Die Now, Pay Later - Recap

Sheriff Ned Harlow comes to see his old friend, town undertaker Walt Peckinpah. Ned demands to know what Walt is up to, running a clearance sale of funeral accessories. Walt insists that he’s just doing what every business does, trying to get rid of surplus supplies by selling them at rock-bottom prices. He shows Ned his accumulation of old coffins and urns, and says that he needs to get rid of them so he can bring in new stock. When Ned continues to object, Walt redirects the issue to how they used to be friends, but that they haven’t gotten together in five years to drink beer and play checkers, not since Ned married his wife Etta.



Walt suggests that Ned sit for a spell and relax, but Ned points out that the accidental death rate in their town has skyrocketed since Walt began his sale. Walt doesn’t see why, and Ned explains that Etta thinks that Walt has engineered the whole thing to cause more deaths. The undertaker insists that they’re unrelated, and Ned admits that he can’t prove anything. However, he points out that all of the recent deaths were of people that someone wanted dead, either family members who stood to inherit, or neighbors who hated the now-dead person who “accidentally” died. All the people who wanted them dead would have had to pay the expensive funeral costs, until Walt held his sale. Further, everyone who has died recently has died under very suspicious and unlikely circumstances.



Walt admits that his friend might have a point, but then gets a call. There’s been another death, of a hated older woman named Lucy who fell into the mill pond and drowned. Ned asks Walt to stop the sale, and Walt reluctantly admits that it’s a shame that, if Ned’s theory is true, that people are taking advantage of his sale. He then invites Ned to sit down and play checkers, and asks what Etta has against him and why they’ve kept them apart. Ned admits that Etta threatened to leave him if he didn’t break it off with Walt, and that she hates the undertaker because his ancestor was burned at the stake in Salem, when Etta’s family lived there. Etta believed that witchcraft runs in the Peckinpah family, and figures that Walt is a warlock and causing all of the deaths. Walt laughingly dismisses the idea that he’s slipping the devil into people and causing them to kill each other.

As Walt picks up his pet black cat, Etta calls the funeral home and demands to talk to Ned. He takes the phone and irritably listens to his wife nag... and nag... and nag. She finally tells him to come home and hangs up. Walt offers his friend a drink and suggests that he should run the sale for one more day. Ned grows contemplative, smiles, and then says that it wouldn’t hurt.



Soon, there’s another body in a lake: Etta’s.

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