They walked downhill to the meeting point. Jenny, the guide that night, also greeted Meg with a hug and seemed pleased to meet Matt. “You being here makes me a little nervous,” she told Meg. “Makes me feel I’d better get it right!”
“You always have everything right,” Meg assured her.
Matt tried to pay for the tour, but Jenny, too, refused to accept any money.
There were few places in the world quite like Harpers Ferry. Darkness had settled over the valleys between the mountains like a cloak. Historic buildings crouched together, and while there were night-lights along the historic trails, the atmosphere seemed to whisper of the past, of ghosts.
Jenny started by pointing out Harper House, explaining that in 1747 Robert Harper had come to the beautiful spot that had then been known as “the hole.” An architect and millwright, he’d fallen in love with the place where the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers met, where water was such a tremendous power. He’d purchased the land from a man who had squatter’s rights—Peter Stephens, who was running a ferry—under Lord Fairfax, and from Lord Fairfax himself. And thus, Harpers Ferry was born.
Jefferson would call it one of the most beautiful spots on earth; Washington would arrive and assess the potential.
It would become an effective place for munitions and, later, a battleground that was fiercely contested in the Civil War.
“And now...” Jenny told the tour that people often saw Mrs. Harper in the windows. Harper had died before the house was finished; he’d asked his wife to look after their gold, and it was assumed that when she died, she remained behind to keep vigil over it.
The John Brown Raid was next on the agenda. But while Jenny talked about John Brown and told everyone about his desire to begin a slave revolt, Matt noted a boy of about ten hovering on the outskirts of the group of twelve.
“Dangerfield Newby, one of Brown’s men, was the first to be killed in the action. Sadly, by friendly fire from Brown’s own party. His was a sorry tale. His white father had freed him, but when he’d tried to buy his wife and children from a slave-owner, he was told—as soon as he’d earned the required money—that the price had gone up. Angry and desperate, he’d joined with John Brown. The people here, terrified of a slave revolt, had torn the poor man’s body to shreds and fed it to the hogs, which is why we still have Hog Alley.”
As Jenny talked, going on to tell the crowd how the ghost of Dangerfield Newby was often seen on a foggy night, Matt noticed that the boy was watching Meg.
The boy seemed determined to come around and reach her.
Matt shifted his own position. The kid wasn’t trying to interrupt the guide and he didn’t seem to intend any harm.
Nonetheless, Matt stayed nearby. When Jenny said the group was moving on, the young boy walked up to Meg.
Meg obviously realized he was coming and turned around. A smile lit her face; Matt was startled by the way that smile touched him. He felt something tugging at him; he wasn’t sure whether it was about his emotions—or his libido.
“Joey,” Meg said softly, although they were approaching the steps to the upper level—the cemetery, the ruins of one church and the beautiful Catholic church that had survived the war because its canny priest had continued to hoist the British flag, which stopped both sides from firing on it.
She knew the boy. So they weren’t seeing a ghost who might help, but maybe this child could.
“Meg.” The boy started to speak. Then, seeing Matt, he hesitated. He reached out to pet Killer, who was in Meg’s arms.
“It’s okay, Joey, Matt’s with me,” Meg told the boy. “This is Matt Bosworth. He’s a federal agent—like me.” She turned to Matt. “Joey’s family and my family are friends. His house is near my parents’ house.” She glanced around. “Um, are your mom and dad here, Joey?”
The boy was reluctant to answer, and Matt assumed that Meg would address this later, when they had a little more privacy.
“Hi, Joey, nice to meet you,” he said.
Joey stared up at him, still a little wary.
“Maybe I should follow the tour and let you two catch up,” Matt said.
“He’s really okay,” Meg told Joey.
“Oh, you’re, like, friends, right?” Joey asked.
“Good friends,” Matt said.
“Oh.” Joey nodded wisely, as if he’d determined they were actually more than friends—as in a romantic pair.
He seemed to like that concept, and neither of them corrected him.
“Have you seen Lara?” Joey asked worriedly.
“No, in fact, I’m looking for her,” Meg told him. “Have you seen her?”
Joey nodded again.
“Recently?” Meg asked.
Joey shook his head. “But it wasn’t that long ago. I can’t remember exactly. She was here a couple weeks ago.”
“I’m so glad you saw her,” Meg said. “Do you know where she was staying?”
“She didn’t stay. She said she’d just come for the day.”
“Where did you see her?” Matt asked him.
He waved toward the car lot. “She parked, and then she came up the steps.” He paused to look at Matt. “You know her—she’s so nice. She and Meg...” He paused again with a slightly embarrassed smile. “Well, they’re nice. They like kids. So I ran after her when she went up the steps. I wanted to say hi.”
“That was very sweet,” Meg said. “Where did she go?”
“She stopped in the church and she was kneeling, so I thought maybe something bad happened, or maybe she didn’t want to be disturbed. But then she walked up to Harper Cemetery. I followed her there.” He grinned at Matt. “First we stopped at the other John Brown’s grave. All the kids know about John Brown’s head.”
Matt was anxious for whatever information Joey had, but he was ten or so. At that age, kids would keep talking as long as you let them.
“Yeah, it’s a creepy story,” he said. “It happened years later, and it wasn’t the John Brown, but a John Brown, who had himself buried standing up, with his head in glass. He paid a guy to watch for seven days to see if he’d come back to life.”
“And then,” Meg continued, “the glass broke and the head came off and rolled around and kids thought it was a toy. They played kickball with it, until someone rescued it. He sent it to the widow, who assured him that she had her John Brown’s head. John Brown is a fairly common name, except that in Harpers Ferry, everyone immediately assumes it means only one John Brown.”
Joey nodded enthusiastically. “Kids still like to play in the cemetery,” he said, grinning up at Matt.
“I love cemeteries, too,” he told Joey with a smile.
“Hey, you guys coming?” Jenny called to them.
Meg raised a hand. “We’ll catch up!” she called back.
Jenny went on with her tour.
“So what else did Lara do at the cemetery?” Meg asked.
“Well, she walked around looking at graves,” Joey said. “She seemed okay. I went up to her and she hugged me, but she acted kind of...weird, so I asked her if she was okay. She smiled and said she was fine. She was glad to see me, she wanted to know about Little League and all... But before she left, we walked to Jefferson Rock. We were looking out over the river and she talked about the great legends and how much she loves it here, even if bad things happened a long time ago. They were a lesson to us all,” he added breathlessly. “That’s what she said—a lesson to us all. We sat on the rock for a while and then she had to go back to work. But she told me if I saw you, I was supposed to say you should go to the cemetery. She said you’d understand what that means. I didn’t know when I’d see you again, but I heard my mom talking about how you were in town. So I—I came out to find you.”
“We’ll walk you home,” Meg insisted.
“I’m not supposed to be out. I’ll just sneak back in.”
“How about this,” Matt suggested. “We’ll walk you back to where we can see you get inside your house.”
Joey shrugged. “Sure. It’s a lot of walking, though.”
“That’s okay. We need the exercise.” Meg flashed him a glance like nothing he’d seen from her yet. It was appreciation. She might actually like him a little bit for this. Or, at least, not dislike him quite so much.
They walked back up the hill with Joey. Killer trotted beside the child, happy to be in his company.
They passed a house with a plaque announcing that it had been Stonewall Jackson’s headquarters when he was in Harpers Ferry. A block later, Joey paused and knelt down to stroke Killer.
“We’ll watch from here,” Meg said. “And thanks so much, Joey. I guess no one else knew she was here because she just went to the church and then the cemetery—and left.”
Joey nodded.
Meg asked, “She was okay, though, right?”
“She seemed really...thoughtful, I don’t know, like my mom sometimes gets.”
“Hurry into your house. We’ll watch until you go inside,” Matt said.
Joey gave Meg an impulsive hug and Matt a wave, then ran toward his house. They waited until he’d slipped through a side door.
“Which one does your family own?” Matt asked.
“Opposite side.” Meg pointed out a house just behind Joey’s, built in the colonial style.
“Nice place.”
“My folks will never let it go. But they’re both retired. My mom worked for the park service and my dad was a teacher.”
“No siblings?”
“No. That’s why Lara was like a sister. She was an only child, too, and had lost her parents, as you know. My parents adored her and her aunt, Nancy, and so did my grandfather. We all spent lots of time together.” She turned and looked at Matt. “Let’s get to the cemetery.”
“Thank God for moonlight,” Matt said. “You have a flashlight?”
She reached into her pocket. “Of course. Do you have yours?”
“Of course,” he said, mimicking her. “I’ve been out in the field a long time. And I’ve been through another academy besides the FBI.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Life,” he told her.
* * *
Slash had left his car in a parking lot in Bolivar—abutting Harpers Ferry—and rented a flashy little sports car, easier to maneuver on mountains and hilly roads, instead. But Harpers Ferry was such a small, tight-knit town, plus the main drive down the hill was a tourist mecca, so he’d parked it, too. Why attract unnecessary attention?
For the past hour, he’d been walking. Uphill, downhill, following these wretched people.
Now they were going downhill again.
He had to make sure he couldn’t be seen. There was no explanation for him to be in Harpers Ferry, other than that he was hoping to find Lara, too, and then he’d be on their radar, a definite suspect.
They should have been huffing and puffing. Slash had to admit that fitness training at the academy had to be good. The two ahead of him didn’t even seem winded.
He stayed some distance back. As he waited, he saw the kid go through the side door. Curious, he made his way over to the house.
He could move well. He didn’t seem to have the wind or the ease of the agents, but he had learned to move like a spirit in the night. It was too bright out for him—the damned moon just had to be full—but what was he going to do?
Be careful. Be very careful.
He got closer to the house. He hadn’t been able to hear what the kid had told the agents.
At the house, he slunk against the wall and peered through the window. There was no sign of the kid. A pretty woman—a blonde—was at the kitchen window washing dishes. A man came in and slid his arms around her waist.
He listened the best he could to their conversation, watching their lips move. He’d gotten pretty good at lip-reading through the years. The conversation was boring.
The husband said he’d had a long day at work. She’d been busy with the PTA.
She was very pretty.
Long, wavy blonde hair. About five-six. He studied her and smiled.
Maybe...
But for now, the agents were getting a little too far ahead of him.
And he had to find out what the hell they were doing here.
What they knew. And what they might discover.
* * *
The cemetery sat at the top of the hill. When Robert Harper died, there’d only been three houses in the area, but Harper had set the four acres aside for a cemetery.
In the moonlight, the gravestones were beautifully, hauntingly opaque. The night’s fog was swirling around the graves.
Killer was oddly calm and quiet, staying close to Meg’s feet. It was almost as if the dog sensed that they were in a sacred place, that they walked among the dead.
If the tour group had come to the cemetery, they’d already moved on. While the puffs of fog hugging the graves might have been spooky to some, they were reassuring to her. As a child, she, like Joey, had played here.
She never saw the dead at the Harper Cemetery. They didn’t seem to linger. There was talk that Father Michael Costello could be seen walking the heights, still protecting the church he’d presided over during the Civil War—raising his British flag to prevent the opposing forces from firing upon it. She’d never seen him, but she didn’t mind believing the legend that he still walked these steep paths.
The cemetery seemed to sit in the midst of a haunted atmosphere.
Matt stood by her side. “And now?” he asked.
“I think I have to find Mary Wager,” Meg said.
“Mary Wager. Her stone, you mean?”
“Yes, her stone. There are Wagers all over the cemetery,” Meg began. “I’m sure you know that Robert Harper left no children, but his niece married a Wager, so...through the generations, there were many of them. Lara and I were both crazy about her grave marker. It has the most beautiful poem...but the marker was falling apart and we shored it up with stones.”
She lifted her flashlight higher as she looked around the cemetery. Being here reminded her so much of days gone by, back when she and Lara were young, when they slipped out at night—just as Joey had—to hover on the outskirts of a ghost tour or scamper up the steps to the cemetery. Tonight she barely needed the flashlight; they were on the hilltop and the moon was dazzling.
“Mary Wager.” Matt moved ahead of her.
“It’s more or less in the center,” Meg told him.
He nodded. “I vaguely remember...”
The cemetery was somewhat overgrown with haphazard trails. She was accustomed to it; she knew her way through it and took the lead. She came to a stop when she reached the grave. Matt joined her there, his long strides bringing him close to her in a matter of seconds.
She shone her light on the marker and recited the poem, mostly from memory.
“’Tis better to have loved than lost,
No matter what the cost.
I died for him, and he for me,
The war the game, the end the same.
I waited for love, did not return,
And then the pain, the bitter burn.
So I loved and lost and lingered here,
In death, I know, my love be there.”
“Poetic, and quite sad,” Matt said. “So you two, you and Lara, came here and dreamed about Mary’s great romance?”
Meg shrugged and glanced at him. He didn’t seem to be mocking her.
“There’s no record in the archives that we could find, so we made up a story for her. She was a Southern girl and he was a So
uthern boy, but he fought for the Union. When he died, she couldn’t even bury him. So she lived on. She was a good Christian, we’d decided, so no thought of suicide. We imagined her watching the years go by, always believing that she’d see him again once she died.”
She realized he was smiling.
“Hey, we were kids.”
“Pretty impressive that you were doing this kind of research—in the archives—when you were that young.”
“We learned from my parents.”
“A teacher and a mom who worked for the park service—makes sense.”
As he spoke, Meg knelt down, holding her flashlight, Killer beside her, and moved her fingers around the old monument. She found the crack and pushed one finger through to the hollowed-out point at the base.
There might be nothing there. This might just be wishful thinking. But...
“You know, you could hit a snake or spider doing that. You want more light?” Matt asked. “Let me hold yours, too.”
He knelt close beside her. She felt the strength and heat of his body, felt whatever it was that made him so alive, so forceful and charismatic.
The scent of his cologne or aftershave wasn’t bad, either.
“Thanks,” she murmured as he trained dual lights on the marker.
The crack that led to the little hollow in the stone was low against the ground, hidden by overgrown tufts of grass and weeds.
“Want me to try?” Matt asked.
“No, no, I’m fine. And my fingers are smaller,” she said.
They were. Of course, they’d been smaller still when she and Lara were young and left notes for each other there.
But her fingers touched paper. She stared at Matt; his face was practically touching hers. She flushed and said softly, “There’s something here!”
A moment later, she pulled it out—a piece of paper rolled in a tube. She gasped as she almost tore it; there’d been rain since the note was left and the paper was fragile.
“Careful. We can get it back and dry it. Might be good to have the lab look at it, too,” Matt said.
He was, she had to admit, always prepared. He’d put down one of the flashlights and had an evidence bag in his hand. As she placed the paper inside the bag, she frowned up at him. “Matt, we have to read it now. What if she’s in danger? What if she’s in hiding? What if she’s alive and she needs us?”
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