The Caged Graves (7 page)

“Along with all the settlers who were trying to escape the Indian raiders,” added Annie.

“And none of them ever came out again.” Hattie lowered her voice to a sepulchral tone. “We call that place the Shades of Death now.” Verity shuddered obligingly, and Hattie appeared gratified.

“Well,” Carrie said, “one man came out—with the gold. Silas Clayton.”

“I don't believe it,” Annie replied. “His descendants live here still, and they're as poor as dirt.”

“Because the army caught up with him a few years later and shot him for desertion,” Harriet retorted. “And no one ever found where he hid the gold.”

Carrie turned to Verity again. “Over the years there've been stories of gold coins turning up. Boys—and grown men, too—have been searching the swamp for almost a century, looking for the lost payroll.”

“No one ever found it, though,” said Annie.

“As far as we know,” murmured Hattie slyly.

Hattie and Carrie burst into giggles, and Annie swatted them both with her fan. Verity looked back and forth among the three of them, smiling. “I would like very much to share the joke.”

“It's not a joke,” Annie said, “only a silly rumor.”

“I'm sorry, Verity,” Carrie said. “It's just that your father and your uncle were known to be ardent treasure hunters when they were younger.”

“My father?”

Annie nodded regretfully. “He spent half his youth trudging through the swamp looking for that payroll.”

“Well, boys will be boys,” Verity murmured. It did sound like the kind of thing her uncle would do. But her father . . . ?

“Very true. Every inch of that swamp has probably been searched by now.” Carrie looked at Verity from beneath coyly lowered lashes. “Some people say the lost treasure isn't really all that lost.”

 

When the sisters were ready to depart, they hugged Verity affectionately, as if she were already a member of their family. Annie, in particular, held her close and kissed her cheek. “I remember your mother as if it were yesterday,” she said unexpectedly, glancing at the portrait of Sarah Ann Boone. “I was only fourteen when she died, and I was brokenhearted.”

With effort, Verity managed to bite back her questions.
What was she like? Why was she buried that way? What had she done?
She couldn't ask Nate's sisters questions like that on their first meeting. Instead, she thanked Annie for her kind words.

The eldest McClure sister fluffed Verity's curls fondly. “I remember you, too, when you were a baby. Such a beautiful, golden-haired angel! How I loved to come down here and hold you! There were nothing but dark-haired scamps at my house.”

“She means us,” exclaimed Carrie, putting an arm around Hattie's waist. “Dark-haired scamps!”

Verity laughed. She wished her meeting with Nate had gone half as well as this one had. Still, if she could get along with the sisters, she ought to be able to rectify her gauche mistakes with Nate.

On Friday.

 

Late that evening, Verity heard a loud thumping outside her room. She rose from the chair at the dressing table where she'd been composing a letter to Polly and went out to the second floor hallway.

The narrow door between her father's room and her own, which led to the attic stairs, stood open. She poked her head into the cramped, boxed-in space and discovered her father easing a large wooden trunk down the steep, curved staircase. Verity went to help him, grabbing a worn leather handle. It was heavy, and her father called out gruffly, “Watch yourself, child!”

Beulah peeked around the doorway of her room at the end of the hall. She crossed her arms and watched them, her nut-brown face disapproving. After they had managed to get the thing down without injury, she disappeared back into her room.

Verity blew dust off the trunk. “What is this?” she asked. Briefly, she thought of Revolutionary War treasure, but her father didn't seem like the sort of man who would hide a fortune in gold coins in his attic.

Ransloe Boone cleared his throat awkwardly. “I'm ashamed you had to come across your mother's grave by accident,” he said. “And I'm sorry you know so little about her. I'd like to make that up to you, if I can.”

Leaning over, he briskly unbuckled the leather straps on the trunk, then swung open the lid. Dresses, handkerchiefs, bonnets, little wooden boxes, sachets, and bottles of toiletry items filled the trunk. Verity realized she was looking at her mother's possessions.

“There's more upstairs,” her father said. “Dress patterns and fabric and books. Boxes she stored away over the years. You can have anything of hers you want.”

He dragged the trunk into Verity's room and looked around while she dusted it off. “Getting crowded in here,” he remarked.

“My trunks can go to the attic,” Verity said. “I'll have everything I need out of them by tomorrow morning. Thank you, Father. This is a wonderful gift.” She hesitated. Her mother's trunk served as an apology, but an actual conversation would make a better one. “I did not mean to accuse you yesterday. I only wanted to know—”

Ransloe Boone backed away, his expression ending their discussion like a shutter closing off a window. “You'll have to trust me, Verity,” he said gruffly. “I did the best for her I could under difficult circumstances.” Then, with a muttered “Good night,” he left and pulled the door shut behind him.

Verity was drawn first to the collection of boxes inside the trunk. Most were made of wood, varying from the size of a prayer book to an egg, but one was inlaid with mother-of-pearl and another was made of silver and had a felt lining. Verity sat down on the floor and opened them all with a sense of awe. Some held pins; one held sewing supplies. The box with the pearl inlay held a stack of calling cards imprinted with her mother's name:
Mrs. Ransloe Boone.
In the silver box she discovered a cache of photographs.

One of the first to catch her eye was a portrait of a very young and surprisingly handsome Ransloe Boone. In another photograph she recognized Maryett Gaines, seated with a sleeping baby on her lap who was most likely Polly.
Ransloe's cousins,
someone—probably Sarah Ann—had written on the back.

In the next photograph to come out of the box she recognized Uncle John, but the girl with him in the picture surprised her. She'd thought her mother, Sarah Ann, was lovely, but this young woman possessed an astonishing otherworldly beauty.
Asenath and John
—Verity knew it even before she saw the back. Now she understood the dreamy look that had come over her uncle's face when she'd mentioned his first wife, and she felt a pang of sympathy for Aunt Clara. Asenath looked like a princess in a fairy-tale book. The wide-set eyes in her heart-shaped face must have been the lightest blue. Her fair hair, completely colorless in the photograph, was worn in loops and loops of braids that hung down over both her shoulders. Even her dress was white.

She wondered if Liza Thomas had ever seen a picture of Asenath. The girl in this photograph couldn't have been a witch.

VERITY PLANNED on her second visit to the cemetery being more productive than her first. She went armed with a hand trowel and two baskets full of forget-me-nots and ivy from Aunt Clara's garden. When she knelt to arrange the plants, however, she noticed that the stone with her mother's initials lay upside down inside the cage. Puzzled at first, Verity concluded that someone had pried it up and turned it over, perhaps by inserting a crowbar through the latticework.

Shocked and angry, she looked around—at the cemetery, the woods, up the road—as if the culprit might still be lurking nearby. When her eyes landed on the minister's house across the road, she decided the time was right to pay a visit.

Reverend White, a rabbity man of about forty years, welcomed her readily enough—at least until he learned what she wanted. “Move the graves?” he said incredulously.

“No.” Verity sighed. He hadn't been listening. “Enlarge the cemetery. Simply rebuild one end of the wall around those two graves and have the ground consecrated.”

The minister shook his head in a worried way. “I don't think that's possible. Our congregation has been saving to build a new church. I wouldn't want to divert funds to some lesser matter now.”

“It's not a lesser matter to me,” Verity snapped. Then she forced herself to smile politely. Aunt Maryett had always cautioned her about flies and honey. “The current placement of the graves must be an embarrassment to you, Reverend. Surely you'd like to see it rectified? Why were my mother and aunt buried off the grounds in the first place?”

“It was before my time here.”

“But surely you must know!”

“My wife grew up in town,” he conceded. “She said there were accusations the women engaged in heathen practices. I don't know if there was any proof.”

“Then there's no obstacle to rebuilding the cemetery wall around them,” Verity concluded. “They cannot remain where they are, Reverend! It's shameful. Why, someone even knocked over the stone inside my mother's . . .” She hesitated, not wanting to use the word
cage.

“Again?” He sighed. Verity looked at him aghast. “It's the iron cages. People seem to believe they're protecting something valuable.”

“Like treasure?” Now it was the minister's turn to look startled, and Verity smiled grimly. “I've been in Catawissa only three days, and I've already heard about that payroll twice. Who would have hidden it under a gravestone?” Her eyes widened as she remembered what Nate's sisters had said about treasure hunters. “
My father?
That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.”

“It is indeed.”

“Then we are in agreement you'll move the stone wall?” Verity stood up and smoothed her skirt.

The minister stammered and finally allowed that he would “give the matter serious consideration.”

Verity eyed him shrewdly. If he thought he could put her off with vague promises, he didn't know whom he was dealing with. “Who has the keys to the locks on those cages?” she asked.

“Why, the groundskeeper does.”

“I want the keys. I'll tend those graves myself from now on.” Verity smiled politely. “I expect I'll be visiting quite often until things are put right.”

 

The urgent knocking on the front door came late at night, but Verity was lying awake anyway—her mind flitting between the party the next day and the difficulties with her mother's grave. Lighting a candle, she went to the window and looked down. Someone with a lantern stood on the porch.

At this time of night it could hardly be good news.

Throwing a shawl over her nightdress, she hurried down the stairs, rapping on her father's door to rouse him as she passed.

When Verity opened the front door, Clara Thomas held up the lantern. “Aunt Clara!” Verity exclaimed. “What's wrong?”

“Is someone hurt or sick?” Ransloe Boone asked, half stumbling down the steps, befuddled with sleep. From the top of the stairs Beulah peered down at them.

“Yes, but not at my house,” Aunt Clara replied. She turned her gaze on Verity. “Have you ever attended a birth?”

A few minutes later, dressed in an old frock, Verity dashed out of the house and met Aunt Clara at her horse and trap. She had attended two births. The delivery of Aunt Maryett's sixth child, when Verity was fifteen, had been quick and simple. But the other—the lying-in of a woman who lived across the street in Worcester—had taken three days. The baby had not survived, and a week later the mother had died of childbed fever.

“Who is it?” she asked as her aunt urged the horse forward.

“Cissy Clayton.” When Verity shook her head, Aunt Clara cast her a sidelong glance. “You haven't met the Claytons yet? Well, prepare yourself. They're not the cream of Catawissa society. Cissy must be in a bad way, or they would not have summoned help. I thought I might need an extra pair of hands, and Liza's no good for this. She hasn't got the stomach for it.”

The horse and trap took them past the church and parallel to the river. Her aunt directed the horse into the woods, where the road grew even more narrow and rough. The road ended at a ramshackle one-story house.

With Verity at her heels, Aunt Clara marched up and opened the front door without knocking. Inside, a thin woman with hunched shoulders and greasy hair wrung her hands at the sight of them. “Eli didn't want me to send for you, Clara. But it's been a day and a half . . .”

“That's too long, Idella,” Aunt Clara chided.

Verity looked around, trying to hide her distaste. The house reeked of sour milk, unwashed bodies, and liquor. Despite the lateness of the hour, there were children still awake, romping with their dogs amid broken-down furniture. None of them—dogs, children, or furniture—looked as if they'd ever been washed.

The downtrodden woman led them to another room, where the expectant mother—a girl not much older than Verity—lay. She was obviously too tired and weak to scream anymore; each new labor pain left her rigid and helpless. Verity eyed her with worry. She was nothing but skin and bones, her eyes hollowed, her light-brown hair stringy with sweat and tears. The sheets of the bed were fouled, and the stench was unbearable.

“The baby's breech,” Aunt Clara proclaimed after a brief examination.

The girl's father hovered in the room like a vulture, his eyes narrow with suspicion and resentment. He was perhaps sixty years of age, reeking of whisky and clothes that might never have seen water. “Meddlesome woman,” he muttered, and it was unclear whether he meant his wife or Clara Thomas.

“Bring me a bucket of fresh water,” Aunt Clara ordered him, then turned to the wife. “Put a pot on to boil and bring me a cup for brewing tea.”

Once they'd left the room—the man mumbling darkly under his breath—Verity's aunt bent over the pregnant girl and plucked a small cloth bag from around her neck, snapping the string that held it there.