been ignored. It pulls up next to the gravesite. A bald guy in grey overalls climbs out from behind the steering wheel and tucks his hands into his pockets and watches the show. A younger guy climbs out the other side and starts playing with his cellphone.

There isn’t much more they can do while the pile of dirt grows higher and higher. I can see the raindrops plinking into the lake, tiny droplets jumping towards the heavens. I make my way over

to its edge. Anything is better than watching the digger doing its job. I can still feel the vibrations. Small pieces of dirt are rolling down the bank of the lake and splashing into the water.

Flax bushes and ferns and a few poplar trees are scattered around the lakeside. Tall reeds stick up near the banks, reaching for the sky. Broken branches and leaves have become waterlogged and

jammed against the bank.

I turn back to the digger when I hear the scoop scrape across

the coffin lid. It sounds like fingers running down a blackboard, and it makes me shiver more than the cold. The caretaker is shaking pretty hard now. He looks cold and pissed off. Until the moment the digger arrived, I thought he was going to chain himself to the gravestone to prevent the uprooting of one of his tenants. He had plenty to say about the moral implications of what we were doing. He acted as though we were digging up the coffin to put him inside.

The digger operator and the two guys from the flatbed pull on

face masks that cover their noses and mouths, then drop into the grave. The overweight guy from the digger moves with the ease

of somebody who has rehearsed this moment over and over. All

three disappear from view, as if they have found a hidden entrance into another world. They spend some time hunched down, apparently figuring out the mechanics to get the chain attached between the coffin and digger. When the chain is secure the driver climbs back into place and the others climb out of the grave. He wipes his forehead again. Raising the dead is sweaty work.

The engine lurches as it takes the weight of the coffin. The

flatbed truck starts up and backs a little closer. With the two machines violently shuddering, more dirt spills from the bank and slides into the water.

About five metres out into the lake, I see some bubbles rising to the surface, then a patch of mud. But there is something else there too. Something dark that looks like an oil patch.

There is a thud as the coffin is lowered onto the back of the

truck. The springs grind downwards from the weight. I can hear the three men talking quickly among themselves, having to nearly shout to be heard over the engines. The cemetery caretaker has disappeared.

The rain is getting heavier. The dark patch rising beneath the water breaks the surface. It looks like a giant black balloon. I’ve seen these giant black balloons before. You hope they’re one thing but they’re always another.

‘Hey, buddy, you might want to take a look at this,’ one of the men calls out.

But I’m too busy looking at something else.

‘Hey? You listening?’ The voice is closer now. ‘We’ve got

something here you need to look at.’

I glance up at the digger operator as he walks over to me. The caretaker is starting to walk over too. Both men look into the water and say nothing.

The black bubble isn’t really a bubble but the back of a jacket.

It hangs in the water, and connected to it is a soccer ball-sized object. It has hair. And before I can answer, another shape bubbles to the surface, and then another, as the lake releases its hold on the past.

chapter two

The case never made the news because it was never a case. It was a slice of life that happens every day, no matter how hard you try to prevent it. It made the back pages where the obituaries are listed, along with the John Smiths of this world who are beloved parents and grandparents and who will be sorely missed. It was a simple story of man-gets-old-and-dies. Read all about it.

It happened two years ago. Some people wake up every

morning and read the obits while downing scrambled eggs and

orange juice, looking for a name that jumps out from their past.

It’s a crazy way to kill a few minutes. It’s like a morbid lottery, seeing whose number has come up, and I don’t know whether

these people find relief when they get to the end and don’t find anybody they know or relief when they do. They’re looking

for a reason; they’re looking for somebody, wanting to make a

connection and to feel their own mortality.

Henry Martins. I pulled those stories from the library

newspaper database this morning just like I did two years ago, and read what people had to say about him when he died, which

wasn’t much. Then again, it’s hard to sum up a person’s life in five lines of six-point text. It’s hard to say how much you’re going to miss them. There were eleven entries for Henry over three

days from family and friends. Nobody made my job easier by

throwing a ‘glad you’re dead’ in with their woeful sorrows, but each obituary read like the others: boring, emotionless. At least that’s the way they come across when you don’t know the guy.

Henry Martins’ daughter came into the station a week after

the old man was buried. She sat down in my office and told me

her dad was murdered. I told her he wasn’t. If he had been, the medical examiner would have stumbled across it. MEs are like

that. It was easy to see she already had both feet firmly on the road of suspicion, and I told her I’d look into it. I did some checking. Henry Martins was a bank manager who left behind

a lot of family and a lot of clients, but his occupation wasn’t an opportunity for him to line his pockets with other people’s money.

I looked into his life as much as I could in the small amount of time I could allot for his daughter’s ‘hunch’, but nothing stood out as odd.

Two years later, and Henry Martins’ coffin is behind me on

chains as the wind increases in strength. And Henry Martins’ wife is trying to avoid anybody with a badge now that her second

husband has died, his blue fingernails the first indication that he was poisoned. Henry’s daughter hasn’t spoken to me because I’m no longer in the same position I was two years ago. It’s easy to let my mind wander and think of things that might have been. I could have done more back then. I could have solved a murder,

if that’s what happened. Could have stopped another man from

dying. The jury is still out on whether Mrs Martins had bad luck or bad judgement when it came to men.

The rain gets heavier, creating a thousand tiny ripples on the surface of the water. The caretaker is backing away, keeping his eyes on the water. Slowly the elements seem to disappear; so do the voices, and the vibrations. All that is left are the three corpses floating ahead of me, each one a victim of something — a victim of age, foul play, bad luck or maybe a victim of a cemetery’s lack of real estate.

The three workers have all come over beside me. Their excited

bursts of started but stilted observations have ended. We’re

standing, the four of us, in front of the water; three people are in it: it’s like we’re all pairing up for a social but with one person left over. The occasion demands quiet, each of us unwilling to say anything to break the silence building between us. More dirt slides into and mixes with the water, turning it cloudy brown.

One of the bodies sinks back out of view and disappears. The

other two are drifting towards us, swimming without movement.

I’m not about to jump in and pull them out. I’d do it, no doubt there, if the bodies were flailing about. But they’re not. They’re dead, have been for maybe a long time. The situation may seem