John White’s tracer struggled to stand up. For a moment it looked like Antonio was going to try to hold him back, but then Brendan said, with his tracer, “He’ll want to see for himself. He won’t believe us otherwise.”
Antonio began helping the old man’s tracer up. He kept his arm around the tracer’s shoulder. Brendan braced the tracer from the other side, and the two boys led him to the nearest hut.
Jonah couldn’t help admiring the way they guided John White’s tracer, keeping him from seeing the animal skeletons. But what good did that do if the tracer was just going to see human skeletons in the hut?
Nervously, Jonah crept up behind Antonio and Brendan and the tracer, trying to see past them into the hut.
“Oh!” Brendan exclaimed, whirling around, away from his tracer. “There aren’t any skeletons here!”
Jonah peeked in—it was just an empty hut.
The next hut was empty, too, as was the third and the fourth. . . . Then they came to a different kind of a building, its walls lined with a sort of wooden scaffolding. Elongated lumps wrapped in animal skins lay on each level of the scaffolding—could the lumps be skeletons?
John White’s tracer nodded, as if he understood. But he didn’t look upset. He opened his mouth and spoke. Jonah wished so badly that he could hear what the tracer was saying. But of course, separated from the real John White, the tracer was completely silent.
“Oh, this is weird—he’s speaking English right now, and my tracer doesn’t understand. But I can understand what my tracer is hearing,” Brendan said. “John White is saying he knows this is the Croatoans’ temple, where the bodies of their important leaders are kept after death. He saw this in other villages, on his previous trips to America. He’s saying it’s like what they do in England, putting their honored dead in crypts in cathedrals.”
Jonah had actually been in one of those crypts, back in the 1400s, on his last trip through time. This village’s temple didn’t seem any creepier than that.
They stepped out of the temple, Jonah and Katherine and Andrea scurrying ahead so they didn’t keep Antonio and Brendan from staying with their tracers. The two boys walked John White’s tracer toward an open field.
“This is the burial ground for all the other dead,” Antonio said, speaking with his tracer.
John White spoke, and Brendan translated: “He’s asking us, ‘Many, many generations?’”
“No,” Antonio said. “Many died all at once.”
Jonah could tell that John White’s tracer understood, because sorrow crept over his face.
“But some survived,” Antonio said. “Some survived to bury their dead before they left.”
John White’s tracer spoke again, and Jonah could guess at his meaning even without Brendan’s translation: “Where did they go?”
Antonio shrugged.
“We don’t know,” he said softly. “Nobody knows until now, we didn’t know that anybody lived.”
John White’s tracer turned away, his expression sad and thoughtful—but not hopeless. He spoke.
“He’s saying, ‘My search goes on. I knew it would not be easy,’” Brendan whispered.
Andrea let out a gasp. She had tears in her eyes, but she was nodding.
She was still hopeful too.
The others turned back toward the rest of the village. But Jonah walked a little farther into the field.
No different than a cemetery, he thought. Just without creepy tombstones with the names and all. Maybe the Indians weren’t so concerned about how they’d be remembered?
Sunlight streamed down on Jonah’s head; tall grasses waved in the hot summer breeze. Without the piles of human skeletons Jonah had been expecting, this part of Croatoan Island wasn’t horrifying. It was . . . peaceful. Jonah knew there’d been death here—lots of it—but that was a long time ago. The bodies buried beneath this ground had been resting in peace for years.
Hadn’t they?
Jonah noticed a mound toward the back of the field. The soil here was more sand than dirt, and whoever had built this mound had had to pack the soil together tightly to get it to stay in place.
Jonah thought of sand castles on a beach, the way the ones you built at the beginning of a vacation always wore away by the end of the week. How could the sandy soil of this mound still look so tightly packed if it’d been built years ago?
It couldn’t have, Jonah thought.
He stared down at the mound, trying to read messages in grains of sand. They were tightly pressed. Nothing had worn away.
Didn’t that mean this grave, at least, was . . . fresh?
Jonah whirled around and raced back toward the others.
“Hey, guys!” he said. “Come look at this!”
He decided he wouldn’t tell them what he’d figured out—he’d let them look first and see what they concluded.
“Shh,” Katherine hissed at him. “Antonio and Brendan—er, their tracers—they’re trying to decide how to get off the island without letting John White see all the animal bones.”
“We should protect him from knowing the evil that was here,” Antonio was saying, as his tracer would have. “Since it wasn’t as bad as we thought, since he still believes he will find his family, since he’s such an old man . . .”
“But he’s a ghost-man,” Brendan replied, in his tracer’s voice. “Ghost-men don’t know that it is evil to treat our brother animals that way, in death. It will not matter to him.”
Jonah barely listened, because all he could think about was the fresh grave. Who was in it? Who had dug it? Brendan and Antonio had said Indians were afraid to come to Croatoan Island, so it probably wasn’t anyone native. Andrea had said the English never went to Croatoan to look for the Roanoke colonists.
Well, not that history recorded, Jonah corrected himself. John White’s here right now. And that’s not even a change we can blame on Second, because the tracer’s here. . . .
Second! What if Second had killed someone and buried him on Croatoan Island?