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  For Doug, forever

  1

  Detective Natalie Lockhart pulled into the cemetery and parked in front of a run-down church covered in ivy and twining vines, her hands tightening on the steering wheel. This part of the weed-choked graveyard was isolated and neglected. She sat for a moment, scanning the grounds, chiseled engravings of skull-and-crossbones staring back at her with their hollowed-out eyes. Haunting stuff. The weeds grew tallest around the old slate stones from a cholera outbreak in 1825, obscuring the names of the dead. Here lyeth Ezekiel Young. God Shelters Goodwife Palmer.

  Natalie shivered and glanced at her watch. Five o’clock. The sky was overcast. The Weather Channel kept predicting rain. Time to do this thing before the downpour ruined everything.

  She got out of her smoke-gray Honda Pilot, popped the trunk, and gathered up her supplies—spritzer bottles full of harsh chemicals, a soft-bristle brush, trash bags, a plastic scraper, and her grass clippers. The air smelled of balsam and pitch pine. It was mid-April in Upstate New York, a time of renewal. A time for shedding the past and moving on. Except not today—not for Natalie.

  Today was her sister’s twentieth deathiversary.

  She slammed the trunk and, juggling everything in her arms, proceeded along the overgrown path toward the newer part of the cemetery. At the top of the incline she paused to catch her breath and locate her sister’s grave. Willow Mercy Lockhart. Fingers of fog curled around the granite slab, creating the impression of a damp loneliness. Willow would have been thirty-eight years old. Natalie was thirty, and her sister, Grace, was thirty-six. Their parents were gone.

  Natalie’s father, Officer Joseph “Joey” Lockhart, had been blue through and through until the day he died, a proud member of the Burning Lake Police Department for thirty-five years. He spent his career directing traffic, rescuing kittens, breaking up bar fights, and arresting drunk drivers. He was a fitness buff with scruffy brown hair and warm hazel eyes, and his favorite saying was, “Put a fork in us, we’re done.” As the father of three daughters, he’d always wanted a son, but after his wife put her foot down and said, “No more kids,” Joey scooped up his youngest daughter—the one who adored him, the one he’d named after Natalie Wood—and taught her everything he knew about being a cop. Natalie was born with a knack for solving mysteries, Joey claimed. By the age of eight, she’d read all of Agatha Christie’s and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels, and she beat everyone at Clue and Trivial Pursuit.

  Now Natalie turned up the collar of her cheap jacket. Wow. It got worse every year. She surveyed the graffitied headstones—pentagrams, 666, upside-down crosses, Redrum. The grass was littered with crushed beer cans, melted candles, and half-burned incense sticks—evidence of hard-partying kids who were into the occult. The local teenagers liked to speculate about life and hunt for spirits in the town cemeteries, hoping to communicate with the dead. Dabbling in witchcraft was something of a rite of passage in Burning Lake, New York, and Natalie sympathized, since she’d gone through a witchy phase herself—conducting séances, wishing for a boyfriend, hexing her rivals with an acne flare-up or two. I wanna be a teen witch, fuck you. The dark side had a powerful appeal in this town.

  Natalie got down on the ground and started to clip the weeds around the base of Willow’s headstone. She hacked away at the stubborn thistle stems, then sat back and glanced at the swollen sky, which was making ominous rumbling sounds. With a renewed sense of purpose, she picked up the plastic scraper and removed thin shavings of moss from the pink granite. A scrub brush and pump sprayer cleaned it up good. Now for the graffiti—pentacles, horns, hexagrams. The worst one was a resurrection spell calling Willow back to the world of the living. Come through this Mortal door. It disgusted Natalie. “Come on,” she muttered angrily. “Let her rest in peace.”

  For centuries, Burning Lake had buried its most shameful secret. In 1712, three innocent women were executed as witches. It all began when two little sisters accused their village neighbors of bewitching them. Panic ensued. Accusations flew. In the end, three “scurrilous, wicked creatures” were convicted of witchcraft—Abigail Stuart, Sarah Hutchins, and Victoriana Forsyth. Many years later, their accusers admitted they’d made it all up.

  The town fathers had tried to bury Burning Lake’s sordid history for centuries. The city’s rebirth began in the 1960s with the completion of the Adirondack Northway, which connected the idyllic beauty of upstate New York with Manhattan. In the 1970s, a book about the witch trials was published to critical acclaim, drawing hundreds of tourists to Burning Lake. By the 1980s, the town realized its potential and went full-bore Salem. A cottage industry blossomed around Abigail, Sarah, and Victoriana. Today, downtown Burning Lake was full of occult gift shops and New Age boutiques selling everything from spell kits to magic crystals. For those residents who were “into the Craft,” you could find whatever you needed at the local 7-Eleven—Ouija boards, tarot cards, even a tiny cauldron. Fall was their season. Halloween was huge. There were guided tours, a witch museum, and a monument on Abby’s Hex Peninsula, where the executions had taken place. In October, the trees blazed a spectacular orange color, and thousands of tourists came from all over to see the world on fire.

  Now Natalie selected a chemical recommended to her by the paint store guy, a shy man with deep-set eyes who had a thing for her, and spritzed the headstone with it, then scrubbed off the offending graffiti until her arms grew tired. Willow had taught her how to hold herself erect and twirl around like a ballerina. She taught Natalie how to make a boat out of newspapers and float it in the lake, how to identify fish in the water. Her favorite was the darting sunfish, small as a hand, flickering in the early summer light.

  Willow had woven herself into Natalie and was part of her now, and Natalie couldn’t take a step without … somehow, somewhere inside her body, feeling Willow’s faint presence, like a glimmer of life going on inside a house that was no longer yours. Just a glimpse of a tiny figure dancing back and forth, so tall and slender, so light on her feet.

  Ten minutes later, only a “girly skull” sticker remained on the granite slab—an ironic skull-and-crossbones cartoon with a bright pink bow. Natalie used the scraper to chisel away as much of the sticker as she could, then dabbed on paint remover to get rid of the gummy residue.

  Finally. Done. She stood up and brushed the grass clippings off her hands. Next she gathered up the beer cans and fast-food wrappers, filling two heavy-duty trash bags. Okay. Best she could do. It was closing in on six o’clock.

  On her way downhill, heading back to her car, something caught Natalie’s eye—a defaced gravestone with chalk marks covering the speckled granite. The handwriting was nearly impossible to decipher, but she recognized a few shocking words: fuck, cunt, dead.

  She paused between rows four and five, feeling a stab of anxiety. The name on the headstone—Teresa McCarthy—was one of the nine cold cases she’d been assigned as a ro
okie detective in the Criminal Investigations Unit. Twenty-one-year-old Teresa was last seen one April morning more than two decades ago, hitching a ride out of town. Teresa had led a troubled life. She was a tweaker, a meth head who scratched her skin so much it was covered in sores. Her sunken eyes conveyed her shrunken dreams. Last year, her parents finally gave up hope of ever finding her alive and had Teresa declared legally dead. There was no body buried here. Just a stone slab to remember her by.

  Now the wind stirred Natalie’s hair. The graffiti on the grave was not the usual occult bombast—it was scarier than that. The handwriting was mostly illegible, but the ten percent she could make out displayed a unique brand of nastiness and bile—absolute hatred for the deceased. Who would do such a thing? Nobody in town remembered Teresa McCarthy anymore, except for her parents and the detectives who were keeping her cold case alive.

  Natalie glanced warily around. None of the other graves in this part of the cemetery had been defiled. During her first year as the designated newbie of the unit, her assigned task was reinvestigating “the Missing Nine”—nine beat-to-hell plastic binders, battered around the edges, their dog-eared pages full of old leads, inconsistent witness testimonies, and dried-up lines of inquiry. All the other detectives in the unit had taken a shot at the Missing Nine and failed. It was tradition to pass the burden along to the newbie, since what was needed was a fresh pair of eyes.

  In the past twenty-five years, nine transients had gone missing from Burning Lake, and it was Natalie’s turn to find out why. Nine people had vanished off the face of the earth since the mid-1990s—drifters, drug addicts, indigents, alcoholics, the lowest rung of the ladder. The FBI field office briefly got involved back in the mid-2000s, but since the victims were all drifters by nature, it was assumed that they’d drifted on, passing through Burning Lake on their way to warmer destinations. It was difficult at best to keep track of the transient homeless population and freight hoppers who rode the rails.

  In the end, the Missing Nine were Burning Lake’s problem. These pitiful victims were mostly unloved and forgotten—people whose families had given up on them. With the exception of Teresa McCarthy, there were no graves for them. No deathiversaries. No wilting bouquets of remembrance.

  Natalie studied the defiled headstone, every inch of dark granite covered in hastily scribbled words, placed too close together, most of it illegible—and yet the message was clear. Teresa, shit, pussy, fuck, cunt, dead. Deeply troubled, she took out her cell phone and snapped as many pictures as she could, while the sky made guttural rumblings in the distance. She leaned down to rub off one of the letters and validate her suspicion—yes, it was chalk. White chalk. Which meant the message would vanish in the oncoming storm. Natalie documented the scene as best she could, then checked her watch again. She didn’t want to be late.

  2

  Natalie put everything away in the trunk of her SUV, used a hand sanitizer, brushed her fingers through her hair, and grabbed the bouquet of marigolds from the backseat. Just in time.

  Grace Lockhart drove her Mini Cooper through the cemetery gates, while Grace’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Ellie, waved at her aunt through the windshield.

  Natalie smiled and waved back.

  They got out of the Mini Cooper with their bouquets and silver helium balloons, and Natalie opened her arms wide. Hugs and kisses all around.

  “Hi, Aunt Natalie.”

  “How’s it going, kiddo?”

  “Pretty good, thanks.”

  “Hey, sis.” Grace was an exceptionally pretty divorcée who hadn’t aged a day since high school. She had luminous blue eyes and a halo of golden Botticelli hair. She came across as placid, almost complacent, as if nothing fazed her, but Natalie knew a deeper truth. Grace was a natural-born worrier, the type of person who couldn’t prevent everyday problems from weighing heavily on her. She was sensitive to a fault, although you wouldn’t know it to look at her. She was a biology teacher at the local high school, and she’d divorced her hedge-fund-manager husband six years ago, when Ellie was nine. Ellie bore the scars of the divorce on her sweet, sad face.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Grace said absently, checking her phone. “Ellie had a thing after school.”

  “I was with my friends,” Ellie clarified.

  “Sorry … what I meant.”

  “Mom, where’s your head today? Put that thing away.”

  “Pot. Kettle.” Grace smiled and finished checking her text messages.

  “You told me to put my phone away,” Ellie reminded her.

  “Just a second.”

  “Sheesh. Pot. Kettle.” Ellie was a stunner, an avid book-reader and the world’s biggest cynic. Her lovely, skeptical eyes were a waxy blue. She’d dyed her naturally blond hair raven black in order to distance herself from her mother, but otherwise she was the spitting image of Grace. Ellie was born during a hurricane. The gale-force winds had swept in from the southwest, shaking the traffic lights and fanning the suffocating rains. Lately, she reminded Natalie of a hurricane, with her escalating moods and fiery defiance of her mother’s rules.

  “Are we all set?” Natalie asked.

  “Yeah,” Grace said, putting her phone away. “Let’s go.”

  They found Willow’s grave and placed their flowers at the base of the headstone, while Ellie handed out the balloons—one each. Every year, they performed the same simple yet heartfelt ceremony. First, they took turns telling Willow what had transpired since her last deathiversary; then they said a silent prayer; finally they released their balloons.

  “Ellie, you go first,” Grace said. “I’ll go next, and Natalie, you’re last.”

  “Wow, you’re like a well-mannered bulldozer,” Natalie joked.

  Ellie giggled. “Mom’s used to ordering her students around.”

  “I don’t order anyone around,” Grace protested.

  “Then why are you rushing us?”

  “Because I hate graveyards,” Grace admitted with a shudder.

  “You always do this,” Ellie protested softly. “Every year, you come up with some excuse to leave early.”

  “No, I don’t.” Grace blushed. “Do I?”

  Ellie turned to Natalie and asked, “Was she always this superstitious?”

  “Grace is the most superstitious person I know.”

  “It’s like … if I spill a grain of salt,” Ellie said with a derisive snort, “she’ll toss a pinch over her shoulder. If we come across a ladder or a black cat, she’ll walk in the other direction. It’s crazy.”

  “Go ahead and mock your mother. I can take it.” Grace rolled her eyes. “Honey, you’re up,” she coached her daughter.

  Ellie shuffled her feet. She was rail-thin, with an upturned nose, and today she was dressed all in black—black nail polish, black boots, a black lace blouse, black jeans. She was growing out her bangs, and you could see her sly eyes through a curtain of hair, the suggestion of mischief in her adolescent mouth. “Okay, well, um … Aunt Willow, I’ve been wondering lately … what it must feel like to lie underground, year after year, while everyone who visits your grave is so sad … all that negative karma must drive you nuts. And so I want you to know I’m feeling happy for you today, instead of sad, because you’re beyond all the bogus BS.”

  “Ellie,” Grace said.

  “Well, she is,” she insisted. “She’s moved on, and we haven’t. We’re still wallowing in the past. Meanwhile, she’s out there, flowing free with the wind and the water and…”

  Grace put a hand on Ellie’s shoulder. “Honey, just tell your poor aunt what happened since her last deathiversary,” she pleaded. “C’mon, you know the drill. You’ve had all year to think about this.”

  Ellie glanced at Natalie, who refused to take sides. With a sigh, she said, “All right. I got straight As again this year, just like last year. Probably because I’m so good at regurgitating whatever my teachers tell me and sitting quietly for hours, like a good little conformist. I’m an upstanding member of the Honor
Society who does what she’s told … basically I’m Pavlov’s dog. Mom thinks I’m a genius. She’s my helicopter mommy.”

  Grace gasped. “Good grief. Where on earth did you come up with that?”

  “What?” Ellie said.

  Grace turned to Natalie. “Am I a helicopter mommy?”

  Natalie felt the surprise in the pit of her stomach. This child knew herself. She seemed so utterly self-possessed, so very much her own person, that Natalie felt a little lost by comparison.

  “Well, it’s the truth,” Ellie said obstinately. “School is mostly bogus. Anyone can get straight As. It’s all about obedience and rote memory.”

  Grace grew disheartened. Her posture wilted. She lived off Burke Guzman’s alimony payments, but teaching was her passion. “Can we talk about this later, honey?”

  Ellie nodded and said, “Anyway, I’ve never met you, Aunt Willow, but I hope you’ve found peace. Perfect peace.” She smiled softly. “Okay, Mom. Your turn.”

  Grace didn’t bat an eye, she just launched into a recitation of last year’s activities, hitting all the highlights—two weeks in Martha’s Vineyard; a weekend in Boston to check out Harvard and MIT; Christmas in Bermuda. They were thinking of Harvard or Yale, maybe Columbia or Princeton. Ellie was in the top one percent of her class and doing great. Everything was great. Great, great, great. It was seven minutes and counting before she ran out of brag.

  Then came Natalie’s turn. She never knew exactly what to say in these situations, since she preferred to grieve in private, like her father, Joey.

  “Well, let’s see,” she said. “Zack got a job offer, and I didn’t feel like moving to Seattle, so we decided to separate. Test the waters.” That wasn’t the whole truth. Zack Stadler, Natalie’s boyfriend of three years, had left her after a bitter fight during which unforgivable things were said. Zack hated that there was a gun in the house, whereas Natalie had grown up with a gun in the house. Zack hated the autopsy photos she occasionally left out on her desk, whereas Natalie had grown up with autopsy photos on her father’s desk. Zack really didn’t want a cop for a girlfriend, although he’d initially been fascinated by her uniform, her bulletproof vest, her duty belt, her handcuffs, her police baton, her tactical boots, and of course the gun and extra magazines. But once the sex got old, their relationship died. During their final year together, Zack seemed to be fuming underneath the surface, repressing his resentment, which he took out on Natalie by fucking her from behind, always turning her over so he wouldn’t have to look at her indifferent face. Zack wanted prestige, he wanted status, he wanted much more than a town like Burning Lake could offer. And so, eight months ago, he’d packed his belongings and relocated to Seattle, where he went to work for a promising e-zine that covered the art scene. Natalie didn’t feel bitter or heartsick about it, so much as empty. They used to mock other cardboard couples. In the end, they began to mock each other.