The digging took longer than you might imagine. We struck the ground again and again and only managed to unearth clumps of grass and lady’s slippers. Then we heard our shovels tearing root masses, that terrible ripping sound, like muscles, tendons, sinews, coming unattached from their moorings, bodies ripped limb from limb. Then we hit rocks of all sizes. Although the night was chilly, before long we were drenched as much with sweat as with rain.

“This has definitely taken a very weird turn,” Tuck said, pushing his wet hair off his forehead.

“You’re under no obligation to stay.”

“Shut up,” he said. “I’m just saying it’s weird. Sometimes you have to say things out loud.”

The hole emerged slowly over hours. I had blisters on my hands, soft, raw, raised patches of puffy white. Everything about what we were doing made me feel like someone I didn’t recognize, a stranger. A few times I stopped shoveling to laugh, but when I did Tuck stopped shoveling, too, and told me I was a lunatic and asked if I was done. No, we were most certainly not done. I didn’t let myself think too much about what I was looking for, what I might find. I concentrated on the physical act of stabbing the earth with the sharp shovel blade, lifting as much dirt as I could out of the slowly growing hole.

Twice we heard cars on the road, but they passed us by, and although I didn’t like the sound of tires on a wet road, I never stopped digging. I began to feel a growing excitement. I couldn’t believe it had never occurred to me to do this before! The act of exhuming suddenly made such perfect sense. Wasn’t this the culmination of all I’d been doing since Cole arrived in August? Every time I looked in my mother’s drawers, the boxes in the attic, when I talked to Marlene at the police station, when I looked for articles in the Island Sun, all of that was a kind of gentle digging. This was simply more physical.

Tuck’s shovel struck the corner of the coffin when the hole was only three feet deep. I shined the little key chain flashlight into the hole, saw the casket there. It was the same color as the earth. I climbed into the damp hole and touched the casket, brushed the dirt away. It was wooden, plain. We’d been digging in the wrong place, I realized, and had to extend our hole away from the gravestone in order to uncover the rest of it.

“Keep going,” I said.

“Lydia,” Tuck said. “Do you still want to do this? Are you thinking clearly about what you might see?”