My Sister Called to Say Our Father Was Dead While He Sat Beside Me. By Sunset, the Funeral She Planned Had Become Her Trial..105
Very slowly, I turned toward the supposedly dead man beside me.
He stared back at me with his eyebrows raised.
I looked at him.
Then at the phone.
Then back at him again.
If the lie had not felt so calculated, I might have laughed at its sheer absurdity.
Dad certainly looked surprised, but he didn’t look frightened.
After the previous forty-eight hours, surprise was almost the only emotion either of us still had the strength to feel.
Without a word, I switched on the speaker and set the phone beside the sugar bowl like a piece of evidence.
Dad leaned slightly forward.
“When?” I asked.
“Sometime during the night,” Simone replied. “Everett found him.”
Dad’s expression changed immediately.
Everett Sloan had been his closest friend for more than forty years.
The two of them had gone fishing together, attended football games together, and helped each other through marriages, illnesses, and more bad decisions than either of them cared to admit.
More importantly, Everett had owned the town’s funeral home before retiring.
That single detail gave Simone’s lie a disturbing coat of credibility.
Almost.
I kept my voice steady.
“What happened?”
Simone sighed.
Not cried.
Not sniffled.
Not even paused.
