“Anything being done to stop it?”
“The park service is planting seedlings. People are working on it.”
“They’ll probably find a solution. What happened after the revolution?” Lewis prompted.
“The settlers organized the State of Franklin but failed to get it ratified. This all happened in the late 1780s. By the way, did I tell you about the log cabin?”
“What log cabin?”
Lindsay explained about the McBrides’ log cabin and the plaque and the older artifacts identified by Marina. She opened the scrapbook on Lewis’s lap. “These are pictures of the log cabin as it looked when it was at the site and now.”
“This is great. You say Drew didn’t have this?”
“No. The McBrides were put off by the archaeology survey team before Drew could find out anything.”
“I see. This Claire person?”
Lindsay nodded. “Unfortunately.”
“So you believe the lead coffins are from that earlier occupation and not the later one?”
“The use of lead coffins was an earlier burial practice in the North. As far as I can discover, they weren’t used here in the 1800s. By that time, settlers buried their dead in wooden coffins that were made and donated by members of the community. Often, families would keep wood, mostly walnut, on hand for that purpose. Besides, the Gallows family is buried in the church cemetery. They’re all accounted for.”
“So, who’s in the coffins, and how did they get here?”
“What I think is that the lead coffins belong to a family who immigrated from the North in the 1700s. People generally want to be buried the way their parents and grandparents were buried. They were performing the burial practices they were familiar with. I also believe that the burials themselves either predate or post-date the Revolutionary War.”
“Why is that?”
“Because the lead would have been needed for cannonballs and bullets during the war. Claire found an article about one of the first mines in Tennessee. It was a lead mine, and it’s believed that the mine supplied all the bullets for the Battle of Kings Mountain in North Carolina—that was one of the decisive battles of the Revolutionary War.”
“You think the lead in the coffins came from there?”
Lindsay shrugged. “I don’t think they schlepped the coffins all the way from wherever the settlers came from.”
“Is there a way we can match the metal with its source?”
“Maybe, I don’t know. I’ll have to find out. Another interesting question is why a form of burial more typical of wealthy families is being practiced on a farmstead that has shown no indication of wealth. In the 1700s, the log cabin was one room and a loft. Nothing we’ve found so far indicates they had wealth.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. We’ve excavated the house foundation. And we now have the house that came off the foundation.”
“But you said that it was two—what do you call it—pens?” Lewis slapped a flying bug between his hands. “I thought you said there were no mosquitoes.”
Lindsay drew her feet up and sat cross-legged. “There are two pens. The second pen was built much later. You can tell by the two different styles of building techniques. It’s my guess the second pen was added to the house around 1836 by the Gallowses.”
“Could the cemetery be attached to some other house not yet discovered? Like the Gallows House, the house the crew stays in, for instance?”
“The artifacts on top of the coffin predate our house. There could be another house foundation somewhere, but where? There’s no indication I’ve seen of another house, and the initial survey was pretty good.” Lindsay shrugged. “But the survey team did miss the log cabin that was moved. I don’t know how they did that. Their informant knew about it.”
“I wonder why they weren’t told?”
“Mary Susan Tidwell was the main informant used by the survey team. Miss Tidwell was possessive about her status as their informant. Maybe she didn’t want to tell them about the cabin. That would have pointed their attention away from her and toward the McBrides. Maybe she concealed the information to prevent loss of her standing. Informants have been known to do that.”
“Didn’t the survey team use a variety of informants? Did this woman hypnotize them away from everyone else?”
“I think she had such a wealth of knowledge it was just easier to deal with only her. You can ask Drew. I try to keep away from challenging their survey methods.”
“How’s your relationship with the site director? Claire? I know she tried to bring in Nigel Boyd to analyze the remains in the coffins, rather than using you. He was really pissed off when he found out you were already here.”
“I know. He called. But Claire and I are getting along swimmingly now.”
“How did you manage that?”
“Bribery.”
Lewis laughed. “I’m glad to see I’m rubbing off on you. What did you offer?”
“First author on a couple of publications. It turned out that was something she really wanted. She’s not a bad writer or researcher, she’s just too inexperienced to be a site director.”
“That’s a big carrot you offered her. No wonder she took it. Are we about finished with the history lesson? As lovely as these woods are, I’m anxious to get back to civilization. That’s a big spider’s web in those branches over there,” he said, pointing toward a giant web swaying in the breeze with the motion of the branches.
“It’s going to be a cold winter.”
“What?”
“A thick spider’s web means a cold winter.”
“Does it really?”
“The mountain folk think so. I’ve never run a correlation.” Lindsay walked over and touched a strand of the web, gently vibrating it, trying to get the spider to come out. But it wouldn’t show itself. “Must be on to me.” She turned back to Lewis.
“Only about fifty more years of history. In 1789, North Carolina ratified the new Constitution of the United States and ceded its western regions, which included this area, to the federal government. They then called this the Southwest Territory. There was another land rush, and more land was taken from the Indians. In 1792 the Cherokee and Creek warriors attacked settlers in an effort to stop the squatters. The settlers formed a militia and counter-attacked the Indian towns, finally ending the raids. In 1796, Tennessee became the sixteenth state. This is the world the people like the Gallowses settled into.
“At the time, all the manufacturing, like forging tools, spinning cloth, making soap, tanning hides, milling grain, sawing lumber, and making whiskey, were done on the farmsteads like the one we’re excavating. I’ll have to take you to the mountain farm museum. It has a rebuilt farmstead, much like this one.”
“Good. We’ll all go. We have a few days before everyone arrives.”
“I think most of the crew have already seen it, that and Cade’s Cove, too. Anyway, about the only industry outside the farms was ironwork. Early on, metalworking was brought to the region by craftsmen from Pennsylvania—which is where the earliest settlers on our farmstead may have come from. These men built furnaces and forges to process the iron ores and supplied farmers and blacksmiths with the metal.
“Meanwhile, the Cherokee in north Georgia and Tennessee had been peacefully farming their own farmsteads. They wrote their own constitution and started Cherokee language newspapers. Many were better educated than the white settlers. But this didn’t stop the state of Georgia from confiscating their lands when gold was found, nor did the Supreme Court decision protecting Cherokee sovereignty stop Andrew Jackson from ordering the army to forcibly remove them to a reserve in Oklahoma in 1838. The confiscated land was quickly sold to settlers.”
“The Trail of Tears,” commented Lewis.
Lindsay nodded. “Almost two-fifths died of exhaustion, exposure, and starvation. A few managed to escape into the Smoky Mountains, becoming the Eastern Band. John’s a member of the Eastern band.”
&nb
sp; “How is John? I imagine his construction company’s been receiving a lot of business since he built the cofferdam around the shipwreck.”
“It has. In fact, he’s got more work than he can get to. I feel guilty that he had to come haul me out of the woods.”
“Lindsay, we are all very grateful that he did. When you hear of someone missing under those circumstances . . . well, the outcome is not usually good. You know that. All the archaeology faculty, even Kenneth Kerwin, was deeply worried.”
Lindsay tried to smile. Lewis was getting too close to her open wounds. How was she going to keep the fear tucked away safely inside if people insisted on wanting to talk about it? “Kenneth?” she replied, trying to sound like that was funny.
“Of course, now he’s aggravated you’re working in his territory—a historical site. He wonders why I didn’t send him.”
“Did you tell him you didn’t want an archaeologist as much as a detective?”
Lewis chuckled. “I can just see him dealing with some of the people you have described to me on this site. We’d probably be up here hauling him out of jail. I can see the headlines now: Archaeologist Goes Berserk, Trowels Entire Crew to Death.”
Lindsay tried to laugh with him. “I guess we’d better get back. I think Drew had Mrs. Laurens fix a big meal in your honor. She’s a great cook, and she made a red velvet cake.”
“That’s fine with me. We can go out to dinner anytime. What’s this?” Lewis stared at a page in the scrapbook.
Lindsay laughed and the black cloud drifting over her dispersed into the forest. “Poems scratched on the floor of the Gallows cabin loft. Elaine McBride and I are trying to track them down. Marina thinks there’s a good chance they are contemporary with the earliest part of the house.”
“What do you think they mean?”
“They could be children’s rhymes. You know how dark those can be.”
“Interesting. I wonder who would write them on the floor? I appreciate your history lesson, even though it was a little biased.”
“Biased? What do you mean?”
“I detected a slight bias in favor of the Indians.”
“Lewis, I’m shocked you would accuse me of being anything but objective where history is concerned. That’s . . . What in the world is going on now?” In the distance, Lindsay saw the field crew crossing the bridge in the midst of a heated argument with a stranger.
Chapter 23
You Digging Up Bodies?
“JUST TELL ME, is it true that you’re going to dig up bodies from a cemetery?”
The questioner was a young man in jeans, T-shirt, and a long-sleeved shirt worn as a jacket. His brown hair was tousled by the wind. In his hand he had a pen poised over a pad of paper. Adam was poised to yell at him for encroaching on his personal space. Drew was asking him to leave. Lindsay’s first thought was to wonder if Claire was going to steal his car. She looked at his black pickup truck and almost flew over to grab him by his shirt front.
“Where did you get that truck? Does it belong to the McBrides?”
“What? No. It’s mine. What are you doing? Let me go.” He was beginning to look a little wild-eyed, and tried to pull away, but Lindsay held fast, aided by the adrenaline pumping through her body.
“Not until you tell me what you were doing Tuesday at 8:30 A.M.”
“Tuesday? Tuesday . . . I don’t know . . . I was at the newspaper office. What’s this about?”
“Do you know a truck was stolen from the McBrides?”
“No. Who are they? Who are you?”
Lindsay looked again at the truck. It was a small black Toyota, not the truck that had passed her, not the McBrides’ truck. Lindsay loosened her grasp, and he pulled away.
“You people are crazy.” He almost ran across the bridge to his truck.
“That was a strange approach, but effective,” said Adam.
Lindsay glanced over at Lewis. He stared at her, as did all the others, with open amazement on his face.
“The McBrides’ truck was stolen. For a moment I thought that was it.”
“Did you develop some kind of bond with them?” asked Kelsey.
Lindsay looked at Kelsey, realizing suddenly that her behavior must have seemed bizarre. “They’re nice people.”
“They must’ve been,” said Kelsey.
“What did that reporter want?” asked Lewis.
“Someone told him about the lead coffins,” said Drew. “He wouldn’t say who.”
“He had a bad slant to his questions,” said Joel, “like we’re grave robbers or something.”
“We need to have some discussion about how to deal with the media,” said Lewis. “I’ll write an article for the local paper.”
“I like Lindsay’s approach,” said Byron.
Lewis took a suitcase from the trunk of his car and started toward the house with the others. He stopped at the steps and looked up. “Nice place. A lot nicer than some of the places I’ve stayed on digs.”
“It comes with ghosts,” said Powell.
“Yes,” agreed his brother, Dillon, “we hear them knocking about occasionally. Mostly at night.”
“They were very active when we first got here,” said Kelsey. “But they’ve sort of calmed down. Used to us, I suppose.”
“They’ve been real quiet since Trent left,” said Adam.
“Ghosts. This should be interesting,” Lewis said.
“Your room is upstairs,” Drew told him.
As they ascended to the second floor, Lewis leaned over and whispered in Lindsay’s ear. “You want to tell me what that was about?”
“Not particularly.”
Lindsay hurried to her room and gathered up her clothes and towel. She was surprised to discover that the bathroom was empty.
A warm shower—it had been a while since she’d had anything other than a cold one. The warm water was a comfort. She wanted to stay. She’d like to have a bath and just lie back in the tub and soak. But she hurried through the shower, to give the others a turn. Kelsey was waiting at the door when she opened it.
“It’s about time.” Kelsey brushed past her into the bathroom.
“Sorry, I thought I was hurrying.”
Dinner was the most civil it had ever been. Claire ate in silence. From the corner of her eye, Lindsay noticed Claire stealing occasional glances at her. She wondered if she had committed some offense, real or imagined, against her.
It was Lewis who did most of the talking, explaining in detail what was to happen when the NASA team arrived. Lewis was good at rekindling people’s spirits. Soon, everyone was talking, asking questions, speculating about the coffins and the site. Lewis held his own. The brief history lesson Lindsay had given him had taken hold so well that you’d think Tennessee history was his specialty. Lewis could go a long way with a little data.
“So, Lindsay, what was that thing with the reporter about?” asked Powell.
Lindsay had managed to avoid the question all the way through dinner. She thought she was home free when Mrs. Laurens had cut the red velvet cake.
“I almost had a collision yesterday with a reckless driver in a black pickup. It turned out the truck was stolen from the McBrides. I thought it might have been the reporter.” Had that sounded innocent enough? No. They all stared as if there had to be more. “My SUV is brand-new.”
“Ah,” said Bill, “you’re one of those people who park in the farthest parking space just so you don’t get dinged, I’ll bet.”
“Anyway, it was a chance to manhandle him,” said Byron. “Did you see his face? Good job.”
Lindsay had to laugh. She had seen his face, and his wide-eyed, openmouthed expression of dire surprise and bewilderment was indeed funny.
The meal ended with Lewis telling the crew to refer all questions about the coffins to him. Most of the crew drifted along with Drew and Lewis to the living room. Lindsay went to her room, expecting to be alone. Claire was upstairs in the hallway. Lindsay had the impression she had come
from Lewis’s room. She shrugged it off. Perhaps Claire forgot something when she moved, or maybe she had just imagined it.
“You aren’t downstairs with the others?” asked Lindsay.
Claire shook her head. “There’s a lot of stuff I need to be doing up here.”
“Me, too.”
“You and Lewis seem to know each other real well.” Claire followed Lindsay into their room.
“He’s my division head.”
“Division?”
“When he came to the University of Georgia, he combined the Departments of Anthropology and Archaeology into a division. Sort of made us all one department, but not exactly. Each has a separate chair. He’s head of the whole thing.”
“Why not put them all together in one department?”
“Archaeology and anthropology have different needs and concerns, and the anthropology faculty outnumber us. We archaeologists don’t want to get outvoted every time we have a conflict in our interests.”
“There’s a lot of politics in universities.”
“Whatever gave you that idea?”
Lindsay wished for the first time that they had a television set. She would like to watch TV. She would like to occupy her mind with something every moment, no matter how trivial.
“He acts like he’s your friend.”
Lindsay thought that was an odd way of putting it. “I suppose he is, most of the time. I didn’t think we would get along when I first heard he was coming to UGA, but things have worked out, so far.”
“What were the two of you doing in the woods?”
Another peculiar question. “Discussing the ship display and the wax figures he was talking about.” Lindsay hated to lie, but what choice was there? I can’t just say, “Gee, Claire, we were talking about your and Drew’s possible homicidal tendencies.” “He wanted to see the photo album with the pictures of the cabin.”
Lindsay knew that must have hurt, since Claire was the one who had alienated the McBrides from the archaeology project. She had a strong urge to sit Claire down and ask her why she acted the way she did—explain to her that she was her own worst enemy. But why break the peaceful bliss she had achieved? She pulled out a novel instead. Claire got out her papers and computer and was soon pecking away at the keyboard.
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