The minister kept talking despite the fact that his audience showed every sign of being cold and miserable. Even the relentless wind couldn't hurry the man along. He'd come with a feast of platitudes and intended to serve up every oily crumb.

Carly shut him out. Despite her work of researching and writing family histories, she hadn't attended any funerals professionally until this one. Usually she was called in before the fact of death, when someone felt the chill whisper of mortality and truly believed for the first time I will die. That was when people wanted to fix their place not only among the dead, but among the survivors.

See me and know you will die, too.

She wiggled her numb toes inside dress boots that hadn't been designed for standing around on frozen ground while a minister of very ordinary intellect tried to encompass life's greatest mystery by pillaging the work of dead poets.

"… burning in the forest of the night…"

It was Blake's turn on the chopping block. Carly glanced beneath her long dark lashes, trying to see how the audience was responding to the lame eulogy. Andrew Jackson Quintrell V looked green around the edges, but that probably had more to do with a pulsing hangover than the minister's words. Anne Quintrell had no expression except occasional wariness when she glanced at her twenty-three-year-old son to see if he was still standing. Josh looked worn and sad or maybe just cold and bored. With a professional politician it was hard to tell. He certainly was a good-looking man, standing tall and straight in his sixties, with a mane of wind-tossed silver hair and brilliant blue eyes.