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Chapter One
I picked up the pace as an urgent breeze pushed me from behind. Fresh leaves rustled overhead and gray clouds covered the sun, setting a monochrome filter over Bloody Mary. It was par for the course. Virginia was experiencing one of the wettest springs on record.
I’d left my umbrella at the funeral home, so I hurried my steps down Catherine of Aragon, hoping the towering oaks that lined the streets would give me cover as I made my way downtown. I’d at least had the foresight to put on my black parka as I’d let myself out the back door.
My name is J.J. Graves and there was peace in the monotony of routine. For the last several months I’d decided getting fresh air and exercise might be good for me, so I’d gotten into the habit of arriving at the funeral home early and walking to the Towne Square for my morning coffee. It wasn’t a hardship. Jack said I made terrible coffee. My coffee kept me awake and functional, especially during my residency at the hospital, so I’d learned to endure.
The fact that I usually bought a donut to go with my coffee probably balanced out the calories I worked off on my walk. I’m a stress eater, so I don’t really have an excuse. I’m just fortunate I still have my metabolism, but I hear that will disappear by the time I’m forty and all those donuts will catch up to me.
You might be wondering why I’m stress eating. It’s an easy enough answer. It’s also the same reason I decided that exercise and fresh air might be good for me. Jack and I have been trying to have a baby for the past six months or so. So far, we haven’t had any luck, though we’ve had loads of practice.
I’m a doctor, so I know how these things work. It’s too soon to be worried about why I’m not pregnant yet, and there could be any number of sound medical reasons. I tend to lean toward the idea that my stress is caused by my career choices. If the things I’ve seen in life affect my mind and body in strange ways, I figure my reproductive system has its own kind of PTSD to deal with and it’s just trying to figure out what normal is. The rest of me was still trying to figure out what normal was too.
The funeral home was my day job. I was fourth-generation mortician, and Graves Funeral Home was finally running in the black and on the right side of the law. My family would probably be devastated to know this, but they’re too busy hauling coal in hell to care too much.
I used to say that being a mortician was in my blood, but since I found out that the family I’d thought were mine were nothing more than frauds, con artists, and criminals—not to mention kidnappers since they’d taken me from my birth mother—I don’t feel the familial guilt I once did for not willingly taking over the reins of my inheritance.
Running a funeral home is like most jobs, I imagine. There’s a lot of organization and customer service involved. We provide a service of dignity and respect. With the added touch of pumping people’s loved ones full of embalming fluid, cremating them in a fiery furnace, or burying them six feet under. It was an irony that didn’t go unnoticed.
I’d grown the business to the point where I didn’t have to be as hands on as I once had. I was kind of like a death CPA. I had a bunch of interns and staff who did most of the grimy work, and my signature went on everything because the government likes to have someone to blame and tax.
Along with the funeral home, I was also the coroner for King George County, which occupied most of the other hours of my day. The upside to this was that I got to work alongside Jack. The downside was we lived and breathed the job, and we typically saw the worst humanity had to offer. People were generally good, and we tried to remember that. But when you put them in situations like murder investigations there was a basic instinct that crept from the depths of the soul for self-preservation. We always assume everyone is lying in a murder investigation. It made our jobs easier. It didn’t translate so well though when we were off the job.
The least stressful part of either of my jobs was working with the dead. The dead never disappointed, they were always consistent, and they never talked back. It was the living that made things challenging. Plus, there was the stress I put on myself. Like worrying about why I still wasn’t pregnant. It was a never-ending cycle of pressure.
I picked up the pace and waved to the driver of a blue sedan as I crossed the intersection and headed toward the Towne Square. I passed newly renovated condos and walked under a scaffold of another historic building that would end up being a homemade soap or boba tea shop. King George County was becoming another Charleston or Savannah, with its trendy shops and rising real estate costs.
But the citizens of King George were fighters and they didn’t give up their land lightly. The area might be growing and new businesses and families moving in, but it wasn’t big box corporations and billionaire developers. And it wasn’t federal agencies from DC encroaching and trying to take what wasn’t theirs. We knew these attempts were happening for a fact because our friend Carver had discovered things he wasn’t supposed to know while working for the FBI. Now he was a man on the run and we hadn’t heard from him in months.
“Morning, Doc,” Officer Cheek said as he headed to his patrol car. He was fresh faced and spit and polished in his uniform for the start of his shift, and he held a to-go cup of coffee and a bag of donuts from Lady Jane’s.
“Morning, Cheek,” I said, and then I tortured myself as I passed by Lady Jane’s and inhaled the most incredible aromas of powdered sugar and fried dough.
I told myself it was the line out the door that had me walking past Lady Jane’s, but that was a lie. I would have stood in line for hours to taste those sweet confections and the best coffee on this side of the Atlantic. It was only a deep loyalty and friendship that had me walking past Lady Jane’s and continuing across the square to the Donut Palace.
My receptionist, Emmy Lu, had been dating Tom Daly for the good part of a year now. I’d gone to kindergarten with Tom and he was a great guy, but he probably would’ve had more success opening a butcher shop or a bar. Tom was a guy’s guy, and he was as basic as they came. He was meat and potatoes. He was a plain glazed donut. But he was solid and stable, and what he didn’t make in donut income he made up for as a handyman.
All these things were important because Emmy Lu loved him, and she had five boys to raise since her no-good ex-husband left her high and dry. But the Donut Palace had been a staple the last twenty-five years, run by Tom’s father before he passed, and Emmy Lu worked there for extra money four days a week. I wasn’t sure how Tom could afford to pay her, but that probably had more to do with hormones than best business practices. The last thing I wanted was for Tom and Emmy Lu to be in a financial fix, so I passed by Lady Jane’s every morning and walked straight to the Donut Palace, where there was no line out the door and plenty of donuts on the shelf.
“Morning,” I said, as the little bell tinkled above the door.
“Morning, Jaye,” Emmy Lu said from behind the counter. She was a short, plump woman with a kind face and dimples. If I had to think of Suzy Homemaker, Emmy Lu is who’d come to mind. She wore a white apron over a waist that had been thickened by five pregnancies and donuts, and her fluffy brown hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun.
“I was wondering if you were going to make it in this morning,” she said. “It’s looking nasty out there.”
On the mornings Emmy Lu worked at the Donut Palace, she opened with Tom at four and then she’d stay and work the counter until she had to be at the funeral home at nine. I didn’t know where she found the energy to work two jobs and raise five boys, but if I was a betting woman, I’d bet that Emmy Lu could probably rule the world and still make cookies at the end of the day.
“Forecast says there’s no end in sight,” I said. “We’ve got two graveside services this weekend, and six-foot holes that are going to be full of muddy water. The last two days were a reprieve. I’m hoping the excavator can get into the cemetery and get those holes dug this morning without getting stuck. I tried to talk the families out of doing a graveside service and using the funeral home instead, but people get ideas in their heads of how they want things to be and there’s no convincing them otherwise.”
Emmy Lu clicked her tongue in sympathy. “I don’t know why people insist on a graveside service when they know good and well the weather here is as fickle as Norma Greenbough’s dating life since her husband died.”
I grunted in agreement.
“Norma’s all over the place,” Emmy Lu said. “Signing up for a Tinder account one minute and then after she swipes right she’s beating the men off with a stick and telling them she’s not interested. No one wants to see a woman her age on Tinder.”
I hmmed and let out a quiet sigh of disappointment as I looked into the donut case. There were no bear claws or apple fritters. No cream- or jelly-filled donuts. It was just glazed and chocolate and what looked like a sad blueberry cake donut on the bottom shelf.
“People grieve in different ways,” I said.
