I turned to see an old man sitting on a stone bench, wearing a faded jumpsuit. He was sharpening a pair of shears. **Harold**, the groundskeeper. I remembered him from years ago; he had a signature limp and a habit of whistling tunes that sounded like wind through a keyhole.
“I’m looking for **Thomas Miller**,” I said. “Section 4, maybe?”
Harold stopped sharpening. He looked at me, his eyes clouded by cataracts but sharp with a strange, piercing intensity. He looked at my plastic bag, then at my face.
“Leo?” he whispered.
“You remember me?”
Harold stood up, his joints popping. He looked around the empty rows of graves, his movements furtive, paranoid. He stepped closer, the scent of damp earth and tobacco clinging to him.
“Don’t waste your time searching the ground, boy,” he said, his voice dropping to a low, jagged hiss. He reached into the deep pocket of his jumpsuit and pulled out a weathered brown envelope, sealed with red wax.
“What is this?” I asked, my fingers trembling as I took it.
Harold leaned in, his breath cold against my ear. He whispered four chilling words that made the blood in my veins turn to slush:
**“Your father isn’t here.”**
***
### Chapter 2: The Cipher in the Wax
The words hung in the air, heavier than the granite monuments surrounding us. *Your father isn’t here.*
“What do you mean he’s not here?” I demanded, grabbing Harold’s arm. “Linda said he died. She said he was buried here.”
Harold pulled away, his eyes darting toward the cemetery gates. “She bought the plot, Leo. She paid for the stone. She even held a small, private service with a closed casket. But I’m the one who digs the holes, and I’m the one who fills ‘em. That casket? It didn’t have the weight of a man in it. It had the weight of sandbags.”
My head spun. “Where is he, Harold? If he’s not in the ground, where is he?”
“He came to me a week before he ‘died’,” Harold whispered. “He looked like a man who had seen his own shadow move without him. He gave me that envelope. He told me, ‘Harold, if my son comes home and finds a stone with my name on it, give him this. And tell him the lion is in the cage of his own making.’”
