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dig.
    Cardiff let the spade fall. “Mr. Culpepper?”
    Elias Culpepper responded. “Oh God, God, go on. Lift the lid. Do it!” And when Cardiff hesitated, said, “Now!”
    Cardiff bent and pulled at the coffin lid. It was neither nailed nor locked. He swung back the lid and stared down into the coffin.
    Elias Culpepper came to stand beside him.
    They both stared down at…
    An empty coffin.
    “I suspect,” said Elias Culpepper, “you are in need of a drink.”
    “Two,” said Cardiff, “would be fine.”

CHAPTER 16

    They were smoking fine cigars and drinking nameless wine in the middle of the night. Cardiff leaned back in his wicker chair, eyes tight shut.
    “You been noticing things?” inquired Elias Culpepper.
    “A baker’s dozen. When Claude took me on the bread and muffin tour I couldn’t help but notice there are no signs—anywhere—for doctors. Not one funeral parlor that I could see.”
    “Must be somewhere,” said Culpepper.
    “How come not in the phone book yellow pages? No doctors, no surgeons, no mortuary offices.”
    “An oversight.”
    Cardiff studied his notes.
    “Lord, you don’t even have a hospital in this almost ghost town!”
    “We got one small one.”
    Cardiff underlined an entry on his list. “An outpatient clinic thirty feet square? Is that all that ever happens, so you don’t need a big facility?”
    “That,” said Culpepper, “would about describe it.”
    “All you ever have is cut fingers, bee-stings, and the occasional sprained ankle?”
    “You’ve whittled it down fine,” said the other, “but that’s the sum. Continue.”
    “That,” said Cardiff, gazing down on the town from the high verandah, “that tells why all the gravestones are unfinished and all the coffins empty!”
    “You only dug one up.”
    “I don’t need to open more. Do I?”
    Quietly, Culpepper shook his head.
    “Hell, Mr. Culpepper,” said Cardiff. “I’m speechless!”
    “To tell the truth,” said Culpepper, “so am I. This is the first time anyone has ever asked what you’ve been asking. We folks have been so busy just living, we never figured anyone would come, gather his spit, grab a spade, and dig!”
    “I apologize.”
    “Now you’ll want a practical history. I’ll give it to you. Write it down, Mr. Cardiff, write it down. Over the years, when visitors arrived, they got bored quick, and left even quicker. We tried to look like every other town. We put on nice false-front funerals, hearse and all, real flowers, live organ music, but empty coffins with shut lids, just to impress. We were going to hold a pretend funeral tomorrow, show off, so you’d be assured we sometimes die—”
    “Sometimes?!” cried Cardiff.
    “Well, it has been a while. Cars occasionally run over us. Someone might fall from a ladder.”
    “No diseases, whooping cough, pneumonia?”
    “We don’t whoop and we don’t cough. We wear out…slow.”
    “How slow?”
    “Oh, at last count, just about—”
    “How slow?!”
    “One hundred, two hundred years.”
    “Which?”
    “We figure about two hundred. It’s still too early to tell. We’ve only been at this since 1864, ’65, Lincoln’s time.”
    “All of you?”
    “All.”
    “Nef, too?”
    “Wouldn’t lie.”
    “But she’s younger than I am!”
    “Your grandma, maybe.”
    “My God!”
    “God put us up to it. But it’s the weather, mostly. And, well now, the wine.”
    Cardiff stared at his empty glass.
    “The wine makes you live to two hundred?!”
    “Unless it kills you before breakfast. Finish your glass, Mr. Cardiff, finish your glass.”

CHAPTER 17

    Elias Culpepper leaned forward to scan Cardiff’s notepad.
    “You got any more doubts, indecisions, or opinions?”
    Cardiff mused over his notes. “There don’t seem to be any roaring businesses in Summerton.”
    “A few mice but no buffalo.”
    “No travel agencies, just a train station about to sink in the dust. Main road is mostly potholes. No one seems to leave, and