Peachy Flippin' Keen
Author: Molly Harper
Date: 2018-04-09 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Romance; Contemporary; Adult; Humour
Description: A prank war erupts in Lake Sackett, Georgia and coroner Frankie McCready has to turn to the gorgeous but surly new sheriff for help in Molly Harper’s newest Southern Eclectic novella, perfect for fans of Kristan Higgins and Amy E. Reichert. The McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop has crickets running rampant in the store and hot sauce in the Snack Shack’s ketchup bottles. But as the county coroner, Frankie has enough on her plate without worrying about the increasingly mean pranks being played at her family’s business. And the arrival of Sheriff Eric Linden, both devastatingly attractiv
Publisher: Pocket Star

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The McCready Family Tree

1

FRANKIE MCCREADY DABBED one last touch of lipstick on Spud McArthur’s lower lip. Generally, she kept the makeup on her male clients a bit subtler than the treatment she gave the ladies. Families didn’t much care to know that Grandpa was going to his final resting place with a layer of Peachy Keen on his lips. But Spud had tangled with pancreatic cancer during the last months of his life, so Frankie was having to use every cream and powder at her disposal to restore his healthy appearance.

In his final months Spud’s cheeks had become gaunt and his skin sallow. Frankie didn’t want that to be the last image his family had of him. They deserved to remember him as a ruddy-faced, energetic man, even if he’d been a bit of a jackass in life—particularly when it came to politics and his rabid support of University of Georgia’s football team.

Spud’s condition reminded her uncomfortably of Uncle Junior, her mentor, her friend, who had suffered a similar death. Junior had been one of the best men she ever knew, and Frankie was blessed enough to know a wealth of good men. She hadn’t dated one yet, because she was related to most of them, and there were laws against that sort of thing.

Frankie gave Spud’s prominent nose one last dusting of finishing powder and closed the lower portion of the casket lid. Spud’s family had ordered a small casket spray in Georgia Bulldogs black, white, and red, but it was waiting upstairs in the chapel. Her great-uncle, E.J.J., the head of the funeral operation at McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop, preferred to add little touches like that at the last minute before visitations, so everything was perfect when the bereaved arrived. Mourners could fixate on tiny details, like a lapel bent out of shape or ceremony programs printed on the wrong shade of off-white paper, and in their grief get wet-possum mad at the “disrespect” to the deceased’s wishes. That’s when ugly scenes started, and when you became known as the funeral parlor that allowed knock-down, drag-out fights in the chapels, you started attracting the wrong sort of crowd.

Frankie pushed the casket cart toward the elevator and pressed the button. “Good-bye, Mr. Spud. I will miss the boiled peanuts you made for Founders’ Day. I will not miss the way you added ‘the Bulldogs and anybody dumb enough not to root for the Bulldogs’ to the prayer list every Sunday. But Lake Sackett won’t be the same without you.”

She gently rolled the casket into the waiting elevator car and elbow-nudged the button that would alert E.J.J. and her father, Bob, that Spud was coming up. As the elevator doors closed, she stripped off her gloves and stretched her aching back. Spud was her fourth customer that day. Autumn was always a busy time for funeral homes, particularly in towns like Lake Sackett where the population was heavily comprised of baby boomers, but this was getting ridiculous. They were going to have to hire her an assistant if things kept going at this rate. Even her father’s near-miraculous organizational skills were being pushed to their limit.

Frankie was definitely looking forward to the end of the tourist season in a few weeks. Her cousin, Margot, had recently breathed new life into the town by organizing one of the best Founders’ Day festivals they’d ever seen, and the marina side of the business was still experiencing the ripple effect. Over the last week or so, thousands of people from across the Southeast had flocked to town to spend the last warm days of fall on Lake Sackett, shelling out for boat rentals, hotel rooms, food, beer. Most of the businesses in town expected to benefit from the boom somehow.

It was embarrassing that something called the “water dump” had caused so many problems for Frankie’s hometown over the years. A few years before, some dipshit with the Army Corps of Engineers had messed up when calculating how much water needed to be released through the dam at Sackett Point and overestimated by a couple of million gallons—releasing about ten times the water they should have. Lake Sackett dropped to record lows, just in time for a two-year drought. No rain meant no water to replace what was lost.

Less water meant less room on the lake for fishing boats and water sports. It meant more exposed, sunbaked shoreline, which made for some pretty depressing vistas. Depressing vistas meant fewer people renting cabins and buying groceries or visiting the fudge shop or the exotic jerky depot.

The economics of it all had crept up slowly. At first, people just made do with less. They weren’t able to repaint their stores or refurbish their rental cabins, which gave the town a shabby, weathered look. Fewer people rented those motel rooms and cabins, because who wants to take their family to a shabby, weathered motel for a weekend? Tourists booked their holidays in towns where the water was abundant and the locals seemed less desperate. So now Lake Sackett was feeling the full financial brunt of multiple slow seasons. Businesses and restaurants were closing all over town. Families that had lived there for generations had moved away to find work.

McCready’s funeral business wasn’t entirely immune to this downturn. People still died whether they were poor or rich; it was just a question of how much they spent on their way out. But the marina side of the business had definitely taken a hit. Fewer tourists meant less bait and tackle being sold, less food moving through the Snack Shack, less gas being pumped. Fewer charters meant Cousin Duffy and Aunt Donna had more time on their hands, which could prove dangerous. She could only hope Margot’s efforts turned it around.

Sighing, Frankie shrugged out of her lab coat and hung it on her hook, next to the one labeled UNCLE JUNIOR. It had been more than five years and she couldn’t bear to get rid of his lab coat. No one in the family really came down to her domain, so it was a little quirk she could keep to herself.

It took a considerable amount of stubbornness and effort to maintain a private life in a family as big and “involved” as the McCreadys. But Frankie managed it by sneaking away to Atlanta for weekends, blowing off steam with drinks and dancing and other age-appropriate activities that reminded her she was alive. Just a few days ago, she’d met some friends from an online group for Pacific Rim fans and ended up at a nightclub in an old restored opera house in midtown. Her family loved her, but they didn’t need to know that she’d ground the night away with a complete stranger and then gone back to his apartment. Or that she’d waited for him to fall asleep and then Ubered back to her car, because she was not big on awkward morning-after conversations.

And now she was thinking about sex in her workspace, which was a bit of a squicky gray zone, professionally speaking.

Frankie slung her heavy bag over her shoulder and took the stairs two at a time, a skill she had mastered even in her clunky purple wedge sandals. Her mother, Leslie, appeared at the top of the stairs, her faded ginger hair frizzled around her head in a backlit corona like Our Lady of the Snack Shack. She grinned down at her daughter. “Hey, honey, I was just about to pop by and see if you needed any dinner. I’ve got a pork shoulder in the Crock-Pot at home, but if you need somethin’ now, I can whip up some chicken right quick.”

Frankie quirked her petal-bright lips, giving her mama a skeptical smirk.

“Oh, yes, I’m starvin’,” Frankie moaned dramatically, clutching her middle. “I used a considerable amount of energy trying to digest the enormous lunch you fed me today.”

“Well, honey, you’re on your feet all day and need to keep your strength up,” Leslie said, shaking her head as she wrapped an arm around her daughter. “Besides, your dad said this was a real busy day today. You needed a break,” Leslie sniffed.

Frankie shook her head. She loved her parents dearly, but they were one step away from shoving Frankie into one of those giant hamster balls for fear she might hurt herself tying her shoes. They weren’t helicopter parents. That would imply they simply hovered, as opposed to being attached to her back.

“I needed elastic pants after eating that triple-decker turkey sandwich,” Frankie told her.

“It had lettuce and tomato, it was practically a salad,” Leslie argued, making Frankie snicker.

Reaching the top of the steps, they walked through the open “dog run” area between the funeral chapel and the office.

“You know the doctor said he’d like to see you put on a couple more pounds . . .” Leslie’s voice trailed off as a thick, high-pitched grating sound caught her attention from the direction of the lake.

“Do you hear that?” she asked Frankie. “It sounds like an outboard motor, but really far away.”

Suddenly, the noise was replaced by the hum of a vacuum cleaner. Frankie and her mother followed the sound down the concrete steps to the docks. They spotted Cousin Duffy standing in the open doorway of Jack’s Tackle and Stuff with a Shop-Vac, frantically swiping it across the shop floor.

“What in the world?” Leslie tilted her head. But whether she was confused by outdoor vacuuming or the sight of Duffy doing housework, Frankie had no idea.

“I need some help here!” Duffy shouted, his sweaty red-gold curls plastered to his head.

Leslie and Frankie ran to the bait shop, stepping over hundreds of bait crickets as they stampeded down the wooden planks. Even over the rumble of the vacuum, they could hear the chirping of the crickets. Frankie looked inside the darkened interior of the bait shop and saw that the walls and floors seemed to be writhing, waves of tiny black-brown insects bouncing off every surface.

“Some jackass opened my bait-cricket cage and all of my bugs got loose!” Duffy cried.

Frankie grabbed a broom and started sweeping the little critters into a five-gallon bucket. Leslie ran to the other prong of the three-way dock to close the doors and windows to the Snack Shack, preventing a biblical invasion of her culinary kingdom.

Duffy and Frankie started methodically gathering as many of the crickets as they could, returning them to the wire-mesh bait cage.

“Who would do somethin’ like that?” Leslie wondered as she jogged back into the bait shop.

Duffy carefully emptied the Shop-Vac into the wire cage. “Probably some tourist pissed off that he didn’t catch his limit. I had a charter client threaten to sue me this week because he went the whole morning without catching a mackerel.”

“Aw, bless his heart. Did you explain to him that a mackerel is a saltwater fish and he was an idiot?” Frankie asked.

“You know, I tried, but somehow it just didn’t get through to him,” Duffy said. “As it is, I just lost another client scheduled for a sunset charter. He walked in, took one look at the bugs, and ran. I guess losin’ control of my shop to a bunch of invertebrates probably doesn’t put me in the most professional light.”

Frankie gave him a small side hug. This was part of the problem with having a customer service job. Even when the customers were enormous shit heels, you weren’t allowed to slap them. There was a reason Frankie didn’t work with living people.

“This is why we can’t have nice things,” she said with a sigh.

2

FOR THE NEXT hour, Frankie, Duffy, and Leslie worked to set the bait shop to rights. By the time they were done, Frankie’s back and neck were slick with sweat and her bright blue hair was soaked through. And she was pretty sure she had a rogue cricket creeping under her Attack on Titan T-shirt.

“I’m gonna find the jackass who did this and introduce them to the business end of an embalming needle,” Frankie grumbled, wiping her forehead with her sleeve.

“I’m gonna find the jackass who did this and introduce them to my anchor and some duct tape,” Duffy said, offering Frankie an ice-cold bottle of water from the bait shop cooler.

“I’m gonna find that so-and-so who did this and I’m gonna . . . I’m gonna. . . . introduce them to . . .” Leslie frowned as she tried to find a threat suitable for the situation.

“It’s okay, Mama,” Frankie assured her. “You can’t help it that you’re basically a Disney princess on the wrong side of forty.”

“Smart mouth.” Leslie swatted at Frankie with the dish towel she’d been using to wipe down Duffy’s counter. “Also, y’all owe the swear jar fifty cents.”

“Hold still, you’re gonna disturb the cartoon mice who sing backup for your power ballad,” Frankie told her, dodging her mother’s snapping cloth. Leslie increased the frequency of her towel-slapping and Frankie howled with laughter, diving behind the counter.

This was how E.J.J. found them, sweating, cackling, and covered in cricket bits. E.J.J. cleared his throat pointedly, bringing the laughter to an abrupt halt. Leslie hid the cloth behind her back while Frankie, biting her lip to prevent further giggles from escaping, scooted around the counter.

How did her great-uncle-slash-boss manage to look so cool and crisp in a three-piece suit in the lingering autumn heat and humidity? And manage to look so exasperated and yet amused all at once?

E.J.J. gestured to the tall, barrel-chested man standing next to him. The newcomer was wearing a navy collared shirt and khakis ironed with military precision. He had dark-blond hair and had aviator sunglasses perched on high, sharp cheekbones and a slightly crooked, almost Roman nose. The nose didn’t quite match up with the high forehead and square chin. But somehow the overall effect was very pleasant and seemed oddly familiar to Frankie.

The expression on the stranger’s handsome face was not amused or exasperated. He mostly looked alarmed.

“There was a cricket stampede,” Duffy said, before pinching his lips together.

“Sure there was.” E.J.J. cleared his throat to cover his laugh. “Y’all, this is the interim sheriff, Eric Linden. He’s takin’ over for Sheriff Rainey, gettin’ sworn in on Friday. Frankie, your dad thought he should come by to meet the county coroner.”

The new sheriff took off the aviators and Frankie’s jaw dropped. She could have sworn he’d said his name was Derek, but that club had been really loud.

The new sheriff was the hookup she’d Ubered away from without so much as a “Thanks for the naked memories.”

For the first time in her life, she realized how it felt to experience panic and mortification in front of her family members. “Derek’s” apartment had been sparsely furnished and filled with boxes, but she’d assumed that he was a lonely guy who had just moved in and was looking for company. How in the hell was she supposed to know that he was moving to her town?

“Nice to meet you.” Soon-to-be-Sheriff Linden reached toward Duffy for a manly handshake. Duffy frowned and shook the man’s hand.

“Actually, my cousin is the coroner. I’m just the bait guy.”

“You’re the coroner,” the sheriff rasped, turning toward Frankie. “The one I’m going to be workin’ with.”

“The one and only in these parts. I’m Frankie McCready.”

“Unbelievable,” Eric muttered.

“Don’t worry, Sheriff,” she said, her voice so sweet it bordered on saccharine. “You’re not the first person to have trouble seeing me as a competent professional, and you won’t be the last. But I can present you with a pretty impressive list of credentials and certifications, if it makes you feel better.”

Eric did not laugh. Instead, he glanced at E.J.J. and cleared his throat. “I was hoping we could sit down and go over some procedures for search and rescue, transport of remains, on-call status, that sort of thing.”

“Um, sure,” she said, gesturing toward the funeral home. “We can go to my office, where the air-conditioning is downright arctic.”

“No!” he yelped.

Frankie jerked back from him. Eric’s cheeks flushed. She squinted at him as if she could now detect some underlying crazy she might have missed in her sex-induced haze.

“Uh, actually, I was hopin’ I could grab something to eat while we talk,” Eric said, nodding at the Snack Shack. “It’s been a long day and Mr. McCready said you have the best fried chicken in town.”

If this guy socially flailed any harder, Frankie was going to get whiplash. She didn’t have the heart to tell him her mama had closed the snack stand and cleaned up for the day. She put her arm around Leslie’s thin shoulders. “Well, anything deep-fried, Mama’s the master.”

“Oh, that’s your mama?” Eric glanced back and forth between Leslie’s low-key, earthy beauty and Frankie’s aggressively colorful appearance. And somehow, he looked even more uncomfortable, which was quite the trick.

“Leslie’s my mama and Duffy’s my cousin,” Frankie explained in a tone that was probably a little condescending. “E.J.J. is my great-uncle, but really my honorary grandfather. My daddy runs the office side of the funeral home. Uncle Stan drives the hearse. Duffy’s mama runs the bait shop with him and books fishin’ charters. We’re a real family operation.”

E.J.J. clapped a hand on Eric’s shoulder, which made him startle a bit. “So, you’re gonna have to be careful callin’ for a ‘Mr. McCready.’ You’re bound to get more people answerin’ than you want. Might as well switch to a first-name basis now.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a funeral home and bait shop before,” Eric said as Frankie led him down the dock toward the snack stand. Leslie followed at their heels, and if Frankie knew her mother, Leslie was trying to mentally calculate how long it would take her to warm up the fryer and cook enough chicken to fill Eric up so he’d stop being so damn skittish.

“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 for 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.

Very few people understood Frankie’s strange kinship with her uncle. Most chalked it up to the fact that he’d contributed bone marrow for a transplant when Frankie was little. (Lake Sackett residents openly cringed when she mentioned that between the donation from Stan and then another from Duffy a few years later, she had three times the McCready running around in her system.) But Frankie related to the feeling that the universe was out to teach you an Oprah-level life lesson at every turn, that everybody else got all the breaks. Stan had brought many of his problems onto himself with his choices, but he’d done a lot of growing up since he’d gotten sober. He’d done all the emotional developing he was supposed to have done before he got married and had children.

“What are you doing here?” she asked as he joined her under the protection of the porch.

“Eh, your mama got an early start this mornin’. She was worried about you drivin’ in this mess, so she sent me to pick you up.”

“You’re kidding.” Frankie sighed. “She sent you to pick me up in a hearse . . . to make me feel safer.”

“Your mama’s not real big on irony. So Duff said you and the new sheriff are getting along like water and oil.”

“Which is crazy, because I am a livin’ delight.”

“And the new sheriff didn’t think so?”

“I don’t know what the hell he thought because he was a personality-free zone,” she lied, breaking off half her fritter and handing it to him. Stan took out a handkerchief and spread it over his chest to prevent any crumb damage. “He answered no questions, not even the professional ones. He offered no personal details and very few hints of opinions. It was like having a conversation with a block of wood. Or Wendall Mason.”

Stan shuddered at the thought of a prolonged tête-a-tête with the town’s former mechanic, who thought an extensive explanation of how to clean a carburetor was plumb fascinating. “It can’t be easy, coming into a new town where you don’t know anybody, but everybody has known everybody else for generations. And you know you’re supposed to be arresting those people. I doubt it put him in a real sociable mood.”

“True,” she said. “But there’s a difference between ‘unsociable’ and bein’ a jerk.”

“Maybe you’re bein’ a little harsh there?”

“Harsh would be makin’ him a peach cobbler spiked with embalming fluid or dissolving his body with boat-stripping chemicals.”

“You seem to have put some thought into this.”

Frankie shoved the rest of her fritter into her mouth and shrugged.

“It’s possible you’re not used to someone not being charmed by your particular brand of smartass,” he told her. “To a first-timer, you can be about as subtle as a bag of hammers.”

“I’m. A. Livin’. Delight,” Frankie reiterated.

Stan arched a brow.

Frankie scrunched up her face into a resentful pout.

“I won’t try to dissolve him with chemicals,” she muttered.

“Well, that’s a good start to any professional relationship,” Stan said. “E.J.J. said it would be a nice gesture if you went to the reception welcoming the sheriff to town tomorrow, because the whole family is going to be there.”

“Nope.”

“People will wonder why you’re not there.”

She shrugged. “People wonder why I do a lotta things.”

“Your mama said there’s pecan pancakes in it for you.”

“She’ll make ’em for me anyway, if I ask real nice.”

“Would you go if I told you it would make me happy?”

“No,” she scoffed. “Because I know that would be a bald-faced lie. You don’t care either way.”

“You’re right, I don’t.” He pulled her to her feet. “But I do care that you get to work on time, because otherwise, your parents will be chewin’ on my ass. So get your gear on and let’s go.”

“Fine.” She sighed. “So why did Mama have to go in early this morning? The Snack Shack has to be a ghost town.”

“Weirdest thing. Yesterday, in the middle of the lunch rush, some poor tourist ran to the end of the dock, throwin’ up, yellin’ about his ulcer. Somebody had switched some of the ketchup in the squeeze bottles with hot sauce. Very hot sauce. Your mama was in a state, wanted to call an ambulance for him right there, but his wife said he’d be fine. Just needed prescription-level antacids. Your mama threw away all the ketchup in the shack, just to be safe, so now she has to replace all the bottles.”

Frankie surprised Stan by standing suddenly and dropping her coffee cup. “Family meetin’!” she yelled, storming up the stairs to her room.

“What?”

“I’m gettin’ dressed and then I’m calling a family meetin’!” she shouted as she ran. “Everybody’s comin’!”

“Okay, but you have to actually call people to call a family meetin’,” he yelled. “It’s not like we have a redneck Bat-Signal or somethin’.”

FRANKIE USED HER PHONE AND her words and called a family meeting, which E.J.J. somehow turned into a family dinner. Because Frankie didn’t have the corporate authority to call a business meeting. Also, she wasn’t allowed to attend the business meetings after the time she tried to change the McCready’s motto to “Because everybody dies.”

So all of the McCreadys—Duffy, Donna, Stan, Margot, Frankie’s parents, E.J.J. and Tootie, even Marianne and her husband, Carl, who brought their two boys, Nate and Aiden—assembled that evening for an impromptu family meeting. Leslie and Tootie had scrambled to put together a proper family feast in less than a day, complete with flowers and little battery-powered votive candles. They’d made a huge pot of chicken and dumplings, good old-fashioned comfort food. And since Frankie had threatened to toss Tootie’s vintage Betty Crocker cookbook into the lake, they’d even skipped the usual argument over whether dumplings should be light and fluffy or thick, dense “slickers.” Frankie loved them both, but the arguments they had every single family gathering over whether it was acceptable to add sugar to cornbread were bad enough.

The family dining table was spread with the chicken and dumplings, fresh-made bread, and three different kinds of pie. Everything to make you feel warm and toasty and loved inside. Tootie’s dogs were curled up under the table against everyone’s feet, disciplined enough not to beg for scraps but not too proud to accept anything Frankie snuck to them.

Mercutio, a mix of pug and Lord knows what, poked his oddly smashed, conical nose against her knee. She scratched behind his pointed ears and fed him another bite of chicken. Frankie had wanted to adopt a dog from Tootie’s pack for years—Mercutio, in particular, for the last year or so. The first thing she would do would be to change his name. But her hours were so long and unpredictable, she didn’t think it was fair to take on a pet. Plus, Aunt Tootie wouldn’t give her a dog, because Aunt Tootie skirted the line between animal rescuer and hoarder.

Her family ate and chatted until they leaned back in their chairs, near comatose. It was a very cozy scene, which Frankie threw all to hell by saying, “There’s a reason I asked everybody to get together tonight. Has anyone noticed some weird crap happening around the office?”

“This isn’t about the whole ‘Sasquatch is stealin’ from McCready’s’ thing, is it?” Duffy groaned. “Frankie, I’m tellin’ you, sometimes trash cans just fall over.”

“No, no.” Frankie shook her head. “Though I still think the Sasquatch thing is—never mind, not the point. Have any of y’all noticed weird things like the cricket stampede Duffy had to sweep up the other day or the hot sauce switch that Mama had to deal with yesterday? Anything odd and annoyin’ but not quite up to the level of criminal mischief or destruction of property? Situations that created more work for you and seemed to have a certain malicious, but puckish, sense of humor behind them?”

“Like jabbing holes in all the Styrofoam coolers, so they leak all over when you put ice in them?” Donna asked. “Or putting lead weights inside the bobbers so they sink?”

Frankie nodded.

“Dammit, I thought we just got a bad batch,” Donna huffed, which was her main mode of communication. No one knew their way around the lake like she did, unless you counted Duffy. She was a gruff woman who had taken the death of her husband, Junior, very hard, suffering an almost complete change in personality. But while the old Donna had been more comfortable to spend holidays with, the new one was certainly more entertaining to watch.

Leslie very innocently raised her hand. “Please cover the children’s ears, Marianne.”

Frowning, both Carl and Marianne cupped their hands around the kids’ ears.

“Would ‘pranks’ cover something like switchin’ the letters on the ‘Today’s Special’ sign around to say, ‘Butter My Friends Dick’?” Leslie asked.

“Yes.” Frankie nodded. “Definitely.”

“Oh,” Leslie said, blushing.

“Why didn’t you say anythin’ about that?” Bob asked.

“I didn’t want to worry anybody,” Leslie exclaimed.

“What were you tryin’ to spell?” Tootie asked, petting Lulu the pit bull mix.

“Buttermilk fried chicken,” Leslie said, frowning. “The frustrating part was that whoever did it had to bring some extra letters, including their own Y to make the ‘my.’ I thought it was just some smartass teenagers.”

“Oh, it is,” Frankie growled.

“What are you gettin’ at, hon?” her father asked. Bob McCready was a steady man, still matinee-idol handsome in his sixties, but anxious as a stub-tailed cat around customers. That was why he mostly handled paperwork for the funeral home.

“I believe this is the work of . . . Jared Lewis.” Frankie’s sibilant hiss of the name Lewis was enough to make Marianne’s sons shrink away from her.

Duffy, Donna, and Bob groaned. Duffy actually scrubbed his hand over his face.

“What?” Carl glanced around the table. “What is that about?”

Carl, Marianne’s high school sweetheart and beloved husband, looked like a scrubby redneck biker but was basically a unicorn made of marshmallows and glitter.

“There have been . . . problems between Frankie and Jared for years now.” Leslie sighed, sounding extremely weary.

“Wait, Vern Lewis’s boy? I thought he was sixteen or so?”

“He is. But he is a prodigy at being a shit,” Frankie insisted.

“Quarter!” Tootie called, holding up a glitter-covered container marked SWEAR JAR. The swear jars had started as an effort to curb Bob’s cursing after he’d been heard dropping the F-bomb through the air vents in his office during Andy Frickie’s visitation. Sensing that this meeting might involve some profanity, E.J.J.’d had the foresight to bring one home from the office. The proceeds were going toward one of those fancy coffeemakers for the staff break room.

“But he seems like such a . . .” E.J.J. paused and frowned. “No, I can’t lie. I don’t like the kid, either.”

Jared was smug in that way that teenage boys from well-off families in small towns always seemed to be. He was unique only in his persistence toward one target: McCready’s. The boy was bound and determined to break into the funeral home to cause some sort of trouble.

Leslie blamed a costume contest when Jared was eight and Frankie awarded the prize for best costume to another child at the town’s annual trick-or-treat event. But honestly, it probably started when Jared was six and demanded to be taken down to the morgue during his great-uncle’s funeral. Uncle Junior had told him no. A teenage Frankie caught Jared trying to sneak downstairs, grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, and dragged him back to his mother.

Jared had tried to kick her in the shins all the way down the hall. There had been some kerfuffle with Bob over the fact that Frankie bruised very easily, and he had not been pleased to see Jared aiming at Frankie’s shins full strength. Marnette Lewis had always been stuck-up higher than a light pole and certainly didn’t appreciate Frankie dragging Jared into her uncle’s visitation like a naughty puppy. It had made interactions between the McCreadys and the Lewises rather tense, which was unfortunate, considering that Vern Lewis was the county manager and, technically, Frankie’s supervisor as the top county official.

Usually, Jared limited himself to bugging her in October. For four years, he’d made it a point to try to break into the mortuary every Halloween. The previous year, he’d thrown a brick through the front window of the chapel, but he couldn’t fit through the panes. When he was fourteen, he’d tried distracting Stan with a flamin’ bag of dog poo at the side entrance while he was sneaking through the back. He got thwarted by way of Stan being much fleeter of foot than one would expect of a former alcoholic in his sixties. Jared heard Stan thundering down the steps toward the morgue and bolted.

Frankie wasn’t even sure Jared knew what he would do once he finally got into the funeral home. Some teenagers wanted to break in for the scare factor, the daring of—gasp—going into a space where dead bodies were stored. Jared only wanted to break into it because Frankie didn’t want him there. The bottom line was that nothing attracted an entitled kid’s attention like being told no, and Jared was the type of kid to hold on to that kind of thing.

“Honey, you know I like to support you no matter what, but you do realize that Jared, well, he’s just a boy?” Bob said carefully. “And he’s the son of the man who is technically your supervisor?”

“Do you really think that matters to me?” Frankie asked. “I should be quiet and let Jared walk all over us because I might be impeached from a part-time job where the voters would have no choice but to reelect me because I’m the only qualified person in the county?”

“You might want to soften your facial expression, sweetie,” Marianne told her. “You’re emotionally traumatizin’ the kids. And Carl.”

Carl nodded solemnly.

“So, you think Jared is targeting the business?” Donna asked, leveling Frankie with those dark eyes of hers.

“Normally he waits until Halloween to start messing with me, but it seems that he’s starting early,” Frankie muttered.

Duffy scratched his chin through his gingery beard. “You do realize that the pranks are aimed at the marina, which isn’t exactly your domain.”

“Duffy, what’s the quickest way to piss you off?” she asked. Tootie rattled the jar at her.

He thought about it for a moment. “Mess with Marianne.”

Frankie noted that Duffy didn’t say, “Mess with my mama,” because Donna was terrifying and could protect herself from all potential messes. Marianne, on the other hand, gave Duffy a big kiss on his whiskery cheek.

“And what’s the quickest way to piss me off?” Frankie asked, dropping another quarter in the jar.

“Clear out your Netflix favorites list?” Marianne suggested.

Stan said, “Eat the last of your mama’s Nutella donuts?”

“Say the Black Widow doesn’t deserve her own movie?” Aiden asked.

“All valid points, especially given the glaring hole in the Marvel Cinematic Universe,” Frankie said, fist-bumping Aiden. “But I meant that the quickest way to get under my skin is to mess with my family. Mama, you, Aunt Donna—Jared knows how much I care about you. And since he can’t get into the funeral home, because the funeral home has much better locks and windows than the marina, the little”—she patted her pockets and realized she was out of quarters—“jerk is doing what damage he can to the things he can reach. It’s the high season; he knows that problems with the fishing operation or the Snack Shack can hurt our reputation. And he knows that will get to me.”

“You really think he put that much thought into it?” Stan asked.

“I think you’re underestimatin’ the evil at work here,” Frankie said. “The boy would make a nun cuss.”

Her dad asked, “So what are we going to do about it?”

“I have no flippin’ idea.” Frankie slumped back in her chair and took a long drink of sweet tea. “He’s not causin’ actual property damage. The crickets were annoyin’, but the wholesale cost of the whole bait cage was what, a hundred bucks? The same with the coolers and bobbers. Irritatin’, but no real expensive damage or injury. Even the hot sauce didn’t hurt anybody, really. Jared’s parents can claim it was bad chicken or something that made that tourist sick.”

“I beg your pardon?” Leslie exclaimed. “I do not make bad chicken.”

“I know that, Mama; everybody in this end of the state knows that,” Frankie said, patting her arm. “But we both know how far Jared’s parents stretch plausibility to get him out of trouble. Remember that time he rubbed peanut oil all over the doorknobs at school because he didn’t think that Cassie Hooper had a real allergy? His mom said that he was trying to use ‘all-natural cleaning products’ to give back to his school community.”

Leslie harrumphed.

“Well, it’s not like the sheriff’s department has the budget to test for fingerprints on ketchup bottles,” Frankie continued. “We’re going to have to catch him in the act, and even then, I don’t know if there would be any consequences. He’d be charged with what, vandalism? And his daddy would get him out of it. I doubt he would even spend an hour pickin’ up highway trash.”

Donna pointed out, “Well, if you were nice to the new sheriff, maybe he would be willing to help you.”

“Not helpful, Aunt Donna.”

Donna shrugged. “Wasn’t tryin’ to be, really. You can’t do much about this, Frankie. Vern Lewis is a jackass. Jared is a second-generation jackass. It’s a genetic condition.”

“Actually, I’m surprised you’re not more concerned about this,” Margot said as Tootie rattled the jar at Donna. “The harm that this kid could be doing to McCready’s reputation is much more damaging than anything he’s doing to your equipment or stock. All it takes is a couple of bad reviews online, and he’s cost you thousands of dollars in potential business.”

“Thank you, Margot,” Frankie said.

“Things are just handled differently down here,” Stan told Margot gently. “We expect a certain amount of stupidity from our young people. We let them tire themselves out like overgrown toddlers, because self-preservation usually stops them before they go too far. The problem with a family like the Lewises is that Jared never learned how far ‘too far’ is, and his daddy has enough clout to make sure he never does.”

“But I thought the McCreadys were a pretty big deal around here, too,” Margot said.

“We have a different sort of power,” Bob told her. “We have personal power. We have people’s support. We don’t have control over actual government agencies.”

“Can’t you put that sort of power to good use?” Margot asked. “Apply some social pressure?”

“I can go talk to his mama,” Leslie suggested. Most everybody at the table groaned this time. Marnette Lewis was known to lord her “authority” as the wife of the county’s top official over her neighbors. She was not known for her reasonable or logical reactions to criticism of her son.

“Well, figuring that’ll fail, we can put security cameras on the outside of the building, make sure the mortuary bay doors and marina are covered,” E.J.J. said.

“Like I’ve been suggesting?” Frankie said.

“Yep,” E.J.J. responded, his thin lips quirked into a smirk.

“For years now?”

“Don’t push it,” E.J.J. told her.

“I can stay outside a little later at night, spend some evenings on the dock, watching for the little bastard,” Stan said, reaching into his wallet and dropping a dollar into the swear jar.

Tootie noted, “You only cussed once.”

“Well, I’m gonna be gettin’ a lot less sleep over the next few weeks,” Stan retorted. “I’m startin’ a tab.”

4

THE RAIN SWEPT out like a church lady mid-flounce, disappearing over the mountains in full hissy fit.

The skies cleared, leaving behind a landscape that seemed greener and fresher, if a little mildewy. The lake had shot up to “summer pool” levels that would have been normal before the water dump. And the lingering heat shifted to a tolerable fall warmth, though the locals knew that the inevitable boom in the mosquito population was going to make them regret this reprieve later.

Of course, that meant that locals and tourists alike were running crazy all over town like bucks in season, overjoyed to be out of the house for the first time all week and determined to make up for lost time. Fishermen took to the water once more, meaning the Snack Shack and Bait Shop were back in business.

The nonideal road conditions combined with older people clearing away storm debris they had no business trying to lift meant an increase in business at the funeral home, too. Snuggled under a quilt her grandma Sarah had stitched in violet and yellow, Frankie was napping off the effects of prepping five clients in one shift, including two coming in just as she was getting ready to leave for the day. She hadn’t had the heart to leave them unprocessed until the next morning, so she’d worked more than twelve hours, come home, and collapsed into bed without supper.

So even with the cheerful tones of The Big Bang Theory theme song chiming out of her phone, Frankie slapped her hand against the nightstand with a lot of hostility.

“Yello?” she mumbled, pulling the quilt tight against the chill of the full-blast air-conditioning. Her mama always complained she was half polar bear when she slept.

The very official and very unwelcome voice of the duly sworn Sheriff Eric Linden sounded in her ear. “Ms. McCready, I need you to come out to . . . the little jetty at the easternmost point below the dam.”

Smacking her lips against a serious case of dry mouth, Frankie rasped, “Ass Elbow?”

“Please don’t make me call it that.” He sighed on the other end of the line.

Frankie swung her legs over the side of the bed, her bright “Kick This Day Where the Sun Don’t Shine” socks contrasting with the dark floorboards. She frowned at the clock, which showed that it was long after acceptable hours for nonsocial calls from the socially awkward.

“That’s what it’s called, because to get to it, you have to drive to the ass elbow of nowhere. It’s on maps and everything.” Frankie took a long gulp from the water glass she always kept on her nightstand.

“Okay, fine, I need you to come out to Ass Elbow and help me,” he said, grinding out the words Ass Elbow. Frankie held the phone away from her face so he couldn’t hear her snickering. “We’ve got a boater down near the dam. Search and Rescue has been out here for an hour or so, and it’s not looking good. When the body is recovered, I want him processed quickly and moved to your facility as soon as possible.”

“Is it anybody local?” Frankie asked, slipping into a pair of jeans and grabbing the knee-high rubber boots she kept on hand for this sort of backwoods expedition. If she was going to walk around the shoreline near Ass Elbow, she didn’t want to offer up her legs to the local deer ticks as a sacrifice.

“I expect you to respond quickly whether you know this person or not,” he snapped at her.

Frankie held the phone away from her face this time so she could pray for the patience to not hit him with a sock full of nickels the next time she saw him.

“Just get here now,” he said, abruptly hanging up on her.

“Lord, I know I’ve run through a lot of favors with you over the years, miracle-wise . . .” she muttered, glancing up at her ceiling as she shrugged on her orange COUNTY CORONER windbreaker. “No, I will not pray for chiggers to gnaw on a man’s junk until it falls off. That is beneath my dignity as a lady. Also, I’m pretty sure that’s how you end up in the special ‘ironic punishment’ section of hell.”

FRANKIE SAT IN THE FRONT seat of Duffy’s most agile bass boat, the one he only took out for his highest-paying charter clients, as he carefully maneuvered them upriver toward the Sackett Dam in the dark.

Frankie had her full field kit stowed near her feet. She knew this wasn’t going to be a pleasant task. It wasn’t uncommon for boaters to get too close to the dam where the water spilled over and joined the river. Inexperienced people underestimated the drift involved, even when their anchors were in place, and got sucked toward the churning froth. All it took was a few seconds’ carelessness, just a little too much water pressure on the bow, and over the boat went, pushed under by the force of the spillway.

Even though she’d been through this a few times, the debris field from an overturned boat was always staggering. Soda cans, papers, ropes, chunks of foam coolers, every little thing on the boat except what was in the boaters’ pockets, scattered across the water as far as the eye could see. But so far, she couldn’t see anything personal from the boaters, no clothes or anything with a name on it.

“Careful, Duff,” Frankie said quietly as they navigated through the litter. All they needed was one of those ropes caught in their prop and then there would be two capsized boats on the water.

“I’m watching,” Duffy assured her.

She just wished she knew how bad the situation was so she could prepare herself. The sheriff had mentioned one boater missing, but did that mean there was only one fatality? How old was the missing boater? Was he a child? Was Frankie going to be handling the battered remains of someone she knew? She could handle it, but it was always ten times harder than taking care of someone she cared about who’d passed peacefully in their sleep. She assumed it wasn’t a local, considering Sheriff Jackass’s reaction over the phone. She wasn’t exactly a sensitive babe in the woods when it came to this sort of situation, but she would have appreciated a little time to prepare.

She spotted the wreckage of the boat on the darkened shoreline, close to where Eric Linden and a few rescue workers were standing. Backlit by searchlights, the upturned hull was poking out of the water like a broken tooth. Even though it was rare for one of their boats to end up below the dam, a small part of her was relieved it wasn’t one of McCready’s rentals. Duffy always took that hard, when someone was hurt out on the water using their equipment, like he was responsible for not giving them clearer instructions on not doing themselves serious injury.

Frankie spotted rescue workers from the Sackett Preserve National Park Services Office, the closest federal resource with more than one rescue boat, along both shorelines. They were nice guys in general and always willing to earn some overtime doing a little good.

Linden, on the other hand, was about to get a well-deserved attitude adjustment. Bless his heart.

Duffy deftly guided the boat to shore, sliding gently against the mud just as Frankie leaped from the bow and landed on sure feet. Duffy handed her the field kit a few moments later. “You know I hate it when you do that.”

“Which is why I do it,” she retorted.

He smirked. “I’m gonna go look around, join the search grid.”

“I’m sure they’ll appreciate it,” she told him. “If you hear the air horns, come back quick. I’m gonna need your help with transport.”

Duffy nodded sharply. Frankie turned and waved at several familiar faces among the rescue workers. Linden was holding a flashlight over a map, while one of the more senior staff explained the layout of the lower dam. Frankie pulled her windbreaker tight around her middle as she walked closer. She was a professional, dammit. She didn’t care how attractive Eric Linden looked standing there in his green utility pants and emergency vest. He was a prick, prone to prickish things, and she would treat him as such.

“Mr. Redmand,” Frankie said, smiling at the national park’s senior officer. “Thanks for comin’ out.”

“Of course, Frankie. How’s your aunt Tootie doin’?”

“Oh, she’s still a character straight outta science fiction,” she said.

Mr. Redmand, a tall, lanky man with salt-and-pepper hair and a bristly gray mustache, grinned at her. “I always thought of her as more of a Reader’s Digest gal, myself.”

“You be sure to call her a ‘gal’ to her face. It will make her day,” she said, smiling sweetly. “Would you mind if I just borrowed Sheriff Linden right quick? Thank you.”

“Sure thing.”

Mr. Redmand excused himself and all the sticky-sweet charm melted right off her face.

“Do you always talk to the rescue workers that way?” Eric asked.

Her eyes narrowed. She spoke in a low, cold tone that could be mistaken for civil, if someone didn’t know her well. “Yes, I do. Because I’ve known some of them for goin’ on ten years, and around here, you do your colleagues the courtesy of treating them like human beings with lives and personalities of their own, instead of little machines put on this earth to do your biddin’. And by the way, I asked about whether the victim was local earlier because notifying the next of kin might be easier if I could go to them directly as a friend and let them know what was happening as opposed to them hearing the news from someone they barely know and probably won’t like very much.”

Eric’s dark-blond brows knit themselves together. “You’re going to lecture me on how to treat people? The Midnight Uber Escape Artist?”

She rolled her eyes. “I do not discriminate between locals and tourists. They all get top-priority treatment from me. But if you want a shot at a decent second impression with me, remove your head from your hindquarters and try to refrain from doubtin’ my credentials or professionalism for a third time. I have tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, since you’re new to the area and the job, but that benefit has now expired.”

Eric swallowed heavily and nodded. “I will keep that in mind,” he said.

“Now, who are we lookin’ for?” she asked, returning to that sweeter tone she’d used with Mr. Redmand.

Clearing his throat, Eric showed her his clipboard, where he was taking copious notes in a neat block script. He pulled out an iPhone with a heavy-duty waterproof case. He pressed a few keys and a middle-aged man with a shock of white hair and a broad, ruddy face grinned out from the screen. “Len Huffman, age fifty-nine, of Sandusky, Ohio. The boat went down at Ass Elbow around six o’clock. The call for help didn’t come in until a little after seven. We didn’t get boats in the water until almost eight.”

“Have you notified next of kin that he’s missin’?” she asked.

“Yeah, his wife, Melody, is here on the scene. I wanted to get her out of here before the media shows up, but she’s insistin’ on stickin’ around.”

He gestured up the hill to a thin woman with blond hair slicked against her skull, standing at the edge of the water, a green sheriff’s department windbreaker wrapped around her. The resentment in Eric’s voice confused her, like he didn’t understand why a woman would want to be close by as rescue divers searched for her husband. But the guy had issues, and she hadn’t had enough sleep to explore them. She did, however, have just enough mental energy to connect some dots about the wife’s appearance.

“Wait, she was in the boat with him?”

He nodded. “They’d been fishin’ all day, hadn’t caught anything. The wife says she asked her husband to go back to their cabin a few times, but he kept pushin’ for more time. She said he’d heard all these stories about thick schools of fish near the dam, kept getting closer, and over they went. But she didn’t get a call in to 911 until almost an hour later.”

Frankie glanced around. They were in an incredibly remote spot. At that late hour, the Huffmans were likely the only boaters around for miles. The dam didn’t have watchtowers for wayward fishermen, especially at the odd corner end.

“How exactly was she supposed to call?” Frankie asked. “Her cell is probably on the bottom, not to mention what cell reception there is out here sucks. It’s kind of a miracle that she got to the nearest phone that quickly.”

“I’m just sayin’ the fact that she took so long to call in makes the timeline real vague.”

Frankie stared at him. “Why would the timeline need to be clear in an accidental drowning?”

“He’s got a lot of expensive equipment,” he said. “Seems to me an experienced fisherman would know better than to fish so late in the day and to get so close to the dam.”

The bewildered irritation was replaced temporarily by the urge to pat his head like a puppy. “Oh, bless your heart, Sheriff. I forgot this is your first tourist season. Just because somebody has a lot of expensive fishin’ equipment doesn’t necessarily mean they have experience or common sense. In fact, you’ll find that the shinier and more glittery the bass boat, the more unreliable the fisherman’s judgment.”

Eric’s brows rose. “What?”

“You ever heard the expression ‘all hat, no cattle’?” she asked. “Same concept applies to boat purchases.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” He snorted as the hum of an engine cut across the water. “Who’s that?”

Frankie turned to see Aunt Donna’s boat roaring through the debris field. Frankie should have known that her aunt would want to help the Search and Rescue dive team find some of the harder-to-navigate places where the current could have pushed Mr. Huffman. Frankie’s parents had arrived with her, bringing coffee, cold drinks, and sandwiches for the rescue workers. Slowly but surely, more boats arrived, the better boaters in the community coming out to volunteer.

This was one of the things she loved about her family. Yes, they could be frustrating and drive the pope to cuss, but when you really needed them, they rose to the occasion.

“That’s my aunt and my parents. They’re here to help.”

Eric’s eyebrow arched. “Nobody called for them.”

Frankie grinned at him. “Nobody had to.”

While her mama fed and watered the troops, Frankie hiked up the hill to Mrs. Huffman with coffee and a turkey sandwich in hand. Even from ten feet away, Frankie could see the lady was shivering in her wet clothes and borrowed jacket. Talking to the bereaved was one of the few areas of the job that made her uncomfortable. She rarely had to talk to them at the funeral home. E.J.J. usually arranged the details of the services and passed them along to her. He was so much better at it than Frankie, who was always afraid of saying something that would make the situation worse. Death was a verbal minefield.

Still, better her than Eric, who seemed to have been born without empathy.

“Hi,” Frankie said, handing her the coffee. “My name’s Frankie McCready. You look like you need to warm up.”

She didn’t introduce herself as the county coroner as Melody sipped her coffee. Frankie found that the word coroner scared surviving kin still on the scene of tragedies. They wanted to hold on to hope, and she didn’t want to be the one to take it from them.

“Hi,” the woman said in a wobbly rasp.

Melody was considerably younger than her husband, and, well, she was at least a nine, with delicate features and almost catlike green eyes, whereas Len was a Lake Sackett four. She was wearing a damp blue camp shirt, khaki shorts, and sensible deck shoes. All caked with mud and dried leaves. Her pupils were huge, and she kept staring off into the distance, as if she could spot her husband waving from the opposite riverbank.

“Do we need to get you any medical attention?” Frankie asked, eyeing nail beds and lips that were turning purple-blue, even in the lingering warmth of early autumn. She took one of the prepackaged mosquito-repellent citronella bands she kept in her pockets and slipped it around Melody’s wrist. The woman was so unfocused that she barely noticed Frankie’s maneuver.

Melody shook her head. “No, I told the sheriff, I’m fine. The boat tipped and I just flopped into the water. I was wearing a life jacket, so I popped right up. Len . . . he doesn’t like them. Says they pull at his neck too much when he’s moving.”

Frankie noted that Melody was still using the present tense to describe her husband, which was pretty common at this stage in the trauma process. She said, “Sometimes, when you’ve got a lot of adrenaline going through your system, you can be injured and not even realize it. Are you sure you didn’t hit any debris or hurt yourself while you were climbing onto the bank? Any problems breathing or moving around?”

Melody bit her lip. “No.”

“Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”

“People keep asking that,” Melody said, her accent almost exotic in its nasal Northern quality. “They keep asking who they can contact for me. But there’s no one to call. I don’t have any family. And Len’s sons . . . well, his kids weren’t very happy about him marrying someone who’s their age. They haven’t spoken to him in years. They say I broke up their parents’ marriage. That it wasn’t right that Len took their mom out of his will and off his life insurance and added me. They always seem to forget the part where their parents were divorced for two years before we even met. I could call his friends from work, but his phone is in his pocket . . .”

Frankie squeezed her arm gently. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to just go back to your rental and get some rest?”

Melody shook her head so hard Frankie was afraid her teeth would rattle out of her head. “No, I couldn’t possibly sleep not knowing. I can’t just leave him out here alone.”

“I understand,” Frankie told her.

Duffy, sandwich in hand, climbed effortlessly up the hill on his long legs, like he was strolling down a sidewalk.

“Duffy, this is Melody Huffman.”

Duffy nodded, handing the sandwich to Frankie with a Post-it note attached that said, Eat this, Frances Ann! Frankie quickly stuck the sandwich in her jacket pocket.

“Ma’am. I’m Frankie’s cousin, Duffy McCready. I wish we were meetin’ under better circumstances.”

“I don’t suppose there’s much chance that he’s out there somewhere, clinging to a rock or something, huh?” Melody asked softly, her red-rimmed eyes glazed over with another round of tears.

“It doesn’t seem likely at this point,” Frankie said carefully.

“He was so excited about this trip,” Melody said, pressing her bottom lip between her teeth. “He’d been looking forward to it all year. That’s why he didn’t want to go back. He loves . . . loved fishing so much, and this was a new challenge for him.”

“Was the boat new?” Frankie asked, just to give Melody something else to think about.

“No, he’s had it for a few years, but this was the first time he’s gotten it out this season. He’s had so many projects at work, he just hasn’t had the time. That’s why he wanted to stay out late . . . I know I’m repeating myself, I’m sorry.”

“Did he have the engine looked at before y’all came down here?” Duffy asked.

Melody shook her head again. “No, he had it serviced last spring before the season and then put it in a really good storage place. The kind with climate controls and insulation and all that. He said that was good enough.”

Duffy frowned and nodded. “So when you drifted closer to the dam, did he have trouble getting the engine to start?”

Melody nodded. “He pulled up anchor because we were just about ready to go. But the engine wouldn’t turn over.” Melody swallowed thickly, scrubbing her dirty hand over her mouth. Her eyes welled over, and the tears left tracks through the dirt dried on her cheeks. “The closer we drifted to the dam, the faster it pulled us in. We couldn’t get away. The boat went over and I got thrown in the water and . . . I didn’t see him again. I looked all over for him. I tried, but I got so tired . . . I told him to wear a life jacket, but he didn’t like the way it pulled around his neck . . . I tried to tell him . . .”

“Okay, okay,” Frankie said, stroking Melody’s arm. She saw her mother at the base of the hill and led Melody down to where Leslie stood. “This is my mama, Leslie McCready. She just loves to fuss over people. Why don’t you make her feel better by sittin’ down and havin’ something to eat? You’ve been on your feet all night, and you look like you’re getting ready to fall over.”

Melody nodded and let Leslie guide her away to a camp chair near the lights. “Come on, shug, let’s get some food in your system.”

“What was with the boat questions?” Frankie asked Duffy.

Duffy pulled a grimace, frown lines appearing around his blue eyes. “Boat engines are a lot like car engines. You have to change the oil, tune ’em up, keep ’em conditioned for use. If you take a boat out on the water after it’s been in storage for months, without an overhaul? What do you think your car would do if you left it parked in your garage all winter without touching it and then tried to take it on the highway?”

Frankie grimaced. “Not good things?”

Duffy nodded. “Not good things.”

5

IT WAS AUNT Donna who found poor Len Huffman, of course.

She found his body in some hidden eddy downstream from the dam around two that morning. Melody had stayed until she was literally dozing off mid-sentence. Frankie finally convinced her to let Duffy take her back to their rental cabin and promised that someone would come to talk to her as soon as they knew anything.

All the other boats fell quiet as Aunt Donna ferried the body across the river. Hell, Aunt Donna was uncharacteristically silent as she piloted the boat to shore. Len Huffman’s mortal shell was draped carefully with a clean white sheet. Donna didn’t have any funereal experience, but she took such things seriously.

Frankie went over the mental checklist of information she needed to note about his condition. Lividity, rigor, body temp, skin tone. She tried not to focus on the mundane details, like his wedding band or the tattoo on his forearm of the name Melody surrounded by little music notes. His body was in pretty good shape, considering what he’d been through. There were no wounds or obvious bone breaks. It looked like a fairly straightforward case of drowning, though she would have to run some tests at the morgue.

“Sheriff?” She looked around for Eric and couldn’t find hide nor hair of him. She could swear that he’d been right behind her when Aunt Donna called over the radio to say that she’d found him.

Frankie pulled the sheet back over Len’s face and tucked it gently around his head. “Aunt Donna, I’ll be ready to transport him in just a few minutes.”

She hopped off the boat and onto shore. “Sheriff Linden!”

Frankie marched through the base camp, watching the rescue workers and volunteers taking down the lights and equipment. It was oddly deflating, that loss of hope, even though they’d known for hours that Len was probably dead.

Somehow, Eric had managed to disappear from a very well-lit area full of people who were professional finders. It took her multiple walks around the base camp before she finally found him, up the hill, on his cell phone, filling out paperwork on his clipboard. It sounded like he was notifying the dam personnel that they’d found the body. While it was an important step, it wasn’t exactly something that needed to be done the minute they found Len.

Eric ended the call, his face pale and almost cheesy-looking in the artificial light.

She frowned at him and said, “I’m gonna contact his dentist to ask for records. If possible, I’d like to spare his wife the chore of identifyin’ him.”

He nodded. “Good thinkin’, good thinkin’. Keep him in our custody for an extra few days. Um, I’m gonna contact his doctor and ask for a list of his medications.”

“Why would you do that?” Frankie asked.

“In case something comes up on the toxicology report. We need a baseline. Are you going to run a blood-alcohol?”

Frankie shrugged. “I always do, but honestly, I don’t think alcohol or foul play are going to be an issue here. There are no beer cans or bottles in the debris field. I didn’t smell booze on his wife’s breath.”

“Let’s just see what we find, okay?” he said. “Why don’t you take the, uh, body back to the morgue. Get some rest and run the test results back to me as soon as you can.”

“All right, then. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything,” she said. “Are you gonna talk to the wife?”

Eric’s mouth bent into a pained grimace.

“I’ll take care of it.” She turned on her heel and walked off. “Might as well let someone who feels actual human emotions talk to the grievin’ widow, ya tool.”

WHEN LIFE KEPT YOU AT a morgue past ten in the morning, for nonfun reasons, the only thing that could make it better was one of Ike Grandy’s artery-clogging megabreakfasts.

Frankie sat at her usual booth in the back of the Rise and Shine, wearing a pair of oversize sunglasses while she picked at a Good Start, a buttermilk biscuit the size of a hubcap stuffed with bacon, cheese, and sausage omelet, served with a side of home fries. Because home fries.

While several of her neighbors nodded at her from their own booths, most left her alone. Word of Len’s drowning had already spread, and most Lake Sackett residents knew Frankie well enough to know that late nights out involving body retrieval did not give her a sunny disposition. She had a few hours before she was supposed to be back at work, beginning tests on Len’s body. But she knew there was no way she’d be able to sleep in this state, her nerves too keyed up and her belly too empty.

Poor Melody had been beside herself with grief when Frankie informed her of Len’s passing, collapsing against Frankie and sobbing into a stranger’s windbreaker. Even with all evidence to the contrary, she’d still held on to the hope that this was all a misunderstanding, that Len was coming home to her. The only bright spot in Frankie’s morning had been sitting on the rickety rental’s couch with Melody as she called Len’s sons. Frankie had held Melody’s hand, ready to end the call the second that Len Jr. or Marty spoke the least bit crosswise with their estranged stepmother. But she’d been pleasantly surprised by their support, asking Melody if she needed anything, if they should come to Georgia, if she wanted them to start funeral plans in Ohio.

Frankie sincerely hoped that it was the devastation clear in Melody’s voice that prompted this change in the Huffman boys, that they weren’t planning on yanking the estate out from under her while she was grieving. Frankie had spent her life around sincere grief. She knew it when she saw it, and she hoped that Len’s sons could look past their mountain of childhood issues to see it, too. Frankie didn’t understand why Sheriff Linden seemed to think her behavior was suspicious.

Eric Linden. Frankie stretched her aching back against the cracked red vinyl of the diner booth. She wondered if having a sheriff who seemed to be an antisocial curmudgeon with no apparent people skills was better than having no sheriff at all. Or even Landry Mitchell as sheriff, which had given her nightmares for about a week when Bill Rainey had announced his retirement.

How was she going to work with someone who didn’t seem to have any understanding of the town or its people? Or any people, really? Eric Linden didn’t get small towns. He didn’t get that things were less formal here, or that his rigid refusal to relax came off as snobbish. She was more than annoyed with him. She was disappointed. Somehow, she’d held out a secret hope that he would let go of his initial hostile awkwardness and start to show some sign of the man she’d met before. And it hurt her more than she thought possible. Why did she want to see those flashes of kindness in him so badly?

A large, burn-scarred hand appeared in her peripheral vision and poured a second cup of coffee into her red-and-white mug. “Mornin’, Frankie.”

She didn’t have to look up to know the hand belonged to Ike Grandy. The tall, mustachioed owner of the Rise and Shine was the only one brave enough to approach her before her third cup of coffee on most mornings. He’d been serving her breakfast for almost thirty years and was smart enough to gauge when her uncaffeinated threats were empty and when they were dangerously sincere.

“Mornin’, Ike.”

“Somethin’ wrong with your eggs?”

Frankie slid her sunglasses on top of her head and squinted up at him. “Nah, just got a lot on my mind.”

Ike nodded glumly and put a hand on her shoulder. “I heard you had some trouble out at the dam last night. Tourist from Ohio?”

“Yeah.” She nodded, sipping the hot black brew. She would never tell Ike so, but she much preferred his coffee to her mama’s, which Duffy could use to strip a boat engine on a good day. “Aunt Donna found him this morning.”

“Dead bodies don’t usually put you off your breakfast. Something else goin’ on?” Ike was staring at her face, analyzing.

“I’m just fine, Ike,” she promised. “Peachy flippin’ keen, I promise. It was just a long night.”

“I hear the new sheriff is, uh, a character.” Ike eyed her in a new way now, watching her face because he enjoyed her hyperbolic reactions to frustration. It was the basis of their friendship.

Frankie pinched her lips shut.

Ike’s thick brown mustache twitched. “No comment?”

She smiled sweetly and tilted her head at a coquettish angle. “Mama always said that if you can’t say anything nice, it’s best to just smile until the murderous urges go away.”

Ike’s blue eyes narrowed. “That doesn’t sound like your mama.”

“Well, she doesn’t say it often, Ike. That’s how you end up with witnesses.”

Ike snorted and tousled her blue hair. “Take care of yourself, Frankie.”

“Always do.”

Frankie shoved a chunk of omelet into her mouth. She refused to let thoughts of Sheriff Linden ruin her breakfast, especially when she had a long day ahead of her. The way Ike cooked, that was disrespect bordering on sacrilege.

She paused to let the flavors of perfectly cooked egg, fluffy biscuit, smoked sausage, and sugar-cured bacon meld in her mouth. Ike was an artist, and his medium of choice was breakfast meat.

An obnoxious laugh broke through her reverie. She opened her eyes to see Jared Lewis sitting in a booth near the front window with a couple of his equally obnoxious friends. Jared had his mom’s thick, pale cornsilk hair and small brown eyes. His tanned skin bore acne scars across his cheeks and chin. He was thin and short for his age, eye level with Frankie when she wasn’t in heels. It was Duffy’s theory that Jared suffered from “banty rooster syndrome,” meaning he tried to make up for his lack of height by being the biggest, loudest presence in the room. Frankie thought there might be some merit to Duffy’s notion, but she also thought that Jared was an overindulged little creep with entitlement issues.

Jared was mocking the waitress sliding plates of eggs and waffles onto the table, telling her, “Come on, come on, thunder thighs, we’ve got plans today. We don’t have time to wait around on you.”

The waitress, Peggy Taylor, was a pretty junior at Lake Sackett High with her mama’s heart-shaped face and hourglass figure. Her doe eyes narrowed at Jared and she asked, “What did you just call me?”

“I said, ‘Come on, pretty eyes.’ ” Jared smiled winsomely, or what amounted to winsome when you had a mouthful of orthodontia. “What, you can’t take a compliment?”

So not only was this kid obnoxious, but he was also an idiot. Adulting Life Lesson Number One: Do not mess with the people who handle your food.

Peggy made a disdainful face at him, and Jared held up his plate of toast. “Could you stick this in the toaster for just a few more seconds, thunder—I mean, pretty eyes? It’s a little light for my taste. I like it real dark, almost burned. Can you handle that? Or should I ask Ike for help?”

Frankie could practically hear Peggy’s growl from across the room. The poor girl worked on weekends to help her mama support her three younger siblings. Mr. Taylor had run off with Ike’s previous waitress, Pammy Entwhistle, two years ago. Peggy had accepted her early transition into grown-up responsibilities gracefully. The same could not be said of Jared.

Frankie tried to keep the Game of Thrones “I’ma kill you slowly with dragons” expression off her face. But as soon as he made eye contact with Frankie, Jared smirked that insufferable metal-bracketed smirk of his. He took a bottle of hot sauce from the condiment cart on the table, opened it, and shook it over his eggs.

Hot sauce.

Every splatter against the plate seemed to echo in her head, and Jared’s grin grew wider and wider.

Hot. Sauce.

Exactly like the hot sauce that had been poured into the ketchup bottles at the Snack Shack. He was mocking her, openly, with hot sauce.

Screw it, she was about to go full House Bolton on this kid.

He took a big bite of eggs, still staring at her, and smiled around the food. Gross.

Frankie clutched her fork in an overhanded Psycho grip and took a deep breath. Jared, unwisely, chose this moment to slide out of his booth and saunter over to her. Behind him, Frankie could see Peggy practically torching Jared’s toast against a gas burner. Watching her set Jared’s breakfast on fire was enough to get Frankie to relax her death grip on her utensil.

She smiled pleasantly, as if butter’s temperature would not drop a single degree in her mouth. “Good mornin’, Jared. How’s your daddy?”

Jared snickered. “Still your boss, the last time I checked.”

“Aw, bless your heart,” she cooed in the same sugary voice she used to talk to Tootie’s bulldog Myrtle. “That’s an interesting way of lookin’ at what is basically a volunteer position on my part, to help out my community. But if you want to see it that way, sweetie, I won’t burst your little bubble.”

Jared flushed red. He did not like being called “sweetie.” His mama called him that in front of his friends, and it embarrassed the hell out of him. Frankie smirked this time. Adulting Life Lesson Number Two: Know thine enemy.

Or maybe that was the Bible.

Or The Real Housewives of New Jersey.

“So, how’s the season treating y’all over at McCready’s?” Jared asked in a tone far too casual to be genuine. “I hear you’ve been having problems?”

“What?” She gave an exaggerated laugh. “Where would you hear a silly thing like that?”

He sneered. “Oh, I just heard you’ve been having issues with keeping the tourists happy.”

Behind him, Frankie could see Peggy holding up Jared’s strategically burned toast with a pair of tongs and running it through the gap between the hot griddle and the countertop, where even Ike’s meticulous cleaning skills couldn’t quite reach. Peggy was buttering his toast with years’ worth of old grease, grime, and who knew what else.

Frankie approved, heartily.

“Oh, not at all! I mean, I know you’re probably not familiar with this because you’ve never actually worked for anything before, but there are little, tiny, insignificant complications involved with any business. And when those minor, petty, barely noticeable problems come up, you just fix them, forget about them, and move on.”

While placing the finished piece of toast on a plate, Peggy spotted Frankie watching her and froze like a deer caught in headlights. Frankie grinned at her, and Peggy relaxed ever so slightly. Smiling, she picked up the second piece of toast and gave it the same treatment as the first.

“I don’t have to work,” Jared retorted.

“Congratulations . . .” Frankie said, ending the word on a dubious, scornful note.

“You think you’re such a big deal, with your stupid hair and your weird clothes. Everybody feels so sorry for poor little Frankie who almost died. Boo-hoo. Well, I know what you really are. You’re a freak.” Jared leaned and loomed over her . . . because she was seated and that was the only way he could loom over anyone. “And one of these days your mouth is gonna get you in trouble.”

Frankie couldn’t lie. His words stung. Not about her being a freak, of course. She dressed the way she did because it was fun and it set tight-asses like Marnette Lewis on scandalized pearl-clutching rants. But the suggestion that people in Lake Sackett pitied her set her teeth on edge. It was one thing for her to play her parents, but Frankie had never flaunted her illness around town for sympathy.

Then again, the suggestion came from a half-grown jackass, so she was going to give it all the consideration it was due, which wasn’t much.

“Next time you make a vague threat like that, you should really twist a pretend mustache at the corner of your mouth to drive home how super-duper evil you are,” she scoffed. As Jared’s face flushed an unpleasant shade of puce, she nodded to Peggy, who was walking back to his boothful of toadies. “Now, I think that sweet girl serving your food has finished your toast. Why don’t you go sit down and eat your breakfast?”

Jared’s lip curled, but he turned and started to swagger away.

“And Jared?”

He stopped, and she added, “Do be sure and tell your mama I said hello.”

He bared his braces at her, and she made an exaggerated show of shivering in her booth. He snarled and stomped back to his table, snapping at Peggy to get the hell out of his way.

Satisfied, Frankie stood and slid the cost of her breakfast, plus a generous tip for Ike and an extra twenty, across the counter. “Make sure Peggy gets this as a tip. She’s worth every penny.”

Ike wiped his hands on his apron and accepted the bills with a frown. “But Peggy didn’t serve you.”

Frankie grinned at him. “Sure she did.”

6

LEN HUFFMAN’S CONDITION was almost a textbook description of accidental drowning. Lake water in the lungs, complete with the appropriate levels of local diatoms, no alcohol in his system, no suspicious bruising or wounds, no defensive marks on the hands, no contusions on the head, no foreign matter besides dirt under the fingernails. His heart was as clogged as you would expect for any husky man in his fifties, but not diseased. She was still waiting for the drug test results from the state police, but Frankie was willing to sign all papers necessary for Melody Huffman to become a very comfortable widow.

And yet . . .

Eric Linden wouldn’t release the body to the family, claiming an incomplete investigation. Melody was becoming frantic, unable to get the body home for a funeral. The only good news was that her stepsons were equally irritated by Eric’s reluctance and threatening to come down to Georgia if the body wasn’t released in the next three days.

And so Frankie sat in the Sackett County Sheriff’s Department lobby, which was really just two uncomfortable plastic chairs situated in front of the clerk’s desk, contemplating what exactly she would be charged with if she threatened to smack a law enforcement official with one of her drainage pans.

Probably a lot.

Besides the gloomy wear and tear of a county building during a budget shortage, the sheriff’s office was also showing some of the chaotic disorganization left over from the previous administration. Poor Janey Jesper’s desk was overflowing with stacks of files and Post-it notes scrawled with phone numbers and report references. The floor was crowded with filing boxes marked with descriptions like Reports, 1963–1974, Water Damaged. A crumpled truck bumper, labeled with an evidence tag, leaned against the far wall.

Eric had inherited a mess. She felt just the tiniest bit sorry for him, but then she remembered poor Melody’s face when she’d arrived that morning expecting to take Len home, only to be told that Eric hadn’t signed the necessary releases.

Yep, back to the drainage-pan plan.

“He’ll be right with you,” Janey promised, chewing on the Breakfast Stick that Leslie had sent with Frankie. Breakfast Sticks were her mama’s original breakfast creation, comprising bacon wrapped around a sausage, stuffed with cheese, dipped in egg batter, and deep-fried. “He’s been on the phone all morning, tryin’ to get a cleanin’ service that will work for the budget he’s got. I tried to tell him to just ask the local church ladies to pitch in and help him get organized. You know Sara Lee would be chompin’ at the bit to get her hands on this place. But he said there are regulations against that sort of thing.”

“Eh, he’s probably right on that one. He’s got enough chain-of-evidence issues around here without worryin’ about Sara Lee gettin’ her grubby paws on his files.”

Landry Mitchell, thin with ash-blond hair and perpetually pale skin, ambled into the office with a confidence you wouldn’t expect in a man who left his police radio in the break room fridge at least once a week.

“Hey, Frankie,” he said, peering into the white paper bag in her lap. “You got one of those Breakfast Sticks for me?”

“Sure thing, Landry,” she said, offering the bag. “How’s your mama?”

“Ah, she’s fine, thanks for askin’,” he said, grinning around a mouthful of breading and bacon. “No idea how she just fell off the porch swing into those rosebushes, but her leg’s almost a hundred percent. She said she’s got to get better soon so I don’t have to keep cookin’ for her.”

Frankie resisted the urge to grimace. Most everybody in town—except Landry—knew the reason Vonnie Mitchell “fell off” her porch swing was that Landry had installed the swing incorrectly and bolted it to a weak joist on the porch. The joist collapsed under Vonnie’s weight, sending her flying through an equally weak railing—also repaired by Landry—and into her prize roses. But Vonnie never wanted Landry to feel bad about his shortcomings, so she blamed her own clumsiness. She probably wanted to recover before Landry could set her kitchen on fire.

Landry was a sweet guy, but there was a reason he failed to see how underqualified he was for his job. And that reason was spelled V-O-N-N-I-E.

“So how’s the new sheriff settlin’ in?” Frankie asked Landry in a conspiratorial tone.

“He’s a good guy,” Landry said with a shrug. “Knows his stuff when it comes to laws and such. Kind of a stick-in-the-mud, but what are you gonna do?”

“Don’t you think it’s gonna hurt him that he doesn’t know anything about Lake Sackett?” Frankie asked.

“I think it might help him,” Landry said, wiping his mouth with his uniform tie. “It’s always kind of awkward for me, arrestin’ somebody I’ve known since high school or who knows my family. They cuss at me at the scene for not just lettin’ them off with a warnin’. And then my mama wakes me up from a dead sleep to fuss at me for arrestin’ one of her friends’ sons. And then I get nasty looks at the Food Carnival, and I never know whether it’s safe to drink at the Dirty Deer because someone coulda spit in my beer. I figure it’s gonna be easier on him because he doesn’t know anybody. He doesn’t owe anybody any loyalty. His mama’s not gonna wake him up out of a dead sleep to fuss at him because I hear she lives in Florida. Maybe that’s why he moved here, ’cause he doesn’t know anybody.”

Frankie tilted her head and stared at Landry for a moment, as if she’d just watched a turtle play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on a harmonica. “Occasionally you are full of surprises, Landry.”

“Bound to happen sometime.” Landry shrugged and shoved the rest of the Breakfast Stick in his mouth.

Janey snickered, but as soon as Eric came walking out of his office, she straightened in her chair.

“Janey, is there any more coffee?”

“Miss Frankie McCready here to see you, sir,” she said in a very formal tone.

Eric’s generous mouth turned downward, but Frankie wasn’t sure if it was because of her presence or the fact that his deputy had gone full chipmunk cheeks on fried breakfast meat. That was a lovely way to start an appointment. “Ms. McCready, please come back to my office.”

Frankie gave a little salute, winking at Janey as she passed. Janey stifled a grin.

“Landry.”

“Thans for beckfast, Fankie!” Landry called around the food in his mouth. Eric cringed visibly.

Frankie followed Eric into his cramped, windowless office. His desk was a still spot of calm amid stacks of mildewed boxes and files.

She dropped her grease-spotted white paper bag on the desk. “These are Breakfast Sticks from my mama. She hears you haven’t made an appearance at the Rise and Shine yet, and she’s worried you haven’t been eatin’ breakfast. She has this whole rhymin’ thing about breakfast being the most important meal of the day, but I’ll spare ya.”

“People have noticed I haven’t eaten breakfast at the diner yet?”

She shrugged. “Small town.”

Eric eyed the bag dubiously and put it on the corner of the desk, far from his blotter. “Tell your mama I said thank you. Now, how can I help you this mornin’?”

“Well, you can release Len Huffman’s body to his wife, so she can take him home and bury him.”

He sighed, flopping back in his chair. “This again?”

“Yes, this again. Why are you treating that poor woman this way?”

“Because that’s my job! I just got hired. How’s it gonna look if I just rubber-stamp the first complicated situation that comes up? Plus, I just don’t think Melody Huffman’s story adds up. And she stands to gain quite a bit by his death.”

Frankie threw her hands up. “Because he loved his wife and wanted to make sure she was comfortable if something happened to him! Are you really trying to make this into a murder? Because it took her too long to get to a phone after she was thrown in the water? I told you, there is nothing about Len Huffman’s condition that suggests anything but accidental drowning.”

“Look, you can prove that he drowned, but you can’t prove that she didn’t do something to help him along. At least not until the toxicology results come back.”

“You are not the sheriff in Jaws! This was a boating accident!” she cried. “Just let me release the body to Melody so she can take him home and we can all move on with our lives!”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Are you saying this because you don’t want to wreck the rest of the tourist season?”

Her mouth dropped open. “What?”

“Everybody here talks about how vital the season is to the town’s economy. You’re the one who just mentioned Jaws. A civil servant eager to whitewash a tragedy so the town can ‘move on with their lives’ and bring the tourists in, sound familiar?”

“You know, if you could ever get both the brain cells in your head to agree, you’d be downright dangerous.” She stood with all the righteous fury someone could muster when they were wearing a T-shirt featuring a cartoon cat chasing Pop-Tarts. “First of all, screw you. Second, if anything, a nice juicy spousal murder would probably bring more tourists into town, sad to say. But that doesn’t matter because I don’t let things like that affect the decisions I make.”

She jerked his office door open. “You want results? I will show you results.”

She stomped out of his office, only to stomp right back and grab the bag of Breakfast Sticks. “You don’t deserve these.”

And then she walked out, with his breakfast in her hand.

ONCE FRANKIE WORKED UP A head of steam, it was pretty hard to stop her. And she knew the anger was genuine when she was still pissed off after driving to McCready’s from town. Usually, blasting Panic! at the Disco in the funeral home van cheered her out of lesser moods. She stomped down the hall toward the funeral home office, past the paint-by-number Jesuses the family felt too guilty to throw out. With Eric’s bag of Breakfast Sticks still clutched in her fingers, she threw open her daddy’s office door and flung herself into the chair in front of his desk.

“Please, come in,” he said, shaking his head at her.

Knowing this was as close as Bob would come to chastising her, Frankie hung her head. “Sorry, Daddy.”

“What if I’d been with a customer?”

“You’re right, that was rude,” she conceded. “Just remind me again how often the state regulators check our logs for crematory use and how difficult it is to fudge those records.”

“You can’t fire up the crematory to solve personal problems, sweetheart,” Bob said, his lips twitching. “We’ve talked about this, about twice a year, since you were in high school.”

Frankie growled. “Fine, another respectable felony thwarted by good sense and bureaucracy.”

“What’s buggin’ my doodle bug?” he asked, smiling fondly, like her fury was the most adorable thing in the world.

“The new sheriff is impossible,” she hissed. “What in the hell was the county commission thinking, appointing this guy? He’s cold, condescending, constantly questions my authority, wouldn’t know interpersonal skills if they fell onto his face and wiggled, and he uses laws as an excuse to get his own way.”

“So what you’re tellin’ me is that a law enforcement official sticks to professional topics in conversation, doesn’t just accept what he’s told at face value, and follows the letter of the law?” Bob said with a frown. “How dare he? We should fire him immediately before word gets out.”

Frankie pointed to her nose. “See this? Not my amused face.”

“He had a good record and a recommendation from his boss. He had a lot more experience than Landry Mitchell and to our knowledge has never shot himself in the foot while naked.”

Frankie made a harrumphing sound.

“Doodle bug, I know it’s annoyin’ to have your skills questioned, particularly when you take your work so seriously—”

Frankie beamed sweetly and bounced out of her chair. “Yes, thank you for your total agreement. That’s all I needed to hear.”

“BUT,” he added loudly, making Frankie pull a comically unpleasant face as she flopped back down. “Is it possible that you’re having a teensy-tiny overreaction to the fact that Sheriff Linden is not beguiled by your charisma and unique fashion sense?” He rounded his desk and leaned against it so he could smile down at her. “And that hurts your feelin’s just a little bit because you like him?”

Frankie shuddered and edged back away from her father like she was repulsed.

“Okay, we never, ever, talk about me being attracted to anybody, because eww.”

“He’s a nice-lookin’ fella, and you have a weak spot for contrariness. Maybe you can try a little harder to be more understanding.”

“Stop it right now, or I will tell Mama that you’ve been sneakin’ quarters out of the swear jar for the Coke machine!”

Bob’s jaw dropped open. “You wouldn’t dare!”

“Keep talkin’ about what I find attractive in a man and see what happens,” she told her father, who scowled while drinking a fresh can of Coke. He preferred the cold cans from the machine in the break room to hiking down to the Snack Shack for a fountain drink.

“Well, could I persuade you to take a slightly gentler approach to your problem with Jared Lewis? I honestly think if you just talked calmly to his parents about your concerns, you wouldn’t have to send your uncle Stan on stakeouts of the back parking lot. Just reason with them. You’re a smart young lady. You’re a problem solver. I am sure if you found a way to reach out to them, you could recruit them to your side.”

“Again, no, because you can’t reason with ridiculous people,” she said airily, standing and dropping the cold, greasy bag into his hands. “But thank you, you just reminded me of something.”

“What’s that?” he called after her.

She ducked her head back into his office and smiled so brightly that he winced this time. “I’m really good at my job.”

Frankie practically skipped down the Hall of Jesusi, mentally listing all the reports she would need to collect in the next day or so. The paperwork was going to be a pain, but the look on Eric Linden’s face was going to be glorious. Her gleeful route to the morgue was cut short by the sudden appearance of Mercutio, Aunt Tootie’s pug potpourri mix, rounding the corner on his long, giraffe-like legs.

“Yipe!” Frankie cried, tangling her own feet together to avoid stepping on Mercutio. The dog escaped unscathed, but Frankie wound up face-planting into the carpet. She rolled onto her back, one eye closed. “Ow.”

Mercutio made an apologetic little rowr sound, crawled onto her chest, and licked her face. She sighed. “Thanks, Merc.”

Frankie scratched the dog’s ears, only to be crowded by a half dozen additional wet dog noses also seeking cuddles.

Wait.

Frankie bolted up, dislodging Mercutio. She looked up to find her great-aunt standing over her in a purple shirtdress and lime-green Crocs. “Aunt Tootie, you know you’re not supposed to bring the dogs in here. Uncle E.J.J. is gonna have a fit!”

“Oh, what your uncle doesn’t know won’t hurt him. I only brought the well-behaved puppies in, anyway.”

Frankie scanned the pack for Lulu, the pit mix who saw dry carpet as a personal challenge. Lulu was not present, so that was something, at least. On the other hand, a new addition to the pack, a stoic German shepherd, sat beside Tootie’s feet, warily scanning the hallway. Frankie didn’t know whether he was properly carpet-safe or not.

“Who’s this?” Frankie asked.

“Hercules. He just came into the shelter. He used to work at the Atlanta airport as a bomb-sniffing dog, but his handler passed away.”

“Aw, I’m sorry to hear that, Hercules,” Frankie told him.

“Service animals are all about routine,” Tootie said. “And poor Herc is having some transition issues.”

“You’ll get used to us,” Frankie promised, reaching out to let Hercules sniff her hand. He declined and sidled behind Tootie’s legs, which spoke volumes about her appeal to males lately.

“What are you doin’ here in the first place?” Frankie asked, carefully standing up. “I didn’t know any of the services today requested live organ music.”

“Margot has some more paperwork for me to sign for this shelter thing. That girl. I swear, I wouldn’t have agreed to this silly idea.”

“You love it,” Frankie told her. “You’re going to be able to help lots more animals without Dougie Hazard breathin’ down your neck. You’ll be downright respectable.”

“Well, whoever said I wanted to be respectable?” Tootie grinned her too-white-to-possibly-be-her-original-teeth grin. “Now get on to work. You’re not paid to be lollygaggin’ around the hallway, pettin’ puppies.”

She patted Frankie on the shoulder and exited out the back door, her dog pack yapping around her ankles.

“And just as mysteriously as she arrived, she disappeared in a flurry of dog fur and town crazy lady,” Frankie muttered. “Ouch.”

7

THE MCCREADY COUSINS were gathering for their traditional celebration of possum eggs and moonshine-based cocktails. Pestilence and chaos would surely follow.

With Uncle Stan keeping watch on the docks and new security cameras installed on the loading bay doors, the “anonymous” campaign of pranks against McCready’s had dwindled to nothing. Although, Uncle Stan had claimed he saw a small figure dressed all in black row an obnoxiously orange kayak close to the dock in the middle of the night. When Stan shucked his shotgun and yelled, “This can either end in you rowin’ away or you getting an ass cheek full of rock, your choice!” the figure guided the kayak back out onto open water.

It seemed that Jared Lewis had gotten the message, for now.

The clients of McCready’s were happy and un-hot-sauced once more, meaning bigger tips and healthy traffic through the marina. Between that and Frankie’s recent forensic victory, she insisted that their generation gather at the Dirty Deer for a celebration.

The Dirty Deer was the night spot in Lake Sackett, as in it was the only night spot in Lake Sackett. The smoky wood-paneled bar was decorated mostly with neon beer signs and featured old scarred oak booths. The McCreadys held their usual table in the corner, near the pool tables. The waitress, Sierra, took their orders and delivered possum eggs, an appetizer involving potato skins and bacon, but no possum. And because Frankie was the designated driver, she got a glass of extremely sweet tea instead of a Georgia Peach, a cocktail involving moonshine and peach schnapps.

“Kyle couldn’t join us this evening?” Marianne teased as Margot slid into the booth while shoving a possum egg into her mouth.

“School board meeting,” Margot said, grimacing. “I don’t know what’s on the agenda, but he acted like he was facing a firing squad.”

“That’s normal,” Marianne assured her. “We’ve got the Trunk-R-Treat coming up. Even though it’s not an official school event, Kyle ends up getting blamed when the kids get all sugared up and cause chaos. The school board always reminds him that if his staff was teaching the kids better manners, maybe the event would go smoother.”

Margot scrunched up her nose. “Isn’t that the parents’ job? To teach the kids manners?”

Marianne clutched at imaginary pearls at her throat. “But if I try to teach the kids manners, they won’t want to be my friends!”

“That’s why Marianne can’t go to school board meetings anymore,” Frankie told Margot.

“So, I hear that Lana and her latest beau crashed and burned,” Frankie told Duffy as he poured himself a beer. “Big ugly meltdown in the parking lot of the Dirty Deer.”

Duffy looked toward the ceiling, because he couldn’t make eye contact in conversations about his sneaky, adulterous ex-wife who he occasionally slept with, to satisfy some urge for danger and exposure to Designer Imposters perfume. “You don’t say.”

“So she might come sniffin’ around, hopin’ for a rebound hookup.”

Duffy scratched the back of his neck. “Uh . . . huh.”

“But you’re not gonna do that again, right? Because we’ve talked about what an awful, toxic person she is, and how unhealthy your on-again-off-again relationship is, and how one day she’s probably gonna . . . Oh, Jesus Herbert Christ, you already slept with her, didn’t ya?”

“No comment,” Duffy said as Carl approached the table with a pitcher of water. Because he got antsy around drunk people and tried to get them to space out their drinks in the name of hydration. “Hey, Carl, you wanna play some pool? Awesome, let’s go.”

Carl frowned. “What?”

Marianne sighed. “Duffy, we’ve talked about this.”

“Come on.” Duffy yanked on the back of Carl’s shirt, pulling him toward the pool table.

“I don’t get a vote here?” Carl asked.

“He already slept with her,” Frankie said, shaking her head.

Margot wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Yep.”

“Let’s move on to more cheerful topics, like that incredibly lickable new law enforcement professional who just moved into town,” Marianne said.

“Okay, you used the word ‘lickable,’ that means I get to take your drink,” Frankie said, snagging Marianne’s glass. “You promised after last time.”

“I should have never made that agreement.” Marianne sighed. “I blame the liquor. Still, you gotta admit he’s good-lookin’.”

“Oh, he’s good-lookin’, but he clearly has some sort of deal and I do not understand it.”

“You could try to understand it, which would be a rare gesture from you,” Marianne said. “Or, you know, try to understand him more than twice in a row, which would make it your longest relationship ever.”

“Not all of us meet our future spouse in kindergarten,” Frankie sassed her cousin.

“High school sweethearts aren’t that uncommon,” Marianne insisted.

“No, but magical unicorn husbands are.” Frankie sighed, staring at Carl’s arms, his short sleeves displaying his hard-earned muscles. “Just look at him. He’s like the poster boy for biceps fetishists.”

“That’s a thing?” Margot asked, but when Frankie opened her mouth to answer, she quickly added, “Never mind, I don’t want to know.”

Marianne snorted. “My point is that maybe someone who challenges you, instead of shrinking away from that considerable willful streak of yours, would be harder for you to just toss aside.”

“I will take your drink, Marianne. All of it.”

“Do I need to remind you that you once kidnapped me to try to help patch things up with Carl? You can stand a little well-intentioned lecturing.”

“It wasn’t a kidnapping!”

“You put a bag over my head, tossed me on a boat, and took me to a party where you knew Carl would be hangin’ out. You’re lucky I don’t gift wrap you with a big bow and leave you in one of the sheriff’s holdin’ cells. With a sign that says, ‘Cuff me, please!’ ”

“Well, there’s an upsetting visual of your life at home,” Frankie drawled.

Marianne was too busy staring speculatively across the room. “Do you think he has professional handcuffs that he only uses at work and then ‘fun’ handcuffs—ow!”

Frankie rubbed her hand from the sting of smacking Marianne’s leg. “No more speculatin’ on his handcuffs.”

“You’re right, we should stop,” Marianne said as Frankie sipped her tea. “Because he’s walking over here right now.”

Frankie spat her tea back into her glass, glaring as she wiped her sleeve across her mouth.

“You did that on purpose!”

Marianne grinned. “Yep.”

Frankie glanced across the room to see Eric in his “civvies,” a pair of tight jeans and a worn gray V-neck T-shirt.

“I swear, if he asks to see our ID, I’m gonna punch him in the . . . badge.” Frankie took a long draw from her drink.

“You’ll find a way to work with him, Frankie. You always do,” Marianne assured her, still rubbing her leg. “I know we tease you, but I’m always impressed with how you do your job. I know my daddy would be proud of you.”

“Thanks, Marianne,” Frankie said, squeezing her hand. “That means a lot.”

Frankie ignored the way her knees went all gooey at the sight of Eric. She’d seen Landry Mitchell in his uniform and his civvies plenty of times and felt nary a twinge. Stupid, unreliable knees with bad taste in civic aesthetics. Maybe no uniform or civvies would be even better.

Bad knees. Bad.

In the end, she was so caught up in debating between uniform or no uniform, she didn’t move and Eric walked right up to her.

“Ms. McCready,” he said.

“Sheriff,” she said, trying to keep her expression as neutral as possible.

“This is, uh, something,” Eric said, his face twisted into an uncomfortable expression as he glanced around the room.

“We like it,” Frankie said. “Have you met my cousins? Margot Cary and Marianne Dawson?”

Eric cleared his throat and reached out to shake their hands. “Nice to meet you both.”

“Charmed,” Marianne drawled.

“Ignore her. She’s two Peaches in,” Margot told him, bemused.

“Not true. I’m one Peach in, but after kids, your alcohol tolerance drops to undergrad levels. It’s really sad,” Marianne said. “But no worries, Sheriff. Frankie here is our designated driver.”

Eric frowned. Frankie doubted very much that made him feel better.

“Would you mind if I spoke to your cousin privately for a second?” Eric asked. “It’s business related.”

“Sure,” Marianne said with a grin. “You two go find a quiet corner. Real private.”

Margot snickered into her second possum egg.

“My revenge will be swift and terrible!” Frankie whispered harshly at her as she rose from the booth.

“You’ll have to catch me!” Marianne shot back.

Eric led Frankie out of the bar to the bench near the front door.

“Why couldn’t we stay in the nice, warm bar . . . where there are witnesses?” she asked.

“I don’t think it’s professional or appropriate for us to discuss an official case in a bar.”

“Shows what you know. Sheriff Rainey did half of his paperwork here,” she said, rubbing her arms against the relative chill.

“And where is he now?” Eric asked. He cleared his throat. “So I got an envelope on my desk this morning, despite the fact that my office was locked.”

“I can’t help it that Janey also likes my mama’s divinity candy,” Frankie said, all innocent anime eyes.

“And that envelope happened to contain several documents, including a statement from the Corps of Engineers about the conditions at the dam on the day of Len Huffman’s drowning, a report from the manufacturer of Len Huffman’s boat about proper care of the engine and the consequences of operating the boat without appropriate maintenance, and a statement from a mechanic in Atlanta who somehow managed to inspect the Huffmans’ engine without my knowledge.”

“It was stored at my cousin’s husband’s tow yard,” she supplied helpfully.

“Of course it was.” He chuckled, scrubbing his hand across his face. “And that mechanic stated that the condition of the engine was consistent with failure due to poor maintenance. And there were notarized statements from Len Huffman’s sons about his general reluctance to wear a life jacket despite not being a strong swimmer.”

“And?” she prompted him.

“And a toxicology report from the state police lab showing that there were no drugs or alcohol or any suspicious substances, organic or otherwise, in Len Huffman’s system on the day he died.”

“That’s right,” she said. “And each of those outside expert sources concluded?”

He took a deep breath and said, “That the boat’s capsizing and subsequent drowning of one Len Huffman was most likely accidental and not the result of foul play.”

Frankie resisted the urge to do a little flourish and bow, but it was a near thing.

“Did you bribe your friend at the state police lab to expedite the toxicology report just to prove me wrong?” he asked, his expression amused.

“No, I bribed my friend at the state police lab to expedite the toxicology report because it was the right thing to do,” she retorted.

He raised his eyebrows at her and she added, “It was a slightly less than ethical thing to do to accomplish the right thing. Melody Huffman deserves to be able to take her husband’s body home for burial.”

He rolled his eyes toward the cloudless sky. “Okay, okay. Fine. I concede that this is most likely an accidental drowning. Thank you for devoting your due diligence to this investigation.”

“So, Melody can take Len home?”

He sighed. “She can take him home.”

“Thank you,” she said, pulling her iPhone out of her pocket. She pulled up the cloud folder containing the digital release forms for Len Huffman’s body. He leaned closer to get a look at the screen, his chest touching her shoulder. “I’ve already filled out the paperwork. All you have to do is sign here with your fingertip and the funeral home in Ohio will send a van tomorrow.”

“There’s no reason to gloat,” he grumbled into her ear, scrawling his finger across the screen.

“I’m not gloatin’,” she said, turning toward him. He was bent over her now, his body framed around hers. And it reminded her of that night when he had been much more enthusiastic about being that close to her. She raised an eyebrow as she peered up at him. “I’m just enjoyin’ being right. A lot.”

The barest hint of a smile quirked his lips, lips that were so close to hers now. She could just crane her neck the slightest bit and kiss him. “Is there a difference?”

She nodded and her nose nearly brushed his as he lowered his head. “It’s negligible, but it’s there.”

He laughed and she could feel his breath against her cheeks. “You are enjoying this just a little too much.”

Finally, some sort of normal human interaction with this guy, proof that he had a sense of humor and could engage with her in some civil manner. It was wildly unprofessional, but at least they were both sober this time. “Not nearly as much as I could.”

His expression softened and . . . there he was, the man she’d spent the night with. His lips were a whisper away from hers. She could feel his breath against her mouth. His hands slid up her arms, pulling her just a bit closer.

His upper lip ghosted across her lower lip and she’d reached the point of tension, where she was just about to melt against him. And then he pulled away from her, shutters closing behind his eyes and bleeding the emotion from his face.

“I’m not doing this again,” he told her, that stern quality returning to his voice. “And don’t pull any more tricks with cases. Your habit of taking the easy way out could come back and bite us on the ass. There’s a reason testing is backed up at the state police lab. There are a lot of cases out there that deserve attention just as much as Len Huffman. If you misuse friendships to push to the front of the line again, I’m gonna call the lab supervisor and file a complaint against your friend.”

With that, he stepped away from her and walked toward his truck. Her mouth was still hanging open as he drove out of the parking lot.

“What just happened?”

8

FRANKIE PARKED HER van on the recently repaved drive of the Lewis residence. Marnette had convinced Vern to bulldoze his family’s beautiful eighty-year-old brick home in favor of this beige vinyl-sided McMansion.

This is just one more reason to dislike Marnette, Frankie thought, stepping out of the van. She’d intentionally dressed in one of her more “conventional” outfits: jeans, a plain black T-shirt, and her green utility jacket. She actually needed a light jacket, which was a sign that autumn was setting its teeth in and they were heading toward Georgian winter . . . which was a lot like Georgian autumn.

Trying to be a little more understanding of Eric had been . . . sort of . . . effective, in that he hadn’t arrested her for attempted kissing of a law enforcement officer. So she’d decided to take her father’s advice and try a more logical approach to the Jared problem. Jared’s parents weren’t entirely rational, but they did share a common goal with Frankie: keeping Jared out of trouble and away from McCready’s. She had to try to use that to her advantage.

She was relieved that Jared’s SUV was not parked in the driveway, because if he was home, she wasn’t sure she could get through the conversation she had planned civilly. Taking several deep breaths to steel her nerves, she rang the doorbell, which was a two-bar bell-chime rendition of “Jesus, Take the Wheel.”

Marnette’s eyes were the size of saucers when she answered the door. Her face fell from the pleasant “company” expression to a deadpan frown. “Oh, it’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me. I’d like to speak to you and Vern, if you have time.”

“You couldn’t have called ahead? Your mama has my phone number.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d pick up,” Frankie said.

Marnette pursed her lips as if Frankie had just dropped something gross on her doorstep. “I guess you can come in.”

“Thank you.”

Marnette had clearly used a Pinterest board labeled “French Provincial Designs Rejected by Reality Show Housewives” as her decorating guidebook. Everything from ceiling to floor was painted stone-effect gray. Every single surface was covered in some rendition of an overblown flower. Frankie had never seen so many unnecessary carved pillars in her life. And cherubs, so many cherubs. No wonder Jared was lashing out. She’d been inside the house for two minutes, and she was overcome with the urge to punch someone.

Marnette led Frankie to an equally overdone “living room,” where the mounted TV was meant to be hidden behind a swinging portrait of two kissing cherubs. Vern lounged on a very uncomfortable-looking couch, watching professional bowling. “What’s going on?” he asked, glaring at her.

“I was hoping to talk to you about Jared,” Frankie said, noting that she had not been invited to sit.

“I’ve already talked to your mama, and I’m gonna tell you the same thing I told her. Leave my son alone,” Marnette barked.

Vern sighed. “We’ve told you, Frankie. Jared hasn’t been out to your family’s place for years.”

“Yeah, you’ve told me that. The problem is, it’s not true. Someone has played several pranks at McCready’s recently, and we’re very lucky that no one got hurt. That person dumped over a cage full of bait crickets, setting them loose in the tackle shop. They’ve put hot sauce in the ketchup bottles—”

“I’m assuming that you have proof that Jared did this?” Vern sneered. “Because I don’t think I’d go around town sayin’ things like that unless I had proof.”

Frankie breathed deeply. “You’re right. I don’t have any proof that Jared is doing these things, other than Jared taunting me about our ‘difficulties’ after the fact, but—”

“My Jared wouldn’t taunt you. He doesn’t even like talking to you.” Marnette sniffed. “He’s scared of you, has been since he was little.”

“If only,” Frankie said. “We’ve seen your son, with our own eyes, trying to break into the funeral home.”

“But you don’t have photos,” Marnette said smugly. “You don’t have video. It’s just your word against ours, and we’re not the creepy family that plays with dead bodies. Who do you think people are gonna believe?”

Frankie took a deep breath while shaking her head. Telling Marnette that her parenting style was as useful as a glass hammer would only derail the conversation . . . more.

“Look, let’s just say for the sake of argument that Jared isn’t causing any problems at McCready’s. Could you do me a personal favor and keep a closer eye on him for the next few weeks? Keep him closer to home? That way, when we have more ‘difficulties,’ I can come to you and ask about it, and you can say, ‘Impossible, I was with Jared every single minute of that evening, and he never left the house.’ And that will narrow my search.”

“Are you saying I don’t know how to supervise my own child?” Marnette demanded.

“I’m saying that if you would like to prove me wrong and make me look like a jackass, which I know would please you very much, keep Jared closely supervised over the next few weeks.”

Marnette slapped her hand down on her carefully antiqued coffee table. “And I’m saying that I don’t appreciate some childless weirdo telling me how to parent. If you breathe one word of these silly, stupid accusations to anybody, we’re gonna sue you for defamation of character.”

Frankie thought of Peggy at the Rise and Shine, and whether she would testify to the sort of “character” Jared was known for at the high school.

Vern nodded, adding, “And it would be real hard for you to hold on to your job as coroner if you’ve got a lawsuit filed against you by the county manager. Your boss.”

“So you’re telling me that there’s nothing I can say to you that will persuade you to stop Jared’s behavior?”

“I’m telling you that there’s nothing you could say that would convince me the sky is blue,” Marnette shot back.

Well, she could honestly tell her father that she’d tried. If the Lewises weren’t going to be reasonable, she didn’t have to try to reason with them.

Frankie smiled so sweetly it made her teeth hurt. “All right, then. I’ll be going.”

“That’s it?” Vern asked, frowning at her.

“Yep,” Frankie said, crossing her arms over her chest. “If you’re not gonna listen, there’s no point in me wasting my breath.”

“Oh, well, all right. You should go,” Vern told her.

“Oh, I’m going.”

“And don’t go talkin’ to Jared, either,” Marnette told her as she walked back toward the door.

“Marnette, when Jared eventually gets caught doing something awful that lands him in a cell with a roommate named Big Larry, I want you to remember something. People blame the mother for a reason.”

Marnette’s eyes narrowed. “Get out of my house.”

“Gladly,” Frankie said, slamming the front door behind her.

She yanked open the van door and slid behind the wheel. She’d tried. She’d tried to work with Jared’s parents instead of against them. She’d tried to appeal to their common sense, their duty as parents. And they’d thrown it back in her face. So anything that happened from here? It was on their heads.

She put the van in gear and backed out of the driveway, speeding toward home. “Game on, Jared Lewis. Game on.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Molly Harper is the author of two popular series of paranormal romances, the Half-Moon Hollow vampire novels and the Naked Werewolf shifter trilogy. She is also the author of two contemporary series, Southern Eclectic and the Bluegrass ebook series. A former humor columnist and newspaper reporter, she lives in Kentucky with her husband and children. Visit her on the web at mollyharper.com.

FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR:
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Molly-Harper

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SimonandSchuster.com

Books by Molly Harper

THE SOUTHERN ECLECTIC SERIES

Peachy Flippin’ Keen

Save a Truck, Ride a Redneck

Sweet Tea and Sympathy

IN THE WORLD OF HALF-MOON HOLLOW

Accidental Sire

Where the Wild Things Bite

Big Vamp on Campus

Fangs for the Memories

The Single Undead Moms Club

The Dangers of Dating a Rebound Vampire

I’m Dreaming of an Undead Christmas

A Witch’s Handbook of Kisses and Curses

“Undead Sublet” in The Undead in My Bed

The Care and Feeding of Stray Vampires

Driving Mr. Dead

Nice Girls Don’t Bite Their Neighbors

Nice Girls Don’t Live Forever

Nice Girls Don’t Date Dead Men

Nice Girls Don’t Have Fangs

THE NAKED WEREWOLF SERIES

How to Run with a Naked Werewolf

The Art of Seducing a Naked Werewolf

How to Flirt with a Naked Werewolf

THE BLUEGRASS SERIES

Snow Falling on Bluegrass

Rhythm and Bluegrass

My Bluegrass Baby

ALSO

Better Homes and Hauntings

And One Last Thing . . .

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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Molly Harper White

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Pocket Star Books ebook edition April 2018

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Interior design by Michelle Marchese

Cover photography © Uwe Krejci/Getty Images

ISBN 978-1-5011-7894-8

Table of Contents

- The McCready Family Tree
- Chapter 1
- Chapter 2
- Chapter 3
- Chapter 4
- Chapter 5
- Chapter 6
- Chapter 7
- Chapter 8
- About the Author
- Copyright