CHAPTER ONE

George had already waited twenty minutes at the bar for their table by the time her date showed, wedged between two conversations about someone’s Series A funding and a woman loudly litigating her teacup yorkie’s therapy session. The restaurant was listed as one of the top “it” restaurants in her neighborhood on Eater: the kind that didn’t take reservations under six people and had a line down the block by 7:00 PM. It had a postage-stamp-sized dining room, an open kitchen, where the clatter of a stack of clean plates could be heard throughout, and a menu not worth reading, because the specials recited by the server were the reason for its popularity. Cramped. Loud. Kinetic. Alive. George loved everything about it. Not to mention, since she’d finished all her paperwork before 5:00 PM for once, and been given the opportunity to shower off the day and get ready without feeling rushed, which she took as a good omen, like getting the nicer elevator in her apartment building, even if it happened to be a Tuesday night.

The date ended up being fine, stereotypical: drinks and small plates. He looked more like the unflattering photos on his online profile. They’d exchanged the standard getting-to-know-you questions. He was currently telling a passable story about his roommate’s dog, and she was giving it the attention it deserved with a few well-placed “ohs” and “wows.” The burrata was honestly more of a highlight.

“So where are you from originally?” Apparently, his story had ended.

“Maine, but I haven’t lived there in almost twenty years,” she said, trying to make it sound offhand and quickly stuffing her mouth with more burrata, the universal signal to move the conversation along.

“Oh, nice, whereabouts?” He clearly didn’t pick up on it.

She swallowed hard. “Small town on the coast, you’ve never heard of it.” This usually worked. Most people let it go, asked more questions about her work, or if that was too much, then safer topics like siblings or life in the city.

He continued. “Try me, I’m from Salem, Massachusetts. Grew up near the coast.”

“It’s tiny. Not worth—”

“Now I have to know: Camden, Biddeford, Rockland?”

She took a sip of wine and did the math on how many more stalls she had before it became unavoidable. “Popham Harbor.”

He frowned, already reaching for why he knew the name. She braced against his next sentence, tucking a thick brown curl behind her ear. “Popham Harbor... wait, that’s, isn’t that where that mystery writer is from? Not Stephen King, the other one—Daniel MacDougal.” He snapped his fingers in the air like he’d won a trivia question. “Like a million books. My mom has all of them. ‘A real-life Jessica Fletcher’ is his tagline.”

“Yup. That’s my dad.” She quickly followed it up with another longer drink of wine.

“Shut up. Wait, for real?”

“For real.”

Fork down. Attention full. Nothing about her was more interesting than that fact.

If George were anyone else, telling a first date that she spent sixty hours a week elbows deep in corpses would be the entire conversation. People usually wanted to know why she hung out with the dead (she didn’t “hang out with them”), what the morgue smelled like, and if she had nightmares.

She ran her hands across the napkin on her lap, preparing for the rapid-fire questions to come. Not ones about her: she was average height and weight, easily burnt in the summer, fourteen before someone who knew how to cut curly hair came to Popham, often accused of being her mother’s twin in looks, and had a profound dislike for cantaloupe. Nope, once it was discovered Daniel MacDougal was her dad, her job no longer made her interesting; it just made her a potential accessory to his brand.

“That’s insane. My mom would lose her mind. Have you ever, like, helped him? With a case? Considering you’re a medical examiner?”

She had never helped her father solve a murder, unless you counted being handed a legal pad at age nine and told to write down anybody who looked nervous at the Fourth of July baseball game. She did not count that because on returning home, she had slammed her bedroom door, angry she’d been tasked as her father’s assistant and denied the freedom to sit with her friends gawking over boys. She swore never again to help him.

“Wait—isn’t that also the town with the ridiculous murder rate? Like there was a whole thing about it, someone did the math, it’s like worse than—” he laughed, pleased with himself for remembering the fact, “isn’t it like worse than Baltimore or St. Louis or something like that?”

“Something like that.”

“Right, no. That’s what makes his books good though, right? Like the stories aren’t made up, they’re—” he gestured, groping for the word, “genuine.”

George ate another piece of burrata and ran through the rest of the questions in her head before he could get to them. Does your dad always know who did it before the police do? Is the ME character in the books, Faye Gordon, exactly like your mom? Can you tell me anything about the new movie? Had George met Frances McDormand or Bryan Cranston, their respective onscreen counterparts? What causes all those murders? Is it something in the water? How does the town function?

He’d ask all of them eventually. They always did. Though George had to smile slightly at the thought of her father, currently rummaging through a fridge in Popham Harbor to eat leftovers in his worn Brown University sweatshirt and jeans he’d owned since the George W. Bush administration, having anything at all in common with Bryan Cranston.

Her date was still going, referencing something currently circulating on social media. George let out a small breath through her nose and took another sip of her wine.

He proceeded to spend the rest of dinner mining her for details he could repeat later: had she met the guy from the lighthouse case, the one they made the TV movie about; was the subreddit that mapped every death in town on a timeline accurate; didn’t she think it was kind of amazing, statistically, when you actually thought about it—how many murders happened in that one small town? And he was saying this as someone who grew up in Salem, Massachusetts.

She had thought about it. She’d thought about it more than he ever would, standing in the kitchen loading the dishwasher after dinner while her parents discussed autopsy results and motives. George finished her wine and let him talk, the way one lets a mandatory training video run in the background. The burrata was that good.

Later on, she walked instead of catching a cab. The air was still warm from the day, though it mingled with the crispness of an early fall night, and she wasn’t quite ready to go home and climb into sweats, seeing them as the final step in another failed internet date.

It wasn’t really about him. He wasn’t overly pushy or rude in his questions. It was that she’d had some version of this exact conversation constantly since she left Popham Harbor, and she still hadn’t found a way through it that left her feeling like anything other than an acknowledgment footnote in one of her father’s paperbacks, right next to the old family dog.

She told people, when they asked why she became a medical examiner in the city, rather than work with her parents, that she liked the variety. What she didn’t usually say, because it sounded awful out loud, was that she’d grown up so steeped in motive she’d gone numb to it. An affair. A will. A thing somebody said in ’95 that somebody else never let go of. Her parents had solved an average of one murder every week and a half for forty years, around fourteen hundred total, from which Daniel harvested one best-selling novel a year. In the last few years, now that everything was online, decentralized prediction markets would literally wager which specific case he would choose from the thirty-five or so that occurred in Popham annually. After that many murders there was no mystery. The motive was always going to be some version of jealousy, revenge, money or cover-up. The people and details might be swappable, but almost all the motives George had heard fell into those categories. How a person died was far more exciting. There were endless ways for a person to die, and piecing together what the body did in the aftermath was a challenge she relished.

Her phone buzzed in her coat pocket as she turned the corner onto her block.

Mom: how’d the date go?? tell me everything tomorrow, no rush. you were right about the type of poison. Xo.

George smiled a little, anticipating what she’d tell her mother about how the night went, and perhaps feeling a little bit of “I told you so” in being right about the poison. She typed back a thumbs up and a promise—tmrw, it was fine, tell you everything.