It was late in that January afternoon in 2002, and darker than normal from gathering rain clouds. I walked south on the Dunsmuir Avenue, and up a small hill, to visit the Dunsmuir cemetery for the first time.

My wife and had just moved into our apartment in the basement of the pink house on Wood and Dunsmuir Avenue. She was out and I was alone, so I set off on an exploratory stroll around the new neighborhood.

I planned to start from the farthest corner of the graveyard, the southeast. I would march up and down the rows, northward and southward, notching westerly at each turn, until I returned to the road home, hopefully before it started raining.

And I stuck to the plan, holding to sidewalk to the creek, then cutting eastward, not entering the graveyard until I reached the farthest tombstone in the southeast corner.

The darkness was coming soon now, so I set a brisk pace, moving up and down the rows of stone and crosses. Now and then I'd see something that stood out, like the grave of the little girl who died of typhoid in the late 1800's, who I had read about in the library on my first day in Dunsmuir.

Then another monument caught my attention and I stopped. I saw a wide, double plot with a ground-level lid of concrete. A small headstone lay on the side furthest from me, and I had a little difficulty making out names and dates engraved in marble there.

They were Roy and Zora Emmick. They both died in 1953.

Togther? I wondered.

I felt a drop of rain, and picked up the pace again. I watched stones and crosses flow by and caught when I could glimpse of a memorial to a soldier, a sad, tiny tomb of an infant, and what looked like Abner Weed's entire family, protected from the living by a thin iron fence.

I was not far from my goal, well over halfway, and the raindrops were coming more quickly now. I moved more quickly as well, coming to the end of a row, turning, walking, turning, walking, almost done, then I stopped hard.

At my feet I saw a wide, double plot with a ground-level lid of concrete. A small headstone lay on the side furthest from me, and I knew without looking hard at all what names were engraved in marble there.

They were Roy and Zora Emmick. They both died in 1953.

I spun around and glared at the far southeast corner of the graveyard. I tried to wonder if there could be two Emmick crypts, but threw the thought away. In the absence of that thought, I didn't know what to think.

It was too dark to go back there. I was getting wet and cold, though not all my shivers could be attributed to the temperature.

It was two years before I crept back into the southeast corner of the Dunsmuir Cemetery to see what I knew would be there: nothing. No Roy. No Zora. No double-wide concrete slab with marble headstone.

No, today they still lie where I saw them the second time, up near the street. Near the northwest corner.

In the two years that passed before I ventured back to the graveyard, I could come up with nothing that could explain my first encounter with the Emmicks. To this day, I have no idea what happened to me among the stones and crosses that dark afternoon nearly ten years ago.