Chapter Six
I FIND THE MYSTERIOUS GRAVE
THE SUN HAD dipped lower in the sky by the time I got back to the highway, but that didn’t offer me any respite because I was walking west, straight into the bright ball of compressed light that hung in front of me like an oversized Christmas ornament, blinding me with its brilliance and blasting me with the heat of an open fire. Sweat poured off me in rivers, drenching my back and pooling in ever-larger circles under my arms until my blouse was soaked through. I would have killed for another glass of iced tea. I would have settled gratefully for a glass of tepid water.
I walked and sweated, and pretty soon I began to wonder if the caretaker at Oak Grove had pointed me in the right direction or told me the truth about how far it was to Freemount. Maybe he’d intentionally steered me wrong. His attitude toward me had certainly grown surly when I told him what I was looking for. But why? What did he know that I didn’t know?
I heard a vehicle coming up the road behind me. It was a pickup truck, fire-engine red and spotted with patches of rust. It motored past me before grinding to a stop and slowly backing up. The driver leaned across and shouted through the passenger-side window, “You lost, young lady?”
It was one of the old men from the diner, the one who had drawn the map for me. I approached the truck.
“Not unless I’m going in the wrong direction,” I said. “I’m heading to Freemount.”
“Freemount?” He looked dumbfounded. “What do you want with Freemount?”
“Does that mean I’m going in the right direction?”
He slid across the truck’s bench seat and pushed open the passenger door.
“Hop in. I’ll give you a lift.”
Mrs. Hazelton would have been horrified if she’d seen me grab the door handle and climb in. Hitchhiking was something boys and men did. It was definitely not something a girl should ever contemplate. Not a decent girl anyway. But the old man was seventy if he was a day. He looked trim, but I was willing to bet I could outrun him if I had to. I could probably wrestle him to the ground too, if it came to that. I was strong. I’d carried countless piled-sky-high baskets of damp laundry out to the clotheslines to pin them up. I’d trucked a little one on my hip for hours at a time. I’d moved furniture and scrubbed floors and dug and weeded gardens. Also, he was wearing Coke-bottle glasses in heavy black frames, which meant that he was probably blind as a newborn kitten without them. In a pinch, I could yank the glasses off his face and throw them into the weeds at the side of the road. I’d be off in a flash while he lurched around, arms out in front of him, like a real-life Mr. Magoo. I slammed the truck door shut, and the old man pressed down on the gas.
“I’m Miles Standish, by the way,” he said.
“Cady Andrews.”
I left my window cranked all the way down so the breeze would dry my face. For the first time since I’d gotten off the bus, I wondered where I would spend the night. Definitely someplace with a bathtub or a shower. I could hardly wait to scrub off the sweat and grime and climb into my one remaining clean skirt and blouse. Maybe I’d been a little hasty in jettisoning everything else. But at the time I’d done it, I had no idea I was going to make this detour. In fact, just the opposite—I’d been sure that I would end up ripping to shreds whatever was in the envelope.
“What exactly do you know about Freemount, Cady Andrews?” Mr. Standish asked.
“Not much.”
He glanced at me.
“Okay, nothing,” I admitted.
“But you’re interested in the cemetery there?”
“That’s right.”
“You looking for someone in particular?”
“Thomas Jefferson. But not the president.” Although maybe, just maybe, the Thomas Jefferson who was buried in the Freemount cemetery was one of his descendants. I hadn’t thought of that before. Maybe I was related to the third—or was he the fourth?—president of the United States. That would be something. “This Thomas Jefferson died nearly sixteen years ago.”
Mr. Standish didn’t say anything, not about Thomas Jefferson anyway. “What else do you know about the place?”
“Nothing. Until a half hour ago, I didn’t even know it existed. Why?”
“It’s a peculiar destination for a young girl such as yourself. There’s not much there. Just a few old people too stubborn to move after the flood.”
“Flood? What flood?”
“Back in ’49. That was the beginning of the end for Freemount, not that anyone around here shed many tears.”
What did he mean by that?
Before I could ask, a gas station appeared. Its windows were dark, and the sign over it hung crooked. Mr. Standish slowed his truck to a stop and swept an arm out the open window.
“Here we are.”
Beside the gas station, there was a small wood-framed house. Across from it stood what looked like a small bank or post office. A little farther along I saw a closed-down, boarded-up school surrounded by a sagging chicken-wire fence.
“This is Freemount?” It looked more like a ghost town.
“I warned you there wasn’t much here.”
“Not much? It doesn’t look like there’s anything.” Not anything that looked alive anyway. I scanned the desolate landscape. “I don’t see a cemetery.”
“Ah.” Mr. Standish pressed down on the gas again. A moment later I saw a steeple. The truck slowed. I got out in front of a tiny wooden church in the middle of a neatly trimmed lawn edged with well-tended flower beds and shrubs.
“Looks like old Edgar is here.” Mr. Standish nodded to a truck that was even older and sorrier-looking than his own. It was parked next to the church and was a depressing industrial gray, like something out of those old black-and-white pictures from the Depression. The front bumper was held on with wire. “He’ll see you get safely back to town, if you ask him.”
I climbed out of the truck. Mr. Standish tossed me a salute before cranking his steering wheel to turn around. I watched him until he reached the highway and was surprised when he headed back toward town. We hadn’t passed any crossroads on our way here, so there was no place for him to turn off before he got to Orrenstown. So where had he been going when he picked me up? And why wasn’t he continuing on his way there? That’s when it occurred to me: Mr. Standish must have followed me from town. But why? Were people so hard up for gossip around here that they trailed strangers to see what they were up to?
I left my suitcase on the church steps and went around back, where a picket fence that showed more wood than paint corralled a few generations’ worth of headstones. An arch with a rainbow-shaped sign attached to it rose above a small gate: Freemount African Methodist Episcopal Church. Rest in Eternal Peace.
I dug the newspaper clipping out of my pocket and compared it to the scene in front of me. The fence around the cemetery in the picture looked whiter and straighter than the one in front of me. The headstones were straighter too. But apart from these minor differences, I was sure I was in the right place. I opened the little gate and stepped inside to look for the stone that had been vandalized.
I had no trouble finding it. One corner was still missing, just like in the picture, but the stone was no longer lying on the ground. Someone had righted it. I went closer to read the name and the dates. They were the same. I had found Thomas Jefferson’s grave. Now what? What did this man have to do with me?
I heard a whoop. Three small boys with deep-brown skin raced around the side of the church, two of them chasing the third. All three stopped in surprise when they saw me, but I didn’t pay them any attention. They were just kids.
Then another boy appeared, this one older and taller.
“I told you all to stay put,” he shouted at the youngsters. “You’re supposed to be working, and it’s church work. Your gran will have a fit if she finds out you didn’t do what you was told.” He shook his head in disgust. “You know that. You especially, Jacob.”
The smallest and skinniest of t
he boys looked down at his bare and dusty feet, seemingly ashamed of himself—but only for a second. One of the other boys sharp-elbowed him in the ribs and whispered something, and Jacob couldn’t seem to stop himself. He burst out laughing.
“Get back to work,” the bigger boy snarled, “or I’ll tell your granny, and then you’ll be sorry.”
The three boys skulked back around the church and out of sight. The older boy stayed put. He raised a hand to shield his eyes and frowned at me. I wished he would go back to supervising the little ones, if that’s what he was doing, and leave me alone.
He didn’t.
He marched over to me and said, “What are you doing?” just as bold as can be, as if I was on his private property instead of in a church cemetery.
“I’m minding my own business,” I said. Maybe he would take a hint.
The boy’s frown deepened. He leaped over the low fence in one easy fluid movement and wove his way toward me until he could see what I was looking at.
“Why you so interested in that stone?”
That’s the main problem with small towns. People have nothing better to do than snoop in other people’s business. I wanted to tell him to keep his nose where it belonged. But he clearly knew this church. Maybe he knew more.
“The man who’s buried here was awfully young when he died. Do you know what happened to him?” I asked.
“He was shot dead.”
I had wondered how the mysterious Thomas Jefferson died. I’d figured illness, maybe. Or some kind of an accident—a car crash or something work-related. But shot? That had never occurred to me.
“Was it a hunting accident or something?” I asked.
“He was shot escaping from prison.” The boy all but spit the words at me. What was his problem? Who was he mad at—me or this man who had been dead for over a decade?
“What was he doing in prison?”
The boy glowered at me. “Why do you want to know? What’s it to you?”
“I’m just asking.”
“He was doing life. For supposedly killing a man.”
“Supposedly?”
“It’s what I said, isn’t it? They said he killed a white man.”
A white man? I looked up and re-read the sign above the cemetery gate. African Methodist.
The boy cocked his head and looked me over, this time with more curiosity than hostility. “You’re not from around here, are you?”
I shook my head.
“He was a Negro,” the boy said. “They said he killed a white man and they sent him to prison. Then they executed him.”
“But you just said—”
“They executed him,” the boy said again. “I don’t care if you believe it. It’s what happened.”
Chapter Seven
I VISIT A MORGUE
A CAR HORN tooted. It turned out to be the horn of a cop car. It slid up the dirt road and came to rest in front of the little church. The driver’s door swung open and a cop in a tan uniform with a short-sleeved shirt and a cowboy-style hat got out. He had a badge on his left shirt pocket and a pistol holstered to his hip.
“Daniel, how are you?” The cop grinned at the kid.
Daniel did not return the smile. “Good enough, I guess, Sheriff,” he said over the sound of boys whooping and shrieking, out of sight but not out of mind—or earshot. “I’d better go. I’m minding some little ones for their gran.” He walked away without another word.
The sheriff leaned on the open car door and studied me.
“You must be that girl everyone’s talking about, the one with the keen interest in our local cemeteries.” There you go. The only way he could have known that was if one of the old men at the diner—or the waitress—had told him. And since nothing I was doing was even remotely against the law, whoever told him had done so just for the pure joy of passing along a piece of gossip. The sheriff squinted at the stones around me. “Looking for anything in particular?”
I wondered if this sheriff was the same one who had been quoted in the photo caption. Even if he wasn’t, for sure he would know the story behind Thomas Jefferson’s grave.
“I was looking for this stone.” I pointed at it. “That boy was just telling me that the man buried here was shot escaping from prison.”
“Well, I guess that’s true.” He said it casually, as if it were of no importance.
“And that he was sent to prison for murder.”
“True again.” He removed his hat and ran a handkerchief over his forehead and then around the inside brim. “Your interest is in murderers, is it?”
“I’m just curious about this man. The boy who was just here, he seems to think that he didn’t kill anyone.”
“Well, I guess you can’t blame him,” he said. I wondered what he meant by that. “Why is a pretty little thing like you interested in some old murder anyway?”
I didn’t want to tell him. If there was a killer somewhere in my family tree, I wanted to know before I announced it to the world. It might color the way people looked at me or influence whether or not they would talk to me, which would make it harder for me to find out what I needed to know. A good reporter has to talk to a lot of people to unearth the truth. And I intended to do just that.
“I’m working on a story.”
“A story,” he repeated. “Now what kind of story would that be?”
“I’m a reporter,” I said. Why not? I was reporting on my search to understand whether the newspaper photograph Mrs. Hazelton had given me would lead me to the circumstances under which I had come into this world. I intended to write up what I was doing and then use it to get Mr. Carter to give me a job. So yes, I was a reporter. I just wasn’t being paid to be one.
“You look awfully young,” the sheriff said.
“Well, so far I’ve only written for my school paper,” I admitted, if it’s possible to admit to a lie. “But I’m going to be a reporter when I graduate.”
“Is that so? And you plan to write about this fellow here?” He nodded at the stone.
“I do.”
According to the dates engraved on the marker, Thomas Jefferson had died almost a full year after I was born. But he was a black man, which meant there was no way he was my father. I have blond hair, blue eyes and skin that turns red if I get too much sun. The boy, Daniel, had said that Thomas Jefferson had killed a white man. Had his victim been my father? Was that the link between me and Jefferson’s grave? Or—and this was also a distinct possibility—was I related to whoever had pushed Jefferson’s tombstone over and tried to destroy it? Or had my father been the prison guard who had shot Thomas Jefferson when he tried to escape from prison? I needed to find out.
The sheriff put his hat back onto his head, squinted up at the sun and said, “You planning on staying in town a while?”
“Until I get my story.”
“You have kin in these parts?”
“No, sir. I’m on my summer break. I’m on my way home.”
“Where are you staying?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Well then, you’ll want to call on Maggie. She takes in boarders. I’m pretty sure she’ll have a room for you. Come on, I’ll give you a lift back to town.” When I hesitated, he said, “I’m Sheriff Hicks. Bradley Hicks. I’m one of the good guys.”
The sun had sunk to treetop level, but its descent had done nothing to cool the air. The walk back to town promised to be long and thirsty. I accepted his offer.
Sheriff Hicks circled the front of his squad car and opened the front passenger door for me. Then he climbed in behind the wheel, turned the car around, and we drove back to town.
“So, where’s home?” he asked.
I said the first thing that popped into my head.
“New York.”
“New York City?” He whistled and shook his head. “I was there once, and I have to tell you, that was more than enough for me. I don’t know how folks can live like that, cheek-to-jowl and stacked up so high in the sky you
have to rely on an elevator to get you up and down. Not much grass to speak of, either, unless you count Central Park. Me, I like to step out my front door and smell the honeysuckle and the lilacs. I don’t even mind mowing the lawn. The smell of fresh-cut grass is worth it. I guess I’m just a country boy at heart.”
“Have you lived here long?”
“Only my whole life.” He flashed me a smile. “How about you?”
“Me?”
“You lived in New York City your whole life?”
I nodded and hoped he wouldn’t ask me too many questions. I’d only seen New York in pictures and movies.
“Where do you go to school?” he asked.
I stared at him, momentarily flustered.
“You said you work on the school paper. College, right?”
I nodded again, pleased that he seemed to have no trouble picturing me as a college student.
“So where do you go to school?”
“Um, California. I…I have relatives in California. I live with them during the school year.”
“And you’re headed for New York, where you say you’re from.” He glanced at me again, but he had slipped on mirrored sunglasses, and I couldn’t see his eyes. “You wouldn’t be telling me a little fib now, would you?”
What? What would make him think I was lying—even though I was?
“I keep my eyes and ears open,” he continued. “It’s part of my job—making sure my town is safe and free from trouble. And trouble sure seems to be brewing this summer, especially among college students.” He stole another glance at me. “You sure you aren’t heading up to New York to one of those freedom schools to get your marching orders?”
“No, sir,” I said. “I’m going home to see my family.”
He nodded and didn’t ask any more questions. Instead, he told me about the area, which was mostly agricultural, and about the town, which was mostly quiet.
“They’re good, churchgoing people around here. We don’t get much trouble. I’d like to keep it that way.” He gave me a pointed look.
My Life Before Me Page 4