UNDER A BLACK UMBRELLA, ETHAN TRUMAN walked the grassy avenue of graves, his shoes squishing in the saturated turf.
Giant drooping cedars mourned with the weeping day, and birds, like spirits risen, stirred in the cloistered branches when he passed near enough to worry them.
As far as he could see, he alone walked in these mortal fields. Respect for the loved and lost was usually paid on sunny days, with remembrances as bright as the weather. No one would choose to visit a cemetery in a storm.
No one but a cop whose mainspring of curiosity had been wound tight, who had been born with a compulsive need to know the truth. A clockwork mechanism in his heart and soul, designed by fate and granted as a birthright, compelled him to follow wherever suspicion and logic might lead.
In this case, suspicion, logic, and dread.
Intuition wove in him the strange conviction that he would prove to be not the first visitor of the day and that in this bastion of the dead, he would discover something disturbing, though he had no idea what it might be.
[134] Headstones of time-eaten granite, mausoleums crusted with lichen and stained by settled smog, memorial columns and obelisks tilted by ground subsidence: None of that traditional architecture identified this as a cemetery. The marker at each of these graves—a bronze plaque on a pale granite plinth—had been set flush with the grass. From a distance the burial ground appeared to be an ordinary park.
Radiant and unique in life, Hannah was here remembered with the same drab bronze that memorialized the thousands of others who slept eternal in these fields.
Ethan visited her grave six or seven times a year, including once at Christmas. And always on their anniversary.
He didn’t know why he came that often. Hannah didn’t lie here, only her bones. She lived in his heart, always with him.
Sometimes he thought he traveled to this place less to remember her—for she was not in the least forgotten—than to gaze at the empty plot beside her, at the blank granite tablet on which a cast-bronze plaque with his name would one day be fixed.
At thirty-seven, he was too young a man to welcome death, and life continued to hold the greater promise for him. Nevertheless, five years after losing Hannah, Ethan still felt that something of himself had died, as well............