American Heroes Series - 03 - Purgatory (46 page)

He nodded. “I saw it,” he
replied. Then he sighed heavily. “I’ve never heard of a child ghost in this
house, but since you moved in, that’s the third time he’s shown up. Always in
the central hall by the dining room and then….”

Elliot suddenly grabbed him, her
eyes wide. “Ever since we found the crypt!” she hissed. “We started seeing him
right after we found it. Nash, it’s got to be one of the children. Maybe he’s
looking….”

She suddenly trailed off, looking
outside the big ball room windows again to the spot where the silver wraith had
disappeared. A thought occurred to her, one so terrible that tears popped to her
eyes.

“Looking for what, honey?” he
asked.

She whispered in response. “You
told me that Sophie wanders the grounds looking for her lost love.”

Nash could hear her sniffling and
he looked down at her, concerned. “That’s the tale,” he said. “She wanders the
grounds looking for her lost love. You saw her yourself.”

Elliot shook her head, looking up
at him with big watery eyes. “You read her journal,” she insisted. “It doesn’t
sound like she was particularly fond of Louis-Michel at all. But her children…
Nash, what if she’s not wandering the grounds looking for Louis-Michel, but
looking for her children? What if she’s trying to get to them? She vanished
near the trench; you saw that yourself. That used to be an access tunnel back
in her day. What if she’s trying to get to her kids underneath the house?”

Nash was beginning to understand
her logic and his gaze inevitably turned towards the ballroom door where they
had seen the child’s apparition.

“And what if her kids are looking
for her?” he murmured. “We opened the crypt and now they’re coming out and
looking for her.”

Elliot broke into sobs. “That’s
so terrible,” she wept. “Sophie can’t come in and they can’t go out.  She
disappears before she reaches the house and the child disappears when he
reaches the ballroom. They’re within feet of each other but they can’t make
it.  That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard.”

He comforted her has she wiped
her eyes, thinking that maybe this entire night was just too much for her to
take all at once. It was almost too much for him to take in all at once, as
bizarre and fascinating as it had been.

“Come on,” he finally said.
“Let’s go to bed. We’ll finish it up in the morning.”

Elliot balked. “No,” she
insisted. “I’m fine, really. It’s just that this is all so sad. But I’m fine to
continue, I promise. I really want to see if Sophie’s right about everything.
Please?”

He was clearly reluctant but
relented like a gentleman. He really wanted to see if Sophie was right, too,
but not at the expense of Elliot’s emotional state. Still, she insisted she was
fine. He suspected that even if he forced her to bed, she wouldn’t sleep. So he
gave her a resigned kiss and took her hand.

“Come on, then,” he said softly.
“Let’s see what we can see.”

Elliot followed him into the
kitchen where he collected a hammer, an ice pick and a mallet from a kitchen
drawer. He wasn’t sure how effective kitchen tools would be against marble but
it was all they had.

They proceeded down to the crypt
but Elliot kept looking around for the little ghost child in the dark shadows
of the house, still spooked. The crypt somehow seemed danker and more eerie
than she remembered as she followed Nash over to Paul-Michel’s crypt.

He handed her the hammer as he
inspected the crypt closely. The archaeologists had cleaned off most of the
dirt and mold, presenting him with fairly defined lines and grooves. He pointed
to the flat-slab top.

“Look at this,” he said. “This
thing is in two distinct pieces. See the seam for the lid?”

Elliot peered at it. “Yes,” she
said. “How heavy do you think it is?”

He wriggled his eyebrows. “Hard
to say. Less than a ton, I would think, but I guess I’m going to find out.”

“Can you move it by yourself?”

He turned to give her a
threatening look. “If I can’t, it’ll have to wait until someone else can help
me. You’re not touching a thing.”

She shook her head innocently but
his eyes narrowed at her as if he didn’t believe her. Then she smiled brightly
and he couldn’t help but smile in return. She always knew how to play him, to
soften him up. He turned back to the crypt.

“I’m serious, Ellie,” he told
her, holding the mallet in his right hand and positioning the ice pick against
the lid seam with the other. “Stand back, honey. I don’t want anything flying
off and hitting you.”

Elliot moved several feet away,
clutching the hammer to her chest and watching as he took the first few hard
whacks at the seam.  He began to work all along the seam itself, chipping away
at it, loosening the seal of dirt and mold that had filled up the seam like
caulk. Elliot watched him work his way around three quarters of the lid before
stopping and wiping the sweat off his brow. He grinned at her.

“It’s a lot of work,” he said.
“My brother is the hands-on guy, not me.”

She grinned. “Maybe we should
call Beau.”

Nash took a deep breath and
repositioned his hands. “He’ll be here tomorrow,” he said. “If I can’t get this
moving, then he’ll have to come help his weakling brother.”

“You’re not a weakling, sweetie,”
she winked at him when he looked at her. “I ought to know.”

He laughed softly as he went back
to work, hammering along the work he had already done, every once in awhile
giving the lid a shove to see if he had managed to loosen it. Because of the
way the crypt was up against the wall, he couldn’t get to the fourth side of it
very easily. He would have to loosen what he could and then hope it would be
enough to weaken the fourth side. 

As Elliot stood by with
increasing anxiety, Nash methodically worked the seam with his ice pick and
mallet. Finally, motioned her over and handed her the pick and mallet.

“Now, stand back,” he told her.
“I’m going to try and move this thing.”

Elliot moved far away, almost as
far as the secret stairs.  Clutching the hammer, pick and mallet, she held her
breath while Nash threw his weight into his arms and gave the big marble slab a
big shove. The lid didn’t move. Repositioning his hands, he grunted as he
pushed and this time, the lid moved slightly. 

Encouraged, he gave another big
shove. Sounds of grating, stone against stone, filled the air. This time, the
lid moved about two inches, sliding along the length of the crypt. Elliot gave
a little yelp of fear and excitement, as Nash gave another shove and the lid
slid another few inches. A big corner of it suddenly chipped off and Nash had
to move quickly or risk having it fall on his foot.

Now, there was about a six inch
gap in the top of the crypt so he could look down and see into it. The smell of
rot and putrid stench filled his nostrils and he had to take a step back, away
from the foul air. Elliot came running over, trying to see inside of it but it
was just above her eye level. She tried climbing up but he stopped her.

Nash was peering into the crypt,
his hazel eyes full of curiosity. Elliot was practically jumping up and down
beside him.

“What do you see?” she demanded.

He didn’t say anything for a
moment. Then, he cocked his head slightly. All the while, his eyes were riveted
to the dank and moldy depths of the crypt.

“It looks as if one time, there
was a wooden coffin in here,” he began, “but it’s deteriorated into big piles
of mold. The moisture of this room must have gotten into the crypt somehow and
it just all fell apart. But I can see a body; at least, I can see a skull, but
it’s so decrepit that the wood of the coffin and the body have basically become
one entity. It’s one big moldering pile.”

Elliot gazed up at him, distaste
on her face. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see it now. The foul smell of the
dead had reached her nostrils and she pinched her nose shut with her fingers.

“Is that all you see?” she asked.
“No pirate booty?”

Nash stared at the scene before
him for the longest time.  It was clear that he was digesting everything,
analyzing it, wondering what kind of teenager would kill his own siblings out
of greed.  Lying before him was Paul-Michel Aury, his great-grandfather many
times over, a young man who thought he could take everything and then some. 

It was an iconic moment in Nash’s
life, more than he had expected. All he could feel at the moment was sadness
coupled with disgust at Paul-Michel’s actions. At the base of what would have
been the corpse’s feet, something caught his eye. He reached into the crypt and
pulled out an object.

But it wasn’t any object. It
looked like string, or rope, but Elliot quickly realized it was neither. It was
sparkling weakly in the dim light of the crypt, reflecting precious metal that
hadn’t seen the light of day in over one-hundred and fifty years, and as Nash
wiped away the dark rot and tarnish on the metal, an exquisite gold necklace started
to come to light. 

As Elliot gasped in awe and
realization, Nash used his shirt to polish the mold off of a walnut-sized
emerald. He extended the emerald for Elliot to see.

“My God,” Elliot breathed as she
gingerly touched the murky green stone.  “It… it’s a necklace.
That’s
an
emerald.”

Nash nodded, looking at the piece
in his hands, understandingly seeing the blood money Elliot had talked about.
It was a magnificent piece, no doubt worth millions, and as he peered closer
into the crypt, he could see other pieces intermingled with the rot and mold of
the coffin and body. The entire bottom of the crypt was covered with it. The
more he recognized what he was seeing, the more he came to understand just how
rich the trove was.

“It’s everywhere,” he said
quietly. “The entire bottom of this crypt is covered with it and if Sophie says
she buried the greed with all of her children, that means the other three are
like this, too. There’s literally millions of dollars covering the bottom of
this crypt, Ellie.”

Elliot stopped inspecting the
emerald and looked up at him.  There was sadness to his tone and she, too, was
coming to feel the weightiness of the blood money. It was tragic on so many
levels.

“At least what Sophie said was
true,” she pointed out softly.  “She didn’t murder her children, Nash.”

Nash nodded faintly, still
looking at all of the booty, his gaze finally coming to rest on the skull of
his long-dead ancestor. There was bitterness in his voice when he spoke.

“I hope it was worth it,” he said
to Paul-Michel. “I sincerely hope killing your brothers and sister was worth
the price you paid.”

Elliot was watching him closely
because now, it seemed to be affecting him emotionally. He seemed almost angry
and resentful.  She pressed up against him, her hand stroking his back
comfortingly as she gazed into his handsome face.

“So what do you want to do?” she
asked softly. “Now that we know the truth, what do you want to do? Do you want
to seal this all back up and leave it alone or do you want to let the world
know that Sophie MacGregor did not murder her younger children, and that the
death of her oldest son was because he was a greedy bastard and she had to stop
him?”

Nash sighed heavily as he gazed
at the body. He was glad that Elliot couldn’t see it because it was truly
ghastly to behold. After a moment, he simply shook his head and reached out to
take the tools back from her.

“I don’t know,” he murmured. “I
need to sleep on it.”

She watched him carefully. “Nash,
I realize this is your family’s legacy, but can I please say something?”

“Of course.”

She worded her comment
carefully.  “If we take the treasure out of these crypts and donate it, display
it, or whatever we decide to do with it, think of it this way – at least
Paul-Michel doesn’t get to have it for eternity. Right now, he has what he
wants – his treasure, buried with him, forever. I doubt Sophie thought about it
that way before she buried the symbol of greed. But if we take it away from
him… Paul-Michel doesn’t win.  Sophie does, because she’s exonerated.”

He looked at her, nodding as he
saw her train of logic. Still, his mind was too muddled to think clearly at the
moment.

“Let’s talk about it in the
morning,” he said softly.

“We don’t have to if you don’t
want to. It’s your decision, Nash. I’ll support whatever you want to do.”

Nash appreciated her
understanding. He put the necklace back into Paul-Michel’s crypt and pushed the
great marble lid back into place. In silence, he and Elliot made their way back
upstairs and closed the secret door. 

Shutting off the kitchen light,
they went up the backstairs, making their way to the master bedroom as Nash was
drawn to Penelope’s bedroom by the sounds of snoring.  He peeked in to see
Wolfgang sound asleep on Penelope’s bed. Through all of the ghosts and treasure
hunting, the dog had slept right through it.  He had to grin at the irony of
it.

It was after three in the morning
by the time Nash and Elliot finally went to bed. Elliot fell asleep almost
immediately but Nash remained awake, his arms wrapped around his sleeping wife
as his mind wandered to the days of pirates, treasure, and sugar cane empires.