“No, I don’t think so,” Henry told us as he set the yellow label in the windshield.

Two black hearses pulled out from around the funeral parlor’s side lot, then drove slowly past its entrance and toward the parking lot’s exit lane. Cars all around us were backing out of their spots and assembling in a line that formed behind the hearses, which had turned right from the lot onto State Street. Through my window, I saw Pete walking with his mom, who had been friendly with Mischa’s mother. “We should go,” I told Violet.

She started the engine, and suddenly we all cringed in pain. The radio came on at top volume, blasting music. Wincing, Violet clapped her hands over her ears before reaching to turn the radio off on the dashboard. “Jesus!” she shouted. “That wasn’t on before I turned off the car.”

When I managed to calm down, I said, “Turn it back on. I need to know what song was playing.”

I would have been thoroughly freaked out if the radio had been playing “Ring of Fire.” But when Violet twisted the knob to turn the radio back on at a lower volume, the last few seconds of Alicia Keys’s “Fallin’ ” played through the speakers.

“… the way that I love you. Oh baby, I-I-I-I’m fallin’, I-I-I-I’m fallin’.”

Falling. I shot a look at Trey, who frowned at me in response. Falling had everything to do with air. This was a warning. I had no doubt.

“Ugh,” Violet snorted. “This song is, like, a million years old. I don’t even know what station this is.” She threw the car into reverse and politely waited her turn to merge with the vehicles in the procession.

The Mount Zion Cemetery was all the way on the far side of town, in the direction of Green Bay. The long procession of cars, at least forty in total, stretched the length of several blocks, and at a slow speed we continued right through intersections without stopping. Traffic slowed to a crawl when the front of the procession reached the ornate gates of the cemetery.

When it was our turn to drive through the tall wrought-iron gates, we saw why the procession had decelerated so much. The street that wound through the cemetery was barely wide enough for two lanes of traffic, and it snaked through hills covered with tombstones. In some places, the paved road was almost impassable where cars had already parked in the other lane. Some cars ahead of us in line were pulling over to parallel park while others continued onward to stop closer to where Adam and Elena Portnoy would be laid to rest.

Henry said, “We should probably park back here so that if we need to leave quickly, we aren’t boxed in.”

“Good point,” Violet said, and flipped on her turn signal. There was a spot a few feet ahead into which her tiny car would fit.

Trey leaned forward in between the two front seats. “Actually, just drive a little farther. I don’t want to be all the way back here if you guys are on the other side of that hill. I won’t be able to see anything from here.”