Ghosts of Graveyards Past Read Online Free

door. “You know, if it’s old gravesites you’re looking for, you might try the Lesley homestead. It’s a half mile south of the spring, a favorite spot for hikers to visit. A few have mentioned seeing some family headstones behind the house’s burned remains.”
    Family headstones—not a community burial ground. It would do for a start, though, and she scribbled the directions down for lack of a better clue.
     
     
     
     

3
     
    The stretch of wilderness known as Crooked Wood must have become a popular hangout for the local youth. Jenna guessed this from the numerous cigarette stubs and rocks that were arranged in a campfire circle. Plastic bottles littered the ground, a pile of coals nearby from a recent campfire.
    She had parked her car in a clearing off the main road, striking off down the footpath with only a vague sense of where she was going.
    Thunder trilled overhead and Jenna hoisted her knapsack higher as she wished for a compass like the one her father used to carry on family camping trips. It would have to be guesswork and the satellite maps from her cellphone’s on-again-off-again wireless coverage.
    The path before her was defined by a mat of golden-brown needles from pines that towered overhead. She could still hear the sound of car motors passing over the main road. Emboldened with this sense of direction, she moved deeper into the woods, glancing back to see the path’s opening gradually shrink and disappear in the changing foliage.
    She walked in the same direction for as long as she dared, ignoring the trails that seemed to fork in a more promising route than the one advised by the funeral home director. The homestead might not be connected to the burial ground she sought, but it was her only current location for markers in the dense growth of the forest.
    A half mile or so slipped past as she trudged on with nothing to break the landscape of hardwood, the trees growing thicker the further she went. The urge to turn back was increasing with the clouds in the sky, despite her need to confirm at least one lead before the day’s end.
    Climbing a small embankment where a stream snaked between stones, Jenna lifted her gaze to find something unexpected on the other side. Smoke billowed somewhere on the horizon, a thick gray cloud rolling across the tree tops.
    A wildfire was the first possibility to enter her mind, remembering the burned remains of the church in Georgia, the tombstones nearby damaged in the flames.
    Her steps quickened, a mixture of urgency and curiosity carrying her towards the scene ahead. Skirting thorn plants and sagging tree limbs, she made her way to a crest in the path where the ground below turned abruptly steep. At the end of this slope, a farmhouse, rustic and somewhat shabby in appearance but not abandoned by any stretch of the imagination, was visible. The smoke curled upwards from its red brick chimney. White paint was flecked in places, a tangle of ivy stretching from the roof to the picket fence below. Old garden tools leaned there as if forgotten mid-project, the weeds grown tall enough to twine around the wooden handles. It took her a moment to register what else leaned there.
    Gravestones. Old ones, judging from the condition, most broken or cracked. Others were simply tarnished beyond reading beneath the layers of grime and rust, the lichen and moss she had learned to dread when searching for an inscription.
    Confused, her gaze moved beyond the house to a smaller structure that was even more battered in appearance. Cement blocks were stacked beside a storm door, a sign hung from the rafters above with the words ‘ Monumental Masonry’ stenciled in letters that peeled away. A name and phone number appeared below, too faded and far away for Jenna to make out from this distance.
    So there was a stone carver still working in Sylvan Spring. One of her sources must have been mistaken then, leaving her to wonder if Mr. Sawyer still lived, or if this was someone else. The