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. T
he 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.”