Monstrous Beauty (10 page)

She walked around the coffins, examining them. They must have weighed a couple of tons apiece. They both had heavy lids, but they were plenty large enough to hold a person, and they seemed to be watertight. It wasn’t completely impossible that Eleanor could have been drowned in one if it were filled with water. Perhaps the lids had been off in 1873? She was running her hand over the inscription when she heard shuffling footsteps. She stood up straight and turned around, her cheeks heating up.

An elderly minister came down the hall from the direction of the stairs. He had a weathered face and wild white hair, and his arms were crossed, as if he were holding his fragile body together.

“Thar’s a youth en the crrrypt!” he said joyfully, with a thick Scottish accent.

Damn, she was probably going to get ratted out to Ms. Strickland.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t disturb anything, I promise. I was just exploring,” she said.

His face dropped. He stopped where he was and put both hands to his chest. He stared at her. His eyes seemed to be building tears.

Hester said, “Are you all right? Do you need to sit down?” She retrieved a wooden chair from the corner, brushing cobwebs off the ladder back as she rushed over to him.

“Sit here for a minute and rest,” she said. “I’ll go up and get help.”

“Na,” he said. He gripped her arm with both hands and looked into her eyes as she eased him into the chair. “Na, lassie, truly, I feel well. En fact, I feel be’ter than well.” He said the word “better” with the t’s missing: beh-er.

“Are you one of the elders Pastor Marks called to investigate the”—the words “pubic hair” popped to mind, but struck her as improper—“the stained glass?”

He laughed, with a pleasing high crack in his voice. “The pubes waere a wee bit carlish, eh? Losh, I’m fond of a good joke, tho’.” He shook his head and said, “But na, I wannae summoned here.” He motioned vaguely to the tombs along the wall. “I’m re-saerchin’ some o’ the family names for the chaerch records.”

“Well, then, maybe you know about these two sarcophagi.”

He became serious. “I wonder why those in par-ticular would interest you?”

“No reason,” she said defensively. “I mean, I’m curious, that’s all. They were built for two bodies that couldn’t possibly be using them. Reverend Robinson died in Leiden before he could join the Pilgrims in America, and William Brewster is thought to be buried somewhere on Burial Hill.”

His lips curled into the impish smile again. “And she’s as sharp as a needle. Such luck! These coffins waere carved en 1624 as a tribute to the leaders of the faerst congregation. I often wonder how Elder Brewster responded to the gesture, seein’ as he was a vigorous man o’ fifty-eigh’ a’ the time. Which is to say you’re correct: they’re empty. Empty as a bo’tle of scotch on my baerthday!” He burst out laughing again. Hester found both his laugh and his missing t’s delightful. Her wariness evaporated as a bubble of laughter escaped her, too.

“I didn’t think pastors drank,” she said. “Or at least that they admitted it.”

“Ah, bu’ I’m retired, you see. And I’m also Sco’tish, so et’s my baerth righ’.” He stood up, with some signs of stiffness, and extended a bony, frail hand. “Michael Morangie McKee.”

She shook his hand. It was cool and dry, with thin skin. “Hester. Hester Goodwin.”

“Hester,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Et’s
awfully
good to speak with you, I cannae tell you.”

“I have to say, you have the most charming accent.”

“Losh, and she’s kind t’ boot! I grew up en the town of Tain, a’ the edge of the Morangie Forest. Tha’s the origin of my middle name. You may have heard tell tha’ Morangie makes the bes’ scotch en the world; well, the McKees made the bes’ scotch en Morangie.” He looked into the middle distance, and his eyes became glassy with tears. “Och, my darlen mother loved tha’ forest.”

“I’m sorry…”

“And she also loved haer scotch!” He guffawed with his eyebrows raised so high his forehead was a mass of lines.

Hester laughed, too. She was beginning to like this dotty old preacher with the rubbery face and a penchant for drinking.

“I wish you could taste the scotch from Tain,” he said.

She shook her head. “I don’t drink.”

“I had a beau’iful li’tle flask once—hand-hammered selver, et was. A geft from my mum when I took orders.” He patted his waistcoat pocket. “Used to keep et right here.” He laughed. “Et fet enside there like a glove! Tha’ flask was full o’ McKee family scotch, the las’ time I had et.”

“Where is it now?”

“Och, I lost et—en the ocean, of all places. Years ago. But I’d dearly love to have et back.”

There was a slight pause, and Hester wondered if her family might be looking for her.

Pastor McKee saw her eyes wander to the stone stairs.

“Tell me, Hester Goodwin, wha’ were you saerchin’ for en this forgo’ten place?”

Hester looked back at him. “To tell you the truth, I read that a woman drowned here, a long time ago. I was confused about how she could drown in a crypt, so I decided to look around.”

“Who was she, this woman, do you know?” he pressed.

“Her name was Eleanor Ontstaan. I don’t know much about her but…” Hester hesitated.

“But wha’, lamb?”

“Well, there’s a connection between her and my family. My great-great-great-grandmother was also named Ontstaan.”

He nodded, listening intently, but didn’t say anything.

“Pastor McKee, do you think we really have a ghost up there in the sanctuary? I mean, does the church even believe in ghosts? Because—if there is a ghost—maybe it’s related to this drowning?”

It sounded so ridiculous when she said it out loud.

“Tell me, lassie, have you paerchance heard any local tales o’ sea folk?” he said out of the blue.

“Uh…” Hester wondered where he was going with this.

“I’ve haerd tell they live en the deepes’ par’ of our own bay.”

“Why do you ask?”

He shrugged and shifted his feet, preparing to sit in the chair again. She held his arm while he lowered himself into it. “Jus’ tha’ tales o’ ghosts and tales o’ sea folk paersist en the world. Even an educated paerson mus’ wonder ef thar’s a reason for et.”

Hester considered telling him about what Peter’s dad had claimed to see in the bay, and her own childish underwater vision, but decided not to encourage him.

Pastor McKee was suddenly somber. “They’re all women, so I’ve haerd. They’ve kelled feshermen and sailors. They’re no’ human. En fact, they’re emmortal. They have no soul … unless they carry a human child.”

Hester listened politely. Why was he telling her this? She could only assume the poor man had the beginnings of dementia.

She heard Sam’s voice in the distance: “Hess? You down here?”

“It’s my brother,” she said. “I’d better go. Should I send someone for you?”

“Na, lassie. I’m as strong as I ever am. You may safely leave me to my work.”

“It was nice to meet you,” Hester said.

“I hope very much to speak with you again,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. It gave Hester a little pang in her chest to leave him like that.

“Me, too.” She leaned down and patted his hand. “G’bye.”

She ran to the stairs and took them two at a time.

When she emerged from the basement, Sam was in the hall outside of the sanctuary door, peeking through the crack. He turned when he heard her, and a smile peeled open on his face. He looked a bit like a gigantic, cuddly stuffed bear.

“There you are!” he said. “What were you doing?”

“Looking for clues to the original haunting.”

“Well, you managed to miss all the action, Sherlock.” He pulled the sanctuary door open as if it were the night before Christmas and gifts were hidden inside. “C’mere.”

She stuck her head through the opening. The room was empty. The stained-glass windows were … perfectly hairless.

“The pubic hair spontaneously shriveled,” Sam whispered over her shoulder. “It smelled like real burned hair, and it blew away before Pastor Marks had even finished phoning the elders. I saw it with my own eyes. It vanished without a trace!”

“Nancy is going to freak out that you saw it.” Hester grinned, standing up straight.

Sam smiled back and carefully closed the door behind her. “It was so worth it.”

Chapter 16

T
HE NEXT DAY
after work Hester drove to Burial Hill. Her plan was to walk methodically through the graveyard, studying the inscriptions and looking for something else she might have missed in addition to the Ontstaan graves. As she strolled, the blanket of dreary clouds and misty pinpricks of rain reminded her of the end-of-year party at the picnic area. At the top of the hill she looked out over the bay. The water was a murky gray: choppy, unreflective, out of sorts. She couldn’t see the beach, but she could imagine it. Her mind took her down the stone steps, as clearly as if she were there, and set her feet on the sand. The tide was low in this vision, the cave exposed and captivating. She stood there in a distracted sort of trance for a few minutes, and then willed herself back to the moment, shook her head clear, and focused on the task at hand.

It took some time to find the grave of Bartholomew Crotty and his two wives, facing away from the path, nestled near a chain-link fence. It was a single, bleached headstone with a simple cluster of carved flowers as an embellishment at the top. She squatted to push down the weeds that blocked the lowest lines.

BARTHOLOMEW CROTTY

1863–1955

Short is our longest day of Life

MARIJN HIS WIFE

1873–1892

Called by God from the side of her infant Daughter Nellie

LUCY HIS WIFE

1870–1942

Farewell dear Wife untill that day more blest

When if deserving I with thee shall rest,

With thee shall rise with thee shall live above

In worlds of endless bliss and boundless love

Marijn Crotty
must
be her great-great-great-grandmother, Marijn Ontstaan. Really, how many women named Marijn could have been born in 1873 and died in her town?

Hester quickly did the arithmetic. Marijn was nineteen when she died. Her husband, Bartholomew, was only twenty-nine when Marijn died—too young to remain a widower—and so he married Lucy. Lucy lived to be seventy-two, dying when Bartholomew was seventy-nine. He lived until he was ninety-two.

She stood, staring at the inscription. A story bloomed in her mind’s eye. When Marijn met Bartholomew, she was fresh and young, and likely innocent. He must have seemed to her to be mature, experienced, and worldly. At the time, a man would not propose marriage unless he had earned money to buy a home and was settled in his profession. Marijn had to have been beautiful or brilliant or bitingly witty—in some way completely irresistible—for him to scoop her up at such a tender age. Hester imagined a whirlwind romance, and the Angeln parents expressing nervousness at her leaving their home so young, but also relief at Bartholomew’s good prospects.
What were the Angeln names again?
Hester asked herself. They were printed in the
Old Colony
article about the deaths in the church.

“Joseph and Eliza,” she said out loud, remembering.

Joseph and Eliza. She imagined how they felt when their adopted daughter got married, nearly two decades after the horrific deaths of their birth daughter and Eliza’s sister. What joy a wedding would have brought them. A wedding, followed by a pregnancy, and the happy birth of a baby girl. But then, because of the sheer caprice of nature, or the will of God, Marijn had suffered a delivery complication that the doctor failed to identify or cure.

Hester started for home, still unfolding the past in her mind. Marijn’s daughter, Nellie, never knew her. Her husband undoubtedly grieved—swallowed up for a time in sorrow. He raised Nellie alone. He got on his feet again. Soon, he realized that Nellie needed a mother. Later, he admitted to himself that he was lonely. He longed for a lover—not the memory of a lover, but a person of flesh and blood to greet him with warm arms when he arrived home every night. He needed someone to laugh with, someone to pursue his dreams with, someone to wake up in bed with, and to grow old with.

Lucy’s epitaph was extensive and adoring because Lucy was the one who had lived a long life with him. Lucy was the one Nellie grew up loving as her mother, and running to when she skinned her knee or had her feelings crushed. Lucy was the person at Bartholomew’s side for business functions, at church, at dinners and dances. Lucy was the woman who grew old and respected, and was mourned by friends and family and townsfolk when she died. Marijn’s epitaph, by contrast, was perfunctory and already distant. She was almost no one: a blip in Eleanor’s life, a mystery to her daughter, Nellie, and a fleeting blaze of fire early in Bartholomew’s plodding ninety-two years.

Hester reached the stairs leading down to School Street, with the old church looming at her side. She held on tightly to the iron railing, teetering at the top. She felt mentally buffeted, as if the secrets of that headstone, locked up and neglected for so long, were finally liberated and hurling themselves at her. Marijn had been practically her age when she had died. So young, with her entire life ahead of her. Everything she might have done or become was lost to the world. Because of Marijn’s death, Bartholomew’s passion never had a chance to evolve into a deeply comforting love—like the bond Hester saw between Malcolm and Nancy after their fifteen years together. Nellie had never been held by Marijn as a little girl, had never grown irritated by her as a teen, had never returned to her for guidance as a young woman.

Hester’s own biological mother, Susan, was the same mystery to her: she was merely stories from other people’s memories. She was the same handful of photographs that never moved or laughed. She was wistful looks in other people’s eyes.

Hester sat down on the top step. Susan had died knowing this—knowing that she would be only a phantom limb in Hester’s life; knowing that Hester would run to another woman’s arms when she stumbled. In the most recent generation of her family’s mysterious series of deaths, Nancy had played the role of Lucy. Nancy had been by Malcolm’s side as he worked his way up from a postdoctoral researcher at Woods Hole, to staff scientist, to the head of the Ocean Life Institute. Nancy had taken Hester to ballet class, and then soccer practice, and then fencing lessons, until finally Hester had discovered her real hobby—and her passion for history—as an interpreter at Plimoth Plantation, where Nancy drove her every weekend during the school year and every day of the summer until she got her driver’s license. Nancy had comforted her and buoyed her when she got her period at age ten, too young to understand, while
Susan
—lovely, pitiful Susan—was ashes, scattered from a Captain Dave boat in a private ceremony, indistinguishable from the sand and the algae at the bottom of the ocean.