Chapter 5

Josiah Butler had been preparing the dead for thirty one years.

His father had started Butler Funeral Home in Ten Pines in 1974 with a borrowed van and a belief that people deserved dignity in death regardless of what their lives had looked like. Josiah had grown up in the back rooms of that building learning that belief the way other children learned their parents’ trades. By watching. By doing. By understanding that the work was sacred even when the world outside didn’t treat it that way.

Especially when the world outside didn’t treat it that way.

He read the newspaper every morning over coffee at the kitchen table in the apartment above the funeral home. Had done it since his father taught him that a man who knew his neighborhood knew his community and a man who knew his community could serve it properly.

He read about Tyrone Jamison on Wednesday morning.

He read about Jamal Wilkes on the same page.

He set down his coffee cup and read both articles twice.

Then he sat at his kitchen table for a long time thinking about what he knew that the newspaper didn’t.

Tyrone Jamison had come through his doors on Monday night. The family had called Butler Funeral Home because Butler Funeral Home was who you called in Ten Pines when someone you loved needed to be treated with dignity. Thirty one years of that reputation walking through his door when people needed it most.

Josiah had prepared the body himself. The way he prepared every body that came through. Carefully. Completely. With the documentation his father had insisted on and that Josiah had maintained as standard practice for three decades.

Photographs. Entry wound. Exit wound. Every mark. Every detail.

Not because anyone asked for them.

Because the dead deserved a witness.

He looked at his photographs now on his phone. Then he looked at the newspaper again.

Then he picked up his phone and called a number he’d gotten from his neighbor Mrs. Henderson on the second floor who had gotten it from her sister whose granddaughter went to school with Patrick Foster.

It rang twice.

“Mr. Butler,” Camika said.

He stopped. “You know who I am?”

“I know everyone in a four block radius,” she said. “What do you have?”

He came to Mildred’s apartment that evening at six thirty.

A large man. Carefully dressed in the specific way of someone who considers presentation a form of respect. He carried his phone in both hands like it contained something fragile and sat down at Mildred’s kitchen table across from Camika with the gravity of a man who has been sitting across from people in difficult moments for thirty one years and knows how to be present for them.

Mildred brought coffee.

Josiah Butler looked at Camika. At this nine year old girl with her notebook open on the table and her pen ready and her eyes that were already reading him the way she read every space she entered.

“You’re younger than I expected,” he said.

“Everyone says that,” she said. “What do you have Mr. Butler?”

He placed his phone on the table and turned it toward her.

Camika looked at the photographs.

She looked at them carefully. One by one. Without speaking. Her pen not moving. The same stillness that Nora had learned meant she was building something in her mind that writing would interrupt.

Josiah watched her look at them.

After two minutes she looked up.