Hardheaded Lizzie wanted value for her money, so she wasn’t going to lead me directly to the grave that was her grandfather’s. She hadn’t even told me the purpose of my search until I’d gotten out of my car thirty minutes before. Of course, I could wander around to read all the headstones until I found one with appropriate dates. There weren’t that many Joyces under the dirt and rocks. But I’d spin this out, give her some freebies, because she hadn’t flinched at my fee.

I’d taken off my shoes for the reading, though I had to watch where I put my feet. There are thorns hidden in the grass in Texas, no matter how pretty it looks. I cast a final glance across the panorama of rolling ground and trees and emptiness. This little cemetery might as well have been on the moon, the landscape was such a contrast from the thickly clustering housing developments and settled communities we’d seen as we drove to our last job in North Carolina. We’d ended up in a small town, but it hadn’t had the isolated feel that I got from the landscape here. There’d always been the awareness that another settlement was within a few minutes’ drive.

At least it wasn’t as cold here, and at least we could be almost certain there wouldn’t be any snow. My feet stung in the chilly air, but nowhere near as much as my whole body had ached in freezing, wet North Carolina.

The Joyces were buried close to the live oak. I could see a large boulder that had been chiseled smooth on one side, and the name JOYCE was carved in it in huge letters. It would have looked willfully naïve to have ignored that clue. I stopped at the first grave I reached in that plot, though it was clearly not the one I’d come to read. But what the hell, I had to start sometime. The tombstone read, Sarah, Beloved Wife of Paul Joyce. I took a deep breath, and I stepped on top of it. The connection with the bones beneath my feet was electric and immediate. Sarah was waiting, like all of them, the longtime dead and the recently dead, those buried neatly in graves and those tossed aside like debris. I sent that extra sense I had down into the ground. Connected. Learned.

“Woman in her sixties, aneurysm,” I said. I opened my eyes and stepped to the next grave. This was an older one, much older. “Hiram Joyce,” I said. I stood there, trying to get a firm fix on the few remaining bones in the ground under my feet. “Blood poisoning,” I said finally. I walked to the next one, rested for a moment until the buzzing impelled me: that was the call of the bones, the remains. They wanted me to know about them, what had killed them, what their final moments had been like. I looked at the headstone. No point in reinventing the wheel.