I turned on the phone’s built-in flashlight and propped it on a wooden shelf.

The white light illuminated the dusty surface of the ledger.

I opened the cover.

The pages were thick, yellowed, and smelled of cellar damp.

My grandfather’s precise, slanted handwriting filled the first few pages.

They were standard accounts from the nineteen-fifties and sixties.

But as I flipped further back, the handwriting changed.

It became more hurried, written in a dark blue ink that had faded to grey.

I stopped at a page dated August 1924.

The heading at the top read: *North Ridge Clearances.*

“What is it?” Caroline asked, leaning forward from her crate.

“The burials,” I said, my finger tracing the faded ink.

“Marcus said they were just old family servants,” she whispered.

“He’s wrong,” I said. “Or he’s lying.”

I read the list of names written in the ledger.

*Elijah Turner. Sarah Payne. Benjamin Robinson.*

Beside each name was a birth date, a death date, and a plot number on the north ridge.

But there was more written under the names.

My grandfather had pasted several folded slips of paper into the ledger.