Chapter 16

I wave goodbye and am halfway to the door when he calls me back.

“Callie, wait!”

He wants my phone number, perhaps? My email address?

“I have an idea.” Trey rises from his chair and goes to a small wooden rolltop desk in a corner of the room. After unlocking the bottom drawer with a key on a huge ring, he searches for a full minute before returning with a thin notebook covered in plum-colored leather.

“This belongs to my grandpa.” He very carefully flips through the book; the paper is thick and porous, its shade uneven from one page to the next. As with the cemetery ledger, this notebook is filled with names, each written in a precise hand in a variety of black and blue inks.

“What is it?”

Trey’s hazel eyes twinkle, the black and gold flecks nearly pop to three-dimensional life. “There’s a second cemetery here, on the other side of the road.”

I glance at the door, as if I could see through it. I don’t remember passing another graveyard, only the one directly adjacent to the church.

“It doesn’t get many visitors,” Trey says in an ominous tone. “My grandpa thinks…” He glances around the empty office.

“We’re alone, Trey,” I whisper.

“Witches.”

A laugh comes out my nose again. “What?”

“He thinks witches are buried there.”

“Um, why?”

Trey sits on the edge of the metal desk, his hands gingerly clutching the notebook. “Back in the 17th Century, an accused witch couldn’t be buried on the hallowed ground of a church. After he or she was hanged, the families would collect the body and bury them in private. Here in Darby Cove, a separate cemetery was created instead. Anyone with an unsavory past was buried in the second graveyard, which is located across the street so there is both a literal and philosophical distance between the two.”

He points out toward the street. “The cemetery’s caretaker would occasionally salt the road itself to prevent any witches’ spirits from escaping their graves.”

I stare from his arching forefinger along the length of his thick Carhartt jacket and finally to his face. He’s serious. Or at least he’s serious that his grandfather is serious. Can he honestly believe that witches are buried across the street? Nothing in his eyes or his expression seems to give away his true feelings. Then again, I only met this guy half an hour ago so…

“Um, okay.”

His eyes hold mine for the slightest second longer than is comfortable and then he breaks away, grinning. “Aw, I’m joking, I’m joking,” he says, flapping the plum leather journal in his hand. “My grandpa is a little offbeat. Demented Danny Crane, they called him.”

“So you don’t think witches are buried over there?”

Trey shrugs. “Who knows? The Puritans had some weird notions about what constituted witchcraft anyway. You remember the whole thing about the Salem Witch Trials, right?”

I shake my head no. Trey pretends to gape at me. “You moved to Darby Cove and you don’t know about the trials? Geez. I didn’t think they’d let you into the school without knowing that crap.” But he winks when he says it.

“I didn’t pay much attention during that part of history class,” I say. “Kinda boring.”

“More fun to flirt with the boys?”

What? Me? “N-n-no.”

He goes on as if he didn’t just tease me. “Anyway, historians think one of those girls had an epileptic seizure. Back then, no one knew what a seizure was. They thought the victim was being possessed by the devil.”

“What does have to do with Darby Cove?”

“’s only about thirty miles from here, if you didn’t know that either,” he answers with a smirk.

“Nope, I didn’t.”

He holds up the notebook. “My grandpa has been writing down all the old stories since he was a kid. I guess he’s afraid they might get forgotten if someone doesn’t take notes.”

“Demented Danny, huh?” He has to be crazy. Not Trey but his grandfather.

And yet, the concept is intriguing. I’m curious to know if one of my ancestors is buried there. “Maybe we could just look at the book, and just, you know, double check that Abigail’s not buried there? I mean, even if she is, that doesn’t mean she was a witch or anything. That’s sort of ridiculous thinking, you know? Like, stone age thinking. Witches aren’t real and those people back then…”

I feel myself blush when I realize Trey is staring at me. I’m babbling again. I never talk so much or giggle or flirt. It must be the cemetery. Yeah, that must be it. The cemetery is making me giddy.

“Okay, I’ll stop talking now.”

Trey grins and takes the book with him to the door, holding it open for me. “Let’s go look outside.”

Just as I’m stepping foot across the threshold, the phone rings. I look back into the office and suddenly realize I never saw a phone anywhere – or a computer or fax machine or television. But my ear follows the ringing to a black phone sitting in a far corner of the office on top of a triangular wooden table. There’s something odd about it. It’s old, for sure, and beaten up, but also…

“It’s corded,” I say aloud. Trey turns to me. “Your phone. It has a cord.”

“And this is a problem for you?”

“Well, no, I just…it’s really, um, old-fashioned,” I say, holding back a smile that I hope doesn’t appear patronizing.

Trey nudges me out the door with his shoulder. “This is a 17th century caretaker’s shed,” he says. “We had an outhouse until about five months ago.”

Startled, I stop in my tracks and Trey bumps into me. “Really?”

He laughs. “Are you always this gullible?”

“Why, do you have a bridge in you want to sell me?”

“Come on, let’s go.”

He closes the door behind us and the ringing phone becomes a dull trill. Huh, not even an answering machine. This place really is old.

Trey leads me down a path to the main street and now I see the second cemetery. It’s only about a hundred square feet, enclosed by a low wrought iron fence recently painted white. The lawn and stones here are just as well-cared for as those in the larger cemetery with one notable difference: there isn’t a single flower or plant on or near any of the graves.

Trey consults his grandfather’s notebook. “He has each of the graves lettered and numbered. From left to right, A, B, C, D, and so on and then from top to bottom, 1, 2, 3, 4…and this” —he holds up a page— “is the map.”

On the page is a diagram, kind of like the family tree Mrs. Gibson made for me. It looks like this:

ABCDE.

1.

2.

3.

4.

Every name has two dates listed under it; all of the dates are from early to mid 18th Century.

I shudder, thinking about the names on the pages of Grandpa Danny’s journal. Were they all hanged, having been accused of conjuring the devil – or at least conspiring with Him? Now I’m praying Abigail Sweet’s name isn’t on one of these stones.

“Let’s see,” Trey says. “Sweet, Sweet…ayup,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Here she is.”

I seize the book from his hands. “Are you serious? She’s here?”

Trey doesn’t have to point it out to me: my eye goes right to her name: Abigail Meriwether Sweet, E-19.

“E-19, E-19,” I mumble to myself as I head straight for the cemetery. I’m about to climb over the fence when Trey’s hand on my arm stops me. “What? What are you doing?” I ask, staring down at his fingers around the sleeve of my down jacket.

He loosens his grip but still holds fast to the loose bit of fabric at my elbow. “You’re not supposed to walk over the fence like that. You have to approach through the gate.” He gently aims me at the iron gate at the base of the cemetery closest to the street, lifting the latch with his wrist as if he doesn’t want to actually touch the fence.

“But it’s so short,” I say. “Why can’t we just step over it?”

In response, Trey holds up the book. “It’s one of Grandpa’s rules.”

Inside the boundaries of the petite graveyard, I swear the wind has stopped whistling, the birds have stopped chirping. The air is suddenly still, as if the world itself has ceased spinning. Just as when I’m in the shift and my sense of hearing and smell are intensified, I smell an absence: of sound and taste and touch. The soles of my duck shoes don’t feel as if they are touching the earth below them and when I look behind me, I see they have made no impression in the graveyard’s ground.

But all of that’s not possible. Is it? It just feels like that. The temperature and humidity cannot be any different within the confines of the iron fence; time cannot have stopped.

That would simply be…

Am I truly the person to define what is and is not possible?

I watch Trey to see if he too senses the atmosphere here is somehow unusual but if he feels anything at all, his face and body register nothing.

Well, all right then.

We silently count across the top row of the stones until we find E and then we count below it until we reach 19. Trey and I exchange a glance as we find the tombstone at the exact same moment.

'Abigail Sweet, wife of Jonathan Sweet, mother of Libby, Marjory, and Benjamin, Aged 57 years, d. December 14, 1751.'

It is a simple marker, about two feet in height and a foot wide, made of grey stone, carved without ornamentation in thin block letters. Her name is in all capitals while the names of her children and husband are initial caps. I notice the top of the stone is chipped in places. I start to run my hand over the indentations but stop, wondering if touching is against Grandpa’s rules too.

“Go ahead,” Trey says with a nod. “It was busted years ago. Bunch of drunk idiots from the cove used to come here and set cans on the tops of the headstones and then try to shoot them off.” He points his finger at the gravestones, pow-pow, and I see that others have chunks and chips torn from them. “They didn’t bother with the main cemetery. They had too much respect for the honest citizens, I guess.”

Abigail Sweet…who were you? Were you a witch? Did you have any powers?

Could you shift too?

I rest my bare palm upon the top of the stone and feel the jagged edges below, cool to the touch. Closer now, I see the stone is not merely gray but has bits of shiny mica embedded in it. I kneel into the earth, carefully so as not to actually step onto the grave itself, and run my fingers along her name.

Were you pretty? Were you a good mother?

How did you die?

“She’s my great, great, great, great…how many greats go back three hundred years?” I ask Trey over my shoulder. He hovers nearby, seemingly reluctant to get too close.

I feel him shrug, parting the thick air with his shoulders.

“Do you think they tortured her?” I wonder aloud. “Do you think they hanged her?”

“It’s possible she wasn’t a witch at all,” Trey says.

I turn from Abigail’s grave. “What do you mean? I thought you said this cemetery was for the accused.”

“That’s what people assumed,” he says, holding up his grandfather’s journal. “But this little graveyard is also the last resting place of the founders of Darby Cove so it might have been a prestigious place to be buried.”

“Really?” My spirits lift a bit, imagining my ancestor’s remains mingling with the town’s original glitterati.

“Oh sure,” Trey continues, obviously warming to the subject and just as obviously absorbed with it as his grandfather. “The men and women who founded Darby Cove were refugees from shortly after the witch trials. They didn’t want to be Puritans anymore so they started this church, All Souls Church, which was Anglican.”

“Anglican?”

“Church of England.”

I look around at the graves. “Why did I think all of these people were Puritans?”

“Probably because most of us think of Puritans when we think of the earliest New Englanders. But a lot of them rejected Puritanism and all of its restrictions.”

Bea would have fit in nicely with them, I think. She would have loved their plain clothes and rules against anything remotely entertaining.

Trey walks purposefully around the perimeter of the graveyard. “Better to be buried next to the church you worshipped in than one of the rural cemeteries the Puritans used. Here those people would be memorialized.”

“I feel like I’m getting a history lesson,” I say and, unfortunately, this reminds me that I need to get back to school. I’ve been gone for hours and someone – no doubt, my aunt Beatrix - will notice. I take my cell phone out of my bag.

“You won’t get any reception out here,” Trey tells me.

“Why not?”

“Evil spirits.”

I whip my head around to him. His face is dead serious – for a split second and then he starts laughing. “Trey!”

“Sorry, sorry…I couldn’t help myself.”

It is kind of funny, I have to admit. “Now who has the grim sense of humor?”

Trey lowers his chin and looks up at me under heavy lids. “You mean, gallows humor?”

“Ha, ha. I gotta get back to school.”

I push myself up from Abigail’s grave and make a mental promise to her that I will return. I have to: I’m the only family she’s got.

In a comfortable silence, Trey and I walk out to the street and back to the church parking lot which is empty save for a couple of pickup trucks. I wonder which one of them is his.

“I took a bus,” I tell Trey. “And then hoofed it.” I stare pointedly at the pair of trucks and then back. Smiling. Encouraging. Hint, hint…

Trey nods but says nothing which really surprises me, seeing as how I thought we had, you know, made a connection. I kind of hoped he would suggest driving me back but no such offer seems forthcoming.

Hmmm.

“All right, well, good to meet you, Trey.”

“Good to meet you too, Callie. What’d you say your last name was?”

“I didn’t. It’s Bellflower.”

He repeats my name. “Callie Bellflower.” And his lips curl up into a smile.

“Thanks for your help,” I tell him, as I begin walking backwards toward the bus stop. He walks with me, keeping the distance between us fixed. “I never would have found Abigail Sweet’s gravestone if you weren’t there.”

“No worries.”

“Oh hey, that reminds me…”

“Yeah?”

“Your grandfather’s book says Abigail’s middle name was Meriwether but the grave only said Sweet.”

“Probably her maiden name.”

“Well, sure, but how did he know that when it wasn’t on her tombstone?”

Trey’s pace slows as he considers this so mine does too. “I have no idea. Want me to find out?”

“You mind?”

“I can do that. Sure.” He grins; I have given him an assignment. “Why don’t you ask your teacher if she knows anything else?”

“Mrs. Gibson? Okay.” And now I have an assignment, which means we’ll definitely have to see each other again in order to report on our results.

“See ya, Callie.”

I wave goodbye and finally turn around, turn my back to Trey and and Abigail Sweet. I am about fifty yards away, headed back on the main drag, when I pull out my cell phone to check the time. I notice there are three messages on my voicemail, probably all of them from Beatrix. The clock is working again too and I realize I’ve been gone for almost three hours! I will most definitely catch hell from Bea for this little adventure of mine.

But it was so worth it.