The Keep of Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

mistake. Max understood how numbers worked, but the workings of the world were sometimes beyond him. That was fine—that was Jace’s job. And she knew people didn’t catch fire or get their hands burned for no reason. Probably the man had doused himself with some caustic chemical and had ignited himself where a large crowd would see.
    But why? Jace didn’t know. The only thing she did know was that you could never truly know the heart of another.
    He had to know she would be the one to find him, Maude. I know it’s awful to say, but I’m your sister, and it’s the truth. She always puts her bike in the garage when she comes home from school. Never leaves it out for the rain. Such a good girl, that Jacine. He had to know. Bless the poor little thing.…
    A gust of wind kicked up a cloud of sun-baked dust. Jace tucked a stray lock of her short brown hair behind an ear and scanned the cemetery. Where was the undertaker? Dale Stocker, who had managed Castle Heights for the last twenty years, had passed away that spring. But there had been a replacement, hadn’t there?
    “Hello?”
    The wind snatched her voice away. Jace pushed through the iron gate. There was a rise in the middle of the cemetery. He might be on the other side, where he wouldn’t have heard the van approaching.
    The deputy made her way past forgotten graves. Many of the headstones were too wind-worn to read. But there were some she could still make out, their shallow carvings made sharp again by the shadows of morning. She passed by the graves of failed prospectors, Depression-era mothers, and young men sentback in boxes from Normandy. Then she saw a grave that made her pause. She crouched and parted a tuft of weeds to reveal the words scrawled on the cracked sandstone marker:
    NATHANIEL LUKE FARQUHAR
1853–1882
A good Man. A good Father.
“God will forgive you.”
    Jace frowned at the stone, her mission forgotten. What did it matter if God forgave him? What about the people he had left behind? Had they forgiven him? If he was really such a good man, a good father, how had he gotten himself killed at the age of twenty-nine? A good man would have been careful, would have stayed around to watch his children grow up. He wouldn’t have been stuck here in the ground. Jace started to stand, hesitated, then reached out to touch the sun-warmed sandstone.
    “Can I help you, ma’am?” a raspy voice said behind her.
    Jace pulled her hand back, stood, and turned around all in one smooth motion. It took conscious effort to keep from moving her hand to the butt of the revolver at her hip.
    The man before her was tall—far taller than the deputy, who had reached her full five feet two at the age of twelve. Despite the heat he was dressed in a long, shabby suit of black wool that looked as if it had been salvaged from a coffin. His shirt had yellowed like ivory, along with his teeth.
    “Well, now,” the gravedigger said, a grin splitting his gaunt face, his voice at once slick and rusty, “I see you are a woman of the law.” He leaned on the shovel whose handle he gripped in large, bony hands.
    Jace opened her mouth to answer but could only manage a nod. There was something strange aboutthe man. Usually she could size up another inside of five seconds, but the figure before her defied easy definition.
    The man pushed up the brim of his black hat, swiped with a dingy handkerchief at his knobby brow, then settled the hat back down as he nodded toward the grave marker behind her. “Did you know him, then?”
    Jace found her voice. “Sir, that man’s been dead for well over a century.”
    The gravedigger shrugged, as if this fact were not important.
    Furrows dug themselves into Jace’s forehead. She had never seen the gravedigger around town before. When had he arrived in Castle City? Then again, even Dale had liked to keep to himself. Undertakers were a lonely lot—or maybe they just preferred the company of the dead.
    Jace held out the box. “Sir, I have a