them at Riverside.
I drove through the cemetery until I found Harrison’s truck, parked in front of the maintenance building, empty. I’d missed him. I drove back up to the chapel, where I assumed my truck would be less noticeable, parked, and set out on foot. It was a huge place, and it would take a while to find him. I had the time.
I left the road and walked through the grounds, my shoes soon soaked by the dew. After a pass along the south side without any luck, I looped around and headed toward the north, away from the maintenance building. I was not alone in the cemetery. During the walk I saw two people beside graves, paying early-morning respects. I thought that it had been a long time since I’d been to see my mother and father’s stones.
I was approaching the northeast bend of the road, ready to head west and walk back toward the entrance, when I heard the buzz of a weed trimmer. A few minutes later I found Harrison trimming the base of a monument, head bowed.
For a moment I just stood there, unsure of what to do. He was at work, and that’s all he’d be doing for the rest of the day. No need to watch him tend the grass and weeds in a graveyard. If I really wanted to begin surveillance on him, I could come back in the afternoon, wait for him to get off work, and see where he went. That was what mattered, surely. This did not.
I couldn’t leave, though. Now that I’d found him, I wanted to watch just a little bit longer. Just a few minutes. I retreated across the grounds, looking for someplace where I could sit unnoticed and keep an eye on him. Sitting was key. I was suddenly feeling the groggy, mind-numbing weariness of an entirely sleepless night.
About a hundred yards from where Harrison was working, I found an enormous monument with a granite lion resting on top. The lion was lying down with its front paws stretched forward, its head up. The carving job was exquisite. I couldn’t imagine how long something like that took. The name on the stone read simply DAYKIN. No first name, no dates. It was probably a family monument, I decided as I looked around the other stones and saw the Daykin name repeatedly. The patriarch making his claim.
I sat in the grass beneath the lion and leaned back until my head rested against the stone. Out across the way, Harrison’s weeder buzzed and his shoulders swung back and forth methodically. What a place for a murderer to work.
That thought took me back to Harrison’s apartment, to the night Ken and I had made our initial visit and Harrison first told us he worked in a cemetery, told us that it suited him. Ken’s response—
“How unsettling.” I said it aloud and laughed. Man, what a line. How unsettling. I laughed again, softer this time, an under-the-breath chuckle, and then I laid my head back against the stone again and closed my eyes and tried to find a moment of peace. It was there, sitting upright in a graveyard with my head on a piece of granite, that I finally fell asleep.
__________
I woke only minutes later, but it felt longer than that, and I came around slowly, like that moment of awakening was at the end of a long, difficult climb. When my eyes opened it took me a second to place myself, and then I realized that Harrison was out of view and I could no longer hear the sound of his machine. I pushed off the stone and looked around and saw him not ten feet away, standing with his arms folded across his chest, watching me.
“Hello, Lincoln,” he said. “I’m going to assume this is not a coincidence.”
I thought about getting to my feet, but what was the point? Instead, I just leaned forward, rested my arms on my knees, and looked up at him. “Great place to work.”
“I like it.”
I nodded up at the lion above me. “Hell of a cat, too.”
“Do you know who he was?”
“Daykin?” I shook my head.
“A railroad man,” Harrison said. “Specifically, a conductor. He was one of the conductors on Lincoln’s funeral train. John Daykin. This is one of my favorite monuments in the cemetery.”
“You know them all?”
“More than you’d think,” he said.
“You keep the graves clean,” I said, “and Mark Ruzity carves them. Can you explain that?”
“Alexandra taught us the importance of honoring the dead. Mark took up the carving as his way of doing that. By the time I left Whisper Ridge, he’d met people out here, and got me the job. Not so sinister, really. I hate to disappoint you.”
“You know that he’s talked to Sanabria?” I said. “There’s a photo of it, Harrison. Ruzity and Sanabria together around the time your beloved Alexandra and Joshua disappeared. You were on the phone with Sanabria then, yourself.”
He didn’t respond. I looked away from him and out across the sea of weathered stones left to mark lives long finished.
“They haven’t made an arrest in Ken’s murder yet, Harrison.”
“If I could tell them who to arrest, I would.”
“Yeah?”
“Why are you here? Why would you sit here and watch me work?”
“I need an answer,” I said, “to just one question, Harrison. There are so many questions I think you can answer, but I need just this one: Why me? Why did you have to come to me? I ignored your first letter, so you wrote me more. I ignored those, so you came to see me. Why?”
“You’ve already asked me that.”
“I know it. This time I’d like you to tell me the truth.”
He sighed and lowered his weed trimmer to the ground, straightened again, and took a rag off his belt and ran it over his face and neck, soaking up the sweat from the morning’s rapidly rising heat.
“It was the truth then, and it will be the truth this time, too,” he said. “I came to you because of what I’d read. Because of what I hoped you would be.”
“What was that?” I said. “Supposing I believed you, which I do not, what was it that you thought I would be, Harrison?”
“Someone who knew how to see the guilty.”
“What?”
“Not how to find the guilty, Lincoln. How to see them. How to . . . consider them. The people behind the crime. I’m a murderer. I get that. Well, Joshua Cantrell was murdered, and not by me. I wanted to know who did it—and why.”
“That’s not what you asked me to do.”
“No, and that was my mistake. I held on to the truth when I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to get you to the house.”
“Why was that so damn special? Why did I have to see the house?”
He spread his hand, waved it around us. “You see all these stones? What are they?”
I sat and stared up at him, searching his face and trying, yet again, to come to a judgment about him. I wanted to believe him.
“What would you call them?” he said. “These stones.”
“Graves.”
“That’s beneath the stone. What are the—”
“Markers, monuments.”
He nodded. “Joshua Cantrell has one. You’ve seen it. That house is his monument. She left it for him, Lincoln. Something to sit in his memory.”
It was the same comparison Ken Merriman had made. The sort of comparison that came easily when a house had been outfitted with an epitaph.
“Home to dreams,” I said.
“Yes. Dreams she’d shared with her husband. It’s important to remember the dead. Alexandra understood that, and so do I. It’s why I work here, Lincoln—and before you ask the question, yes, I think of the man I killed. I
