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me,” Maddy replied, moving to place the shears in her cart.
    “The yellow tabby that sleeps by the fireplace in the parlor?” Trinity asked. She couldn’t imagine why a sleeping cat would bother the busy gardener.
    “That cat isn’t sleeping. It hasn’t been awake since 1985 according to Violet Jesham,” Maddy said.
    Trinity gaped. She couldn’t help it. First a stuffed crow and now a stuffed…
    “His name was Gibbons and Mrs. Jesham swears he had nine lives. She swears he lived here fifty years before he died,” Maddy shared.
    “I almost went over to scratch his head,” Trinity said, glad that she’d avoided that awkward moment.
    “I did. Walked right over and crooned to him. That’s when Mrs. Jesham told me…after,” Maddy said, her eyes wide with a remembered macabre surprise.
    They stood a few moments in companionable silence. Trinity had put her hands back in her pockets and Maddy had crossed her arms. The other woman worried her bottom lip in thoughtful consideration of…something. Deceased tabby cats or something else, Trinity couldn’t be sure.
    “The place needs these flowers. You’ve done wonders,” she said. She preferred to change the subject rather than dwell on darkness she couldn’t explain away to a stranger who hadn’t grown up in the town where a beloved pet might be seen as comfort even after its death.
    “It keeps me busy,” Maddy replied. She faced the plantings, but her green eyes had gone distant and vague. She stood beside Trinity, but her mind was elsewhere. Then, after only a second or two, her whole body seemed to shake itself out of reverie to get back to work.
    * * *
    The Old Stone Church had probably been called a meeting house at one time. It was almost as old as Hillhaven, having been built by the original settlement on the river. It was kept up by the Historical Society and the Presbyterians who had used the building back in the fifties and sixties before they built a new church across town.
    Trinity had long since become accustomed to walking everywhere she went at college in Boston, but the hike down to town from Hillhaven and then from the library up to the Old Stone Church reminded her of how uneven everything was in the town. Scarlet Falls had been built in and around an ancient twisting riverbed where water had once flowed before it had settled on its current course. Sidewalks pitched and rolled. Roads snaked and curved and wound around trees and hills. In fact, several roads in town had historic trees that grew right in the middle of them with forks to accommodate this oak where a speech was given or that maple where a criminal was hung. Maybe some passersby found it charming and eclectic, but if they lingered for a little while they’d realize it was off kilter and strange even as it was beautiful.
    When she approached the church, Trinity noted the picturesque worn stone blushing pink in the misty air and the black slate roof gone to green where lichen had taken hold. But she also noted the sag and slump toward the graveyard as if one too many holes had been dug near its foundation, and as the bodies wasted away so had the ground’s support for the church’s heavy walls.
    The hillside of the cemetery was pitted and pockmarked, and rather than the neat orderly rows of graves a visitor would normally find elsewhere, the stones and crypts were staggered and crooked. It had probably been caused by geography and geology, the lay of the land and the hard rock found here and there beneath, but the affect was far from natural and peaceful.
    Rather than a place where souls went to rest, Trinity could far too easily imagine restlessness beneath her feet. Yet, still, she strolled. From stone to stone. From crypt to cross. The matron at the Historical Society had explained that some of the cemeteries in town had been mapped, but that no one had attempted this one because of its age and the wear on the stones of its oldest inhabitants.
    Trinity didn’t bother with