Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (22 page)

“‘I’m so sorry about your father, Jake,’ she said.

“‘I’m so sorry about you,’ I said back to her, watching for only a moment as her face angered. Then I got into my limousine for the ride to the grave.

“Well, at the grave site I stood on one side and she stood on the other. She glared at me the whole service. The minister, seeing us, was very embarrassed and made his talk very short. He said that my father had lived his life trying to make the Eastern Shore a better place for people and animals to live. When he said ‘animals’ he looked over at Birdey but she was too angry for that little bit of compromise. He looked at me and I wouldn’t even look at her or him. Far as I was concerned the minister was guilty of letting her up on that pulpit. Believe me, he knew right then he was fast losing his big yearly Terment church contributions. The preacher quickly added that my father’s work in real estate would be remembered by all of us, poor and rich alike. Then the man ended the ceremony and that was it.

“The next day Birdey and her lawyer came to Peachblossom to speak to me.

“She started in, ‘I never meant to embarrass you, Jake. I thought you would see this gift as a tribute to how great a man you father was,’ she said. We talked by her car in front of the house. I had no desire to have her inside. My father’s car was still there where he had left it the day he died, still parked with its front wheels a little bit into the grass like he always did.”

He looked at Frank. “If she and my father hadn’t been so old, I might have thought she had seduced him, slept with him at the house.”

He went on, “‘Birdey,’ I said, ‘I don’t care what you meant to do or did not mean to do. I just want you to leave this place and never come back here again.’

“‘I can’t do that, Jake. Your father gave me this place to use as a home for wildlife.’

“By then, Frank, I was getting upset. You’ve seen me in a lot of situations here in the last few days and that I have had to worry about more than my share of problems in trying to build a few houses here on the Island. I’m sure you’ll agree that I am a pretty calm fellow. This lady had overstepped. I mean, what would you do if someone came around the day after one of your parents died and told you an absolute lie about what that parent had done?”

Frank said nothing.

Jake continued. “So I said to her, ‘Birdey, you’re a liar.’”

“That’s when the lawyer spoke up. I knew the man. He had brought his practice to River Sunday from Baltimore a few years before. He had taken many of the early civil rights cases when the old segregation rules were changing. He wasn’t a native, didn’t have much money and he sure did not understand anything about Peachblossom or Allingham Island, much less the Terments. I didn’t have anything against him. On the other hand, I didn’t have anything for him either.

“He stood there in the sunlight and tried to console me. ‘Jake,’ he said.”

Jake grinned. “You tell me, Frank, don’t you hate it when they use your name and they don’t even know you?”

Frank nodded.

“This fellow went on. He said, ‘Jake, my client says that there was a will written by your father and that she saw it written and put away in the safe up here at Peachblossom.’

“So I said, ‘There’s no will like that here. There’s my father’s only will that he had prepared when I was a child that gives me everything. The will is in the hands of my father’s attorney in River Sunday. I ‘m sure that you’ll find it in order. Another thing. I want you to get you client here to admit she lied about my father photographing all those animals. There is not a one of those photographs here in this old house and anyone wants to see, why they can just come and look.’

“The lawyer and Birdey traded glances. Then he said to her in his outsider’s twang, “Come on, let’s get out of here.” She didn’t say anything, just turned and walked away.

“Later that day I got a telephone call from my father’s attorney to come into his office. I drove into River Sunday. His office was in a large white building behind the Court House. I went in there and talked to him and he asked me if there was any other will that I had heard about. I said, ‘No, my father had only told me about one will, the one he had.’ I said that my father had explained to me that I was going to inherit Peachblossom Manor and the Terment Company stock that he held.

“So my lawyer said, ‘Well, Birdey sees it different. However, what you say, Jake, that’s good enough for me.’” Jake smiled at this point in his story. He took another swallow from the flask.

“A few days later Birdey drove out to the house again. This time she came alone. I was there working at my desk in the living room. I used to take work out to the island to finish it.”

He sighed. “Anyway, I looked up from a report I was working on, and there she was standing, looking at me, from the patio in back of the house. It’s a fine brick terrace where there are white iron chairs and tables. My father and I used to like to sit in the evening. We sat out there many a time and talked about Terment Company. I think that’s where he and I first talked about building houses on the island.

“So she stood there, her hands on her hips like she stands sometimes. I went out on the terrace to talk to her.

“She said, ‘Jake, what did you do with your father’s will?’

“I said, ‘Birdey, you ought to forget this lie. I don’t know where you got all this story. My father would never have let Peachblossom go out of the family. He loved this farm.’

“‘Jake,’ she said, ‘I was here when your father drafted the plan. We sat in his study one summer evening and worked on it together. He was going to finish it himself just the way he wanted it and then give it to his lawyer. That was a few months before he died. He was still in pretty good health. He asked me about what I thought would be the future of the Island. I said that if Jake did not develop it then a child of Jake’s in the future would. I told him that sooner or later someone would come along who wanted to make money off the sale of the island. He was very upset about all of this. Your father was a changed man from the way I had known him even a few years earlier. I guess he had learned that he was going to die. His liver was gone from the drinking. His lungs too from the smoking. He laughed about his lungs, said they were payback for the original family fortune made in growing tobacco.’

“She told me that they went for a walk about the property. The brick walk through the garden and down to the river was pretty at that time of evening. There was a small breeze blowing in from the Bay and so the mosquitoes were not bad. They walked all the way down to the water.

“The brick walk became a wide path. He told me that it was an old road that the Terments used in the colonial days. The slaves would roll the great tobacco hogsheads on this road down to the riverbank to load into the cargo ships for the convoys to England. By the river, she and his father looked at the old foundations where the warehouses had stood.

“‘Your father,’ she said, ‘told me that the Terments had to change the loading place for their tobacco. They had to build this great landing right on the Bay even though the waters were not as sheltered. I asked him why and he did not reply, just kept walking.’

“‘Then we walked down near the butterfly trees. They were large, old. The butterflies loved them. The Monarchs came to those trees every year. I told your father about the insects, how they live and fight and love and die, in a smaller version of our world. He was very interested in all this. I told him while the two of us stood there looking up at those trees, that the butterflies had been coming to this spot for hundreds of years on their flight south and that we had no real idea why they did this. He was very subdued, I remember, thinking, he said, about the effect that we humans had on this tiny creature’s existence. I think your father was impressed that he had the power to change the future for the better for that animal.’

“‘A butterfly flew up when we were there. Your father watched it until it flew away. Then he said that when you were a kid, you used to bring him bags full of mashed butterflies. It was a game you played every fall when they flew over the farm. He looked at me then and he said he knew that you had no interest, that you hated the creatures. I remember him saying that the colors of the Monarch were orange and black, the Maryland colors he told me, same as in the state flag.’

Jake sipped from the flask. “What she didn’t say, Frank, was that my daddy paid me for cleaning up the bugs. He didn’t like them dying all over the lawn.”

“Then she went on with the lies, ‘We walked back toward the manor house in the twilight. ‘Birdey,’ your father said, ‘I’m going to do something different this time, this generation.’

“‘What do you mean, Richard?’ she asked him.

“‘Jake,’ he said, ‘Jake only wants to develop this place for the money in it. He’s talked to me for hours about his plans. He wants to dig up the land, change it, build houses.’

“Well, Frank,” said Jake, “I told her right then and there. I said, ‘Birdey, that is not true, my father didn’t say all that to you. Why did he even talk to you? I find it all ridiculous. You’re not family, you’re not a Terment.’

“Frank, she looked at me and tried to claim, in her high pitched voice, ‘Well, Jake, he tried to talk to you about it but you just went on and on about your business plans, so he talked to me.’

“I said to her, ‘Birdey, I mean he used to try to figure out ways to aggravate you, to get you to leave him alone, all your talk about the animals and your criticizing him for the duck hunting he did up at Wilderness Swamp. He hated you.’

“Well, Frank, she goes on then, ‘He talked to me because he knew that I care about the land and the creatures and that I had always been this way, that I was honest and he knew he could rely on me.’

“So I said, ‘My father didn’t think you were honest, Birdey. He used to call you every name in the book and none of them were honest.’

“So then she went on, ‘He said that he would give you the Terment Company, his shares and that you would make a lot of money. He told me that you could “torment gold” Those were his exact words. He said that he didn’t want you to have Peachblossom because the land should go back to the animals. He said the Terments had taken it by force from the animals and from the Nanticokes. Peachblossom belonged to the animals above all.’”

“Frank, she was right about one thing. That was a favorite expression of my father. He always talked among family members about ‘tormenting gold.’ I don’t know where she heard him say that phrase. Probably heard it in the gossip from one of our servants.”

Jake smiled. “My father always respected me for making money.”

“‘Your father wanted to free you,’ Birdey continued telling me there on the terrace. ‘He told me that he never wanted a son, a new generation of Terments. When you came along he had tried to help you. He said that you would die young if you stayed on the land, if you owned Peachblossom. He said you didn’t have the strength that he did, that you didn’t have the ability to scare people away like he did. He said that returning the island to its original state where only animals lived there would mean a fresh start for you, for the whole family.’

Jake looked at Frank, “Why would he say a thing like that, about scaring people? He had respect for me. I tell you she was lying.”

“‘Birdey,’ I said to her, ‘This whole thing is a lie. I want you off the island.’”

“‘Jake,’ she said to me, ‘your father said that this place would kill you. He said it made him drink hard all his life but surviving was different during his lifetime. He knew life would be harder for you.’

“Then she left. I heard from her lawyer for a while but the case went nowhere. They didn’t have a will to disprove my ownership. From that day, however, she has tried to hurt me here in River Sunday. This butterfly costume gimmick of hers is a nasty way to try to hurt my project and my friends and me.”

“I heard you had a step-mother,” asked Frank. “What was she doing while Birdey was coming up on her visits. What happened to her?”

“I see Jefferson has been telling his lies. That woman never meant much to me or my father. She lived in one of the old cottages. She was a housekeeper, that’s all she was. She certainly wasn’t my mother in any way. My mother was a very beautiful woman.”

“I shouldn’t have asked.”

“That’s all right, Frank.” Jake smiled. “You and I, we have to get this cleaned up. I’ve got some of my business associates coming out here pretty soon. I told you about that.”

“We haven’t finished with the research yet, Jake. I don’t want to mislead you,” said Frank, opening the car door and climbing out into the heat. Jake followed him outside and they stood together beside the car.

Jake was suddenly impatient. “I guess you don’t understand anything I’ve told you.” He motioned towards the site. “Maybe these bones could have been planted here by someone who wants to hold up the construction.”

“That’s not likely, Jake. They are very old. We will excavate what we can and make our recommendations about the site. That’s all,” said Frank.

“This is not a very attractive display for my friends,” he said.

“Well, I can’t disregard all these, Jake. This is a very unusual find. Especially the giant man.”

“I don’t really care about what may or may not have happened in ancient history. I just want to get this place cleaned up.”

Jake motioned to Spyder who was standing by the gate. The two men followed Frank as he returned to the site. When they reached the excavations, Jake jumped down into the pit where the Pastor was working on the new skeletons. Before anyone could stop him, he had picked one of the skulls out of the soil and placed it up on the edge of the pit. As he reached for another, Frank jumped down into the pit beside the Pastor and put his hand on Jake’s arm.

Jake stopped and turned to Frank, smiling again. “What are you doing, Frank?”

“You can’t do that, Jake,” said the Pastor.

“What do you say, Frank?” Jake stood straight in the pit, looking directly at Frank. Spyder was towering over Frank at the edge of the pit, his highly polished shoes outstanding on the edge of the pit, while below him Frank’s feet were muck covered and bare.