Polly stuck with Maude as she stalked off toward the edge of the ridge. Livingston lay below them, on the north bank of the curl of the Yellowstone as it headed north and bent east. To Maude, the river was filled with dead people, and she pointed a knobby, beringed finger as she said their names. “Maggie Strand, only three I think, about 1924; Fred Byrne, in his teens in 1917 when the bridge went; Connor someone, a pretty Irish kid, in a car like our girl, sometime before the war.”

The dogs chased curlews and the kids chased the dogs. Cruel little shits, all of them, and all of them ignoring Ned’s warnings about snakes. Normally Polly would have been worried, but it was almost dark, burrow time, and she was now on her second shot. Merle tried to point out a golden eagle and Maude showed no interest. She was back on the dead, a local history of drowning, and her toll had reached the Korean War.

Harry fidgeted.

“You can go back to your gizmo, if I’m so boring,” said Maude. “I won’t bother with irrigation ditches. The Schmidt boy fell in down there near old Clark City, the Gallianos’ drunk father just downstream. Mostly boys, of course, poor idiots. But there is the road our beautiful girl followed to the old bridge.”’

“Don’t forget our beautiful Ariel,” said Drake, walking back to his shovel.

It was as close to a criticism that Polly could imagine him doling out.

“Don’t you want to see the bodies?” said Harry.

Of course they did. There were four tarps. Polly, looking at the outlines of the coffins, was horrified. “You have four bodies that shouldn’t be here?”

“No,” he said. “Four bodies in the wrong place, though the tags match the records. I think the gravediggers ran into some rock and went with the easy solution.” He flipped tarps off to show them half-excavated, half-crushed pine boxes. “We have a Marjorie Pince, aged sixty-two, dead of apoplexy; S. Oditz, an alcoholic; Ferdinand Zapruder, bowel cancer.”

Polly looked for the children, but they were still chasing the dogs or curlews, whichever came first.

“Here’s the problem,” Harry said, lifting the last tarp.

They saw a fully excavated skeleton, facedown on top of a crushed coffin, arms outstretched. The right hand had been the one taken by the grader. “I think someone put him in here when the ground was still soft,” said Harry. “In the coffin underneath, we have Vincenzo Speri, dead of blood poisoning in August of 1940. The guy on top has a bullet in his head”—he knelt down and pointed to a hole centered above the eye sockets—“and it looks as if another is lodged in his pelvis. Tall guy, good dental work, some sort of fancy class ring on his finger—I haven’t tried to clean it off yet, and maybe I shouldn’t.”