by Sue Clifton
“Ever the optimist, Sister. No, I didn’t think of that, but you could be right. The best way to keep people away is by being a scary bad-ass. You just might have figured the old girl out.” Cayce noticed the apparition was back and hoped it was Peg’s way of acknowledging Harri was right about her. Peg left a few seconds after she appeared, but not before glancing up at the sisters from under her old, worn, black hat.
“We’ll have to follow the tracks and see where she’s coming from. We know one of those falling-down cabins was hers. We’ll have to get Hank to show us which one. Maybe Peg will make contact with us.”
Harri and Cayce left the mine and headed down the trail. Once, Cayce sensed a presence behind them and glanced back discreetly, not wanting to alarm her sister. Nothing was there except for boot tracks, or rather one boot and one peg, but they were going the same direction as the sisters, away from the mine. Just around the next curve, they saw what was left of a rusted iron fence surrounding what must have been a hundred or more tombstones.
“I didn’t expect it to be so big. Did you?” Harri stood wide-eyed, staring.
“Well, if you think about the history, Bar None was a boom town at one time. A lot of people lived here; a lot of people died here. Problem is I don’t know where to start looking for our little girl. Any ideas?”
The sisters saw it at the same time—a huge statue of Jesus with outstretched arms on the far side of the cemetery. They headed in that direction.
“I love old cemeteries but hate that I don’t know if I’m stepping on a grave or not. These old homemade tombstones are so crumbly, and it looks like many have fallen and formed little piles like red sand. See all the piles of sandstone? What a shame.” Harri, focusing on the stacks of sandstone, tripped over a piece of tombstone half-buried in the ground. She tried to stop her fall by catching hold of another tombstone, but it crumbled into a pile of red dirt with her weight.
“Oh, no! I am so sorry…whoever you are…were.” Harri worked at stacking the fallen stones that remained intact, but some of these crumbled to dust.
Cayce took Harri’s pack and dug out the water and snacks. “Let’s eat a granola bar and have the rest of our water before we start our search.”
“Here. Let’s sit right here beneath Jesus and eat.” Cayce took a seat on the wide base of the statue. “We should probably say the blessing.” Harri lifted her granola bar up toward Jesus. “Bless this food, Lord, and help us to find our little girl.” Both sisters said, “Amen,” at the same time.
“Eating in a cemetery reminds me of when Grandpa Zeke used to take a quart jar of sweet iced tea and a pimento cheese sandwich and eat at the cemetery with Granny Lou every Wednesday at lunch when it wasn’t raining.”
“Yep. Now that was true love.” Harri chomped on her granola bar as she talked. “This statue is in remarkable shape. It looks as if it has been cleaned recently. There’s hardly any black from aging, and it doesn’t have a chip on it. I wonder what its significance is, other than the obvious, of course.” Harri shaded her eyes and looked up at the statue standing fifteen or more feet high. “It’s really quite beautiful, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I do. I bet there is a heck of a story behind it, too. Do you notice anything about the children clinging to His robe?” Cayce stood on the base, where she was eye level with the children. Harri climbed up beside Cayce and stood on her tiptoes to get a good look.
“Oh, my gosh! They’re all Asian! Look at their eyes. How sad!” Harri tenderly stroked the face of one little girl as if comforting her. “I’m going to take some pictures of the statue with my camcorder—some still shots, and then I’ll zoom around for movie footage. I want it from different angles.” Harri moved to several locations and began taking pictures.
“I’ll start searching away from you so I won’t contaminate any sounds you might pick up. Remember the EVP you caught that time in the old cemetery down in Natchez?”
“How could I forget? It was the scariest thing I’ve ever recorded. That deep man’s voice in my left ear saying ‘Go away!’ scared the bajiggers, as you say, out of me. I think I had stepped on him and some of his brothers that died in the Civil War.” Harri shivered. “I hate you reminded me. That tombstone I just killed will probably have something to say.”
Five minutes later, Cayce called, “Over here. I think I found her.” Cayce motioned from behind a large tombstone with an angel on top. It, too, sparkled white like the statue of Jesus. As Cayce watched her sister walk toward her, she noticed Harri was not alone. A dark shadow moved right behind her. Then, as if the shadow saw Cayce watching, it faded into the background. Harri was not cognizant of the shadow behind her, and Cayce once again decided not to tell her.
“Oh, my gosh! Just look at that. It even had her picture on it, but it’s too faded to tell anything about her now.” Harri knelt down to get a closer look at the picture and read the engraving aloud: “Sara Elise Ezell, born August 3, 1918, died September 5, 1925. A beautiful gift too shortly given; Forever, she dances with the angels in heaven.”
As soon as she finished reading, a giant shadow fell over the grave like a man with outstretched arms trying to grab her. Harri screamed and fell back on her butt. Cayce laughed. She heard another deeper laugh beside her and turned in that direction but saw nothing.
“You got a problem with the Lord trying to protect you? Look.” Cayce pointed to the statue of Jesus. The sun was directly behind it, causing him to cast his shadow over the little girl’s grave. The shadow of his left arm seemed to encompass the grave as if comforting Sara.
Harri stood and brushed off the seat of her pants.
“No, I don’t. I just wish I had known it was Jesus. Keep it up, Lord. I think we’re going to need you in Bar None.”
“Well, check this out.” Cayce moved to the grave next to Sara’s, one with only a small plain headstone, no angel. “Now we know who Sara was. Belle’s grave is right next to hers, and look at the name. Isabelle ‘Belle’ Ezell, born February 12, 1850, died November 3, 1928. But if Belle was seventy-eight when she died, Sara could not have been her daughter. Maybe there’s no connection. But the last name Ezell would imply otherwise.” Cayce continued to read. “May God have mercy on her soul.”
“A fitting cliché, I’d say. I wonder if that is what Belle wanted, or if the women of the church had that put on for the ‘floozy.’” Harri looked from Sara’s grave to Belle’s. “Maybe Sara was a granddaughter. Of course, that would mean Belle had a son, since the last name is the same as Belle’s.”
“Think about that—about Belle’s career choice. If she had a daughter that took after her in career preference, it was likely there was no father’s last name.” Cayce shaded her eyes and looked directly into the sun. “Look, Harri. The shadow stops at Sara’s grave. It’s like Jesus doesn’t want to touch Belle’s grave. So much for mercy.” Cayce turned away from Belle’s grave. “Let’s find the rest of the story, so to speak—Absalom, Yu, and the baby, and maybe Peg.”
Cayce and Harri separated, wandering the cemetery and looking at tombstones. A cloud covered the sun for a minute, giving the cemetery an eerie look and feel. No breeze stirred; it was deathly silent.
Cayce broke the silence. “We should look for other little girls buried here. Our little spirit might not be Sara, but it seems logical that only a child connected to Belle would linger in a hotel owned by the madam. Remember, Teesh said she and her sister were not allowed past the porch. I’m sure the other ladies of the town felt the same way as Teesh’s mother.”
“Wait a minute,” Harri yelled from several yards away. “I’ve already been in that area. Here, let’s make a grid and mark each one so we won’t overlap.” Harri handed the camcorder to Cayce and went to the edge of the woods surrounding the cemetery on three sides. She began dragging in fallen limbs. Cayce realized what Harri was doing and walked over to help with a big log.
“I’ve got it, Cayce. For some reason, this thing is light even though it isn’t rotten.
”
Cayce stood back and realized why the log seemed so light to her weak city sister. The black mist behind Harri held up the log. Cayce turned the camcorder on record as Harri and her friend moved the log with ease and then walked to the edge of the woods to get another. Cayce stopped recording and went after logs of her own. Soon, the back of the cemetery was cordoned off, with each sister taking a section.
“Here’s Absalom!” Cayce called fifteen minutes later.
Harri joined her, and they both leaned down to read the blackened tombstone.
“All I can read is his first name. I can feel the indentions of the rest of the letters, but can’t decipher them.” Cayce left Absalom and ran her fingers over the gravestones closest to his. “These are probably Yu’s and Tamara’s, but I can’t read them at all.”
“We could visit Teesh. Or we could just Google LDS Genealogy or Archives, or Ancestry.com and look up the information. I’m sure even Bar None had census takers, and the Bar None Sentry had to be full of obituaries.”
“No cell phones, no Internet, so we can forget Mr. Google,” Harri reminded Cayce. “Teesh is a better idea for the obituaries in the newspaper. We need to find Peg’s grave, too, but we don’t even know her last name. And would she be Annie or Peg? Can you imagine how many Annies are in this cemetery? I’ve seen several already.”
Harri must have sensed the shadow behind her, because she turned and looked behind her.
“What’s wrong? Did you see something, Harri?”
“Not so much see as feel. Must be restless spirits, or my very vivid imagination.”
Harri and Cayce talked little as they walked down the road from the cemetery. Cayce suspected Harri was thinking about the same thing she was—the little spirit they thought was a seven-year-old girl named Sara. How could they help her?
Harri knew someone or something had watched them the whole time they had wandered through the cemetery. In fact, she felt she and Cayce had been watched ever since they left the mine. She kept turning around, expecting to see a mannish woman with a scarred face and hands and hear a not-too-feminine laugh. She also expected to see tracks right on their heels, tracks consisting of a boot and a wooden peg leg. The tracks were there, and she knew Cayce had seen them. Cayce never missed a trick when they were on the paranormal trail.
I guess my sister thinks I’ll freak out too early if I know Peg is with me, but she’s wrong, as usual.
Cayce noticed her sister looking back, but chose to ignore it. She also did not tell Harri about the apparition of Peg at the mine and at the cemetery, even if she had only seen it for a split second each time. Peg showed great interest in Harri, but Cayce did not know what the interest was. Her sister and Peg were miles apart in physical and mental characteristics, not to mention they existed in two different worlds.
As they reached the first of the cabins, Harri stopped and stared, first at the piece of railroad track just across the road in front of the cabin. The track ran a little piece up into the valley and stopped at the cabin remains.
“I feel so sad right now, like I could sit on what’s left of that porch and cry my eyes out.” Harri walked toward the porch.
“Do you think we should maybe try to pick through the rubble?” Cayce caught a glimpse of a shadow just inside the front room, the same shadow traveling wherever Harri went.
“Yes. I think I’m supposed to go into this cabin. I just know it belonged to Peg.”
The walls were still standing, but most of the roof was gone. The inside was strewn with broken dishes, pottery, and whiskey bottles and garbage left by curiosity seekers who had no respect for the departed. In one corner of the front wall, someone had built a fire, possibly young people trying to conjure up ghosts on a cold night. Cayce kicked at the piles of garbage carefully, afraid of disrupting the nap of a snake or rat. Harri moved to the second room. A coiled, rusted bedspring was all that was left to signify the room had been used for resting.
“The table with one leg might have been used as a bedside table here rather than in the saloon or hotel. And no, I’m not having visions like you do. It’s just a feeling.”
“I guess I could try to touch things and see if Peg will appear to me.” Cayce scanned around the room, looking for objects she could hold.
“Why? Haven’t you seen Peg enough?” Harri smiled, letting Cayce know her sister was not born yesterday, as their dad always said. “Surely, you don’t think you are the only one that saw her. I knew she was behind me the whole time, and yes, I saw her tracks in the dust. I just can’t figure out why she attached herself to me.”
Harri stood in the middle of the back room and spoke without raising her voice. “Peg, now listen carefully. If you need a friend, or even better, a fashion consultant, I’m here for you, but if you have any other notion under that ugly black hat of yours, get it out of your head. I was a happily married woman with a husband I adored. Get it?” Harri walked back into the front room, leaving Cayce stunned.
Beside the fireplace, Cayce saw a stack of boards that looked as if they had fallen from the wall or had been pulled up from the floor. At the same instant, the sun shot a ray of light directly on that section of the room, setting off sparks somewhere deep down in the pile of decaying lumber.
“I think I’ve found something. Come help me.” Cayce began moving the pile, board by board. Harri soon joined in the effort.
“I see something under there, but I’m not reaching my hand in and tickling a rattlesnake’s belly.” Harri took two steps back as she spoke.
“Come on. Let’s move this lumber, and then we can get to the bottom.”
Cayce and Harri moved the boards, one piece at a time, until they reached the objects they had seen.
“Oh, my gosh, would you look at this?” Harri picked up what was left of a hairbrush. The handle and frame holding only a few bristles were extremely ornate, and though tarnished, looked like real gold. “This is beautiful! Do you think Peg wants me to take it?” Harri looked from Cayce to the ornate brush in her hand. “I can clean and polish it and then give it to Hank to display in the hotel, or maybe return it to Peg’s cabin when it is restored.”
“I think Peg meant for you to find it. Besides, if you leave it here, it will end up in the wrong hands, hanging beside rusty hoes or frayed leather horse collars on Lester’s wall, or with another antique dealer in the area. This brush is way too personal not to be saved by someone who knows its human value is more important than its monetary value.” Cayce reached down and brought up the other item lying face down. “Well, would you look at this?” Cayce wiped the face of the object on her sleeve and handed it to Harri.
“What a beautiful family portrait! Can you believe this glass isn’t even cracked? What’s up with that?” Harri examined the frame, which was not ornate like the hairbrush, but was also gold. “We know this is not Peg’s family. This young woman is beautiful. Her lacy blouse really sets off her pretty face. And those tantalizing dark eyes!” Harri shook her head in awe and held the picture so Cayce could look at it with her.
“Look at the way her long brown curls drape over her shoulder and hang almost to her waist. Her husband is handsome, too, although I’m not a lover of handlebar mustaches.”
“And these children look like angels.” Cayce took the picture to get a closer look. “The little girl is so pretty and looks so sweet with her hand on her daddy’s shoulder. She looks like a little copy of her mom. But this little boy sitting on his daddy’s lap is my favorite. I love a blond child, and look at his dimples.”
“Usually, everyone is somber in these old family pictures, but this little guy looks like he couldn’t be anything but happy. He looks about three years old.” Cayce handed the picture to Harri. “Here, I think you need to take this with the hairbrush. I know Peg wants you to have it. She led you here. This man and these beautiful children were important to her, and eventually, she will let you know why.”
When Cayce and Harri got back to the hotel, Harri replayed
the footage she had taken in the cemetery, and they watched on the camcorder screen. As Harri scanned the cemetery in the first shots, the camcorder caught a very light, wispy shadow at the graves of Absalom’s family. She and Cayce knew it had to be Yu pacing, mourning the loss of Tamara. But the best evidence caught was not the video; it was the sound coming from the front of the Jesus monument, the faint sound of a small child humming “Jesus Loves Me.”
Cayce laughed with her own recorded laugh when the picture went wild, shooting up into the sky as Harri fell on her butt at Sara’s grave. Harri shushed Cayce and told her to listen, and she rewound the footage. This time, two voices could be heard laughing, but it was not just Cayce’s voice. It was her laugh plus a deeper sound, the raspy chuckle of Peg.
The best video footage was the one where Cayce recorded Harri dragging the log. A dark, almost transparent figure wearing a black hat and clothes could be seen limping behind Harri, helping her carry the heavy log.
Chapter Twelve
The next day, Harri and Cayce pulled up in front of Teesh’s cabin and found her rocking on the front porch with Jezebel in her lap. The cat kept her eyes closed, probably hoping her owner would not leave the rocker.
“Well, hello, sisters. I was in need of company today. If I sit on the porch long enough, somebody passing will stop and visit. It’s usually a local stopping at the spring to get water, but I’m glad it’s you this time. I like talking ’bout the old days and Bar None.” Teesh motioned toward two other rockers. “Pull a chair over and tell me what brings you.”
Cayce and Harri pulled the rockers over close. Cayce spoke first.
“We seem to have a little spirit with us in the hotel where we’re staying. We feel sure it’s a little girl, because she likes playing with Harri’s makeup.”
“And we heard her giggle,” Harri added. “We found a grave in the cemetery, beside Belle’s grave, belonging to a seven-year-old girl named Sara. Can you tell us anything about Sara, Teesh? Could she be our little spirit?” Cayce and Harri leaned forward in their chairs, ready to hear Teesh.