Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1)

by Hollyday, Thomas

Maggie said, “We think that some of the slaves were on half decks built up over the main deck of the hold. When the fire occurred the half decks and their occupants tumbled down upon the slaves chained below. That would explain the jumbled bones that they are finding. They have found more than fifty sets of remains so far, some chained directly to the large ring bolts in the flooring.”

  “This morning we heard that there is interest in forming a local group to operate this site as a monument,” said the Pastor. “People like Birdey Pond want to serve as board members.”

  “That would be wonderful,” said Maggie.

  “There will be a need for some good archaeologists to be on the staff.”

  The telephone crackled. “I’ve found her,” said Thomas. “It’s a strange story. Got a few minutes?”

  “Go ahead,” said Frank.

  “The citation on this story is from a probate case argued in London in 1693. The lawyers for the litigant were arguing that a Richard Terment, a colonist in Maryland, had the complete rights to the fortune of his brother Henry Terment, who had been lost at sea on a voyage to West Africa and Maryland. The case was not contested. Apparently these brothers were the only family who had any right to the estate. It was a very large estate for that time. According to the summary of the case, this Henry Terment had been a merchant, mostly in Africa, and had made a fortune in the slave trade to the Caribbean. He had a mansion located on the Thames River and a country estate in Kent as well as his own ship, the Adam and Eve.

  “Richard Terment was in Maryland at the time of the case. He had a plantation in Maryland, a small plantation apparently. His brother Henry had a substantially larger land holding next to Richard. Henry owned a sizable number of slaves and indentured servants who worked for the brother Richard. All this land was on the Eastern Shore of Maryland near a port called Sunday. The records call it a parish or church town. I assume this must be one of the early names for River Sunday.

  “Henry had an agent in Whydah which was a slave port in West Africa. That agent’s records state that he purchased a substantial quantity of cowrie shells from London, specially imported from India, to engage in trading in Africa.

  “One thing I noticed immediately, Frank, that was odd about this Terment. He owned the ship completely in his own name. Usually these trader merchants would own the ships in shares, several merchants to a ship. Then if the ship was lost their mutual ownership acted like a kind of insurance to share the risk and the loss. In his case he owned the ship all by himself. I expect he was so sure of his success he wanted to keep all the profits for himself.

  “Here’s some details about the ship itself. The Adam and Eve was a merchantman, a little under a hundred feet between perpendiculars, sternpost to bow stem. It had a figurehead of two naked figures embracing each other. It had galleries on its stern, apparently quite fancy because Henry traveled with the ship as its captain. It was ship rigged which meant that it had three masts.

  “In the agent’s records there is a lot of inventory information. In a case like this there are always debts and even though he owned the ship some of the cargo was financed. So the court demanded to know how much was lost so the creditors could be satisfied. For example there were ten guns on the ship, iron guns, twelve pounder semi culverins which Henry had purchased with some of the cost being paid on the return of the ship to London. In case you are wondering, Frank, these traders carried a lot of guns because of the pirates who used to raid the shipping lanes down through the Atlantic passage into Africa and then in the Caribbean and Chesapeake areas.”

  “Captain Terment sailed to Africa, purchased slaves from his agent and was then bound for Maryland. The agent’s records show what he bought and when he left the Slave Coast. The court also had a document from Richard’s lawyer in Maryland stating that Henry never made it to Maryland. On the basis of this, the court determined that Captain Henry Terment and the Adam and Eve went down in a storm with all hands and the slave cargo being lost.

  “In the court case Richard Terment of Maryland claimed all of Henry’s estate as the surviving heir. There was no will. Since there was no other family, the estate was totaled and Richard got himself a very large estate. “

  Frank said, “We have the wreck of the Adam and Eve here in Maryland at a spot where part of Richard Terment’s Maryland plantation was located at the time of the death of his brother. The Adam and Eve did not sink in the ocean. It sank here in Maryland.”

  “Seems that way. Oldest motive there is, money,” chuckled Thomas.

  “Ask your friend about the giant?” interrupted Maggie.

  “Here’s another mystery, Thomas. One of the skeletons in the wreck was a huge man. Could you run a search on persons in the records who might have been of great size?”

  “There’s a few newspapers on the computer. The early journals rarely mention names.”

  “Do me a favor. Try a key words like giant and Terment and tie it to the time of the ship.”

  “Hang on.” After a few minutes, Thomas came back on.

  “You won’t believe this,” he said. “Your giant is Captain Henry Terment.”

  “He says the giant is the Terment who was lost,” said Frank to Maggie and the Pastor.

  “It’s an obituary in the London newspaper. The kind of thing they write after a major hanging. Only this is for a man they call the “Tormentor.” I’ll read you the excerpt.

  “Today word reached London that the “Tormentor” is lost at sea. This man, also known as Henry Terment, was notably the largest man in civilization, a brute of a person in physical size and mind, surrounded always with his portable army of strong, vicious men. None can forget his long braided hair. None can forget the sharp jeweled cutlass he wore with such impertinence. None of us who had the misfortune to be in his presence can fail to remember the terror, the fear of a disagreement with him which had already cost the lives of twenty good and brave men in duels and other private misfortunes. Here was the terror of a man the King himself could not keep arrested because Terment’s power of force and money was so great. This was the man who claimed he could ‘torment gold.’ The Good Lord Himself has intervened and proved this man dead at sea in his last pursuit of more wealth.”

  Frank repeated the story sentence by sentence as Thomas read it to him. After Frank hung up he looked at Maggie and the Pastor.

  “Jake’s father used that phrase, ‘torment gold’,” said Frank. “Jake told me that.”

  “Brother kills brother. One of the oldest crimes in the Bible.” The Pastor looked thoughtful. “Back up here on the Nanticoke, Richard could have come down to the ship by himself. He could have got them all drinking and drugged them somehow. It would have been easy then to lock them in the ship and to set it afire. There would have been no witnesses. Later on slaves and indentured servants could have been brought in to cover the wreckage with soil. Any kind of explanation could have been used and in those days, people kept their mouths shut for fear of being killed.”

  “It’s damn close to the perfect murder,” said Frank. “If it had not been for the digging up of this so called graveyard, old Richard would never have been found out.”

  “So what do we do with a three hundred year old murder case?”

  “We can be pretty sure from that health examiner that no one in this town will have any interest.”

  The three of them laughed.

  “We can document it, that’s about all,” said Maggie.

  “So that leaves the question,” said Frank. “How much did Jake actually know about what was out there in that marsh?”

  “He knew,” said the Pastor. “You mentioned they both knew about ‘tormenting gold’.”

  “We’ll never be sure,” said Frank. “If he did know, Jake thought the secret was safe. He probably didn’t worry about the river rising, the soil erosion exposing the wreck. He knew he could quietly fill in the marsh and plant a cornfield. He could get rid of any artifacts,” continued the Pastor. “What he did not count
on was that he had let the bridge fall apart over the years and had to fix it. That got him in a bind about this little marsh property. There was no other land on which to build the bridge supports.”

  The Pastor smiled. “The tide water had washed out more soil than Jake realized. That’s how come the wreck got found by that bulldozer, ‘cause it was so close to the surface.”

  Maggie added, “Then, you found the clues and, because you were more honest than Jake had calculated, you couldn’t quit, Frank. All this put Jake in a position where he became desperate.”

  The Pastor smiled. “Even more desperate because Jake couldn’t let that mansion be lost. Peachblossom was his family heritage. That manor house was probably the only thing Jake cared about all his life. That’s where you got to understand people like the Terments.”

  “I got this feeling he looked on this as a duty,” said Frank.

  “Yes,” said Maggie. “Maybe even more so because of the rumors about him that his real father was not a Terment. Maybe that led him to assert himself as the savior of the family.”

  The Pastor said, “Some of the demonstrators stretched that orange banner on the monument out in the harbor. The word ‘Butterfly’ in big black letters can be seen from shore.”

  Frank looked at Maggie.

  “You could write this,” she smiled. “The dead slaves get new life. Jake, who in an ironic way, was also a slave, a slave to his family, gets death.”

  “Yeah, but what would we have done if Jake hadn’t had the accident?” Frank said.

  The Pastor looked at them. “Sad to say, if he had not had that unfortunate accident, if he had not died, all those people out there would only have been able to slow him and his company for a few hours. Even if you had succeeded in beating him up and chasing him away to stop the bulldozer, all would have been only for a short time. In a few hours Jake would have been back with plenty of lawyers and a lot more green coated guards. Maggie’s boss was on Jake’s side. She wanted to close the site. Without State of Maryland support, all of us would have been forced out of there.”

  “What made the change? His death?”

  “His death allowed the Governor and his people to cater to those demonstrators. There were a lot of votes out there, white and black,” said the Pastor.

  Frank pulled on the brim of his hat. “What about the Union soldier?”

  “Let the story be known,” said the Pastor.

  “Adam and Eve,” Maggie said to herself. “That’s why it’s so hard for most of us to be sorry for Jake.”

  “What?” said Frank.

  “Go back to the Bible,” she smiled. “After Adam and Eve blew the deal in the garden, we all became slaves, each in our own way, and we’re not likely to love whoever we think are our slave masters.”

  Chapter 24

  It was the morning of Heritage Day.

  Hundreds of people were at the funeral. Their cars formed one of the longest lines River Sunday had ever seen for a burial. Old timers said with authority that the only time more people had shown up on the streets was when General Eisenhower came through looking for votes. The Pastor told Frank that Lulu, one of his friends from the old civil rights days who was now the owner of a twenty four hour strip club on the main highway south outside River Sunday, said she and her girls had made more money since yesterday that they had during the peak of last year’s peak summer vacation season. Friends of Jake and his wife were transported from the small River Sunday airport in black limousines. The cars stopped at the small Episcopal church. It was the same church from which Jake’s father had been buried. Many of the friends were celebrities themselves. They were richly dressed and their faces showed a common and well-practiced expression of grief.

  Maggie observed that she would have believed their sorrow was truly felt if only there had been some difference among their expressions.

  “You expected an occasional tear,” said Frank.

  “Yes,” she said, “Or a sob or two.”

  Those not invited to the ceremony at the church, especially the hundreds of tourists visiting the harbor for Heritage Day, stood on the sidewalk outside. One visitor from Texas remarked casually that he was delighted he could see, if not a wedding of a celebrity, at least a funeral. Frank and Maggie watched from her replacement State of Maryland sedan. Some of the crowd on the street near them, especially the teenagers, they recognized as members of the crowd at the fire. Many of the local onlookers were crying as if a close relative had died.

  “They thought of Jake as their royalty,” said Maggie.

  Clouds had come up and the day had a strange chill, even in the summer humidity. The procession came out of the church. The line of cars moved slowly under the Heritage Day banners stretched across Strand Street. Maggie pulled her car into the end of the line. State government officials ordered by the Governor to attend at the gravesite were in the line in chauffeured black state cars, much larger than Maggie’s sedan. The Governor had stated that he was unavoidably detained. The mayor had urged a short church ceremony so that the Baltimore television crew would have more time to film the outside procession going through the tourist area of the town. Out in the harbor an offshore breeze chased large swells out to the Chesapeake Bay where a distant roll of black sky foretold storms. Jake’s white yacht, its bow showing scar marks from the explosion, pitched with the waves, rising and falling without purpose or direction.

  The television cameras, set up in front of the ruined church just over the old bridge, were broadcasting live as the cars rumbled onto the island. People throughout Maryland and across the United States saw the slow limousines filled with mourners pass by, headlights proclaiming the night of death. The television commentators spoke repetitively the keynotes of Jake’s audiovisual obituary, his great real estate wealth, his glittering marriage to Serena, his antique house on Allingham Island. They reported nothing about the tall concrete piers thrusting up in the background behind the limousines. Nor did they mention the collapsed crane in the river, oil still leaking. The cameras were set high and did not photograph the strips of bullet cracked concrete and the scorches from machine gun tracers on the walls of the ruined church. No one mentioned the blackened trees in the distance where the fire at the farm house had burned leaves and treetops.

  Other expertly placed cameras captured the cars moving slowly into the ancient graveyard. They panned over the gravestones, televising the names of generations of Terments who lay buried under the ivy and lingered at the Admiral’s grave tracing the deep carved Confederate flag, its stone lines filled with the ever-present cemetery moss, the cannonballs at its foot. They caught the dim light of the cloudy sky as it bounced off leaves of the heavy bending trees. If the moisture of the rich vegetation and ancient burying place could be transferred to film, the photographers accomplished this.

  Frank and Maggie stood behind the other attendees, barely able to see the grave as the minister said last words. The white preacher had been told moments before to shorten his speech still further because the television coverage requested more linkup time for the interview with Jake’s wife.

  Billy led the other pallbearers as the coffin was rolled to the gravesite. Now the television cameras turned to the minister.

  “He lost his life,” quickly intoned this black suited man, trying to accomplish what perhaps was the greatest speech of his church career as he continued speaking, “doing what he cared about most, serving his people, his family, his land. He lost his life but he won our hearts as only a man of principle can do. Jake Terment will be remembered by all who knew him. He will not be forgotten. Here was a man who cared about homes for the people and devoted his life to sheltering his neighbors. Only the truly big man can give so graciously to the small man.”

  Frank stepped out of the way as the television reporters began interviewing the guests. He watched as a very old woman with red dyed hair came unnoticed up to the gravesite as the others were moving away. She stood looking at the grave for a few moments, tear
s coming from her wrinkled eyes. Then, as she slowly stepped away, a trumpet began playing “Maryland My Maryland,” the song Frank recognized from his first day in River Sunday.

  As the words traveled over the other graves, Frank and Maggie turned to leave. He wanted to get some more work done at the site. There was an interview with Jake’s wife at the entry to the graveyard, near a pair of concrete and stone posts and a broken iron gate that was pulled back to the side in the uncut grass. Frank stopped nearby with Maggie and listened.

  “I knew this was a mistake,” Serena sobbed to the television interviewer. She was the same reporter who had interviewed Maggie. Serena was dressed in a loose fitting pantsuit and her right arm was in a sling.

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Terment,” the reporter sympathized.

  She looked up from her handkerchief. “Please use the name Serena. Jake would have wanted it that way. He said it was better for my pictures.”

  “Serena, is it true that you had a premonition of harm coming to your husband? Did you try to warn him?”

  “Jake never listened to me. I did tell him not to come to this place. I told him he belongs to the world, not to this island where he was born. I tried to keep him away.”

  “What did he say when you tried to stop him?”

  Then Serena stared at the interviewer for several moments. The reporter moved the microphone in an attempt to get her to talk. “We’re on the air. There’s no time. Can you tell us?”

  “He said we had to make this trip. He wanted to announce here in his home town that we are expecting our first child.”

  “You’re pregnant.” The reporter smiled broadly.

  “She’s got a scoop and she knows it. She smells pay bonuses,” whispered Frank to Maggie.

  “It’s all wrong now,” Serena said, wiping her eyes. “Now he’s dead. I don’t know what he wants me to do.”

  “You can name the baby after him. He was a great man.”

  She held her sore arm. “We know it will be a boy. Jake wanted the name to be Henry. Now I must go.”