Bellewether

He nodded, and thrusting the papers towards me said, “Do it.”

He didn’t go back to his car straight away, but walked off on his own through the woods on the path that I knew from experience led to the old family graveyard. I’d been there a few times myself. There weren’t many stones left—most had fallen or broken or been lost to time, and the few older ones that survived had been gathered and propped on a central stone monument topped with a carved bust of Benjamin Wilde gazing fearlessly over the cove to the waters of Long Island Sound, where he’d sailed as a hero.

I knew Frank went up there from time to time. He kept the grass trimmed and straightened the stones when they needed it. And while he might not believe that his ancestors left any ghosts behind, I had a feeling he still had a few things to say to them on this particular visit.

He kept to himself for a few days but by the next week he was back to his regular pattern of coming on site to keep up with the work being done.

The engineer had been here, too, inspecting the repairs to the wood sheathing and the timber frame, and having met with his approval part of Sam’s crew were now on the north side of the house replacing siding, while the rest were on the south side of the roof removing shingles.

It was not a job I would have wanted. Even though the south side of the roof, above the kitchen lean-to, wasn’t pitched as steeply as the front, you had to be a certain kind of crazy, I decided, to spend all day walking on an angle over thin boards that in places had been rotted through by insects and neglect and years of damp.

I had a clear view from my office window of the workers on the roof. One was a woman who worked with a steady competence that didn’t make me worried, but one of her colleagues was a guy who looked younger than Gianni, with a hipster beard and hair tied in a ponytail beneath his hardhat. He moved like a mountain goat—a very reckless mountain goat. It made me nervous every time he crossed my field of vision.

So the day I heard the crash and yell and looked up just in time to see a hardhat disappearing through a dark hole at the far end of the roof, I knew whose hardhat it would be.

I don’t remember pushing back my chair and dashing through the doorway from my office into the old section of the house. I only know I reached him first.

I found him standing on both feet within a shaft of sunlight spearing through a jagged hole in the sloped ceiling of the room above the buttery. Dust danced wildly in the dimness, sparkling in and out of shadow as it sifted from the opening above his head. It covered him. It settled in his beard and on his shoulders.

“I’m okay,” were his first words to me as I raced in. “I’m good, man.” He repeated that, as if he was amazed to find himself unhurt. “I’m good.”

Above us came a quick, deft fall of footsteps on the rafters and Sam’s face appeared within the new hole, blocking out the light. “What happened?”

“Man,” his worker told him, looking up in awe, “it was like someone caught me. It was awesome! But I’m good.”

Sam didn’t care how awesome it had been. “I’m getting Rick to take you to the hospital,” he said, “to get checked out. And when you work for me, you wear your safety gear, you got it?”

“Got it.” With a glance around the room, as if he half expected there’d be someone else to see besides the two of us, the bearded worker moved his hands to test them. “Cool,” he said, and sauntered past me.

He had dropped his hammer. Or, to be more accurate, his hammer had smashed through a floorboard near where I was standing in the doorway, and was stuck there with the metal head embedded in the splintered wood, the handle angled upwards.

Sam could see it, too. “Hang on,” he said, and shifting he manoeuvred himself through the hole and dropped down with a solid thud that raised another swirl of dust. “A good thing it was just his hammer, not his head.”

He tried to ease it out, but like King Arthur with his sword stuck in the stone, looks were deceiving. It was really stuck. The floorboard lifted with it, and I heard the ripping sound of wood, and then Sam pointed to the gap now showing where the floorboard’s end had been, and asked me, “What is that?”

I looked. It was a small cloth bag, or what was left of one, and when I saw what it had once contained I knew this hadn’t truly been an accident.

? ? ?

“And this,” I told the members of the board, “is what we found.”

I set the tray down carefully that held the remnants of the little bag and all its contents, cleaned and catalogued.

Malaika had known this was coming. So had Frank and Lara. But most of the others were looking at me like I’d lost my mind.

I didn’t blame them. To the average eye, the things that I was showing them looked more like things someone would throw away on purpose, not a find of any true significance: thin brass pins, several bent iron nails, small glass beads, a few fragments of pottery, oxidized lead shot, and two flat, triangular, water-smoothed stones that looked something like axe heads.

I attempted to put things in context. Not knowing what everyone’s level of knowledge was when it came to the historical facts of the slave trade, I started with the Portuguese and rapidly moved on to, “So a large part of the slaves who ended up here in America came from what’s now Nigeria on Africa’s West Coast, and most of those were either Igbo or Yoruba, and in the Yoruba culture there’s a god, Eshu Elegba, who is kind of like a trickster god. He mediates between the gods and men and carries messages between the worlds, and he guards all the crossroads and all thresholds. And a slave here in America would follow the religion of their ancestors and if they were Yoruba they would leave specific offerings for Eshu on their thresholds. Archaeologists aren’t sure if these were meant to protect those inside the room, or harm those who might try to enter, but when you find these near windows or at doorways, what it means is there were probably slaves living in that room.”

“Probably,” Sharon said, archly. “Not certainly.”

“Well, no. But then we’ve got all this to add to it.” I’d spent a lot of time getting my evidence organized. Now I presented it piece upon piece like a lawyer constructing a case.

I started with the copied pages from the “Negro registers” of Fishers’ store, with entries for a Phyllis and a Violet, of Snug Cove. I’d done some digging in the New York Public Library and found they had the personal accounts of Reuben Wilde for 1743, detailing money owed him by his brother For the hire of Phyllis and her child. And then, the coup de grace, I’d found the will of Reuben Wilde, that listed Violet in the property he passed to his son Silas when he died. “And he died in the summer of 1760,” I told them, “so that’s why our Violet stops showing up in the store registers over at Cross Harbor.”

She’d been “reclaimed” by the cousin of Benjamin Wilde—Silas. I hadn’t found much on him, yet, but Violet, if we could believe all the documents, would have been eighteen years old at the time. And Benjamin, who wouldn’t captain his first ship till later that year, would have been twenty-five.

“There’s no doubt in my mind,” I said, “Benjamin Wilde grew up in a household with slaves. What we need to decide now is, what are we going to do with that knowledge?”

Eve wasn’t sure we should do anything. “Like Sharon said before, I think this takes us too far off our mandate.”

Sharon nodded firm agreement. “That’s right. First you want the legend of the French ghost, which not only is a legend but has no connection whatsoever with our Captain Wilde. And now you try to sneak this whole slave angle in. I just don’t think you even understand what you were hired to do.”

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