Free Sins of the Fathers by Patricia Sprinkle

place gives me the willies.” Dr. Flo put both hands on her hips and peered out at the trees that ringed the clearing, hung with trailing vines and moss.
    Now that Katharine looked closer, the forest there was mostly sycamores and cedars, with a few cabbage palms and clumps of towering long-leaf pines hung with fat cones. The nine live oaks—she turned in a circle and counted them—must have been planted to mark the edges of the clearing. She slapped one cheek and waved away a swarm of mosquitoes around her head. “We’ll be lucky to get out of here alive.”
    The silence of the place and its utter isolation were making her uneasy, too. She had a sense that something brooded in the shadows around the clearing, waiting to pounce. The live oaks guarded the secrets of whatever once stood on those desolate foundations, and no birds sang on their limbs. When Katharine listened, she didn’t hear a single sound except the shrill warnings of cicadas, the slip of her shoes in the sand, and the high whine of mosquitoes. The back of her neck prickled, as if they were being watched, but although she looked, she saw nothing but sand, grass, and trees to her left and marshes stretching for miles to her right.
    She trudged another couple of steps, then whirled. From the corner of her eye she thought she saw a scrap of blue duck back into the green dimness. Were the old man and boy keeping an eye on them? “Probably making sure we aren’t stealing tombstones,” she said aloud to reassure herself.
    She was answered only by the scream of a gull, high in the sky.
    She joined Dr. Flo near the wrought-iron fence, which was rusty and ornamented by lichens: chartreuse, forest green, and a flat green that reminded her of elementary school bathrooms. She found the small collection of graves both pathetic and disturbing. Most lay within the railing but four Morrisons had been buried outside, to the right of the gate. They were parents, a son, and a daughter-in-law. All had been buried in the twentieth century. The daughter-in-law had only been dead fifteen years.
    “Let’s get this over with,” Dr. Flo said briskly. “This air is humid enough to choke us, and it’s a tossup whether we’ll die first from malaria or heat prostration.”
    Katharine scanned the sky, which was almost white with the heat. “Feels like we’re building up to a storm, but the only clouds are those little ones away out over the ocean.”
    Dr. Flo wiped her forehead with one forearm. “Grandmother Lucy would have said, ‘It’s missing a real good chance to rain.’”
    She pushed open the rusty gate with a creak worthy of a horror movie. Katharine tried not to shudder as she followed slowly into the little fenced plot, but as she entered the gate, the hair prickled again at the back of her neck. She turned and peered back at the forest, certain somebody was watching them. Again she thought she saw a flash of blue.
    She stared harder, but nothing moved until a jay swooped down from a pine tree and perched on the lowest branch of the sentinel cedar that guarded the gate.
    She gave a nervous chuckle. “Silly,” she chided herself. “Scared of a blue jay.”
    Putting her fears into words made her feel better. So did Dr. Flo, who looked very professorial as she exchanged her sunglasses for reading glasses with gold rims. She perched them on the end of her nose, opened her little notebook, and clicked her pen to lower the point.
    “Let’s start at the front and work back. You take that side, I’ll take this one, and we’ll meet at the big slab at the far back in the middle. We are looking for Claude Gilbert.”
    Katharine began to roam, reading inscriptions. Some graves were marked by small stones and some by obelisks three or four feet high. Three had slabs of concrete that covered the entire grave. Two of those rested on tabby foundations, but one was elevated on brick pilings fifteen inches above the ground. She could understand the tabby foundations if