Free You Only Die Twice by Edna Buchanan

proposed?”
    She took in my blank stare, the files and notes strewn across my desk, the blocks of copy glowing on my computer screen, and rolled her eyes.
    â€œUh-oh. We ain’t at the same address, are we? Not even the same zip code.” Her expression changed to one of alarm. “Don’t tell me you got stuck here on a story and didn’t git to go?”
    My ill-fated evening and the baby pictures came back to me.
    â€œI went,” I said. “Bummer. But wait till you hear the story I’m working on! Let’s go for breakfast and I’ll tell you about it.”
    She dropped off her film, art of an out-of-control brush fire on the fringe of the Everglades. I left the city desk a detailed memo on my story, and we went to a Cuban coffee shop a few blocks away.
    I filled her in on the story between bites of flaky cheese-filled pastelitos and thick hot black coffee that resuscitated my brain cells and set my blood on fire, “Now I need to go find a grave.” I put down my cup and checked my watch. “It shouldn’t take long.”
    â€œIs it in a cemetery?” she asked, daintily pattingcrumbs from her mouth with a paper napkin. “Or do we need a shovel?”
    â€œWoodlawn,” I said. “I have to see it, to make sure it’s really there.”
    â€œYou don’t need me for that. But I want in on this one, Britt. Call me when there’s something to shoot. Helluva story.”
    â€œDamn straight.”
    Â 
    Pink and mauve streaks lit the sky as a fiery orange sun burned its way through banks of purple and a misty haze rose off the lush green grass at Woodlawn Park Cemetery.
    Noisy traffic streamed in every direction. There was gridlock on the Palmetto Expressway after a tractor-trailer rollover. Motorists were trapped by construction on I-95, and wheezing Metro buses exhaled poisonous fumes at every stop, but here the grass smelled fresh and clean, insects buzzed, and flowers bloomed. In this place of death, I felt overwhelmed by life. Birds sang, water trickled merrily in a stone fountain, and time stood still. Nobody who slept here was in a hurry.
    I found no one at the caretaker’s cottage, so I studied the map posted outside, drove to the designated section, and set out on foot.
    Mounds of fragrant fresh-dug earth piled high with damp and dewy floral arrangements marked a burial site less than twenty-four hours old. I stopped nearby to study the heartbreaking beauty of a stone angel that had been weeping over a child’s grave since 1946.
    If she’s here at all, this must be the place, I thought, reading the lettering on stone markers and bronzeplaques. Then I found it and saw why I had missed it at first. I was not expecting a freshly tended, recently visited gravesite. Somebody had neatly cleared away the weeds and tangled vines and placed a bouquet of long-stemmed white roses in the bronze flower holder. The double plaque bore two names.
    Â 
    MOTHER
    Reva Rae Warren
    April 25, 1926–May 11, 1996
    Â 
    BELOVED DAUGHTER
    Kaithlin Ann Warren Jordan
    January 27, 1965–February 17, 1991
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    The roses had withered and shriveled, crisped by the sun. Dried blossoms and buds had fallen away from the thorny stems. The weathered bouquet looked as though it had been there for about two weeks, since just before Kaithlin Jordan arrived unclaimed at the morgue.
    What was it like, I wondered, to kneel at your own grave?

4
    I found the groundskeeper back at the cottage, pointing out a section on the map for a middle-aged couple to whom he was giving directions. A stooped, slightly built man in his fifties, he nodded, eyes curious behind the tinted lenses of his eyeglasses when I told him the name and plot number.
    â€œThat one’s had a lotta company all of a sudden,” he said, his look quizzical.
    â€œOh?” I said.
    â€œNever had any action, any visitors, far as I know,” he said, self-consciously covering his mouth