Free Judgment of the Grave by Sarah Stewart Taylor Page A

going to sleep with her. It had surprised him, sitting across from her in the office during her interview, hearing about all the computer programs she knew, all the responsibilities she’d had at her previous jobs. He’d never cheated on Cecily before, though he’d thought about it, but somehow when he’d seen Lauren, he’d just known.
    Now he lay his hot face against her neck, breathing hard. He loved her so fiercely, he sometimes felt guilty about Noah and Rory. Of course he loved his son and daughter too, but it was an easy kind of love, fun love, sweet love. The way he felt about Lauren, still after all this time, made him feel ashamed and scared sometimes. It was the way he felt about Pres, he realized with a start. If he was honest with himself, they were the two people he loved the most in the world.

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    The hill cemetery was located across from Monument Square, climbing away from Lexington Road, the headstones perched along the rise like trees hanging on by their roots. The story went that the reason for its existence, only steps from the South Burying Ground on the other side of Main Street, was the superstitions of Concord’s earliest settlers. Believing that carrying a corpse across running water caused the soul to be carried away, the townspeople living on the far side of the Mill Dam that had run under Main Street refused to carry their dead to the South Burying Ground. So they had built their own.
    There were a few well-known stones that Sweeney had seen before, but she didn’t stop to look at them again. Today she was looking for further evidence of the round-skull carver.
    She started at the bottom of the hill, moving across the rows of stones and looking for the distinctive death’s-head. If she could find another stone that the round-skull carver had made for a prominent Concord resident, then she’d have a good chance of finding at least one of the names. This was always her favorite part. As she looked out across the stones, she saw only promise, only the stories that these stones had to tell. Once she waded in among them, she would confront the realities of her field, broken stones, stones that would never yield up a clue to their maker no matter how hard she tried, stones made long after the death date on the stone that hopelessly confused a time line. But for now she looked out across the little city of stone and smiled.
    As she searched, she had fun browsing through them again, finding typical seventeenth- and eighteenth-century stones, a few wonderful death’s-heads complete with skulls and crossbones, and some winged death’s-heads. The classic death’s-head—a primitive, often grinning skull—was a common sight in seventeenth-century graveyards, and to contemporary minds it presented a macabre image of the consequences of the grave. But it was by no means a simple symbol, and Sweeney was interested in the various ways it had been used over the centuries.
    Sweeney’s specialty was the funerary art of the Victorian world, and she thought it must be difficult to find a culture as obsessed with death as the Victorians had been. But there was no denying that the Puritans had also spent a lot of time and energy contemplating their final demise. Children were brought up on pithy little rhymes such as “Time cuts down all / Both Great and small” and “Youth forward slips / Death soonest nips.”
    Puritan stonecutters had made good use of the skull or death’s-head on their stones, and it was a common sight in cemeteries filled during the eighteenth century. Over time, the death’s-head had evolved into the soul’s head, the moon-shaped faces, often winged, that were a common sight on eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century stones. And in the late 1700s, stonecutters had even started to carve actual portraits on their memorials.
    But as time went on, she felt her hopes flag. She had climbed to the top of the hill and had finished with the stones from the 1740s and ’50s, when the