The Gravedigger's Daughter
Chapter One
Chautauqua Falls, New York
One afternoon in September 1959 a young woman factory
worker was walking home on the towpath of the Erie Barge
Canal, east of the small city of Chautauqua Falls, when
she began to notice that she was being followed, at a
distance of about thirty feet, by a man in a panama hat.
A panama hat! And strange light-colored clothes, of a
kind not commonly seen in Chautauqua Falls.
The young woman's name was Rebecca Tignor. She was
married, her husband's name Tignor was one of which she
was terribly vain.
"Tignor."
So in love, and so childish in her vanity, though not a
girl any longer, a married woman a mother. Still she
uttered "Tignor" a dozen times a day.
Thinking now as she began to walk faster He better not
be following me, Tignor won't like it.
To discourage the man in the panama hat from wishing to
catch up with her and talk to her as men sometimes, not
often but sometimes, did, Rebecca dug the heels of her
work shoes into the towpath, gracelessly. She was
nerved-up anyway, irritable as a horse tormented by
flies. ... read full excerpt from Gravedigger's Daughter, The ebook
