by Lea Wait
“Everyone in town will know soon. They say he ate a toxic clam at the lobster bake yesterday.”
“Red Tide?” asked Anna.
“Let me guess. Amateur clam digging,” said Ruth. I nodded. “His sons and Jeremy, his assistant at the gallery, went out yesterday morning.”
“Where were they digging?” asked Anna. “I thought all the affected areas around here were posted.”
“I’m not sure. I know they divided and went to several flats. No one found many clams.”
“Mackerel Point is posted,” Anna said. “What time was this again?”
“Yesterday. Late morning,” I said. “I don’t know precisely.”
“I was at Mackerel Point about noon yesterday,” said Anna. “Hoped to get a few photos of migrating birds. This time of year we get some wonderful visitors, especially near the shore. That area was definitely posted. But I did see someone digging at the other end of the flat from where I was. Even with my glasses I couldn’t see who it was, or even if it were a man or a woman.”
“Sounds like the right time to have been one of the Lawrence clammers,” I agreed.
“Didn’t you tell them to stop?” asked Ruth.
“I headed down that way, meaning to point out the posted signs. But I’ll admit I got distracted when I thought I saw a red-necked grebe.” She shook her head. “I was wrong. It was only a horned grebe. It’s still a little early for the red-necks. By the time I got to the end of the flat whoever had been digging was gone. I hoped they’d seen the posted warning on their way out and discarded any clams they’d gotten. They hadn’t been there long.”
“So sad about Ted,” said Ruth. “I hadn’t seen him recently. Arthritis keeps me to home a lot. But I would have called Ted and Lily ‘close acquaintances’ years ago. He never really got over her death.”
“I heard she’d drowned,” I said.
Ruth and Gram looked at each other. “That’s right,” said Gram. “She did. Ob’s father was the one who found her, all tangled up in his lobster gear.”
“Horrible.”
“It was. And, of course, all the gossip didn’t help Ted accept her death.”
“Gossip?” My ears perked up. If anything had happened in Haven Harbor in the last hundred years, these ladies had heard it—directly or from their mothers, when they were children. Lily Lawrence had died in 1981.
Just a pebble in the stream to these ladies.
“There had been rumors,” said Ruth. “Nasty rumors. Ted traveled a lot in those days, with his father. Robert was still alive then, and painting, and they all lived at The Point. Anyway, Ted and Robert went to galleries and museum openings, and sometimes they headed south in the winter, to paint.”
“All Robert really cared about was his work. Ted painted too, of course, but he wasn’t in the same class as his father. Robert’s wife had divorced him years before, and then died a short time after that, so Ted spent a lot of time with his dad. In those days Ted was a handsome fellow, and a bit of a ladies’ man,” Gram added.
“Of course, then he married Lily. She was a beauty, no doubt. And so was little Abbie—took after her mother, that one. But with a big house to take care of, and people calling about Robert’s paintings, and three little ones to take care of, Lily had a hard time of it,” explained Katie. “She used to come to see my husband and beg him for pills. You know the kind—to help her relax.”
“But your husband’s a surgeon,” said Gram. “Surgeons don’t write prescriptions for frustrated women!”
“Well, he did sometimes. At least he did for Lily. Valium, I think it was she wanted.”
Ruth pursed her lips in disapproval.
“Oh, he doesn’t do that anymore. The rules about medications are so much stricter now, I don’t think he’d dare. But back a few years, for a friend . . . anyway, so sometimes he gave her pills.”
I thought of the portrait in the Lawrences’ living room. I’d imagined Lily’s life with Ted as idyllic. Money, a big house, some fame by way of Robert. A husband who adored her. I hadn’t thought of her as someone who needed medication to cope.
“So that was the gossip?” I tried to get back to where the conversation had started. “That Lily Lawrence took pills?”
Ruth and Katie and Gram exchanged glances. Gram answered. “We probably shouldn’t be talking this way, with Sarah now a Lawrence, and Ted passed away so recently, poor man. But no, the pills were just part of it. She also drank a bit more than most women. At least women around here.”
I’d grown up in a house without a drop of liquor in it, despite Mama’s working in restaurants and bars and my remembering her stumbling up the stairs late at night. But times changed. Now Gram and Reverend Tom had their own wine cellar. I had a feeling Gram’s “a bit more” meant, “a lot more.”
“So she took pills and drank. Not a good combination.”
“Not at all. Those children weren’t exactly neglected, but sometimes they were . . . forgotten,” said Katie. “Once in a while one of them would show up at my house, because they knew me, you know. Lily’d forgotten to pick them up after Cub Scouts, or they’d been shopping together and she’d left without one of them.”
“That’s horrible!” I said. No wonder Abbie had married early and the boys hadn’t stayed in touch.
“Haven Harbor’s a small town. The Lawrences lived out on that Point of theirs, but the rest of us kept an eye on those kids. We all knew Lily was a little absentminded,” said Ruth.
“You call it absentminded?” Katie shook her head. “That girl had problems.”
“Well, despite everything, she seemed sweet to me,” said Gram. “And everyone was upset when Ted and Robert came home that time—they’d been to Boston or somewhere on the Cape, I don’t recall—and she was gone. Just—gone. The kids were there, but they didn’t know where she was. They said she hadn’t woken them up for school, and wasn’t home.”
“Ted was frantic. Do you remember?” asked Ruth. “Had the police out everywhere, sure she’d been kidnapped for ransom or something else horrible.”
“Well, it was horrible,” said Gram. “When Zeke Winslow found her body it was a shock to everyone.”
Katie leaned over toward me. “But the biggest shock came later. See, they did an autopsy. Lily was pregnant.”
“A fourth child? Why would that have been horrible?” I asked, not understanding.
“Because she was three months along. And three months before that, Ted and Robert were in Asia on some sort of tour. They were gone for almost four months.” Katie sat back. “That child wasn’t her husband’s. No way.”
“Did anyone know who the child’s father was?” I asked.
Gram shook her head. “Someone must have known. But I never heard. I suspect Ted never knew either, although he might have had some ideas. Lily kept that secret the night she took those pills and drank scotch and went for a swim.”
Michael had told us late-night swims were a family tradition. Had he been remembering his mother’s death when he’d said that?
Chapter Thirty
“Last week our children had their examination and many from Lancaster who had girls in our boarding school came here to see and hear what improvement their children had made. They were examined in spelling, reading, German and English, arithmetic, grammar, geography, music, knitting, tambour, and embroidery or stain stitch as I believe you call it more properly.” —
From a letter written by Sister Penny, a teacher at a Moravian school (Linden Hall Seminary) in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on April 18, 1801.
What a sad story. I immediately made a vow not to tell Sarah. She’d loved Ted. She didn’t need to hear all his dirty laundry. Especially now. Lily’s story wasn’t about Ted. Although it did help explain how lonely he’d seemed to be, and maybe why he’d been so open to an unknown relative.
The ladies continued to talk, but about other people, other times. Town history.
But today my question was for Gram. I needed her advice.
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br /> I finished my tea, hoping the ladies wouldn’t stay long. I wanted to check with Sarah too, and find out how she was coping.
Finally, cookies and tea finished, Katie offered Ruth a ride home and Anna left, too.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
As they were getting ready to go, I picked up the dishes we’d used and took them to the kitchen.
Gram joined me in a few minutes. “So, why are you here, Angel? You certainly got an earful about Lily Lawrence, but I’m pretty sure she’s not the reason you stopped in this afternoon.”
“No.” Gram knew me better than anyone else in the world. I couldn’t hide anything from her. Or, I thought, remembering a few high school escapades, I couldn’t hide anything important from her.
I sat on one of the kitchen chairs. Juno, her Maine Coon cat who’d been hiding when the other guests were there, jumped up to check me out. She probably smelled Trixi. I stroked her a few times and she jumped down and settled herself on the bed Gram had put for her in the corner.
“It’s about that bone I found under the stone wall.”
Gram sighed. “I thought it might be.”
“Dave Percy was over, and he took a look at it. Then he dug a little further.”
Gram didn’t say anything.
“He found more bones. He’s pretty sure they’re human. That they’re a young child.”
“What do you want from me?” Gram asked.
“Dave suggested I call the police. That the medical examiner’s office would know a forensic anthropologist who could tell more about the bones—how old they were, for example. But I wanted to talk with you first.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Anything that would help me understand what we found. How long has that wall been there? Who built it?” I hesitated. Gram wasn’t acting as open as she usually was. “Do you know anything about the bones?”
“Angie, to begin with, no. I don’t know anything about those bones. I didn’t know they were there until you called me. The house was built in 1809, and I’m pretty sure the wall was built about that time, too. Probably the stones were dug out of the cellar space. New England ground is full of rocks. That’s why we have so many stone walls. People built houses or barns or dug gardens, and needed a place to put the stones. Some places you’ll see piles of them in the corner of property. Other folks built walls, for appearance and privacy. Stone walls in Maine are different from stone walls in New Hampshire, or Vermont. Rocks are different here, and people had different ways of putting them together.”
“I knew that,” I said. “But I never heard of anyone being buried under a wall.”
“I haven’t either. But I can imagine someone doing that.”
“Because they murdered a child?”
“No, no, Angie. Nothing so dramatic. You just found out your mama was killed, I know. Maybe that’s why murder is your first thought. Or maybe you read too many mysteries . . . and you’ve gotten involved in solving a few murders, too. Or maybe it’s just that in today’s world death, unless it comes in old age, is considered unusual. We want to know why someone died, and how. We even feel guilty that we couldn’t have stopped, or at least delayed, it. When someone dies in a car accident we want to know whose fault it was. When someone gets cancer we wonder whether they were eating the wrong food, or smoking, or whether they had a bad genetic history. We ask God why the person we loved died before we were ready for them to go.”
“Hasn’t it always been that way?”
“People have always asked ‘Why?’ But in the past they accepted that they would never know. God-fearing people believed God took their loved ones. That they were now in a better place than in this imperfect world. Other people accepted, in their own ways, that wars and disease and accidents were part of life. Death was part of life.”
“What has that to do with those bones?”
“I don’t know whose bones those are, Angie. Maybe if you went back through all the family records you could figure it out. But I don’t think that child was killed. Back when our house was being built, many families lost children. Women gave birth to five, six, seven, or even more children, not only because there wasn’t reliable birth control, but because they knew perhaps a third, sometimes more, of their children wouldn’t live to grow up. It didn’t happen just in New England. It was the way families were everywhere.”
“So why are those bones there?”
“What I suspect is that when our house was being built a young mother, probably someone in our family, lost a child very precious to her. She wanted the child to stay close, so, when men—perhaps her husband—were building that stone wall, they buried her baby under it. The stone wall was that child’s grave maker. She could see it from her kitchen or bedroom window, and feel close to him or her.”
“That’s sad.”
“Perhaps. But I’d like to believe she went on. That she had other children, who grew up in our house, and who played in that backyard, the way you did when you were young. That those bones have been there since the house was, and have had company . . . family . . . with them all these years.”
“So you don’t think it’s a mystery.”
“I think all families have mysteries, and secrets, and stories. I don’t think they’re all meant to be uncovered.”
“So I should bury the bones again. Build the wall again.”
“The house is yours now. It will be your decision. But yes. If it were my choice, I’d leave that child in peace.”
Peace. I hoped Ted was in peace tonight too, even if his body was in Augusta with the medical examiner.
I couldn’t help my small ancestor, but I could put him or her back in a place of rest.
Chapter Thirty-one
“Amidst the Cheerful bloom of youth
With ardent zeal pursue
The ways of Piety and truth
With death and heaven in view.”
—From a sampler stitched in 1838 in wool on linen using cross- and satin stitches by Sarah Ann Dreisback of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It also pictured a church, two houses, two trees, sheep, and a bird. Sampler owned by the Moravian Museum of Bethlehem.
At home, I looked at the tarp in my backyard, and the bone in my kitchen.
Wrong or right, I liked Gram’s version of what had happened. I said a quiet prayer for the child whose bones I’d disturbed, and for his or her mother and father. Chances were they were all parts of my family. And family should be treated with respect.
I’d rebury the bones, and rebuild the wall. Soon. But I wanted to check on Sarah. It hadn’t been an easy weekend for anyone—certainly not for Ted—but I was most worried about Sarah. Her high hopes had been shattered. How was she coping?
“Angie? I’m fine. Really fine,” she assured me when I called her.
“You don’t sound fine.”
“I opened the store for a couple of hours, but there weren’t many customers, so I’m at home.”
“How about dinner?”
“I don’t know if I can eat anything.”
“No clams, I promise.”
Silence. Clearly she wasn’t ready to laugh about clams.
“I don’t have much food in the house. I was thinking of getting something at the Harbor Haunts. Join me?” I didn’t like the idea of Sarah alone, thinking of what might have been.
More silence. “I guess so,” she agreed reluctantly. “But soon. I don’t know how well I’ll sleep, but I want to hide under the covers early tonight.”
That didn’t sound good. “I’ll meet you at the café in fifteen minutes.”
“Okay.”
I glanced in the mirror over the sideboard where I kept my gun. Since I’d been home in Haven Harbor I hadn’t even done any target shooting, and hadn’t fired it in any other circumstances. But it had come in handy a couple of times. Like this morning.
What a strange weekend. I combed my hair, added lipstick, and decided the rest of me would be acceptable. The Harbor Haunts Café wasn�
��t an elegant place. When Mama’d taken me there years ago, I’d always ordered milkshakes. She’d preferred chocolate sodas with coffee ice cream.
Now the Haunts had a bar.
Tonight I could have used a soothing milkshake.
Sarah was sitting near one of the windows. I headed toward her, but stopped on my way when I saw Haven Harbor Police Sergeant Pete Lambert sitting at the bar. Drinking coffee, I noted. He must be on duty and taking a break.
“Hi, Pete! Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Most folks think not being in constant touch with law enforcement is good.” He grinned. “Heard you and your friend Sarah were out at The Point yesterday when Ted Lawrence died.”
“How did you know?”
He shrugged. “Unattended deaths get reported to the police. We called the Marine Resources guys to investigate the clams, and the medical examiner to confirm cause of death. Your name was on the report as being one of those present when Ted collapsed.”
“I was.”
“Sad situation. Marine Resources folks work hard to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and most Mainers are careful. Hasn’t been a Red Tide death around here in years.”
“Life is strange,” I said.
“Death, too,” Pete added. He saw me looking over at Sarah. “Two of you having dinner together?”
“It was an upsetting weekend. Good to get away from The Point.”
“Understood. Enjoy!”
Sarah was waiting for me. She was sipping iced tea.
“What did Sergeant Lambert have to say?”
I shrugged. “Not much. He knew we’d been with Ted last night. Said Marine Resources was concerned.”
“Red Tide deaths don’t help Maine public relations.”
“True.” A waitress appeared next to our table. She must be new; I’d have remembered her purple spiked hair.
I pointed at Sarah’s tea. “Make it two. And a Caesar salad with shrimp. Have you ordered, Sarah?”