Lake Thirteen by Greg Herren Read Free Book Online

the road. The headstones themselves were an odd mix of shapes and sizes.
    It felt like it was getting even colder, and the fog rising from the ground was getting thicker around my ankles, with little wisps floating up into the air and dissipating. I looked over at my friends. They’d stopped walking about twenty yards down the road and had gathered around a massive headstone about fifteen yards from the side of the road. I bit my lower lip. I wondered what they were doing and if I should join them, but somehow I couldn’t make myself walk down there.
    You’re safer here—it’s better not to go down there. Stay close to the car.
    I shook my head. Maybe I was losing my mind.
    I stepped back up out of the grass and leaned with my back against the SUV. There was a large old headstone not ten feet from where I was standing.
    It won’t hurt you to go take a look at it, now would it? What are you so afraid of, really? It’s just a headstone.
    I walked through the ankle-high grass until I was standing next to the headstone. It was remarkably large, so big it seemed like it should have more than one name carved it into, like a married couple’s or maybe even an entire family’s. The ones this size at Four Corners in Virginia usually did.
    But the carving on the face of this one simply read:
     
    ALBERT TYLER
    June 10, 1890–August 20, 1907
     
    “How sad,” I said without thinking about it, “he was only seventeen.” And we have the same birthday.
    As I knelt next to the tombstone, an overwhelming sense of sadness swept over me.
    It was so intense I felt tears swimming up in my eyes.
    My heart was breaking, and I had to stifle a sob.
    How awful to die so young, I thought, wiping at my eyes and looking over to the next headstone. It was slightly larger, and Tyler was also carved into it, close to the top. Underneath, there were two gray boxes with names carved inside. The one on the left said Abram with the dates March 7, 1858–September 12, 1920 underneath. The right read Sarah , and the dates of her life were April 2, 1866–January 3, 1965.
    Another tear ran down the side of my face and I swiped at it. “You poor thing,” I murmured. “You outlived your son by almost fifty-eight years. How awful for you that must have been. Did you ever get over it, Mrs. Tyler? Can you get over something like that?”
    The sadness—the sorrow— swept over me again, and as my eyes filled with more tears, I couldn’t help feeling a little confused. Why do I feel so bad for these people I don’t even know? What’s wrong with me? Why is this affecting me so strongly?
    Almost the moment I thought that, I remembered the day when I was thirteen when Mom and Dad had to have my cocker spaniel, Skipper, put to sleep. I remembered my mother herding him into his kennel and my dad carrying it out to the car—they wouldn’t let me go with, so I’d already had to say good-bye to him, he had cancer and it wasn’t curable, and Mom had wiped her own tears away as I buried my face in his neck and cried, it wasn’t fair, he was a good dog—
    I caught my breath as I forced down a sob.
    I hadn’t thought about Skipper in years. Why now? Why here, of all places?
    And Marc flashed into my head, saying good-bye to him last night, and the sad look on his face as we hugged at my front door, and how he’d said I don’t know, I’m just afraid I’ll never see you again before he walked down the driveway and down the street to his own house, and how weird that had been, but I’d felt sad, lonely, and empty. It had taken me a long time to fall asleep.
    I shivered a little as the moon went behind a cloud again. My back now felt so cold it was like it had turned to ice, just like my arms and shoulders and the back of my neck, and I wished again I’d brought a sweatshirt with me.
    I took another deep breath and touched the tombstone for a moment, tracing the name with my index finger.
    “I wonder what you died from, Albert,” I said out loud. Of