The Secret of the Missing Grave Read online

  Ab cast a sheepish glance at Mr. and Mrs. Proverb, who, seeing that she was all right, departed with a sleepy “good-night.”

  “What is it, Punkin’?” asked her dad softly.

  Good question, thought Ab. “I thought I heard a noise,” she said.

  “What kind of noise?”

  Ab squirmed a little. She knew that if she told them, they’d say, Oh, that’s only the wind, or probably just the house settling. Still, they’d asked—and she had gotten them out of bed—so she told them.

  “Breathing?” said her mother when she’d finished.

  “Breathing?” her father echoed. “You mean like this?” He panted rapidly in and out, like an overheated Saint Bernard. Ab giggled.

  “No,” she said. “Not like that.”

  “It was probably just the wind,” said her mother, patting her on the shoulder. Ab peeked out the window. The willow tree, which swayed in the slightest breeze, was perfectly motionless against the glow of the streetlight.

  “Or the house settling,” said her father reassuringly. It was as if they’d rehearsed their parts. He lowered her head to the pillow and tucked the covers up under her chin. “The only thing you’ve got to be afraid of is what’s up here.” He tapped her on the forehead. “You’ve got too much imagination.”

  Not to hear Bean tell it, she thought.

  They left the room quietly and closed the door.

  Abby was beginning to wonder if they were right. Maybe she had been imagining things. She’d nearly convinced herself of that and was just drifting off to sleep when the slow, metallic thumping began again. It was coming from her closet.

  She modified her response this time. She didn’t scream, but she did hide under the covers. It didn’t help; the bumping sound continued. Surely her folks would hear it and come running to her rescue. They didn’t.

  Then, as quickly as it started, it stopped. Ab peeked out from under the covers and stared holes into the deep shadows in the corner of the room where the closet door stood partially open. For a long time she waited, the blood throbbing in her ears as she held her breath.

  But someone else was breathing. Once again a long, low inward breath, carrying with it a sorrowful sigh, drew a faint rush of air by her ears. Then all was quiet.

  “It’s the house,” said Ab as she and Bean ambled down the narrow path to the quarry. The sweet grass slapped at their ankles. Now and then, they spied a wild strawberry and stopped to pick it.

  “Well,” Bean replied, “you said it was haunted.”

  “No,” Ab replied thoughtfully. “Well, yes—but I don’t feel that it’s something in the house. I mean, it’s the house itself. As if it’s alive.”

  Bean, holding an alder branch aside so Ab could pass, made eerie sound effects.

  “What if it is alive?” Ab retorted emphatically. “Haven’t you ever felt that a house has a soul, or something?” Bean rolled his eyes. “No, think about it. Sometimes, when you’re sitting in a house, don’t you feel as if you’re being watched, even when there’s nobody’s home?”

  “Nobody’s home,” echoed Bean. “You got that right.” He tapped his temple.

  Ab pressed on. “Haven’t you ever had that feeling?” She stopped short and put her hands on her hips, as if challenging him to deny it. She knew her Bean.

  “I suppose,” Bean admitted grudgingly. “In an old house.”

  “Well, you sure would have that feeling at the Moses Webster House.”

  True, thought Bean. He would. The Moses Webster House was the biggest on the island. It had a tower in which a solitary window seemed to cast a stem eye over the town that Moses Webster had created. For a number of years, the house had stood empty, slowly falling into disrepair and inviting squirrels, bats, and homeless ghosts through its broken windows. Ever since the Johnsons had moved in and fixed up the place, Bean never looked at the house or thought of it without imagining it as it had been during those lonely, vacant years. The long fingers of the big dead elm tree in the comer of the front yard seemed to point at the tower on moonlit nights as if to say, best ye take the long way home than pass ye too close by.

  Passersby automatically crossed to the far side of the road, and even the most hardened skeptic couldn’t help but entertain the notion that, if ghosts did exist, the Moses Webster House would be the perfect place for them.

  Bean shuddered.

  “I think it’s sad,” said Ab, who had been talking all the while, but Bean hadn’t heard her because he’d been wrapped up in his own thoughts.

  “What’s sad?” he said.

  “The house,” Ab replied as they arrived at the quarry. “Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  “Sure I have,” he asserted in self-defense. Then his conscience caught up with him. “Well,” he added, “I was thinking.” He took off his T-shirt, blue jeans, and shoes, revealing baggy blue and yellow swim trunks from which he seemed to sprout like an undernourished scarecrow. His legs were blindingly white.

  “Wow, we’ll have to call you Frosty,” she said, shielding her eyes mockingly.

  She undressed to her new pink bathing suit. “What were you thinking about that was so important you couldn’t listen to me?”

  Casting a kind of sideways glance at Ab, Bean suddenly felt even more uncomfortable. “About whatever it was you said,” he answered. “Last one in’s a rotten egg.” So saying, he hurled himself off the granite cliff at the cold green water below.

  A year ago Ab would have been right behind him. Now, though, she merely sauntered casually to the edge and sat down, dangling her legs and waiting for Bean’s copper-spangled head to bob out of the water. She knew it would eventually, out near the middle of the quarry.

  On the surface Bean thrashed around as if he were about to drown, but underwater he was like a fish. He could swim much farther than anyone else, even the older teenagers, who were now sunning themselves on the rough-cut granite slag heap that towered over the other side of the quarry. Even they were impressed, and they threw pebbles to mark the spot where they thought Bean would surface.

  This time, though, Bean came straight through his own cloud of bubbles and looked up the smooth-sided cliff at Ab, silhouetted thirty-five feet above against the bright blue sky. “You’re a rotten egg,” he proclaimed loudly, his voice echoing off the cliffs.

  Ab pretended to brush something from her knee as she studied him down the length of her nose. “Don’t be so childish,” she said, sighing. Of course, things would have been different had she been able to beat him into the water.

  Nevertheless, Abby’s aloof attitude confused Bean more than ever, and somehow her words hurt him. “Oh, yeah?” he said, buying time for something clever to come to mind. “Well, what about putting that napkin down my back?” He was paddling awkwardly to keep his skinny body afloat.

  Ab laughed lightly and tossed her head. “That was entirely different,” she announced, as if it were. Which it wasn’t.

  “What about a house that’s alive?” Bean retorted in his most annoying voice. Flailing away, he swam toward the ledges. Then he pulled himself out and began the long climb—by soggy little hand-holds and narrow, pebbly ledges—up the familiar cliffs. He was too angry to even notice how cold it was in those pockets of shadow.

  Now why did I say that? thought Abby. It was as if something had suddenly come over her. She didn’t think Bean was childish. She thought he was great. He’d been her best friend since the first summer she came to the island when she was four, and they’d shared a hundred wonderful adventures together.

  The summer she was laid up with a broken leg, it was Bean who spent time with her, playing board games and reading books, when she knew he’d rather be out in his boat poking around the shallows. She remembered the times they tramped over Armburst Hill, with its craggy caves and spruce-covered granite ledges that rose high over the village. And the Trolly Pond cliff and its heart-stopping view of all Penobscot Bay. And to the south, Matinicus and Criehaven, those strange is
lands that some days seemed to float high above the horizon and other days—even perfectly clear days—couldn’t be seen at all. To the west were the White Islands—spiked nests of evergreen against the backdrop of the rolling blue Camden Hills. Up the bay were North Haven, Islesboro, and Eagle Island and, to the north, Blue Hill and Mount Desert.

  Ab took a deep breath. She might live in New York City, but her home was Penobscot Island. It always would be. “Good ol’ Bean,” she said aloud, just above a whisper. What had come over her anyway?

  “I was just teasing,” she apologized as Bean’s red head poked above the ledge. “You’re right. I’m a rotten egg.”

  Bean had been seething as he climbed. He’d been rehearsing what Ab would say, then imagining what he would reply. In fact, he had the whole conversation mapped out in his head, and it wasn’t a very pleasant conversation, at that.

  Now this.

  There was only one thing for him to say. “I didn’t mean that about the house being alive, either.”

  Ab smiled. “Well, I admit that it sounds pretty silly in the daylight. But at night ... ”

  “I know. Things are different in the dark.”

  For a while they forgot about the strange noises. Instead they climbed down to the water and played and splashed and swam and dived in the little comer of the quarry they’d staked out for themselves.

  When Bean went to chase a small trout into the emerald depths, Ab sat on a ledge with her legs in the water up to her knees. New York seemed a million miles away. There, all her friends were wearing makeup. Some had started to smoke. Some were dating. Some ... well, as her dad said, they were thirteen going on thirty, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.

  What would they think if they saw her here, hanging around with Bean? She could almost hear the mocking laughter. What would they think of Bean? They’d be hysterical.

  Just then Bean’s head broke the surface in a shower of spray made golden by the sunshine. He gasped and sputtered and made one of his silly faces. She smiled, but there was a trace of sadness to the smile. Those girls would never understand.

  Too bad for them.

  The sky was an unbelievable blue filled with puffy white clouds. They seemed to drift aimlessly around the heavens as they watched the deep magic of a Maine summer cast its spell on those fortunate enough to share it.

  There were a lot of people in the quarry. Little ones in the slippery shallows just off the path shouted, “Look, ma. Watch. Ma!” while their mothers tried to carry on conversations with friends whose own children chirped the same timeless refrain. Boisterous teenagers stretched out on the granite slabs overhanging the Deeps, the cold black canyon that went straight down more than 150 feet. They talked too loudly and played their radios too loudly, and they defied gravity and physics with feats of daring and foolhardiness. They were saying, in their own way, Hey, look at me. Watch. Hey!

  On the way home Ab and Bean took their time, poking at tar bubbles in the hot pavement and tossing stones at the windows of the abandoned schoolhouse down by the ball field, which had given way to tall grass and cat-o’ -nine-tails.

  “They say there’s a tunnel between the Moses Webster House and the Winthrop House,” said Bean offhandedly. He plucked a piece of grass and stuck it between his teeth.

  Ab stopped in her tracks. “Who says?”

  Bean shrugged. “Everybody knows.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Nobody’s ever found it.”

  “Then how do you know it’s there?”

  Bean didn’t know. “Let’s ask my mom. She’s the one who told me.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Carver after a little thought, “I’m not sure where I heard that. It’s just one of those legends you learn growing up on the island.”

  “Tell us about it, Mrs. Carver,” Ab pleaded excitedly.

  Bean’s mom finished drying the dishes and hung the dishcloth to dry on the metal rack over the oil stove. “I’d love to, but I have to make a blueberry pie for supper tonight.”

  “We’ll help,” Ab volunteered.

  Bean was less enthusiastic. “We will?”

  Ab regarded him with a furrowed brow. “We will.” She smiled up at Mrs. Carver. “And she can tell us while we work.”

  Mrs. Carver nodded and held out her hand to Abby. “Deal,” she said. “You guys get the berries out of the pantry. They need to be washed and have the stems taken off. Pick out the white ones and put them aside with the stems.”

  Once everything was ready, Mrs. Carver began her story.

  “Moses Webster and Isaiah Winthrop were business partners. They owned one of the granite quarries back in the mid-1800s.”

  “Which one?” asked Ab.

  “I’m not sure,” said Mrs. Carver. “I bet you could find out up at the historical society—Bean, just put in one cup of sugar, okay? I know the recipe says two and a half, but that’s for cultivated berries. These little wild ones are a lot sweeter.

  “Anyway, after some hard times, they finally got rich and decided to build the biggest houses on the island, side by side. So they made a friendly wager over who could build the biggest house. They agreed to keep their plans to themselves, and they agreed that a tunnel would connect the houses, so they could get back and forth easily. Especially in winter.

  “Well, they hired crews and set to. Construction started on the cellars on the same day, and the tunnel was the first thing finished—Ab, would you get the pie pan for me? Anyway, as I understand it, Moses and Isaiah went off to Boston for the fall and winter. They had houses there, too—apparently there wasn’t enough social life for them on the island in the winter—and when they came back in the spring, the houses were nearly finished.

  “That’s when everything started to go wrong. Apparently Moses’s house was bigger in square footage and Isaiah’s was bigger in height, so neither of them would concede that he’d lost the bet. Instead, Moses closed off his end of the tunnel and had another wing added to the back of his house.”

  “That’s where my bedroom is,” Ab chimed in.

  “Right,” Mrs. Carver agreed. “Isaiah closed off his end of the tunnel, too, and added another six feet to his tower.”

  “Did they stay in business together?” asked Bean.

  “As a matter of fact, they didn’t. Winthrop sold his shares to Moses Webster and went off and started his own granite company, right here on the island, to compete against his former partner.

  “Neither of them ever spoke to the other again, although they lived in those houses, side by side, for the rest of their lives. I seem to remember that their houses in Boston were across the street from each other, too.” Mrs. Carver sighed. “So sad.”

  She opened the heavy oven door, tested the temperature, then slid in the pie. “Now, why did you want to know all this? I suppose you want to start looking for the treasure.”

  “Treasure?” Ab and Bean replied in concert.

  3

  Widow of the Moors

  “I THOUGHT THAT’S WHAT THIS WAS ALL ABOUT—old Minerva’s treasure,” said Mrs. Carver. She gently shut the oven door and set the wind-up timer on the stovetop.

  “We don’t know about any treasure,” said Bean, as he emptied the stems and unripe berries into the garbage pail under the sink.

  “Then what’s all this about?”

  Bean and Ab exchanged an unsure glance. “Well ... ,” said Bean tentatively.

  Ab jumped in with both feet. “I’ve been hearing sounds in my room.”

  “Oh, really?” said Mrs. Carver. She finished washing her hands and turned off the water. “What kind of sounds?”

  Abby told the whole story, with occasional additions from Bean whenever he felt that the telling was getting a little too dry.

  “Very interesting, Abigail,” Mrs. Carver said. She sat for a while, staring out the window but oblivious to the occasional passerby or the busy summer traffic down on Main Street. “Well, I’ll tell you a little secret,” she said at last. “When I w
as about your age, the Moses Webster House was empty—that was before the Johnsons moved in—and we’d go in the cellar sometimes to try to find the tunnel. I always felt we were just that close.” She held her thumb and forefinger about a sixteenth of an inch apart. “But we never did find it. Neither has anyone else, as far as I know. If they did, they kept it to themselves, which would be impossible to do on the island.”

  “You mean, other people have tried to find the tunnel?” asked Ab.

  “Oh, you bet they have. My father. His father. Probably most of the island has taken a crack at it one time or another.” Mrs. Carver bent down toward her listeners. “That’s the kind of thing you do with yourself when you don’t have a movie theater or a video arcade.” She laughed a light, warm, musical laugh that always made Bean smile. He’d never say it out loud, but he thought his mother was the most beautiful person in the world. His dad did, too.

  “But what’s the treasure?” Bean asked.

  “That’s the interesting part, I think,” said Mrs. Carver dreamily. “It’s romantic.”

  Bean rolled his eyes. “Oh, brother.”

  “Tell us,” said Ab excitedly.

  “Tell her,” Bean suggested.

  Mrs. Carver began. “It’s very sad.”

  “I think I’ll go clean my room and wash the dog,” said Bean sarcastically.

  “I didn’t know you had a dog,” said Ab.

  “We don’t,” Mrs. Carver replied, looking at Bean a little sideways. “If you don’t want to listen, you don’t have to. But if you’re going to look for the treasure, you’d better have all the facts, don’t you think?”

  Bean sat on the corner of his chair and resolved to listen with just one ear, until things got interesting.

  “Well, Moses Webster had a son whose name was Reuben, and Isaiah Winthrop had a daughter, Rebecca.”

  “And they fell in love,” said Ab enthusiastically.

  “Right the first time,” Mrs. Carver replied with a smile. “And—”

  “And their fathers wouldn’t let them see each other,” Ab interrupted. “So they unblocked the tunnel, somehow, and met there in the deepest hours of the night.”