“I didn’t know what I should . . . I was just . . . you know, stunned . . . trying to get my head around the idea that he was gone. The funeral director, Mr. Donelli, suggested Memorial because Hillview is almost full . . . and on the other side of town, besides . . .”
Stop her, Ralph wanted to say to Howie. It’s painful and pointless. It doesn’t matter where he’s buried, except to Marcy and her daughters.
But once more he kept silent and took it, because it was another kind of scolding, wasn’t it? Even if Marcy Maitland might not mean it that way. He told himself this would be over eventually, leaving him free to discover a life beyond Terry fucking Maitland. He had to believe there would be one.
“I knew about the other place,” Marcy went on, “of course I did, but I never thought of mentioning it to Mr. Donelli. Terry took me there once, but it’s so far out of town . . . and so lonely . . .”
“What other place would that have been?” Holly asked.
A picture rose unbidden in Ralph’s mind—six cowboy pallbearers carrying a plank coffin. He sensed the arrival of another confluence.
“The old graveyard in Canning Township,” Marcy said. “Terry took me out once, and it looked like nobody had been buried there for a long time, or even visited. There were no flowers or memorial flags. Just some crumbling grave markers. You couldn’t read the names on most of them.”
Startled, Ralph glanced at Yune, who nodded slightly.
“That’s why he was interested in that book in the newsstand,” Bill Samuels said in a low voice. “A Pictorial History of Flint County, Douree County, and Canning Township.”
Marcy continued to wipe her eyes with Jeannie’s handkerchief. “Of course he would have been interested in a book like that. There have been Maitlands in this part of the state ever since the Land Rush of 1889. Terry’s great-great-grandparents—or maybe even a generation greater than that, I don’t know for sure—settled in Canning.”
“Not in Flint City?” Alec asked.
“There was no Flint City back then. Just a little village called Flint, a wide spot in the road. Until statehood, in the early twentieth century, Canning was the biggest town in the area. Named after the biggest landowner, of course. When it came to acreage, the Maitlands were second or third. Canning was an important town until the big dust storms came in the twenties and thirties, when most of the good topsoil blew away. These days there’s nothing out there but a store and a church hardly anyone goes to.”
“And the graveyard,” Alec said. “Where people did their burying until the town dried up. Including a bunch of Terry’s ancestors.”
Marcy smiled wanly. “That graveyard . . . I thought it was awful. Like an empty house nobody cares about.”
Yune said, “If this outsider was absorbing Terry’s thoughts and memories as the transformation progressed, then he would have known about the graveyard.” He was looking at one of the pictures on the wall now, but Ralph had a good idea what was going through his mind. It was going through his, as well. The barn. The discarded clothes.
“According to the legends—there are dozens about El Cuco online—these creatures like places of death,” Holly said. “It’s where they feel most at home.”
“If there are creatures who eat sadness,” Jeannie mused, “a graveyard would make a nice cafeteria, wouldn’t it?”
Ralph wished mightily that his wife hadn’t come. If not for her, he would have been out the door ten minutes ago. Yes, the barn where the clothes had been found was near that dusty old boneyard. Yes, the goo that had turned the hay black was puzzling, and yes, perhaps there had been an outsider. That was a theory he was willing to accept, at least for the time being. It explained a lot. An outsider who was consciously re-creating a Mexican legend would explain even more . . . but it didn’t explain the disappearing man at the courthouse, or how Terry Maitland could have been in two places at the same time. He kept coming up against those things; they were like pebbles lodged in his throat.
Holly said, “Let me show you some pictures I took at another graveyard. They may open a line of more normal investigation. If either Detective Anderson or Lieutenant Sablo is willing to talk to the police in Montgomery County, Ohio, that is.”
Yune said, “At this point I’d talk to the pope, if it would help to clear this up.”
One by one, Holly projected the photos on the screen: the train station, the factory with the swastika spray-painted on the side, the deserted car wash.