Walking through cemeteries was always one of Monique’s favorite pastimes. She’d never found them eerie or unwelcoming. On the contrary, she had always loved the quiet solitude and how those places made her reflect not only on the lives of those who had come before, but on her own life and what she thought ought to be truly important in life. In warmer weather she tended to walk through the local cemetery at least once a week, but now that the year was entering winter she found it harder to make the usual trips out for a walk.

Shallow snowdrifts had formed overnight. The snow was powdery and was blown easily by even a soft breeze, catching the snow and swirling it around. Glints of sunlight caught and sparkled within the powdery flurries that were never long lived. Most of the drifts were against the standing headstone that filled that section of the cemetery. In the newer sections of the cemetery, where the headstones were all laid flat on the ground, there were hardly any drifts and it was impossible to tell were any of the headstones were without rooting around in the snow for a bit.

During most of the year it was difficult to tell how often most graves were visited. The only signs that someone had been there were the occasional flowers or decorations that would pop up from time to time throughout the year. During the winter, however, every visit was made apparent by the trail of footprints in the snow. Some graves kept well-worn paths through the snow while others never seemed to have their snow disturbed.

Monique wondered about those who came to visit, especially for the ones who visited graves so old that those visiting would surely have to be grandchildren at the youngest. Then there were those fresh graves that no one ever visited. Did they have no living family, or no family nearby? She had yet to have anyone close to her pass away and so she had no real way of knowing how she would feel about such things and whether or not she would want to visit. Perhaps it would be too painful, reliving whatever sorrows were felt over their loss.

As she looked over the rows and rows of headstones, she noticed something odd a short way away from where she was. Beside one of the older headstones, and where no trail had been tromped through the snow, stood a pair of footprints. At first she thought that someone might have jumped from where they had been walking to that headstone, but as she looked, she saw that none of the neighboring headstones had a trail of footprints either. The nearest trail in the snow was much too far for someone to have reasonably been able to jump the distance, and certainly not without making a mess of the snow once they landed. The footprints beside the headstone were simply too crisp and clean, as though someone had been lowered straight down onto that spot.

Monique looked around to see if any of the other headstones had similar footprints but found nothing else like what she’d seen. Returning to the spot where she’d first seen the footprints, she made her way off of the walking path and into the plot so she could get a better look. The footprints were much too well defined. The snow was so powdery that it should have collapsed in on itself, leaving only a pair of impressions. Yet the footprints were neatly outlined. She tapped the snow near to where the footprints were, wondering if maybe the snow here was different for some reason, but it was just as powdery there as it was everywhere else she’d walked that day.

Inevitably, her eyes moved to the headstone itself. The etched face was weathered and hard to read, with the name all but impossible to make out. The only words still fairly legible was a piece of what Monique could only guess was from a much larger body of text that was now worn away.

…I’ll wait here for you…

Looking around, she noted that there was enough room beside this one for another grave and yet there was no headstone.

For the first time in her life, Monique wondered seriously about the possibility of such a thing as ghosts. Were those footprints the evidence of this person standing vigil, waiting for someone to come and join them? If so, what had happened that had prevented such a reunion? She looked back down to the footprints, unchanged from the first moment she had seen them, and then back over to the unused gravesite.

A part of her wanted to kick some snow into the footprints, or ask aloud if someone was there, but she resisted. Instead, she turned around and walked back to the path. There wasn’t much she could do there, really. The headstone was so worn that there was no way she could find out who had been buried there. That wasn’t to say that she was giving up on the whole affair. The city, she knew, kept records of who was buried in the cemetery and she figured that was probably the best place to begin such an investigation.

Adjacent to the cemetery was the office where those records were kept and she hurried along the path, hoping they would be open. She wasn’t sure if they would keep normal business hours or not. As luck would have it, they were open and Monique strode in. The building was small with only a pair of offices beside the reception desk. At the desk sat an older woman who looked up as Monique entered.

“Yes, can I help you?” the woman asked.

“Yeah,” Monique replied, “I’m trying to figure out the name on a headstone I saw.”

This sort of request must have been somewhat frequent since the woman at the desk immediately pulled out a paper map of the cemetery and laid it out on her desk.

“Can you show me on this map where the headstone’s located?” she asked.

Monique sat down in the chair opposite the woman and looked over the map. IT took her a moment to trace along the path marked on the map but eventually she was pretty confident she’d found the general area.

“It’s around here,” Monique told the woman. “The only thing I could make out on the headstone was part of an inscription, ‘I’ll wait here for you’.”

The woman at the desk nodded and turned towards a bookshelf set beside her desk. The shelves were filled with thick, three-ring binders. Their spines were labeled with some sort of organization code but Monique had no way of knowing what their meanings were.

“Here we are,” the woman said, more to herself than to Monique as she began flipping through the pages of the binder.

It took a few minutes of searching but eventually she stopped and turned the binder over towards Monique.

“Adelaide Klein,” the woman said, her finger resting on the entry for Monique. “Born seventeen eighty, died eighteen ten.”

Monique read along the information in the binder until she reached where the full inscription was recorded.

“Though long the years,” Monique read aloud to herself, “I’ll wait here for you, Bernard, my love, my dear.”

“The next plot over is still reserved for the husband,” the woman stated matter-of-factly. “Not sure whatever happened to him, though.”

She took the binder back, closed it, and returned it to the shelf.

“Anything else I can help you with?”

Monique shook her head and left after thanking the woman. She thought that her curiosity would be satisfied now that she’d learned what she could about the headstone but as she walked back towards her home she found herself thinking over again and again about Bernard and what had happened to him. Why hadn’t he been buried beside his wife? Had he simply moved to someplace else? But the thought most pressing on her mind was whether or not those footprints in the snow had belonged to Adelaide or if her imagination was getting the better of her.

As soon as she got home, Monique pulled out her laptop and began searching through the internet for Bernard and Adelaide Klein. She had no experience with tracking down ordinary people from two hundred years in the past. She quickly discovered how unhelpful census records could be and how difficult and unorganized they were. Still, she pressed on, hoping that whatever records there were about the couple had been digitized.

She didn’t find anything that day and she wasn’t overly surprised by her failure. She began to chip away at it, spending her free time reading through old records in the hopes of finding some reference to Bernard that would lead her to finding what had happened to him.

The New Year came and went. As was usual, Monique found it difficult to make it out to walk through the cemetery. However, every time she went out on her walks she made certain to pass by Adelaide Klein. The footprints were always there, always fresh. Monique found herself spending more and more time there, eventually speaking out loud, telling Adelaide about the different records she’d dug up. The small snippets of history she’d begun to piece together. She’d found a record for a deed of land he’d sold in the area shortly after Adelaide’s death, followed by another record of him buying a different piece of land not far from the old one.

“Maybe he just needed a change of scenery,” Monique had mused out loud by Adelaide’s grave.

Spring began to grow in strength, melting down the snow and allowing the first eager buds to begin to grow, when Monique finally discovered what she’d been looking for. Bernard’s death certificate. She stared at the computer screen for some time, reading and re-reading it. She had expected to be elated but instead was confused. It recorded him as dying in that same town, in eighteen forty-two. There was only the one cemetery in town so why he hadn’t been buried beside Adelaide was still unknown.

Unable to wait, she copied down the information and hurried over to the cemetery offices. Inside, she found the same older woman who greeted her just as she had done the first time Monique had come in to ask about Adelaide’s headstone.

“Yes, can I help you?” the woman asked.

“I don’t know if you remember,” Monique began as she sat down in front of the desk, “I came in here a few months ago, asking about Adelaide Klein’s headstone.”

“Mmhmm,” the woman hummed although Monique wasn’t sure if that meant she did remember or if she was just politely encouraging Monique to get to her current question.

“Any way,” Monique went on, “I was curious because her husband hadn’t been buried beside her but I think I found him, or, I found his death certificate and he was still living in this town so I was wondering if he’s buried here but someplace else?”

The older woman pursed her lips as though thinking and after a moment asked, “What’s the husbands name and death date?”

Monique pulled out her hand copied note and held it out for the woman. She looked it over and then turned back to her shelves of binders.

“Most people who didn’t have family plots,” she explained while looking for the right binder, “were buried in whatever section of the cemetery was the newest. Maybe no one knew he had a plot and buried him there instead.”

She found the binder she’d been looking for and opened it up. She ran her finger down the outside margin of the pages, mumbling the dates as she went. Finally, she paused and a mildly surprised expression came over her.

“Well, how about that,” she said and held the binder out for Monique to read.

There, indicated by the woman’s finger, was Bernard Klein.

“Looks like he was buried alone,” the woman added once she took the binder back. “All of the plots around him don’t seem to share a last name.”

The woman paused, then pulled out her map of the cemetery and looked along it until she placed a finger firmly on the spot where Bernard’s grave site was.

“Do you remember where his wife was buried?” she asked.

Monique, who had frequented the site many times found it easily and pointed it out. Both women looked from the one point on the map to the other.

“They’re not more than a stone’s throw apart,” the woman noted. “Just across the path and in a few rows.”

Monique thought for a moment and then asked, “Is there a way to get him moved?”

The older woman looked surprised at the request. “We don’t generally disturb them unless there’s a very good reason,” she said.

Monique knew it wouldn’t help her case to take the woman over to show her the footprints. With how often she had gone that way the footprints looked like almost any other.

“It just seems wrong,” Monique said, “he was supposed to be beside her.”

“I don’t know how much such things matter to them on that side of things.”

“But what if it does matter to them?” Monique burst out much more energetically than she’d intended.

The woman eyed Monique with an added measure of caution.

“It just doesn’t seem right,” Monique said in calmer tones, hoping to assuage the situation.

“It’s not up to me,” the woman finally said. “You’ll have to take it up with the city.”

She nodded towards the first of the two offices.

“Are they here right now?” Monique asked, already halfway standing in her rush to get this done.

“You’ll need to set up an appointment,” the woman told her and began pulling up the schedule on her computer. “There’s a four o’clock opening tomorrow afternoon.”

“I’ll take it,” Monique said. “Thank you.”

The older woman just shrugged and made the note in the schedule.

Monique wasn’t sure what all might be involved in getting Bernard moved but she was certain Adelaide was waiting for him, standing there beside her grave and looking across the short distance to where her beloved had been buried by mistake. As she walked back towards her home she looked back over the cemetery towards where Adelaide and Bernard were buried and wondered if there was another set of inexplicable footprints beside Bernard.

At once, Monique turned around and made her way to where Bernard’s headstone was. It didn’t take her too long to find it. His name wasn’t as worn away as Adelaide’s. There were no tracks in the melting snow leading up to Bernard’s grave site and yet, just like Adelaide, there was a pair of footprints in the snow. Standing beside them she could tell that they were facing Adelaide’s grave just as her footprints were facing Bernard’s. She could almost sense them, calling out to her to fix what had been done.

“I’m working on it,” she said.

The bureaucracy of disinterring a person, especially someone who had been dead for so long, was not altogether surprising. Nevertheless, Monique found it to be incredibly unhelpful. There were no living descendants since Adelaide and Bernard had never had any children, and as far as Monique had been able to find, neither of them had any siblings that lived into adulthood. Still, she persevered. Monique wrote letters to the state governor, to senators and members of congress. She attended town hall meetings and met with the mayor and city council. Everyone loved the story, the lovers still kept apart after death, but none of them seemed to be very motivated to really do anything about it. Only after months and months of lobbying, of phone calls, letters, e-mails, and everything else she could think of, the first signs of progress were made.

“Look,” Mayor Silva told her after she’d cornered him following yet another town hall meeting, “if you can raise the funds to pay for the transfer of Bernard’s remains then I’ll do what I can to cut the red tape, okay?”

“Yes, perfect!” Monique exclaimed.

She had foreseen this inevitability and had been saving away some of her paycheck each month just in case. She’d also been building an online presence as well, building a decent sized following that she was fairly confident she could leverage in order to raise whatever else would be needed.

That evening she sent out the notice regarding what the mayor had told her and before too long there was a fundraiser set up and going. The cost of relocating Bernard wasn’t a small amount by any stretch of the imagination. There was no telling what sort of condition his remains would be in, and such excavations were sure to be anything but quick and easy.

By the time Monique got up in the morning, however, her phone was filled with texts and notifications for missed calls. All of them were commenting on Adelaide and Bernard, and many of them were from various news outlets looking to get interviews with her. It wasn’t clear to her how or why there was suddenly this influx of interest until she checked the fundraiser. Overnight, they had raised almost one million dollars. She was staring at her computer screen in disbelief when her phone rang. She answered it, still in a bit of a daze and it took her a moment before she realized it was the mayor on the other end.

“Monique,” he was saying, “I’ve been swamped with calls from the media and could barely get into my office this morning with how many reporters there were, all asking about you and that couple in the cemetery. Look, I like good press for our town and this little story of long-lost lovers is great, but I can’t have the city offices being overrun with reporters. Get down here, give them an interview, maybe even take them to the cemetery. Just get them out of my office.”

“Of course,” Monique said, and then added quickly, “I’m sure their first question will be when the exhumation is scheduled for.”

There was a pregnant pause on the other end and Monique bit her lip to keep from breaking it.

“Can you have everything on your end ready to go by this Friday?” Mayor Silva asked.

“Yes,” Monique declared excitedly. “We are ready to go.”

“Good,” Mayor Silva replied. “Then you can tell them Friday. Have them all come back and cover the event.”

The call ended and Monique all but leaped into the air as she celebrated. She then hurriedly got dressed and headed over to City Hall. The mayor hadn’t been lying when he said there was a whole slew of reporters there. They had all heard about the fundraiser and the story of Adelaide and Bernard and had been sent to get the story. This wouldn’t be front page material, Monique knew, but that didn’t matter. Just this bit of exposure had been enough to tip the scale. Monique spent the morning answering questions and leading the reporters through the cemetery to show them where Adelaide and Bernard were buried.

The next couple days were a flurry of activity. She scheduled to have the new grave dug and the old one opened. She picked out the new coffin for Bernard’s remains to be placed into since there likely wouldn’t be much remaining of his original coffin. Monique even managed to get a new headstone made for them since their original ones were in such poor condition.

It was all such a mad dash to get everything done that it was with some surprise that Monique found herself standing beside the freshly covered grave, Bernard and Adelaide finally resting side by side. The crowds that had come for the event were gone and it was quiet in the early evening, the sun just beginning to set. The Autumn chill only just apparent as the day waned and a few leaves were gathered on the ground.

That winter, Monique made sure to come by after the first snow. She wasn’t sure what to expect but she wanted to be there all the same. As she reached their plot, she was greeted by two pairs of footprints in the newly fallen snow. These, however, did not last throughout the winter. After that first snow, it seemed, they began to fade like any other set of footprints would. Even though Monique came by frequently, the footprints did not refresh themselves and over time they were eventually swallowed up beneath the passing of the season.

In the end, she understood. They did not need to wait for one another any longer but had stayed to express their thanks for what Monique had done. Even though the media and others seemed to forget about Adelaide and Bernard after a few days and weeks, Monique continued to think about them for years to come and to wonder about what they were doing now that they were no longer apart.