do, though I'd never tried to mislead them. Right out there, in front of all their friends, I'd blurted out what had really happened to the child. I shuddered, remembering. Then I made myself shake off the memory. Focus on this night, this dead girl, this grave, I told myself. I took a deep breath, let it out. Then another.
'I know the body is gone,' I said, almost in a whisper. 'The body's always been my connection, but I'm going to try to recreate what I got from her yesterday.'
'We're in an isolated graveyard in the dark,' Tolliver muttered. 'At least you're not wearing a long white nightgown, and at least we're together. And believe me, my cell phone battery is fully charged.'
I almost smiled. Usually, I felt most comfortable in a cemetery; but not this one, not this night. I stumbled again. Cemeteries are tricky going, especially the older ones. So many of the new ones have the flat headstones. But in the older ones, there are broken headstones in the grass, which is often uneven and tufted with weeds. In more secluded cemeteries, the living often leave trash on top of the dead—broken liquor bottles and crushed beer cans, condoms, food wrappers, all kinds of stuff. I can't count the times I've found underpants suitable to both sexes, and once I found a top hat set jauntily upright on a stone.
St. Margaret's graveyard was free from debris of that sort. It had been mowed and trimmed at the end of the summer, so the grass was fairly low. Our flashlights bobbed through the darkness like playful fireflies, sometimes crossing their beams and then floating away.
The still air was cold, a cold that bit through my gloves and made me shiver. I had on a knit cap and scarf, but my nose felt especially chilled. Tolliver, some steps ahead of me and to my left, made the beam of his flashlight dance as he rubbed his hands together.
The night had a thick, waiting quality that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. I tried to identify the swoosh of the traffic on the road off through the trees, but there was an absolute silence. I felt a stab of alarm. Surely, at night, I should be able to see the lights of those cars, even through the trees? I slowed down, feeling suddenly disoriented. The flashlight beams seemed dimmer. I was very close to the right spot, but somehow I couldn't pick it out. The buzzing of the bodies around me seemed extraordinarily clear and strong for such old corpses. I started to say my brother's name, but I couldn't speak. Suddenly, Tolliver gripped my lower arm with both hands, very tightly, bringing me to a complete standstill. 'Look at your feet,' he said in a very strange voice. I shone the light directly downward.
In one more step I would have fallen into the open grave.
'Ohmygod. That was close. Thank you. Do you hear anything?' I whispered. One hand slid down to mine, squeezed it, and released it. There was something odd about the feel of that bony hand.
And then I realized Tolliver's flashlight was shining at me from the other side of the grave, with Tolliver holding it.
My heart pounded so fast I thought the vibrations might tear my chest apart. I sank down to my knees on the soft, freshly turned earth.
'See?' said the voice, though I couldn't have said where it had come from. With an increasing sense of dread, I directed my flashlight down into the grave.
There was another body in it.
eight
TOLLIVER didn't seem to be able to move from his side of the open grave, and we both shone our flashlights down at the body.
'At least I didn't fall in,' I managed to say, and my voice sounded hoarse and strange to my own ears.
'He stopped you,' Tolliver said.
'You saw him? Clearly?'
'Just his silhouette,' he said, and even Tolliver's voice was strained and breathless. 'A small man. With a beard.'
This was the first time such a thing had happened to us. It was like being an accountant for five years, and then suddenly being presented with a set of alien numerals that had to be balanced in five minutes.
Tolliver stumbled around the grave to kneel beside me, put both his arms around me, and we held each other fiercely. We were shivering, shivering intensely—not from the cold, but from the nearness of the unknown. I made a little noise that was horribly like a whimper. Tolliver said, 'Don't be scared,' and I turned my head a little to tell him I wasn't any more scared than he was; which was to say, quite a lot. He kissed me, and I was glad for his warmth.
I said, 'This is a thin place.'
'What's that?'
'A place where the other world is very close to this world, separated only by a thin membrane.'
'You've been reading Stephen King again.'
'It felt strange from the moment we got here tonight.'
'Did you feel anything different when we were here the first time? Yesterday?'
'The old ones always feel a little different from the new ones. Maybe I saw the dead more clearly, with more detail.' I held him tighter. Now that I'd gotten over my startled reaction to the ghost, I had plenty of other fears to cope with. We had a situation on our hands. 'What will we do about the body, Tolliver? We shouldn't call the police, right? We're already under enough suspicion.'
My feelings about the law were, at best, ambiguous. I couldn't blame the Texarkana PD for not knowing what was going on in our household when I was a teenager. After all, we'd struggled so hard to conceal it. I hardly blamed them for not finding Cameron; I, of all people, knew how hard it could be to find a dead person. But now that I was grown, the thing I valued most was the ability to shape my life as I wanted. The law could take that away from me in a New York minute.
'No one knows we came here,' Tolliver said, as if thinking out loud. 'No one's come out here since we got here. I bet we could leave and not get caught. But someone's got to get this body out of the grave. We can't just
