The Grove

Some secrets don't stay buried. Harlan "Digger" Hale has been digging graves at Peach Grove Cemetery his entire life. He knows this ground the way most men know their own kitchens. He knows what belongs in it. He knows what doesn't. For thirty-seven years he has kept a secret in this earth. A secret that walks the cemetery at night in a dead man's coat, carrying a dead man's cane, standing under the old pine tree and waiting for Digger to finally look back. Jimmy Reardon has been visiting his wife's grave every day since they buried her here.
He knows every stone, every shadow, every quality of light on the pond at dusk. He is not the kind of man who believes in ghosts. Then he takes a photograph. The figure in the frame is not alive. Jimmy knows this before he can explain how he knows it. And when the image vanishes from his screen before he can print it, he knows something else too. It wants to be found. What follows will pull in a grieving widower, a seventy-year-old woman who reads the dead through a Ouija board, a small-town sheriff who stops believing in coincidence, and a gravedigger carrying the weight of a sixteen-year-old boy's worst night deep into a truth that Peach Grove has been sitting on since 1831. Because Digger's secret is not the only thing wrong with this ground! Beneath the cemetery, beneath the dead peach grove that borders it, beneath a hill that a long dead man specified must never be disturbed, something has been waiting for a very long time. Seventeen somethings. And the ground is done keeping quiet. The Grove is a ghost story for readers who know that the most frightening things are not the ones that go bump in the night.
They are the ones that have been standing in the dark for a hundred and fifty years, patient and still, waiting for someone to finally look in the right direction.