“Oh, it’s not that unusual around here to combine businesses that don’t quite match up. One family member has business space all set, another has ambitions, and next thing you know, you’ve got a place like ours. McCready’s just started earlier than most. After World War I, during the flu pandemic, my Pawpaw John asked his brother, Earl Jr., if he could move his expanding coffin-building business into the back of Earl’s bait shack.”
Frankie was making a story of it, using the “tall tales” voice she normally used exclusively on school visits or while trying to freak out the macho types at the Dirty Deer. Eric seemed to be one big exposed nerve. He needed a bedtime story to settle him, badly. Judging from the rings she could see under his eyes now that his sunglasses were off, he needed a nap, too. And she couldn’t do what she’d done to get him to sleep the last time, not with her family within ten feet.
“Earl was selling worms, homemade lemonade, and sandwiches right here on the shore, and making a pretty good go of it. And he and his wife, Kate, got along real well with John and his wife, Ellie. The Spanish flu epidemic hit us hard in 1918. People needed caskets a lot more than they needed cabinets, and Ellie had a talent for helpin’ their neighbors through their grief. Their kids added to the business and their kids added more to the business, and now, here we are.”
Leslie had ducked around them while Frankie was talking, nimble on her feet after years of working on those docks. She unlocked the doors to the Snack Shack, turning on the lights, the AC, and the fryer. She began prep work without even thinking, taking chicken out of the brine she’d prepared that morning, rinsing it, and dredging it through seasoned flour.
Frankie motioned for Eric to sit at the early-Coca-Cola-themed bar. He slouched against the red vinyl stool as if the weight of the world came with him.
“So, what brings you to Lake Sackett, Sheriff?” Frankie asked, attempting to keep her tone casual. “It’s pretty odd for someone without ties to the area to try to get hired on with the department, much less lead it. Hell, you can’t get hired on at the jerky depot unless three generations of family can vouch for you.”
Frankie didn’t feel the need to comment on the fact that there was no way the county commission could promote from within. Local residents didn’t feel safe with Lake Sackett’s lone deputy trolling their neighborhoods at night with firearms, unsupervised. Deputy Landry Mitchell once shot himself in the foot while getting out of the shower.
He sighed as if weary of answering questions. “I was just lookin’ for a change of pace. A fresh start.”
“From where?” she asked, as if she didn’t have some clue.
“Atlanta PD,” he said in a tone that invited no further chitchat.
“Are you from Atlanta originally?”
“Yes. How often do you work with the sheriff’s department?”
It seemed the introductory period of their meeting was over.
“Not often,” she said. “I don’t contact you unless there’s a death I consider suspicious, which is pretty rare. You don’t contact me unless there’s a hunting accident or something like that. I’m the only operating morgue for fifty miles. Any important postmortem tests, beyond blood alcohol or gunshot residue, I send to the state police crime lab. I have a friend there who occasionally puts a rush on things if I promise him some of my mom’s divinity candy.”
“How long have you been county coroner?”
“I took the job about five years ago, when my uncle Junior, the previous coroner, passed away. But he trained me himself, even before I graduated from mortuary school. I’m fully licensed, qualified, and duly elected.”
“You ran unopposed?” Sheriff Linden asked.
“No one else wanted the job,” she said with a shrug.
“How old are you?”
“Nunya,” she said, smiling sweetly.
“Nunya?”
“Nunya damn business. Didn’t your mama ever teach you it’s rude to ask a lady her age?”
He frowned at her. “Not in a professional setting, no.”
“Well, it’s rude.”
The frown deepened as he changed the subject. “I’ve been looking around the office for records on the violent crimes and suspicious deaths over the last few years and haven’t been able to find anything.”
Frankie winced. “Yeah, that was part of the reason Sheriff Rainey was ‘encouraged’ to retire. There was a bit of a rodent infestation in the evidence room, and it spread to the rest of the courthouse. Word got out that the sheriff was basically a hoarder, but the kind whose hoard leaks into his office. He’d take things into evidence and tell the owners they got lost in processing. He got the reputation over the years for being a bit of a klepto, but it turned out he just tossed the stuff into the evidence room and, God’s honest truth, lost it. Same with files, tickets, court reports, basically anything that came across his desk. The whole thing had to be turned over to the state police for an audit. The only thing that saved our collective butts was the fact that we don’t have a lot of crime here in Lake Sackett. I can work up a report on the suspicious deaths over the last decade, but I can tell you right now that it boils down to two incidents. A suspected poisoning in 2014 that turned out to be a wife who didn’t know how to refrigerate pork products properly. And last year, we had a moonshine still explode, taking out three members of the Gibbs family. Generally, any nonnatural death in these parts involves someone operating a boat, ATV, or vehicle that they have no business operating. Most of the time, beer is involved.”
Frankie paused to watch him take a sip of her mama’s sweet tea, prepared the proper Southern way by stirring real sugar into the boiling water so the sweetness mixed evenly throughout the tea. (If Mama caught you with a packet of Splenda and an unsweetened tea, you better be diabetic, because otherwise, you were getting smacked with a spatula.) Maybe he would show some sort of personality reacting to the tea. Maybe she could get some hint, something to help her figure this guy out.
Eric swallowed several mouthfuls without pause and set the glass on the counter. No response. No wince. No smile. Maybe this guy was a robot? Frankie leaned back on her stool and checked the back of his neck for a bar code. Nope. It was probably on his ass. The apartment had been pretty dark.
“Don’t suppose you know anything about the drunk drivin’ stats?” Eric asked.
“That’s where you’re gonna have to talk to your deputy, Landry Mitchell,” she said. Eric winced and she added, “I see you’ve met Landry.”
“Yeah, I don’t hold out a lot of hope there,” he muttered as Leslie slid a plate of golden fried chicken in front of him. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Leslie’s smile was almost as sweet as her iced tea. “You eat every bite, now. You look like you could fall over if the wind blew too hard. Frankie, honey, I’ll see you later. You two catch up on your business.”
Eric nodded and dug into his chicken. Leslie shut the door behind her, and Frankie whipped her head toward him. “What in the living hell are you doing here?”
“I’m as surprised as you are, and I’m getting the impression I’m just about as thrilled to see you as you are to see me.”
“Excuse me?”
“What kind of person just runs off in the middle of the night without so much as a shake on the shoulder and a ‘Hey, I’m leaving, you might want to lock your dead bolt’?”
“Are you unfamiliar with the one-night-stand procedure?” she asked. “It’s ‘I came, I saw, I got out with as little fuss as possible.’ Not ‘I came, I saw, I neglected to mention I’ll be followin’ you to your hometown and workin’ in a close professional capacity with you for the foreseeable future.’ ”
“It didn’t strike you that I’m a person with feelings and I might not like bein’ treated that way?”
“Most of the guys I deal with appreciate a low-maintenance approach.”
“Well, that tells me a lot about you.”
“Oh, do not even start trying to slut-shame me, bud. I do not apologize f
or having a healthy sexual appetite.”
“Hey, I saw the panic in your eyes when you realized who I was.”
“Yeah, because I also happen have healthy boundaries between my family and said appetite.”
“So where does that leave us?” he asked. “Other than me havin’ no interest in a second ‘date.’ ”
“Oh, thank you for the clarification,” she shot back. “And I have no flippin’ idea. Look, we’re adults. These things happen. People have sex with people they don’t know that well, and then lifelong relationships don’t develop as a result. There’s no reason we can’t have polite, professional interactions from here out. Can we start over?”
He sighed. “I suppose.”
“So, are you from Atlanta originally?” she asked again.
“Yep.”
She frowned at his lack of basic conversational etiquette. “Do you have people there?”
He took a big bite of chicken. “Nope.”
“Have you always wanted to be a cop?”
“Yep.”
Okay, Frankie could appreciate the appeal of the strong, silent type, but this was verging on rude.
“Did you have any more questions for me?” she asked.
“No.”
“Alrighty,” she said, nodding and pressing her lips together. “Well, I have been on my feet for about twelve hours. I’ve got three people to prep in the mornin’. And after this scintillatin’ conversation, I’ve had about all the fun I can stand.”
Frankie noted that Eric turned faintly green at the mention of her work. She sighed. Well, he wouldn’t be the first man who couldn’t stomach her job. This was just the cherry on the sundae of his lack of personality.
“Good night, Sheriff. Good luck to us both.”
3
GOD HAD EMPTIED his washtub over Lake Sackett.
In other words, it was raining. A lot. Great cat-yowling sheets of rain that dumped inches of water on the town in a matter of an hour. It had been raining since the morning after her reintroduction to Eric a few days before.
This was good news for Lake Sackett. Even though it kept tourists off the water for a few days, it meant more water in the lake and regaining coverage lost during the water dump. Of course, it also meant flash flood conditions and that the dam might even open a spillway or two, which would be a first in three years. But the town needed it, every drop.
The constant rain put the Snack Shack out of commission, meaning Leslie had plenty of time to berate Frankie over her rude treatment of “that poor, nice sheriff.” Of course, it was Leslie, so her version of berating equaled a light scolding over Frankie walking out in the middle of Eric’s meal and not staying to offer him dessert, meaning Mama had to go back and close up. But that was about as far as Leslie’s disapproval went. Frankie’s mama seemed to think Eric was a lost lamb whose social ineptitude was the product of stress and his lacking a mother to shove deep-fried nutrition down his throat anytime he dared stand still.
Frankie took to hiding in the morgue just to prevent further tales of “that poor, nice sheriff” who seemed so anxious about taking on the job. As far as she was concerned, if he couldn’t handle the heat, he needed to vacate the damn kitchen.
While a day or two of heavy rain gave Donna and Duffy time to do some cleaning and maintenance at the bait shop, the storm actually improved conditions at the funeral home. It thinned the crowds, because people were a bit more reluctant to attend services of an acquaintance they were only loosely connected to if it meant going out in a monsoon. And for the people who did attend services, the weather lent a somber, softening mood to the proceedings. Frankie had never seen a fistfight break out at a funeral held in the rain. Plus, the families tended not to linger graveside, which kept things on schedule. Shorter funerals created tender memories, as opposed to emotional trauma.
Frankie sat on the porch of her parents’ cabin in the dawn hours, watching the lake churn under heaven’s deluge and eating one of her mama’s apple fritters. Her family lived in a row of cabins along the shoreline, centered around E.J.J. and Tootie’s cabin, where the original McCready homestead once stood. She knew it was a little odd to live on what could only be considered a “compound,” but McCreadys had built cabins on the old farmland since before there was a Lake Sackett. For the most part, living this close to her relatives worked. There were unwritten rules that everybody followed. Knock before barging through someone’s door. Keep your opinions about a situation to yourself unless you’re directly involved or asked. Don’t leave your door open, or you will be invaded by Aunt Tootie’s wandering dog pack. And never, ever eat Aunt Donna’s peach cobbler, because it is basically poison with a grainy crust.
There were benefits to living this close together. Holiday travel time was minimal. Carpooling opportunities were plentiful. No one ever got caught without sugar or butter. But Frankie was feeling less and less comfortable with her own particular living situation. She was twenty-eight years old. She was quickly coming up on that margin between being a “late bloomer” and people shaking their heads and saying, “Oh, it’s so sad” when her name was mentioned. She wanted her own space. She wanted to take care of her own meals, her own laundry. She wanted to come and go as she pleased without hiding certain details from her parents because they would worry or try to talk her into “just staying home” because going to concerts or clubs was too much for her delicate system.
She’d wanted to move out for a while, just to Marianne’s old cabin two doors down, but every time Frankie tried to bring it up, her mother got all twitchy and teary-eyed. It wasn’t that her parents didn’t trust her to take care of herself, and it wasn’t that they wanted control over what she did or who she did it with. They just wanted to spend time with her. They’d lived under the threat of losing that time with her during her childhood, and now she supposed they were greedy for it.
Because her parents had put so much effort into keeping her alive when she was a kid, helping her fight through a particularly nasty bout of leukemia, Frankie felt guilty about putting them through the stress of separation. She knew it wasn’t particularly healthy. Her relationship with them involved a large dollop of codependence along with their unconditional love. She knew she had it easy compared to most, including Marianne, whose contentious relationship with Aunt Donna had made several holidays very awkward. Frankie’s parents didn’t push her. She never felt like she had to meet their standards or strive to be more.
Marianne and Duffy claimed she was spoiled as hell. Frankie liked to think of herself as an imposing but benevolent ruler. In a lazier person, this could have been a very bad way to start life. Fortunately, the rest of the family had beaten the McCready work ethic into her.
She was going to need that professional dedication if she had to keep working with Eric Linden.
Why had he seemed so butt-hurt over their encounter? She was completely bewildered by his response. They had enjoyed themselves, several times. Every other partner she’d had liked the fact that she left without prolonging the good-bye or the expectation of another meetup.
Eric hadn’t seemed so different. Yeah, the sex had been almost tender, compared to how they’d started off, all wandering hands and insistent pleasure under the flashing lights of the club. She wasn’t even sure what had drawn her across the dark room to his table in the first place. She didn’t usually go for the gym-built type. She was so slender—read: upper-body strength of a T. rex—that she found big guys sort of intimidating. But he was this still, quiet spot in the constantly shifting sea of people, staring down into his beer while everybody else was writhing around like oversexed bees. She decided she could do with some quiet, so she didn’t even speak as she held out her hand and nodded toward the dance floor.
When they were alone later that night, he was still quiet, but focused. He was focused on touching her as much as possible and effortlessly stripping her out of her clothes. After carrying her across his packed apartment, he’d kissed her with lazy ease,
stopping at all of her favorite spots to nibble.
It had been so easy. No arguments over condoms or boundaries, just skin gliding against skin. He didn’t object to her wanting to be on top. He’d been sweet to her, making eye contact as he slid inside her, touching her face as he moved under her. He’d eagerly slipped his hand between her thighs to help her quiver and shake her way to bliss. He’d spooned her as he fell asleep, for goodness sake.
It was possible the spooning was what sent her thumb sprinting across her phone screen for her Uber app.
But this one-eighty into a gruff, snappish douche in a pair of aviators? How was she supposed to work with someone like that? Sheriff Rainey hadn’t been a paragon of professionalism, but he’d been willing to have a polite conversation. Then again, she hadn’t wanted to trace the outline of the sixty-three-year-old former sheriff’s abs with her tongue—which she had done with Eric. Extensively.
She sighed as her uncle Stan parked the hearse in front of her parents’ house, and she immediately started pondering unsexy things—wet socks, global warming, quinoa. She had to stop thinking sexy thoughts in inappropriate places. If she wasn’t careful, it was going to warp her emotionally.
Stan stepped out of the elegant—if depressing—vehicle and used an oversize umbrella to protect the crisp navy suit he was wearing. Stan McCready used to be, as Marianne once put it, the saddest sack to ever sack. He was all forlorn brown eyes underscored by puffy bags and a bow-shaped mouth that naturally turned down.
He’d been a drinker in his youth, a case-a-day man, before his face got jowly and his hair went all salt-and-pepper. Unhappy with his habits and his lack of “upward mobility,” his wife, Linda, had left with their toddler daughter, Margot, for parts unknown. Frankie was just a newborn when she left, so Duffy and Marianne had more memories of their cousin, a bright, happy golden baby smiling out of the family photos on the mantel. And now, Margot had returned to their lives and Stan was tentatively building a relationship with her, so carefully that Frankie was afraid he would actually take backward steps.