“Because it’s the right thing to do,” Charlie muttered. Salt in open wounds; so much fun. And that had only been the first verse. Those who dared the cemetery after dark—to hide, to sulk, to shit disturb—would be poked and manipulated and shamed and convinced they deserved to have what they wanted. Regardless of consequence. Had the shadow been able to hold a beer, it would have been indistinguishable from the assholes who finished the night with “Where’s your phone, man? We got to put this on Facebook.”

Charlie was deeply in favor of expending the least amount of effort necessary, but this sort of thing, this deserved a rousing rendition of “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” Eyes squinted shut against the sudden flare of light, she finished a final irritatingly perky run-through of the chorus as the cemetery came back into focus. Show tunes, one. Gathered malevolence, zero.

That said, it took her a moment to unlock her fingers.

Remaining shadows were nothing more than a temporary absence of light. The sounds of a city in the very early morning—distant traffic, the hum of transformers on the power lines—pushed in from both sides, met in the middle and smoothed out to normalcy.

“Thank you, you’ve been a great crowd . . .” Names and dates on the gravestones moved in and out of focus as Charlie walked away from the gate. “. . . but it’s time to go home.”

In a cemetery this old, it was unlikely she’d pick up any hitchhikers, an annoyance in newer cemeteries where some of the recently dead seem to believe that being incorporeal was an excuse to cling. Given the situation, arriving with a haunt in tow would only put her further into Allie’s bad books.

Although, it would also be a distraction . . .

No. Allie’d be distracting enough all on her own. She shouldn’t have hung up. She was thirty years old, for gods’ sake, and Gale girls learned young what happened to those stupid enough or unlucky enough to make a Gale girl angry. Younger members of the family reported that the boys’ washroom at the Darsden East Public School still smelled like cordite and cinnamon.

“Now that,” Charlie told Honor Brown, 1871 to 1907, Beloved Wife and Mother, “had been effective use of a muffin.”

She stepped past a weathered obelisk, between two ancient white oaks, and into the Wood.

Two AM in Baltimore. Midafternoon in the Wood. October replaced by perpetual late summer. The smell of asphalt and lingering car exhaust and six hundred thousand sweaty people replaced by the scent of damp earth and growing things with the faintest hint of autumn on the breeze. In all honesty, Charlie had no objection to the smell of civilization—civilization gave her coffee and beer and the Mesa/Boogie Mark Five—but the Wood was like a member of the family.