Brian Freeman - Thief River Falls

It felt like long ago.

The trail was wet under her feet. She kept her head down and her hands in her pockets. Soon she reached a familiar cross trail. Going right would take her to the river and the path that was haunted by Indians and murderers, according to local legend. Dead Man’s Trail, they called it. Going left would lead her out of the park toward the open land of the cemetery. Part of her wanted to go right and stay in the past, when she was young and Danny was alive. But she went left, following Willow’s instructions. She saw the midday light through the trees, and when she broke free of the woods, the dead were waiting quietly for her in neat, parallel rows.

This was where her entire family was buried.

Madeleine Power, her mother. Gerald Power, her father. Anton, Charles, and Samuel, her brothers. They were together, lined up next to each other under matching gray marble stones. Danny was buried here, too, in a more distant place. Everyone she loved was here, waiting for the day when she would join them. She thought about Willow’s poem, and for an instant, she was possessed by a strange desire to dance until the dead came to take her away.

But no. She couldn’t do that. According to Willow, Lisa’s book had come to life here two nights ago, and she needed to understand why. If the teenager was right, someone had visited the cemetery in the rain and buried a body in the soft ground. Two nights ago, Purdue had also showed up at her house. She didn’t believe in coincidences. If reality and fiction were blurring, it was because someone had planned it that way.

Someone was playing a game with her, but it didn’t feel like a game at all.

Have you ever been afraid that someone will bring your books to life?

Lisa was alone in the graveyard. The huge field was dusted over with wet snow clinging to the grass, untouched by footprints. Even without the sun, she felt blinded by the reflected brilliance of white light. Rows and rows of headstones pushed out of the ground, stretching for hundreds of feet in every direction. A few trees interrupted their neat geometry. Some trees clung to their colored leaves; others blew them across the field.

She walked up and down the rows. The years on the stones went back for decades, but every now and then, she came across the names of people she knew. A couple of times, they were people she didn’t even realize had died. The dentist her family had used when she was a girl had passed away two years ago. A nurse who’d retired not long after Lisa joined the hospital had died only recently. The current year was freshly carved on her stone.

Up and down. Back and forth.

Twenty minutes later, with the cold numbing her skin, she still hadn’t found the newly dug grave that Willow had told her about. It occurred to her that maybe the girl had imagined the whole thing. Willow was fragile, probably anorexic, and emotionally overwrought; she’d obviously gone to the cemetery with thoughts of suicide on her brain. Lisa had been concerned enough by the teenager’s story that she’d given Willow her cell phone number and told her to call anytime, day or night, if she ever felt an impulse to harm herself.

So maybe there had been no person in the shadows. No shovel scraping metal against rock. No reenacted scene from her favorite novel. Willow had seen what she wanted to see, all in her head, driven by exhaustion and depression. Brief reactive psychosis , that was what the shrinks called it. Lisa had researched the syndrome for her first novel and built it into the book’s plot. In the face of severe trauma, the brain could conjure entire worlds that didn’t exist as a way of blocking out reality. Hallucinations of people and places. Delusions that the mind refused to give up.

Lisa was starting to give up hope of finding anything, but she kept following the rows, continuing past grave after grave.

And then there it was.

Not an illusion. Real.

Near the trees in the cemetery’s far eastern corner, she saw a brown stone with rough, unpolished edges. It was the last plot in the row, and there was an open space next to it for someone else to be buried at a future date. The ground in front of the stone had recently been overturned and was a blotchy mixture of snow and black dirt. Not green grass like the other graves.

As if a hole had been made and something — someone — had been buried there.

Lisa cast her gaze around the large cemetery. She saw that someone else had joined her in the peaceful ground. A white Oldsmobile was parked on one of the narrow driveways crisscrossing the field, close to the entrance at Greenwood Street. A man made his way down one of the cemetery rows with a large box in his hand, and every now and then, Lisa could see him stop to pluck something off one of the headstones. His clothes — a dark suit and tie, a neat trench coat — made him look like either a minister or an undertaker.

She headed his way, cutting diagonally across the land. As she got closer, she could see that the man was in his seventies, with slightly hunched shoulders. His white hair sprouted from the top of his head and settled on either side like water from a fountain. His dark eyes were cheerful and alert, and he whistled as he went from grave to grave. Lisa watched him bend down at his knees and pick up a flowerpot filled with weathered plastic roses and deposit it in the box he was carrying. He took one of the sad old white roses from the pot and poked it into the buttonhole of his lapel like a boutonniere.

“Excuse me,” Lisa called.

The man eyed Lisa from where he was, and his face showed his surprise that he wasn’t alone. “Oh, hello.”

“Do you work here?”

The man pushed himself up until he was standing again, and Lisa could hear an audible pop in one of his knees and saw a twinge of discomfort cross the man’s face. “No, I’m just a volunteer.”

“My name is Lisa Power,” she said, but her name drew no recognition from him.

“Tom Manno. Father Manno, actually.”

“You’re a priest?”

“Recently retired. I still do the occasional funeral service for parishioners I’ve known for a long time. Plus, I help the city keep the cemetery here in good order. People like to leave things behind when they visit. Flowers, trinkets, little memorials for their loved ones. Usually the city comes through before winter and gathers them up and throws them away. I’ve never liked that. So I get out here before the cemetery workers arrive and save what I can. I keep it all in storage at the church. No one has ever come back to get anything, but that doesn’t matter to me. These objects have meaning to someone, so I want them treated with respect.”

“That’s very nice,” Lisa told him.

Father Manno put down the box at his feet. He stared into the wind at the gravestones surrounding them. “Well, to be perfectly honest, these visits are selfish, too. I like spending time here by myself. I have a chance to catch up with old friends. I can reflect on what’s ahead for me, too. Not that I’m looking to rush it, but I’ve seen enough people unprepared that I’d rather get my head around it. People always assume that priests are just fine with death, as if going to a better world means you don’t regret leaving the one you know. How silly.”

“Well, I don’t mean to intrude,” Lisa told him.

“Not at all. Is there something you need?”

“I have a question, actually.” She pointed to the corner of the cemetery near the trees. “There’s a freshly dug grave back there. I assume someone was buried very recently. I was just wondering if you happened to know who it was, or know anything about it.”

Father Manno followed the direction of her finger and shook his head. “I’m afraid not. I’m not involved in every burial here, unless the deceased had a connection to my church.”