Judgment of the Grave (10 page)

As Quinn walked out the door, he realized that Havrilek had been signing papers the whole time. He hadn’t missed a beat.

Will Baker liked routine. Ever since he’d bought the inn, he had existed in a happy state of perfect predictability, rising at five for an early-morning walk, usually up to the Old North Bridge and back, then into the kitchen to make sure that the breakfast chef had arrived and was starting the meal preparations. He had a cup of coffee and a croissant in the kitchen while they talked about the day, then went upstairs to shower and change. By seven, he was at the front desk, making a list of which guests were staying and which were checking out so he could give the housekeepers their orders for the day.

He spent much of the morning greeting guests as they came down for breakfast, then oversaw the housekeepers and helped arrange flowers and set things right in the lobby and the lounge. Then it was time for lunch, after which he did errands and spent a couple of hours on accounting and bookkeeping. Then the new check-ins started arriving and he helped them until it was time for dinner. He liked to visit each table for a few moments, then have his own meal alone in his apartment at the back of the inn. In bed about ten and then it was time to get up and do it all over again. Perfect.

The only time he deviated from this schedule was on weekends when he had a reenactment. Then he was able to let his head housekeeper handle a lot of the room details and his assistant manager was able to take care of the guests.

But it was now 11:30 and he wasn’t in bed and didn’t think he was anywhere near being able to go to sleep. Somewhere in the past couple of days, his routine had been disrupted and he didn’t like it one bit. The first thing that had happened was that his head housekeeper, a capable, grandmotherly woman who knew how to clean a bedroom better than anyone he’d ever had on his payroll had informed him that she was too old to be “crawling around on the floor with a vacuum cleaner.” Her husband, she said, had forbidden her from working anymore. She was going to retire. He supposed she had the right to retire if she wanted to, but it was damned inconvenient for him and he was going to have to hire someone to replace her before the holidays, which were a busy time of year.

Then there was this whole thing with the body. Will had heard it had been found from one of the local boys who helped in the kitchen. “There are police everywhere up by Whitings’,” he’d said, coming into the kitchen twenty minutes late for his shift. “Someone said there’s a body up there.” Later Will had heard all the details, how it had been Pres Whiting who had found it, about how the police were baffled by the British uniform, how nobody knew who it was. The police had even called him in to look at a drawing, to see if he recognized the uniform, but of course it was impossible to tell. They said they were going to ask around at the encampment coming up on the weekend, and this bothered Will somehow, that one of the encampments, which he loved, would be marred by this…this awful thing that had happened.

And then there was that woman looking into Josiah Whiting. That, he realized, was what bothered him most of all. It was just too much of a coincidence. Why Josiah Whiting? Why now? He had thought that that whole thing was finished, but here she was, asking questions about him and saying she was interested in his gravestones. It might be true, but he wasn’t sure he bought it.

He got up and put on the teakettle. Outside, it was dark and he couldn’t make out any of the details of the wooded hill behind the inn, or the buildings he could sometimes see above the trees. It was just blackness out there. His mind couldn’t help going to the woods, to the clubhouse and the place where he had spent so much time that one year, that sweet year he couldn’t stop thinking about, no matter how hard he tried.

The water boiled and he made his tea and sat down in the chair again. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do, but he knew he had to do something.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15

Sweeney had already driven by the Whitings’ house and seen the modest white Colonial just barely showing behind the high hedgerow next to the road, but she was unprepared for how driving down the short driveway and into a small gravel-lined parking area would send her back in time. The house looked as though it had barely been changed since it was built by Josiah Whiting’s father in 1756, and the woods that provided the backdrop to the house made her feel that she was much farther away from town than she really was. It was hard to tell exactly where the clubhouse was, but you entered the woods a few hundred yards down Monument Street and walked parallel to the house. It was somewhere back there in the dark trees that the man, whoever he was, had been killed.

It was a beautiful old house, but the peeling paint on the clapboards and the shutters, and the withered vegetable garden on one side of the house, the tall, drooping tomato plants and a witchy-looking scarecrow, gave the place a sinister feeling. Sweeney looked at the woods and shivered.

She knocked on the door, and it was answered almost immediately by a tall woman dressed in a pink sweatsuit and a flowered apron, her white hair piled on top of her head in an elaborate bun. When Sweeney introduced herself and explained what she wanted, the woman said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, the last thing he needs is to get going on Josiah Whiting again,” but she held the door open and led the way through a cluttered, darkened living room stuffed with old furniture and cardboard boxes into a large Colonial kitchen. A fat orange cat jumped off the counter and glared at Sweeney. At the table was a thin gray-haired man, eating what looked like a bowl of tomato soup.

“I’m Sweeney St. George,” Sweeney said nervously. “Your son was going to tell you I might stop by today. Is this a good time? I’m happy to come back if not.”

George Whiting waved her away. “No, no, no,” he said through a mouthful of tomato soup. “Sit down, sit down, tell me what you want.”

Sweeney shrugged off her tweed jacket and sat down across from him at the table. “I’m an art historian. I study gravestones. And I want to know more about Josiah Whiting,” she said.

“He was a hero,” George Whiting said. “He was an American hero, is what he was. What did my son tell you about him?”

“We talked a little bit about his gravestones,” Sweeney said, not sure what the right answer would be. “He showed me some of his work.”

“He’s good at what he does, Bruce, but he doesn’t know anything about Josiah Whiting. He’s lost his sense of patriotism. That’s the problem, and he doesn’t have the proper respect for what our forefathers accomplished here in Concord.” He took a spoonful of soup, dribbling a bit of the red liquid onto his chin. “He went to Vietnam, you know. Didn’t like what he found there. And so he thinks that anyone else who fought in any war feels the same way he does. I can tell you, when I was putting my life on the line in old Italia, I wasn’t thinking about whether my government was justified in sending me over there. I just did what I had to do.”

“George, she doesn’t want to know about you,” the woman said. “She wants to know about Josiah Whiting.” She turned to Sweeney. “Do you want some coffee?”

Sweeney said she was fine and turned back to George, “Cecily said he was killed on April nineteenth, but they never found his body. What do you think happened to him?”

George Whiting pushed his soup bowl aside and stood up. “Come with me,” he said. Sweeney followed him out through the back door onto a little stone patio. A peeling metal table held a couple of anemic-looking begonias in clay pots. They stood for a moment, and Sweeney smelled the woods, the dark, wet, leafy scent of them, and remembered what Pres had said about people hearing a man crying out in pain sometimes.

“Back in those days,” George said. “This was all fields or woods. You’ve gotta imagine what it was like for those men. Josiah was awakened around one in the morning on the nineteenth. The alarm would have spread across the countryside by then and he would have gotten his horse from the stable, which was over there.” He pointed to a low garage on the other side of the vegetable garden. “And he took off through the woods for town. They waited most of the night and then, when the word came from Lexington, they started assembling. Josiah was sent up as a scout, to watch the approach of the British from the ridge, and when it was clear what the Redcoats were up to, he came down and gathered with the rest of the men at the bridge. We know that he fought bravely at the bridge. We have a couple of accounts of that, and we know that as the Redcoats hightailed it back to Boston, Josiah and his company chased them. A number of the regulars were going into houses along the route back and ransacking them, even killing the people who lived there, by some accounts. Josiah and his friend John Baker were chasing down a couple of Redcoats when Baker saw Whiting get bayoneted by a young regular. He gave an account of it ten years later. He tried to help Josiah, but he got caught up in the fighting again and lost track of him. The next day they searched for his body.

“I’ve always thought,” George Whiting continued, “that he must have dragged himself into the woods. He could have been somewhere not too far and maybe he just wanted to go home to his wife, you know? Have her take care of him. But maybe he didn’t make it and he died in the woods and no one ever found him.”

He looked upset for a minute, then said, “This guy they found out there, last weekend. You know about that?”

Sweeney nodded.

“It just about gave me a heart attack, when they told me. It was like…I don’t know, I thought somehow they’d found Josiah. But that’s ridiculous, of course. And this guy, they say he was wearing a Redcoat’s uniform.” Sweeney had the sense that he was going to say something else, but he didn’t. Instead, he just kept looking out at the trees.

They stood there for another few moments and then he turned and walked back inside. Sweeney followed him.

“Who else in town might be able to tell me about him?” she asked.

“Will Baker, who owns the inn, he’s quite a historian. He’s a member of the Concord Minuteman company with me and he’s done a lot of research on his ancestor John Baker. You could ask him.”

“That’s great,” Sweeney said. “I’m staying at the inn, so that will work out well. Oh, and Cecily said that you might have a list of all of Josiah Whiting’s gravestones.”

“Yeah, I’ve got it here somewhere. I have an extra copy from when I made one for Kenneth, the other guy who’s looking into Josiah. Where did I…?” He searched through the piles, turning pieces of paper over and stacking them back up again in a seemingly random order.

“I’m sorry, did you say that there’s someone else who’s studying Josiah Whiting’s gravestones?” Sweeney felt her heart sink. That was all she needed. She thought she had found someone who hadn’t been written about.

“Yeah, Kenneth. He’s a reenactor. He joined the Concord Minutemen this year. Teaches at BU, I think. He’s writing a book about him. I helped him a lot, but I’m not going to help him anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he started asking funny questions. I didn’t like where he was going with it. Oh, here it is.”

“What do you mean? What kind of questions?” She took the three pieces of paper that George handed over.

“He asked me if I’d ever heard anything about Josiah or John Baker being a spy. Ridiculous. I don’t know where he got an idea like that. He didn’t have anything to back it up. I told him I wouldn’t help him anymore if he was going to be talking like that.”

Spies? Why spies? Maybe he’d seen the exhibit at the Minuteman Museum.

She looked down at the pieces of paper. There were hand drawn maps of various graveyards, with stones presumably by Josiah Whiting circled in dark pen. “This is terrific. Thank you for all your help,” she said.

George Whiting walked her to the door and stood with her for a moment.

“Getting cold,” he said. “Always gives me the blues when it starts getting cold.” And then he smiled at her and went back inside.

On her way back to the inn, Sweeney decided to visit the Old North Bridge. She told herself that it made sense to try to get a feel for the place before she got seriously into her research about Josiah Whiting’s heroism at the bridge in April of 1775, but in truth, she just liked the idea of strolling along the river in the crisp October air.

She parked in the designated parking area and crossed Monument Street, headed toward the bridge on a little path flanked by trees. Since it was a weekday, the site was nearly deserted and she wandered past the monument to the British soldiers who had died at the Old North Bridge. The modest plaque, set into a low wall, read, “They came three thousand miles, and died / To keep the past upon its throne: / Unheard beyond the ocean tide / Their English mother made her moan.”

She crossed the bridge and stood beneath the Minuteman statue. This was where Josiah Whiting and the other men of the Concord militia had gathered before the first shot was fired.

She felt an odd surge of pride. Sweeney was not a particularly patriotic American. She had spent much of her adult life living outside of the United States and had gotten used to preempting her British friends’ comments about American imperialism and cultural vapidness with cuts of her own. Though she didn’t like paying them, she rather believed there ought to be more taxes than there were, more government control. But when it came right down to it, she believed in the values that Josiah Whiting had spilled his blood for: democracy, self-determination, freedom.

She looked up at the woods. “Where are you, Josiah Whiting?” she said softly before she turned back for the parking lot.

It was five as she walked into the lobby of the Minuteman, and she decided that she’d see if Will Baker was free to talk. She could ask him about Josiah Whiting and see if he had anything to add to what George Whiting had told her. She also wanted to call BU and see if she could track down this Kenneth Churchill.

But as she walked into the lobby, she saw a man standing there, talking to the woman behind the registration desk. He was holding a baby and trying to balance a stroller, two suitcases, and a large diaper bag, and as Sweeney watched, he dropped one of the suitcases and the baby began to cry.

She crossed the lobby and stood there, not sure what to say. “Hey,” she said finally.

He looked up, and the expression she saw on his face was not mere surprise but something more like shock. He stared at her as though she were the very last person he would ever have expected to see in the lobby of the Minuteman Inn.

“Sweeney?” His blue eyes looked dark in the low light.

It was Quinn.