The House of Hidden Things

X: Grave Marker

Lane Cemetery

More snow is lightly falling across the gravel drive. The night sky is clouded but bright where the moon can be seen. My fingers itched to slide deep into my coat pockets, as the sharp slope of Bridgeland Manor comes into view in the distance, high above the trees. The slope of the chimney reaching towards the thick bruised clouds.

The snow danced around in the wind. Some of it clinging to the arms of my coat, my fingertips. Curled around the edges of the box Ana Crane had left out. It seemed to get heavier the closer I got to the high-walls surrounding the manor. Between the road and the gravel drive reached a riverbed lined with old graves. The twin to the small family cemetery inside the high-walls.

The gravel crunched under my shoes. Loud and sharp.

There was a rumour whispered behind fingers that the graves dug here were empty. That the headstones guarded coffins full of dirt instead of bodies. Just a rumour. An old wives tale, something to dream about but looking at the wide yard and it's broke, crumbling headstones, I could believe it.

Empty coffins trapped inside the earth with nothing to hold in them. Granddaughter of a grave robber, floated on the wind, pulling at my hair. That much I knew to be true.

At my back the haze of lights from the Elwood Carehome shine like twisted stars. Winking in the breeze as fingers branch and reach for the windows. The tomb like building towered and loomed over the trees. It's presence a reminder of it's own kind of omen. Doctor Burke wouldn't allow me to get passed the front lobby, his face turned down.

She's having a bad day. Maybe tomorrow. She doesn't remember you. Another bad day.

It had been three weeks and I couldn't see her. I couldn't help her – be there for her. My grip tightened on the box, shifting the weight to lean against my hip. There was nothing I could do and I knew she'd get to this point, I just didn't imagine it would been this soon. I was charing ghosts and now everything was slipping through my fingers. My sigh puffs air out of my lungs, hot and hazy.

Pieces of the surrounding walls cut sharply around large rocks and old trees. Branches in the graveyard, reaching out to me over the walls. I'd chosen a bedroom farthest from the front of Bridgeland, where the view of the tombstones fizzles out and the cliffs edge turned dangerous. In the nights spent sitting awake in that bedroom, I'd noticed the rotted skeleton fingers of the trees, tapped against the windows in the night.

Snow cracks under my boots as I climb the narrow hill path. Around a large tree, I brace a free hand against sharp stone for grip, and that's when I notice a figure walking along the tombstones. Flowers hanging grey in the moonlight.

I watched them from behind the wall. Fingers aching in the cold.

There were never any mourners in this graveyard. I hadn't seen anyone in the cool mornings or the late evenings where I could see the headstones from the kitchen window. The figure kneels. Head bowed forward. I knew I couldn't be staring, watching someone mourn but there was something so heartbreaking about it. Alone in the dark the future reached up to whip dirt off the name carved into stone.

I cast my eyes away, leaving the figure to their peace but not my own. A morbid though chases me up the narrow path: Could the body the hand belonged too be buried here? Was Eleanor DelGrave? I knew Edmund wasn't. He was with the rest of the graves in the cemetery inside the high-walls of Bridgeland.

His was the only headstone with a name. The other's only had worn dates and chipped away confessions. What would DelGrave's say? Would it have the loving memory part? Did anyone claim her body when she died?