“It’s beautiful,” I said, trying to recover my breath.

“You should have seen it when it was tended. I spent half of each of my days maintaining it to Mrs. Shaw’s specifications. She was a demon for pruning. The elder Mrs. Shaw, I’m talking of now. Not a bloom out of place, not a weed. ‘Take off every shoot whose value is doubtful,’ she taught me, ‘and all you have left is beauty.’ It was a masterpiece. Yep. Some magazine wanted to do a spread, but she wouldn’t have strangers stomping through it with tripods and cameras.”

I looked around at the weeds and the vines pulling at the statue. “Why’d you let it go?”

“This is the way the elder Mrs. Shaw, she wanted it. ‘Just let it go when I die, Nat,’ she told me.” His voice took on a strange power as he imitated hers. “ ‘Let the earth take it back,’ she told me. So that’s what I’ve done.”

“It seems a shame.”

“That it does, yep. Every once in a while I come with my shears and get the urge to straighten it up, some. To prune. But the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was one who liked her orders carried out to the letter. It was the least I could do for her to honor her wishes. It was her place, you know. She’d been coming here ever since she was a girl. Built it up herself.”

“What was she like, Nat?”

“The elder Mrs. Shaw? Quite a woman, she was. Like a mother to me. Brought me here when I was still a boy and made sure I was taken care of ever since, almost like I was one of her own. She’s done more for me and mine then you’d ever imagine, Mr. Carl. Can’t say as she was the gentlest soul I’ve ever met.” He squatted down and pulled at a long piece of grass, wrapping it about his hand. “Nope, I could never say that. But deep in her heart she wanted to do good. N’aren’t too many like that.”

He stood and strolled over to the statue and kicked roughly at the base.

“She’s laying right there,” he said. “In some special urn of hers. Her ashes mixed up with her husband’s. I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Carl. She loved him more than she loved anything else on this good earth. That kind of love coming from a woman for a man, she’s got to have more than a little good in her.”

“How did he die, her husband?” I asked.

Nat’s blue eyes looked into mine and he smiled as if he knew that I knew the answer, though how he could I couldn’t know. “It was before my time. But I’ll say this, the elder Mrs. Shaw, she was probably right to let this place go. Sometimes what’s buried should remain buried. No good can come from digging up the dead. Come along, Mr. Carl, I’ll show you out. The way it is now, it sometimes gets tricky and you might end up here longer than you’d expect.”

He winked at me before turning and starting back. I followed him, through the arched entranceway of the clearing, along passageways, through the narrow opening, thorns grabbing at my suit jacket, until we had returned to the wide lawn. The sun was bright now and there was no mist left. Nat took off his hat and wiped his head with his forearm. “Getting hot. You had best go on up and get your eggs.”

I heard something from the patio. Some of the others were there now, Kendall, waving at me energetically, Caroline, in sunglasses, with a drink in her hand. I turned away and looked down the hill, beyond the pond to the wooded area in which sat that old weathered and burned Victorian house. From here I couldn’t see any of it, blocked as it was by the foliage, but I could feel it there, listing in its sad way.

“There is a house down there beyond the pond, in those trees,” I said. “Who lived there?”

“You did get around, didn’t you, Mr. Carl?” said Nat. “Feeling a bit frisky this morning, I suppose.” He turned toward the relic. “That was the caretaker’s house. Mrs. Shaw’s father, he deeded it for the whole of her life to the widow Poole. She lived there with her daughter until the widow Poole, she died. Then it reverted back to the estate.”

“What happened to the daughter?”

Nat, still looking down the hill, his back to me, shrugged. “She up and left. Rumor was she died in an asylum New England way. She was supposed to be demented. Caught the pox, or some such fever, and gave up the ghost. The whole family Poole sort of just withered away. I guess that’s the way of it. The good Lord’s always pruning, trying to get it right at last.”

Before I could respond he started walking away from me, down the hill, toward the pond with all those frogs.

“You remember what I said about leaving the buried be, Mr. Carl,” he said without turning. “Some patches of this earth are better left unturned.”

IT WAS A TOUCHING LITTLE SERVICE for Jimmy Vigs at the funeral parlor on North Broad Street. The rabbi spoke of the joy that Jimmy Dubinsky had given to his family and his friends, of the sage advice and prompt service he had given his clients, of his generous spirit in running the charity bingo events at the synagogue. A tall straw of a man with flighty hands stood up and spoke of how Jimmy was always there for him in his times of deepest need, when the fates conspired against him and OTB was closed. He was a giver, said the man, and he gave without complaint, so long as the call was laid in time. Anton Schmidt, a tie beneath his leather jacket, looking almost like a yeshiva student in his wide fedora and evident sadness, talked in soft halting sentences of Jimmy’s fairness and kindness and his facility with numbers. And then the son spoke, a young heavy man, just in from the Coast, the spitting image of poor dead Jimmy, talking of how his dad was the greatest dad in the whole wide world, always taking him to the ball game, watching sports with him on television. The son spoke of the joy they had in traveling together, father and son, to Vegas, to watch a Mike Tyson fight, and here the son choked up a bit and grabbed tightly onto the lectern before continuing. His father had taught him how to play craps, he said through a blubber of sobs, how to handicap the horses. He would remember his father, he said, for the rest of his life.

Jimmy would have liked it. And with the over and under at seventy-five and the higher than expected turnout in the chapel, Jimmy would also have liked that the over pulled through. But even with the turnout, when I arrived a little late and went to sign the guest book I wasn’t surprised to see it totally devoid of names. I was the only mourner willing to be identified.

The rabbi started reading the Twenty-third Psalm and, right at the part about walking through the valley of the shadow of death, Earl Dante slid into my pew, jamming his hip into mine. With the yarmulke neatly on his head and the white rose pinned to his lapel he could have been mistaken for the owner of the joint. Like I said before, he had that kind of face.

“Glad you could make it, Victor,” he said in his slurry voice. “We were counting on you to show.”

“Just paying my respects.”

“There was a rumor that the feds were tapping Jimmy’s phones at the end. Any truth to it?”

“How would I know? I’m just the lawyer.”

“Always the last to know, right, Victor?”

“That’s right.”

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “I have you down as a pallbearer. When they turn the bier around we need you to go on up and grab a handle.”

“I can’t believe there aren’t six men who were closer to Jimmy than me.”

“There are,” said Dante, leaning forward in preparation to stand. “But it will take more than six to carry Jimmy off to his final reward. There’s a limo for the pallbearers that will ferry you to the cemetery. They’ll need you there too.”

“I wasn’t planning to go to the cemetery,” I said.

He looked at me and sucked his teeth. “Take the limo.”

When it was time to wheel the coffin out, there were ten of us jockeying for position at the handles. From the other side of the coffin I caught Cressi grinning at me. “Yo, Vic,” he mouthed, bobbing his head up and down. Anton Schmidt was also there, red-eyed beneath his thick glasses. Then, with the rabbi silent and the mourners standing, we walked beside the coffin on its journey out of the chapel. At the side door, with the hearse waiting, its back door swung wide, we all tightened our grip on the handles and heaved. The coffin didn’t budge.