Page 27 of 13 Nights

She puts on her coat, and we walk into a night lit by the orange glow of carved pumpkins lining every sidewalk. The Old Dutch Burying Ground locks at dusk. The iron gate is chained, and the churchyard sits dark and empty behind the white clapboard walls. Higher on the hill, lanterns from a Sleepy Hollow Cemetery tour bob between the trees, their light catching the older monuments. But the burying ground itself belongs to no one at this hour.

The stone wall on the east side has a gap where the mortar crumbled decades ago. I've been visiting this churchyard for far longer than that.

I walk Ashley past the older graves, the Dutch names, the English dates, the sandstone markers so eroded that the inscriptions are more suggestion than text.

Dead leaves scrape across the flagstones. The lantern light from the adjacent cemetery tour catches the tilted headstones at intervals, then passes on.

Near the back wall, a modern slab stands apart from the colonial markers. It was installed within the last few years by the village tourism board rather than the church.

IN MEMORY OF THE UNKNOWN HESSIAN THE HEADLESS HORSEMAN OF SLEEPY HOLLOW

Ashley reads it. Her gaze moves from the engraved words to my face and back again.

"It isn't a grave," I tell her. "It's advertising shaped like one. My body is in a mass grave at White Plains, buried under a name that wasn't mine along with dozens of other men who died the same afternoon. No one claimed us."

She crouches beside the slab and runs her fingers across the cut letters.

The wind picks up. A dry leaf catches against the base and holds.

"They gave the legend a memorial," she says. "And they didn't even get the legend's name."

"Irving didn't know my name. He never looked." I stand in front of the stone that commemorates my death. The absurdity of it presses against my ribs.

"The Hadleys know. Tom knows. His father knew. His grandfather knew. They've maintained the historical record and the tourist attraction simultaneously, and the cognitive dissonance hasn't killed any of them yet."

"How does it feel?" she asks. "Standing here."

"Like visiting your own monument and discovering they spelled your name wrong. Except they didn't spell it wrong. They never had it." I pause. "Irving had a good ear for atmosphere. I'll give him that much."

Ashley straightens. Her face in the borrowed light is serious, intent, stripped of the humor she deploys as armor. She looks at the memorial and then at me.

She brushes the dirt from the engraved title with the back of her hand. "Severin von Brandt," she says. "Someone should say the right name here."

"I'm not buried here."

"Then someone should say it where you're standing."

We walk back to the cottage without speaking. The town glitters below us, orange and purple lights strung along the storefronts, skeleton projections dancing across brick facades. Sleepy Hollow dresses for my death like a holiday.

Inside, I sit across from her at the kitchen table, in the chair that has become mine by mutual silent agreement. Tom's confrontation and Eliza's story have forced me to stop postponing.

"There's a Hadley document older than anything Tom has shown you." I lean forward. "A fragment. Partially damaged. Your mother had a copy."

"What does it say?"

"The legible portion reads: When the Horseman is loved, the Gate will claim... The final word is damaged. Illegible. Your mother annotated the copy. She couldn't determine whether the missing word was the beloved, the soul, or something else entirely. She wasn't even certain 'claim' was the correct translation."

Ashley takes the information apart and reassembles it. I can see the evidentiary framework building behind her eyes, the journalist slotting the fragment into the chain she's been constructing since the night she opened that drawer.

"That's why she left," Ashley says. "She believed loving you was dangerous."

"She believed proximity to me was dangerous. She was right."

"The warning wasn't in the drawer."

I go still. "What?"

"The folder, the sketch, the journal entry, the muster-roll facsimile, the correspondence with archivists. All of it was in the locked drawer. The warning wasn't."