The Burying Ground (22 page)

“Me? He thought it was me?”

“Aided and abetted by Mrs. Dunphy, dressed as a man.”

Christie began to laugh then, too. “Brilliant!” he said. “Flora dressed up as a bone digger. Oh my goodness, the mental image that conjures up is priceless.” Then he subsided somewhat and added, “You mustn't ever tell her. She's all too aware that she's an ugly duckling.”

“I won't breathe a word,” Luke promised.

“Yes, I think enough has been said on all counts, don't you? We both know where we stand. Now, are you going to hang around here all morning or do you have some patients to see?”

Luke smiled. “I'll leave you to it.”

But just as he reached the door, Christie spoke again. “Mind you, what you do about telling your father is up to you.” And then he settled himself happily at the easel again, humming a tune to himself, off-key and punctuated by the occasional “dum-de-de-dum.”

Thaddeus was in the dining room pretending to read a newspaper. He looked up when Luke came from the kitchen.

“Well?” he whispered.

“It's not Christie,” Luke said. “Go see for yourself.” And then he grabbed his leather satchel and walked out the door, leaving Thaddeus sitting open-mouthed at the table.

It had been grey and cloudy, threatening rain all day, and that evening, just as Mrs. Dunphy served up a plate of sausages and fried potatoes, Luke heard a patter against the window as a sprinkle of raindrops began to fall. As he reached for a sausage, his father said “I think I should go to the Burying Ground tonight.”

“Do you have some sort of presentiment or something?” Luke asked.

“No. It's just that there's a half-moon tonight, and it's cloudy. I'd like to test my lunar cycle theory.”

“It's more than cloudy,” Luke said. “It's actively raining.”

Thaddeus looked unconcerned. “Oh, don't worry, this is just a shower. It'll clear up later.”

“Maybe I'll come with you,” Luke said. He would tag along with his father and try to get a look at the cemetery ledger, although neither Thaddeus nor Morgan Spicer seemed to think that there was anything to see other than the simple recording of burials.

“The more the merrier,” Thaddeus said. He looked pleased. “Would you like to come along as well, sir?” he said to Dr. Christie.

“Oh, I shouldn't think so,” Christie said. “Don't fancy standing around in the rain. Unless, of course, another grave is dug up in spite of your efforts. If that occurs, you might come and get me so I can have a look.”

“I think one human skeleton is enough for anybody.”

“Oh, don't worry, I don't intend to spirit it away. I just want to look. I've always felt that I didn't get the shoulder articulation quite right on poor old Mul-Sack.”

“We'll let you know,” Luke said. It was amazing how much more comfortable he felt with Christie after their startling conversation among the bones. He had been shy about joining the mealtime banter before. Now he felt perfectly at ease with it. Part of the reason, he realized, was that the most worrying of his problems was resolved. He could disregard Lavinia's threat, at least as far as he was personally concerned. He felt, for the first time, that he had the advantage in the situation, and he was determined to use it, somehow, to extricate Perry. Luke once again felt a stab of guilt and regret at the accusation he had made, but he could see no clear way to undo it. He could only, like Christie, atone after the fact.

Thaddeus was correct in his weather prediction. By the time they were ready to leave, the rain had stopped, although the sky was still dark and cloudy. They were only a few steps down the street when Luke saw Andrew Holden limping toward them. He grinned when he saw Luke.

“Oh look, it's the quack out for an evening stroll.”

Thaddeus looked surprised at the flippancy of the greeting, but Luke grinned at Holden in return. “Andrew Holden, this is my father, Thaddeus Lewis.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir. I'd shake your hand, but mine got a little muddy finding this fellow.” He showed them what he was carrying. It was a dead salamander, quite a large one, blue-black with irregular splotches of yellow splashed across its back and tail.

“It's beautiful,” Luke said. “Where did you get it?”

“Down by the brewery pond,” Holden said. “He was lying in some brush. I reckon a hawk or something got him and then dropped him. He was already dead when I found him.”

“You're not going to eat him, are you? Salamander stew for supper?”

“Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that. But I reckon he's not too tasty. I'll take him to Christie instead.”

“Do you supply Dr. Christie with a lot of animals?” Thaddeus asked.

“We all do,” Holden said, “but it's getting harder to find things he'll pay for. He never wants the same thing twice. I sold him a big bullfrog in the spring, but then it got so dry everything disappeared. I spent a lot of time grubbing around in the pond looking for things, but all I got was muddy.”

“Glad to hear that business has picked up,” Luke said. “And you'll make Christie's day with that fellow.”

“Your Dr. Christie certainly has a fascination with bones, doesn't he?” Thaddeus said when they had walked on.

“He probably should have been a surgeon, or a scientist or something, rather than a jack-of-all-trades doctor in a small town,” Luke said. “A waste, really. He's so knowledgeable.”

“Quite incredible. I've never seen anything like it.”

“Did he show you the drawings he made?”

“Yes, and I think his plan to publish them is sound. There's a new interest in the mechanics of how the world works. The Great Exhibition proved that. On the other hand, it's too bad that his pastime is so innocent. Christie as a grave robber would have provided an easy solution to Morgan's puzzle. I'm not sure where this leaves us in terms of finding the culprit. Of course, if it had been Christie, the consequences would have been a bit awkward for you, wouldn't they?”

“To say the least,” Luke replied. “And for you, as well. Do you think Mr. Spicer would mind if I had a look at the cemetery ledger?”

“I don't think you'll find anything there,” Thaddeus said. “We've been over it and over it.”

“I'm sure you have,” Luke said. ”I don't really expect to find anything. But you never know, sometimes a second eye can pick out something that the first missed.”
Especially when the second eye already knew what was going on
, he thought.
Surely there's something there that will lead to the right graves
.

Sally answered the door. “I chased Morgan off to bed already,” she said. “The grass has grown up so much with the rain it's taken him three days to cut it. He's about done in. I'll get the twins settled, then I'll come and sit with you.”

Thaddeus stopped her as she turned to go. “May we have another look at the ledger while we wait?

“Of course.” She went to the cupboard and fetched it down. “I'll be very happy if you manage to find something. I've had enough of this nonsense. Morgan is wearing himself out.”

“There you go,” Thaddeus said, handing the book to Luke. “Do your worst.”

“What was the name of the first one again?” he asked.

“Abraham Jenkins. It's quite a long way in. The records go all the way back to when the cemetery first opened.

Luke flipped forward until he found the name. Date of death, cause of death, date of burial. Nothing more.

“And the second?”

“Isaiah Marshall.”

He found it a few entries later. Again, nothing but a few sketchy details of his death. He scanned the names listed between the two. Nothing. He flipped the pages backward. Nothing. He leafed forward a few pages. Nothing. There were no tell-tale initials beside any of the names. Nothing that would tie any of the deaths to the name Van Hansel. Nothing that would tell him where Hands had hidden his fortune. He closed the ledger.

“Well?” Thaddeus said.

“Nothing that I can see.” He shrugged. “I thought it might be worth looking.” He was disappointed that he could see no clue that his father might have missed, although he supposed he shouldn't be surprised. Morgan and Thaddeus would have searched it thoroughly long since. “So what is your plan? Do we just sit here until something happens?”

“Would you prefer to sit outside in the rain?”

“I don't think it's actually raining anymore. We might stand a better chance of catching someone if we were in the graveyard.”

“We might stand a better chance of scaring them off, too,” Thaddeus pointed out. “Besides, if anything happens tonight, it won't be until later, when it's dark. It was nearly twelve the night someone tried to get into the cottage.”

Luke had forgotten about the attempted break-in at the Keeper's Lodge. It must have been Lavinia, hoping to steal away the ledger. Or more likely Cherub, who seemed willing to do whatever Lavinia asked of her.

“We could take turns watching,” Luke said. He knew that as much as Thaddeus was itching to solve the puzzle Morgan had sent his way, he would grumble at sitting in a damp graveyard for hours. “Why don't we go outside now while there's still a little light, and decide on the best place to wait?”

It was as good an excuse as any he could think of to search the graveyard for something that might help Lavinia. If he found nothing, there was little more he could do. He would have to report that he had done his best and hope it was enough. She had blackmailed Perry, and when he failed, she turned her attention to Luke. If he failed, he could only hope that she would look elsewhere.

“I suppose we could wander around for a while,” Thaddeus said, and then his resolve seemed to firm up. “Yes, that makes sense.”

They rose from the table and went outside. The rain had stopped and sunlight began to break through the dispersing clouds. Luke stood and surveyed the Burying Ground. Unlike the newer cemeteries there was little shelter, just row after row of graves, shoehorned closely together. There were a few trees growing along the back fence, but other than those, the chapel or the cottage itself were the only features large enough to effectively hide a man.

“Which way do you suppose they'll come, if they come at all?” Luke asked.

“It would make most sense to climb the fence at the back, where the buildings would screen you,” Thaddeus said. “Although they did come through the front gates the second time.”

“Then this side of the chapel would provide the best shelter. It would hide you no matter which way they came.”

“Agreed. Now let's go back inside. You can take the first watch later.”

“I'll just look around a bit, then I'll join you.”

Thaddeus returned to the cottage. Luke set off down the pathway, making a show of stopping to look around now and again, just in case his father was watching out the window. There wasn't a great deal to see. Here and there a family had put up a marble headstone, but the majority of the markers were plain slabs of granite with the barest of details inscribed on them. He reached a point halfway down the grounds and ambled over to the mound of earth that still lay raw over the Jenkins grave. Morgan had replaced the marker when he reburied the body, but Luke could find nothing that differentiated it from any of the stones beside it. He wandered through the graveyard until he came to Isaiah Marshall's grave.

He could see nothing there that was out of the ordinary either. His investigation appeared to have reached an end. Disappointed, he rounded the row to walk back to the lodge. Just as he turned, a shaft of sunlight briefly lit the back of Marshall's stone, illuminating a small scratch in the granite. It was barely noticeable, just a small mark a few inches from the bottom, something that at first glance could well have been ascribed to the scrape of a shovel. And that would have been hidden by grass before Morgan had ruthlessly scythed it to the ground. Luke bent down for a closer look, and once he saw it clearly, he was astonished that no one had noticed it before. It was a tiny, entwined
O
and
P
. The same mark that was on the doorframes of the taverns Perry had taken him to; the same mark that was a recognized symbol of welcome for men like him. He stood up, then bent to look again. It was unmistakable.

Had Isaiah Marshall been like Luke, a man who had to hide in the shadows? An
outcast?
Marshall had been a carpenter. Had he worked for Fraser and Hess, who in turn worked for Van Hansel? Had Hands known all about Marshall, and used his coffin as a treasury, confident that no one would come questioning if someone were to dig it up one night? It made sense. And how many more like Marshall were buried here?

Luke wanted to run up and down the rows to check the backs of the stones, but mindful that Thaddeus might be watching, he forced himself to move slowly. He couldn't waste too much time, though — the sun was starting to slip below the horizon. It would soon be too dark to see clearly. Then he realized that the old-fashioned layout of the Burying Ground would work to his advantage. The graves were arranged in strict rows, the coffins buried in the order in which they had arrived. Anthony Hawke's investigation into the embezzlement of funds at the Toronto Fever Hospital had begun in 1847, and with no conclusions reached, petered out sometime in 1848. Hands would have no need to hide his money so thoroughly once the investigation drew to a close. Luke need only examine the stones that were planted in 1847 or 1848 in order to discover if there were any more marked graves. And they were all laid out in tidy rows for him.

As he walked from Isaiah Marshall to Abraham Jenkins he looked closely, not at the etched fronts of the markers he passed, but at the backs of the opposite row. Nothing, nothing, nothing … then another faint scratch. He stopped. This was not the
O
and
P
he had seen before — it was an arrow-like icon. He didn't know what it meant, but, like the other, it seemed to have been deliberately carved. The name on the stone was Amelia Quinn. A female. One of the poor girls who had been forced into a brothel and had died there of disease or despair? It seemed likely.

He found two more like it by the time he reached Abraham Jenkins's grave, and took careful note of the names.

He stooped to examine the back of Jenkins's stone. Here he found a faint squiggled line, a crude representation of a snake or a worm slithering across the ground. It meant nothing to him, but he would wager that it correlated somehow with the list that Lavinia had copied.

Beyond Jenkins, another molly, an additional whore, and two more snakes. Did the symbol stand for vagrant, perhaps? And then the dates on the stones began to read 1849. He stopped walking and counted up the marks he had found. There were eight in all; eight graves with substantial amounts of money hidden in the coffins. His years of memorizing lists of medicines, of learning the names of organs and bones, and the signs and symptoms of disease stood him in good stead now. He fixed the names and locations of each grave in his mind and repeated the list several times over until he was sure that he could retrieve them at a future date.