Saturday ca. 1:00 p.m. Riders set out for Meadow Bluff to inform the Heasters of their daughter’s death.
Saturday ca. 1:45 p.m. Dr. Knapp arrives and is permitted only a cursory examination of the body.
Saturday ca. 2:15 p.m. Dr. Knapp leaves, and Edward Shue alone dresses his wife’s body for burial. The coffin must have arrived about this time, because Shue had time to put padding into it to support Zona’s head.
Saturday ca. 3:30 p.m. Riders reach the Heaster farm with the news of Zona’s death. They now have just over two hours of daylight left to make a return journey of twenty miles.
Saturday ca. 3:15 p.m. In a wagon borrowed from Crookshank’s smithy, Shue and a group of neighbors set out for the Heaster farm, at a slower pace than that of the riders, with just over two hours of daylight remaining, on a cold January evening. (This is a bit hard to believe. Why not wait until the next day?)
Saturday ca. 7:30 p.m. Assuming the loaded wagon can travel five miles an hour over dark winter roads, the party will arrive at the Heasters’ place. (Do they go back that night to Livesay’s Mill, twenty miles in the freezing dark, or do they spend the night at the Heaster farm—despite the fact that Zona’s parents dislike and distrust Shue? Or do they not set out on Saturday night, but instead deliver the body on Sunday when they have daylight and warmer temperatures? This would also limit the Heasters’ time with the body and obviate the need for an overnight stay.)
Sunday afternoon—Funeral? The Meadow Bluff community could be notified at the morning church service that the burial will take place that afternoon.
The weather and time of year make all this seem improbable—an unnecessary hardship for the travelers with no real urgency to accomplish their mission so quickly. The arguments in favor of the undue haste are: 1) Shue wants Zona’s body buried before anyone has a chance to examine it too closely; 2) If the funeral is delayed until Monday, he would miss a day of work and either have to spend more time with the Heasters or make the twenty-mile journey twice.
Lacking evidence to the contrary, and trying for the most logical sequence of events, I opted for the Sunday funeral, with the body arriving that morning by wagon.
Sandra and I hashed out every possible alternative for the events of January 23–24 before agreeing on this one. Our correspondence of analysis, fact-checking, and speculation on all the people and events we examined would outnumber the pages of the novel itself. Having the documentary evidence to substantiate the details of the lives of everyone involved transformed the vague folktale back into a story about real people. It was extremely helpful to be able to talk over the case with Sandra as I worked on the novel. She was a kindred spirit who shared my enthusiasm for that time and place, while bringing her own opinions and expertise to bear on the story.
As Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” Because I have spent years studying nineteenth-century England, I was fortunate to come to this story with an arcane fact that no one else who had studied the Greenbrier Ghost seemed to know: the precedent—the story of Maria Marten/The Murder in the Red Barn. Was there a connection? Although the stories were eerily similar, the murder of Maria Marten occurred in Suffolk, England, in 1827. Could Mary Jane Heaster, poor, ill-educated, and living on a remote mountain farm in Appalachia, have known about that earlier incident that happened an ocean away? It took more than a year, and many hours of Sandra’s diligent and wide-ranging document searches, to confirm my hunches, but we finally found the connection. In the last chapter of the book, John Alfred Preston, the prosecuting attorney, learns this fact at a dinner party at the Old White Hotel. I don’t know that Preston ever did hear of it, but it is likely that the cosmopolitan guests at the hotel would have known the story because The Murder in the Red Barn, based on the Marten case, was one of the most popular plays in Victorian England. The explanation Preston was given in that scene and the evidence for Mary Jane Heaster’s knowledge of the Marten case is all true.
Much of the biographical information on William Parks Rucker, attorney for the defense, came from Bridge Burner: The Full and Factual Story of Dr. William Parks Rucker Slave-owning Union Partisan by Michael Rucker (Quarrier Press, 2014). John Alfred Preston was never the subject of a biography, but a brief reminiscence of his life appeared in J. R. Cole’s History of Greenbrier County (1917).
James P. D. Gardner, who is buried in an unmarked grave in Lewisburg, proved particularly difficult to track, even though he practiced law in Bluefield, West Virginia, for more than thirty years. My thanks to the Craft Memorial Library in Bluefield for allowing me access to their archives on Bluefield’s past, and especially to Ramona Fletcher of Bluefield, who was able to locate important pieces of information about Mr. Gardner’s college education, and his social activities in Mercer County. I’m grateful for all her help. Thanks also to Jason Riffle for his guidance on the West Virginia Masons.
Background on the psychiatrist Dr. James Boozer was provided by Peggy Mack Roach, who visited Pennsylvania’s Lincoln University, Boozer’s alma mater, in search of more information about him. In New York, Karen Chapman found the site of Boozer’s boyhood home in Mt. Kisco (now a parking lot), and she discovered the only photograph we have of him: his yearbook photo from Howard University Medical School, taken only a year or two before he joined the staff of the West Virginia Asylum at Lakin.
My thanks to Dr. Robert Sevier for his advice on some of the medical aspects in the narrative, and to my old school friend, attorney Jim McAdams, for giving me the benefit of his expertise regarding matters of law in the story, particularly for explaining to me why the nineteenth-century attorneys took turns serving as county prosecutor.
I am grateful as always to my friend Susan Richards, for accompanying me to the Moundsville prison and an old asylum (both now tourist sites) in the early stages of my research; to North Carolina Civil War historian Michael Hardy for his advice on the war experiences of attorneys Preston and Rucker; and to Professor Elizabeth Baird Hardy for sharing her expertise in the clothing styles of the nineteenth century.
—Sharyn McCrumb
About the Author
SHARYN McCRUMB is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Ballad novels. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Mary Frances Hobson Prize for Southern Literature, the AWA Book of the Year, and Notable Books in both the New York Times and LA Times. She was also named a Virginia Woman of History for Achievement in Literature. She lives and writes in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, fewer than one hundred miles from where her family settled in 1790.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Sharyn McCrumb
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First Atria Books hardcover edition September 2017
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Interior design by Amy Trombat
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Jacket image: Enchanted Forest © 2016 by Thomas Dodd (www.thomasdodd.com)
Author photograph by David McCrumb
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCrumb, Sharyn.
Title: The unquiet grave : a novel / Sharyn McCrumb.
Description: First Atria Books hardcover edition. | New York : Atria Books, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016043969 (print) | LCCN 2016053435 (ebook) | ISBN 9781476772875 (hardback) | ISBN 9781476772882 (paperback) | ISBN 9781476772899 (eBook)
Subjects: LCSH: Murder—West Virginia—Greenbrier County—Fiction. | Shue, Erasmus Stribbling, 1861 or 1862-1900—Fiction. | Shue, Zona Heaster, -1897—Fiction. | Criminal defense lawyers—Fiction. | African American lawyers—Fiction. | Trials (Murder)—Fiction. | Greenbrier County (W. Va.)—History—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Biographical fiction. | Historical fiction. | Legal stories.
Classification: LCC PS3563.C3527 U57 2017 (print) | LCC PS3563.C3527 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043969
ISBN 978-1-4767-7287-5
ISBN 978-1-4767-7289-9 (ebook)
The Unquiet Grave: A Novel Page 34