The Deed (30 page)

Staring beyond the graveyard at the relatively distant family tree on the wall, he could pick out no detail but the glaring gap toward the top. It occurred to Jason that he and Amanda had one unknown—the mysterious middle of his descendancy line—but two equations, the family tree and the map. Combining them should let him solve for the unknown, shouldn’t it? It seemed reasonable, anyway.

He began correlating the names on either side of the family-tree gap to their grave sites, on the hunch that a geographical clue might emerge, suspecting even as he did it that there was a tiny flaw in the logic here that would become obvious later, when his head was clearer.

But he was wrong. Almost instantly, the experiment yielded pay dirt.

There was only one double-
a
Haansvoort grave out in the main graveyard, poor fourteen-year-old Mary, buried right up against the fence. Robert, the first of the single-
a
Hansvoorts, was also just outside the fence but a little farther away, in the same concentric circle as Mary. The old inner fence corraled all the old Haansvoort stones apart from Mary’s, and none of the new ones. And it was after Mary, on the wall map, that the trail went cold.

There simply had to be something here. He wanted to call Amanda, but she’d still be out at the reservation with her mother, he had to assume, and if she had a cell phone he didn’t know about it yet. It was a frustratingly primitive problem, this business of not being able to reach somebody whenever you wanted. Balancing on the couch, hungry for further insight, Jason turned back to the treasure map on his floor.

And made a new discovery.

There had been a gap, he now realized, between the girl’s gravestone, close to the fence, and Robert’s grave, six or eight feet away in the same circle. On Jason’s floor, this was represented only by five inches of immaculate oak flooring. But on Amanda’s drawing, a small black scribbled-in circle stood between his grave and hers, like an errant standardized test entry. Searching his memory, Jason recalled the phenomenon the scribble represented, a small unmarked mound they’d both dismissed that day as the spot of a removed tree. Now, Amanda’s map made it clear that the spot lined up perfectly with the concentric circular grid of gravestones. He wondered if the fact that she’d bothered to include it meant that this had occurred to her, too.

The mound between Robert’s and Mary’s stones was a grave, clear as day, an unmarked grave that corresponded exactly to the gap in the family tree, if it could be deciphered. He felt another wave of vertigo, as if the apartment were rolling away beneath his feet.

Catching his breath a little, he stepped off the couch and walked gingerly into the graveyard, rustling the dead as he slipped past, and lifted up the two critical sketches, Mary’s and Robert’s, for a closer look.

Robert’s was simple:

ROBERT MICHAEL HANSVOORT
1765–1810
DEVOTED SON AND FATHER
AND SERVANT OF OUR LORD
JESUS CHRIST

Crowning the stone was the same three-leaf pattern found on Mary’s stone—another parallel, one he remembered noticing, but not investigating, back in the graveyard.

Mary’s stone, more than seventy years older, read:

MARY ELIZABETH HAANSVOORT
1720–1734
CHYLDE IS TAKEN TOO SOON FROM US
BUT THE STAR OF HER LYFE LIVES ON
“WHEN PRIDE COMES, THEN COMES DISGRACE
BUT WITH HUMILITY COMES WISDOM”

WHAT PROVIDENCE HATH GRANTED
LET CHARITY NEVER FORGET

He smiled, remembering Amanda’s elated discovery of the weed-obscured line at the bottom and their mutual efforts to clear it.

This is all the clue you get,
Jason told himself.
Time to try Amanda’s crazy logic: Start from the presumption that the line’s important, and work it backward. Imagine there’s a reason that that line…revealed itself to us. Pretend it wanted to be found.

“What Providence hath granted, let Charity never forget.”

He looked at the rubbings in his hand, peered at the wall, mentally subtracted dates. Thirty-one years between the girl’s death at age fourteen and Robert’s birth.

Let Charity never forget.

Suddenly, his jaw dropped, and he sat down on the couch. Could it be?

Mary had died at fourteen, putting an apparent end to the line. But it hadn’t ended, clearly, and the only possible explanation, however improbable it might seem, had to be the right one.

Mary had been pregnant, and had died in childbirth.

He glanced at the clock as he leaped up to race for the door. “Fantastic!” he shouted, amused by just how close he’d come to actually opening the apartment door before remembering he was buck, raving naked.

Jason threw on his boxers and fell to the floor pulling on his pants, thumping his ass on the hardwood and scattering ancestors helter-skelter. He began laughing uncontrollably at his piteous state, then somehow got himself dressed and jammed the two critical sketches in his pocket. Ten minutes later, he was out the door and hailing a cab. First stop: Chase Manhattan for some cash. This was going to be the longest cab ride of his life. But money was no object.

Charity was a
person.

LONG ISLAND
, 1:45
P.M.

In his addled state, haggling over a fee with the cabdriver had proved excruciating beyond belief. But by the time they’d left the Long Island Expressway and begun the steady downgrading of roads leading to the reservation itself, Jason’s buzz had worn down to a manageable level. He proudly plotted, for the cabbie, the exact route to the reservation; his mind was ideally hardwired for the stone logic of streets, and new ones, once sketched into the ever-developing atlas in his head, tended to stay firmly put.

They dipped down at last off the end of the paved road, and Jason smiled in anticipation. A half mile inside the reservation, just short of the house itself, the car came to a lurching halt, as if fatally intimidated by the moonscape of undercarriage-eating potholes pocking the path. He fished out the monstrous fare and stepped outside.

Even as Jason’s euphoria wandered and reason, with a reproachful glare, politely took up the reins again, his belief that he was on to the truth only continued to crystallize. And all the evidence he could bring to bear, he considered as he walked the final half mile to Amanda’s mother’s house, only buttressed the hypothesis. Mary gets pregnant at fourteen, dies in childbirth. No surprise there. She’s a Haansvoort, of course, so as an unmarried teenager, she takes her maiden surname to that early grave. Her parents name the baby Charity, maybe for the simple fact that she survives; for lack of a legal father—did they ever even find out who he was?—Charity keeps the Haansvoort name as well.

So far, so good.

But why is Charity’s grave unmarked, and her identity struck from the family Bible—evidence of an organized effort to wipe out her entire existence? There were indications of no small familial distress here, it seemed to Jason, and while he had to allow that his theory from this point on flowered into wilder speculation, still Jason thought it stayed within the bounds of logic. Charity would have been born out of wedlock—could a girl be a “bastard”?—and an orphan, effectively. Difficult enough today; no doubt unthinkable in the days of witch-burning and so on. She would have been an outcast from day one.

Whatever had happened to her next was buried in that unmarked grave. But would it have surprised anybody if Charity had grown up to repeat the sin of her mother? One way or another, by the time Charity came around to bearing her own child, Robert, there was again no husband in the picture to give the boy a new last name.

And just so, the Haansvoort name had survived.

Jason crossed the lawn, climbed the unpainted steps of the porch, and pressed the bell. He felt a thrill of accomplishment about to come to fruition: the clever boy bringing a term project to school at last. But his elation was mixed with a little of the unease he’d felt the last time he was out here, now spiced with a dash of stoner paranoia. How would Amanda’s mom react to seeing him again…and would this, plus the family Bible Amanda had brought earlier, be enough to get her to cough up her secrets? Most important of all, did she know where the deed was, or not?

Jason had already depressed the buzzer again when he heard footsteps shuffling on the other side of the door, too late to stay his hand. He smiled sheepishly, loading up a casual apology to deliver to Amanda or her mother, whichever one answered.

But it was Amanda’s father who pulled back the door, framing himself darkly in the opening, and the shock thoroughly disabled Jason. He stood drowning on the doorstep, honestly trying to remember why he’d come.

The big Indian was less overtly hostile than in their first encounter, but still presented a terrifying figure, his linebacker build augmented by a completely unfair six-inch height bonus courtesy of the step-down porch. As in their last encounter, he spoke not a word, merely assaulted Jason with an evil
You-bangin’-my-daughter?
glare. His rough-and-tumble appearance—unshaven, one shirttail hanging out—helped humanize him, diffusing the terror somewhat. He’d slept on the couch, maybe…but the potentially humorous observation couldn’t compete, in Jason’s mind, with the image of a whistling tomahawk sending a hairy pizza of scalp flipping gracelessly off the top of his head.

“Hi, I’m…,” began Jason, suddenly a fourteen-year-old selling newspaper subscriptions. “I’m Jason,” he continued. Behind him he heard the cab’s undercarriage scrape as it backed up onto the pavement, and part of him wanted to turn and sprint for it, knees pumping like a racehorse, and try to leap in through the open window,
Dukes of Hazzard
–style.

“Amanda’s not here,” said the Indian.

Caught unawares, Jason started, felt his mouth drop open.
Here’s a cog in the works,
he thought, struggling for a plan, not remotely ready to face an absurd journey back to Manhattan empty-handed. “Do you have any idea where…when she’s coming back?” he managed weakly.
Because maybe we could just watch the game together or something while we wait. Dad.

Again the Indian said nothing, and Jason marveled at the man’s complete lack of civility. It occurred to him to wonder whether he knew anything at all about the deed. If he did, how did he feel about Jason’s role? About an ancient mother-to-daughter succession structure that left him to bake cookies in the kitchen while the womenfolk talked business?

I could see where that could make a man edgy,
Jason decided.

But that clearly wasn’t the whole answer; there was something else here. Amanda’s relationship with her dad had soured long before any of this deed nonsense; or her knowledge of it, anyway. This silent, antagonistic soul, Jason reminded himself, was the guy who’d first defined men for her. Food for thought.

Perhaps conceding that his burning stare wasn’t tumbling Jason backward off the step, Amanda’s father relented and slowly hooked one thumb rightward, indicating a spot in the woods behind his house. “They’re out by the sound,” he said.

The sound?
“Thanks,” said Jason, confused but gleefully seizing the opportunity to beat feet. He’d know the sound when he heard it, he decided, turning on one heel and leaping sideways off the stoop like a rabbit having finally chewed through his ankle and slipped the trap.

The door latched behind him without incident.

As crappy an excuse for civilization as this godforsaken housing tract was, Jason felt sorry to leave it as the trees closed in around him. By the time he’d gone a hundred paces downhill and into an indifferently wooded gully, glances behind him no longer caught any corner of the houses, the lines of sight intercepted by trunks of unnaturally thick birch trees. For the first time, he began to doubt whether the profundity of his discovery was really worth coming all the way out here. This apparent triumph of instinct over reason unsettled him at a deep level; he felt a sudden need to take care of his business quickly and head back to the firmer ground of Manhattan.

It had rained here—this morning, apparently—and in the spaces between his own mushy footfalls and the brushing of his jeans in the uncannily long grass he could still hear occasional droplets slapping onto foliage. Jason paused and did a full three-sixty to check out the surroundings. The quick little breeze into which he was sailing upturned the leaves’ matte green underbellies; above him loomed a brooding, billowing sky. There was an eternal sort of grandeur to this intimate dance of the elements; it occurred to Jason that he was alone in what was perhaps one of the last untouched areas of forest on the Atlantic seaboard.