I stood watching while he went off down the road toward Cainesville. I was angry at him and terribly afraid of what was happening to me as well as to my son. I was also fearful of going back into the ugly monstrosity of a house—and even more fearful of doing what I did. After a few minutes I walked to the back of the house and out to the graveyard.

It was a pleasant autumn afternoon. The cicadas were singing in the oak trees, and bees were swarming around the vines growing wild against the graveyard fence.

There were shoots of green coming through the new earth now. I found a fairly straight tree branch and shoved it into the soil. It went in easily, which seemed to me to indicate that if anything had been buried below, it was now removed.

Then I went to the back of the graveyard and took a close look at the general’s headstone. What we had failed to notice earlier was that the stone wasn’t lodged in the ground, but merely resting against a pile of rocks and small stones, evidently placed there for the purpose. In fact some of the pile was made from shattered headstones—including, I assumed, the stone from the grave that someone wanted us to think was General Caine’s.

Well, if his remains weren’t in the graveyard, where were they? At the Weber house? Maybe it wasn’t necessary for Mrs. Reddy to have them in her immediate possession in order to make use of them. Maybe all that was necessary was to have them available to her. Therefore maybe the coffin and its contents, or what was left of them, was still on the Caine property.

But where? In the barn or the wagon shed? I walked back to the shed and squeezed in past the wagon and the buggy behind it. There was nothing in or under either one of them except curtains of cobwebs. I overcame my revulsion, brushed aside the cobwebs and lifted the cracked leather buggy seat. Nothing.

And there was nothing on the ground floor of the barn other than the rusting tools we had seen before. There was a ladder leading up to a hayloft, but it had several broken rungs and I was afraid to risk climbing it. In any event it didn’t look sturdy enough to support someone carrying or dragging a coffin. Of course another ladder could have been used and then taken away.

Then another thought occurred to me. Maybe the idea wasn’t to make the remains available to Mrs. Reddy. Maybe it was only necessary that they be available to Duff. Therefore maybe the coffin was somewhere in the house.