slivered glimpses of stained glass and locked drawers. Breaking into these, I realized, would not involve any digging. I whispered my brainstorm to Harnett.
“First off,” he responded in a fake conversational tone, “whispering like that it makes it look like we’re planning to rob a grave or something.”
“Sorry,” I whispered. He glared and I tried again more casually: “I’m sorry.”
He gestured at one of the crypts. “They’re usually not worth the effort. You chip a lot of cement and bend a lot of iron and break a lot of glass. There’s no time to repair that mess, and that’s the most important thing, kid, the most important thing of all: never let them know you were there.”
“Duh.” I said it because I could feel the security cocoon of my specifying wear away, and beneath, waiting patiently, was the dead woman, her maggot eyes, the chasms of her slashed wrists. Quickly I scanned the cemetery for Two-Fingered Jesus and thought I saw him proselytizing to huddled stones.
“You want to spend a few years in prison?” Harnett asked with a fake cheer that emphasized his ill temper. “Either of us gets caught and it’s third-degree criminal mischief. And that’s progress. A hundred years ago, you’d be strung up by your neck and publicly whipped. If you think something similar isn’t possible today, then you’re reading the wrong newspapers.”
The pathway forked. Harnett paused to gauge each path’s twists.
“How old is the Merriman grave?” I asked.
“Been under two years.”
“Why’d you wait so long?”
“Wasn’t listed in the obits. Had to piece it together from other sources.”
This meant there would be no fresh mound, no telltale bouquets. “So what, we’re going to read every single gravestone to find it?”
“Open your damn eyes.” He pointed at the ground. “See that?”
“Sure.” I paused. “I see grass and leaves.”
Harnett chose a path and charged ahead. He pointed at another seemingly random patch of ground. “Okay, there. See?”
I saw only more grass and leaves and told him so.
He pushed a hand through his hair. “New graves rise slightly. You know this. After some time, though, the opposite happens, they settle and sink.” He pointed yet again. “When leaves fall, they come right out and tell you where to look, they practically hand you the bodies. If you can’t see this then you better wait in the truck.”
The subtle clue, when I finally noticed it, was repeated all over: leaves caught in gentle depressions otherwise imperceptible to the naked eye. It would be the same with thawing snow, I realized with a surge of excitement. This was what Diggers did—they used nature’s clues to solve mankind’s puzzles.
Encouraged, I picked up speed and unexpectedly collided with Harnett. Pain burst through my nose. He whirled around and dropped into a praying position before a random grave.
“Damn, Harnett.” I rubbed my injured nose.
“Get down here,” he said.
I read aloud the name on the stone. “Oliver Lunch.” I snorted. “Nice name.”
“Will you get down?”
I kneeled and dutifully tried to summon images of Sundays at church with my mother. Nothing came to me. Harnett sneaked a glance over his shoulder and then retreated to Oliver Lunch. “You never know what you’re going to get, kid.”
I took the cue to peek over my shoulder. In the fading light, at the top of a nearby hill, a woman in a black dress embraced a shiny obsidian gravestone, her posture of genuine grief putting our feigned sorrow to shame. Even at this distance it was clear she was sobbing. I blinked at Harnett.
“I thought you said it’d been two years,” I said.
“It has been. To the day.”
It dawned on me. “The anniversary.”
He shook his head and exhaled. “Well, shit.”
We quietly returned to the truck, sat in the cab for ninety minutes until the sun had sunk, and then grabbed our gray sacks and moved quietly back through the cemetery. When we reached Oliver Lunch, Harnett again put on the brakes. My hand flew to my abused nose; he gripped my arm and pulled me from the path.
“Well, shit.”
“Damn, Harnett,” I complained, checking my nostrils for blood. “What, she’s still there?”
His shape in the darkness nodded. Nearby was a mausoleum the size of Harnett’s cabin, and together we squatted against a wall. Once my eyes adjusted I found the grieving woman, still draped across Nathaniel Merriman’s marker and uttering occasional soft noises.
“She can’t stay there all night,” I said. “Can she?”
Harnett did not respond.
I crossed my arms and snuggled my head into a thin cushion of moss. “Some anniversary.”
Harnett locked