Sacred Ground

by Barbara Wood

  Erica was glued to the TV set in Jared’s motor home. When she had found the documentary video on the 1920s’ spiritualist, she had had no idea what a rich mine she was about to tap into: rare archival footage of Sister Sarah’s sermons where audiences of six thousand were brought to their feet in ecstasy as they saw deceased loved ones materialize, with the charismatic Sister Sarah onstage in her flowing robes, arms outstretched, head back, eyes closed, quivering with spiritual energy.

  She had been an astounding beauty. Film clips from the few movies she had made prior to being discovered showed a sultry, sloe-eyed siren who had been variously labeled vamp, goddess, seductress, femme fatale. Audiences loved her. Footage also included home movies made by Edgar Rice Burroughs on his Tarzana Rancho, where Sarah was a frequent visitor, along with Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford. It was in those early days that her talent had been discovered, when she told fortunes to friends, counseled them on important decisions, and even helped the police locate a child that had gone missing in the Baldwin Hills. Word of mouth had spread, and she became more and more in demand for private séances. Sarah moved to larger venues, finding that she was just as able to summon numbers of ghosts as easily as one. People worshiped her. She reunited them with the dear departed. She was also the living promise of life after death.

  While Sarah lifted her arms and eyes heavenward in the video, her audience breathless with spiritual anticipation, Erica consulted her watch. What was keeping Jared?

  He had left hours ago for an urgent meeting with the Confederated Tribes of Southern California, hoping to dissuade them from putting a stop to DNA testing on the Emerald Hills skeleton. Their surprise move, resulting in a court order suspending all archaeological and forensic work in the cave, could ruin all possibilities for identifying the skeleton once and for all. Temporarily restrained from working in the cave, Erica had decided to take the time to pursue her search for the source of the painting in her dreams.

  If Mrs. Dockstader was not her grandmother, and if Erica had never before set eyes on the painting over Mrs. Dockstader’s fireplace, then her childhood dreams must have stemmed from another source. It seemed logical that since Sister Sarah bought this property and filled in the canyon, someone might have taken a photograph inside the cave and published it somewhere.

  But Erica was having a hard time concentrating.

  All she could think about was she and Jared making love beneath the stars. Was this what it was like to be in love? No wonder people wrote songs about it! She felt giddy and silly, happy and delirious. But scared, too, that it might all be just a dream, or that she might lose him before she even had him. Maybe that was all part of—

  She suddenly stared at the screen. Restored film footage, taken in 1922, was showing Sister Sarah going inside the cave. Erica shifted to the edge of her seat.

  The camera was on the south ridge and focused down on the cave entrance. Sarah, in her trademark white robe and hood, disappeared into the darkness while her entourage and reporters waited dramatically outside. When she emerged minutes later, her expression was transfixed. The voice-over said, “Did Sister Sarah experience a spiritual revelation in this cave as she later claimed, or was she acting”? Shortly after she purchased the property, she had the canyon filled in, burying the cave so that we will never know what she saw in there.”

  The closing film clip of the documentary, shot in 1928, showed a distraught Sister Sarah in front of microphones and journalists saying farewell to her followers. The news had come abruptly and unexpectedly, when the Church of the Spirits was at its peak popularity. Sarah did not explain why she was dropping out of public work, only that it was “God’s will.” She then vanished from view and although efforts were made to find her— newspapers ran contests, reporters vied for the big story— Sister Sarah was never heard from again.

  The documentary ended, and as Erica turned off the TV, she thought: It all comes down to the cave. It was the painting that brought me here in the first place, and others over the centuries were drawn to the cave— the people who left behind the spectacles, the reliquary, the crucifix, the braid, the spirit-stone, the Aztec fetish, the deed to the rancho. Sister Sarah. How are they all connected? How do they connect to the painting in Kathleen Dockstader’s house? How does it all connect to me?

  What she and Jared had found on the original owners of Rancho Paloma was that the Navarros had been a prominent founding family in Los Angeles. Apparently the matriarch, a woman named Angela, had been a major force in shaping the new town. One of the things she had accomplished was pushing for a city park where people could sit or walk, and where bullfights would not be held, as they were in the Plaza. The park was created in 1866 and originally called Central Park— its contemporary name was Pershing Square. Today, in the San Fernando Valley there was a school named Angela Navarro Elementary, in her honor. Erica and Jared had also found out that Angela Navarro had lived at Rancho Paloma and died in there in 1866, and that a legal hassle had ensued upon her death when the family couldn’t produce the deed to the property.

  Because it was buried in our cave. Whoever hid it there knew about the skeleton buried there, and who she was. And the people who visited the cave through the centuries knew who the woman was. DNA tests would at least point us in a direction.

  “Hi.”

  She looked up at Jared’s smile. Her heart executed a somersault. “Hi.” Sister Sarah’s séances weren’t the only miracles that had taken place here. Jared had finally called his father. They had talked for an hour. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a start. And Jared was going to design a house just for Erica. She said she liked the one the miniature Arbogasts lived in.

  “I’m afraid I have some bad news. I can’t get them to change their minds about blocking the DNA testing.”

  “We’ll just have to keep trying.”

  He paused, smoky eyes filling up with the sight of her. Erica wondered if she and Jared would ever tire of the delicious thrill of suddenly being in each other’s presence. “There’s worse news, I’m afraid,” he said. “The bones are going to be removed and buried in a local Native American cemetery.”

  “No! When?”

  “As soon as possible. I’m sorry, Erica. You know, I never thought I would come around to your way of thinking, but I now believe that it’s wrong to remove bones until a cultural affiliation can be identified. I’ve never been a religious or spiritual man, but we know that the woman buried in the cave was, and that the people who came and paid homage to her were spiritual people. We have to honor that, and we also have a duty to find who are the rightful caretakers of her final resting place.”

  He bent to kiss her.

  Luke stuck his head through the door. “Uh, Erica? You have visitors. They said it’s important.”

  She stepped outside and shielded her eyes against the sun. “Mrs. Dockstader!”

  The older woman was dressed in white slacks and a pale pink blouse, with open-toed sandals and a small shoulder purse hanging from a long gold chain. Her eyes were hidden behind enormous sunglasses. “Tell me about the headaches,” she said.

  * * *

  Jared invited Kathleen Dockstader and her attorney to meet with Erica in his RV, which was more comfortable and more private than Erica’s tent or the lab trailer.

  “Dr. Tyler,” the older woman began, “after you left I had my lawyer run a background check on you. As you seemed legitimate, an anthropologist working for the state with impressive credentials, I decided to check out your story. I hired a private detective to do a search on hippie communes, anyone who might have lived in one and could remember that far back. He tracked down someone running a tavern in Seattle, who had lived in a commune during the years my daughter would have. He said he remembered the Dockstader girl, a runaway heiress who didn’t want to have anything to do with her mother’s millions. They all admired her at the time. In retrospect, he thinks she was crazy. The detective asked him if he knew what happened to her. He said s
he left the commune with a musician on a Harley motorcycle.”

  Kathleen paused, clasping and unclasping her hands. It was just as Jared had speculated: after he and Erica left her house a week ago, Mrs. Dockstader hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Erica. She had even canceled her world golf tour.

  “And then there was this,” she said as she signaled to the attorney, who retrieved a book from his briefcase, handing it to her. Erica was astonished to see that it was her high school yearbook from 1982, the year she graduated. Kathleen opened it to a page marked with what turned out to be a small black-and-white photograph that looked as if it had been clipped from an earlier yearbook. The girl in the picture had a bouffant hairdo that curled out at the bottom in a flip. “This was taken in 1965,” Kathleen said. “When Monica was seventeen.” She laid the picture next to the one of Erica. “You were both the same age in these photos. The resemblance is astonishing, isn’t it?”

  “We look like twins,” Erica murmured.

  Kathleen closed the book and handed it back to the lawyer. “But what finally convinced me that you were my granddaughter was when you asked about the headaches. My mother had blinding headaches. Not just migraines, but strange fainting spells during which she heard things and saw things. Visions. Apparently it is an inherited trait. She told me that a great-aunt suffered from the same thing. No one knew about it. It was sort of our family secret. Others pretending to be you, who had come hoping to claim a reward or inheritance, knew nothing about the headaches.”

  “Mrs. Dockstader—”

  “Please call me Kathleen.”

  “Why did my mother run away?”

  “Because we wanted her to stay at a home for unwed mothers and keep her pregnancy a secret. Afterward, we were going to place the child with one of Herman’s sisters— Herman was my husband, Monica’s father. The child would have been raised as a cousin. We believed that having a baby would ruin Monica’s life.

  “After she ran away, it devastated us. She was Herman’s princess, the light of his life. When she left, something died in him. We placed ads in all the personal classified sections of major newspapers around the country telling her that we wanted her and the baby to come home. But… we never heard.”

  “Do you know who my father was?” Erica asked in a whisper.

  “Monica would never tell us.” Kathleen brought a monogrammed handkerchief out of her purse. “I have no idea who he was. She wasn’t a bad girl. She was just spirited. You don’t know how many times since the day she left us I’ve wished her father and I had spoken different words. She wanted to have the baby at home. She would have stayed with us.” Kathleen turned shimmering, vulnerable eyes to Erica. “You would have been raised in our home.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  Kathleen dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief. “Neither do I. This is going to take some getting used to.”

  They looked at each other, the younger woman scrutinizing the older woman’s face for signs of similarity— they shared the same widow’s peak hairline— the older woman looking at the face that would have been her daughter’s one day.

  “I wonder,” said Kathleen, “if I might be permitted to see the cave.”

  “The cave?”

  “If I may.”

  Jared escorted them both down the scaffolding, assisting the older woman down the steps while Erica produced a key for the padlock on the iron security gate. Inside, she turned on the fluorescent lights that bathed the cavern in a surreal glow, illuminating wooden timbers and struts, trenches carved into the floor, the wall covered with scarlet and gold suns and mysterious symbols, and finally the Lady, lying peacefully on her side beneath a protective transparent cover that looked like a glass sarcophagus.

  Kathleen’s sigh whispered like a breeze, her eyes were filled with wonder. “I know all about this cave,” she said softly, as if not wishing to disturb the slumbering Lady, “the paintings on the wall, the words Primera Madre. It’s all exactly how I imagined it to be.”

  Erica gave her a surprised look. “You’ve been here?”

  “No no. This canyon was already filled in when I was a child. But I was told about it by someone who had been in here.”

  “Who?”

  She smiled. “The woman who painted the canvas of the two suns that hangs in my living room. The woman who built a retreat here called the Church of the Spirits. Sister Sarah, my mother. Your great-grandmother. I was her love child. I was the reason she vanished.”

  * * *

  “My mother always knew someone was buried in the cave,” Kathleen said. She and Erica were sitting in the sun-filled living room of Mrs. Dockstader’s Palm Springs house, going through albums full of pictures, news clippings, and mementos. “She sensed it, even though she had no proof. She even claimed that the spirit that dwelled in the cave had instructed her to build her Church of the Spirits on that spot.”

  “What happened to her? Why did she vanish?”

  “She was in love with a married man, but his wife wouldn’t give him a divorce. When my mother found out she was pregnant, she knew it would upset her followers, so she opted to vanish. She moved to a small town where there was no movie theater and where people were not likely to recognize her. I was born, and she raised me alone. I never saw my father. I don’t know if they ever had contact after that. All I know is that it was very tragic. My mother died when I was twenty-two. She was buried in the cemetery in that small town, and to this day no one knows that the woman in that grave is the famous Sister Sarah.”

  “Is that why you wanted my mother to give up her baby?”

  Kathleen smiled sadly. “I grew up witnessing my mother’s sadness. She tried to hide it, but a child senses these things. I knew she was an outcast because she was an unmarried woman with a child. And I knew a stigma was attached to me as well. She passed herself off as a widow, so we lived a lie. We didn’t want Monica to have to go through that.”

  Erica could barely take it all in. She felt like a starving person who had been brought to a feast. All the photos and stories, people who looked like her, were related to her, a vast family of aunts and uncles and cousins, and grandparents and great-grandparents going way back.

  “This is,” Kathleen said. “Daniel Goodside. He was a Boston Clipper ship captain. I found this picture in an old trunk. It was one of a pair of portraits taken in 1875. The one in the other frame was of a woman but it was too mildewed and beyond saving. On the back I could see the name written: Marina, wife of Daniel. I don’t know anything about Marina, what her family name was. I assume she was also a Bostonian. He lost an arm, as you can see, maybe in the Civil War. He was something of an artist.”

  On the opposite page was a small watercolor done by Daniel Goodside in 1830— “Medicine woman of the Topaa tribe living at Mission San Gabriel Arcangel.”

  “Topaa,” Erica murmured. “I’ve never heard of that tribe.”

  Kathleen closed the book and rose. “Probably he meant Tongva. There was a lot of misunderstanding names and words back then. Come, let me take you on a tour of the property.”

  She linked her arm through Erica’s. “My husband’s father— who would be your great-grandfather— imported the first date palms from Arabia and started the farm back in 1890. I married into the Dockstader family in 1946, right after the war. I was eighteen. Your mother was born two years later, in 1948.”

  They were interrupted by a maid informing Erica that she had a phone call. It was Jared. “You’d better get back here. There’s been a startling development.”

  * * *

  They heard robust laughter coming from Jared’s RV. His visitor was a heavyset woman with ruddy cheeks and a strong handshake.

  “Dr. Tyler, my name is Irene Young and I think I might have something of interest to you. I’m a phys-ed teacher in Bakersfield but my hobby is genealogy. I’m tracing my family tree and when I saw the news report about you finding the deed to a rancho that belonged to a family named Navarro I knew I h
ad to come.” She reached into her canvas tote bag and brought out a leather portfolio. “I’ve traced my family on my mother’s side to a family named Navarro that lived on Rancho Paloma. Here is a picture of them.” She held out an antique photo in a protective plastic cover. “You notice there’s something written on the back. This picture was taken in 1866 on the occasion of this woman’s birthday,” and she pointed to a dignified elderly woman sitting in the center of what looked like a family grouping.

  Irene went on to explain that she had contacted many of the descendents from the people in the photo, but that she wasn’t able to identify one couple. She pointed to them.

  Erica squinted at the one-armed man in the back. “My God! It’s Daniel Goodside. My ancestor.”

  “What!” Jared said, looking at the picture.

  “Goodside?” said Irene Young. “Is that his name? I assume he was married to the woman seated next to him.”

  “That would be Marina,” Erica said, remembering what Kathleen had told her.

  “She bears a strong resemblance to the woman in the center, who I assume is the family matriarch. Her name is Angela Navarro, which would make Goodside’s wife a Navarro.”

  “My grandmother said she never knew Marina’s last name, that she assumed she was a Bostonian. My God… Am I related to the Navarros?”