16 The Meadow Simmons family who had failed to vent their water heater. It then jumped nun row and headed into the back of 18B. This was Alannah’s favorite place in the cemetery, a section that her grandfather had set aside for mercy graves. An “unknown man” had rested beside an “Indian woman” since 1972. Alannah’s most beloved Shamrock Bear had gone into a hand-carved box with the toddler found frozen into a rest-stop waste pit. Here, in the hills of Idaho, a half-crippled elfin gun-runner from Belfast had brokered final peace for the poorest of the poor. For most, he had gifted them with the only real-estate they would ever own. Alannah followed the drops back to the northern boundary of 18B and the security fence designed to keep the living from the dead. No animal carcass had been dragged through the wires, leaving fur and blood on steel barbs. This carcass was human and buried in a shallow pit in the shade of a straggly piss elm. The grave was so shallow that busy paws and sharp teeth had already uncovered one leg. Blood soaked denim had been torn aside to reveal the knee joint, gnawed clean and glistening in the sun. She sat down on Virgie Claiborne to think. It would be easy to conclude that the midnight grave diggers had been careless, having no qualms about supplying protein to a parade of winter-thin carnivores. In reality, though, they had probably been more ignorant than negligent. This time of year, they would have hit pore ice at about seven inches, and it took a solid foot of dirt to hide rot from the sensitive nose of a coyote or cougar. Best of intentions aside, digging a functional grave with spades would have been impossible. Alannah could make this all go away in an hour or two. She had a backhoe equipped with a frost tooth to cut through the frozen ground. She had two gravediggers on call who would willingly bury the truth and the legal complications that went with it. But she also had a man, woman, or child who would disappear into the ground forever. No name on Find A Grave, thus no wistful decedents clutching plastic roses. No name on a folder in the District Attorney’s office and no justice if the death had been intentional. Alannah stood and fingered the cell phone in her sweater pocket. A
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