Just the thought made me wince. “Maybe another time.”
“How about the old graves? Have you seen those?”
The sweat trickling down my back went cool. “Pardon me? Graves?”
“You haven’t seen them?” She seemed surprised. “Didn’t you say you grew up in this neighborhood?”
“I didn’t go outdoors very much,” I said. “What do you mean,graves?”
Terri’s eyes widened, and she looked pleased as she realized she could show me something I’d never seen before. “They’re really old,” she said. “They’re back where we came from, behind your house.”
I hesitated. “You mean in the trees?”
“Yes.” She was walking back to her bike, so I had to follow. “I’m sorry I went back there, but no one lived in your house. I didn’t think anyone would mind.”
“I’m not angry,” I assured her. “I just don’t think it’s safe.”
“But it is. There are bugs, and it’s muddy after it rains, but there aren’t any wild animals or anything.” She picked up her bike. “The graves are old, and they’re really neat.”
Neat. I did not think that going back to the trees, toward that shadow, would be neat.
But graves? I had no idea there were graves back there, and neither did my siblings. The police who searched the grounds for Ben hadn’t talked about graves, and they weren’t in the police report.
Vail and I had walked through those trees, and we’d seen nothing.
This girl wasn’t lying. That much I knew. If I sent her home, I couldn’t find the graves by myself without hours of searching. To find them, we had to go back to where I’d seen the shadow.
Terri was waiting, so I nodded. “It has to be quick. And don’t stray far from me.”
She smiled. She thought I wanted her to protect me, not the other way around. “All right.”
She pulled to a stop between our houses and got off her bike again. She hurried across the grass in a line as straight as an arrow, heading for the trees where we’d met.
I followed her, half jogging and looking from side to side. We entered the trees at a different spot from where Vail and I had walked. Terri seemed to know exactly where she was going. She wove along a path only she could see, stepping over fallen branches.
I felt cold and sweaty, but that could have just been because of the exertion. When I glanced behind us, I didn’t see a shadow.
“I hope this cemetery isn’t for family pets or something,” I said. Was it getting darker, or was I imagining it?
“It isn’t pets,” Terri assured me. “It’s the Whittens.”
“What’s the Whittens?”
“They’re people. It’s their graveyard.”
She stepped over a fallen branch and pointed to a space clear of trees. Brush and weeds had been roughly pushed aside in some places, obviously by hand.
At first I couldn’t see anything, but when I stepped to one of the cleared spots, I saw a stone. It was a flat headstone, dirty and tarnished.
“There are a dozen of these,” Terri said. “I haven’t found them all, I don’t think. They’re all Whittens.”
I looked at the stone between my feet, then stepped to the next one. I understood it now. If the police had come here in their search for Ben, they wouldn’t have seen these stones if they were covered in dead brush. The graves would have been deep under the unbroken snow.
I crouched down to readNathaniel Whitten, Dearly Departed, Beloved of God and His Family, July 7, 1848–October 29, 1889.
I kept walking, using my feet to flatten the grass, and found another Whitten, and then another. One of the stones listed three names, all babies born a year apart. Next to them was their mother, who had died at age fifty-one.
How was it possible for a family to just bury its members in the woods for years? Was that legal? Perhaps this had been a cemetery at one time, though there was no church for miles. Maybe it had been private land. Whitten land.
