The voice behind Mrs. Prattle might have made her jump, but May’s voice had been in Mrs. Prattle’s ear since they were both in pigtails, even when May herself was home asleep halfway across the island. Both of them, May and her voice, could argue the shape of a circle or whether a toad is bumpy.
“Leb held the empty mason jar out like it was full of hornets. His bare feet tested the least creaky floorboards as he stepped, ankles popping, his daddy just inches away in the other dinky bed. Both beds were old as Methuselah and twice as gripey. Leb’s getting on his feet without waking up his daddy and the whole island, holding that jar with both hands, had been a feat to behold. Getting to the end of the bed without stubbing his toe, toppling over into the other bed, or dropping the jar outright was not his usual luck at all. Maybe the fool thing works, he thought.”
Leb lives at the literal end of the road ... on an island ... in Florida ... in a graveyard.
His groundskeeper daddy’d tell you, the boy knows more about graveyards at eleven than most folks with one foot in the grave. The old widow across the street, for one, hasn’t visited her husband and daughter in the graveyard in a decade. To be fair, her husband does visit her every morning for breakfast in the body of a graveyard rat. All of them—young boy, old woman, rat, and half the state of Florida—get flung together when a new (and national newsworthy) death arrives at their far-flung little graveyard gate. Then things get downright deadly for every one of them.
If they don’t all sink the island, and they get through the bodies and ghosts and cutthroat treasure hunters and black-cloaked witches and ravenous press and bicycle-riding island police, something still waits out there. Something terrible that’s having way too much fun.