Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1)

by Hollyday, Thomas

  Jake was standing in the middle of the road with two of the policemen. As Frank got closer to them, he recognized the chief of police.

  “What happened here, Frank?” asked Jake, his southern smile broad on his face.

  “We don’t know, Jake. There was some guy running away when the fire started.”

  “You two must have left some light on,” said Jake. “The wire in the house was all frayed, worn out. This place really wasn’t livable. I’m glad you folks were not hurt. I tried to get you to stay in at the Chesapeake Hotel. You can’t blame me.”

  “That’s where I slept, Jake,” said Maggie, staring at him. “Aren’t you at all concerned that we might have been killed? I was lucky. I was out of the house when it started.”

  Jake moved his eyes from her stare.

  “Look at what these people have done to our work,” said Frank.

  “I’m afraid our local people don’t have much regard for holes in the ground, not when there’s a fire to see,” Jake grinned at the police chief who smiled.

  “Our work is ruined,” said Maggie.

  “I can’t worry about that, Maggie. I just lost a house. Seems to me someone could think about that. I just lost my tenant farmer house. Besides, this digging here wasn’t supposed to be permanent. I’ve already given the two of you fair warning that my men will begin bulldozing tomorrow morning. “

  “We planned to work until your machines start.”

  “Well,” said Jake, his voice dictatorial, “I guess your work is really finished.”

  “How can you just let all this happen?” said Frank. “You told me the other day you didn’t want a lot of strangers hanging around. How can you let all these people in here?”

  “Look here, I’m not letting anything happen,” said Jake. “This is my house that just burned down. Somebody tried to blow up my boat. This is my land that you are digging up. Folks know I’m getting all kinds of trouble. They came here to help. That’s the way we are down here in the country. They found my house was on fire and they came to help. Down here in River Sunday this is the way we do things. I’m not about to tell my friends to leave when they have come to help me. You two get yourselves together, get your stuff packed up, because in a few more hours you two are going to be trespassing on my land. If you are not gone by then, I will have to remove you.”

  Jake looked at the chief. “Billy, you see them around here in the morning, you get them off my land. You get something on that old woman too for what she did to my boat.”

  “We’ll take care of it, Jake,” said Billy. “Come on, boys,” he waved at the other officers near him. “Let’s get these cars moved so other people can get by.”

  Frank stood with Maggie at the edge of the honeysuckle hedge for a long time. They watched as the rest of the farmhouse collapsed inward, sparks twisting upward into the sky in the white smoke of the dying fire. They saw the fire engine blinker lights switched off one by one as the firemen packed up their equipment and left, the drivers gunning the engines with roars of unmuffled exhausts.

  Chapter 19

  Frank awoke just after dawn. Maggie was still asleep, her body against his on the seat of the truck, her breasts flecked with cinders and exposed in his ill-fitting shirt. They had climbed into the truck, exhausted after the last fireman left almost two hours ago. He smiled at her, sensing a closeness with her, as though they were two comrades who had fought an enemy side by side and survived. He moved his fingers softly against the side of her face. Maggie slowly opened her eyes and smiled at him. She turned and moved closer to him, her eyes closing again.

  He kissed her lips. He wiped a smudge of the soot from the fire that had landed on her nose. Her eyes opened. “Do that again.” This time their lips touched with a passion that surprised them both. When they drew apart, he said, “We’ll have to explore that when this is all over.”

  She smiled. “Yes.”

  “I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things,” he said. It wasn’t just the kiss. He knew that Mello was out of his life forever.

  She touched his lips with her finger. “I know.” Then she said, “You have a little mole on your forehead, right with the freckles.”

  “My Mom used to say it gave me wisdom.”

  “She was right, your Mom. I wish I could have known her.” She smiled as she pulled up the neck of the tee shirt and then looked inside. “There’s room for both of us in here.” She looked around, holding her head just above the steel dashboard. The truck still had its military panel of switches and dials, the stark faces and numbers contrasting with the softness of her hair and face.

  Frank sat up.” We need to get out on the site and see what we can preserve.” He looked through the windshield at the desolation of the burned house.

  “My God,” he said. “Just like Tet was. Everything busted up.”

  She touched his arm.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind that Jake did not care whether he killed us last night,” Frank said slowly. “He wanted to get rid of the artifacts and he didn’t care who got hurt.”

  She looked at him, her eyes asking him what to do.

  “The Pastor’s got the right idea. Only trouble is he’s not here yet. I’ve tried not to take sides but Jake’s forced me. I’ll stand in front of the bulldozer myself. Jake’ll have to run that yellow bulldozer right over me,” said Frank. He climbed down from the truck, his skin and cutoffs coated with sticky bits of black ash.

  Maggie climbed out of the truck. “I’m going to stand there with you,” she said. He took her hand and they walked toward the house. The sky was clear blue, with a hot orange red sun rising big above the tree line and cornfields. Insects buzzed in the morning dew. There was, however, the unpleasant smell of smoke and steam from the wet charred stud wood. Scorched tarpaper hung in long sheets from the exposed frame members of the house. Windows had fallen out on the ground and timbers, bricks and pipes hung without order and with no resemblance to the once weathertight construction.

  Frank’s skin itched from the embedded soil and cinders. His left foot still ached from slipping off the underwater limb last night on the way to the bridge and his side felt bruised where the briars had shredded his underwear. His toes felt the damp soil and the grass that was smashed down from the heavy tires of the fire trucks. Some of the boxwoods had been broken in half by the trucks. The fire engines had left great tracks in the grass where only a few hours ago people had stood with cocktails at Jake’s party.

  He looked toward the site, beyond the remains of the boxwoods. He could see the top of the bulldozer. The crowd had pulled the canopy from the machine. It was upright on the ground, its mounting poles up thrust like a great dead beetle.

  As they got closer to the house, Frank noted the muck that was splattered on what little grass was left, the soil that the heavy tires had brought from the lane with its new ruts and deep potholes full of black water and broken charred timbers. The house itself had fallen inward for the most part, the remains of the roof collapsing with the layers of asphalt shingles spilling into the first floor. Large sections of sodden plaster bent forward from sections of walls, the plaster still held together by fragile electrical wiring and water pipes.

  Maggie’s car was a blackened ruin. Its cloth upholstery still steamed. Broken glass was sprinkled on the ground, tires were flat, and a pair of her shorts and various of her digging tools were scattered on the ground outside the wreck. The grass under the car’s gasoline tank was blackened in a large circle.

  They circled back to the front of the house and started toward the site. Much of the honeysuckle had been torn out of the hedges by catching against the fenders of the fire trucks. The broken vines were dying quickly in the morning sunlight but even with the dank odor of the wet burned wood of the house, there was still a faint smell of the sugar of the honeysuckle.

  Suddenly Frank smelled burning tobacco and looked behind him expecting to see someone standing there with a pipe or cigar. There was no one. Maggie stop
ped and looked at him. The smell was overpowering. He felt like he was choking on the fumes. He reached for his throat. He began to cough. Then the odor disappeared. He looked around again, remembering what the Pastor had said about the tobacco legend.

  “What’s the matter?” she said.

  “That tobacco smell.”

  “You better watch out,” she smiled.

  “There’s not much more can happen to us,” he answered. “I’m going over to the site.”

  “I’ll want to look around the house,” she replied.

  As he approached the site he noticed the sifting pile, the heap of soil that they had run carefully through Maggie’s screen as they excavated it from the various pits. This hill was several feet high and surprisingly untouched by the vandalism. The screen itself had also been left alone.

  A few feet beyond the pile he saw what remained of the excavation. He noticed first that the carefully established marked sections were all destroyed, the twine torn down and the markers pulled out in the rampage of the previous night. The several pits had become one large hole, the carefully measured and staked walls or balks between pit areas, all tumbled in the frenzy of the crowd.

  Then he saw the horror, a sight that made his stomach heave with disgust. He stopped and kneeled in weakness. His eyes moved to the center of the area where the white datum stake had been. There was a great pile of bones and skulls with the skulls stacked on top in grinning frenzy. Sadly, most of the skulls were small in size. He knew that his worst fear, and Maggie’s and the Pastor’s too, that there had been many slave children burned here, was indeed true. The pile stretched from the middle of the wreck area to the edge of the site on the farmhouse side. Towards the road a few boxes were still upturned where the merry makers had apparently sat and tossed the skulls and bones at the pile.

  The site was changed in another way. Much of the frame of the shipwreck was visible. Wood frames strutted above the soil, exposing sections of the ship’s ancient flooring. Rising from the boards were rusty iron rings, coupled to long chains which were entangled with dozens of skeletons, almost all of them children.

  “Maggie,” he called back to her. “It’s beyond belief. The spectators cleared out the loose earth when they were walking on the site. We were proceeding so carefully, so slowly. Their feet hurried up the whole process. In trying to destroy our work, they actually helped bring the wreck out of the ground.”

  He heard her rushing through the bushes from the house. He climbed down quickly into what had become a large rectangular trench. The sides of the trench waved and sloped with the soft earth. In the center of the great pit, the pile of jumbled bones stuck above the ship wreckage like a fat white mast.

  “There must be hundreds of small skulls here,” Maggie said from behind him. She kicked at the soil, trying to punish it.

  He reached back for her hand. She walked forward and squatted beside him.

  “Let me just look at this for a moment,” he said.

  He jumped up and moved toward the bow of the wreck where some boards were showing. He knelt and looked closely at the boards, talking quickly. “We’ve got to study this, and this has to be done right. Help me.” His voice shook as he fought to control himself, the nausea at seeing the remains of the murdered children.

  He spoke carefully, the technical terms helping him to control himself. “First of all I see some ochre colored boards. Below them are a section with boards with tar in between. That tar system we know was a Seventeenth Century way of protecting the hull from worms. The outside board was eaten and the tar stopped the predators from getting at the inner board. The ochre was the color they painted most of these old ships. Made the hull look like strong new oak so pirates would not think the ship was easy to destroy with cannon fire.”

  His knowledgeable fingers traced the board edges. “It’s definitely the British and American style, the bulging beam near the bow like a fish, the stern real narrow.”

  He looked up at her.

  “New York,” she said. “The old merchant ship wreck they found there.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  Frank walked to the stern area and stopped at a board protruding vertically from the earth. “Look at this.”

  Maggie moved to his side.

  “See the little curves to the top of the rudder,” he said. “That means she’s Chesapeake built. I can spot the rudder trim anywhere. Same as the wreck in New York. Let’s look at the bow again.”

  Walking forward again, they kept spotting fragments and showing them with excitement to each other. At the bow there were pieces of wood with carving and what remained of two shapes that might have been some type of figurehead. One shape looked like a hand holding a ball.

  “Those figures. They remind me of something. I’ll think of it,” Maggie said.

  “The carving is all early,” said Frank. “Definitely Seventeenth Century. Nobody could afford this work in the later ships.”

  “Come see what I found at the house,” Maggie said, new energy in her eyes.

  They moved back up toward the wreck of the house, she holding his hand and pulling him along gently, the two of them walking through the remains of the high grass, the insects noisy around them, coming out from hiding after the inferno of the previous night. Maggie led Frank, turning anxiously from time to time, hurrying him along. They reached the remains of the porch and stepped through the ruined black wood into the space where the kitchen floor had been.

  “Careful. Your bare feet. The nails,” said Frank.

  “Seeing those children has made me tough,” she said.

  He followed her into the jungle of broken wood. Her excitement, her impish figure like a wraith, a spectral and physical presence amidst the awful holocaust wreckage, was cheering to Frank.

  “Look at this,” she said.

  “The ship’s bell. I thought it was lost in all that heat,” said Frank

  “Look at it closely,” she said.

  The ship’s bell lay in the midst of the wreckage, several pieces of plaster resting on top of it. He scratched his neck.

  “I see what you mean. The aggregate has been burned off. There’s raw metal left,” he said.

  They bent over the object, no longer survivors, but scientists and scholars again.

  “It’s got some letters on it,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, excitement in her eyes.

  “Let me move some of this wood.” He pulled at one of the fallen studs that was resting on the bell. As he shifted it, a piece of plaster fell backward, crashing into the rubble with a huge cloud of black soot. Maggie and Frank were both showered with some of the gray and black fire dust.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yes,” he answered, impatiently brushing off the clinging flotsam. They moved closer to the bell. The metal was clear on all sides of the object.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Frank.

  “Look at the scrollwork up at the top where the bell hanger is.”

  “This was very expensive to cast,” said Frank. He tipped the bell upward. “Still pretty heavy.”

  Maggie leaned over and pulled on the object with Frank. They tipped it further and Maggie got her hand around the bottom lip of the bell.

  “There’s conglomerate inside. Can you get your hand around it to help me lift it?” Maggie said. She was bent well over, her feet close to the lip of the object.

  “Watch out for your toes,” said Frank.

  “You too,” she said.

  Frank stepped ahead, his right foot along the opposite side of the object, his left hand bracing himself against the ruined timbers of the old kitchen wall.

  “OK. I’ve got it,” he said.

  They lifted the bell and moved it, walking backward out of the broken timbers. Then they stood on a patch of scorched grass, the bell on the ground between them.

  “Let’s get it over to the truck in case this building collapses any more,” said Frank.

  Fran
k placed a remnant of porch flooring under the bell and they skidded the object along the ground to the truck. He opened the tailgate and cleared a small space near the hoist.

  “Do you think we can lift it up or do we need the hoist?” asked Maggie.

  “Let’s try it. One, two, three,” Frank counted off and they hefted the object up on the truck.

  “It must be a couple hundred pounds at least.”

  “It’s heavy all right,” agreed Frank. “Let’s see if we can make out any of the letters.”

  “They are very fancy letters. I think that one is an ‘A’ and this one is a small ‘d.’

  “We’ll try a little water on it.” Frank took his shirt and dipped it in a puddle. He looked at Maggie. “We’re supposed to use a clean special conservator’s cloth.”

  “I’m sure the association of antique metal conservators will not mind this one infraction,” Maggie smiled.

  As he wiped the surface the letters started to come out more clearly. “Adam is the first word. Another is Eve. Underneath there is another word, the port I think. London. I’m sure it’s London.”

  “I think you’re right. Adam and Eve, London. No date. We can guess at that. Probably early Eighteenth Century or late Seventeenth judging for the design of the bell.”

  She stopped talking. Her face lit up. “That’s it. Those figures on the ship bow. The one holding a ball. It was Adam and Eve with the woman holding the apple.”

  Frank looked at her, his eyes wide.

  “What?” she said.

  “The old blind preacher, remember that Mr. Johnson described. Maybe it was the ship that he was referring to.”

  She realized what he was saying. “All those years of living in fear,” she said. “Some of the Terment slaves must have seen the fire. Their code for the horror, for the dead children, was Adam and Eve.”

  There was a sound of a tool hitting a sheet of steel. “What was that noise?” he said. The metallic sound clanked again behind the boxwoods.

  “Let’s take a look.”

  A small yellow truck had arrived quietly and was parked near the large bulldozer. The broken canopy from the tractor was already loaded in the back of the truck.