The House Account

Everett Sims is fifty two years old, the third of his name to hold a Mississippi funeral director’s license, and the first to hold an accounting degree.

At ten minutes past four on a Friday morning, three weeks before a state examiner walks through his door, he is reconciling his preneed trust line by line when he reaches contract forty one. The name on it belongs to a man he saw alive eight days ago, counting change at a gas station outside Yazoo City.

Forty one contracts. Forty one death certificates, every one of them filed by Sims and Son. Nine of them under Everett’s own license number, signed by a hand that is not his. And forty one people who are still walking around, wondering why the Social Security stopped, why the bank froze, why the house sold at tax auction while they were standing in it.

A licensed funeral home is the only entity in the state that can put a death on the record. That is not the crime. That is the reason the crime needed him.

Everett has twenty one days until the exit conference, a state examiner who has been waiting nine years to open his books, and a secret of his own burning a hole in the only room in the building with a fire in it.