Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (38 page)

“So what do we do with a three hundred year old murder case?”

“We can be pretty sure from that health examiner that no one in this town will have any interest.”

The three of them laughed.

“We can document it, that’s about all,” said Maggie.

“So that leaves the question,” said Frank. “How much did Jake actually know about what was out there in that marsh?”

“He knew,” said the Pastor. “You mentioned they both knew about ‘tormenting gold’.”

“We’ll never be sure,” said Frank. “If he did know, Jake thought the secret was safe. He probably didn’t worry about the river rising, the soil erosion exposing the wreck. He knew he could quietly fill in the marsh and plant a cornfield. He could get rid of any artifacts,” continued the Pastor. “What he did not count on was that he had let the bridge fall apart over the years and had to fix it. That got him in a bind about this little marsh property. There was no other land on which to build the bridge supports.”

The Pastor smiled. “The tide water had washed out more soil than Jake realized. That’s how come the wreck got found by that bulldozer, ‘cause it was so close to the surface.”

Maggie added, “Then, you found the clues and, because you were more honest than Jake had calculated, you couldn’t quit, Frank. All this put Jake in a position where he became desperate.”

The Pastor smiled. “Even more desperate because Jake couldn’t let that mansion be lost. Peachblossom was his family heritage. That manor house was probably the only thing Jake cared about all his life. That’s where you got to understand people like the Terments.”

“I got this feeling he looked on this as a duty,” said Frank.

“Yes,” said Maggie. “Maybe even more so because of the rumors about him that his real father was not a Terment. Maybe that led him to assert himself as the savior of the family.”

The Pastor said, “Some of the demonstrators stretched that orange banner on the monument out in the harbor. The word ‘Butterfly’ in big black letters can be seen from shore.”

Frank looked at Maggie.

“You could write this,” she smiled. “The dead slaves get new life. Jake, who in an ironic way, was also a slave, a slave to his family, gets death.”

“Yeah, but what would we have done if Jake hadn’t had the accident?” Frank said.

The Pastor looked at them. “Sad to say, if he had not had that unfortunate accident, if he had not died, all those people out there would only have been able to slow him and his company for a few hours. Even if you had succeeded in beating him up and chasing him away to stop the bulldozer, all would have been only for a short time. In a few hours Jake would have been back with plenty of lawyers and a lot more green coated guards. Maggie’s boss was on Jake’s side. She wanted to close the site. Without State of Maryland support, all of us would have been forced out of there.”

“What made the change? His death?”

“His death allowed the Governor and his people to cater to those demonstrators. There were a lot of votes out there, white and black,” said the Pastor.

Frank pulled on the brim of his hat. “What about the Union soldier?”

“Let the story be known,” said the Pastor.

“Adam and Eve,” Maggie said to herself. “That’s why it’s so hard for most of us to be sorry for Jake.”

“What?” said Frank.

“Go back to the Bible,” she smiled. “After Adam and Eve blew the deal in the garden, we all became slaves, each in our own way, and we’re not likely to love whoever we think are our slave masters.”

It was the morning of Heritage Day.

Hundreds of people were at the funeral. Their cars formed one of the longest lines River Sunday had ever seen for a burial. Old timers said with authority that the only time more people had shown up on the streets was when General Eisenhower came through looking for votes. The Pastor told Frank that Lulu, one of his friends from the old civil rights days who was now the owner of a twenty four hour strip club on the main highway south outside River Sunday, said she and her girls had made more money since yesterday that they had during the peak of last year’s peak summer vacation season. Friends of Jake and his wife were transported from the small River Sunday airport in black limousines. The cars stopped at the small Episcopal church. It was the same church from which Jake’s father had been buried. Many of the friends were celebrities themselves. They were richly dressed and their faces showed a common and well-practiced expression of grief.

Maggie observed that she would have believed their sorrow was truly felt if only there had been some difference among their expressions.

“You expected an occasional tear,” said Frank.

“Yes,” she said, “Or a sob or two.”

Those not invited to the ceremony at the church, especially the hundreds of tourists visiting the harbor for Heritage Day, stood on the sidewalk outside. One visitor from Texas remarked casually that he was delighted he could see, if not a wedding of a celebrity, at least a funeral. Frank and Maggie watched from her replacement State of Maryland sedan. Some of the crowd on the street near them, especially the teenagers, they recognized as members of the crowd at the fire. Many of the local onlookers were crying as if a close relative had died.

“They thought of Jake as their royalty,” said Maggie.

Clouds had come up and the day had a strange chill, even in the summer humidity. The procession came out of the church. The line of cars moved slowly under the Heritage Day banners stretched across Strand Street. Maggie pulled her car into the end of the line. State government officials ordered by the Governor to attend at the gravesite were in the line in chauffeured black state cars, much larger than Maggie’s sedan. The Governor had stated that he was unavoidably detained. The mayor had urged a short church ceremony so that the Baltimore television crew would have more time to film the outside procession going through the tourist area of the town. Out in the harbor an offshore breeze chased large swells out to the Chesapeake Bay where a distant roll of black sky foretold storms. Jake’s white yacht, its bow showing scar marks from the explosion, pitched with the waves, rising and falling without purpose or direction.

The television cameras, set up in front of the ruined church just over the old bridge, were broadcasting live as the cars rumbled onto the island. People throughout Maryland and across the United States saw the slow limousines filled with mourners pass by, headlights proclaiming the night of death. The television commentators spoke repetitively the keynotes of Jake’s audiovisual obituary, his great real estate wealth, his glittering marriage to Serena, his antique house on Allingham Island. They reported nothing about the tall concrete piers thrusting up in the background behind the limousines. Nor did they mention the collapsed crane in the river, oil still leaking. The cameras were set high and did not photograph the strips of bullet cracked concrete and the scorches from machine gun tracers on the walls of the ruined church. No one mentioned the blackened trees in the distance where the fire at the farm house had burned leaves and treetops.

Other expertly placed cameras captured the cars moving slowly into the ancient graveyard. They panned over the gravestones, televising the names of generations of Terments who lay buried under the ivy and lingered at the Admiral’s grave tracing the deep carved Confederate flag, its stone lines filled with the ever-present cemetery moss, the cannonballs at its foot. They caught the dim light of the cloudy sky as it bounced off leaves of the heavy bending trees. If the moisture of the rich vegetation and ancient burying place could be transferred to film, the photographers accomplished this.

Frank and Maggie stood behind the other attendees, barely able to see the grave as the minister said last words. The white preacher had been told moments before to shorten his speech still further because the television coverage requested more linkup time for the interview with Jake’s wife.

Billy led the other pallbearers as the coffin was rolled to the gravesite. Now the television cameras turned to the minister.

“He lost his life,” quickly intoned this black suited man, trying to accomplish what perhaps was the greatest speech of his church career as he continued speaking, “doing what he cared about most, serving his people, his family, his land. He lost his life but he won our hearts as only a man of principle can do. Jake Terment will be remembered by all who knew him. He will not be forgotten. Here was a man who cared about homes for the people and devoted his life to sheltering his neighbors. Only the truly big man can give so graciously to the small man.”

Frank stepped out of the way as the television reporters began interviewing the guests. He watched as a very old woman with red dyed hair came unnoticed up to the gravesite as the others were moving away. She stood looking at the grave for a few moments, tears coming from her wrinkled eyes. Then, as she slowly stepped away, a trumpet began playing “Maryland My Maryland,” the song Frank recognized from his first day in River Sunday.

As the words traveled over the other graves, Frank and Maggie turned to leave. He wanted to get some more work done at the site. There was an interview with Jake’s wife at the entry to the graveyard, near a pair of concrete and stone posts and a broken iron gate that was pulled back to the side in the uncut grass. Frank stopped nearby with Maggie and listened.

“I knew this was a mistake,” Serena sobbed to the television interviewer. She was the same reporter who had interviewed Maggie. Serena was dressed in a loose fitting pantsuit and her right arm was in a sling.

“It’s all right, Mrs. Terment,” the reporter sympathized.

She looked up from her handkerchief. “Please use the name Serena. Jake would have wanted it that way. He said it was better for my pictures.”

“Serena, is it true that you had a premonition of harm coming to your husband? Did you try to warn him?”

“Jake never listened to me. I did tell him not to come to this place. I told him he belongs to the world, not to this island where he was born. I tried to keep him away.”

“What did he say when you tried to stop him?”

Then Serena stared at the interviewer for several moments. The reporter moved the microphone in an attempt to get her to talk. “We’re on the air. There’s no time. Can you tell us?”

“He said we had to make this trip. He wanted to announce here in his home town that we are expecting our first child.”

“You’re pregnant.” The reporter smiled broadly.

“She’s got a scoop and she knows it. She smells pay bonuses,” whispered Frank to Maggie.

“It’s all wrong now,” Serena said, wiping her eyes. “Now he’s dead. I don’t know what he wants me to do.”

“You can name the baby after him. He was a great man.”

She held her sore arm. “We know it will be a boy. Jake wanted the name to be Henry. Now I must go.”

“Just one more question. People here say that he was loved. What do you think?”

“Do you expect them to say anything else? Do you expect them to say that he died because he was hated?” She sobbed as she looked at the reporter, a look that begged the reporter to let her go.

The reporter persisted, “We’ve heard from reliable sources in Hollywood that your centerfold modeling and your movie career are finished, that the accident you had here with a wild animal has scarred your body so you will never be able to model again.”

Serena did not answer.

The reporter continued, “What do you think about the bankruptcy of the Terment Company? Now that your movie career is finished and your husband’s money is gone, what will you and the child live on?”

Serena sobbed, then stared through her tears with what appeared to Frank as sudden hatred at the reporter. She said nothing more and the reporter finally walked away leaving Serena crying, standing alone as other visitors to the grave passed by her without stopping.

As Frank left the graveyard with Maggie, the clouds went away and the sun blazed light among the old trees. Outside the shade of the trees, his body felt the brunt of the steaming sunlight.

Later at the site, Cathy reviewed with Frank and Maggie how the technicians brought in from other sites were transforming the dig. She was dressed more simply now in blue jeans and a brown work shirt. She had come out to the site to inspect the installation of a new security fence, a tall chain link affair that would protect the excavation site from any future vandalism. Most of the honeysuckle hedge along the road had been taken down for the fencing.

“There will be a twenty four hour human and electronic security system, paid for by the State of Maryland,” she said.

“Tell me,” said Frank, “What’s the State going to do here now?”

“The Governor is making this place into a park. There’s also some chance that it will be picked up by the National Park Service as a Federal park. We are going to make a maximum effort to get this site established in the best way we can. I’m sure that you will be pleased about that.”

“Certainly am.”

“Poor Jake Terment. He was such a gentleman to have come to such a horrible accident. His death will be a loss for the whole State.” She looked at Frank. “You mustn’t feel responsible.”

“I don’t,” said Frank.

For a moment she was taken aback by Frank’s earnestness. Then she went on, “The Governor is going to dedicate all of this to the African children who died here in the shipwreck. There’s a lot of hope in Baltimore that there will be tourist interest in the site, maybe the same as there is for the old slave monument out in the harbor at River Sunday.”

They walked toward the site where a long steel building was being bolted together. “This is temporary,” Cathy said. “It will protect the site from rain. We will have it there until the site is completely studied. Maybe two or three years. Maggie will supervise the reassembly, study, and proper burial of every skeleton. We are hoping to trace every child as far as we can to his or her original village in Africa.”

One of the archeologists, a woman in jeans, waved to Frank. She had a small plastic bag in her left hand.