This didn’t make sense to Wunder. Sadness and beauty did not go together. “What’s so beautiful about a cemetery?” he asked.

“It is where the dead are remembered by those who love them,” the witch said. She lit the rust-coated stove and placed the kettle on the flames. “It is where the living connect to the ones they love. This is beautiful, I think.”

Wunder shook his head. “The Minister of Consolation—I mean, Sylvester Dabrowski, the one you sent the letter to—he thinks that when people die, they’re gone. He said he doesn’t even go to the cemetery, because he knows his wife’s not there. She’s in a better place.”

“That is one way to think of it,” the witch said. “Did that seem to bring him some comfort?”

“No,” Wunder admitted. “He was very sad. And angry.”

“It is not an easy thing to believe the dead have gone far, far away, even if it is to a better place. No, no, no. We want them here, with us.” She came to sit across from them. Her wrinkled hands rested on the obituaries spread out before her. “But there are many ways to think about death.”

“I think death is terrible,” Faye said. One hand was tucked in her cloak, and Wunder knew she was holding on to her amulet.

“For the living, it often is,” the witch said. “But the dead may feel differently.”

Here was another thing Wunder had never thought of before. He had never imagined that the tiny, helpless baby he had spent hours watching in the hospital could have any feelings about her own death.

“You mean because they’re in heaven?” he asked.

The witch shrugged, her thin shoulders rising and falling under her white robe and shawls. “Heaven, maybe,” she said. “I have not been that far; I do not know exactly. But”—she leaned across the table toward them, and her dark eyes were bright—“how do you know that is all there is? How do you know it is death and then—zip—straight to heaven? Maybe there are other branches to climb up, other roots to follow down. Other places, other lives, other ways of being.”

“Like zombies?” Faye asked, her voice shrill. “Like ghosts? Like resurrections? What? What else happens?”

The witch shrugged again. “Zombies, I don’t know,” she said. “Ghosts, resurrections, maybe, maybe. But there is far more than heaven and earth, I think. Yes, yes, yes. Far, far more.”

Wunder knew that this was the time to demand answers. This was the time to ask the witch about the memorial stone, to ask her who she was. But in that spiraling house, with his heart shaking and the witch’s black eyes staring into his, he couldn’t seem to find the words.

And when Faye spoke, her voice was quiet again, slow and dreamy. “My grandfather used to do these ceremonies for the dead,” she said. “He would set out special foods for his parents on the anniversaries of their deaths and on holidays. Jesa, that’s what it’s called. I helped him sometimes, but my mother never did.” She pulled her cloak tighter around herself. “My grandfather believed in a lot of things.”