13
The dog didn’t like crowds. Upon coming downstairs, Raquel and Theo had found him pressed against the front door, whining low in his throat while throwing anxious glances at the growing number of vehicles rolling down their drive.
Raquel had sent Theo outside to deal with the masses—particularly the news van—while she and the dog retreated to the kitchen for breakfast. Theo thrived on attention. She and their new canine companion…not so much.
Now the dog nosed restlessly at his partially filled food bowl. He didn’t seem to have much of an appetite this morning. Then again, neither did she.
Raquel waited until she heard the sound of Theo’s footsteps pounding down the front steps. Then she headed up to the second story, dog in tow. The window from the kids’ room had the best view. Somehow, she’d never doubted it would be any other way.
Picking up a pair of binoculars. Adjusting them enough to take in the action.
It looked to Raquel like half the law enforcement officers in northern New Hampshire were in attendance.
Mostly men of various ages, standing around the freshly erected wooden perimeter.
It heartened her, then, to see that the two lone women appeared to be the ones in charge.
As well as totally impervious to Theo’s charms.
She took in the show: some general hand-gesturing followed by scurrying about. A younger guy in firefighter overalls peeling off. Theo leading the other official-looking female over to the pile of dismantled cover boards. More gesturing.
When the firefighter returned, she could make out a jumble of carabiners and coils of ropes jangling from a dark green backpack. Time to descend into the well, then. Get up close and personal with a tragedy that had most likely played out before any of them had been born.
The true legacy of these old homesteads.
Family plots and tombstones that reached back centuries with their tales of hardship and woe, granite slabs so old and weathered, the wind had long ago scoured away the particulars, leaving behind only rows of somber silhouettes as reminders of what used to be and might’ve been.
Raquel fingered the antique locket now nestled between her breasts.
It made Theo uncomfortable to see her wearing it, but this morning it had seemed fitting.
A memento of sorrow that stretched across nearly two hundred years.
A young mother’s loss then, worn by a woman in mourning now, looking down upon another woman’s suffering from maybe even earlier.
Or sometime in between? The timing didn’t matter.
Pain was pain, regardless of the century.
Raquel had discovered the locket while roaming aimlessly through a Charlestown antique store.
The size of a silver dollar, gold stamped onto brass and already worn off in places, it was the plain Jane stuck in the middle of flashier, brighter ornaments.
But she’d found herself picking it up, using her thumbnail to pry it open. And then…
Staring deep into the eyes of a somberly dressed young woman who looked just as lost and emptied out as Raquel herself felt. The dark-haired female held what appeared to be a white bouquet on her lap. Except upon closer examination of the time-blurred image…
A baby, swathed in gauzy white muslin with a sprig of pink flowers clutched in its tiny lifeless fist.
Ah, you’ve discovered our memento mori collection, the proprietor had rushed over to explain.
Given the rarity of photographers in the mid-nineteenth century, postmortem photos were often the only image ever taken of family members, especially infants and young children.
Why, it wasn’t uncommon to prop up a deceased three-year-old on a stand, surrounded by his living siblings, or pose a young girl sitting in a chair with her favorite dolls. Blah, blah, blah.
Raquel had merely nodded. She hadn’t needed his words to understand the import of what she was seeing. While the infant’s face was too marred to discern, the young mother’s expression said it all. Grief. Endless, shocking, bewildering.
How do I let go?
How can I possibly carry on?
Did you? Raquel dearly wanted to ask. And if so, can you tell me how?
Because speaking for herself, a woman who’d always prided herself on her iron will and emotional detachment, she could barely summon the strength to get out of bed anymore.
And even if the first two miscarriages hadn’t left behind enough to wrap in a bundle and hold on her lap, the third…
A baby girl. With ten tiny fingers and ten tiny toes. Which Raquel had counted over and over and over again, as she’d held her daughter for the first and last time all in a space of fifteen terrible minutes.
Now you’re just like me…
She barely remembered buying the locket.
Wouldn’t even hand it back long enough for the proprietor to remove the tags.
Instead, she’d thrust it into her pocket, fingers curled around the time-worn edges.
The moment she got home, she popped it back open, staring, staring, staring.
Until the sound of Theo walking through the front door startled her back to consciousness. She’d quickly secreted it away.
It took her four weeks to work up the courage to pry out the thin metal daguerreotype and inspect the back for a name or date.
No luck. Next she’d started researching the locket design itself, but it’d been mass-produced in Rhode Island, at one time the Jewelry Capital of the World; no way to trace what happened after that.
Then one day, a trick of the light caught the merest hint of scratchings on the inside cover. Many more Google searches and experiments with various solvents later, she was able to reveal a flowery script letter by letter until, at last, a date and family name emerged.
After that, she waited for Theo to depart each morning just so she could jump on the internet and plow her way through various ancestry sites, the locket nestled between her breasts.
Birth certificates, death records. Marriages and divorce.
She could’ve earned a minor in American history, with an emphasis on colonial life.
Which had eventually brought her to New Hampshire and then to the expansive Dixon clan.
The young mother’s exact position on the many-limbed tree was harder for Raquel to determine, given the tendency to repeat names.
But reading about the family had, of course, brought up this story, which had brought up this house, and once she’d seen the first photo…
Raquel had needed to come here. She just knew it. This place, this land, these four walls.
Hannah Dixon’s grief, Raquel’s own intense sorrow, could never be erased.
But this, a mystery where the end was yet to be written…
Raquel had known absolutely what she must do.
While Theo had been so damn grateful to see the spark back in her eyes, he would’ve granted her an entire mountain of historic homesteads.
Besides, he liked a good challenge, he claimed.
And what could be more challenging than…
dear lord, was there truly no electricity, heat, or plumbing in the residence?
Had the Hannah Dixon from her locket known anything about the remains in the well? Or was the skeleton just one more tragedy on a land that already knew plenty?
Raquel put down the binoculars, returned to her task at hand.
For all of her impulsiveness, she hadn’t been a total idiot about acquiring the Dixon property. She’d done her homework, including tracking down original town maps, nineteenth-century property deeds, and twentieth-century building permits.
Now she studied the jumble of rolled and flattened documents that accounted for over two hundred fifty years of land ownership.
The earliest record was from 1765; a charcoal-on-parchment sketch of the property.
The original surveyors’ drawings had to be scanned and printed, as they were far too fragile for handling.
Even then, notations were faint, the old-world British American script nearly indecipherable.
She’d started out completely lost, unable to connect site map A with surveyor’s drawing B.
Eventually, she’d determined the granite cliff that formed the eastern border held the key.
No matter the year, generation, or phase of homesteading, Widow’s Ledge remained the same.
Now she started with the most current overview of the property, a 1970s site map that had been part of the permitting process for tearing down the old family home and replacing it with this current post-and-beam structure.
Raquel eyed the activities happening in real time out the window, then oriented the drawing until the positioning aligned with the scene before her.
Wells were universally indicated with a circle, an obvious reference to their shape.
Hence the round dot for the current drilled well to the left of the driveway on the most recent map.
But behind the house, where the real-time gathering was taking place…
She searched for an open circle. Found nothing.
Meaning the young firefighter was gearing up and preparing to descend into a landmark that according to current records didn’t exist.
Flipping her way backward, in leaps of twenty, thirty, fifty years through the pile of documents.
If the Dixons’ primary residence had always occupied roughly the same footprint, the land surrounding it had been in a constant state of change.
Pockets of green farmland steadily expanded as sons had grown, cleared their own acreage, married into the tight-knit community, Dixons joining with Shepherds and MacAllisters and Karlssons.
More children led to even more farms and a myriad of stone walls—most still standing—to delineate the rapidly multiplying number of homesteads.
Until the inevitable reverse. Sons and daughters growing up but now moving away, driven by wanderlust and lured by city life or the promise of new opportunities.
By the mid-twentieth century, the bright green pastures were once again dark with trees as descendants retreated and the forest reclaimed its own.
Land had been sold, acreages whittled down as various branches of the family had moved on, until the once expansive whole became smaller patches of kinfolk, dotting the community with a multitude of second, third, and fourth cousins.
Of them, the original Dixon clan had held on the longest, and this property had remained the largest, though from what Raquel could tell, it was only a fraction of the size it’d been in its heyday as it had transitioned from working farm to idyllic summer home.
Time progressed. Families evolved. And even something as durable and hardy as the mountains changed with them.
Raquel once more fingered the locket tucked between her breasts, the brass warm from the heat of her body.
She worked her way back to the original 1765 document, eyes peeled for any markings to indicate the hand-dug well. Still nothing.
Which made no sense. From the very beginning, reliable access to water had been crucial. It would’ve been the determining factor for where to place the barn, fenced corral, human abode, everything.
And yet, historic map after map, sketch after sketch, no record of a well appeared for the first hundred fifty years of the property’s life.
Raquel took a break, glancing out the window. The firefighter had disappeared from sight. Up top, she spotted a giant ginger-haired man, legs planted for balance as he slowly unspooled the rope controlling his buddy’s descent.
Chief Grady and the other woman were peering down intently from the lip of the pit, monitoring the action.
Raquel returned to the original map. Stared and stared. There!
Maybe wishful thinking. She’d have to return to the original to be sure, but on the photocopy of the oldest record, she could now determine a slight smudge. Maybe uneven shading on the crude drawing or a blemish from two hundred–plus years of handling.
Or…
Signs of erasure. Of what could’ve once been a charcoal circle.
She quickly moved on to the next map in time, then the next. In each and every case, now that she was looking…
A shadow of a shadow.
As if the original water source hadn’t just been boarded over in real life, but had been completely and meticulously deleted from historic record.
Raquel sat back on her heels.
This property had secrets. That much Raquel understood. And tragedy, as the entire world had witnessed.
But maybe neither was as new as anyone thought.
Maybe the evil had been here all along.