A chuckle escapes his throat—as if the sound began in his toes and had time to gain momentum. “Just like your grandmother,” he says, clucking his tongue. “Always worrying over me.” He waves me off and begins shuffling back down the dock. “At my age, an hour feels like an eternity.” He sweeps the snow from the edge of the dock onto the frozen ice. “Plenty of time.” Instead of saying goodbye, he hums a familiar tune under his breath, a tune my grandma used to sing. Something about lost finches flying too far east, poison berries held in their talons, seeking the weary and brokenhearted. A fable song—about time being cut short, slipping through fingertips. Hearing it makes my chest ache. A strange sadness that I will never be rid of.

It makes me feel impossibly alone.

Fin heads around the shore, and I think again that maybe I shouldn’t follow. But curiosity is a nagging thump inside my skull. Urging me on.

I push through the deep snow, beneath the stormy sky, until we reach a place where Oliver’s tracks veer away from the lake. Where they lead up into the trees—to a place I rarely visit.

A place where the gloom of darkness never lifts. Where I’ve often seen human shadows wandering at twilight—specters who don’t yet know they’re dead. Where Walkers prefer to avoid.

The Jackjaw Cemetery.

The graveyard sits between the rocky shore and the forest—visible from all sides of the lake. A hundred years ago when the first settler died, the mourners walked a few yards down the shore and decided this was as good a place as any. They dug a hole where they stood, and this became the spot where the dead were lowered into the earth.

Fin trots into the graveyard, then stops at a row of old stones, digging his nose into the snow, pawing at the ground briefly. I don’t want to be here, among the dead, but I follow Oliver’s tracks to where they end.

My skin shivers. My temples itch like bugs crawling across my flesh. I kneel down beside the grave where Oliver’s prints came to a stop and run my palm over the face of it, wiping away the layer of snow. I know this grave—I know most of the ones that belong to my family.

Willa Walker lies here, beneath several feet of hard-packed earth and clay.

Boys from camp often come here to the graves of Walkers. They drink beers and howl at the moon and rub their palms over the stones, making wishes. It’s a place to gather, to try to frighten one another. On Halloween night, kids drive up from Fir Haven and camp out among the graves, telling stories about Walkers, casting their own made-up spells, and hexing one another.