Airtight Case (23 page)

* * *

Even with two roommates, Lindsay slept better than she had since she’d been at the site. The reality of a door gave her immeasurable peace of mind, which manifested itself in a good mood. It must have been catching, for everyone worked happily all morning.

The main task was to finish the units immediately adjacent to where the lead coffins were buried. Structure 4 seemed to be either a large smokehouse or maybe a small one-room cabin. It had a fireplace and measured about ten by seven feet.

“I have something here,” said Adam, who was excavating the firebox.

“Oh, my God,” said Sharon, looking over his shoulder. “Those look like human teeth.”

Chapter 20

Pig Teeth

“HUMAN TEETH?” ASKED Erin. “What would they be doing in the firebox?”

The others looked at her and grinned wickedly.

“Lindsay?” called Adam.

Lindsay had heard snatches of the conversation, but was involved with Drew mapping Structure 1 and had tuned most of it out.

“Just a minute.” She wrote down a number and laid down her clipboard and tape measure.

She and the others working on Structure 1 marched over to Structure 4 to see what the excitement was about.

“It looks like they’re human,” said Adam, rubbing the dirt off two molars.

“Could it be one of Rosellen Gallows’s little babies?” asked Erin, torn between getting a closer look and stepping away entirely.

“No. They look adult to me,” said Sharon, “like a rather large adult.”

Lindsay took the teeth from Adam and turned them over in her hand. “Suidae, P2 and P3—Pig.”

“Pig?” said Adam.

“They have teeth similar to ours.” Lindsay grinned at him and put the teeth back in the palm of his hand. “Does that surprise you?”

“I should’ve guessed. Can you tell if they’re from wild hogs in the area or domestic pigs?”

“Wild hogs weren’t introduced to this area until the early 1900s. None were seen in the Smoky Mountains until the 1950s.” Lindsay gestured toward where the barn originally stood. “They raised them.”

She went back to Structure 1, smiling inwardly. Not everything is sinister, she thought.

“Claire,” she said, “I’m meeting Mrs. McBride after lunch. I think I’ll go shower.”

Claire nodded and asked Powell to help her with the mapping. No argument. No smart retort. Lindsay was seriously considering bribery as a normal means of interaction with people. Powell raised his eyebrows at Lindsay as she passed, wondering, no doubt, about the mysterious change in Claire.

* * *

“You seem recovered,” said Elaine when Lindsay met her after lunch at the library. “Did you find out who sent you that awful thing?”

“No. But it was probably a prank. Ready to go through some documents?”

“Sure.” Elaine took several boxes of documents from the shelves and divided them between herself and Lindsay.

Many were hard to read—the ink was faded, or the handwriting was illegible. Lindsay scanned them as quickly as she could, looking for key words and phrases. “This is interesting. It’s a letter from someone—it’s hard to make out—the State of Franklin commissioned a survey of this area in 1784.”

“You know, we—the historical society—need to copy some of these documents for the schools.” She wrote a note in her notebook. “I visited the nursing home.” She gave Lindsay a look that said she had found out something important and had been waiting for the right time to tell her.

“And?”

“I found out a tidbit of something. One of my husband’s patients is a hundred and two. She’s bedridden but is lucid most of the time. I read the poems to her, and we talked a while. Suddenly, she remembered something her grandmother used to say to her when she was little. ‘You’re gonna be like Eda Mae.’ Or, ‘You don’t want to be like Eda Mae.’”

“Really? Did she say who Eda Mae was?”

“No. She said she never knew an Eda Mae. It was like saying don’t be a Peeping Tom. I asked her what she was doing when her grandmother chastised her, but she couldn’t remember. She really just added to the puzzle.”

“Research is like that. If you aren’t getting more questions than answers, you aren’t doing it right.”

“Phil suggested I put a letter in the local paper and ask if anyone has heard the expression.”

“That’s a good idea. Had your friend heard of Cherry?”

“No, she hadn’t. I’m still trying to get a line on descendants of Hope Foute.” Elaine hesitated a moment. “Phil had another idea about the writing.”

“What’s that?”

“A lot of people think Rosellen Gallows killed her children. Mainly, I think, because of the last one, the one who thrived with Hope Foute’s daughter but died when he was returned to Rosellen. Anyway, Phil suggested that maybe some of the poems reflect Rosellen’s guilt—or her husband’s.”

Lindsay thought about that for a moment. “Like maybe her husband killed the children, and Rosellen scratched out the poem, ‘Not my sin, the hell he’s in,’ out of her guilt for not being able to save them.”

Elaine nodded. “Or, her husband wrote them for the same reason. Were men more likely to be literate back then?”

“I believe so, but I’m not sure. Many women knew how to write. Hope Foute did. That’s a good hypothesis. I’m not sure how we can verify it. What you and your husband are doing is a big help.”

“I’m glad to do it. I’m going to get some more information from Miss Hill. That’s the woman in the nursing home. She was born in 1899, so she may have lots of stories from her mother or grandmother.”

“Did you ask her about the Gallowses?”

“Yes, but she didn’t remember anything about them. She said she’d think on it. Her granddaughter says Miss Hill’s like that. She can’t remember something, then it will just pop into her head. Maybe talking to me will jog other memories.”

“Didn’t the initial archaeology survey team interview community residents?”

“Yes, but they found Mary Susan Tidwell early on. Miss Tidwell was jealous of her unique position. She liked being the one to give out information and kind of discouraged your people from using anyone else. She didn’t mean any harm.”

“I’m sure she didn’t. No doubt she enjoyed the attention. I can’t blame her. But the survey team should have known how to deal with informants to avoid that kind of situation.”

Lindsay put a document aside and picked up another one. “When we leave here would it be possible to drop by your husband’s office? I’d like to ask him something.”

Lindsay lowered her voice to almost a whisper and told Elaine about the lead coffins and what was about to happen.

“I thought maybe he would like to assist in examining the remains.”

Elaine was wide-eyed. “That’s what you meant the other day about repaying him. Oh, yes, I know he’d love to. These were people who lived in our cabin, weren’t they? He’ll be excited to help.”

“This has to be kept quiet.”

“Folks will know, when all those people come to town.”

“Yes. But we’d like to keep it under wraps until then.”

“Phil’s as interested as I am in information about our house. He’ll really love this.” Elaine put one box back on the shelf and got another one. “These really need to be cataloged, don’t they? That would be another good project for the historical society.”

“At least they have protective coverings.” Lindsay picked up a letter and would have discarded it because the writing was so illegible . . . had not a word caught her eye. She took it to the copier and made an enlargement.

“What is it?” asked Elaine when Lindsay returned.

“It’s a letter dated 1785, from a Michael Ellis, ordering a pewter plaque from a metalsmith.”

“What does that mean?”

“Pewter is an alloy of tin, sometimes mixed with lead. It was used widely in the making of fine kitchen utensils and tableware. Perhaps, the same metalsmith also made lead coffins. And if he did, maybe there’s information somewhere about who he made them for.”

“I hate to rain on your parade, but that sounds kind of like a long shot.”

“It is, but that’s the nature of the beast. You look for clues and cross-check them.”

“So, we’re looking for anything about lead, too?”

“Or pewter, or any other product or process that uses lead. You said there may be records on who donated documents to the library?”

“I’ll ask Afton.”

Elaine stepped to the door and asked the assistant librarian to join them. Afton came in smiling, her brown curly hair bouncing as she walked.

“What can I do for you? No more morbidity, I hope.”

“No,” said Lindsay. “I was just wondering if you have a list of people who have donated documents to the library?”

Afton sat down and shook her short brown curls. “They were purged during the dark age of the library.”

“Oh, yes, I forgot,” said Elaine. “The madness of King George.”

“What’s the dark age?”

“The reign of George Henry McKinnon. He owns a hardware store and got himself elected to the city council. Our library’s not part of the Tennessee library system. It’s owned by the town. Miss Marella Oliver started it with her own money fifty years ago.”

Lindsay relaxed from her efforts at deciphering the writing. This had the markings of a long story.

“About six or seven years ago the librarian retired, and the budget came under consideration. I was in high school at the time. George Henry had become head of the library committee. He decided that keeping track of books couldn’t be too much different from keeping track of hammers and nails and applied the same principles of good hardware management to the library. Space is money, and anything that wasn’t earning its keep—by being checked out—would have to go. So, he decided to have a book sale, and he ordered the people who worked here to locate all the books that hadn’t been checked out in two years, to be sold—any of them,” she added with emphasis.

“You don’t mean . . . ,” began Lindsay, and Afton and Elaine nodded.

“All the reference materials, the rare books that weren’t allowed to circulate, and the archives. Fortunately, the idea had to go before the council. My dad came to the meeting. He’s a farmer. Taught us kids to love books. Anyway, he stood up and told George Henry he was a damn fool. Didn’t he, Miss McBride? He stood right up and said that. The sale was voted down.”

“Many people missed the opportunity to get a good deal on encyclopedias, dictionaries, and some very rare manuscripts.” Elaine folded her arms and grinned at Afton.

“I don’t believe that,” said Lindsay. “You’re making that up.”

“No. It’s true,” said Elaine.

“What happened to the list of donations?” Lindsay asked.

“A victim of the dark age. George Henry decided that a list of who had donated books and documents to the library was a sign of vanity. He had the whole list purged and ordered the crediting of donations to stop. Unfortunately, that list covered all the documents in this room. George finally went back to what he knew best, and we now keep track again.”

Lindsay didn’t quite know what to say. “I don’t suppose you remember if Mary Susan Tidwell donated any documents to the library collection of the historical society?”

“I don’t recall her ever donating anything. But I’ll ask some of the people who used to work here.”

Afton stood up to go. “Wait a minute,” said Elaine, motioning her to sit back down. “Afton’s great-great-grandmother is the woman I talked to at the nursing home.”

“You visited Granny Hill? I’ll bet she enjoyed that. She loves visitors.”

“She’s fun to talk to.” Elaine pulled out the page of loft poems and handed it to Afton, briefly explaining where they came from.

“These are scratched in your floor? Wow.”

“We’re trying to find anyone who ever heard of a Cherry or an Eda Mae.”

Afton screwed up her face, thinking. “Granny Hill used to tell us a lot of stuff. I wish I’d written it down. I don’t remember a Cherry or Eda Mae.”

“She said she thought she remembered her grandmother saying something about not wanting to be like Eda Mae,” prodded Elaine.

Afton scanned the poems again. “‘Eda Mae/Gone all day’ . . . This is kind of like jump rope rhymes, in a way.”

She tapped out a rhythm on the table and muttered almost to herself while moving her body to the beat.

“I had a little puppy/His name was Tiny Tim/I put him in the bathtub, to see if he could swim/He drank all the water, he ate a bar of soap/The next thing you know, he had a bubble in his throat/In came the doctor/In came the nurse/In came the lady with the alligator purse.”

She looked up at Lindsay and Elaine staring at her. “Didn’t you all jump rope?”

Lindsay shook her head.

“Some,” said Elaine. “Seems I remember something about Cinderella dressed in yella . . .”

“That’s one of them,” Afton said. “Julie Ramsey, the sheriff’s daughter, and I used to be on the precision jump rope team. We were pretty good.”

“Amazing,” said Lindsay. “I didn’t think of children’s poems. The poems were so dark, I thought it was some kind of disturbed adult. I’d forgotten that children’s stories and rhymes are pretty grim.”

“What’s the date on these?” asked Afton.

“They’re in the old part of the cabin,” said Elaine. “But it could be anywhere from 1775 on until recent, I guess. But they look really old,” she added quickly.

“Before the nineteenth century, jumping rope was a guy thing, and they didn’t say any rhymes with it . . . did a few tricks, though. It was the girls who made it like flash dance. They already had these clapping songs and just applied them to the rope jumping.”

“I never knew,” said Elaine.

Afton stood and put a hand on her hip. “Just visit the library. We know everything.”

“Interesting,” said Lindsay. “Maybe you could investigate some of these rhymes. They may have been in popular use at one time.”

“Good idea.” Elaine fairly wiggled with delight.

“I’ll start with an Internet search tonight.”

“I’ll ask a folklorist at UGA,” said Lindsay.

They reached the end of the day without finding anything else that shed light on any of their questions. Nor did Lindsay discover any definitive answer to her question about the source of the documents owned by the historical society. Her life these days seemed to consist of dead ends.