Slave Graves Page 3

The Terment Company stationwagon clattered over the ruts and was gone, dust drifting across the corn field. Frank picked up his suitcase and hefted it up the steps into the old house.

  “Give me a minute,” he called to the others.

  They turned and headed back to the site. Frank carefully folded his suit and his expensive shoes and put them inside his case. Then he dressed in his work shorts, a cotton shirt and his slouch hat. He had worn that hat to many sites and it had brought him luck.

  Outside again, he listened for a moment to the wildlife moving around where he stood, both inside the dense cornfield and also among the hedges of fragrant vines. Birds fluttered, chirped for accent, then shrilled their songs. Gnats worried the bare flesh of his neck and legs. He smelled the aroma of the wetlands, the smell almost a stink coming up from the newly exposed and bacteria rich earth of the excavation. In the heat, he felt his body oppressed by the same forces as those in a great steam engine cylinder, the heat and humid vapor thrusting against him. He wiped the sweat from his forehead. His fingers touched a tiny mole there. His mother had told him long ago that he had that mole for wisdom. He grinned. He wondered what kind of wisdom he would need before this job was over. He started toward the site.

  From the pattern of the dried and bent marsh grasses, he could see that an occasional high tide washed over this wetland. Still, that would not be much water and he was surprised that the ground was so wet. The soil on the marsh surface was crusted from the sun but his feet broke through into several inches of sticky muck. It was wet enough to cling aggressively to his work shoes. He wondered where the water came from if not from the river tides.

  The bulldozer operator had done his work well. The site area was stripped bare of living reeds, with the only green coming from some older trees surviving around the edges of the marsh and some near the river, loblolly pines and oaks, the pines covered with rough bark on tall and slender trunks. The land was hot and smelly with only the surrounding edges still gracious terrain for its wildlife, especially its small animals. Their night tracks where they came out to inspect this disaster, could be seen among the tread marks of the bulldozer, like the five fingered hands of tiny soldiers searching through crisscrossed chevrons of military tanks. Crushed and dying grasses were everywhere. However, in the still untouched hedges where much of the wildlife still lived, masses of green richness were heavily overgrown and bent under many years of untrimmed growth of wild honeysuckle. Everpresent and treacherous wasps and hornets, their stings made ferocious from the stifling sunlight, buzzed on guard among the fragile blossoms of honeysuckle sugar.

  “Muskrats,” said the Pastor as he watched Frank approach. “Their tracks look like hands.”

  Ahead, more dead grass extended to the riverbank where there was a small drop leading down less than a foot to the normal high tide or high water mark.The shore was ringed with bits of driftwood, dried seaweed, rotting fish and dead crabs among growths of still living high grass.The tide was low so several more feet of the bank were exposed. A large mudflat extended into the river. It was covered with reeds which, closer to the river, took over from the field grass and mixed with more cattails. On the upthrust parts of these plants, a bird or two darted and competed with various hovering bugs for perches. To Frank’s right, towards the old bridge, were several fallen gnarled trees, reaching far out into the river and horribly bent from storms.

  “This is going to be as uncomfortable a site as I have ever worked on,” Frank said. He looked back at the gate to the main road, rethinking Jake’s invitation to live out on a comfortable yacht. Then he shrugged in resignation and reviewed the site again. He could see areas along the edge of the cleared area where Jake’s workmen had stockpiled large timbers and pilings, in preparation for the construction of the piers. Beside the stockpiles at the ends of the bulldozer swipes were tangled brush mixed with torn chicken wire fence and brambles, all twisted in the great rolls of wreckage that were the signatures of those machines.

  “Those bulldozers cut up the land quick, don’t they?” observed Frank.

  “We hope they haven’t cleared too much of what we have to study,” said Maggie.

  “Looks like they took out mostly brush, not much topsoil.” Frank grinned. “Just brush full of angry wasps .”

  “Don’t worry about snakes,” said the Pastor. “They’re long gone. The bulldozers scared them away. You see any I’ll take care of them. Snakes and me we get along fine.”

  Frank smiled. “Maggie, we got a great volunteer here. Pastor, if I see any snakes, I’ll certainly call you.”

  Across the river Frank could see the high crane and piledriver. “That thing is pretty big, isn’t it?”

  “Makes a lot of noise. I heard it this morning when I got here. Then the workers shut it down and went back to River Sunday until we get done.”

  The machine was about a thousand feet away, immense against the treeline. Its steel latticework was profiled against the curves of the old trees. The rusty barge sides brushed harshly against the reeds. The machine lurked, its hammer ready to drive more pilings into the river.

  “Big equipment,” said Maggie.

  “A lot of money,” said Frank. He looked back at the pump. “We have to run that all the time I guess.”

  “Soon as we go down a foot or so the water fills the test pits.”

  “That’s strange,” he said, sniffing the air.

  “The place stinks,” said Maggie.

  “No. There’s another smell. Like burning tobacco from a pipe.”

  “Nobody smokes.”

  The Pastor smiled at Frank. “Tobacco smoke?” he asked.

  “I smell it.”

  “I don’t,” said the Pastor, his face serious.

  “Me either,” said Maggie.

  The Pastor looked at Frank. “When I was a boy,” he said, “My father told me that if I ever smelled tobacco smoke, and there wasn’t nobody smoking, then it was a sure sign that evil was nearby. There was a local legend, come down from the Nanticokes that used to have their villages around here, that the smell of burning tobacco was the way the good spirits kept the evil ones away.”

  “Do you think the spirits are after me?” asked Frank, smiling.

  The Pastor, his face thoughtful, said, “They might be after any one of us.”

  “I don’t smell it anymore,” said Frank.

  “If you guys are through with your ghost stories, let’s look at the wreck,” said Maggie.

  The three of them squatted around the remnants of the wreck. On all sides were stretched the tense white surveyor strings, their clean straight lines out of place in the construction disorganization of the site. Besides the wooden stempiece that Spyder had destroyed, there were several other timbers that had been ripped by the bulldozer from the ground. Some were of substantial size. Most had fresh marks on them where the bulldozer blade had cut into the old wood as it pushed them upward out of the soil.

  “Cant frame construction,” said Frank, as he gently touched the heavy timbers. “The old ship carpenters built them this way for a long time. It solved the problem of strength when the bow rounded to the stem and the frames could no longer be at right angles to the keel.”

  He pointed to some round pieces of wood that stuck halfway out of the timbers. “The way they connected them was by these wooden pegs. That’s a sign this wreck might be old. The problem for us is that in ship construction the carpenters often used the older methods in newer boats. Especially in a rural area like the Eastern Shore. So it’s hard to date her this way .”

  “It’s a start,” said Maggie.

  “Oak. I’m pretty sure of that. Whether it’s American oak or English oak I’d have to have an expert take a look. It might tell us where she was built. Then again the American merchants shipped a lot of oak to England.”

  He looked closely at a part of one of the frames. “I think this timber was burned at one time.”

  “That fits with what I found in one of my probes,”
said Maggie.

  “Sometimes the carpenters charred the wood so it would bend around the frames. However, this looks more like destructive burning. These timbers are likely from the lower hull below the waterline. That might mean the part above the waterline burned away before she sank. Then the river water put out the fire in the lower section. Let’s see.” Frank put some numbers in the ground at his feet. “So if the hull was twenty five feet from keel to deck, and she drew fifteen feet, all we may have is the lower fifteen feet. If she was sitting on the bottom when she burned, say at low tide, then the waterline might have been high and dry, well above the water surface, and we may have less than fifteen feet of her.”

  He sat back on his heels and reconnoitered the site, his eyes moving along the white surveying lines, thinking of promising excavation areas. He tapped some of the upthrust stakes lightly with his archaeologist’s trowel as he looked. He scratched his neck and adjusted his hat.

  “OK,” he said. “What do we know and what do we think we know?”

  “There’s at least the bow section of a ship here and no reason to think that the rest of her isn’t here,” said Maggie.

  “Can we assume that it’s all here running out toward the riverbank and down a few feet under the surface?”

  Maggie nodded. “I think that’s right. I think we should set up the dig on that orientation.”

  Frank continued, “If this ship is early, if she dates to the Eighteenth Century or even before then, this would be a significant find. There haven’t been many of these early commerce traders found in the Chesapeake Bay. It would be a wonderful find.”

  He looked at them. “Remember that Jake said it was just an old wheat schooner, beached up here in the marsh, left to rot. Let’s not get too excited yet. According to him, she sank and disappeared, maybe less than a hundred years ago. He’s probably right because it’s his land. He would likely have heard any stories or legends of any shipwreck being here any earlier. I mean, his family settled this farm, didn’t they, back in the colonial period?”

  “Yes, but he wants us out of here too. I wouldn’t rely on him being too truthful,” said Maggie.

  “Did you find any written records?”

  “I did a quick search at the library here in River Sunday and in Baltimore. There’s nothing that I could find concerning any wrecks on this part of the river. There’s mention of a tobacco dock here in the early days but the loading place was moved to the Terment family plantation on the other side of Allingham Island. The loading areas were changed often in these rivers because of the silting. The rivers became too shallow to navigate.”

  Frank drew with his finger in the earth. “Whatever her date, early or late, her bowsprit or any bow timbers will be out here beyond the stem that the bulldozer unearthed.”

  He put in the lines. “Here. The stem and the bowsprit.” He looked toward the river. “We have to figure out how long she was. Maggie, what was the size of hull you used for your grid?”

  “I estimated eighty feet, figured a line perpendicular to the riverbank and set my datum mark, my center measure, at forty feet from here toward the river.”

  “That’s a good approach. At eighty feet she could have been either a large local schooner, built in the last century, or a three masted colonial trader.”

  Maggie continued, “Then I set up the rest of my measurements from that datum point. I thought it made the most sense to do all my measurements to the points where I guessed parts of the ship might be buried. I used a benchmark from the bridge construction for my elevations and marked the stakes.”

  “OK.”

  “I set up pit locations for excavation just like in your book, Doctor Light. Just like we did in the summer school. I like your system for a job like this. We can move from part to part of the ship if we begin to get some clues or find anything. I started two probes and then I had to worry about the surface water. When you folks drove up, the Pastor and I were getting the pump going.”

  “Wait a minute.” She stood up and walked over to the edge of the cleared section and picked up a large notebook which was resting against a clump of marsh grass. As she walked back toward him, Frank smiled at the light bounce to her step.

  “You always found things faster than any of the other students, Maggie. I figured you worked smarter than the others with a little luck thrown in.” He noticed the small gold Christian cross jouncing on the front of her tee shirt.

  “Still got the cross. Maybe that was it. The source of your luck.”

  “Maybe,” she said, her blue eyes cheerful in the sunlight. “I used to think it was. Some days I still do. You found more than any of us and you didn’t wear any cross.You just had that old hat.” She sat down cross legged in front of him and the Pastor, her bare legs spotted with dried dirt.

  “Here’s the plan I drew up.” In front of them she spread a diagram of the site itself. It was a drawing of a twenty by eighty foot rectangle surrounded on its four sides by the farm property. On the top was the entrance lane and the large cornfield. To the right was the farm house with its outbuildings and the old box gardens. On the bottom of the diagram was the riverbank and the Nanticoke River. To the left was the large hedgerow, the county road and the entrance to the old bridge. In the center, within the rectangle, she had sketched the deck plan of an early trading ship. The ship lines converged on the point in the diagram where the actual bow frames had been found. She had drawn the ship’s hull parallel to a line constructed direct from those bow artifacts. The line ran back to the riverbank, almost perpendicular to the river, and with the proposed stern of the wreck about thirty yards from the water.

  “What’s the small x mark to the right between the bow section and the farmhouse?” Frank asked.

  “I thought that would be a good spot for the sifting screen and the excavated soil pile.”

  “OK by me. That will probably become a pretty good sized hill before we’re through.”

  She had drawn a grid precisely over the hull. The hull itself was an oval with three large black dots for the suggested mast locations. Placed on the grid were a series of proposed test pit locations measured out from the datum point marked in the center of the outline. These suggested pits corresponded to Maggie’s stakes in the actual site.

  “I’ll run you through it,” she said. “There are twenty-six test pits in my plan. They are located three across at different sections running down the hull and I have placed them ten feet apart going across and ten feet apart going lengthwise. There is a letter code identifying each one, so the first is A and the last is Z. The letter codes start A at near the top of the grid at the bow area and end up Z near the bottom of the grid at the stern area. I surmised three mast locations and labeled their test pits H for the foremast, N for the mainmast and T for the mizzenmast. So,” she said, “you start at the port side of the bow with a test pit marked A, then go to the right ten feet. That is test pit B, the original discovery location, right where Mr. Spyder destroyed that piece of stem wood. Go ten feet to the right of that and that is test pit C. You can see how the letters run down the wreck, for example, the crew area begins near test pits D to F, the cargo area runs G to I and down the ship to S to V.”

  “The whole center of the ship,” said the Pastor.

  “Yes,” she answered, “and the Captain’s quarters in the stern near the river would be S across to U and back down to test pit Z.”

  She pointed out to the site, “Each stake out here corresponds to the center of the test pit location on the grid.”

  “Looks like a good search pattern,” said Frank. “The ship’s beam could be anywhere from twenty to thirty feet at her widest points of sheer and chines. You’ve set the centers of the pits at ten feet. The pits themselves will be staked in their corners and could go out further to allow for collapse of the old hull sides outward. You’re assuming that there will be artifact scatter outward from the hull.”

  She nodded.

  “Which pit do we search first?�
�� asked the Pastor.

  Maggie looked at Frank hesitatingly.

  “Come on, Maggie. You call it. You’ve studied the site,” said Frank.

  “OK. We only have a short time.”

  “Jake Terment is talking two days,” said Frank.

  Maggie looked at him. “Do you really think we can do a good job in two days?”

  “We can try,” said Frank.

  The Pastor raised his hand. “Let me understand,” he said. “We search this site for two days. Then you decide whether they can pour concrete on it and destroy it forever?”

  “That’s about it,” said Frank. “If we decide that they should hold up the construction any further we better have some good arguments. There’s usually a lot of jobs and money at stake. People have to be convinced that there’s something here worth all the fuss.”

  “Terment Company made a deal with my office and the other state officials when this artifact was discovered. They agreed that to leave the decision to an independent consultant, that’s you, Doctor Light. Doctor Light does his reconnaissance, tests a few pits, makes a decision what’s here or isn’t here and makes a recommendation. What Jake Terment wants is a recommendation from Doctor Light that there is nothing here worth saving. Then he’ll get a construction permit to continue building the bridge.”

  “What happens if we find anything that you recommend is significant?” asked the Pastor.

  “The law is clear. Historic artifacts are to be preserved. Jake has to stop immediately until the situation is cleared up, the artifacts researched or moved to another site. It would definitely be a major and expensive delay for him and his backers.”

  “Suppose there are graves here but we don’t find them?” asked the Pastor.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Frank.

  “There was never any agreement to hold the site for the discovery of graves. It’s the shipwreck that is holding up the bridge, that’s all,” said Maggie. “The agreement between Jake Terment’s company and my office is pretty definite.”

  “That’s because I couldn’t get any proof of the graveyard. I’m a clergyman, not a historian. I couldn’t find anything in the few records that remain from those days. Most of the records in the River Sunday courthouse were burned by vandals during the Civil War. There’s only one man in the parish that talks these days about this burying place. He’s very old. His story is too emotional. He keeps talking about Adam and Eve, always quoting verse, too much about the Bible. People like you, Doctor Light, you want facts.”

  “You have to understand that my job here is to look for a ship, not to look for graves of dead slaves.”

  “I understand that,” said the Pastor. “There’s not any room for an old man who confuses his Bible with his stories.”

  “Doctor Light?” interrupted Maggie.

  “I’m not your teacher anymore so you might as well call me Frank.”

  “OK,” she smiled. “Frank, let’s prioritize. We’ll start by working back from the discovery area in the bow.”

  “Could there be gold here, a treasure?” asked the Pastor.

  “I wish,” smiled Maggie. “Unfortunately, the ones that have gold usually get salvaged right after they sink. Especially if they go down in shallow water like this one. There’s a lot of things to look for. Every wreck is different. What you want to find is something to date her by. Something in the soil strata of the wreck that can tie us to the time that she entered that strata. It’s highly unlikely we’ll find a date stamped right on the ship itself. What we do is date it from things which lie in the soil near it, if we can prove that those things arrived at that spot at the same time. Beside the dating of the artifacts we try find things about the wreck itself, construction, timber, that kind of thing. We want to find out about the people on board, the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the items they had with them.”

  “Maggie. You said you had already started two pits.”

  “I dug first at pit A, the location of the port bow area.”

  Maggie folded her diagram and put it back into the notebook. They walked a few feet toward the bow timbers and came to a two foot square-sided hole in the ground. It was almost a foot deep, with some water in the bottom.

  “These pits get expanded in size if we find anything,” Frank explained to the Pastor. They got down on their knees, heads over the pit.

  “Here’s what I wanted to show you,” Maggie said. “On the side or balk of the pit you can see the different colors of the soil strata. The first strata is made up of silt. That soil comes from the local fields around the site. When it rains here, the silt runs out from the fields into the marsh on its way to the river. I found silt throughout the excavation area. I figure that took a long time to build up. The next strata is what I think was a fill. It’s not anywhere but in the ship area. I did some quick shovel probes nearby and found the natural soil profile. There was no fill. That’s when I went out and found the borrow pit. I found a topsoil like the fill, in an area that looked like it was dug out a long time ago. It was a big hole in the ground, a gully, with trees growing down inside it that are at least two hundred years old. Then, down along the shoreline, there are pilings, some of them very old ones, that have been set into the bank to keep the soil fill from washing out into the river. Some of that embankment is falling in, rotting away, and the marsh soil is falling into the river.”

  Frank ran his fingers lightly over the strata marks. “It’s certainly interesting.”

  “What you’re looking at, Frank, that darker soil, was pulled up near the bow timbers, disturbed from below by the bulldozer.”

  “Let me have your brush,” he said. He worked intently at a spot, brushing the soil carefully away.

  “I’ve got something here. Have you got some tweezers?”

  She handed him the tool.

  “Here, I have it.” He held up a sliver of rusting metal.

  “Same type of thing we found in the other pit,” said the Pastor.

  “Part of a spike or bolt used to hold the ship together. If we could find one in good shape we might be able to tell something from the type of spike. If it was handmade, that would indicate the ship was older.”

  Maggie sketched the find in her notebook. Frank put the sliver of rust into a small plastic bag that Maggie handed to him. Then they labeled the bag with a marker on a tag giving the exact location measured with reference to Maggie’s pit stakes.

  “Come on over to the other probe. I want to show you something else,” she said.

  “This other one is pit Z,” she said. “It’s in the stern section.”

  They walked back over the site, stepping carefully over the white twine. As they walked they passed by the soil pile on their left towards the house. Near it was Maggie’s sifting frame, of wood with hardware cloth and a hose for wet screening. Already she had completed the sifting of a large pile of soil from the two small test pits.

  “I’ve had that sifting rig with me for a long time. I built it the year after I worked with you. You probably recognize it. It’s like the one we had in field school.”

  Frank nodded. Walking was difficult. There was mire everywhere. Maggie sank to her ankles each time she stepped, slipping through the thin hard crust that the sun formed over the wetness. The Pastor’s high tops were totally covered with the soft muck. Frank stopped and removed his heavy boots after a few steps. Soon his own bare feet were clods of earth.

  Beside the other pit, neatly arrayed in a white plastic tray were several of the rusty splinters, each with a carefully written label tied to it.

  “I’m using your coding system, Frank.”

  Frank smiled. “With the coding system, Pastor, and with our drawings, notes and photographs we itemize exactly where everything was found and how it looked when we found it. Many times we find that we want to go back to the records of a find with new information and new insight. It’s important to see what was there originally. Records are very important. We are dealing somet
imes with such little clues that we have to put all the traces together to come up with any information. The records are very important because we can work with them at home, back at the university, or wherever. We can study them, come up with ideas that we would never have time to develop out here on the site. You see, archeology is inherently destructive. Once we’ve finished with an area, by definition it is destroyed. Our notes are all that is left of it.”

  “Would you like me to keep some of these finds back at my church?”

  “I think they’ll be safe here.” Frank said, looking at Maggie for her agreement.

  She nodded. “I’m keeping everything in the farmhouse or in my car. Safe, especially if it rains. It’s clean there. Besides, we ought to be able to get at the material if we need to look up something.”

  “Well, if you two change your mind and need a place to keep things, you let me know.”

  Maggie nodded. Her attention was on the small pit in front of them. They squatted by it.

  “Here’s what I wanted you to see,” she said. She pointed with her trowel to dark surfaces on the side of the probe pit. Moving her trowel downward, she explained.

  “Here is the silting layer and the darker fill that we had in the other pit. Here is the base layer of the dark clay. Then there is this thin layer of black carbon at the top of the dark clay. I think it shows there was a fire here. It makes me think there was possibly some kind of fire damage to the wreck. This fits with what you saw on that frame section, too.”

  “A more recent wreck could have run in here at a real high tide, maybe during a storm, then be left here for years, just rotting. Some kids could have come along and set it on fire for fun,” said Frank, remembering Jake’s speech.

  “That’s possible, but it doesn’t fit with the wreck being below the fill area. The fill alone seems to date the wreck a good two hundred years ago.”

  She went on. “I think this area was a cove of water, fed by a stream from back over the fields, and that the action of the stream filled and silted the cove. That stream is probably still there underground and gives us all this ground water. I think this wreck caught the silt as it came off the fields, stopped it like a dam or barricade, stopped it from going out further into the river, maybe speeded up the filling-in process. Then the pilings were installed at the river’s edge to stop the soil flow even more effectively. There’s something more going on here too.”

  “What?” asked Frank.

  “In the last few years the Nanticoke River has risen here. You can see from the shorelines. That’s what is destroying the bank, weakening the pilings. This site might get washed out in time. Then the wreck would be opened up anyway.”

  “We see global warming everywhere,” mused Frank.

  She nodded. “The silting of two hundred years is being reversed. Unless the bank is rebuilt, the higher tides from the rising water will wash out the soil and uncover whatever is buried here for all to see. Even if those pilings are reinforced they may continue to collapse. Nothing can stop the rising water.”

  “The graves too,” said the Pastor. “The water will open them up. I mean, if they are here,” he quickly added.

  There was a piece of orange and black paper caught on one of the stakes.

  “You lost one of your journal pages,” said the Pastor.

  “It looks like a butterfly,” said Frank.

  Maggie reached down and picked it up, “Clever. Another one of these butterfly things,” she said, holding it for them to see.

  The Pastor smiled. “You see them everywhere in town, Frank. Mrs. Pond will try anything to keep Jake from taking down those nesting trees out on his island.”

  “I’ve seen some of her work already,” grinned Frank.

  Maggie began to read it out loud.

  RED ALERT RED ALERT

  WE NEED YOUR HELP

  HELP US STOP THE NEW BRIDGE TO ALLINGHAM ISLAND

  HELP US STOP THE CONSTRUCTION

  HELP US SAVE OUR FUTURE

  THE BRIDGE WILL BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF OUR HERITAGE

  OF OUR ENVIRONMENT, OF OUR LIFE.

  RED ALERT RED ALERT .

  “It’s just signed ‘BUTTERFLIES’,” she said.

  “How did it get here?” said Frank, looking out at the road.

  “Maybe she came over when we were up at the porch,” said Maggie.

  “At least her coming here brought in a breeze,” said Frank, smiling, his hand up in the cooler air.

  “A breeze is strange coming this time of day,” observed Maggie. “There’re no clouds.”

  “Maybe that guy brought it,” said Frank pointing out at the river.

  The leaves of the trees and bushes around the edges of the site area rustled slightly . Out on the river they could see a small section of ripples move across the surface and disappear into the shore reeds. Then, through the leaves of the riverbank trees, they saw a white work boat approaching. It was almost forty feet long, low to the water, narrow with a cuddy cabin in the bow. A long white wooden awning extended part of the length of the craft suspended on iron plumbing pipes built into the side of the boat. In the center was a rectangular engine box, its top resting partly open to cool the engine running under it in the bright afternoon heat. A rusting exhaust pipe extended up through a hole in the awning, For all its fast lines the craft moved slowly, its engine barely turning revolutions, with each chug a small puff of gray smoke coming from the stack. The craft inched toward a mooring on a crooked tree limb snag staggering from the shallow water about fifty feet from shore.

  A lanky muscular man, old and deeply tanned with a white beard, in canvas colored shorts and bare-chested, stood at the side of the boat, steering with a vertical shaft device attached to pulleys and cables along the gunwales of the boat to the open tiller in the stern.The man reached down inside the boat, threw a switch and the engine idled. Then he went to the stern and, watching carefully the drift of the boat, anticipated his best spot and threw out his anchor. He moved to the bow and when the boat glided to the tree limb, he expertly tied a loop of his mooring line. The man snugged the anchor line and shut down the engine. He opened a can of beer and, observing them on the shoreline, stood silently, drinking.

  “You’re going to meet Soldado.” said the Pastor.

  Frank turned from watching the visitor and moved back toward the bow end of the shipwreck.

  “I’m going to start working on the starboard side at location I. That is where the side of the ship starts to straighten out on an eighty foot ship. If we can find her width, her beam, we’ll estimate her potential length.”

  “Pastor, help me get this pump working,” said Maggie.

  Soldado came ashore a half hour later. He was a towering man, of advanced age. His full white hair and muscular body proclaimed robust health. He walked up to the Pastor and nodded a greeting. Then he looked around at Frank and Maggie.

  “So you two are Jake’s experts.” There was a slight accent to his words, perhaps Spanish, perhaps French, Frank could not be sure.

  Frank held out his hand, “I’m Frank Light and this is Maggie Davis.”

  “Jake Terment, he send you here?” asked Soldado as he shook hands with Frank.

  “He asked me to come in and look at the site, yes,” said Frank.

  Soldado looked at him, holding his head slightly at an angle to the left side so that his eyes were tilted and the tip of his beard folded slightly.

  “You look honest.” He continued, his voice having a slight Hispanic accent. “Let me tell you something for your own good.”

  “What’s that?” said Frank.

  “That Jake, he’s up to something.”

  “Speaking of Jake, he was just here,” said the Pastor.

  “I can smell him. The New York perfume he and that runt Spyder put on themselves.”

  “He told Frank to keep you off the property,” said the Pastor.

  Soldado glanced at Frank. “I want no trouble with you, Doctor. I’ll lea
ve.”

  “No,” said Frank. “Whether you leave or stay is none of my business. I’m just here to look for parts of an old shipwreck. Nothing else.”

  “Maybe you are all right,” said the Pastor, smiling at Frank.

  Soldado said, “There’s wrecks beached up on the river. You might learn something looking them over.”

  “We’d like to see them,” said Frank.

  “I’ll come by tomorrow midday. Take you out on my boat.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “Maybe I can help you in some other ways.” He paused as if he were going to speak again, then walked back to his boat.

  The Pastor was already beginning to dig. ‘‘Maggie, tell me something,” asked Frank, as he prepared his digging gear.

  “What’s that?”

  “What really happened on that site in Southern Maryland?”

  “It wasn’t the problem everyone thought it was. I was never upset. I simply made a decision and stood by it.”

  “I read it was a site of a Confederate spy ring. Their artifacts were discovered right in the middle of the parking lot of a new shopping center.”

  “The artifacts needed attention, needed to be preserved, needed study. I stood up for the history, that’s all. I said the local businessman had to stop his paving machine until I finished.”

  She went on, “Then the Maryland state legislator from that area called my department and I was moved from the job. The paving machine started up an hour after I left.”

  “I heard you were kept at a desk in Baltimore.”

  “There have not been many field assignments since that one, that’s true.”

  “We miss your work in the journals.”

  “I got this assignment only because the Pastor requested me personally.”

  “Look,” Frank said, “Jake Terment just wants to build his bridge. He has a right to do that.”

  “I guess what I’d like to understand is what you’re going to do here. This may be a good site, something we can all be excited about.”

  “You think I’ll just let Jake Terment concrete it over?”

  “Will you? Maybe your school needs one of those big Terment Company contributions.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll do my job.”

  “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” She paused, “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

  “OK.”

  “There’s not going to be any help from my office on this one.”

  “No backup, no analysis, no conservation lab?”

  “Right. My boss told me before I came down here. She said, ‘Don’t bother to send over for any remote sensing equipment. You’re on your own. It’s in all use on other jobs.’”

  “I’m afraid,” said Frank, “That I can’t get anything from the university here in time.”

  “The problem is that our department is small,” said Maggie.” My boss is a political appointee and unfortunately, knows more about how to get votes for the Governor.”

  “The work will just take a little longer, that’s all,” said Frank.

  “You and I both realize the work will take a whole lot longer without the instruments. As a result, we’ll probably overlook a good portion of the history here,” said Maggie.

  She stared at Frank, and he felt the pressure of that stare. “Let’s see what we find before we get too excited,” said Frank.

  Maggie walked away without another word.

  Chapter 4