The Gravekeeper

"A man can't hear the dead while his ears are still full of the living's noise."

Thirty-eight-year-old Adam knows the living world is an exhausting theater production. Before founding his own commercial IT company, he spent over a decade climbing utility poles and pulling cable through the attics of suburban Texas homes and Westlake mansions-seeing firsthand the secrets and quiet misery hidden behind freshly painted front doors.

Now the evening caretaker of sixteen-acre Oakridge Cemetery in the Texas Hill Country, Adam has built a sacred fortress of second chances in Jarrell with his wife, Rose, and their two-year-old daughter, Scarlett. Yet beyond his driveway, old wounds still press against his chest: a twenty-seven-year family exile sparked by a childhood misunderstanding in Huntsville; the suicide of his estranged older sister, whose ashes were coldly packed away in a closet box; and the heartbreaking eight-month silence of his sixteen-year-old firstborn daughter, Katherine.

Then, on a cool October evening as Adam prepares to padlock the nineteenth-century iron gates of Oakridge, the dead begin to speak.

Over five weeks, Adam is visited by five spirits buried between 1894 and 2014 whose unfinished earthly business mirrors his own wounds-helping him unearth the buried truth while keeping the porch light burning for his oldest daughter to find her way home.