“Maybe they’ve already found him,” West said.

Brazil thought about that as he scanned leaning headstones so old the inscriptions were ghosts of words no longer readable. Trees that had been around before the Civil War cast thick shadows, and leaves rustled with breaths of wind.

“Look, Virginia, I’m going to hang out here for a while,” Brazil said. “I’ll radio someone to come get me when I’m done.”

She hesitated. Brazil sensed she was bothered that he would stay, that he didn’t seem to care if she went on without him.

“Well, anyway.” West hesitated again, then was disagreeable. “All I can say is it’s amazing the problems in this fucking city and what? They’ll spend a fucking fortune on a fucking cemetery.”

“Actually,” said Brazil, who had done much research on Richmond and its surroundings, “Hollywood’s a nonprofit, nonstock corporation owned by its lot owners, not the city.”

“Huh,” retorted West as she stalked off. “Who cares.”

Lelia Ehrhart did. She was serving her eighth term as chairman of Hollywood Cemetery’s board of directors, which required very little of her time, really. The majority of lot owners were dead, the annual meeting with the board always poorly attended, suggestions and complaints few.

Ehrhart had never needed anyone at meetings. She had never needed the opinions or suggestions of others. It had been her idea, and her idea alone, to ban picnics, snacks, alcoholic beverages, bicycles, jogging, motorcycles, skateboards, Rollerblades, recreational vehicles, vehicles pulling trailers and boom boxes from the grounds. Ehrhart was passionately devoted to the cemetery and its importance as a tourist attraction and celebration of lives faded but not forgotten, especially those Ehrhart claimed as her relations.

“This is far more than vandals,” Ehrhart declared in the private boardroom of the Commonwealth Club, where she had called the meeting and then changed the time of it. “This is a front to our unalien rights, to their liberty and happiness, to our very civilization. These vandals, these unrepentent, cold-bloody juvenile delinquents that call themselfs Pikes have descegraded everyone sitting in their room.”

• • •

This did not include Chief Judy Hammer, since she was originally from Arkansas. She ran through the ivy-framed entrance and up the old brick front steps of the historic and aristocratic club where women could not be members, but as guests of husbands or male friends were welcome to enjoy all amenities except the Victorian bar, Men’s Grill, swimming pool, gym, steam and sauna rooms, squash and racquetball courts and reading rooms.

Such restrictions were of little concern to public-service–minded women busy with forming various committees for the Bal du Bois and its debutantes, or supporting the arts with auctions of wine, vacations, fine jewelry and other luxury items, or planning wedding receptions or exhibits for the Maymont Flower & Garden Show, or lunching with the Virginia Federation of Garden Clubs, Daughters of the American Revolution or Daughters of the Confederacy, and with the Junior League, and of course, first families of Virginia and wives of legislators.