Laughter in the Wind Read Free Page A

putting a new fence around it and leveling up the ground. No one was caretaker for the cemetery anymore and people only visited it in attempts to see a ghost. Rebecca felt it was a shame that all of those interred there had been forgotten by the world.
    As she walked up to the gate, she was afraid she would see vandalism. Instead she saw a fresh mound of dirt in front of an old headstone. The inscription on the stone was nearly worn away by the weather but by kneeling close to it she could make it out.
     
    MARY J. FARTHING
    March 1, 1907 – February 3, 1933
     
    “Sad. She was so young.” Rebecca spoke quietly but her voice sounded much louder in the still morning air. Only eight years older than me. She stood and looked around for any other signs of disturbance to the cemetery. The loose dirt near the mound revealed a couple of different shoe prints and the grass was trodden down around the headstone and in a path to the gate but the rest of the cemetery looked as if a human had not been there for many years. Her curiosity nearly got the best of her as she considered looking for a stick to loosen the dirt so she could move it aside and discover whether something had been hidden there. Her curiosity was stifled as she recalled her father’s warnings about cave-ins of old graves. As she walked back out the gate, she stopped to carefully close it. She picked up her tackle box and pole then turned to walk away.
    Her attention was captured by broken and leaning grass in two parallel lines outside the fence. She recognized them as tire tracks and they headed from the cemetery in a gentle curve until they were out of sight around a small grove of trees. A memory of headlights on Halloween night returned to her and she knew immediately this was where the lights had been. She assumed the old lane the tracks followed came out beside the old house she knew was down the road from her uncle’s house. She thought about following the tracks but decided against it, heading on her way after latching the crooked gate, her thoughts still preoccupied with the fresh mound of dirt.
    The area of disturbed dirt wasn’t large enough for a coffin, not even a very small one. Maybe a shoe box or something that size could have been buried there, maybe even a small, beloved pet. But Mary Farthing had died in 1933 and surely there weren’t any pets, even parrots, that could outlive their owners by more than eighty years.
    Rebecca wasn’t even sure there would be anyone around who would remember Mary Farthing. She decided she would take another walk that day, after fishing of course. Her grandmother lived past her house about a mile and might have some ideas.
    * * *
     
    Rebecca’s first cast set the tone for the day. She immediately snagged her line on an old post at the bottom of the pond, left over from when a fence had divided the pond in half. “Shit!” she said loudly as she snapped her line. She tried to avoid cussing for her mother’s sake but she enjoyed being able to let go and say what she felt when she was out of earshot of others. She quickly slipped the end of the line through the eye of another hook and tied it into place with practiced fingers then used needle-nose pliers from the tackle box to squeeze a couple of split-shot weights onto the line above the hook. The small knife she always carried in her pocket trimmed the end of the line. Then she baited her hook and tried again.
    She caught a couple of small catfish, but mostly her bait fed the fish. Her attention was not on the vibrations coming through her line as the fish nibbled the worms or liver from her hook, but on that mysterious pile of freshly overturned dirt at Mary Farthing’s grave. Early in the afternoon, she gave up on fishing. Feeling generous, she threw the remainder of the liver into the pond for a free meal for the fish if they could beat the turtles to it. She wasn’t sure if she would get back to the pond before spring and she knew her mother wouldn’t