“The dead woman’s name was either Ellen or Helen, and Owen refused to leave until somebody decided which.”
Tess stood behind him with a bag of leaves dragging against her knee. Across Peace Church Cemetery, volunteers worked between the stones in the bright, slanting light. Somebody’s rake caught in a root. Somebody else had brought an enormous box of doughnuts and left it open to the attention of three yellow jackets.
“Take a picture,” Tess said.
“I did. It looks like Ellen in the picture.”
“Then put Ellen.”
“It looks like Helen when I’m looking at it.”
Her phone vibrated inside her coat. She shifted the bag to reach it, scattering a small avalanche of leaves across her shoes.
IMANI: Did you approve the orange?
Below that was a photograph of a painted board. On Tess’s screen it resembled a traffic cone having an emotional crisis.
TESS: That’s not our orange.
IMANI: The can says pumpkin.
TESS: So does the pie filling. Don’t paint with that either.
“Tess.”
She put the phone away. Owen was looking up at her, his pencil suspended above a notebook. He had worn his skeleton gloves to the cleanup, and the white finger bones had become grubby enough to look properly excavated.
“What?”
“You said you’d help.”
She crouched beside him. The stone was worn, the first letter half lost in a shallow seam. Somebody had placed a small fallen branch at its foot, and a brown leaf had worked itself into a crack.
“Could be either,” she admitted.
The caretaker came along the row carrying an empty bucket. He had a wool cap pushed back above his ears and grass seeds clinging to both trouser legs. Owen asked him, and the man lowered the bucket to look.
“I wouldn’t guess,” he said. “Put a question mark beside it. We’ll compare it with the records.”
Owen drew the question mark carefully.
“How come people still do this?” he asked.
“Because you’ve spilled leaves where I just raked,” Tess said.
“No. The whole thing. What if nobody remembers her anymore?”
The caretaker glanced at the notebook. “You noticed her, didn’t you?”
Owen considered this. He bent over the page again, adding the location of the stone beneath the uncertain name.