by Lois Ruby
He stepped over the foot-high chunk of wall into the secret chamber. “Punir, what are you doing here? Oh,” he said, backing out. His face was ashy white.
“Somebody’s been dead a long, long time behind that wall, Dad.”
“More than a hundred years,” Dr. Baxi said. “That’s an educated guess. Bones are clean, teeth are intact, there’s still a tuft of hair on the back of the scalp.” Dana leaned in for a closer look. Sure enough, there were a few wisps of black hair standing stiffly up from the skull.
Her father could barely get the words out. “Who is it? Was it?”
“We don’t know yet,” Dr. Baxi said, as he directed two men to slide a thin plank under the skeleton. He carefully held each bone just so. The men wrapped a tight canvas over the skeleton and tied it under the stretcher. “Hold it steady,” Dr. Baxi directed them, as they stepped over the rubble in the room and took the very thin corpse out of the house. Dr. Baxi followed. “I will phone you later,” he said somberly, and then as though cheered by this new thought, he motioned for the bearers to stop, and he said, “Dana, my wife tells me you are quite a biology buff.” Mrs. Baxi was her Life Sciences teacher at Thoreau. “Maybe you would like to be present for the autopsy?”
“Would I!” Ever since her mother would let her hold a sharp knife, she’d dissected worms, fish, fish eyes, slabs of liver from the kitchen. Once, a bird had fallen out of a tree and been abandoned by its mother, and it came under Dana’s knife. The red, stringy, spongy insides of a dead thing always seemed so much more, well, alive. “I’ll be a big help, I promise.”
“I don’t mean present in the actual autopsy theater, but you could be just outside in my office.”
“I won’t faint, Dr. Baxi, honestly.”
His smile made his small eyes vanish. “But there are laws, my dear. You shall be the first to get word when we complete our examination.”
“All right,” she said, disappointed. But it was better than nothing, and maybe when the door swung open, she could steal peeks of something gory to describe to her friends.
“I’ll call you in the morning,” Dr. Baxi promised. “I’ll need this evening to get records prepared. Jeffrey, you know Simon Fleicher, the forensic anthropologist at the university. Do you know if he’s in town? I’ll call him in on the case also. Very intriguing,” he said, snapping off his rubber gloves as he followed the stretcher down the stairs.
“We have a few questions, Dr. Shannon,” Officer Wyles said, nailing him with her eyes. “A few preliminary questions before Homicide gets here.”
“Homicide?” Dana’s mother was having trouble processing all this. “Jeffrey? Is this in my contract?”
But Dr. Shannon wasn’t doing much better. History was his field at the university, not criminology or anthropology. What did he know about murder investigations and identifying bones, especially bones that were a century old? Dana seemed to be the only one staying calm. Good thing they won’t be at the autopsy, she thought.
She climbed back into the room for a last look, because the police would be sealing it off soon for their investigation. Everybody was talking at once, firing questions, answers, orders, theories. This was not the typical case. No one was in charge, and everyone was the boss. People passed back and forth from the secret chamber, carrying equipment in, carrying equipment out. Officer Wyles pulled out the cot so one of Dr. Baxi’s men could lift fingerprints from the wall, and Dana thought she saw something drop down to the floor.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” the coroner’s man said, as he busied himself with his fingerprint kit.
Dana squatted and quickly picked up a small black book, which she slipped into the pocket of her jumper.
“And don’t touch anything,” the man said. “Leave it to the public to gum up every one of our investigations.”
“I’m out of here,” Dana said merrily. The black book slapped her thigh as she stepped over the open gash of the wall.
“Just in time.” Officer Burney taped a crisscross of yellow plastic over the gaping hole, stamped with the message: DO NOT BREAK THIS SEAL, UNDER PENALTY OF LAW, BY ORDER OF THE LAWRENCE POLICE DEPARTMENT. Officer Wyles crossed that out and wrote in black marker: BY ORDER OF THE DOUGLAS COUNTY CORONER.
“Let’s get out of here,” Dana’s father said, and the three of them drifted off to a guest bedroom. They sat on the floor with their backs up against the four-poster. Someday this room would rent for $120 a night, but not for a while, since people wouldn’t be too excited about staying in a house where skeletons turned up.
“What do you think happened, Dad?”
“I have no idea. I’ve got the librarian hunting up some documents on the house already, so we’ll know what we’re doing as we restore it to its nineteenth-century state. They should have the materials by Monday. And I’ll go down to the Douglas County Register of Deeds, see what I can find out about the previous owners of the house. But right now, who knows?”
Dana fingered the book in her pocket. It felt like an address book or a pocket calendar, but very heavy for its size. Should she show it to her parents? “Suppose somebody found something in that little room,” she began.
“Like what?” Her mother sounded distant and disconnected, like a bad phone line. But her father was looking at her closely.
“Oh, I don’t know. A little knickknack or something?”
“If I found something,” her father said carefully, “I’d give it to the police right away, even though the historian in me would want to keep it and study it.”
That’s the way her parents were. They never said, “You have to do this, don’t you dare do that.” They always laid out the choices, let her know what they thought she should do, then made her decide. Her friends thought this was really cool, especially Ahn Thuey, whose Vietnamese family controlled every inch of her life. But Dana’s friends didn’t understand how hard it was to have the responsibility back on your own shoulders. If you blew it, you had no one to blame but yourself.
So, that settled it. She’d show them the black book—but not until she’d had a chance to find out just what was in it.
“I need to fix dinner,” her mother said, “if they ever get out of our house. Or do we feed all the civil servants of Lawrence?”
Dana’s dad said, “Let’s go out and get a pizza. It’ll be a long time before anything’s settled.”
As it turned out, it would be months before anything was settled, and even then, there were unsolved puzzles.
• • •
Half the police department of Lawrence gathered outside Dr. Baxi’s lab. How often did they get a chance to investigate bones that were over a hundred years old? An assistant was issuing everyone masks, and Dana casually took one.
“Now, you’ll stand free and clear of the table. Don’t get in the coroner’s way. And keep your mouths shut, because he’ll be dictating his findings and you don’t want your witticisms to be preserved in the record for all eternity, right? People get in the autopsy room and think they have to make jokes. Believe me, we’ve heard them all.”
Dana tied the paper mask around her head and watched everyone else suck air in and out.
“And if you feel like you’re going to faint, get out of the theater on the double. We don’t want two stiffs on the table.” This was obviously a line he’d delivered a thousand times, but still found hilarious.
They filed into the lab. It was cold, like a morgue. There were two other doctors besides Dr. Baxi, and Dana also recognized Dr. Fleicher, the forensic anthropologist from the university.
Dr. Baxi’s eyes were fixed on the arrangement of bones on his table. A sheet covered all but the head and shoulders. “We will observe strict hygienic conditions,” he announced. It seemed silly to worry about sanitary conditions, considering how dead the body was, but then Dana wondered if they might be worried about catching something from the skeleton.
Dana had to stand on her tiptoes and peer between the shoulders of the doctors and
policemen. Twice she was elbowed in the ribs. The anthropologist reached under the sheet and lifted one bony hand lovingly, as if it were a dozen roses. One of the policemen swooned, stepped back, and tromped on Dana’s foot.
“Ouch,” she whispered, and Dr. Baxi looked up sharply, recognizing her. With a slight nod of his head and a rolling of his eyes, he motioned for her to leave.
How absolutely demoralizing, treating her just like a child.
“But—”
A policeman took her firmly by the arm and parked her in Dr. Baxi’s office. He stripped off his mask and left, looking glad to be out of the lab himself. Hours passed, it seemed, or maybe thirty minutes, as Dana studied photos on the walls of horrible murder scenes and crashes. A skeleton hung in the corner, with its perpetual smile fixed on Dana. She gave it a poke, and it danced for her, bones clattering—a poor substitute for the real bones inside the lab.
Finally, an assistant came for her and took her back into the lab. Everyone was gone, but Dr. Baxi gave Dana a private briefing.
“This is what we know,” he said. “The subject is five feet three inches and is female, which we can tell by the breadth of the pelvic bone, but more clearly by the smoothness of the back of the skull. Later, this will be confirmed through DNA analysis of the tooth enamel. Excellent teeth, by the way. She has all of them. And see here how the eye sockets are shaped, and the nose?”
Dana studied the skull carefully. It looked like every skull she’d ever seen on poison bottles, on Halloween skeletons, in books, in museums, in Dr. Baxi’s office.
“We can tell by the eyes, the nose, and the hair that the woman was of the Negro race. Age, somewhere between eighteen and twenty-four. Difficult to say exactly. I can tell she’s never given birth or broken any bones. Look at her, what do you think? Left-handed, or right-handed?”
“I don’t know. Right, I guess,” which she guessed because the odds were with her.
“Left-handed. See? The bones of the left arm are slightly longer. She worked very hard in her life. Look here at the spurs on her heels. Stress. Maybe she walked hundreds of miles.”
“I wonder who she was,” Dana said quietly.
“The forensic anthropologist may have a clearer idea when he completes his study. He may even be able to reconstruct her face. But here is my working hypothesis.” Dr. Baxi held the Dictaphone tape up, as if she could read it. “I believe the subject was a fugitive slave who died 130 to 140 years ago. Her identity is unknown, and the cause of death is unknown. I’m recommending further investigation. Are you interested in pursuing it further? My wife says you have a fine scientific mind. You’ll find some answers, my dear.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Wakarusa War
April 1856
James slept a little later the next morning. Rebecca had talked to him half the night, kicked the rest of the night, and there wasn’t a minute he was covered with the blanket. Once she got up, he slept like a baby. But when he finally got downstairs, Rebecca and Ma and the Negro family were already half done with breakfast. The runaways were solemnly working their way through a stack of flapjacks. The boy ate with his hands; maple syrup streamed down his arms.
“Was thee sleeping away the day?” Ma asked, with a sparkle to her voice.
“It’s barely sunrise,” he replied. “Has thee even heard the cock crow yet?”
“I heard the stomachs growl,” Ma said. “That was enough to rouse me. Now, sit down before the flapjacks are cold as stone.”
James noticed that Rebecca sat right up close to the boy, cutting his pork sausage into bite-sized bits like a little mother.
“Now,” Ma said, putting a dainty bite into her mouth. I’ll catch her talking with her mouth full! James thought, but no, she chewed slowly, and they all waited for her. “Now, without saying where thee’s come from, tell us how long thee’s been, shall we say, traveling.”
“This is the fourth day, ma’am,” the man answered, keeping his eyes on his plate.
James pictured the map on the wall in Miss Malone’s classroom, imagining inches for miles, miles for days. They couldn’t have come from Georgia or someplace in the Deep South. They’d be way out of their way here in the Kansas Territory. From Georgia, they’d have gone up through South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington, Maryland, and into Pennsylvania, which was a free state. No one came this way, through the blamed wilderness. Reasonable people didn’t even live here, James reminded himself.
Unless these Negroes came from Missouri. James had been hearing all about the scuffles between Missouri and Kansas over who had a right to hold slaves. Missouri was a slave state, and Kansas, which wasn’t even a state yet, was still fighting it out. Of course, the settlers in Kansas Territory wanted to be Free-Soilers, and that’s what they voted for. That’s why Quaker families like James’s settled in Kansas, instead of Missouri, or instead of continuing on west along the Oregon Trail.
But slaveholders in Missouri had a different plan. They swarmed across the border, which is why they were called Border Ruffians, and stuffed the ballot boxes and made it look like more Kansans were proslavery. At the last voting, one even shouted, “We are going to have Kansas if we wade to the knees in blood to get it.”
The Lawrence Free-Soilers refused to accept the results of the voting that elected a proslavery legislature. They called it a bogus government, headed by Governor Shannon. Ma said, “Hmph, the man’s nothing but a scoundrel.” Now Pa was off in Topeka with other Kansas Territory men, trying to hammer out a constitution so Kansas could become a state, a free state. They were electing a Free-Soil legislature, and they were putting up their own Dr. Charles Robinson for governor. But it sure wasn’t easy.
All last year, before James and his family had come from Boston, there’d been border skirmishes—the Wakarusa War, they were calling it, for the Wakarusa River that pulsed through Lawrence, and it wasn’t over yet. A small civil war, they were calling it, because proslavery and antislavery people from the same Union fought each other at arm’s length. They were close enough to see what color eyes the enemy had, smell his breath.
Jeremy Macon had told James all about it, about how he’d gotten to shoot one of those Sharps rifles. “James Weaver, it was so exciting. You missed it. Best thing that’s happened in my lifetime.”
Jeremy and he were walking into town, where they’d go to Miss Malone’s class in Dr. Robinson’s big house. James kicked stones, while Jeremy rambled on and on about the rifles and the war and all. “Early in fifty-five, all these boxes came in on barges up the Kansas River. They were marked Books.” Jeremy chuckled. “You’d have thought every man in Lawrence was a bookworm, by the number of books that landed here. Inside the boxes—Sharps rifles, the newest thing in repeating guns. My pa got one,” Jeremy said proudly. “ ’Course, your pa wouldn’t have.”
No, James thought, they would be sitting out the whole Wakarusa War, while his pa talked and talked long into the night with other Quaker men. All words and no action. “Pa,” he’d said one night, “ever think about the man who said, ‘Action speaks louder than words’?” Pa had given it a good two minutes’ thought, in that Friends way of weighty, churning silence. “Well, son, here’s what I believe. Words speak softer than actions. But there’s nothing more powerful than the word, beginning with the Good Word of the Lord.” Jeremy would have had a good laugh over that one.
“And you know what they called these rifles, James? Beecher’s Bibles.”
“No!”
“Truth.” Jeremy crossed his heart. “Henry Ward Beecher, why he got up and spoke at the Congregational Church last year. Said we had to raise money for self-defense. Said get guns in here, not Bibles.”
This was heresy. If James’s parents could hear this—
“Said a rifle’s a higher moral power so far as these proslavers are concerned. Said you might as well read the Bible to buffaloes as to one of them slaveholders. That’s how come they’re called Beecher’s Bibles.” Jeremy laughed rauc
ously, then added, “Maybe thee wouldn’t call ’em that, but we would!”
Now the runaways—probably from Missouri—sat at James’s table and ate more flapjacks than he’d ever seen anyone pack away before, all of them washed down with creamy milk.
Ma said, “Best thee not go outside today. We don’t know much about our neighbors yet.”
So James wondered what they’d all do indoors—play chess?
But Ma had it all planned out. She turned to the young woman, who still hadn’t said a single word. “Missus, I could use a hand with the ironing today. It’s my day to wash bed linens. Oh, and James promised his pa he’d fix that sagging bed frame you slept on upstairs. He’s a smart boy, but he’s not an expert with a hammer and nails,” Ma said, giving the man a chance to make the offer.
“I’m good with tools. Can fix most anything, ma’am.”
“Fine. James, show him the toolbox. And Rebecca, take the boy down to the cellar. I want thee to count every jar down there. Does thee know thy numbers, child?” The alleyes boy shook his head. “Well, but thee can tell tomatoes from corn. After they’re sorted and counted, bring up a jar of each thing you find, and we’ll send them off with these good people tonight.” She clapped her hands. “Thee’s still sitting?”
All of them scrambled to their feet. The woman gathered plates and cups and took them to the washbasin. Rebecca dragged the boy by the hand toward the cellar door. And James wondered how he’d do, alone with a Negro man for the first time. Would he give off a different scent? What if he couldn’t think of a thing to say to the man, like he got sometimes with Bethany Maxwell.
Upstairs, the man rifled through the toolbox until he found four sturdy nails. Then he shoved up his threadbare sleeves and took the bed apart, looking at it every which way. He could stay squatted for the longest time without toppling.
James asked, “Can it be fixed?”
“Yessir.”
Sir? It was the first time an adult had ever called him that! James watched him drive a nail into the wood with two fierce thwacks of the hammer. He handed the hammer to James to do the other side. James smacked his thumb a few times, but got the nail in good and straight, while he thought about how the bed ought not to need nails. It should be built so that each section fit perfectly, tightly into each other section. James imagined beautiful lumber sanded smooth as glass—not this nubby old cottonwood. And the bed he saw would be on four carved legs, high enough that it would take a footstool to climb up into bed. Then you’d sink into a feather mattress a foot thick… .