The Caged Graves (16 page)

The inscription on the older of the two was worn nearly to illegibility. Verity could make out only the last name, CLAYTON, and a death date beginning with the numbers 17–.

The other was not as old, but strange indeed.

 

CALEB CLAYTON

 

1780–1832

STAY PUT NOW

 

“Begone, you foul creature!” boomed a voice from the darkness.

Stifling a shriek, Verity whirled around. She thrust the lantern in front of her in defense.

Eli Clayton loomed over her, his hair awry, his brow bunched in anger. He held a walking stick in the air as if he was about to strike her with it. She gasped and stepped backward. He watched her, his expression slowly changing from fury to astonishment. “You!” he gasped. “What are
you
doing here?”

Verity didn't need to explain her presence to this man. “Who did you think I was?” she countered, her heart pounding.

He clamped his lips shut, but his eyes skittered sideways toward the caged grave of his daughter Asenath. Verity felt a prickle of horror crawl up her spine.

Eli Clayton turned his malevolent gaze back on her and growled, “What are you doing
here?
”

She glanced down involuntarily at the stones in the ground between them. “Who were these people?” she asked. “Relations of yours?”

“Get out of here!” Clayton snarled, his voice low and angry. “Stay out of my family matters, or worse will befall you than being trampled by a horse!”

He stepped menacingly toward her, and Verity suddenly awakened to her danger. This man had nearly gotten her killed once before. She bolted from the church grounds, taking the hill at a breakneck pace. Shooting pains in her ankle didn't slow her, nor did the fall of darkness when her lantern blew out. She was gasping for air by the time she reached the top of the hill and staggering by the time she stumbled up the front steps of her father's house. She locked the front door behind her.

When she reached her bedchamber, she found her mother's last diary lying on her bed, open to the very same page as before:

 

Nov 10 – Asenath has it bad too.

Nov 12 – Feeling no better today. Very tired of being so sick.

Nov 14 – Asenath pins her hopes on Miss Piper's remedies.

 

Beside the open diary lay the photograph of John and Asenath Thomas.

Verity recoiled. “Who's doing this?” she cried, turning around and looking at the four walls of her room as if they held some answer. “Why?”

This time she didn't just think about jamming a chair under the knob of her door.

She did it.

 

Brisk knocking startled her awake in the morning. Verity leaped out of bed, pushed aside the chair, and threw open the door. Her father was standing in the hallway, holding her kitten in the air by the scruff of his neck. Lucky curled his tail toward his belly and looked repentant.

“Oh!” she cried, reaching out.

Ransloe Boone handed the kitten over. “He was hollering for breakfast at the back door. Lazy thing should be catching his own meals.”

His gruffness didn't fool Verity at all. “Thank you, Father,” she said, throwing one arm around him and kissing his cheek. He grunted in surprise, and when she stepped back, he left wearing the biggest smile she'd seen on him since she'd come home.

Cuddling the kitten under her chin, she turned to face her room. In the bright morning light, with her pet safely home just as her father had predicted, her fears and fancies of the night before seemed silly. Eli Clayton had frightened her in the cemetery, staring down at her with wild eyes as if she were Asenath out of her grave. But he was crazy; everyone in town knew that. She certainly wouldn't go walking alone at night again, now that she knew he might be out there.

As for the diary and the photograph left out for her to find—Verity had thrown them both into her mother's trunk last night and buckled it closed, convinced that Nate was right and she needed to leave the past alone. But what if she wasn't supposed to leave it alone?

What if that was the message contained in the photograph and the diary?

Her courage rekindled, she set Lucky on the bed. She pulled the trunk's leather straps free of the buckles and threw open the lid.

Verity reread the final entries of her mother's last diary, hoping to see something she'd missed. The days leading up to her mother's death were ordinary and unremarkable. And the final page was heartbreaking. Verity closed that book, puzzled and no more enlightened than before. Then she returned to the one Sarah Ann Boone had written in the summer of 1852 and took up reading from where she'd left off.

Rebecca Clayton's death had been only one of several that August.

The night of the funeral, other members of the Clayton family sickened, succumbing to the same ailment that had felled Rebecca. And the day after that, Asenath took ill too.

 

Aug 16 – Mother sent for us at once. Asenath fell ill in the evening—cramps in the stomach and gut. We all knew it was the same thing that has taken her family, even though we did not want to say it.

 

Dire stomach pains followed by lethargy and stupor resulted in the death of Rebecca's grandmother, a baby, and an aunt, and the Thomases feared for Asenath's life.

 

Every person in this town with the name of Clayton has fallen to it. What nature of illness can pick out people by their name? It is no wonder people are remembering the stories about a curse on that poor wretched family!

 

Verity's mother didn't think it was a matter of contagion. Asenath had not visited her family home since the day of Rebecca's death.

On August 17, the entry read:

 

Heart beats slow. She waters from the eyes, nose, and mouth. Chokes if we lay her down. She is very sleepy, but we are afraid to let her sleep. Those who died fell into a stupor before they passed.

 

Sarah Ann Boone's hands had shaken as she wrote those words.

However, later that evening, she wrote:

 

There is no more drool and her heartbeat is stronger. I dared not write it before, but praise the Lord, I think she will live.

 

The following day's entry reported:

 

Asenath is much better today, John is prostrate with exhaustion and relief, and Mother broke down and repented of every unkind thing she has ever said. Ransloe took us down to church to pray, where we heard disturbing gossip from town. Sometimes I cannot credit what ignorant people will stoop to believing.

 

Verity wondered what the townsfolk had been saying, but her mother did not record it.
I heard it again today, and it is not worth repeating,
she wrote on August 19.

And then, on August 20:

 

When I heard about Rebecca's grave being opened last night, I ran from the room and emptied my stomach. What has the world come to? How could anyone desecrate the dead in such a vile manner?

 

There it was. Verity could draw only one conclusion—this was the incident her father had mentioned. Rebecca Clayton's grave had been robbed, her body stolen and sold to medical students.

Verity closed the diary. An illness that took only Claytons? Ignorant gossip in town and pillaged graves?

If she wanted to know what had really happened in the summer and fall of 1852, she was going to have to seek more information from people who liked to gossip and tell stories, even when it wasn't prudent to do so.

“CARRIE,” VERITY ventured, eyeing Nate's sister over her cup of tea, “I was at the cemetery yesterday, and I realized that there are two other graves outside the wall. One of them has the strangest inscription . . .”

Carrie's blue eyes twinkled. “I'll bet you mean the Clayton stones.”

Annie and Carrie had been delighted to receive Verity's calling card and promptly invited her for afternoon tea. They welcomed her in the family library, a much cozier room than the front parlor, where Verity had looked through countless issues of
Godey's
with Mrs. McClure. The sisters expressed regrets from Hattie, who was unable to join them. The youngest McClure sister was nursing her husband, whose war injury had flared up.

“Yes, those two,” Verity agreed, smiling as if her interest in the subject were only a passing fancy. “I said to myself, if anyone knows the story, Carrie will.”

“She does indeed.” Annie sniffed with mock disapproval. “It's her favorite story after the Battle of Wyoming.”

Carrie waved a hand dismissively at her older sister. “All part of the
same
story, as it happens. The older stone belongs to the fellow I told you about: the Clayton who survived the massacre and might have escaped with the soldiers' gold. Some say he made a bargain with the Devil to get out of the swamp alive; others say he murdered another soldier for the gold and brought a blood curse down upon his head.” Carrie seemed to find both possibilities equally thrilling. “Whichever it was, he didn't make out well in the end. He lived in Catawissa for a while, but somebody turned him over to a regiment of Continental soldiers at Forty Fort and they shot him for desertion. Repeatedly.”

“Once wasn't enough?” Verity asked.

“They say it took five musket balls to put him down. Even that wasn't enough. They took their eyes off him, thinking he was dead, and he almost got away—staggered to his feet and into the woods. They had to—” Annie cleared her throat loudly, and Carrie changed whatever she'd been going to say. “Take more drastic methods after that. If you ask me, they should have made him give up the gold before they killed him!”

“I don't believe he had any gold,” said Annie. “The Claytons live like paupers.”

“Well, he couldn't use it openly, could he?” Carrie protested. “People suspected him, and he kept it hidden somewhere. Drove his son, Caleb, crazy looking for it.”

“Caleb Clayton didn't have far to go,” Annie said.

“And the other grave belongs to the deserter's son?” Verity asked. “What relation was he to the present Claytons?”

“Caleb, the son, was Eli's father,” said Carrie. “
My
father said Caleb was the meanest, craziest wretch the town has ever known—and that's saying a lot, when you consider Eli.”

“What's the meaning of that epitaph—
Stay put now?
” Verity asked.

Carrie leaned forward eagerly in her chair, her carefully curled hair bobbing on her shoulders. “They had to put him in his coffin
twice.
Father saw it.” Annie clicked her tongue in annoyance, and Carrie darted a look her way. “Well, he
did,
Annie!” She turned back to Verity and lowered her voice. “Our father was about fifteen when Caleb Clayton died, and he went to the wake out of curiosity—just to make sure Caleb was really dead, he said. About halfway through the evening, everyone heard a moan . . . and a rustling . . . and the coffin began to shake. Father said the hair stood up on the back of his neck, and if he could have gotten out of the house, he would have! But the coffin was between him and the door. Then the whole thing fell off the table—and Caleb kicked his way out of it!” Carrie's eyes were alight with gleeful horror. “He staggered to his feet . . . then turned and grabbed his wife by the neck and started strangling her!”

“No!” gasped Verity.

“He did!” insisted Carrie. “And people were too stunned and frightened to stop him, except Eli, who grabbed up a shotgun and emptied both barrels into his father. Then, when Caleb was down and still, they rolled him back into the coffin, closed it up, put it back on the table, and went on with the wake. My father swore to it.”

Verity looked back and forth between the sisters, wide-eyed. “He wasn't dead.”

“Not the first time,” murmured Annie. “Father thinks he must have been in a drunken stupor, and his wife knew it. She probably hoped they'd put him in the ground before anyone noticed—he was such a hateful cuss.”

“But Eli Clayton wasn't punished?” asked Verity. “He killed his father in front of half the town.”

“You can't kill somebody who's already dead,” replied Carrie. “And none of the Claytons rest easy in their graves. I've heard lots of people say as much.”

“Is that true of my aunt Asenath as well?”

The teasing light in Carrie's eyes died out. “Oh, I—” Annie gave her sister a withering look, and Carrie winced. “I'm sorry, Verity,” she said earnestly. “I forgot she was a Clayton. I was only a child when she died, and I don't remember her very well.”

Verity nodded, accepting the apology. She could hardly be offended when this was what she'd come to hear.

“Your uncle could have had the pick of any girl in town,” Carrie declared, then cast a sideways glance at her sister. “Including Annie, I think. If he chose Asenath Clayton, she must not have been like the others.”

“Why were she and my mother buried with those two Clayton men outside the church?” After regaling her with those other horrible stories, they could hardly refuse to tell her now.

Annie, still red cheeked after Carrie's comment, looked pained. “Very few Claytons ever made it into the churchyard, and when they did, parishioners complained. There was trouble.”

Trouble with the parishioners or with the dead Claytons?
Verity wondered. But instead of pursuing that, she asked, “Did my mother die of the strange illness that otherwise made only Claytons ill? Asenath survived it once, but it came back, didn't it?”