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hurt.
    After a bit she felt silly and finally stepped through the iron gates. Her mother had been buried next to her father, and Frank walked in the direction that memory took her. She remembered his grave being near a tall, bare tree at the far end of the cemetery. But there were dozens of tall bare trees. She meandered between headstones looking for her father’s name. She paused at some of the more poetic headstones, impressed by the age of others. Almost surprised, she read a white marble slab inscribed “C. S. Franco 1932—1983.”
    For a second she was confused, wondering if there were two C. S. Franco’s in the same cemetery. She glanced at the stone next to her mother’s.
    Francis S. Franco
    Born 1934—Died 1969.
    Just as she remembered.
    But there was a jar of cut flowers in front of her father’s stone. And a devotional candle, its pale wax smudged and melted.
    Frank wondered who could have left them. She felt like she’d stumbled upon a secret. She backed away from the graves to gain perspective, searching for a plausible explanation. Perched against a granite tombstone she began compiling a list of names.
    Her mother’s parents were both long dead. She had twin sisters that Frank never met. They’d lived somewhere in New England, maybe Rhode Island or Maine. She couldn’t remember.
    Her father’s parents were also deceased. They had died when she was six.. She remembered her father and Uncle Al flying home for the funeral, her mother crying in the airport and her father reassuring her he’d be back in a couple days. Not to worry. Telling Frank to take care of her mother, his cheek rough against hers when he kissed her.
    Frank rubbed the back of her neck, bringing her focus into the present.
    Al and her father were their only children. Al died not long after she’d moved to California and his wife had returned to Illinois.
    Her cousin John had died of hepatitis, contracted from dirty needles. Her other cousin went to Illinois with his mother. Last Frank had heard, in a long-ago letter from her mother, he’d found God and joined a fringe Klu Klux Klan. Frank wouldn’t have been surprised to see his name pop up on an FBI bulletin.
    She tried to remember her father’s co-workers, his friends at the bars. Her mother had known hundreds of people but Frank couldn’t say she’d been close to any of them. She scanned nearby headstones, looking for similar offerings. There weren’t any. Whoever put the flowers and votive here had done so deliberately.
    Frank squatted in front of the candle. It had a paper picture on it, a kid dressed like a pilgrim. Santo Nino de Atocha. She reached for the glass, then pulled her hand back.
    Someone would have left prints on it.
    Frank studied the flowers. White chrysanthemums wilting at the edges. In an old mayonnaise jar stained with evaporation lines. The jar had been used before. She stood, peering down into the candle. There was water, about an inch collected at the bottom. Her heart was speeding. She wished she had a camera. She checked the headstones again, making sure she had the right ones. She calculated the odds of having identical headstones in the same cemetery, deciding they were slim to nonexistent in a place the size of Canarsie. She found two fallen branches and stuck them into the jars, inverting the glass onto the sticks so she could carry them without marring the prints.
    Carrying the jars like flags, she walked to the corner deli she’d noticed on the way in. She asked a three-hundred-pound man for a phone book and he grudgingly slid it over the counter. Frank found the number for the Ninth Precinct and called on her cell phone.
    “Sergeant-Jones-NYPD-how-can-I-help-you.”
    “Sergeant Jones, who would I talk to about a lead on a very old homicide?”
    “Depends. How old we talkin’?”
    “It’s about”—Frank calculated—“thirty-six years cold.”
    “That’s pretty icy. Where did this alleged homicide occur?”
    “Ninth Precinct and