Grave Concern Read Online Free

ribbon (luckily, once she’d dug down through the snow, she found the last bouquet’s ribbon well preserved). Then she’d had to adjust her camera manually with frozen fingers and try to bounce the light as much as possible off the stone itself in the falling dark, without getting reflective glare. A certain professional flare was expected in photo results, which Kate generally delivered. At the graveyard, she hadn’t been able to gauge the results by her camera’s display, which was scratched all to hell. Well, now she’d see.
    Kate clicked “Import” and glanced up at the clock: 5:15 p.m. She blinked a long blink, afraid of what the screen might reveal. But it was all right. The photos were pretty good, not great, but good enough. Dear old Adele would be pleased.

    Kate attached the photos to an email and pressed “Send.” Sat back in her wonky secretary’s chair circa 1978, well satisfied. Pleased, even. Not such a bad business, after all. Her doubts about the prospects of a grave-tending venture somewhat quelled, Hope reared its head, and so did Kate, lifting her eyes from her computer and gazing into the distance.
    Maddening in every other sense, the office nevertheless undeniably boasted a million-dollar view. A carpet of grass rolled down a gentle slope to River Road. On the far side of the road along the riverbank, a few majestic red and white pines still unmolested by the Pine Rapids Beautification Committee waved their feathery foliage in the breeze. Beyond, the Pine River continuously whispered of its storied past, when it had carried the mighty giants felled by larger-than-life loggers all the way to the junction at Big River, where Valleyview now stood. There, the mighty timbers had been squared, made up in giant cribs and piloted still farther down the liquid highway — to the grand St. Lawrence, and thence by ship across the sea.
    It was a bloody shame, of course, these ancient old-growth forests winding up as ship masts of the imperial British fleet. A catastrophe, you could say, despite what local legend would have one think. Which just proved a truth Kate was grasping all the more firmly with the approach of her fiftieth birthday: that most things in life could be understood as though reflected in a mirror — at shiny face value or from the shadowy rear. You could gawk at a grand past of hardy souls setting forth to wrest civilization from merciless wilderness; marvel at the doughty fur traders, heaving twice their weight on their backs — singing all the while; stand in awe of First Nations tribes, moving in seasonal cycles with the land. The grand romantic story. Or you could step through the looking glass, where darker truths prevailed. Like famine and desperation, carnage and exploitation, rape and pillage and war. Nature “red in tooth and claw,” as Tennyson so aptly wrote. (Pretty good, Kate considered, for a guy who’d never attended a Junior B Lumber Kings game of a Saturday night.)
    Kate put her feet up on the desk by the computer and pushed the secretarial chair back to its limit, in order to pursue further this train of thought. Like it or not, narrative would pile up. And Pine Rapids was full of it. Rife with romance. Pulsating with plot. Haunted by hagiography. Layer upon layer of the stuff. A tragicomic bloody compost heap.

    At 5:28, an email popped up on Kate’s screen:
    My dear Kate: Thank you for sending along the pictures. I can forgive them being a day late. I understand things are busy, this time of year. However, I am not as inclined to excuse the fact that, despite their excellent quality (perhaps a little on the dark side), the photos you sent are not of my dear Nathan’s grave but that of Norman Litwiller, who rests in the row behind. The roses are lovely indeed. I can only hope Norman was more fond of pink than Nathan, who can’t stand the shade. Could you please redo? Happy Hanukah! Your trusting