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“No, why?” I get up and join her at the window, where Mom is taking Uneven Steven for his walk. Exercise helps him move his bowels, so Mom takes him for a walk every day by supporting his hind end with a loop of silk, while he trots happily along, leaving his breakfast behind him.

I explain this to Bristal, who watches, fascinated as Steven finishes his tour of the yard and Mom folds up his silk extension, cradling him in her arms as they head back to the house.

“Now, that,” Bristal declares, “is a family treasure.”

Eleven

The dedication of the Civil War monument is just as dead as the people it’s commemorating.

I take pictures of the new spire, making sure to capture all the names of the townspeople who lost their lives inscribed across the four sides. Paving stones etched with the names of donors surround it, and I dutifully record them as well, silently grateful that Bristal isn’t there to give me a hard time about the fact that the Chass paver is a little bigger than the others, in direct ratio to the amount donated. But the drive for that money had been years ago, when Dad had fewer enemies—and more paying clients.

Mrs. Levering is there with her class of fifth graders who are way more interested in their Gatorades than they are in Gettysburg. The high school band plays “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then a solitary trumpet player breaks away to play taps. Its solemn tones are echoed from another trumpeter, hidden below the rise of a knoll. Hats come off and heads are bowed, but most of the hands I can see aren’t exactly folded in prayer. Pretty much everyone is checking their texts while they wait for taps to finish up.

The mayor says a few words just as the breeze kicks in, sending dried leaves scuttling across the pavers, a little touch of death brushing against the shiny new stones. Maybe in another two hundred years someone will be launching a campaign to save the pavers, reetching the last names of those who gave money to remember those who gave lives, everyone pouring effort into making sure their own predecessors are remembered.

It’s a morbid thought, and I stifle a shudder, thinking of all the places around town where the name Chass holds sway. The high school baseball diamond is named after us, and at least four rows of seats in the new auditorium have our name on brass plates. There’s a Chass Street in town and Chass Corners out near Far Cry Road, an old dividing line between the country cousins and the family members who lived within the village limits. You can’t walk through the cemetery without passing a Chass. I can see four from where I’m standing, their tombstones taller than the others. One even has an angel perched on top, her head hung in perpetual mourning for whoever lies six feet under her.

It’s like being forgotten is the worst thing that can happen.

“There it is,” I blurt, the gray funk that had gathered in my mind suddenly pierced by a ray of inspiration. That’s my angle, that’s how I make this interesting. I don’t have to make people care about the dead; I just have to remind the living that they’re going to die one day, too.

Nicely, of course.

The mayor is still talking about sacrifices, and the fifth graders are idly pulling up grass and sneaking it into each other’s hair when my phone vibrates. I slip it out of my pocket to see a text from Bailey Foxglove. A series of pictures are trying to download, but the service in the cemetery is spotty at best. The gray downloading circles aren’t any closer to being useful images by the time I’m back at the school, signing in along with the band kids in the front office.

“So how was it?” MacKenzie asks me at lunch. “Historically invigorating?”

I decide not to explain to her that she’s going to die someday and instead just tell her about the fifth grader who wandered off from the group and fell into a freshly dug grave. When some adults had fished him out it’d been written all over his face that he totally gets it. My phone vibrates in my pocket, letting me know the downloads are finished.

I whip it out, scrolling through. Bailey has sent me a series of pictures, all close-up shots of the journal she’d kept next to the phone as she fielded calls from panicked residents of Henley. There are notes to herself—Call back Les Hendrix, grandma’s necklace found hanging from Willow Street stop sign. Fran Childress, missing cat, long hair, black, personality: “kind of bitchy.” Dover Jamison, lost dog, German shepherd mix. The message about Fran has a line drawn through, which I guess either means that the cat came home or its body was found. As for Dover’s dog, I make a note to check with Linda Chance and see if the German shepherd was one of the unfortunate inhabitants of the dog pound as the water began to rise.

Everything is written deeply, Bailey’s own tension translating into pressure on the pen. I can see a collection of dots and imagine her on a particularly long call—maybe with Fran Childress describing her cat—and Bailey tapping the pen impatiently.

On the second page Bailey’s finger obscures part of the top left-hand corner, but I enlarge the pic and just make out sshole peeking from underneath. No doubt another note to herself, a brief rumination on the character traits of someone who had likely just given her an earful. She’s covered who exactly was an asshole to her in 1994, probably worried that I’ll announce it on the podcast.

The last few pics are what I’m really after, Bailey’s lists of the missing, the found, and the dead. She wrote the header in all caps, and these pages hold no doodles, no idle ink marks, no extraneous thoughts. This is serious business, and she knew it.

The list of the missing goes across four pages, each of them with a line drawn through the names, then copied over onto the found page. Bailey hadn’t settled for checkmarks or notations; she’d fully transcribed their names over onto the right list, moving the feared dead over to the living, transferring relief, and the promise of continued breath along with them.

Except for five.

The names of the young family who died are listed together on the first page of the missing, their names conspicuously not crossed through: Jimmy Beckley (23), Jessica Beckley (21), and Beckley (baby). On the third page I spot the name of the elderly lady who had died of a heart attack: Laura Richardson (72). These are names I’ve only seen in the black and white of newsprint, or chipped into stone. Written in Bailey’s loopy script, the blue ink faded with age, makes my heart skip a beat. These aren’t stale names or fuzzy memories. These are the freshly dead, newly mourned, and I can see the impact of it where Bailey’s hand had quivered as she wrote baby.

The last name is on page four, standing out starkly in the middle of the list, the only name not crossed out and inscribed among the found.

Denise Halverson (?)

I glance up and spot Bristal on the other side of the cafeteria, eating with Beck Parsons and Lainie Crow. Beck is wearing an oversized sweatshirt that can’t hide her four-month pregnancy, and Lainie is using a black Sharpie to sketch something on her arm; probably an extension of the badly chosen barbwire tattoo she got last year to match her boyfriend’s. When he broke up with her, she’d paid someone to convert it to vines and roses, but I imagine when she looks at it all she sees are the sharp edges.

I shoot Bristal a text, letting her know that Bailey came through, and I share the pics with her. She reaches for her phone, then looks up at me. A response comes quickly.

B: Somebody’s an asshole

L: You saw that too?

B: I can always spot an asshole.

L: Check out the sixth picture, fourth page of the missing.