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.
'The upper body, the newer one, is a young girl.'
There was sudden and absolute silence. I could hear the traffic rushing by on busy roads just yards away from the old graveyard.
'How recent is the second body?' Tolliver asked.
'Two years at the most,' I said. I tilted my head from side to side, to get the most accurate 'reading' I could. On the age of the bones, I mostly go by the intensity of the vibration and the feel of it. I never said I was a scientist. But I'm right.
'Oh, my God,' whispered one of the female students, finally understanding the implication.
'She's a murder victim,' I said. 'Her name was… Tabitha.' As I heard what my voice was saying, an awful sense of doom flowed over me. The boogeyman jumped out from behind the door and screamed in my face.
My brother moved across the intervening ground like a quarterback who could see the end zone. He stopped just short of the grave, but he was close enough to take my hand. Our eyes met. His echoed the dismay in mine.
'Tell me it's not,' Tolliver said. His dark brown eyes were steady on mine.
'It is,' I said. 'We finally found Tabitha Morgenstern.'
After a moment, in which the younger people in the group turned to look at each other with inquiring faces, Clyde Nunley said, 'You mean… the girl who was abducted from Nashville?'
