Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1)

by Hollyday, Thomas

  Frank called out, “Are you all right?”

  “We’re all fine,” Jake called back.

  “What happened?” shouted Frank.

  “We don’t know,” answered Maggie’s boss, her voice frantic.

  “The Viet Cong sapper teams did that to freighters anchored in Cam Ranh Bay during the War,” Frank said to the Pastor, as they waited for Jake to land.

  “I heard about that,” said the Pastor. “The enemy swam up beside the freighter hulls and attached explosives to the steel sides just below the water line. Then the bombs went off and put holes in the ship.”

  Frank nodded. “Men sat on those ships waiting for their turn to unload cargo, listening down below for tapping sounds that might mean the Cong were at work.”

  “Soldado carried a lot of that wartime freight into Cam Ranh,” said the Pastor.

  Jake was in the back of the Whaler, operating the throttle and steering lever with his right hand, his face intent. Spyder stood in the bow, his grin more forced, his hands holding the bow line. When the boat reached the mud of the shoreline, Spyder jumped to the shore with the line and pulled the boat up. Cathy stepped out, then Jake.

  “That old lady is trying to scare us. I didn’t really think that she would go this far. She might of killed somebody.” He smiled viciously, staring at Spyder, “She wants trouble she’ll get plenty.”

  “You should call the police,” said Cathy.

  “Someone is going to get killed if this kind of thing keeps up,” said Frank.

  “We’ll take care of it,” answered Jake.

  “You better have something besides bones, professor,” said Jake, anger in his voice.

  “We did find something interesting,” said Frank. Jake and Cathy followed Frank to the farmhouse. Maggie walked a few feet behind. The group entered the house, their weight causing the boards of the porch and the kitchen floor to creak. The kitchen light hanging from its black wire made the people’s shadows race against the stained walls, while moths flopped insanely against the glass of the bulb.

  “You found a ship’s bell” said Cathy, pushing at the muddy edge of the artifact with the tip of her well shined but obviously soaked shoe.

  “Cathy, it’s a very important find,” said Maggie. “We think it will tell us what the name of the ship was.”

  “The ship’s name. How can you do that?” said Jake, squatting beside the object, his eyes suddenly showing intense interest.

  “It can be done,” said Frank. “Jake, we can be sure of the importance of the site. It’s strange though. With a bell on board, this must have been a sizeable shipwreck. I just don’t understand why your family didn’t know about all this.”

  Jake looked at Frank. “Don’t you get started on my family. That’s a little bit out of your line.”

  “Sorry.” Frank pointed to a small patch of metalwork. “Here, look at this. On the surface of the bronze bell we think we’ll find some etched letters or numerals that will help us identify the ship. We have to clean and conserve this carefully though so that the remnants of any lettering aren’t lost when we clean it.”

  Jake, acting the southern gentleman again, smiled. “I was telling your boss that it’s a real hard job to get anything out of the wreck that you can use.”

  “We don’t have any capability to help you in our little office,” said Cathy.

  “Well, I just wanted to show this to you,” said Frank.

  “I wish I could help more,” said Cathy. “Maggie explains these things to me and tells me what she needs. I’m of course not an archaeologist by training but I try to understand.”

  “We’ll try to clean it up some more tomorrow.”

  “I hate to break up this party but as long as I was forced to come ashore with my guests,” said Jake, “I wanted to remind you all of my plans for the morning. Tomorrow morning, Frank,” asserted Jake. “I want you guys out of here. My bulldozer will start early.”

  Cathy smiled. “I guess that’s it. We all know, shipwreck or no shipwreck, the bridge has got to be constructed. Maybe this bell could be a nice exhibit for a local museum in River Sunday.”

  “Cathy,” said Maggie, “This wreck is old. It’s very important.”

  “Maggie,” said Cathy, “The time has come to close the site. I can’t do any more for you. I’m sure Doctor Light will write an appropriate report. That’s my job. Maggie.”

  “Looking over the construction work to be done, Spyder?” Frank asked. Spyder grinned without answering.

  Frank decided to make one last appeal to Jake. “Can’t you see, Jake? This is something important. This is not a site like most of the ones I have worked on where there was no value, where it was easy to argue that it could be closed. Finding an old ship like this one is important to the history of this whole community. There was a true catastrophe here, a mystery. The puzzle should be solved. You’ve got to give us a few more days.”

  Jake stopped and looked at Frank. The Pastor and Maggie went ahead with Cathy.

  “What I don’t expect, don’t want to deal with, is people who change on me. You should have known though, Frank, that you can’t change your mind halfway through the job. Remember the army, Frank. How they taught you to follow orders. You were brought here to work on my team. You best remember that.”

  Frank answered, feeling he was being forced. He did not like the feeling. “What if I don’t chose to remember?”

  Jake went on, “I haven’t got time for this. My wife’s hurt. I got a lot of money riding on a bridge construction. Frank you are bought and paid for. Bought and paid for. You are here to do what I say when I say it. I don’t care what you call it.” He stared at Frank. “I had some doubts about you in the beginning when I read your resume.”

  “You told me you found something you didn’t like.”

  “More something I didn’t understand. I couldn’t understand how a smart man like you could have ended up as a soldier in Vietnam. Then, I thought, this guy must have gone over there to make some money, maybe as a civilian contractor after his hitch was up. I know there was a lot of money to be made.”

  “Your first impression was right,” said Frank. “I was not smart going over there. On the other hand, I served with some of the best men I’ll ever know and many of them gave their lives stopping bullets meant for me.”

  Jake smiled, “I guess I should have looked more closely, followed my hunch. I sure picked the wrong man. No matter. Let me tell you what your report to the Maryland people is going to say, Frank. As the wise archaeology scholar from the world famous university, you have thoroughly reviewed the site. You have decided after two days of reconnaissance probes at the site that this old wreck is likely not of historical significance. While it might be old, you believe the age is too difficult to determine at this time. You also make note in this report that some bones have been found but it is almost impossible from their condition to determine whether they are human or animal. So based on two days of intensive work by yourself and another archaeologist, you feel comfortable with the bridge project proceeding as planned and will recommend that the site be filled.”

  “I can’t write that, Jake,” said Frank.

  “I expect to get a report like that from you before you leave tomorrow morning. I suggest you write it. If you don’t write it, I’ll have someone write it for you. If you don’t sign it, I’ll find another archaeologist who will sign it. I’m sure that will not be a problem. I’ll just have to make sure he’s a little better at taking orders than you were. As for you, cross me any more and I think you will find that your job back at that university of yours doesn’t get funding in future years. You may find also that no one is very interested in what you have to say or write in the future.”

  Jake smiled and turned to walk toward the boat. He said over his shoulder, “Frank, without my friends helping you, you don’t exist. If you were the big scholar you’re pretending to be, I never would have hired you. I wanted someone who could compromise, who knew how t
o make a bargain.”

  “I never thought we had a bargain, Jake.”

  “I knew we had a deal the moment you got in that fancy BMW of yours to drive down here.”

  Jake reached the side of the runabout, and Cathy reached out a steadying hand. The engine roared, cavitated the river water in a huge swirl of mud and seaweed. Bits of the weed landed at Frank’s feet. The boat then shot forward into the dark river night, towards the twinkle of the yacht lights a few hundred yards distant.

  The Pastor, who had returned and had heard the last of Jake’s tirade, spoke. “Jake Terment never intended to let us study this site. His political pull has convinced your boss too, Maggie.”

  “You heard my boss,” said Maggie. “She’s so wrapped up in preserving the department, she can’t hear anything else.”

  “Her job too.” Frank scratched the back of his neck.

  “She wants me in the office tomorrow,” said Maggie.

  “It’s pretty discouraging,” said Frank. He continued. “I guess I came down here for all the wrong reasons.”

  “Your university sent you. You didn’t have any choice.”

  “I had a choice but wasn’t thinking about choices at the time.”

  “You had no way of knowing it would be like this. How could you have known that he would not keep the project open if you actually found something? Everyone thought there was nothing here. No one considered what to do if we actually found something.”

  Frank shook his head. “With other jobs it was always assumed that the property owner and everyone else would be so excited that they would grant extensions, go out of their way to get more information, help us out. The projects are usually so weak in historic value that no one complains when we close up the sites. Your Confederate site excited people. The media made weak historical value into a political problem. We have a location far more important but we can’t get any excitement.”

  “Jake thought that you were like him.”

  Frank looked out into the darkness. “He even told me I was like him. I guess I used to think that was a compliment. He says that if I was a real scholar he would never have brought me down here. What bothers me is that he had that original impression of me.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Maggie.

  “How do you stop a bulldozer?” asked the Pastor.

  “You could make this work, Frank. When I was your student I thought you could accomplish anything. I haven’t lost that faith in you.”

  He looked at Maggie. “Since I’ve been down here, I’ve thought a lot about those early teaching days, about who I was.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Like in the war, there’s a time to lock and load.”

  The Pastor and Maggie looked at him.

  “We’ve got to become winners,” said Frank.

  Maggie turned on the floodlights and for a while the Pastor and Frank worked beside each other at Q. The skeletons were more exposed. Frank was working on the thigh area of the adult figure. The Pastor was scraping soil from the lower part of the leg of the child’s skeleton.

  “Strange there’s nothing about them that shows why they were here. Usually there’s jewelry or some kind of possessions. These people had no possessions buried with them.”

  “There’s the fact of the fire that burned the bones. Maybe that took away any of the possessions. Burned them up,” said the Pastor. “Hey, here’s something,” he said as he worked at the ankle. Frank moved over to where the Pastor was. He scraped at the bone while the Pastor watched.

  “What is it?”

  “Looks like rust,” said Frank, his face close to the soil.

  The object took form among the bits of the mud and clay of its home. As Frank worked he followed trails of the artifact which led out from the initial point. The rust led in a brown path towards the leg of other skeleton. “It seems to be attached to the ankle area.”

  Then Frank looked at the Pastor. “I know why there were no possessions.”

  “What?” said Maggie.

  “This is part of a leg iron. See, Pastor, this is where the hasp was attached. I think this is one of the old type padlocks. See the bag shape. That kind of lock shape means they are very old. They used these locks long before the padlocks that we have today.”

  Frank stood and motioned to Maggie to come over. He looked at the Pastor. “Chains on a child. These poor people were slaves.”

  “Children were very valuable in the slave trade,” said Maggie. “They had less disease than the adults so they were a better investment for the traders.”

  Frank continued, “These chains indicate that the child here was burned to death with no chance of escaping.” Frank shifted his position squatting and ran his hands with care over the earth in front of him.

  “If these two skeletons were slaves, I expect that there are a lot of slave skeletons in here, probably a lot more children too.”

  The Pastor touched the aggregate also with a tender touch, softly with his fingers, carefully wiping back the trickle of ground water. “So this was a slave graveyard. The legend is true. “

  “Yes,” said Maggie.

  “I wish I hadn’t found this,” said the Pastor.

  Maggie stood up. “This graveyard legend, Pastor. It could have been a story made up by the surviving local slaves, maybe the ones who were forced to bury the wreckage. The legend was a way to keep the story alive, a way that the white overseers could not suppress.”

  “The murderers would not want to let anyone live who witnessed anything. Any witness would have to be very careful the rest of his or her life,” said the Pastor.

  “It could have been an accident,” said Frank, as usual speaking as a scientist, trying to consider all sides of the issue. “We still have no reason to believe it was murder.”

  Maggie said, her emotion showing in her tone, “An accident maybe but it was an accident where no one was saved. In those days if there was a shipboard catastrophe, lots of times they saved the Europeans, put them on the lifeboats and left the slaves on the ship. There are lots of stories of that kind of thing happening.”

  “That giant and his associates in the other end of the ship were burned to death too,” mused Frank.

  “More likely the slaves were killed because the others were killed,” said the Pastor. “Keep in mind they were considered the same as livestock. There may have been no thought about whether the slaves would die.”

  “The slaves had great value,” said Frank.

  “That just means the murder of the others was significant, something that had to be hidden or covered up by fire even with the great loss of the slave value,” continued the Pastor.

  “This explains old Mr. Johnson’s story about Adam and Eve,” said Maggie, who was sitting on the ground. Her hands were around her knees. She stared at the leg iron.

  “How’s that?” said the Pastor.

  “Adam and Eve were old slave names. When the traders loaded the ships over in Africa they would name the first male and the first female brought on board as Adam and as Eve,” said Maggie.

  “Maggie, you must have been interested in black history to know all this,” said the Pastor.

  “No,” said Maggie. “I was actually studying European history. My mother told me of her heritage, of her family’s generations in very early England. In college I was doing research to write a paper on the English tribes.”

  “How did you get into slavery?” said Frank.

  “In the early days the Romans took the English tribal captives back to Rome as slaves. The story of slavery began to fascinate me. I changed the paper and I read about all the civilizations that practiced slavery. I read the diaries of the captains in the African slave trade, some of them dating to the Seventeenth Century. That’s how I found out about the Adam and Eve names. I just didn’t think of it when the Pastor told that story. That old preacher must have heard some earlier story about this place,” said Maggie.

  “This wretched child
here,” said the Pastor. He looked at the fragile yellowed bones and tenderly tried to wipe them clean of the muck. “Young, too young to know anything, maybe eight or nine years old. Terrified.”

  “Let me tell you what I remember from the diary descriptions,” said Maggie. “Of course I can only guess at the ending, when the ship got up here in this creek.” Her eyes were closed as she slowly spoke.

  “The children had to surrender with their families to some other African, perhaps a debt collector or a conquering warrior from an enemy tribe. Then they were separated from parents and marched with others in tropical woodlands for miles and miles. Their little legs would be exhausted when they would reach a gathering point, a riverbank, maybe something like this river here, fairly narrow, muddy, with long dugout canoes drawn up on the shoreline. Iron rings were put on the children’s ankles and they were loaded into these boats, pushed down into the bowels of the canoes until there were many packed inside. The canoes were guided out into the river by expert boatmen, and they were taken down river to another place. The children would cry and cry but there were no parents to hear them and after a while they would stop crying and begin to think about survival. One of the children would become a leader, the strongest child, and would whisper in the village language about plans of escape. The thought of escape would keep the children warm for a while in the chill.

  “The iron bites into the flesh of their ankles and the pain becomes intense. They scream or moan, bodies shaking with cold and shock in the night. Their skin has no cover. They are stripped of even the simple loincloth they had worn, and all their body hair shaved so no one can tell their ages and so each can bring a higher price. The iron pulls constantly against their skin with each touch causing more pain.