Read Lincoln's Dreams for Free Online

sleet, even after I’d parked the car at the back of the house next to the outbuilding that had been turned into the gift shop, but Annie wasn’t looking at the house. As soon as I’d parked the car, she got out and walked around to the garden as if she knew exactly where she was going.
    I followed her, squinting through the snow at the house to see if it was open to visitors. I couldn’t tell. There weren’t any other cars in the parking lot, and there weren’t any footprints leading up to the house, but the snow was coming down fast enough that it could have hidden them. The only way to tell would be to go up to the front door, but Annie was already standing in front of the first of the tombstones at the edge of the garden, her head bent to look at the name on the wet tombstone as if she wasn’t even aware of the snow.
    I went over and stood next to her. The snow still wasn’t sticking to the grass except in little isolated clumps that melted and refroze, making webs of icebetween the blades of grass, but the wind had blown enough snow against the tombstones to make them almost unreadable. I could barely make out the name on the first one.
    “John Goulding, Lieutenant, Sixteenth New York Cavalry,’” Annie read.
    “These aren’t the soldiers who were originally buried here,” I said. “Those were all enlisted men. Officers were buried on the hill in front of the mansion.”
    The second gravestone was covered with snow. I bent and wiped it off with my hand, wishing I’d worn gloves. “See? ‘Gustave Von Branson, Lieutenant, Company K, Third U.S. Vermont Volunteers.’ Lieutenant Von Branson wasn’t buried here till 1865, after Arlington had become a national cemetery.” I straightened up, rubbing my wet hand on my jeans, and turned around. “Then Commander Meigs had the enlisted men moved to—”
    Annie was gone. “Annie?” I said stupidly and looked down the row of tombstones, thinking maybe she had gone past me, but she wasn’t there. She must have gone into the house, I thought. It must be open today after all.
    I walked rapidly back along the gravel path and up the slick steps onto the porch. The wind was blowing snow up onto the brick-tiled porch and against the buff-colored pillars so they looked almost white.
    I tried the door and then pounded on it. “Are you open?” I shouted, trying to see in through the windows. There weren’t any footprints on the porch except mine, but I kept on pounding for another full minute, as if I thought Annie might have gotten locked in, before my rational self told me she’d probably gotten cold and gone back to the car, and I went back around the house to see.
    She wasn’t in the car, and the gift shop was locked up tight, and I gave up all pretense that I wasn’t worried and went tearing back to the front of the house to look down the hill at the lawn where the bodies had been buried.
    The wind had picked up in the time it took me to get to the car and back, and I couldn’t see more than a few yards down the hill. “Annie!” I shouted.
    I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hear her if she answered, but I shouted again, ready to take off down the hill, and then I caught a glimpse of gray moving between trees on the far side of Arlington House and took off running after her. She must be on the Custis Walk, the wide cement sidewalk that came up from the road below. It made a wide curve around the hill so the view of the house wouldn’t be spoiled, and I wondered as I ran if that was why they had moved the bodies, too, because they had spoiled the view.
    The walk was hardly snowy at all, protected as it was by the big trees that were planted all along its length, and I took the cracked, uneven steps two at a time, trying to catch up with her, and found myself suddenly at the curved wall and marble terrace of the Kennedy Memorial. The eternal flame burned on the grave in the center of a circle of rough, smoke-charred stone, melting the snow around it as it