The bridal sedan chair had been sitting before the sharp bend on K317 for three years. Of the three cranes brought in, one snapped a cable that sliced open the driver's arm, one had its winch start smoking, and one tipped up at the front, forcing its driver to jump clear. Old Zhou from the highway maintenance department wrote eight reports, but couldn't move it. When Chen Yan arrived, he said just two words: "Let's take a look." He took off his coat, braced his hands against the lifting bar, and put his shoulder, waist, and knees into it. The upward heave he'd trained for seventeen years raised the sedan chair three inches. Beneath it lay an old stone platform, covered by asphalt for thirty years. When he lifted the curtain, the cabin was empty, but the padding showed gray impressions of a distinct back and two legs. Old Zhou said he'd lifted the curtain three years ago and there had been no marks then. Just afterward, an old voice like dry paper rubbing together sounded in Chen Yan's ear: "Where are you headed?" He pulled out an album containing more than 230 photos of ruined temples. There hadn't been a temple within five miles of K317, but a bulldozer had demolished a small shrine thirty years earlier. Three white incense sticks, unlit and cold, bent into a hook in his palm, pointing east-northeast. Old Zhou pressed him: "What does this line of work actually depend on?" Chen Yan said, "On remembering whose family lost someone where, and whose family made offerings where." Old Zhou shone his light on the ring of chisel marks along the stone edge beneath the sedan chair. He crouched there and didn't get up for a long time. Chen Yan had just put his coat back on when the notebook in his pocket moved by itself.
