Chapter 6 #3
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.”
He moved back to his desk, that careful funeral director’s walk that suggested he’d learned long ago how to move through rooms without disturbing the grief that lived in them.
“Then one day I left school early—told the teacher I was sick so I could skip the afternoon. It was spring, nice weather, and I wanted to go to the beach with some friends.” A ghost of a smile crossed his face.
“Mama was at work cleaning houses, wasn’t supposed to be home until after 5.
So I figured I could get away with it, be back before she knew I’d skipped. ”
He paused, and the smile disappeared.
“Our house was small—just a few rooms in the part of town people didn’t talk about much.
You know the area, down past the fish processing plant where the paint peels off the houses and the yards are more weeds than grass.
The kind of neighborhood where people minded their own business because everyone had something they didn’t want looked at too closely.
” He paused. “You could hear everything through those thin walls. When I came in the back door, I heard voices coming from Mama’s bedroom.
The door was open just a crack. I saw them.
” His voice had gone flat, emotionless, the way people sound when they’re describing something they’ve spent years trying not to think about.
“I was ten years old and I saw more than a ten-year-old should see, and I knew—even then, even without understanding what I was looking at—I knew it was wrong.”
The office felt too quiet, too still, like the air had stopped moving.
“I left,” Michael continued. “Went outside, sat on the back steps for maybe twenty minutes until I heard Reverend Pickering’s car leave.
Then I came back in and Mama was in the kitchen making dinner like nothing had happened.
She smiled at me, asked how my day had gone.
And I never said a word about it. Not to her, not to anyone. ”
I could see it so clearly—a little boy carrying that knowledge like a stone in his pocket, too heavy to hold but impossible to put down.
“After that, I paid more attention. Noticed things. The way people at church would whisper when Mama walked by. The way other mothers would pull their kids away from me at Sunday school, like whatever sin Mama was committing might be contagious. The way Mama would get dressed up on certain evenings, put on perfume, tell me she had to run errands even though the stores were closed.”
“She wasn’t hiding it,” I said softly, understanding. This was the Ruby Bailey from the case file—the one who sang in the choir every Sunday with Pickering watching her, who didn’t care what people thought, who wore the affair like armor.