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registered, one that was part of the real world, not the stuff in her mind.
    It was a fence. A ten-foot-high, glossy black wrought-iron fence.
    Beyond which were graves.
    The Pine Grove Cemetery.
    How had she ended up in this part of town? Then again, if you didn’t have a destination, a tank of gas and a machine could take you somewhere. Didn’t mean you had to go inside, however.
    And she really meant to continue on by the place—it just was not the way the Harley happened to go. The gates were open because it was after eight, and as she zoomed through them, her stomach went on the grind.
    The landscape of blocky gray markers, and tombs that looked like banks, and white marble statues of angels and crosses made her think of that tattoo on Jim’s back, the one of the Grim Reaper.
    And this, naturally, took her right back to the fingernail scratches on his chest.
    She was still cursing as she rounded a fat turn, ascended a brief hill . . . and found herself at her own grave site. Hitting the brakes, she was surprised that she’d managed to make it to the right place. The cemetery was a maze of all-the-same and she had been here only once before.
    When her remains had been sunk beneath the surface.
    Funny, she’d always had a fear of being buried alive, those Edgar Allan Poe–era stories of people scratching at the insides of their coffins scaring the crap out of her. Now? Turned out that hadn’t been worth worrying about. She’d have done herself more of a favor not to have made that ice cream run to Hannaford’s.
    Killing the engine, she dismounted and walked across the asphalt strip. The scratchy spring grass was a bright fresh green, and crocuses and tulips were pushing up to the sun, their pale shoots searching and finding warmth, their flowers about to come out and see the world.
    She was careful not to step on them as she made her way over to the grave marker that had her name and dates on it.
    The groundskeeping staff had done a pretty crappy job withthe rolls of grass over all that loose dirt, the lengths a little cockeyed, one of them trimmed too short.
    She pictured her funeral mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Her mother crying. Her sister. Her father. She saw her artwork arranged in the narthex . . . and that groundskeeper who had been so kind to her . . . and all the people, young and old, who had come to pay their respects.
    Abruptly, it was hard to breathe.
    None of them deserved this destiny of hers.
    And the longer she stood over her own grave, the more she became convinced that virtue was so overrated. If she hadn’t been a virgin, none of this would have happened. Instead, she’d be gearing up for finals right now and in the studio with her favorite art teacher, Ms. Douglass. She probably should have just given it up to Bobby Carne when she’d been a junior in high school. Even though he’d had octopus arms and a tongue like a dripping sponge. . . .
    From out of nowhere, another image of Jim popped up, this time from when she’d knocked on his door the morning before and he’d scrambled to open it. His hair had been a mess and he’d been half-dressed, nothing but loose sweats hanging off the curves of those pelvic bones. He’d looked at her . . . in a way he hadn’t before.
    If she didn’t know better, she’d swear it was the way a man looked at a woman when he—
    â€œOkay, you need to stop,” she said out loud.
    God, she really couldn’t believe he had a girlfriend in the middle of all this. Or that she cared one way or the other.
    What she needed to get focused on was freeing the others who were like her, those who didn’t belong down below, the poor fools who had been sacrificed and claimed because of their virtue.
    On this fine spring morning, she needed to put the crazy angeraside, go back to that house, and sit down with that ancient book Adrian had