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the elevators, she wondered where she had taken such a wrong turn.
    Perhaps, she was just out of practice. It had been a while since she had done a truly ‘investigative’ piece. Most of her recent blogs had been researched from the comfort of her own laptop. Field work required stealth, and Jess had come in like a rampaging buffalo. She knew better.
    On the elevator ride up, she started to tick off her options again. She may well have burned this particular bridge, but there was still something about this Eunice. During the exchange, for just a moment there, she had felt something that made the prickly hairs on her arms stand up.
    She couldn’t name it, but there was a story here, and it was time to put on her reporter panties and find out what it was.
     
     
    It had called to her from the window.
    Jess had stood in room 213, her outstretched fingers on the windowpane, as if she could actually reach out and touch it.
    And now, she was touching it. She ran her fingers over the rough edges of the iron gate, flecks of reddish brown coming off onto her fingertips, and she marveled at the oddity of it. There really was a rusty gate. The ‘haunted inn’ had been named for the entrance to a cemetery. A one hundred and fifty year old cemetery.
    This story was going to write itself.
    ‘Weeping Gardens Cemetery’ said the curved wrought iron sign over the entrance, and it was all coming into focus. This town wasn’t just a collection of Civil War enthusiasts. This town was built around a Civil War cemetery.
    Jess’ gaze wandered over the seventy or so markers sticking up out of the black soil on the other side of the fence. Most were badly weathered, some to the point of being illegible. She saw names that had long since passed into obscurity, like the owners beneath them. Ambrose, Beauregard, Hiram, names that only a mother could love. She searched for one name in particular, but many stones were turned away from her, and many more obscured by the shadow of the town’s namesake.
    The shadow of the giant weeping willow.
    It was easy to see how the town had come to be known as Willow Tree. The tree could probably be seen from space, thought Jess. It was like this enormous, green umbrella, sheltering those who slumbered beneath its drooping boughs.
    The wrought iron fence that encircled the cemetery had most likely been built when the tree was about half its present size. Now, it towered over sixty or seventy feet into the sky, and its branches hung out over the fence, its green hanging leaves tickling the iron tips.
    Jess thought that she had never seen a tree so green and lush. Normally trees of this vintage were in the autumn of their years, their trunks dried and splitting, their branches bare and withered. It being the autumn of this year, she would at least expect the tree to be shedding its leaves.
    But the leaves on this tree defined the word ‘green’, the color deep and vibrant. There was barely a leafy needle on the ground. The almost overpowering scent in the air was like a spring day, leading Jess to wonder after their secret. Were they using some kind of super-fertilizer? Then she remembered that she was looking at a cemetery, and she shivered at the morbid implication. Was it normal, she wondered, for the soil of a cemetery to be more fertile? She admitted to knowing nothing of horticulture. She didn’t remember this chapter in her high school biology class. But if that were the case, it certainly put a new slant on the name ‘Weeping Gardens’. The tabloid potential alone was staggering.
    “Excuse me!”
    The shout from behind startled her and she jerked her hand from the iron gate, cutting her finger on the rusty jagged edge.
    “ Ahhh!” she grunted, wincing as the sharp pain crawled up the back of her hand. Her finger went reflexively into her mouth in an attempt to suck the pain away. She examined her middle finger, where a thin slice along the pad had begun oozing bright red blood. Before she could