Clyde Nunley smirked at his students. "Why, this one would be fine," he said, gesturing to the grave to his right. Of course, there was no mound, probably hadn't been in a hundred and seventy years. The headstone was indecipherable, at least to my unaided eyes. If I bent down with a flashlight, maybe I could read it. But they didn't care about that part of it; they wanted to know what I would say about the cause of death.
The faint tremor, the vibration I'd been feeling since I'd neared the cemetery, increased in frequency as I stepped onto the grave. I'd been feeling the hum in the air even before I'd passed through the rusted gate, and now it increased in intensity, vibrating just below the surface of my skin. It was like getting closer and closer to a hive of bees.
I shut my eyes, because it was easier to concentrate that way. The bones were directly underneath me, waiting for me. I sent that extra sense down into the ground under my feet, and the knowledge entered me with the familiarity of a lover.
"Cart fell on him," I said. "This is a man, I think in his thirties. Ephraim? Something like that? His leg was crushed, and he went into shock. He bled out."
There was a long silence. I opened my eyes. The professor had stopped smirking. The students were busily making notations on their clipboards. One girl's eyes were wide as she looked at me.
"All right," said Dr. Clyde Nunley, his voice suddenly a lot less scornful. "Let's try another one."
Gotcha, I thought.
The next grave was Ephraim's wife. The bones didn't tell me that; I deduced her identity from the similar headstone positioned side by side with Ephraim's. "Isabelle," I said with certainty. "Isabelle. Oh, she died in childbirth." My hand grazed my lower stomach. Isabelle must have been pregnant when her husband met with his accident. Hard luck. "Wait a minute," I said. I wanted to interpret that faint echo I was picking up underneath Isabelle's. To hell with what they thought. I pulled off my shoes, but kept my socks on in a compromise with the cold weather. "The baby's in there with her," I told them. "Poor little thing," I added very softly. There was no pain in the baby's death.
I opened my eyes.
The group had shifted its configuration. They stood closer to each other, but farther from me.
"Next?" I asked.
Clyde Nunley, his mouth compressed into a straight line, gestured toward a grave so old its headstone had split and fallen. The marble had been white when it had been situated.
As Tolliver and I went over to the next body, his hand on my back, one of the students said, "He should stand somewhere else. What if he's somehow feeding her information?"
It was the older male student, the guy in his thirties. He had brown hair, a thread or two of gray mixed in. He had a narrow face and the broad shoulders of a swimmer. He didn't sound as if he actually suspected me. He sounded objective.
"Good point, Rick. Mr. Lang, if you'd stand out of Miss Connelly's sight?"
I felt a tiny flutter of anxiety. But I made myself nod at Tolliver in a calm way. He went back to lean against our car, parked outside what remained of the cemetery fence. While I watched him, another car pulled up, and a young black man with a camera got out. It was a dilapidated car, dented and scraped, but clean.
"Hey, y'all," the newcomer called, and several of the younger students waved at him. "Sorry I'm late."
The professor said, "Miss Connelly, this is Clark. I forgot to tell you that the student newspaper wanted to get a few shots."
I didn't think he'd forgotten. He just didn't care if I objected or not.
I considered for a moment. I really didn't care. I was ready to have a good fight with Clyde Nunley, but not a frivolous one. I shrugged. "I don't mind," I said. I stepped onto the grave, close to the headstone, and focused my whole attention on ground below me. This one was hard to decipher. It was very old, and the bones were scattered; the coffin had disintegrated. I hardly felt my right hand begin to twitch, or my head begin to turn from side to side. My facial muscles danced beneath my skin.
"Kidneys," I said, at last. "Something with his kidneys." The ache in my back swelled to a level of pain that was almost unbearable, and then it was gone. I opened my eyes and took a deep breath. I fought the impulse to turn to look at my brother.
One of the youngest of the students was white as a sheet. I'd spooked her good. I smiled at her, trying to look friendly and reassuring. I don't think I achieved it. She took another step away from me. I sighed and turned my attention back to my job.
Next, I found a woman who'd died of pneumonia; a child who'd died of an infected appendix; a baby who'd had a heart malformation; a baby who'd had a blood problem—I suspected he was the second child of a couple with conflicting Rh factors—and a pre-teen boy who'd had one of the fevers, scarlet, maybe. Every now and then I heard the photographer snap a picture, but it really didn't bother me. I don't care much about my physical appearance when I'm working.
After thirty or forty minutes, Nunley seemed almost won over. He pointed to a grave in the corner of the cemetery farthest from the gate. The plot he indicated lay right by the fence, which had collapsed almost completely in that area. The headstone was partially obscured by the overhanging branches of a live oak, and the light was especially bad. This is a draining process, so I was beginning to get tired. At first I attributed my extraordinary reading to that. I opened my eyes, frowned.
"It's a girl," I said.
"Ha!" Nunley chose to regard himself as vindicated. He kind of overdid his glee, he was so happy to be proved right. "Wrong!" he said. Mr. Open Mind.
"I'm not wrong," I said, though I really wasn't thinking about him, or the students, or even Tolliver. I was thinking about the puzzle under the ground. I was thinking about solving it.
I took off my socks. My feet felt fragile in the chilly air. I stepped back onto the dead grass in line with the headstone to get a fresh outlook. For the first time, I noticed that though an attempt had been made to level this grave—it bore the flattened spots that blows with a shovel on soft dirt would have produced—the earth had been recently turned.
Well, well, well. I stood still for a moment, the implications working their way through my brain. I had the ominous creeping feeling you get when you just know something's right outside your realm of knowledge—a bad piece of future poised to jump out from behind a door and scream in your face.
Though the kids were muttering to each other and the two older students were having a low-voiced conversation, I squatted down to decipher the headstone. It read, JOSIAH POUNDSTONE, 1839-1858, REST IN PEACE BELOVED BROTHER. No mention of a wife, or a twin, or…
Okay, maybe the ground had shifted a bit and the body buried next to Josiah's had sort of wandered over.
I stepped back onto the grave, and I squatted. Distantly, I heard the click of the camera, but it was not relevant. I laid my hand on the turned earth. I was as connected as I could be without lying full length on the ground.
I glanced over at Tolliver. "Something's wrong here," I said, loudly enough for him to hear. He started over.
"A problem, Miss Connelly?" Dr. Nunley asked, scorn lending his voice fiery edges. This was a man who loved to be right.
"Yes." I stepped off the grave, shook myself, and tried again. Standing right above Josiah Poundstone, I reached down again.
Same result.
"There are two bodies here, not one," I said.
Nunley made the predictable attempts to find an explanation. "A coffin gave way in the next grave," he said impatiently. "Or something like that."
"No, the body that's lower is in an intact coffin." I took a deep breath. "And the upper body isn't. It's much newer. This ground has been turned over recently."
Finally interested, the students quieted down. Dr. Nunley consulted his papers. "Who do you… see… in there?"
"The lower body, the older one…" I closed my eyes, trying to peer through one body to another. I'd never done this before. "Is a young man named Josiah, like the headstone says. By the way, he died of blood poisoning from a cut." I could tell from Nunley's face that I was right. However the priest had described Josiah's death, modern knowledge could recognize the symptoms. What the priest may not have known, however, is that the cut had come from a stab wound, inflicted in a fight. I could see the knife sliding into the young man's flesh, feel him staunch the blood. But the infection had carried him off.