“I like dogs,” Michael said simply. “They understand grief better than most humans. They don’t try to fix it or talk you out of it. They just…sit with you in it.” He stepped back, gesturing us inside. “Please, come in.”
The interior of Grimm Island Funeral Home smelled like furniture polish and lilies, with an underlying chemical scent that I recognized from Patrick’s funeral—formaldehyde, disguised but never quite eliminated. No matter how much air freshener or how many flowers, that smell always lurked underneath, a reminder of what the business actually involved. The entry hall was all dark wood and thick carpeting that absorbed sound, making every footstep feel muffled and somehow guilty, like we were intruding on sacred space.
Chowder’s nails clicked against the hardwood in the foyer before we moved onto carpet, each click echoing in the high-ceilinged space. Victorian furniture lined the walls—uncomfortable-looking chairs that probably cost a fortune, side tables with elaborate flower arrangements, paintings of peaceful landscapes that were meant to be soothing but somehow just emphasized the unnaturalness of the whole enterprise.
Michael led us past the viewing rooms—doors discreetly closed, but I knew what lay beyond them from my own experience. Rooms set up to look like living rooms, as if the dead person had just decided to take a nap in their best clothes. The elaborate fiction we constructed around death, pretending it was sleep or peace or any number of euphemisms that avoided the stark reality of cessation.
His office was at the back of the building, overlooking the gardens through tall windows that let in afternoon light. It was a room lined with leather-bound volumes about grief and loss, grief counseling, the psychology of mourning, books with titles like Understanding Bereavement and The Art of Funeral Direction. A massive mahogany desk dominated the space, probably weighing more than my car, its surface clear except for a single photograph and a leather desk pad.
Family photos covered one wall—black-and-white images of Baileys going back generations, all wearing the same expression of professional sympathy. It was like looking at a timeline of grief—Grandfather Bailey in his 1950s suit, Grandmother Bailey in her proper dress, Father Bailey (who I realized must have been Ruby’s father), all of them with that same carefully neutral expression that said I’m here for you without promising anything more.
One photograph stood apart from the others—a color picture, slightly faded with that particular quality of 1980s photography, of a young woman with dark hair, laughing at something outside the frame. She wore a simple yellow dress, and she held a small boy’s hand. Both of them looked radiantly, impossibly happy, caught in one of those perfect moments that you don’t recognize as perfect until they’re over.
“That’s the only picture I have where she’s truly smiling,” Michael said, catching me looking. His voice had gone soft, almost reverent. “Most photos from back then, she looks tired. Worn down. Like the world was pressing on her and she was too polite to complain. This was taken at my eighth birthday party, two years before she died. She’d gotten a raise that week—Mrs. Watson had given her an extra fifty dollars for doing such good work—and Mama said we were going to celebrate properly. We went to the Dairy Queen in Charleston, got banana splits, stayed until they closed.”
He gestured for us to sit in the chairs across from his desk—comfortable leather that had been broken in by generations of grieving families, the kind of chairs that absorbed tears and pain and all the complicated emotions that came with planning funerals. I sank into mine, feeling the weight of all that accumulated sorrow pressing down like humidity. Chowder settled at my feet with a dramatic sigh that suggested he found funeral homes exhausting, which was fair—I found them exhausting too.
Dash remained standing for a moment, studying the family photographs, his cop eyes cataloguing everything, looking for patterns and connections that might not be immediately obvious.
“You want to talk about my mother’s murder,” Michael said, not making it a question. He settled into his chair behind the desk with the heaviness of someone who’d been carrying weight for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to be unburdened.
I must have looked shocked at his prescient statement because he said, “Sheriff Beckett called yesterday, said you were reviewing the case. I’ve been waiting a long time for someone to ask the right questions.”
“What are the right questions?” Dash asked, sitting in the leather chair across from the desk.
Michael was quiet for a moment, his fingers drumming against his desk in an odd pattern. Maybe grief had its own language, its own Morse code that only the bereaved could interpret.
“Everyone always asked about Reverend Pickering,” Michael said finally. “About their affair, about the scandal, about whether my mother loved him or was using him. No one ever asked the right questions.” Michael’s voice had gone soft, thoughtful, like someone sorting through memories that had been carefully packed away for decades. “Like who else knew about them. Who had the most to lose if it all came out.”
The room went quiet except for the tick of the antique clock on Michael’s desk—a steady, patient sound that marked the seconds like a metronome counting down the decades. Outside, a mockingbird called from the azaleas, its song bright and careless, utterly unaware of the weight of what was being discussed in this room where so many people had come to say their final goodbyes.
Chowder, who’d been dozing at my feet, lifted his head and made a small sound—not quite a whine, more like a question. He could always sense when something important was happening, when the air in a room changed texture.
Michael stood and moved to the window, his movements slow and deliberate, like someone walking through water. He looked out at his carefully maintained gardens where azaleas bloomed in shades of pink and white—colors chosen for their ability to soothe, to comfort, to make death seem like just another gentle transition. Everything was ordered and beautiful out there, precisely because dead things were kept carefully hidden underground, their decay transformed into nourishment for living beauty. There was a metaphor in that, I thought. A lesson about how we bury our secrets and pray they’ll feed something better than what they were.
When Michael spoke again, his voice had shed years, decades falling away until I could hear the ghost of the ten-year-old boy who’d lost everything. “Mama was scared those last few weeks. Not the kind of scared you get from a spider or a scary movie. The real kind. The kind that makes your hands shake when you think no one’s looking.” He pressed his palm against the window glass, and I watched his breath fog the pane. “She kept talking about leaving the island, about starting over somewhere else. She’d been looking at apartments in Charleston, even took me to see one on a Sunday afternoon. It was small—just two bedrooms in a building that smelled like someone else’s cooking—but Mama talked about it like it was a palace. Said we’d be safer there.”
“Safer from what?” Dash asked, his voice gentle but insistent, the way you’d coax a frightened animal out of hiding.
“She never said. Not exactly.” Michael turned back to face us, and the afternoon light caught him in profile, highlighting the lines around his eyes, the gray at his temples, the weight of the past carried in the set of his shoulders. He had his mother’s bone structure—I could see it in the crime-scene photos I’d memorized, in the shape of his jaw, the angle of his cheekbones. Ruby Bailey looking out at me through her son’s face, still asking to be heard after all this time. “But I knew she meant safer from someone here. Someone on Grimm Island.”
The funeral home seemed to press closer around us, all that carefully maintained peace suddenly feeling oppressive, like the calm before a storm when the air gets so heavy you can taste electricity on your tongue.
“Did she mention anyone specifically?” Dash asked. He was listening with his whole body, the way good investigators do, absorbing not just words but tone, body language, the spaces between what was said.
“Elder Matthias Crenshaw.” The name fell into the room like a stone into still water, sending ripples through the quiet. Michael’s hands gripped the back of his chair hard enough that his knuckles went white, tendons standing out like cables under skin. “He was on the church board—one of the senior elders. Handled a lot of the church business, made decisions about money and property and who got to do what. Very powerful man, the kind who thought his position in the church gave him authority over everyone’s lives.”
I’d heard that name before, somewhere in the background noise of Grimm Island life. Crenshaw. One of those old families that had roots going back to before the Civil War, the kind of people who considered themselves the island’s guardians, its moral arbiters.
“What happened with Elder Crenshaw?” I asked softly.
Michael moved back to his desk. “Mama said he’d caught her and Reverend Pickering together one evening at the church. They weren’t doing anything wrong—not then, anyway. Just talking in Reverend Pickering’s office after choir practice. But Elder Crenshaw knew. He made it very clear he knew what was going on between them.”
The office felt smaller suddenly, the walls closer, as if the past was pressing in on the present, demanding space. The lilies on Michael’s desk seemed too fragrant, their scent cloying, making it hard to breathe properly.
“What did he say to them?” Dash’s voice had gone very quiet, very still, the way water looks before it freezes.
“I don’t know exactly. I wasn’t supposed to know about any of it.” Michael’s hands gripped the back of his chair. “I was ten. Mama never talked to me about Reverend Pickering, never explained what was going on. I just knew he came to the house sometimes. He’d bring her flowers or money because we didn’t have much, and sometimes they’d talk on the back porch while I did homework. I thought they were friends.”
