One day, early in January, we drove over to Exeter to visit a grave: Mercy L. Brown, who became infamous after her death from tuberculosis in 1892. Neighbors suspected she was a vampire who was staying alive in her casket by sucking the blood of other family members. This was the theory. They dug her up to check, and because she wasn’t as decomposed as she should have been, they cut out her heart and burned it and fed the ashes to her sick brother. It did not help him. Mercy’s grave is in the cemetery behind Chestnut Hill Baptist Church on Route 102. You walk down a short dirt track, and it’s on the left under some sort of evergreen tree. Her stone is regularly decorated by visitors, just like Jim Morrison’s gravesite in Paris. We found it piled with dozens of pebbles, shells, and coins. The stone itself, a slab of slowly eroding limestone, is bolted into the ground with an iron collar, apparently to prevent anyone from stealing it. One imagines how that might happen. I left a penny. We stopped at the public library, which has a special box placed outside the front door for recycling flags. Then we had lunch down on Nooseneck Road at the Middle of Nowhere Diner, where the baked apples side dish is delicious and highly recommended.