Shifting Shadows by Sally Berneathy

Author:Sally Berneathy [Berneathy, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 2013-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

Analise pulled off the road and parked. She stared at the faded letters on the weathered wooden sign over the rusty wrought-iron gates. Holbert Cemetery.

The last time I walked under that sign I was walking behind the horse-drawn hearse carrying Papa’s coffin. The pain washed over her anew.

She slid from the car, walked slowly over to the gate and pushed on one side. With a creaking protest, it moved, permitting her entrance.

“Do you know what you’re looking for?” Dylan asked, and she jumped at the sound of his voice beside her. For a moment she’d forgotten he was with her...had forgotten who or where she was.

She hesitated then nodded in answer to his question.

Against all reason, she knew exactly where she was going. Everything looked different, there were so many more graves, but she’d never forget the route to Papa’s grave.

In the early morning chill not yet dissipated by the sun’s weak rays, she moved unerringly among the markers. She gritted her teeth, tried to evade the overwhelming sadness this visit was bringing her and told herself her knowledge only proved she’d been here before...as Analise, not as Elizabeth.

She’d never known Elizabeth’s father and couldn’t mourn him.

“Analise, look.” Again Dylan’s voice startled her, and she whirled to find him pointing off to the side, to a large monument. She could read the names easily. The Holbert family plot. Logically, she realized, that would be where Elizabeth lay. With her husband, not with her parents.

She walked slowly toward it, anger and fear overpowering her sadness—anger at Blake for what he’d done to Elizabeth and irrational fear as though he might come up from the grave to attack her again. She passed the tombstone that marked the resting places of Blake’s mother and father. Beside it stood a newer but similar one for Blake and Susan Holbert, husband and wife.

That wasn’t possible! She stared at the carving, trying to make sense out of it. “I married him,” she whispered. “The journal proved it.”

“Maybe he remarried,” Dylan suggested. “He lived a long time, until 1985.”

“Maybe,” she agreed, grateful for his words even though she could hear the doubt in them. A deceased wife would be buried in her husband’s plot, even if she did later prove to be only the first wife.

The evidence should have made her doubt herself, but she didn’t. She knew Elizabeth had been Blake’s first wife. Maybe she’d died young, and Mama had insisted she not be near him in death after the way he’d treated her in life. But Mama’s wishes would likely not have been honored.

Glad to be leaving this place that held Blake’s remains, she continued on her familiar route. And there it was, the remembered gray stone. Gaston Dupard, Beloved Husband and Father. Born July 26, 1866. Died January 19, 1911. The carving was weathered, blurred, no longer as new and vivid as she remembered. But the pain of losing her father felt new and vivid.

She forced herself to beat back the grief for someone she couldn’t possibly have known, to hang onto the real world, the present world.

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