The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 by Laura Lippman, Otto Penzler

happen. They found green hundred-year-old bottles and rusty tools. They found a maze of half-buried chicken-wire fences and a pile of glazed bricks with raised letters that said “Metropolitan Block,” the foundation of something long since rotted away. They admired the glazed bricks and would put them to good use. They found a perfectly preserved brown jug. Then they found the grave.
    The house overlooked a small hollow that fell away, rising quickly again at the edge of their property. Later they would install a large picture window so that they could look across that little hollow. They had been inspecting the brow the house sat upon when Parveen noticed a smooth spot on the ground. She thought it was the odd piece of broken brick, but when she rubbed it with her shoe she saw that it was larger than that. She scraped more away with her shoe and saw letters. The two knelt down together and with their gloved hands gently pushed away the dirt and matted leaves. Deeply and carefully carved into a thick piece of aged oak, the epitaph had a few worn letters but was clear nonetheless:
     
HERE LIES PRINCESS JENNY
Forever friends in this gentle place
My little princess
Gone home now to this good earth
Sleeping now where we lived together
And will again
When the heavens and the oceans and the mountains
Shall pass away
     
    For a couple who treasured relics, nothing they might have found could have been more endearing. Parveen raised a hand to her reddening throat as Derek slowly read the words aloud in his clear barrister voice. He nodded his head approvingly and smiled. He stood up, put his hands on his hips, and looked about. They were home.
    Derek took the oak marker down to his basement workshop. He cleaned out the letters with a wire brush and let the wood dry out for three weeks. He soaked the underside in black creosote and soaked the surface in boiled linseed oil. After it dried, he replaced it exactly, now essentially impervious to the elements.
    Parveen gathered softball-sized fieldstones of gray and grayish pink and gray-black and made a semicircle around the top of the marker. She planted crocosmia with the orange-flame flowers that the hummingbirds loved and moonbeam coreopsis with their bright bursts of yellow, daisylike blooms.
    Derek cleared the grounds of the forgotten homestead on weekends and vacations, removing the chaos of brush and dropping the dead trees with his thunderous 1950s Homelite chainsaw. It all began to look parklike, a five-acre estate. They installed the picture window and added an outside light. Sometimes at night they would light up the little grave and the area around it, the artificial light casting shadows so differently from the moonlight. When they turned off the light, the moonlight flowed down through the boughs, blanketing the marker and the fieldstones and the flowers in a magical glow.
    Derek cut logs from the steel-like black locust and made twin benches. One he placed next to the grave, the other he placed directly across on the opposite ridge close to the property line. The benches became their favorite places to sit and read and have coffee, and, finally, wonderful places to sit with baby Margaret.
    Margaret arrived after Smoky, the black Lab, and Trudy, the calico cat, had already joined the family, and after the heavy lifting at the place was done. A puppy, a kitty, a blond-headed baby girl. A young, vigorous, devoted couple. What had been a forgotten and forlorn place was now bursting with life. Derek and Parveen nestled into their handmade world. The joy they felt was beyond words. Because the grave was a mystery, holding no memories, it became a fanciful thing. As the years went by, they invented stories for Margaret. The stories of Princess Jenny became a bedtime ritual. Parveen drew charcoal sketches to bring the fantasies to life. Princess Jenny was a unicorn ridden by a fairy, a ferocious black panther with golden eyes who was the protector of a golden queen. Princess