Free When Secrets Die by Lynn S. Hightower Page A

a glass of milk. How healthy of her daughter, Emma thought. Look how she does not take advantage. They sat together on the couch sharing the Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate bar, and Emma started to feel a little bit better. Not a lot, but definitely a little. Especially when Blaine had hugged her and said, “Oh, Mom, this is so unfair. You’ve been through so much.” It was nice to be understood, even for a little while. And in the mom chamber of her heart she was pleased to see that she was raising such a fine little girl.

FRANKLIN
    C HAPTER S IX
    Tired—the word nailed him. He was too tired to stop on the way home from work for toilet paper or cashews or the dark robust Belgian beer he favored. He was too tired to cook, too tired to go out, and too steeped in professional experience to be attracted by the neon lure of fast food promises that littered the drive home. He spent a significant portion of his work time observing the slippery globules of weighty yellow fat that padded the interiors of the men, women, and children who made the detour to his stainless steel tables on their final road home, revealing their innermost privacies to his swift, benevolent blades.
    No, thanks.
    The other pathologists, the techs who worked with him at the state lab in Frankfort, Kentucky, would have been surprised by the description of Dr. Marcus Franklin as tired. Punctual, maybe; workaholic, definitely. Precise to the point of rudeness, brusque when preoccupied, a distant boss whose face lived in a frown. A brilliant man with a stick up his butt. None of these descriptions would have given his coworkers pause.
    The exception, of course, was Lucca, his secretary and younger sister. He’d pulled strings to hire her, broken a few of the rules he usually followed, and had expected a lot more kick from the staff and management than he’d gotten. Nepotism was business as usual in the South, and Kentuckians were as good at it as anyone else.
    There could be no question that Lucca was more than qualified for the job—not with an MBA from Northwestern, experience running the fencing business she started with her ex-husband and signed away in a divorce, and a personal warmth and charm that was a direct contrast to her brother’s distracted brusqueness.
    As it turned out, nepotism or no, the staff in Franklin’s pathology department would have died on the hill to keep Lucca running the admin end of the department. If anyone had rolled their eyes or worried about her competence when she was hired, they’d never admit it now. Lucca could do the job standing on her head. She had a good work ethic, organization was her specialty, and her ease in lifting the load of minutiae from the staff, combined with the sheer fun of having her around, made her the department darling. She humanized Franklin, kept on her desk a preschool-era picture of the two of them dressed in Halloween costumes—Lucca as a pig, Franklin as a cow. She treated her brother with offhand affection and casual insubordination. She referred to his directives as suggestions and turned into an instant tornado if they were not couched in tact. Whenever Franklin’s preoccupation with the job got in the way of his recognition that he was dealing with a staff of human beings, she called him on it, but always in private between just the two of them.
    On the other hand, anyone who was unwise enough to speak critically of Franklin in earshot of Lucca received the immediate brunt of her personal fury concerning this one subject where she had no sense of humor. You could never call his sister shy.
    Lucca was the other person who knew Franklin was tired. You couldn’t see it in his walk—not the way he went down the corridors like a man on the road to salvation. And not in the way he pursued prosecutors and/or defense attorneys when he thought they were on the wrong page. Not from his tireless court appearances, and his house brand of peculiarly