Dead and Breakfast by Kimberly G. Giarratano Page A

this?”
    “You tell me.” Her face reflected a mixture of impatience and mistrust. Liam wasn’t sure what to make of her.
    He had been sitting at the Cayo’s round kitchen table, eating a sandwich from a deli around the corner. It was his afternoon break, although he didn’t miss seeing Evelyn’s pinched face as she kept popping in with the excuse she was adjusting the dinner menu when really she was only checking her watch. He wiped his hands on his cargo shorts and took the photo from Autumn’s hands. Their fingers grazed and he felt a slight jolt.
    Liam stared at the photo of the four sailors. It was exactly the same picture Mick Canton had in his home office. He remembered seeing it when he and Victoria dated. “Where did you get this?”
    “I found it in the attic.” She pointed to the curly haired sailor on the far right. “That’s Uncle Duncan. He and my grandpa were brothers. My grandpa said I have his dark hair.” She smiled at Liam like she was proud of the connection. Liam loved his grandfather, but he was certain he never smiled with pride at the mention of genetic similarities between him and Pops.
    “I’ve seen this photo before,” he said. “So?”
    She gestured to the photo again. This time her finger zeroed in on Leo Breyer. “So, you look just like your grandfather.”
    He nodded. “I know.”
    Autumn shook her head in disbelief. “I mean just like him. You’re clones.”
    Liam scoffed. Leo Breyer was a crotchety old man full of cryptic pieces of caution that did him no good. When Liam decided to drop out of high school so he could work with his dad in the northern oil fields, Leo didn’t do anything to stop him. He only said, “See you in the summer, kiddo.” When Liam asked Pops about his mother, Leo kept his mouth shut. “Not my place to say.” Sure, young Leo Breyer and Liam might have looked identical, but the similarities stopped at the physical. Liam was going to make something of his life regardless of the deadbeats who gave him his start in this world. “Again, so?”
    “Flip it over,” said Autumn, annoyed.
    Liam sighed and turned over the photo. There was something written on the back. Buddies for life . Had his grandpa and his friends ever imagined one day they’d barely speak to one another?
    Autumn sat down at the table and ran her fingers over the scratches in the wood. “Liam,” her voice was soft, gentle as if she was his preschool teacher telling him his mother had not yet arrived to pick him up from school, “Inez keeps attacking you. You . Why would she do that?”
    Liam swallowed a bite of food. A hunk of salami scraped his throat. “I don’t know.”
    “Don’t you think it’s odd that she would come after you? You weren’t alive when she was alive. But—”
    “But what?”
    “But someone who resembled you was around in 1966.”
    Liam hated all this cryptic talk. “You’re saying my grandfather killed this girl.” The words sounded as ridiculous aloud as they did in his head. Pops wasn’t the aggressive type. He was the passive-aggressive type. The avoiding type. “That’s not possible.”
    “I don’t know your grandfather,” she said.
    “That’s right. You don’t.”
    “But, he definitely knew her.”
    Liam dropped his salami on rye on top of the wax paper it came wrapped in. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He realized that Autumn truly believed in the spirit world. But he was remembering Pops’s reaction the other night at dinner when he mentioned Inez’s name. That kind of visceral response couldn’t be faked. “You said yourself that she’s a confused spirit. She probably doesn’t know who killed her. Or what happened.”
    Autumn blew a strand of dark hair from her face. It would’ve been a cute gesture had they not been talking about his elderly grandfather killing a girl when he was a teenager.
    “Ask your grandfather about it,” she said quietly.
    “Autumn, I’m not—”
    “She named him.”
    Liam sputtered,