The Wild Shore

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“It wouldn’t really be grave-robbing,” Nicolin was explaining. “Just dig up a coffin and take the silver off the outside of it. Never open it up at all. Bury it again nice and proper—now what could be wrong with that? Those silver coffin handles are going to waste in the ground anyway.”

The five of us considered it. Near sunset the cliffs at the mouth of our valley glow amber, and on the wide beach below tangles of driftwood cast shadows all the way to the sandstone boulders at the foot of the cliff. Each clump of wave-worn wood could have been a gravemarker, swamped and washed on its side, and I imagined digging under one to find what lay beneath it.

Gabby Mendez tossed a pebble out at a gliding seagull. “Just exactly how is that not graverobbing?” he demanded of Nicolin.

“It takes desecration of the body to make it graverobbing.” Nicolin winked at me; I was his partner in these sorts of things. “We aren’t going to do any such thing. No searching for cuff links or belt buckles, no pulling off rings or dental work, nothing of the sort!”

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