Digging Up History Read online

  But Barney now knew that Marty would be keeping an eye on things and wouldn’t let him get away with anything shady. And he probably knew that if he stayed on her good side, she could help smooth the road with the right city agencies and figure out what to do.

  When we reached my office, I turned to Dylan. “You want to take a shot at finding whatever history is attached to that plot? Barney more or less said it had to be a cemetery, given its size, and not just a random burial of a couple of people, so there should be some public information about it. And it had to date back to the eighteenth century, because that’s where the city was then.” Or it could be later, because I was no expert at determining the age of bodily remains, but why confuse Dylan now?

  “Sure,” Dylan said quickly. “This is really interesting. And how do you misplace an entire cemetery full of people? I want to know more. Listen, do you want me to come along tomorrow? I can bring a camera and stuff.”

  “Sure—another set of eyes would help. But please don’t talk about this to anyone else for now—we have no idea what the legal status of the land is, or what’s going on below the surface. Marty and I will let you know when it’s all right to talk about it publicly. But do keep notes on what you learn—you may get a publication out of it yet.”

  “Thanks, Nell. You want to meet here or at the, uh, apartment site?”

  “Let’s meet at the site. Say at ten? That work for you, Marty?”

  Marty’s head jerked up, as if she was surprised to hear her name. “What? Oh, sure, we can meet there. Assuming the weather cooperates.”

  “See you then,” Dylan said, and headed toward the stacks, brimming with youthful energy.

  Marty still looked a bit dazed. “Are you all right, Marty?” I asked.

  “Yes. And no.” She shut the office door and flopped onto the settee against the wall—one of the perks of my elevated status. “You have time to talk?”

  “Of course. Is something wrong?”

  “I don’t know. There are a lot of things I haven’t even thought about for years. Since I was young, in fact. I think I always knew there was a cemetery near John Terwilliger’s house, but I never went looking for it or saw it. If I had to guess, I’d say back then the cemetery lot was covered with grass, without any buildings on it, but I never paid any attention to it. Then of course they built I-95 right in that area. I wasn’t even driving then, so we didn’t visit that part of town much.”

  I wondered if Marty was going to make a point, and she didn’t keep me waiting. “I told you that when I was a kid—ten or even younger—my cousins and I used to snoop around that part of town. It’s a wonder we didn’t get hurt, but I guess we were lucky. And it’s not like we were looking for anything, like treasure or something—we were just having a good time. Nobody gave much thought to that part of town, back then. I think we picked it only because our families kept talking about which of the ancestors had lived around there, way back.”

  “But you never noticed any remnants of the cemetery?” I asked.

  “No. Or, not exactly. Don’t rush me, Nell. I’m trying to piece together some pretty ancient memories, and I certainly wasn’t a historian when I was ten, just a curious kid. But there was one thing . . . I forgot about it, probably on purpose, because it was creepy. We found a body.”

  I hadn’t exactly expected to hear that from Marty. “What do you mean? Overflow from the cemetery? Some homeless person who crawled down there to die and nobody ever noticed?”

  “Somewhere between those two, I’d guess, in hindsight. Look, you never saw those houses when they were standing. You know they were close to the river. And, yes, there were some tunnels or other ways of accessing some of the houses, if you didn’t want anyone to see you.”

  “Like smugglers, you mean?”

  “Yes, or maybe spies. And you know that General Washington spent a lot of time around there, for years. Maybe he sneaked in and out occasionally.”

  “Marty, you’re driving me crazy. Okay, so you and your cousins—I’ll assume most of them were male—played hide-and-seek in the ruins of eighteenth-century houses near the waterfront, and there was a cemetery nearby. The one you say you didn’t know existed. And you found a body in the basement or maybe sub-basement of one of those houses, and you never mentioned it to any responsible grown-up. Have I got it right so far?”

  “Close enough. It was our secret. We didn’t even tell our friends—at least, I didn’t. If we had, they probably would all have gone down there and started pawing through the ruins. Look, I don’t know if that house or any part of it is still there. Maybe it was razed like the cemetery. I wouldn’t have known if anyone had found a body there—I wasn’t exactly reading daily newspapers then. But before you bite my head off, I want to say two things. One, it wasn’t close to that cemetery Barney found, so it wasn’t like it was a body they crammed in at the edge when they were running out of room. Didn’t have a coffin either. Two, it’s exactly the location that map Dylan found shows. Maybe that letter wasn’t just a piece of wastepaper. Maybe somebody was sending a message, and that’s why my dead man ended up there, dead, or somebody wanted to be able to find him later. I can’t begin to guess who or why, but the place and maybe the time are right. It was an old skeleton even then—not much flesh left, as I remember.”

  “Did you ever go back?”

  Marty shook her head. “No. I think we’d all seen enough. And like I said, we never talked about it, and kind of went on with our lives.”

  I thought about it for maybe thirty seconds. Marty was not the kind of person to make up something like this, and she probably hadn’t been at age ten either. “Marty, do you want to find out if that body is still there? If anybody ever discovered it? And why somebody thought it worth making a map of? If you don’t say anything now, I doubt Barney is going to stumble over it, because it’s not exactly in his building lot. You may not get another chance.”

  She looked me in the eye then. “Yes. I do. I know a lot more now, about the city and its history, than I did back then, and this just doesn’t sit right. Particularly the letter. Somebody wanted to know where the body was. And maybe there was something more there that we didn’t find. And now we have the perfect opportunity—and excuse—to snoop around and find out. Maybe it’s all long gone, and we can forget about it again. But I want to know.”

  I could understand that. As part of the historical community in Philadelphia, I was still horrified at how many treasures from the past had been discarded altogether, or stolen by tourists who saw no reason why they shouldn’t palm a cool—and free—souvenir. How much of the past had been permanently lost? So that people could have parking spaces? And now purely by accident an old letter and map had landed in our laps, and we had a pretty good idea of the location it showed. We had every right to check it out. If we found nothing, nothing was lost, and Dylan could file the letter away under “Anonymous Manuscript, late eighteenth century.”

  “Then let’s look for it,” I said firmly. “Barney’s already agreed to meet us there tomorrow morning. Right now we don’t know whether the particular place we want to find is still intact in any way or disappeared a long time ago, but that should be easy enough to check, either by just looking at what’s there or by checking city records. Or maybe Barney knows something—maybe he bought it, or maybe he found he couldn’t buy it for some reason. Do you trust him?”

  “About ninety percent, I think,” Marty said dubiously. “He’s not really into history, so I’d guess that if he found something under there, he’d be happy to hand it over to one or another museum. Or ask me who would want to have it. Unless, of course, it turned out to be a pirate’s chest of gold doubloons, being guarded by that skeleton I remember, which he could probably find some use for. But let’s not tell him what we’re up to until we know a bit more. As far as he knows, we’re just curious about the cemetery.”

  “And we’re going to wait to get in touch with any of the city agencies until we know more?” I asked.


  “I’d say yes. If we find something, we’ll tell them next week. That should give us time to collect information. If there is any.”

  “Okay!” I said, slapping my desktop. “We have a plan. Tomorrow we’ll hunt in the dirt for a cemetery that shouldn’t be there, and a body that may not be there. Sounds like how I spend most of my time. I will dress appropriately for dirty work. Should we bring any tools? Dylan will have his camera.”

  “A shovel wouldn’t hurt, or maybe some brushes. We don’t want to damage anything. Just in case.”

  “Can James come? You know he’s trustworthy. Besides, he can do the heavy shoveling.”

  Marty grinned. “I always feel better with an officer of the law handy. Although I doubt we’ll come upon anything that relates to his business.”

  “I’m going to assume that current laws about reporting finding a body to the police will not hold in this case. But I’m sure James will tell us if they do. And from what you’ve said, that person, whoever he was, has been dead a very long time.”

  “Wonder if we’re related?” Marty said, more to herself than to me.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.”

  My cell phone rang then: James. Speak of the devil. I hadn’t realized how late it had gotten. “Hi,” I answered. “Where are you? I mean, downstairs waiting for me so we can go home, or still at your office mired in work?”

  “The first one. Can you leave now?”

  “Yes—it’s been pretty quiet here today. I’ll be down in five.” I ended the call, then looked at Marty. “I would have asked you to join us for dinner, but I want to kick this around with James first. There’s probably nothing we need to worry about, apart from telling someone there’s another body, in addition to however many there are in the cemetery. If it is a cemetery, and not just a dumping ground. And if the other body is still there. If we don’t find it, that’s the end of the story. If somebody says, ‘I’ll swing by and pick it up,’ I guess we don’t have to worry about legalities, beyond maybe a short report. You can decide how much you want to tell people about the first time you found him—it was a ‘him,’ right?”

  “There are a lot of ‘ifs’ here. If I didn’t imagine the whole thing. If he’s still there. If the building he was under is still there. If there’s any evidence of who he was and what he was doing there. And if we tell the authorities about the letter, if the answer to all those other ‘ifs’ is yes.”

  “Why wouldn’t we? It’s evidence, if they feel the need to ID the person. Or they may not even bother, if the person has been dead a century or two—a lot of work for them, with no predictable results.”

  “True. Look, you go meet James, and you can hash all this over at dinner. Me, I want to go home and think about it. Like I told you, it’s been a long time, and memories are tricky things. Maybe it was just a heap of old rags in a dark corner, and we jumped to some conclusions before we ran. Remember how young we were.”

  “All possible. I’ll see what James has to say. Then we all rendezvous at the construction site in the morning and see what we find. And if it really was a cemetery that the city forgot, you can make sure that Barney lets the right people know.”

  Marty stood up. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll walk down with you. If we need to do research, I can come back here tomorrow.”

  The front door was still open. James had opted to wait outside, and with such nice weather I couldn’t blame him. “Hey,” I said. I was still kind of reluctant to get into a romantic clinch in front of the museum/library that I ran, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t tempted.

  “Hello, you,” he said. With remarkable restraint. Then he noticed Marty behind me, and his tone became more formal. “Hello, Martha. We haven’t seen you for a while.”

  “James,” she replied. “You may be seeing a bit more of me. I’ll let Nell explain. Ten o’clock?” she said to me.

  “Yes. Tomorrow.”

  Marty turned on her heel and headed for her own home. James looked at me. “What was that all about?”

  “I’ll explain over dinner. No, not on the train—I don’t want other people to overhear.”

  “Okay. This should be interesting.”

  “I think it will be.”

  Chapter Seven

  We talked about nothing in particular as we walked toward the train station across from City Hall. I was still a bit distracted by what Marty and I had seen earlier, but James didn’t insist on conversation. I wasn’t sure what to tell him anyway. As far as I knew, Marty and I weren’t looking at a crime. All the possible bodies on Barney’s building site had been dead a very long time. Probably their great-grandchildren were dead too by now. There was no killer to find, and nobody to prosecute. What the city decided to do with the bulk of the bodies wasn’t my problem, although I certainly was curious about what had happened that had left them there, hidden for all these years.

  We caught our train with time to spare and found seats easily. As I had expected, a lot of people with jobs were probably headed “down the Shore” at the moment. And for once the air-conditioning in the train car was working.

  “Is there anything in the house to eat?” I asked when we were about halfway home.

  “I won’t swear to it. Take-out? Chinese? Or Thai?”

  “Thai,” I said decisively. “Wine?”

  “Plenty of that,” James replied.

  We stopped at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant a few blocks from our house and emerged with a couple of bags of food that smelled wonderful. Another five minutes’ walk and we were home. I dumped my bag of food in the kitchen and said, “I’m going to go put on something grubby, and then I’ll explain what Marty and I were doing today while we eat.”

  When I returned to the kitchen, James had already distributed plates and utensils around the kitchen table and filled two glasses with wine. “You are amazing,” I said, dropping into a chair.

  “Are you ready to talk now?” he asked.

  “And let me add you are phenomenally patient. Yes. But this may take a while. You don’t have anything else you need to do, do you? No significant baseball game to watch?”

  “You have my full attention,” James said, helping himself to some kind of noodle dish.

  “Well, I told you about Dylan finding that letter, and then we all went over to your lab and made it readable. Then Dylan and I went back to the Society and we ran into Marty, who after looking at the letter decided it might be part of an old map of the city, and she thought she knew the area it showed and wanted us—that included Dylan—to go look at it immediately.” And then I described the site, and the plans for it . . . and the bones her developer friend had found. “And then Marty remembered something that she’d seen a long time ago in the same area, when she was a kid, and wondered if and how that fit with what we’d seen today, but she wanted to think about it, maybe decide if she’d only imagined it. So we went back to the Society and talked about it, and we’re planning to go back tomorrow morning and take a better look at the construction site. She knows the contractor, so there’s no problem with getting in.”

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” James asked when I ran out of breath.

  “Most likely a cemetery. I gather there are a lot of abandoned ones in the city, particularly in that part of it. There’s a website that shows where many of them were located, which I never knew about until now. I can’t figure out if builders a century or more back were in a hurry, since the city was growing so fast, or just lazy.”

  “What was it that Martha remembered?”

  “Keep in mind, she was only about ten years old.” I took a long swallow of my wine and held out my glass for a refill. “She thinks she remembers seeing a body in a nearby ruined house. Her ancestors came from right around there, a couple of centuries ago, and she and her cousins kind of hung out there, exploring, when they could get away with it. I gather finding what they thought was a skeleton freaked them out. They never told anyone else, and they didn’t go back.”
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br />   “She doesn’t think it was part of the hypothetical cemetery?” James asked.

  “It’s about a half a block away from that. Of course, there could be a lot more bodies in between, but the one she remembers didn’t have a coffin or a stone to go with it, and it seemed to be the only one in that particular place, and pretty much hidden under an old building. And then there’s the map. Which, by the way, has some sort of writing on it, as you know, but we didn’t have time to study it carefully.”

  “So you and Marty and Dylan decided to go back tomorrow and snoop some more?”

  “Yes. Look, Marty’s developer friend is the one who discovered there are some bones buried there, right where he wants to build. He didn’t know how many, but he said he’d checked the available records and gotten all the necessary construction permits from the city and nothing like a cemetery had turned up. Marty says he’s an honest guy. He’ll be there tomorrow, mostly because he’s curious now.”

  “What’s your goal?”

  “Well, at a minimum we could discover that it was a forgotten cemetery, which might have some news value, at least to the Society, if we claim we found it. I don’t know if Barney has thought that far ahead. But we’ve got his permission to look, and Marty knows who works for the city, who she should call, if this turns out to be anything. And, of course, since we’re there sort of officially—at the request of the property owner—she wants to check out the place where she found the body in the old days. Which could easily be long gone now.”

  “If that body existed, and not just as a kid’s fantasy, it could be just about anyone. Male?”

  “Yes. Or at least, she didn’t mention a dress. And she wasn’t really sure how old it was. Could be eighteenth or nineteenth century, or even later, but not real recent. Listen, did we once talk about whether all unidentified bodies had to be reported to someone in the city? The police, maybe?”