The Burial Ledger

Records clerk Clara Freeman has spent twenty-six years making Grayhaven Cemetery's paper agree with its ground. Then an expressway line cuts through the eastern annex, and the first disputed plot yields a child's coffin beneath an adult name. The grave under the family monument is empty.

Across the annex, 214 transfer cards trace back to a 1937 relocation completed on paper but perhaps never completed in the earth. Families want answers, engineers need a defensible count, and every missing record invites Clara to supply the most likely name.

When she turns a probable association into an official identity, an unknown man is buried beneath a woman's monument. Correcting that mistake means building a public record honest enough to preserve doubt—before the highway carries the rest away.