“Who lives there?” Gretchen asked.
“Hawk,” she said, as if it were obvious and Gretchen already knew. “And his sister. I think you’ll like them. Listen, sweets. I don’t mean to rush you, but we have to get down to business here. For a long time your mother had been planning to go through this entire archive. She started some years ago but left abruptly before finishing it,” Esther said. “And frankly someone has to do it, and it might as well be the heiress apparent. We’re hoping for some clues, for anything that could help.”
“She was here?” Gretchen asked. “She was . . . clues for what?” Things were beginning to seem even more surreal.
“Mona came here every year,” Esther said. “She was looking for—”
“When was the last time she came out here?” Gretchen interrupted.
Esther thought about it. “Five, six years ago maybe. She was taking pictures of the land. She must have told you about what happened here, right? What she was doing?”
“No.”
“No?” Now it was Esther’s turn to look shocked, then simply exhausted. Her chin crumpled and she turned away.
“I know this is where she started thinking about spirits,” Gretchen said quickly, not wanting the old woman to shut down. But honestly, what did Esther expect? Until yesterday Gretchen had only the vaguest notion that Esther even existed, or that the house was still in their family.
“She showed me a picture she thought had a ghost in it when I was a little kid,” Gretchen said. “Her brother’s ghost, she said. Now that I’ve been shooting for a while I think it was probably a double exposure, or a mix-up at the processing place—it was from the seventies. . . .”
“Yes, yes, Piper,” Esther said. “He died in an accident. Accidents seem to be the number-one cause of death here, especially this time of year. This was something your mother was very keen on studying, and documenting.”
“Why?”
“Now listen to me, sweets,” Esther said. “We don’t have too much time, and you have a lot to learn. Did your mom mention anything else about the house?”
Gretchen shook her head. “Just that her parents left it and never went back.” She was dying for Esther to go on—to find out anything that might give her the slightest hint of what could have happened to her mother or where she could be.
“Well, before all of that,” Esther said, “our relatives were abolitionists.”
“Wow, really?” Gretchen walked across the creaking floor and sat in one of the old carved chairs. “I had no idea.”
Esther smiled, but there was something sad underneath it. “Your great-great-great-great-uncle James was a pastor of a church he built on this property. His brother was your great-great-great-great-grandfather—George—the guy in the picture. The church was a safe house on the Underground Railroad. Fidelia and James and George would hide people there and then help them settle in the north or get to Canada safely. James preached liberation theology—how Jesus wanted all men to be free and have no masters. He had one of the first fully integrated congregations in the country.”
All of this was very interesting, but Gretchen was impatient. She didn’t see what it had to do with accidents or Mona going missing. And then that feeling she thought was gone came surging back. The feeling that maybe she would stumble upon the truth hidden in some everyday moment or conversation and be able to find her mother herself. Mona had stood in that very room, digging through these archives. Why, she wondered, had neither of her parents ever mentioned the extent of the Axton family’s history in Mayville? Especially when it was so important to her mother—important enough to go there every year without telling a soul. As far as she knew it was a secret even from her father.
“When the Civil War started,” Esther went on, “James went off to fight and left George here to be pastor of the church.”
“You can just do that?” she asked skeptically. “You can just be, like . . . I’m leaving, so you’re the pastor now, tell everyone Jesus hates bigots?” Gretchen asked.
“Hush,” Esther said. “Don’t be a wise ass. Where was I? Oh . . . in any case, George kept working in the family business, and presumably kept up the mission of the church. He and Fidelia got married and had two children, Celia and Adam, and from what we know they kept helping people escape slavery, bringing them through here. Some even settled in the town eventually.