Digging Up History Page 7

  “Bodies, huh?” the older police officer said. “Like a few? Recent?”

  I figured James would prefer that Marty and I kept our mouths shut for the moment, so I let him answer. “No, probably a couple of hundred. Plus one more under that building there.”

  “Hundreds, eh?” the officer said sarcastically. “Where are they?”

  James pointed. “Just walk around what used to be the parking lot there. They’re hard to miss.”

  “You folk been drinking? Smoking weed?”

  James replied in a sharper tone, “Just take a look.”

  The two officers exchanged glances, and then the younger one trotted over to the main lot. Clearly neither one had believed us, not that I blamed them, so it was kind of fun watching the younger officer stop suddenly and stare at something at his feet. I had a pretty good idea what it was. Then he moved forward, more cautiously, and stopped again. And again. Finally he returned to where we were waiting, placing his feet carefully. “Uh, Sarge, they weren’t kidding. There are lots of bones over there.”

  “Huh,” the sergeant said, and I could almost hear the gears turning in his head as he tried to figure out what to do next. I doubted the Philadelphia police force had found an entire lot full of skeletons very often.

  Luckily James stepped in. “Sergeant, I suggest that you tell your superior and then call the medical examiner. I think we have a lot to sort out here.”

  “No kidding,” the sergeant said. “So how the hell did you all stumble onto this?”

  I decided I should say something now. “Ms. Terwilliger knows the developer, who called her when he had cleared the asphalt off this lot. He knows she knows local history and wanted her to take a look and maybe tell him who to contact next.”

  “Where’s he?”

  “We don’t know. He met us here earlier. We were all here just getting an idea of how many bodies there were, and he apparently left while we were looking. We haven’t seen him for a while. He did say he’s gotten all the appropriate construction permits for this property, so apparently there’s no official record of all these bodies. That we or the city know of, anyway.” I exchanged glances with Marty, who was curiously silent—in shock, maybe?—before adding, “We might want to get someone who knows urban archeology to take a look at this site, before anyone starts carting the skeletons away. This is clearly a historic site and should be handled as such.”

  Sarge didn’t look very happy about my suggestion, but he hadn’t looked happy before I made it. “You know anybody like that?”

  “I can find someone,” I said firmly. I was pretty sure I could, with Marty’s and Dylan’s help, and I would bet that some eager archeologist would jump at the chance to investigate this. Then I added, “Maybe you should put some sort of guard on this place. I bet a lot of crazy tourists would like to pick up an unusual souvenir from their trip to Philadelphia, and I’m sure the word will get out pretty fast.”

  Poor Sarge was looking more and more bewildered. “I’m going to call headquarters and see what they say.” He turned and walked away, nearly tripping over a skull.

  While he talked on the phone, the rest of us stared at each other. “Well, this is interesting,” I commented. “What happens next? James, you’re the expert on bodies.”

  “Not quite as old as these. Or as numerous. Marty, I’m glad you pointed out the gentleman under the house.”

  Marty looked defensive. “I’m not hiding him—although he’s been pretty well hidden for quite a while. But I want a historian to look at him before the police or the ME drag him away.

  “Dylan, I’m grateful to you for thinking of taking the pictures. It’s good to know that I saw what I thought I saw, all those years ago. You know, I think I know a lot about Philadelphia, and particularly this end of town, but I’ll admit all that we’ve seen today surprises me. I’m going to have to figure out a strategy.”

  “We all do,” I said. “Look, I’m exhausted and hungry and filthy. All I want is to go home and have some wine and take a shower and eat something, not necessarily in that order. You two are welcome to join us.”

  Both Marty and Dylan declined—they both looked about as tired as I felt, and I knew Marty had a lot to think about.

  “I’ve got to figure out who to call to make sure we don’t lose whatever evidence there is. And I need to call Barney—wonder why he hasn’t come back? And the head of the Revolutionary War museum. And of course there’s a lot of information at the Society.”

  I wasn’t sure if she was talking to us or to herself. “We’ve got two days’ worth of time to do research, since we’re not open Monday. And I wouldn’t call the official folk tomorrow, since that’s Sunday. Who’s going to be the public spokesperson for this?”

  “I’d vote for spokespeople, plural,” James said. “I can handle the investigative side, unless some major case comes up at the FBI, but Marty knows a lot more about the situation, and the possible history of the site. She’s right—this should be handled carefully.”

  “Then I vote that we go to our respective homes and rendezvous at the Society tomorrow. And see if you can track down Barney, okay, Marty? He really needs to know what’s going on. And if this makes it to the news, he may want to have a say in how to present it. It is at least under his management, if he doesn’t own it outright.”

  “Got it,” Marty said. “I’ll call you in the morning and we can decide when to meet. And thank you all for agreeing to what I was afraid would be a wild-goose chase.”

  And so we went our separate ways for the evening. I had no idea what would come next.

  Chapter Nine

  James and I walked back to the car in silence. Marty and Dylan had each gone their own way, without comment. Like Marty, I needed time to think.

  I had been an English major in college and then a fund-raiser. I knew a lot of general things about American history, and even about Philadelphia history, but I was not prepared to deal with what we had just found. Marty was better equipped, but she had no official standing with the Society now that she was no longer on the board, although unofficially she was an invaluable resource. James represented law enforcement, although I wasn’t sure we needed that. Clearly none of us had killed all those people. But there they all were, and whether or not we had a legal obligation to establish who they were and how they’d been left there for so long, they were now a piece of Philadelphia history and deserved some attention, and I didn’t want to think of the police or the medical examiner’s office bundling them up and dumping them into a pit somewhere, or worse, burning the bones.

  And then there was the man in the hole. Being skittish kids, Marty and her cousins had probably caught sight of a skeleton and turned and run. And it had been a long time ago.

  I wished I had thought to ask Dylan to send copies of the photographs he had taken to our home computers, so we could enlarge them and see if there was more detail.

  “You’re quiet,” James said when we got to the car.

  “I’m thinking.”

  “I thought you might be excited. This could be an interesting find, and maybe even a feather in the cap for the Society.”

  “I haven’t thought that far. I’m still stuck on why anybody would simply forget about a couple of hundred buried skeletons. In a small town I could understand it—and aren’t there some towns that were deliberately flooded for dams and the cemeteries were left behind?—but this was a big city in that era, and that part of the city was its heart back then. How do you forget a cemetery that takes up an entire city block?”

  “That I can’t answer. But you may be the best person to find out.”

  “I’m not sure that was on my résumé when I applied for the job.”

  We drove in silence for a mile or two. “I’m glad you were with us,” I told James. “It never occurred to me that the police would show up, not that they didn’t have every right to, because we certainly could have been trespassers or scavengers. Either way, it was good to have a man with a b
adge on our side. I feel almost sorry for those police—they couldn’t have been expecting anything like what they found. We certainly must have looked like an unlikely crew.”

  “I wonder how many other surprises are lurking under parking lots in the city?” James said.

  “I’m not going looking,” I responded tartly. “Let Marty deal with that—it’s more her style. Does it strike you as strange that a body sat there under a crumbling building for, oh, a century or two? Or maybe not—you remember how many abandoned buildings we discovered there are in the city, not long ago, and nobody’s going to invest time and money in tearing them down—unless it’s someone running for mayor who wants to improve the appearance of our fair city. Actually, they’d be more likely to pretty up Independence Mall than North Philadelphia. At the same time, there’s been a lot of construction in that area even in the few years I’ve been working in the city. There’s I-95, which must have been a big mess to build. Come to think of it, I read that they didn’t bother with any official archeologists—the road builders just started building and buried whatever they found. It’s understandable, I guess, since they were in a hurry, but imagine what artifacts they must have covered over. Same thing with Independence Mall. Again, I understand why the city wanted a good setting for Independence Hall, but what’s under the grass there? Funny how attitudes toward history change over time. Some people were really upset when they excavated what was Washington’s house near there and found it had slave quarters.”

  “Have you found any interesting relics around our house?”

  “A couple of broken bottles. A lot of rusty cut nails. I haven’t done much gardening, so there may be more. But I don’t have time to look. So, what do you think will happen next?”

  James said firmly, “Marty will figure out the proper city authorities to contact and lean on them to get something done about it. And fill Barney in, I assume. No doubt she will draft you to help, and any other members of the historical community who are interested. As for the body, I don’t know. Do you think it’s possible that it’s an ancestor of hers? You said at least one lived right around there, back in seventeen-whatever.”

  “Since it’s Marty, it’s always possible. Should somebody keep a guard on the site? Would the police do that, or would Barney have to hire someone? I can just see strollers passing by on the street thinking a skull just lying there on the ground would look great on their man-cave mantelpiece.”

  “Nell, you have a strange imagination. Anything else you want to worry about?”

  “Food.”

  “Take-out again?” James quirked an eyebrow at me.

  “How about someone who delivers? I’m not sure they’d let us in the door, looking the way we do now.”

  “Good point. Home, then phone for food.”

  When we arrived, I let James manage the food while I went up to take a fast shower. When I came down, toweling my hair dry, he’d already poured two glasses of wine. Anything stronger and I thought I’d fall asleep with my face in my dinner.

  We settled in comfortable chairs to wait for the delivery. “Don’t you just love these unexpected events?” I asked James.

  “I hope you’re being sarcastic. But at least nobody’s been shooting at us.”

  “They’ve all been dead for at least a century, so that’s unlikely. Is there any crime involved?”

  “I doubt it. Somebody messed up with the cemetery. I can’t imagine anyone associated with a church would simply bury the buried, so to speak, simply to build a new building on the site. The parishioners would have pitched a fit!”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But how on earth would you go about covering up so much space, filled with not just bodies but a fair number of coffins and maybe some headstones, without anybody noticing what you were doing? Even if you did it at night, that’s a lot of ground to cover. Oops, sorry, bad pun.”

  “Burying dozens of the dead at one time is not my area of expertise. Nor was I ever in the military, so I did not observe the process. But I’m sure between all of us we can find an expert.”

  “Let’s hope so!” I said firmly. “This is definitely not in my job description.”

  The food arrived, we ate, and as I had predicted, my eyes would not stay open. After a huge yawn I asked James, “Marty and I thought we should meet at the Society tomorrow and do some research. Better her than me—she can get that done quickly. I’m surprised that she never looked up that house, but maybe she really was terrified at what she’d seen and tried to blot it out.”

  “You and Marty can start with finding out when that house was built, and then abandoned. And who the cemetery belonged to and when it was shut down. They must have coincided at some point.”

  “Maybe that’s why General Terwilliger moved away from the river—he’d had enough of staring at graves.”

  “I don’t suppose there would be a record at the Society of who spread asphalt or whatever was used before? The graves must have been hard to miss.”

  “We don’t keep many commercial or industrial records at the Society, unless they intersect with important people. Church records, maybe. But you’re right—that would have been a big job. We can look at maps, I suppose—it should be possible to determine when that cemetery disappeared from a dated map. Not that anyone would have labeled a parking lot. Maybe there’s something in documents relating to the I-95 construction, although I wouldn’t know where they’d be stored. Or even if they survived. But I will look. Can I go to bed now? Marty’s an early riser, and she’d probably like to see me at dawn. Thank goodness she has a key to the Society.”

  • • •

  The phone range at dawn. James, accustomed to phone calls that usually signaled some sort of crisis, was out of bed and down the hall and talking before I managed to get my eyes open. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I didn’t have a good feeling about it. I wished I could just put a pillow over my head and go back to sleep.

  That was not to be. He was back inside of two minutes and sat on the edge of the bed. “That was Martha.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” I pulled myself up into a sitting position. “What’s going on?”

  “She couldn’t find Barney yesterday.”

  “She calls us at dawn to tell us that?” I demanded.

  “She’s worried. What with this bunch of bodies showing up, she thought he’d be all over it. And he left before we found the other body, so he doesn’t know about all that.”

  “That’s true, although it may not have anything to do with his plans. I can’t say how well Marty knows Barney—she knows a lot of people. Maybe he went off to some bar to drown his sorrows over the mess his construction project has become.”

  “Do you know anything more about Barney?” James asked.

  “No. I don’t even know how much Marty knows. She said she’d been at school with his sister, but I forget where she went to school. Someplace that probably cost a lot of money, with plenty of alumni whose names you would recognize from the news. Sorry, that sounds kind of snide, but you know what I mean.”

  “I do. Among other things, it probably means that Barney didn’t have any sort of criminal record. That’s all?”

  “Yup,” I told James. “It takes quite a while to get to know as many people as she does. So, we assume Marty was working her network last night, trying to track Barney down, but she failed to find him. She seems to be worried about that. Now she wants us to worry too. Great way to start the day,” I grumbled.

  “When was he last seen?” James asked, not unreasonably.

  “Dylan was hunting for skeletons with him, and then he left to get us all some water. When Dylan came back, Barney was gone. He didn’t say anything to Dylan about leaving, but he never reappeared.”

  “Nell, don’t get too bent out of shape. This doesn’t have to mean anything. Maybe he just fell into a grave and bashed his head.”

  I glared at him. “James, you’re not making me feel any better about this. Isn’t two
hundred-plus bodies in a day enough? Did Marty say we should go meet her?”

  “For all you know there are more than two hundred bodies, and yes—she’ll be waiting for us at the site. Remember, as far as we know Marty was the only person who knew about the hole under that building, and the four of us are the only people who know what’s in it. Barney wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe he did. Barney did have a work team there, and any of them could have been poking around.”

  “And no doubt they’d have made a big thing of it. Let’s stick with the basic assumption that we four—plus Marty’s cousins, whoever they were—are the only ones who know what we found. Unless Barney found it on his own. We don’t know who that man was.”

  I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. “Okay, let’s take a step back. Barney and his crew discovered a whole lot of bodies. Who were they supposed to tell? There were too many to just pour concrete over them and start building, and I’d imagine that his construction crew might object to that.”

  “The police,” James said flatly. “They’re unidentified bodies and we don’t know how they died. Ergo, they must be investigated.”

  “Can we hope that our favorite detective will be in charge of the case?”

  “Detective Hrivnak? Quite possibly. After all, it’s practically in her backyard.”

  “Good. At least she’s smart, and I think we mended a few fences the last time we worked together. But we’re going to have a lot to explain if we throw in the other body.”

  “She should be used to that, after working with us before. So you’d better get up and get dressed. I’ll make coffee, and then we’ll go meet Marty. And if the police aren’t already involved, it would fall to me to contact them.”