One hundred and thirty years ago the Dead Reb had wandered through this field.

Maybe shuffling along the very path this tall, lean man now walked in the hot April rain.

Tate Collier looked over his shoulder and imagined that he saw the legendary ghost staring at him from a cluster of brush fifty yards away. Then he laughed to himself and, crunching through rain-wet corn husks and stalks, the waste from last year’s harvest, he continued through the field, inspecting hairline fractures in an irrigation pipe that promised far more water than it had been delivering lately. It’d have to be replaced within the next week, he concluded, and wondered how much the work would cost.

Loping along awkwardly, somewhat stooped, Tate was in a Brooks Brothers pinstripe beneath a yellow sou’wester and outrageous galoshes, having come here straight from his strip mall law office in Fairfax, Virginia, where he’d just spent an hour explaining to Mattie Howe that suing the Prince William Advocate for libel because the paper had accurately reported her drunk-driving arrest was a lawsuit doomed to failure. He’d booted her out good-naturedly and sped back to his two-hundred-acre farm.

He brushed at his unruly black hair, plastered around his face by the rain, and glanced at his watch. A half hour until Bett and Megan arrived. Again, the uneasy twist of his stomach at the thought.

He glanced once more over his shoulder-toward where he’d seen the wisp of the ghostly soldier gazing at him from the cluster of vines and kudzu and loblolly pine. Tate returned to the damaged pipe, recalling what his grandfather-born Charles William Collier but known throughout northern Virginia as “the Judge”-had told him about the Dead Reb.