Cook brought a book over to her and put it on the table.“You might find this fun, since you have so many ancestors in Plymouth.” It was a reserve-only volume called Burial Hill in the 1990s—Plymouth, Massachusetts: A six-year cemetery mapping project with descriptions, conditions, and some photographs. Hester smiled to herself. Her nerdiness must have been showing.There was an index of names in the back. She looked up Nellie Burroughs and Grace Keep and discovered that they had both been laid to rest in Burial Hill. She drew a crude map for herself on a scrap of paper so she could visit the graves and clapped the volume shut.On an inspiration she said to Ms. Cook, “Do you know if the library has any books about tales of sea folk in Plymouth Bay?” If she was going to go to the graveyard anyway, she thought, she’d like to pop into the church and see if that kooky old pastor was there.“There are mermaid books in the children’s section, of course.”“Mm … not fairy tales, but something historical, like a nonfiction account of sea creatures that local fishermen have claimed to see over the years.
