The Secret of the Missing Grave Page 4

  “Could have,” said Mrs. Carver calmly. “Who wants pie?”

  4

  “EVERY WORK A MASTERPIECE”

  “HERE SHE IS,” Bean called from the opposite side of the graveyard. He was pointing at a white marble tombstone that leaned at a precarious angle due to its age and neglect.

  Abby ran to his side, careful not to step on any graves along the way. She knelt at Bean’s side and peered through a crust of yellow and brown lichen. “Mary, beloved of Hermann Olson, born October 1,1843. Died April 19, 1917,” she read aloud.

  The sun was rich and dipped in gold, and the air was cool and slightly damp with a recent fog as Bean and Ab sat on the low stone border of the Olson grave. Abby absentmindedly traced the family name that had been embossed on the granite.

  “I’m going to have a video tombstone,” said Bean, as if that were a sensible thing to say.

  Ab looked at him as if he’d just arrived from another dimension. “What are you talking about?”

  “Interactive,” Bean added, having had a second or two to think about it. “An infrared trip switch will make a video screen pop out of the ground when someone walks by.” He raised his hands in the air. “And there’ll be an interactive multimedia presentation so they can talk to me and ask me questions and find out how wonderfull am.”

  “How wonderful you were,” Ab corrected.

  Bean smiled impishly. “I’m flattered you think so.”

  Ab turned away and pretended to ignore him, but she couldn’t keep from smiling.

  “If only we knew what she knew,” said Bean half to himself as he tossed a nod at Mary Olson’s tombstone.

  For a few minutes neither of them spoke.

  In the treetops, crows called loudly to one another across the tiny clearing while the passing day drew long, dark shadows, like blankets, across the ground.

  “Funny that no one’s ever found that tunnel,” Ab mused after a while. “I mean, if it really exists.”

  “They haven’t looked the right way,” Bean remarked philosophically.

  “You mean they haven’t looked in the right place.”

  “I doubt that,” Bean replied. “Can’t be that many places to look down there. I think they’re just not looking the right way.”

  “I think you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ab stated. Slowly she tilted her head sideways, studying Mary Olson’s tomb-stone from a different angle. “What’s that?” she said, indicating some engraving barely visible above ground level and disappearing beneath the soil where the stone slanted.

  “Writing,” said Bean, pressing down the grass to reveal as much of the lettering as possible. “Lord, rest my ... something,” he read.

  Abby began to dig away the turf with a brittle maple twig, but it kept breaking. “That’s useless,” she said, tossing it aside.

  “Hey, wait,” said Bean. “I’ve got an idea.” He jumped to his feet and, bracing himself against the stone on the downhill side, began to push. Nothing happened.

  “I don’t think that’ll work,” said Ab. “It’s been here too long. It’s all grown in.”

  This was precisely the impetus Bean needed. Summoning all the strength he possessed, he wedged his feet against the low granite border and his back against the gravestone and pushed. This time there was a faint yielding.

  “It moved,” Ab cried. Scrambling to her feet, she got a good handhold on the weathered stone and heaved for all she was worth. Slowly, as if a dull old giant was being wakened from his sleep, the stone groaned to a somewhat upright position.

  “Quick,” said Bean, nearly out of breath, “get a rock and wedge it underneath.”

  “But if I let go—,” Ab began in protest.

  “I’ve got it. Hurry,” Bean grunted mightily.

  With that, Ab darted to the deeply rutted dirt road that ringed the cemetery and kicked a big stone loose from the side of the grassy ridge. It was larger than she thought, and by the time she wrestled it back to Bean, his face was bright red with the strain of his effort, and he was dripping with sweat. He didn’t even have enough strength left to ask why she’d taken so long. Though he did think about it.

  Abby stuck the rock in the opening under the tombstone, but it was too big. “Lift a little higher,” she urged.

  Bean looked at her as if she’d just grown another head. His eyes were bugged out and bloodshot, but, as bidden, he drew on his slim reserves and pushed the stone to a near perfect perpendicular.

  That was all Ab needed. Working quickly, she dug a little hollow in the soft, dry earth just enough so she could cram the rock under the tombstone. Using both feet, she stomped on it until, finally, much to Bean’s relief, it was wedged into the hole.

  Bean fell on the ground in a heaving, panting pile of arms and legs, still unable to speak.

  Ab bent down beside him to see if he was all right. When she saw that he was still breathing, she batted her eyes in gentle mocking. “My hero,” she said, clasping her hands under her chin.

  Bean started to say something, but Ab looked so ridiculous that all he could do was laugh. The sound of their joy silenced even the crows for a moment.

  “Come on,” said Ab finally. She rolled to the front of the stone and brushed away the crusted clumps of dirt. Bean got to his knees and crawled to her side.

  “Lord, rest my bones as happy here, as she among her babes,” he read.

  Ab studied the curious epitaph. “What do you s’pose that means?” She read it again and shook her head.

  Bean was thinking. “That reminds me of something.”

  “Huh?”

  “Babes,” said Bean. “Baby ... ”

  They remembered together. “Cradling the package like a baby in her arms,” they chimed with wide eyes.

  “That’s what Mary Olson said about Miss Minerva,” Ab blurted out excitedly.

  “She wrapped the bundles like babies and sang to ’em,” Bean recalled.

  Ab’s forehead wrinkled in perplexity. “Babies? She was keeping babies in the cellar?”

  Bean read the last line on the tombstone again. “As she among her babes.” He looked aghast at Ab. “You don’t think all those bundles—”

  “Of course not,” said Ab. “It’s a clue. It means something else. It’s a metaphor.”

  It was Bean’s turn to be impressed, but he didn’t say anything. “I know what that means,” he said. He stood up and brushed off his hands on his jeans. “It’s too weird.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Ab. “I don’t know what all that babies stuff is about, but I’ll bet you a quarter that the ‘she’ on the tombstone is Miss Minerva Webster herself.”

  “Must be,” said Bean thoughtfully. “But what could ‘babes’ mean?” he asked as they walked the rutted road that led from the cemetery.

  “What do you think?” said Ab.

  “Some kind of code, maybe. You know how words can have more than one meaning.”

  Abby grabbed a green apple from a low-hanging branch and took a big, crunching bite. Immediately her mouth puckered and her eyes watered as the unripe fruit’s sour juices touched her tongue. “Good apple,” she proclaimed. Bean picked one for himself and joined her in the feast.

  Neither of them said anything for a while as they trod the thick layer of gold that the setting sun had spread on the road. Bean chucked his apple core into the creek, where it landed with a spiop, then bobbed to the surface, creating a pattern of concentric rings in the bright, still water. “She did know something, ol’ Mary Olson.”

  The rumble of a motor troubled the silence. “I know that sound,” said Bean, looking down the road behind them. “Uncle Phil.” Bean stopped and waited for his uncle’s familiar rusty yellow truck to come rattling around the corner. After half a minute or so, it squealed to a halt beside them. “Told ya,” Bean said to Ab, beaming with pride.

  “You kids want a lift downtown?” said Phil, but before the phrase was out of his mouth, they were clambering in back.

>   Bean and Ab both loved Uncle Phil, as did most of the kids in town. He was tall as a tree with salt-and-pepper hair that spiked out from his head in all directions, and he always looked as though he’d just climbed out of bed. Oddly enough, one of the legends that had grown up about Uncle Phil resulted from the fact that no one had ever actually seen him asleep. Not even his wife and daughter. When the fishermen gathered at the Donut Hole for coffee before going to haul at four in the morning, Phil was there. When the town gathered at the post office after the second ferry, Phil was there. Late at night, when everyone else was asleep, Phil’s battered old truck could be heard driving back and forth all over town, like a watchman. In between, Uncle Phil was everywhere. He owned the only motel in town, so he spent lots of time fixing this or that, and he was a carpenter, and he sold insurance and real estate, and he owned a restaurant. He was poor as a church mouse and contented as a clam.

  Since time immemorial, all the kids in town under twelve would gather at the flagpole every Friday night, then pile into the old yellow truck for a bumpy, blissful, crowded ride to Scooper’s, the ice cream parlor on Harbor Hill. Phil would treat everyone to a single-scoop sugar cone of their choice. That was one of the reasons why all the kids loved Uncle Phil, but it wasn’t the only reason. It was probably because he was a lot like a kid himself. That, and the fact that he was just the littlest bit mysterious, with a mischievous twinkle ever present in his green-gray eyes. Everyone called him Uncle Phil. But he really was Bean’s uncle, his mother’s brother.

  Ab’s and Bean’s ride to town in the back of Phil’s truck took only about a minute and a half. Phil drew to a halt near the bandstand. “Pile out,” he called from the cab. The kids jumped over the side.

  “Thanks, Uncle Phil,” said Bean.

  “Thanks, Uncle Phil,” Ab echoed. It made her feel accepted as one of the family when he grunted in reply. “Ice cream tomorrow?” she asked.

  “’Fraid not,” he replied flatly. “Have to go off island again.”

  Bean knew what that meant. “Back to New York?”

  Phil nodded. Unlike many islands on the Maine coast, Penobscot Island hadn’t been overrun by tourists—not completely, anyway. So it still retained much of its charm as a working fishing village, and it was that very charm that for years had drawn artists from the world over to live there. Some famous, most obscure, some incredibly wealthy, some scraping by as carpenters and cooks, sacrificing everything for their art. All drawn by a certain irresistible magnetism that infused the island with an undefinable magic.

  One of those artists was Maud Valliers, the dark, unfriendly loner who lived in the old Winthrop House, across the narrow lane from where Ab was staying. Maud had moved to the island about four years earlier and bought the Winthrop place, which, like the Moses Webster House, had stood vacant for years. Unlike the Moses Webster House, though, the Winthrop House was never reclaimed from the ravages of time. The paint was badly weathered, and green mold grew in the comers and places where the gutters had rotted through. Stonework was at odd angles, and the once-beautiful wrought-iron railings that adorned the roofs were broken in places and rusted away in others. Spooky as the Moses Webster House may have looked on a foggy night, it didn’t hold a candle to Maud’s place.

  Spookier still was the woman herself.

  Shortly after taking up residence, she opened a gallery on Main Street called Masterpiece and advertised that all of her paintings were guaranteed masterpieces. The gimmick worked, and her quirky paintings, all of which were covered with the letters CB in different sizes and styles (which Bean’s mother called a terrible thing to do to a good painting) sold like hotcakes.

  Pretty soon her work became popular in Boston. Then a prestigious gallery in New York began requesting her paintings. Because she never left the house herself, she struck a deal with Phil to have him run the pictures to Boston and New York in her car, which was left on the mainland, in return for a percentage of the sales price.

  Soon the island’s other popular painters began to take advantage of Phil’s unique courier service. He didn’t mind. The income supported all his other businesses.

  “Are you leaving tomorrow?” Bean asked.

  Phil leaned out the cranked-down window of his truck, with his nose resting on the crook of his arm. He leveled his unreadable eyes at his nephew. “First boat. Back Monday.”

  “Okay,” said Bean cheerily. He was always a little uncomfortable under Uncle Phil’s gaze. “Thanks for the ride,” he said as he and Ab waved and started to walk away. But Uncle Phil didn’t budge. He was thinking.

  “How old are you, Beans?” he called after him. Phil was the one who bestowed the nickname Bean when Bean was no more than two years old. Not for any particular reason; he just liked the sound of it. Then the name caught on. But because Phil didn’t like doing what everyone else did, he added the s and had called him “Beans” ever since.

  “Thirteen,” said Bean a little unsurely.

  Phil studied him a little more. “Thirteen?”

  Bean nodded.

  Finally Phil sat up. “Hop back in. I’ve got something for you up at the house.”

  Bean and Ab dutifully jumped back in the truck and took their seats on the wheel wells. Bean shrugged in response to the question in Ab’s eyes.

  “Mom, guess what Uncle Phil gave me,” cried Bean as he and Ab thundered up the wood walkway outside the kitchen door.

  “Don’t slam the—”

  Slam.

  “—door,” Mrs. Carver finished with a sigh.

  “Sorry,” Bean apologized. “Guess what Uncle Phil gave me.”

  Mrs. Carver had been writing. She put down her pen and looked from Bean’s excited face to Ab’s excited face, then back to Bean, who was nearly bursting at the seams. “Well, I take it we can rule out a spanking,” she said with a smile.

  “C’mon,” said Bean impatiently. “Be serious.”

  Mrs. Carver folded her hands in a serious manner and cleared her throat. “Sorry. Okay. Now, do you want me to guess, or are you going to tell me anyway? Because I think if you try to keep it in, I’m going to be scraping you off the walls.”

  “A motorcycle!” Bean blurted.

  “A moped,” Ab corrected.

  Bean grabbed his mother’s hand and pulled her out of the chair. “Come look at it.”

  Once again the screen door slammed as the kids herded Mrs. Carver outside. There, standing in the deep, velvety grass that Bean should have mowed three days ago, was what with a little imagination could be described as a moped. The tires were flat and the drive chain hung from the sprockets in a rusty knot. The rear-view mirrors dangled from the handlebars like broken limbs, and the headlight looked like Cyclops after his encounter with Ulysses. For some odd reason, the seat was in good shape, and there was still enough paint on the frame to suggest that the bike had once been blue and gray. The motor, however, was shiny with oil. When Bean turned the key and pushed the starter pedal, it hummed to life in a cloud of blue smoke, amid which Bean and Ab stood grinning like a couple of misplaced Buddhas.

  Mrs. Carver smiled behind her hand as she waved away the smoke. “It’s beautiful,” she said with a cough. She recognized the bike as the remnant of a fleet that her brother had bought during his rental-business phase. Bicycles, outboards, mopeds; you name it, he’d rented it. As she recalled, it had been an expensive experiment, and before her stood its remains.

  Bean brushed his hair out of his eyes. “It needs a little work,” he allowed pragmatically. “But me and Ab can fix it up okay.”

  “Ab and I,” Mrs. Carver corrected automatically.

  The message was lost on Bean. “Well, you can help if you want to,” he said skeptically. “You any good with duct tape?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “I can paint it,” Ab volunteered.

  There followed a brief debate about color. Ab’s taste tended more toward pastels, whereas Bean favored Day-Glo orange.

  “I think
there’s a can of blue spray enamel in the shed,” Mrs. Carver suggested diplomatically. She had the comforting notion that Bean would soon lose interest in the project before the vehicle ever actually got on the road. “It’s yours. No charge. Make sure you put newspapers down.” She leveled a meaningful glance at Bean, but it bounced off.

  While Ab painted the moped and herself blue, Bean fixed the mirrors and the headlight, patched the inner tubes, and repaired the chain. They worked by the porch light until well after eleven. By the time they finished, they had wheels—of a sort.

  Once again they showed off their prize to Mrs. Carver, who was impressed by the work they’d done if not necessarily by the road-worthiness of the vehicle.

  “Are you certain it’s safe?” she ventured.

  “Sure, what could be safer?” Bean declared unequivocally. “I just need to tune it up a little.”

  Mrs. Carver had a flash of inspiration. “Take it down to Alby Oakes at Carl’s Garage tomorrow. He’ll be able to tune it.” Meanwhile, she’d have time to ask Alby to check out the bike for general reliability.

  Now that they had done all they could, exhaustion fell. Abby, decorated with smudges of blue paint, dragged herself wearily up the sidewalk toward the Moses Webster House. Bean walked into the kitchen of his house, where he sat at the table for a long time. Eating homemade molasses cookies washed down with a glass of milk, he stared out the window at the resurrected machine glistening in the moonlight. “Ab said we should call her the Blue Moose,” he said dreamily.

  Mrs. Carver’s gaze followed his out the window and came to rest on the bike. This was one of those special times she wished that Bean’s father wasn’t in the Coast Guard. Because of his repeated absences, sometimes for as long as three months at a stretch, it was hard for her to make decisions about things like this. During these times she had to be both mother and father to Bean. Right now the mother side was thinking it would like to throttle Uncle Phil, and the father side was saying, Oh, don’t be such a worrywart. He’ll be all right. You have to let him spread his wings a little. The longer she looked at the Blue Moose, the more it seemed that the mother side was going to win this argument. Well, she thought, if we’re lucky, it won’t pass inspection.