Stepping closer, he said, “What’re you doing?”
Startled, she turned to face him.
Petite but athletic-looking, about five feet two, she had an immediate impact far greater than her size or her appearance could explain, as though she were clothed not merely in blue jeans and a yellow cotton blouse but in some powerful magnetic field that bent the world to her. Skin the shade of milk chocolate. Huge eyes as dark as the silt at the bottom of a cup of Armenian espresso, harder to read than the portents in tea leaves, with a distinct almond shape suggesting a touch of Asian blood in the family line. Hair not Afro-kinky or in cornrows but feather-cut, thick and naturally straight and so glossy black that it almost looked blue, which seemed Asian too. Her bone structure was all out of Africa: smooth broad brow, high cheekbones, finely carved but powerful, proud but beautiful. She was maybe five years older than Joe, in her early forties, but a quality of innocence in her knowing eyes and a faint aspect of childlike vulnerability in her otherwise strong face made her seem younger than he was.
“Who are you, what’re you doing?” he repeated.
Lips parted as if to speak, speechless with surprise, she gazed at him as though he were an apparition. She raised one hand to his face and touched his cheek, and Joe did not flinch from her.
At first he thought he saw amazement in her eyes. The extreme tenderness of her touch caused him to look again, and he realized that what he saw was not wonderment but sadness and pity.
“I’m not ready to talk to you yet.” Her soft voice was musical
“Why’re you taking pictures… why pictures of their graves?”
Clutching the camera with two hands, she said, “Soon. I’ll be back when it’s time. Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.”
An almost supernatural quality to the moment half convinced Joe that she was an apparition, that her touch had been so achingly gentle precisely because it was barely real, an ectoplasmic caress.
The woman herself, however, was too powerfully present to be a ghost or a heatstroke illusion. Diminutive but dynamic. More real than anything in the day. More real than sky and trees and August sun, than granite and bronze. She had such a compelling presence that she seemed to be coming at him though she was standing still, loomed over him though she was ten inches shorter than he. She was more brightly lighted in the pine shadows than he was in the direct glare of the sun.
“How are you coping?” she asked.
Disoriented, he answered only by shaking his head.
“Not well,” she whispered.
Joe looked past her, down at the granite and bronze markers. As if from very far away, he heard himself say, “Lost forever,” speaking as much about himself as about his wife and daughters.
When he returned his attention to the woman, she was gazing past him, into the distance. As the sound of a racing engine rose, concern crinkled the corners of her eyes and creased her forehead.
Joe turned to see what was troubling her. Along the road that he had travelled, a white Ford van was approaching at a far higher speed than the posted limit.
“Bastards,” she said.
When Joe turned to the woman again, she was already running from him, angling across the slope toward the brow of the low hill.
“Hey, wait,” he said.
She didn’t pause or look back.
He started after her, but his physical condition wasn’t as good as hers. She seemed to be an experienced runner. After a few steps, Joe halted. Defeated by the suffocating heat, he wouldn’t be able to catch up with her.
Sunlight mirroring the windshield and flaring off the headlight lenses, the white van shot past Joe. It paralleled the woman as she sprinted across the grave rows.
Joe started back down the hill toward his car, not sure what he was going to do. Maybe he should give chase. What the hell was going on here?
Fifty or sixty yards beyond the parked Honda, brakes shrieking, leaving twin smears of rubber on the pavement behind it, the van slid to a stop at the curb. Both front doors flew open, and the men in Hawaiian shirts leaped out. They bolted after the woman.