Monstrous Beauty (9 page)

On the way home she passed Burial Hill and her mind returned to Linnie. She had never even asked Linnie what her last name was. If she had, she could search for her online. She might contact her, and find out what college she was going to, and what she looked like now that she was eighteen. They could reminisce about their creepy childhood playing in a graveyard, and Hester would apologize for dropping Linnie’s friendship after the Bible incident.

On an impulse, Hester pulled into a space in front of the hill. She got out of the car and climbed the long steps, past headstones that were still familiar to her so many years later. It was a lovely place, she realized. She should come here more often, just to read or to think in a peaceful setting. She strolled for a while, and then she searched out a bench that she remembered under an ancient tree. The wood was parched and splintered, but she sat down carefully and leaned back. The evening breeze off the bay was damp and salty and wonderful.

The three headstones in front of her were made of blue slate. The first had one of her favorite decorations: a cherub’s face with wings, chiseled in a charming folk-art style. She glanced at the inscription:

ISAAC ONTSTAAN

Dec. 6th 1866–Jan. 19th 1870

Stop traveller and shed a tear

Uppon the sod of a child dear

Hester sat up straight. Ontstaan was the last name of her great-great-great-grandmother. Surely she had read this headstone many times before, while playing on this very bench. She tried to remember if she had known Marijn Ontstaan’s name when she was seven. If she had, it had not made an impression.

She quickly read the second headstone, which had a skull above crossed bones carved at the top:

Here lies Buried the Body of

MR OLAF ONTSTAAN

deceased by the hand of a Fiend Unknowen and departed this Life July 8th 1872

O ye whose cheek the tear of pity stains

Draw near with pious reverence and attend

Here lie the loving Husbands dear remains

The tender Father and the courteous Friend

The dauntless heart yet touched by human woe

A Friend to man to vice alone a Foe

And next to that:

ELEANOR HANNAH ONTSTAAN,

the wife of MR OLAF ONTSTAAN and daughter of MR THOMAS and MRS RUTH SMYTH whose Life was cruelly taken from her July 11th 1873 in the 48th Year of her Age It belongs to God’s Judgment to punish the Wicked

Hester searched her bag for a pen. There was no paper. She wrote this on her hand: Olaf 7/8/72, Eleanor Hannah 7/11/73. These were undoubtedly her
relatives
, and they had both been murdered, about a year apart. She laughed with excitement. Their deaths were sure to be in the newspaper archives, and she had exact dates. She looked at her watch. The library was still open, but only just. She ran to the car.

*   *   *

Her discovery was more intriguing than she could possibly have imagined. The
Old Colony
reported that Olaf’s body had been recovered in his underclothes, lying in his boat—which had been carefully pulled ashore—with his throat slashed and his lungs savagely cut out. The murder had never been solved. It was like the plot of a thriller movie.

Hester quickly scanned through the headlines in the days after Eleanor’s death date. Eleanor had drowned in the crypt of the First Church of Pilgrims, as part of a suspected triple murder. A drowning? In the crypt? It didn’t make any sense, and it wasn’t explained further. She read on: the other victims were a minister of the church, whose name would not be printed until his family had been located, and Eleanor’s niece, Adeline Angeln.
Angeln.
It was Peter’s last name. And it was undoubtedly the murder-suicide that Sylvie Atwood had told her about—the tragedy that had spawned all the haunting rumors at the church.

She searched for Eleanor’s obituary and found it in the paper a week later. A rush something like a caffeine overload made her heart patter and her hands tremble as her eyes caught on the name Marijn.

Eleanor Ontstaan was the devoted adoptive mother of a foundling infant, surname unknown but given name Marijn, who has been sent to live with Eleanor’s grieving brother-in-law and loving sister, Joseph and Eliza Angeln, in Carver.

Chapter 14

1873

W
HEN THE TIME CAME
for Sarah’s confinement, she left a nosegay of wildflowers tied with twine for the Misses Floy on the kitchen table. She slipped out the back screen door and walked six miles to the town, stopping to rest through the contractions. She hid until nightfall, biting a stick to keep herself from crying out with pain, and when no one was near, she walked into the cold, soothing waters of the bay. She gave birth to a baby girl submerged in the water—where only she heard the first lusty cry. The infant had human legs but was covered in delicate scales. Sarah brought her to the surface, washed her, and carefully swaddled her in seaweed. She kissed her forehead, her cheek, her neck.

There was a boat in the distance—a lobster fisherman checking his traps—and Sarah acted swiftly now. She fastened the bundle underwater by wedging the trailing ends of the seaweed under a rock, giving her daughter to her companions, to be nurtured as one of their own. She slapped the water with her hands to draw their attention from the depths, until she feared the attention of the fisherman instead. Finally, with a lump in her throat that she could not identify, she retreated to land to begin her new life.

The wind picked up suddenly. Within minutes, a storm churned the bay. The lobster fisherman struggled to take his boat in through waves that battered the shore. He saw something in the foaming, churning surf—something that tumbled forward and then was clawed back by the retreating undertow, again and again—something pale. It was crying.

The baby was bruised and entangled in a mass of seaweed, but in the mind of the fisherman, who did not know her lineage, it was a miracle that she had not drowned. Many of the scales had been ripped off her body, showing raw pink patches of skin that he assumed were abrasions. A bachelor, he did the only thing he could think of: he wrapped her in his coat and took her to the widow of his longtime friend Olaf Ontstaan. He knew that Olaf and Eleanor had wanted a child after the death of their son. Who better than Eleanor to care for the infant until the parents came forward to claim it?
If
the parents came forward, he thought to himself.
If
they had not died in a boating accident.

Over the next couple of weeks, the remaining scales dried and flaked off the baby’s skin. Eleanor was certain it was because she had applied burdock root oil mixed with chamomile—a remedy from the Old Country for stubborn cases of cradle cap. Soon, she forgot about the scales entirely. The baby was perfect in every possible way: strong, engaged, healthy, and pretty.

Meanwhile, no parents claimed her as their own, and no reports surfaced of a boating accident. Eleanor gave her the Dutch name Marijn, because it meant “of the sea.” Recognizing that Marijn was the daughter she would never otherwise have, Eleanor unlocked her hope chest to retrieve a gift she had planned thirty years ago, as a new bride, to give to her own baby girl someday.

She opened the clasp and carefully put the necklace around Marijn’s neck, admiring the tiny gold heart against her fair skin. With tears in her eyes, she scooped the baby up in her arms and kissed her.

Chapter 15

J
UST AS
H
ESTER’S DAD OPENED
the heavy door of the church on Sunday, Pastor Marks flew past him, his robe flapping, headed toward the church office.

“I’ll be right back, Malcolm,” the pastor barked over his shoulder. “I’m calling the elders for their advice.”

“Uh…” Malcolm said.

“Please keep track of your youngsters,” Pastor Marks called out to Nancy as an afterthought. “It’s really not suitable for them to see.”

Nancy and Malcolm stared at each other as Malcolm continued to hold the door.

“Who uses the word ‘youngster’ anymore?” Sam said, ducking under his dad’s arm.

Hester followed him. “Only the interpreters at Plimoth Plantation.”

The parishioners who had arrived earlier were in the vestibule—their faces close together, speaking in gossipy whispers with wide eyes. The doors to the sanctuary were shut, when they would normally have been propped wide open.

Hester skirted around the crowd and cracked open the door, slipping inside. Other than an assistant pastor and the director of education huddled in a private discussion, the room was empty.

The sanctuary looked completely normal to Hester. The carved wooden pews, the chandeliers nested between hammer beams, the organ, all seemed exactly the same as ever. There were two large bouquets of fresh white roses on either side of the altar, and white bows tied at the aisle-end of each pew—sure signs that there had been a wedding there the day before. She was about to slip back out, unnoticed, when she glanced up at the stained-glass windows.

The windows were a particular source of pride for the parish. They were crafted by the actual Tiffany Glass Studios in 1898, and depicted various important Pilgrim events: the arrival of the Mayflower at the rock, the signing of the Compact, and Governor Carver exchanging gifts with Massasoit before they signed their peace treaty.

Hester’s mouth dropped open. All of the figures had massive clouds of pubic hair where their genitals would be. The hair appeared to be real—not painted on, sprayed on, or scribbled in with a streak pen. She couldn’t help but snicker, which she knew wasn’t quite right in a church.

The assistant pastor snapped his head in her direction.

“Is vandalism funny to you?” he asked humorlessly.

“I’m sorry,” Hester said. “Is it … is that real hair?”

“Hester Goodwin,” the director of education said, recognizing her, incredibly, from Sunday school a decade before, “go back to the vestibule, please. Pastor Marks is calling the elders, and we’d like to handle this with as little hoopla as possible.” She smiled the way only Sunday school teachers can—like Sweet ’N Low, when you were expecting honey. “We’d appreciate it if you didn’t gossip about this to the other children.”

Hester was not a little girl anymore. “To be honest, Ms. Strickland, I’m completely incapable of not mentioning this to my brother, Sam, but I do promise that I’ll ask him to be tactful with the information.”

She left through the side door of the sanctuary, intending to return to the vestibule as she had been told. But there, to her left, was the door to the crypt—old and solid, with a plastic plaque nailed to it that said “Staff Only.” And now she knew that the crypt was where Eleanor Ontstaan had mysteriously drowned. She tugged the door open and peered in. There was an antique light switch at the top of the stairs—the push-button kind where the second button pops out as the first is pushed in. Hester pushed, and nothing happened. Two more tries, and the lights flickered on, first uncertainly and then confidently. A string of bare, dusty bulbs snaked down the ceiling of the stone stairs, connected by ancient, fabric-covered electrical cord. They generated plenty of light: a stark, unsentimental light.

Nothing could have stopped her from going down.

As she entered the cool stairway she shivered. Rubbing her arms to calm herself, she turned over in her head the still-surprising news that Marijn Ontstaan, her great-great-great-grandmother, had a connection to the crypt murders. It was a brief connection, but it was there: she had been adopted as an infant by the woman who was murdered—whose death had likely triggered nearly one hundred forty years of haunting myths at the church. After that, little Marijn was cared for by a second family—one that was undoubtedly distantly related to Peter. It created a tie between her family and Peter’s—not a blood relationship, but a sort of historical one. And it made her wonder who that little orphan, Marijn, really was. Not an Ontstaan, not an Angeln, but still Hester’s direct ancestor.

The crypt had no windows. It smelled musty and earthen. The whitewashed walls were made of large stones of odd shapes, expertly fitted together like puzzle pieces. She imagined them being laid nearly three hundred years ago by husky masons—strenuous work by men who were in the prime of their lives at the time, each loved by a woman, perhaps starting their young families, and who were now most likely dry bones in unmarked graves, lost to time, their entire lives summed up in this one church foundation.

The joists of the floor above were supported by square brick posts, also whitewashed. The floor was made of hard-packed coastal earth. It would be nearly impossible for even the most torrential rain to flood a space like this with enough water to drown someone: the water would be absorbed by the ground.

There were tombs built along one wall, with blackened family name plaques on each. And there were a few discarded pieces of ancient furniture, a couple of organ pipes, and broken wooden file cabinets. But what caught Hester’s attention were two stone sarcophagi, spaced between the brick posts. They were simple things, large limestone coffins with very little decoration: a carved angel’s head on one, a bas-relief of drapery around the perimeter of the other. She walked up to the first one and bent to see the inscription:

REV. JOHN ROBINSON, M.A.

“Then I proclaimed a fast there, at the river of Ahava,

that we might afflict ourselves before our God,

to seek of Him a right way for us, and for our little ones,

and for all our substance.” Ezra 8:21

She looked at the second sarcophagus: Elder William Brewster. It was fascinating to her—the two sarcophagi were like trick questions of history. From years of studying for her various Pilgrim roles, she knew that neither could ever have held the body that was intended for it.