by E. A. House
“We still don’t have an eyewitness account of the sinking of that ship,” Chris said, “and I’m pretty sure Maddison told her dad everything she suspected about what we’ve been doing and is going to fill him in on everything we told her today.”
“Yes,” Carrie said slowly. “But is that going to be such a bad thing? Because now we don’t have to pretend not to know about the letter she left us. And Dr. McRae might even be trying to help us—he did check who else had been looking for that parish register. Honestly, none of us would have thought to do that.”
“I . . . just don’t know,” Chris said finally. He tried to imagine perfectly harmless reasons for all of Dr. McRae’s actions since they’d met, and started to get a headache. “He does know a lot about old Spanish mission churches,” Chris admitted.
“That’s what he did his dissertation on,” Carrie said immediately, as though that were a fact any average person would know. “I deal with suspicion by researching people!” she said in defense when Chris stared at her incredulously.
“I guess there are worse ways of dealing with suspicion,” he said. Being suspicious on principle was a perfectly good coping method, as far as Chris was concerned, but Carrie just sighed at him in response.
“We might be able to get his help finding the Santa Maria mission if we ask nicely and avoid glaring at him,” Carrie pointed out. “So you need to try not to be the most obviously suspicious person on the planet next time you see him,” she finished.
“Why can’t we just ask Professor Griffin?” Chris moaned.
“Because he doesn’t know a thing about archeology unless it’s under at least a foot of water?” Carrie suggested. Professor Griffin was usually more interested in the geology under the archeology, and he’d admit as much to anyone who listened, which was a constant source of amusement for his students and a point of ongoing despair for his historian and archeology colleagues.
“Okay, true. But he has a boat,” Chris said.
“We don’t know that Dr. McRae doesn’t have a boat,” Carrie pointed out. “Or that we’re even going to need a boat. But yeah, I’ve been wondering if it might be a good idea to tell Professor Griffin what we’re up to. I’m just not sure how to bring it up in a way that won’t immediately send him to Aunt—our parents.”
Chris knew she had been about to say “immediately send him to Aunt Elsie” because that was the person Professor Griffin told if Chris and Carrie were being what he referred to as “bewildering.” Chris had been thinking of her too.
“He could still tell the whole thing to Aunt Elsie,” Chris said. “Except he thinks mediums are a waste of space and that ghosts are figments of our collective unconscious, so there’s no way for him to contact the dead. Do you think he’d like Maddison?”
“Well, he tolerates you,” Carrie said, and they commenced shooting rubber bands at each other until Carrie’s mom poked her head in the room and announced that it was time for people with sprained ankles to hobble out to the car and go home.
Carrie and Maddison went radio silent on Saturday because, Chris discovered over a series of frantic texts from Carrie early Saturday morning, they had been invited to a summer tea by Mrs. Hadler. Chris couldn’t imagine Mrs. Hadler doing anything as human as eating, unless she was eating the bones of tardy children and drinking tea made from boiled detention slips. He also couldn’t figure out why Carrie sent him twenty angry text messages demanding he tell her where he’d put the lace tablecloth from last Christmas dinner until she sent him a picture of herself wearing it as a shawl, along with her mother’s straw sun hat with a plastic lei wrapped around the band, her locket, and a sundress with added lace frills.
It’s a costume party? he replied to her text, which was the picture along with a comment that she had found the tablecloth in the baking cupboard.
Apparently, Carrie sent him. Mrs. Hadler called me this morning and told me she’d forgotten to mention that they had a Sunday hat contest and to bring a shawl because the church hall gets cold.
That’s . . . nice?
So enthusiastic. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow. Btw, my phone is working fine today, yours?
Fully charged, Chris replied, feeling his amusement at Carrie in a flower-covered hat evaporate. The ghost in the cistern was still a mystery.
Luckily, Chris had a day unexpectedly free, since Carrie and Maddison were occupied. And Chris suspected they were plotting something beyond how to sneak out of the party with extra cupcakes.
So he spent half of the day reading about ghostly manifestations on websites of varying quality and pretending he hadn’t noticed the online applications to the pet store, movie theater, and plant nursery that kept popping up in his inbox. His mom was relentless, but Chris figured he had about a week to stall or find something he could convince her took up too much time for him to hold a job. Searching for buried treasure would probably do it, but his mom was not likely to believe him, since he’d tried using that excuse before with a much less valid treasure map. So Chris avoided thinking about the job applications, and instead got nowhere in his quest to figure out what had been up with the ghost in the cistern.
He hadn’t really talked it over with Carrie or Maddison. Carrie, at least, was probably already well on the way to convincing herself the ghost had been nothing but a trick of the light, and there had been no time to talk to Maddison, but Chris was way more unsettled than he wanted to be.
What they had seen just seconds before Dr. McRae and the priest had found them had been a real ghost.
But it had not been Cesar Francisco. Cesar Francisco was supposed to appear, when he appeared in ghostly form, as a dark-haired figure in an old-fashioned gray suit spattered with blood. The ghost Chris, Carrie, and Maddison had seen had been wearing a red T-shirt and what were obviously sneakers. After a full hour of researching increasingly dubious websites Chris came to the conclusion that ghosts were not capable of changing their clothes. Either the ghost they had seen was some sort of super ghost, or everybody who had ever seen the ghost of Cesar Francisco had misreported what he had been wearing, or (and much more likely) the ghost they had seen was not Cesar Francisco. And if the ghost was not Cesar Francisco—and since his clothing would seem to date him from after Francisco had died that was a pretty good bet—then who was he?
Chris spent twenty minutes searching for instances of ghosts who haunted Saint Erasmus who were not Cesar Francisco and getting nowhere before he ran out of interest and likely sources and started getting a headache.
The headache had worsened and he’d started to develop a crick in his neck before he finally realized, at about ten thirty, that he was glancing at his window every three seconds and expecting Carrie to come through it, even though she almost never did during daylight hours.
Carrie’s busy, Chris told himself firmly, and you’re going to do something useful with your time, so chill. But the day wore on and he couldn’t chill and he couldn’t even manage to settle, and finally Chris glanced at his calendar and realized why he was so twitchy.
It was the twenty-fifth. Aunt Elsie’s paycheck for the month would have come today, and usually she’d have invited the family over for dinner and a movie. He was missing her again. And he’d been trying to avoid even thinking about her, because it hurt too much, and solving the last puzzle she’d ever left him was just as good as remembering her, right?
It really, really wasn’t, and Chris knew that.
So, Chris saved about six tabs on his computer, one of them a job application with one question answered, and had half a sandwich and a glass of water, which helped with the headache. Then he begged the use of the car off his mom, who was sitting at the kitchen table watching square-dancing videos online and taking notes on the competition.
He had to ask her three times she was so involved, and when he finally got the keys and told her where he was going and also why, because there was maybe something to that rule the McRaes had, he went out the door as fast as possible so she couldn’t trap him as a cap
tive audience. She was itching to drag someone into a discussion of how talentless her major competitor was. The square-dancing community was a small community, but it was a competitive community.
The local florist was badly understaffed, which made Chris feel guilty for not filling out the application. He poked around the display cases for fifteen minutes, watching three different people buy red roses with guilty expressions and one tiny elderly couple buy each other Venus fly traps before there was a break in the action big enough for him to make it to the counter. Then the girl at the cash register had to go in the back and search for five minutes, but eventually she sold him a small bouquet of asters.
Asters were small, purple, daisy-like flowers also known as Michaelmas daisies, and they had been Aunt Elsie’s third-favorite flower, after lilacs and common white clovers. She’d liked that they were purple; it was a less-than-common color for a flower. Asters could also be light purple, which was an even less common color than regular purple. They were the flower that she tended to get as a gift, because clover was not something you got from a florist and people never seemed to remember lilacs except in the spring. Asters had then somehow turned into the one thing everyone got Aunt Elsie whenever she was stressed or worried or running around demanding that some sort of higher power give her strength and patience.
That one meaning of the Michaelmas daisy actually was patience Chris had learned only in the past year, but oh, how it fit. And since Chris suspected that if his aunt were up there somewhere watching him she was making a lot of alarmed faces and muttering to herself about common sense and his lack thereof, if Chris was going to bring flowers to his aunt’s grave he was going to bring her asters.
He hadn’t been to the cemetery since the funeral, which—Chris stopped to think under a statue of an angel, her wings furled and head hanging in her hands, and was almost attacked by a goose—had been only three weeks ago. It felt like forever. Aunt Elsie’s grave was still newer than any of the others surrounding it, and simpler since she hadn’t wanted any inscription, and it looked barren to someone who had last seen the gravesite buried under funeral flowers.
Chris didn’t really hold with talking to the tombstone like you were talking to the person you’d lost, but he sat down cross-legged in front of the slab of black granite anyway, laying his small bouquet down before it.
“Hey,” he said. “I miss you.”
Nothing earth-shattering happened. But Chris sat for a moment, in the warm sunshine with a light, sea-touched breeze rustling the grass, and birds trilling somewhere in the distance, and let himself feel lost and scared and more than a little worried he was going to be murdered for a sunken treasure, and also very glad he’d known his aunt for as long as he had. It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it would.
It was only as he got up to leave that he realized the green grass covering Aunt Elsie’s final resting place was peppered all over with little white balls of clover, and that what he’d assumed was a tuft of grass up against the gravestone was actually an intricately woven crown of those same clovers, a day or two old and slightly wilted. It was delightful and charming, if maybe a little creepy at the same time.
“I’m not the only one, am I?” he asked his aunt. “We must be driving you crazy down here.”
Chris went one blissful night without anyone climbing in his window before it started up again. But it wasn’t just Carrie this time—he was woken up disgustingly early on Sunday to someone tapping on his window, and when he finished his minor heart attack and crawled out from under the covers to look he found Maddison waving at him.
“It’s seven in the morning,” he whispered when he pushed the glass up. “What are you—Carrie put you up to this, didn’t she?”
“Carrie told me this was the best way to wake you up,” Maddison said innocently, leaning her elbows on the ledge. She was standing on the garden bench and she didn’t even have black circles under her eyes. Everything in life was unfair.
“Did she happen to give you a reason?” Chris asked. “Or are you both just trying to scare me to death?”
“Get dressed and come on,” Maddison said. “We’re going to the park, and I brought muffins.”
“Which park?” Chris asked, finding a pair of pants and a shirt and some shoes.
“Those don’t match,” Maddison pointed out helpfully from the window.
And a different pair of shoes. Chris stomped off to the bathroom to dress, feeling like a goldfish in a fishbowl. Carrie was sitting in the backseat of the car eating carrot muffins when Chris hopped out to the driveway, still trying to pull his left shoe on. Dr. McRae was sitting in the driver’s seat, also eating muffins and looking faintly puzzled. Chris realized that he was wearing a tie-dyed purple and green shirt with a T-rex on the front, and choked.
“I was under the impression you wanted transportation for a date,” Dr. McRae said as Chris and Maddison clambered into the car.
“Did I say that?” Maddison asked. “Because I meant that I wanted transportation on a particular date. To the state park. For our summer research project.”
Carrie sighed, Chris realized that this was one of those things he was never going to live down, like the lizard incident in third grade, and Dr. McRae made a sound like a strangled duck and began beating his head against the steering wheel.
“So, is this why Carrie was too busy last night to come through my window at eight thirty?” Chris said over the thump of Dr. McRae banging his head against the steering wheel.
“Three hours in the library going over maps and old land records on microfilm,” Carrie said happily, proving without a doubt that she was not human. “Why? What incredibly important thing were you afraid I’d interrupt?”
“Uh,” Chris admitted. “I read the first three chapters of that book for English class?”
Carrie would have tried checking him for signs of being a pod-person but apparently Dr. McRae had rules about doing that sort of thing in the car.
“I didn’t enjoy it or anything,” Chris protested. “I just thought ‘what would Carrie do if she had an evening free?’ and then I did the most boring thing I could think of.”
He didn’t mention that he had also spent part of the evening writing and then discarding five different speeches to give to Professor Griffin on the topic of treasure hunting. Dr. McRae was in the car. And if he mentioned that he was practicing a “so we’re searching for buried treasure” speech it would lead to questions about why he was practicing one, and then questions about why he hadn’t bothered to practice one for Maddison. And then the whole thing would blow up in his face again, and Chris was tired of things blowing up in his face. And nothing had even blown up in his face literally; although with the way his life was going it was only a matter of time before something did.
Also, it was surprisingly difficult to come up with a “so we’re searching for buried treasure” speech that wouldn’t make someone panic. Maddison must just be unusually calm.
The Archer’s Grove State Park was small, as far as state parks went, seeing as it was only a couple hundred acres of wetlands, swamp, beach, and interior vegetable tangle that was attractive to nesting seabirds, crocodiles, one very rare and very retiring species of mussel, and migratory flocks of tourists. It was also home to the coastal remains of several early attempts to settle the area, one of which, Dr. McRae explained over orange juice and carrot muffins at the picnic tables next to one of the major trailheads, was located just off one of the medium-difficulty hiking trails. It was this site that was the most likely place to look for the lost parish registry.
“Seeing as this is my area of expertise and all,” he sighed as they pored over maps spread out over the picnic table.
“You could probably take a hiking trip that just happened to pass by it,” Chris realized. “It’d be better to do it in two days, maybe three, but it’s definitely doable. After Carrie’s ankle gets better,” he added. When he glanced up, intending to check how grumpy this was making Carr
ie, he discovered that Dr. McRae had a distant, wistful expression on his face. Then Maddison looked up to see what Chris was looking at and Dr. McRae’s look vanished.
“Dad?” Maddison asked.
“See, this is why I kept saying you should join the school newspaper,” Dr. McRae told Maddison. “You don’t even like hiking.”
“I’m way too involved to back out now,” Maddison said firmly. “And I’d rather see it through than ignore it, willingly or not.”
Dr. McRae winced a little at that, as though she’d hit him with the pointed comment as well as Chris, but he did concede the point, and the conversation turned to Carrie’s prognosis, which was good, with full mobility likely in the next two to three days. Chris didn’t realize he’d wandered away from the picnic table until Maddison caught up to him on the edge of what could optimistically be called a beach on wet days and where he was flicking pebbles.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hi.”
“So,” Maddison said. “I have two questions.”
Chris nodded and waited.
“One,” Maddison said, “when do you want to go look for possibly haunted ruins? And two,” she said, “who the heck is Professor Griffin?”
“Um,” Chris said, startled. “Well, Professor Griffin is an old family friend—he knew Aunt Elsie in college and they stayed in touch. He teaches oceanography at the college and partners with the Archive a lot. If you spend any time at Edgewater you’ve probably met him without realizing it. He’s the tall blond guy who’s always wearing a captain’s hat?”
“Um,” Maddison said, frowning. “I don’t think so?”
Chris sighed. He loved Professor Griffin like a confusing but harmless uncle, and he didn’t want to add to his absent-minded professor reputation, but he added, “He tends to walk into closed doors while he’s reading his mail?”
“Oh! Him.”
“Yeah,” Chris said. “He’s less absent minded—or it doesn’t matter as much that he’s so absent minded—when he’s in his element. He’s very good at oceanography. I was actually going to tell him some of what we’ve been doing.”