“You see our body?” Preacher asked.
Maureen frowned. “I do not.”
At second glance, she realized less of the cemetery was visible to her than she’d thought.
Magnolia trees rose in various spots, hiding some of the tombs. Live oaks grew on the sidewalks surrounding the cemetery, and their long, gnarled branches reached over the brick wall, hiding the inside edges and corners of the grounds in shadow. Many of the structures stood close together, creating narrow alleyways, invisible to her from where she stood. The cemetery mirrored the neighborhoods she patrolled, Maureen thought. The closer and longer that she looked at them, the more untended and mysterious, and possibly dangerous, spaces she discovered. She would have to get down from her perch and search the cemetery on foot. The longer she looked at it, the larger the cemetery seemed to grow. Searching the corners and shadows and alleyways alone would take a lot longer than she had anticipated.
“You realize what you’re standing on, right?” Preacher said.
“What’s that?” The wind was rising again. Maureen thought she heard musical notes. A flute, maybe a toy piano.
“What you’re standing on,” Preacher said, “is the mausoleum. You know, a big marble-and-concrete filing cabinet, basically, full of two centuries of human remains.”
Maureen looked down at her feet, transmitting a silent apology to the spirits of the dead. “I’ll let you know when I’ve found our body.”
She walked to the edge of the shelf. She sat, fighting the wind, letting her legs dangle, and then she dropped to the ground.
She landed with a thump. A sleeping stray cat shrieked to panicked life right at her feet, darting into the darkness. Maureen shouted and stumbled backward against the mausoleum. Startled by the noise and the commotion, two more cats shot out of the grass, launching themselves in opposite directions, shadows darting among the crypts. Maureen dropped her flashlight. She had her weapon halfway drawn before she stopped herself.
From the other side of the wall, she could hear Preacher laughing at her. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she might have heard the security guard chuckling as well.
“I’m fine,” she shouted. That she’d been so quick to draw embarrassed and frightened her. The panic felt out of character. “God, I hate cats.”
She re-secured her weapon and picked up her flashlight, shined it to the left and then to the right down the path of hard dirt and dead grass. Nothing. No body, no ghouls, and thankfully no more stray cats. The surrounding streetlights shed a pale glow on the grounds. At least she wasn’t fumbling about in the pitch-dark, she thought. The idea occurred to her, looking around, that this whole scenario could be part of some elaborate welcome-back prank. Please, God, she thought, don’t let me shoot one of my coworkers because he jumped out at me wearing a monster mask.
Her radio crackled. Preacher’s voice, “This was your idea. Get to work.”
She keyed her mic. “We got nothing as to where the body might be?”
“Inside the walls, that’s the best we got,” Preacher said.
“Fuck me.” Should’ve waited for backup, she thought.
She walked the wide grass path with careful steps, flashlight beam sweeping in front of her from side to side. She was looking for signs of foul play, for signs of a dead body, but it was hard not be distracted by her surroundings. Some of the crypts and tombs were badly neglected, crumbling, ashen, and stained, the angels adorning their peaked rooftops having lost an arm or a wing or a halo, the engraved family names all but worn away by time and weather. Other buildings shone white and new in the beam of her flashlight. Oddly, age had little bearing on condition. On one of the cleanest tombs, the inscription revealed that the most recent inhabitant had been interred more than eighty years ago. Another cold winter gust rushed along the path and Maureen heard the musical notes again. Like someone blowing into the top of an empty bottle.