Maggie started to speak, then stopped. She turned off the pump. The site was suddenly silent. She ignored Jake and said, “I need this pump, Frank over at my test pit.”
Frank started to help her, but Jake restrained him. “You stay here. I haven’t finished with you.” They watched for a moment as she pulled it towards her area, the pump skids bumping on the few ruts that were dry in the sun, leaving a mark of its runners on the soil.
“Let me give you an example, Frank,” Jake said, his hand still on Frank’s shoulder, his voice smoothed again to a pleasant drawl. “A while back I wanted to watch the ducks and geese forming up on the Bay, rafting up. I wanted to see whether they were starting to fly over the North Creek because that’s where I have a hunting blind. The old fashioned windows in the mansion house are too hard to see from so I wanted to open up the front side of the house. People in River Sunday heard about my renovation plans. I got telegrams up at my office in New York. They wanted me to keep the house in its original condition and design so the tourists could come and see the historic architecture. Guess what, Frank? I went ahead and changed the windows. People who did not like what I was doing realized the cost of trying to beat me in court. No one wanted to put up the money to take me on. Money wins. That’s the way it will be here at the bridge.
“I have faith in you, Frank. You’re supposed to be a professional. When I heard about you I said there’s a man who is alert to what’s happening in the world. Youngest chairman of archeology in the whole country. You don’t get that kind of job without being a team player. I said to Spyder, get this man. He will help us to keep the folks in line.”
Frank persisted, tried to reason with Jake. As he spoke he watched Jake’s face get red with anger. “If we find something in here, it not only belongs to the people of River Sunday but it also belongs to the scholarship of the world. There are many historians who’ll be very interested in what we have found here.”
“Look, Frank, you are supposed to help me.”
“So what happens? Do you fire me? If I don’t finish up by tomorrow morning, what happens next?” Frank was trying to joke. Jake just looked angry.
“Frank, I won’t have to fire you. There just won’t be any place left for you to dig. You folks can’t dig through concrete.”
Jake’s manner had become dictatorial as though he were ordering entry level employees, not professionals. “This afternoon, I got visitors coming to the site. I want them to see progress, I want them to see you finishing up. These folks got a stake in the building of the bridge.” Jake suddenly smiled, a consoling smile. “I’m sure you’ll help us, Frank. Your boss as much as guaranteed me that you would do what had to be done.”
He walked back towards his car. As he did he pressed buttons on his telephone and began to talk into it. He nodded to Spyder like a man who thinks he has just solved a big problem. Maggie walked over to where Frank was working and the two of them watched Jake leave.
“You can see what’s going on, Frank,”
“It’s a set up,” he said.
“Working for the State doesn’t give me any great choices either.”
Frank said slowly, “It’s not what I decide to do here. It’s what Jake decides to do.”
She put her arm around him. “It’s tough to face up to reality.”
The Pastor arrived at that moment, his black car covered with dust in the sunlight, jouncing as it maneuvered the ruts.
“I’m going to buy the Pastor a new set of shock absorbers. I bet he has the original set on that Cadillac, judging from the way it bounces,” grinned Frank.
“Glad you still got your sense of humor, Frank,” Maggie said. “Getting depressed won’t get you anywhere.”
The Pastor walked up to them, holding two large paper bags with food. “Here. Coffee inside. Hot.” Frank reached for the bags and put them on the ground. He pulled out the coffee thermos and cups and poured coffee for all of them .
“Jake was just here,” said Maggie, “Giving us the word.”
“He went by me, the other way, going into River Sunday. Didn’t even notice me. He was talking on his cell phone.”
“We have until tomorrow morning. Then he’s going to start up the bulldozers again.”
“That’s about what he’s been saying all along,” said the Pastor. “Jake knew we wouldn’t have enough time.”
Maggie said, “The project’s not hopeless. We can take out of here anything we find. Our records and our photographs can still be studied.”
“You’re right. Let’s find what we can . We’ve still got a day,” said Frank, moving towards his dig. “Besides, I might still be able to reason with Jake.”
Maggie and the Pastor smiled at Frank’s remark. “I’ll work as long as I can,” said the Pastor.
“We’ve found more bones, Pastor,” said Frank over his shoulder.
The Pastor hardly looked at the new find. “I don’t have to see anymore. These people were murdered.”
No one spoke. The mention of the word “murder” gave the project a definition, a stature. The Pastor had labeled these skeletons in a stark and horrible way. If he was right, this was a crime scene, a place with all the proof of a hideous crime. They touched the bones carefully, even more aware of the pain that these humans must have endured.
“Murder might be too strong a term to use,” said Frank.
The Pastor ignored him and went on, “I’ve been telling my church members about these horrors we are finding up here. Trouble is the church has only a few members. Not enough of us to make any difference. Over the years, many of our church families have left River Sunday, gone to Baltimore and Philadelphia to find work. None of those people are aware of all this.”
“What about the nature people, the human butterflies? What will they think of these discoveries?” asked Maggie.
“Their only interest in this dig is that it holds up Jake’s building that bridge,” the Pastor said in a disgusted tone. “Besides, she’s not tough enough to beat him.”
“Why don’t you got to the press?” Maggie suggested to the Pastor. “I’ve seen the power the press has on public opinion of these excavations.”
“The press will back Jake,” said the Pastor. “People want jobs.”
Then he said, “There might be another way to stop him.” The Pastor remained silent after that.
“No skywriters today.” a voice boomed behind them. It was Soldado.
“It’s started,” he said.
Frank looked at him. “What has started?”
“Jake brought in his soldiers. He’s got them green coats posted on all the streets of River Sunday. They got guns too.”
“There’s no war here.”
“You still think it can be all talk,” shrugged Soldado as he looked at the array of skulls below him in area Q. “Jake Terment killed these people,” he said. Frank and the others looked at him and saw how serious his face was.
“No, Soldado,” said Frank. “These skeletons are very old, from long before Jake was born.”
“His family, they have a hand in it. It’s the same as if it was him that did it. Skulls tell their story. Maybe the skulls, they tell you something. This is proof.”
“Jake is the landlord, not the murderer,” said Frank. He immediately regretted using the word, “murderer,” fearing he might encourage Soldado to start more violence. “It’s all part of archaeology, doing a dig, working with the land owners, Soldado.”
“That’s the problem I got with you, professor,” Soldado replied. “You can’t decide what to do. When you can’t decide, you can’t beat the bastard. You’re the kind of guy wants to get along with everybody, rather than be on the right side.”
Frank stepped into the bone scatter of area Q. He began to brush soil off the bones that were in front of him. Then he said, “I can’t do anything about what you think, Soldado.”
Frank was silent for a few moments. The others watched him. Then he looked up from his work and said, “I’m goi
ng to continue working. Maggie, if you will, you could continue in your test pit. Pastor, perhaps you can help me here for a while. Soldado, if you want to help, there’s a lot of sifting to be done over at the soil pile by the bow of the wreck. I’ll get you started and show you what to look for.”
Soldado smiled. “I just tell you what is true. They is always good guys and bad guys no matter how much a man wish different.”
Chapter 10
Soldado left to tend to his crab lines. They listened to his engine fade into the distance. Frank looked at his watch. It was nine AM.
“You’re thinking,” said the Pastor, “that finding these skeletons is not going to be enough to delay the bridge.”
“If they were the bodies of some people who had been killed recently by some serial killer maybe that would stop the bridge construction. I’m sure in fact that it would. But these persons died a long time ago and, like Jake said, most people don’t care that much what happened to them. Like that Doc Bayne said, call him if the bones are recent.”
“Some people do care.”
“Yeah, but do they care enough about some burned sailors, even if they were killed by some colonial criminal, to give up several million dollars of investment money?” said Frank.
“It’s a tough job convincing people the loss of the money is worth finding the answers to the history puzzles,” said Maggie.
“You learned that at your Southern Maryland excavation.”
“It was a lot like it is here.” She dumped some soil from her dustpan on to the plastic sheet laid out beside her dig and studied it for a moment then went back to work. “We were called down there when the shopping center, was almost completed, and the contractor was applying blacktop. There was still one section open to insert another drainpipe. The hole was right in the center of the lot.”
She stood up and stretched. “Ah, that feels better. Anyway, the men working on the hole for the piping found a part of a brick foundation. Same as here, the project had to immediately stop. We got a call that afternoon and were down in the evening. We worked by lights. Cathy made sure we got everything, portable x-ray equipment, magnetometers. I was put in charge of several archeologists.”
“We began to enlarge the hole, Frank. Like here, all we had to do was prove it was nothing more than a smokehouse, or an old barn of no importance, and we could go home. I remember there was this large paving machine full of macadam that was sitting right next to the hole. The smell of tar was getting all of us sick.
“At about midnight, we dug into wire, coils of the stuff, all copper. The wire was the type used in telegraphs back in the Nineteenth Century. Then we started new holes ten feet out from the original. The contractor had to move the paving machine back. He also had to come in with jack hammers to cut out the blacktop. He was not happy at doing all this extra work. On top of that, the police there were not able to stop the workmen from making angry remarks to us. There were the usual remarks that the redneck workmen made to our women. One tried to say something about my body and I glared at him so hard, he walked away and left me alone.”
“He probably had never run into a woman who had the guts to threaten him,” said Frank.
Maggie continued, “Research was being done in the local library. We were told that the land had been farmland and woodland. There had been no railroad within twenty miles and no telegraph lines. Then we made an astounding discovery. Down a few inches below the strata where the wire was located were a variety of Confederate artifacts. In small metal boxes were the remains of cloth ribbons with Secession mottoes, Confederate flags of various sizes and some uniform material and insignia. Then we found rusted guns, mostly revolvers but also rifles.”
“The word went out to Washington to the National Archives and to museums that were involved in Civil War history. About seven in the morning an intern in Richmond working at the Museum of the Confederacy turned up an obscure reference to a secret telegraph station in Southern Maryland. It had been used in 1864 for transferring messages from the Confederate intelligence agents located in the District of Columbia.
“We did not report any of this to the media. I was a state employee and it was a State of Maryland project. There was a certain requirement of privacy between the landholder and the government. That did not stop a local reporter from sending the story to the Washington newspapers. The result was that by noon we had visitors standing all around our site. Some of them were unfriendly and all of them had one cause or another.
“Cathy was pretty good about it. I told her I wanted to finish the work; she told me that the Governor’s Office wanted the project finished yesterday. She went out on a limb and gave me half a day to find what I could, document it, and cover it up.
“Then I found a skeleton. With the equipment we had at the site we could not determine the race of the skeleton. The time period of the soil strata around the body was all Civil War, no question.
“More research came in from the museums. There was a son of the landowners who had served in the Confederate Army intelligence service. He had disappeared right after visiting his family and on his way into Washington on a mission. It seemed that this might be a Confederate hero. There was suddenly political pressure from black politicians to close the site. Needless to say, relatives of the white landowners called the Governor to request more extensive digging. I told Cathy that she had to give me more time, that this was an important site, that little was understood about the Confederate activities in this part of Maryland. I argued we ought to collect the information. She told me she was getting in her car and coming down to close it herself.”
“I was interviewed on national television. The reporters buzzed in with a helicopter and a great noise. In three minutes of live coverage, the fact that I answered only the simplest archeological questions about the site meant that I became the poster girl for every radical group in America. When I said that we were digging to get more accurate historical research on the Confederacy meant only one thing to those creeps. It translated that I was either for or against their agendas. Every reporter twisted what I said to support whatever his news report was covering, every kind of radical idea possible.
“Cathy closed us down that evening at dinner time. I went home before they poured the blacktop. I did not go back to work for a week because I was so disgusted. Then Cathy convinced me to come back to the office. She said I had the strongest credentials of anyone in the office. She said that to replace me, she would have to submit budget requests for two years in the state bureaucracy. I realized that without enough workers, many other Maryland projects would be jeopardized. I came back, out of love of archeology more than anything else. The first thing Cathy told me was that she had learned her lesson, that she would never go out that far again. That’s why she’s the way she is.”
He smiled. “I know the feeling.”
“Do you?” Maggie looked at him, a long hard look. Then she went on, “Cathy did me a favor in a way. She kept me in archeology. I owe her that.”
“Maggie,” Frank said earnestly, “If we can find some reason to fight for this marshland, I’ll stand in front of Jake’s bulldozer myself. I just wish I had a few more workers here today.”
Maggie said, “There’s no time to train anyone. We should have had them two days ago when we first started. I wish we could get another worker like you, Pastor. You have a great attention to detail. If you ever want to change professions, we could bring you into the archaeological field.”
“Unfortunately my church people work long hours in day jobs. They can’t get out here,” said the Pastor.
“You must have made some compromises in your life. How does a Pastor of a small church get a Cadillac?” asked Frank.
The Pastor didn’t take offense. He carefully scraped some more of the clay away from the leg bone in front of him. “That car got willed to me by a woman in River Sunday. She wasn’t even a member of my church. She lived on the far side of the harbor, the other direction from the way yo
u come up here. The folks around here call that area Tulip Neck. This lady had a mansion, not quite as old, but just about as large as Peachblossom.
“Well, one morning in the spring of 1980 I got a call to come over to the center of town to this lawyer’s office, her lawyer, a white man who had lived in River Sunday all his life. I can tell you though that this was the first time for me, even though River Sunday was a very little town, that I ever said a word to him. So his secretary let me into his office and I sat in front of him while he finished up some call on the telephone. Then he got up and came around his desk and shook my hand.
“The lawyer said, ‘Pastor Allingham, I’m sure glad you could come by here this morning.’ then he looked at me with a sort of smile and he said, ‘I don’t expect you to say yes but did you ever know Mrs. Steers?’”
“I said, ‘Nossir, I never had the pleasure. Might be long ago my father knew her.’”
“So he continues, ‘Well, she has passed away.’”
“‘I’m sorry to hear that. I’m sorry for her family.’”
“‘Well,’ he said ‘that’s very nice of you.’”
“Then he sits back down at his desk and lifts up a folder and pulls out an envelope. ‘I wanted to tell you as her executor that she has left you an automobile.’”
“‘A car?’”
“‘A car. Yes. She has authorized me to buy you a new Cadillac coupe and to maintain and insure it for your use from the estate as long as you want the use of the car.’ He pulled a set of keys out of an envelope.”
“‘Here you are. I assumed black would be a good color, you being in the ministry and all.’”
“Well, I can tell you I was mighty surprised. I said, ‘Thank you,’ when he gave me the keys.”
“Reasonable thing to do, say thank you,” smiled Frank.
“Yes. Then I sat there while he was rummaging through the file folder. Finally he said to me, ‘There’s a note in here for you also from her.’ He handed me the letter. It was written in large flowing script like nothing I had ever seen before, not like the handwork that we had learned in our River Sunday schooling, but maybe something foreign.”
Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) Page 14