Chapter 26
After Frannie left, Cisco said, "I don't want you going out there alone. I should go with you."
"Please, Hon, let me do this my way. I just want to put myself where Meg was, to try to understand her better. I have to be alone to do that. We've been out there a dozen times-what could happen?"
She didn't mention the sixth sense that compelled her to go unaccompanied, as she could think of no way to explain that.
---
The next morning Cora picked up Meg's diary and went through all of it this time, hoping to know and understand Meg as well as she could before going to Saint James.
The entries were well written and entertaining. She wondered if, had she lived, Meg would have achieved her ambition to be a writer, as noted by the uncle who gave her the book. In fact, the diary itself was publish-worthy, in Cora's opinion, presenting a delightful picture of a young woman at a particular time and place. Perhaps when this was all over Cora would look into what it took to publish it.
Cora tried to take notes that might help to solve the mystery of Meg's death, but had no idea what details could be important, and soon became lost in Meg's life and set the note pad aside. Cora began to view Meg as a friend-a close friend.
She was amused to read of trivial day-to-day events like buying new clothes, gossip among school friends, and spats with her sister. It seemed she and her sister were very different people who battled frequently, but besides frequent outbursts of anger, she wrote of occasionally standing up for her against their mam or anyone who treated Sally poorly.
Meg gave very vivid descriptions of her thoughts about the Columbian Exposition, and what it was like to be a single woman living and working in Chicago. She had worked at Marshall Field's Department Store as a clerk, and told a story about how Marshall Field had sold his interests in a store in Sag Bridge to open his store in Chicago. The Sag store had apparently been doing quite well, and the partner laughed at Field's decision, calling him a fool. Cora had heard this story before, but had never been able to find any facts to back it up.
She talked about meeting Packey when returning to Sag for a Fourth of July picnic, and how he immediately swept her off her feet with his commanding presence and infectious good humor. She admitted to arriving at the picnic with her nose in the air, in a stylish dress and hat unlike what local women were wearing, feeling better than "this old town". Packey told Meg what attracted him from across the grove was not her stylish clothes, but how she moved with energy and confidence, which reminded him of the red-headed "spitfires" he had known in Ireland. Throughout the diary Meg wrote about how much everyone loved and admired Packey, and how fortunate she felt to be his wife, missing her life in Chicago, but never regretting her decision to marry Packey and move back to Sag.
She talked about life on the farm before her father died, and how decisions were made about where her mother would live and who would run the farm after his death.
As she read, she recalled Bridey's stories. Bridey's father was a young boy when Meg died, and Cora envisioned him at the farms and in the town of Sag, fishing and visiting the quarries where Packey worked. Bridey said Packey had sometimes given her father fossils.
She then scanned historical documents online about Saint James and found the location on MapQuest, zooming in for a virtual tour of the cemetery.
In addition to its historic status and unique setting in the middle of a forest, the church was popular with psychics and ghost-hunters. Many reports of sightings and supernatural events had occurred over the years and attracted thrill-seekers.
Resurrection Mary, in nearby Willow Springs, was the most famous ghost, but Saint James had its share of followers due to its isolated forest location and evidence it was built over an Indian burial ground. Cora had described her own experience there in her talk on Fright Night a few weeks ago.
Was it only a few weeks? So much has happened since then!
One ghostly legend told of a young housekeeper at Saint James who fell in love with the pastor's assistant. Planning to elope, the lovers arranged for a wagon to pick them up in the middle of the night. When it arrived, the horses spooked and the wagon overturned, killing the woman. Afterwards, reliable witnesses saw a young woman and wagon at Saint James on multiple occasions, the woman calling "Come on!" before both she and the wagon disappeared. Cora noted the date of the first sighting was 1897, near the date of Meg's tragedy, and she wondered if the legend developed from Meg's murder.
A further, and surprising, discovery was that Meg's farm was near where Cora now lived. She pulled old maps out of her Sag Bridge folder and determined that the land her home was built on was probably in Sag, not Lemont as she thought. She would look up land records at the historical society and see who originally owned it.
---
It was midafternoon when Cora finished her research and pulled onto Archer Road, the same road Meg would have traveled in 1898. Cora now imagined the scene as it looked in Meg's day: a dirt road, ditches on both sides, wide enough for wagons to pass. Horses, wagons, bicycles, and feet were the means of transportation then.
Along Archer Road today were homes, banks, gas stations, mini-malls, golf courses-these weren't along Archer in 1898, of course. There were a few old frame two-story homes, one with a front porch, and occasionally a dirt road led off the highway. Cora realized these were probably updated farm houses and lanes that dated back to the 1890s. She drove this road frequently but hadn't noticed them before.
She stopped for a red light, which she now knew was at a corner that once was the heart of Sag Bridge. She imagined a few small shops on a dirt road with tracks down the middle and electric poles on one side, a hotel on a corner, riders gossiping on the porch waiting for their train. Beyond were poorer dwellings and shanties. Today there was no sign of the town. There was a subdivision, a field, a street that led up a hill, and Archer widened to four lanes here and became an elevated road with a series of bridges that traversed four waterways ahead. On one side was an abandoned quarry, now filled with water, a popular fishing area and part of the county's forest preserves.
Cora drove over a wide working canal that passed by warehouses, docks, and trucking and stone yards. When Meg lived here, this canal wasn't yet excavated. The area then was flat farmland with only a small ditch where the canal was now.
Cora stopped for another red light at the end of the first bridge and looked around as she waited. She knew from her research that she was on the edge of a hill overlooking two valleys that came together at this point. Today's driver wouldn't realize this was a hill or a vantage point, as the elevated road gave the impression the land was level. Meg, on the other hand, would have had to make her way from the valley floor and climb steeply.
Archer split off here to become a two-lane road, and after a short distance through a densely forested area Cora came to the entrance to Saint James. She pulled off the road to picture the land Meg would have come through, with a log tavern directly across from the church lane. Cora had read the foundation of the tavern could still be found there. Meg would have seen farms, not woods, and beyond them a railroad, with two other canals and then the river a half mile away.
Cora drove through iron entry gates at Saint James. A single car was parked near the rectory. She picked a spot close to the parish hall and turned off her motor, unsure what to do next. Looking around, she realized much of the property was unchanged from 1898, as most building was completed before Meg's death. She knew from her research that the rectory in Meg's day was a frame building with a front porch, the parish hall a low wooden structure. Both were replaced by stone buildings of similar size at their original locations. The iron entry gates had been added, and the lot and lane were now paved.
Cora got out of her car and wandered around the grounds. Meg wrote in her diary that Packey went to a church meeting just before she made her last journal entry and went to bed. Either someone woke her up and asked her to go to the church, or Packey didn't come home so Meg went to look for him, Cora surmised. It must have been important, because in Meg's condition she wouldn't go out alone in the middle of the night otherwise. Sally was sick, but Cora wondered why Mick, the brother-in-law, didn't go.
Whatever the reason, Cora knew from Bridey's story that Meg went and was killed, and she guessed it was because she interrupted Packey's killer. Unless Meg was the target of the killer instead of Packey. Bridey hadn't mentioned rape. Cora assumed Packey was killed before Meg, but maybe not.
What would Meg have done when she got here? It was likely she drove a wagon and carried a lantern. The meeting Packey went to was probably held at the parish hall, so perhaps Meg went there first, and if no one was there, she would have looked further. It must have been late, since no one witnessed the killings and the bodies weren't found until the morning. It was logical to think the rectory was dark and the priest asleep. Would Meg want to search the grounds before she woke him up?
Cora wished she had looked up the news articles about the killings before coming here, but time had run out. She would do it later.
The day was sunny, the temperature moderate, there was no wind, and Cora was comfortable in her leather jacket. It was a nice day to amble around the peaceful premises, she thought, as she crunched through fallen leaves. She imagined she was Meg, searching for Packey, and followed the path she thought Meg would have taken. Cora circled the parish hall but found no reason to linger there. As she started uphill through the parking lot, she was jolted back to the present when a woman left the rectory, looked at her, smiled and waved before she got into her car and drove away. She probably thought Cora was there to visit a grave or the rectory.
Cora skipped the rectory, as she figured Meg did, climbed the hill, entered the cemetery, and followed the path to the church. The church doors were locked. She went behind the church, where the bodies were found, and a short way into the graveyard.
She stood looking at the gravestones and trying to imagine how the place would look in the middle of the night. Based on Bridey's description, she was near where the bodies were found. She could not see other buildings, as the church blocked the rectory, and the parish hall was below the crest of the hill. With her back to the church, she was facing east. Assuming again that this happened late at night or early in the morning, the moon, if there was a moon, was descending in the west, and that side of the church would be dark. Cora saw a small stone building, which she knew from her research was there to hold remains during winter months, until the ground thawed and burials could take place. To her right the hill dropped sharply to an area of dense brush. Cora thought it probably was the same in 1898. She figured both places provided ample cover for a killer to hide, even on horseback.
Lost in thought, Cora wandered among the gravestones, randomly noticing names and dates. Most names were Irish, but not all. Some small graves were simply marked, INFANT, testifying to high infant and childbirth mortality and harsh living conditions of the time. She noticed that the gravestones all faced east and remembered they were placed so that on Judgment Day the deceased could sit up and face the rising sun.
She came to a simple stone that marked the graves of John and Mary Chauncey. That would be Meg's mother and father, she knew from the diary, and the dates made sense. Meg's mother, Máime, apparently lived to a ripe old age, surviving many years after Meg's death. Cora wondered who took care of Máime after Meg died and how Máime's husband felt about spending eternity buried next to such a witchy woman.
Meg's probably buried here too. I wonder where her grave is...it's not here with her mother....
A sudden gust of cold wind blew a scattering of dry leaves across the ground, and Cora caught a scent of something foul. She shivered and looked around nervously but saw nothing unusual. The sun emerged from behind a cloud and all seemed warm and peaceful again. Her attention was drawn to the northwest corner, and she headed that way, as if pulled, no guided, in that direction. She was reminded of an occasion years ago when a similar compulsion led her to follow an abandoned road, where she experienced an amazing display of butterflies and discovered a different sort of cemetery, where nuclear waste was buried. That was only a short distance through the forest from her present location.
She noticed a tombstone carving: ILL MOUNTED VOLUNTEER OF THE BLACK HAWK WAR, and she remembered reading that a section of the cemetery was set aside for people who died violently. Most stones were simple flat markers, weathered and difficult to read. Despite the warm day, a shiver went up her spine at the thought of finding Meg's grave. As she searched the stones on the ground, she caught motion with her peripheral vision, looked that way and saw a woman moving slowly in her direction.
Strange. I thought I was alone. I didn't see any cars pull up.
She checked the parking area, which she could see clearly from where she stood, and indeed her car was the only one in the lot. A woman was coming from the far side of the cemetery, adjacent to a wooded area separated from the cemetery by a fence. This was puzzling-why would she be coming from the forest, and how did she get through the fence? Was she in the cemetery all along, or was there another path? Cora had already walked through that area and not seen anyone, or a path or opening in the fence. Cora stared with a rising sense of comprehension.
As the woman walked, her body stayed in the same plane, with little up and down or side to side motion, as if she were gliding. She wore no coat or jacket, unusual in November. A dark, full-length skirt, was softly tailored and flared below the knee, and her white blouse fit loosely, the standup collar trimmed with lace, as was the upper bodice. The long sleeves were puffed at the top, tight across the arms, with lace at the wrists. She held her skirt a few inches off the ground, and Cora got glimpses of neat black boots. She was young, perhaps in her twenties, a small woman with striking auburn hair parted in the middle, braided and wound into a tidy bun at the nape of her neck. She was pretty in an understated way, and she carried herself erect.
Cora froze in place, unable to take her eyes away. She knew who the woman was, and illogically her initial reaction was one of pleasure, as if spotting a dear friend she hadn't seen for years.
The feeling quickly changed as her mind processed that she was seeing someone who had been dead for over a hundred years. Her scalp, fingers and toes tingled, and she was lightheaded, but oddly calm despite the surreal aura. She put both hands to her mouth, trying to think rationally. Should she leave-run off? Or was this an opportunity? Was she led here today, and did Angel orchestrate the encounter? If that was so, Angel, materialized as Meg, could inhabit the cemetery as well as Cora's home.
A spirit, in the flesh...no, not in the flesh! Is this happening? What does she want? What should I do?
The apparition moved past Cora without speaking, her face emotionless. She looked through Cora rather than at her, unfocused, as if confused or dazed. She went about twenty feet past, then stopped at a particular grave. She lowered herself to the ground, rested her cheek against the gravestone, closed her eyes and moaned softly.
Cora didn't know what to do. Should she approach the clearly grief-stricken woman? Maybe the apparition didn't know Cora was there; perhaps she should sneak off and leave her undisturbed. As she stood there undecided, the age of the graves touched her, the bodies in them dead so many years. She realized Meg-who else could she be seeing?-had been grieving all this time. Cora felt she knew her now, and didn't feel she could just walk away.
Angel had never hurt her before, why should she now? Cora approached her. "Are you okay?" she asked softly. "Can I do anything to help?"
The woman, Angel/Meg, turned her face, met Cora's gaze, but said nothing.
Cora took a gamble, and lowered herself to the ground. "Do you mind if I sit here with you?"
Meg didn't reply, but laid her head down again and closed her eyes. The gravestone was one of a group of three, and Cora turned to read the names. The closest one said, PACKEY HENNESSEY, AGE 33-BORN AUGUST 7, 1865, LAID TO REST JULY 11, 1898. The middle one read, MAVOURNEEN HENNESSEY, AGE 23-BORN JANUARY 15, 1875, LAID TO REST JULY 11, 1898. The third, the grave the woman was resting on, said, INFANT GIRL HENNESSEY, BORN AND DIED JULY 11, 1898.
Cora's eyes filled with hot tears. Was it because she was finally face to face with Angel? Was she moved by Meg's tragic story, made real by the manifestation of her spirit?
She put both hands on the ground, leaned back, and asked in a soft voice that broke with emotion, "You're Meg, aren't you?"
The woman turned her head, eyes full of pain. She rolled to a sitting position but made no sound, merely gazed at Cora, as if inviting conversation.
"I'm glad to meet you at last," Cora began. They regarded each other. "I read your diary, and I'm very sorry about what happened to you." She moved closer, and reached out to the woman, wanting to offer the comfort of a gentle touch.
The woman's eyes flew wide and she pulled away violently in terror, commanding in a guttural voice, "No!"
Cora withdrew her hand and moved back. The woman relaxed, and said more calmly, the voice now high-pitched, "Touch...afraid...."
Cora considered the words. Why was everything so cryptic with Angel, even face to face? "You're afraid for me to touch you? Something bad could happen if I touch you? Bad to you, or bad to me?"
Meg gave a single nod, paused, opened her mouth as if to reply, but before any sound came out she began to fade, became transparent. She closed her mouth and lifted her arms, as if struggling or gathering something, and her substance slowly returned. In a calm, soft but clear voice, normal-sounding woman's voice, she implored, "What happened...to us?"
"You don't know!" Cora remarked in surprise. "That's it, isn't it?"
Meg, Angel, dropped her eyes, and then looked back up. Cora realized she was indicating the guess was correct.
"When I brought your diary home, you recognized it. You wanted me to know who you were, and you wanted me to tell you who killed you and why, that's what you wanted, wasn't it?"
Meg repeated the sign. In view of the earlier fading, Cora speculated that speech reduced her strength.
"You wanted me to tell you about the murder, and Father McGrath was getting in the way, so you had that wolf go after him."
Meg's eyes blazed with emotion, and she started to fade again. Cora watched as she struggled to fight it off, gathered strength, regained substance.
"I'm so sorry Meg, but I don't know what happened," Cora said softly. "No one ever found out who killed you or why. I wish I could tell you, but I don't know."
Suddenly Meg seemed charged with energy, and became radiant. She shot to her feet, a powerful and fearsome being that stood glaring at Cora. "You...find out!" she commanded in the deep, guttural voice that echoed with emotion, then just as suddenly started to wilt before Cora's eyes. "Do it for Máime, Darlin'," she pleaded softly, the voice high-pitched again, like an LP record played on high speed, thin, exhausted. "Time...to know...you and me...hurry...before..." Meg seemed to collapse. She stood small and weak with Cora at her feet, then turned and moved away, indicating the visit was over.
"Wait!" Cora begged, jumping up to face Meg, unanswered questions tumbling out in a disordered rush. "Why do you want me to hurry? What's so urgent? I don't know how to find out, but I'll try. Why me, why did you pick me? Why do you call me Darlin'? Why did you wait so long to reveal yourself? What changed? I don't know enough to help you!"
Meg turned to Cora, but she was losing substance once more, and this time she didn't stop. As she faded she said in a weakening voice, so soft Cora couldn't be sure she wasn't imagining it, "Over forty years to find you, Darlin'. Can't leave now...."