I sent him a piercing look, which he avoided by sliding the first book off the stack and opening it. “So, what have you discovered?”
“Oh, lots of interesting things, as usual.” She gave Jack a coquettish grin, then patted my hand. “Don’t worry, Melanie. I have my own beau now, so Jack is safe.”
I remembered the handsome older gentleman she’d brought to the Holiday Shop and Stroll at the Francis Marion Hotel in December. “I’m so happy to hear you and Harold Chalmers are still stepping out together.”
A small V appeared in the smooth skin between her brows. “Isn’t it called ‘hooking up’ these days? I’m around all these young college students now, so I’m trying to get with the lingo.”
My surprised eyes met Jack’s. “Um, I’m not sure that’s the correct term—” I began.
“Well, look at this,” Jack interrupted as he opened the leather-bound book in front of him that had been tabbed with a place marker. “Is this the land plat for our house?” He slid the book toward the middle of the table so the three of us could get a better view.
I ignored the little jump in the pit of my stomach when he said the words “our house” and leaned closer. “I don’t see the cistern or any outbuildings. But a plat should include all structures on a property, right?”
Yvette smiled at us as if we were her star pupils as she placed another plat on top of the first. “That would be correct. As you can see in this one from 1848, when the house was built, the lot contained several dependencies, including an outdoor kitchen and henhouse.” She pointed to small rectangles on the pages with pink-tipped fingers. “The cistern was added a bit later, which is why it’s not shown on this plat.”
She flipped back to the original page. “This plat was made in 1944, at the time the land at the back half of the original property on Tradd Street was sold and Ford Alley created behind it and the two houses on the alley were built.” She tapped her finger on the outline of one of the outbuildings on the page, then slid her finger next to it. “This is where your cistern is, correct? By 1944 it had been filled in, which is why it doesn’t appear here. But it makes sense that the cistern would have been next to the kitchen house.”
“What happened to the outbuildings?” Jack asked.
“According to what I could find in the archives regarding your house, it seems it sustained some damage during the fire of 1861 and then again during the earthquake of 1886. I imagine the dependencies were probably damaged or destroyed by either event, and at some point it was decided not to rebuild those. My guess would be that the kitchen would have been incorporated into the main house when that occurred.”
“Fire?” I said, my nostrils flaring at the remembered scent emanating from the Frozen Charlotte. “Were there any casualties?”
“If there is a casualty list, I have yet to discover it. Surely there were casualties—over five hundred forty-five acres were burned, after all. Those were turbulent times, with the war going on. Considering how devastating it was, there’s a sad lack of documentation about the fire. And don’t forget the earthquake of 1886. Almost every single structure in the city was damaged, and most had to be rebuilt or demolished.”
Jack leaned closer to study the plat. “Is there any chance this was a cemetery at some point?”
Yvonne shook her head. “Not really. The Vanderhorst mausoleum is in Magnolia Cemetery, as you know. Of course, any graves discovered could predate the house, with no connection to the Vanderhorsts.”
“Perhaps.” I reached into my purse and pulled out the plastic baggie filled with the buttons we’d found in Nola’s room that morning. I opened it and let the buttons spill out onto the table. “We found these near the cistern, in what we think might have been a grave. They might have been part of a charm string.”
“You found them in a grave?” Yvonne asked, picking up a mother-of-pearl button and placing her glasses on the end of her nose to examine it.
Jack and I glanced at each other for a moment before I replied. “More or less. Along with other items that definitely point to the Victorian era. But no skeletal remains. Well, except for those of a dog, but that might not be connected.”
Yvonne lowered her glasses on their chain again. “Then why do you think it was a grave?”
“Because the excavators also found a headstone. The only thing legible was the letter E. No other grave markers have been found to indicate this might have been a cemetery, but they could have all disappeared when the land behind the house was excavated in 1945 prior to building the houses on Ford Alley.”
Yvonne frowned in concentration. “I’ll need to double-check, but if my memory serves me right, there was an Emily Vanderhorst born in the 1830s. I seem to recall she married an Englishman before the war and lived the rest of her life in London. I’ll see if I can find her grave, but I’m confident she was buried in England.”
“Any other ideas?” I asked.
“Well,” Yvonne continued, “the Victorian era was between 1837 and 1901. So perhaps the headstone belonged to a victim of the fire or the earthquake, and with the chaos ensuing from both catastrophic events, the family interred the person temporarily.”
“It was fire,” I said definitively, making Yvonne send me a questioning look. “Just a guess,” I added.
Her eyes settled on me briefly before returning to the plat. “So whatever was in that grave might not have had any connection to the cistern at all.”
I nodded. “If a victim from either of those events was buried in the ruins of the destroyed outbuildings, over time with the flooding and other erosion factors, any remains or artifacts might have mingled with those from the cistern.”