Now the asphalted road was easily wide enough for two cars to pass, and the woods and weeds had been cut back on either side.

Dale pulled the Land Cruiser onto the grassy berm outside the Calvary Cemetery, stopped the engine, left the headlights on, and stepped out into the night.

The wind had come up more strongly now, and the low clouds seemed to be rushing by just yards overhead. There were no stars. The cemetery’s tall black iron gate and the long spiked iron fence were visible in the headlights and looked just as he remembered them, except for the fact that they appeared to have grown black bat wings or witches’ robes—long, flapping streamers of what seemed to be black crêpe paper. It was no illusion. Dale could hear the frenzied flapping of the streamers and see different lengths of tattered black material waving and blowing eastward along the full length of the fence and all around the arched gate.

Corn husks, thought Dale. “Shucks,” we used to call them. He had seen this post-harvest phenomenon when he was a kid here, and he often thought of it on windy days in Montana when tumbleweeds lined the fences of the highways. To the east of the cemetery, across County 6, had been Old Man Johnson’s farm when Dale was a boy, and whoever now owned the land still raised corn. Hundreds of these dried shucks and husks had blown from the field and tangled themselves on the black iron gate after the harvest.

Harvested by a combine with rolling-chain corn pickers, just like the machine that killed Duane. Had Duane’s torn clothes and flesh flown through the night wind like this, catching and flapping on some barbed-wire fence along this road?

Dale shook his head. He was very tired.

Dale had no family in the cemetery—his folks had not been Catholic—but he knew that the O’Rourkes and many of his other Elm Haven friends and acquaintances had people buried there. Some of those old friends of mine are probably buried there now as well, he thought. He would come back in the daylight and check. He would have plenty of time in the coming weeks. He climbed back into the Land Cruiser, started the engine, and headed down the next hill, leaving the flapping, waving, crackling apparitions behind.