Dear Emily,

I hope this finds you well! I have looked into your ancestor, Richard Stirler, as you requested. I am currently working on my investigation. I’m sorry to email you before I have any concrete results, but I wanted to ask: for what reason are you doing this research? May I ask how you are related to the subject?

Please let me know when it suits your convenience!

Thanks,

Meredith

Hi, Meredith!

I hope your research is going well. Actually, I am not looking for this information on my own behalf. Richard Stirler would be my great grandfather, I believe? At least, I think that’s how he’s related. It’s been very hard to find information on him. I’m actually doing this for my uncle Peter. He requested any information I could find on him, but I quickly found that my own research skills weren’t up for the task!

Could I ask what you’ve found up to this point?

So glad to hear from you!

Emily

My stomach sank as I read Emily’s latest email. Her uncle…Peter? My mind raced back to the little skeleton entombed in the fake gravestone. No. No, no, no. It couldn’t be. Peter’s a common name. It could be…anyone, right?

I knew there was only one person who could help me at this point.

As soon as I got off work, I drove down to the cemetery. Andrew was outside, stalking through the rows of tombstones, picking up old flowers, trinkets, etc. He didn’t even notice me drive in and only became aware of my presence when I was a few rows away. I saw him immediately become nervous.

He was definitely hiding something.

“Andrew, you’re not telling me everything you know, are you?”

All semblance of tact went out the window. There was a dead child and I needed to know exactly who it was.

Andrew shifted from one foot to the other and looked down. “Can’t say I know what you’re talking about, Meredith.”

I wanted to yell and scream but I knew better. I understand people. They’re not so hard to deal with. And I’d already planned for this. I pulled a few hundreds out of my wallet and handed them over.

“How about we go talk about this in private?”

His eyes widened and I could see him calculating how many bottles of cheap beer this would buy at the local liquor store. He nodded and a few minutes later we found ourselves in his living room, the picture window framing the quiet of the cemetery behind us.

“Meredith, I don’t want people in town to know any more about this incident than they have to. I don’t know why you’re so curious about it, but whatever I tell you stays out of this town. Am I making myself clear?”

I nodded and he continued.

“My father was very good friends with Richard. They used to knock a few beers back every few nights. That’s how Richard got the fake stone set up in the first place – you think he could have done that without my dad’s help? Hardly.

“See, Richard made a mistake when he bought that property out on 75. He thought he could make a living as a farmer, but he never really was cut out for that kind of work. Plus, those first few years the crops didn’t turn out so well. Not enough rain or sunshine, I think it was. By the time he started up his moonshine operation, he and Rosemary were pretty far in debt.

“The night that Rosemary gave birth, Richard showed up at our house. Mind you, this is as my father told me. I wasn’t even born yet when most of this happened. Anyway, according to my father, Richard was really shaken up. He was white and trembling and looked half-dead. He said something had gone wrong with the birth. See, Rosemary had twins. A boy and a girl. The boy was born healthy and hardy, but the girl wasn’t doing so well.”

Andrew took a deep breath at this point. He paused to take a sip out of his flask. I noticed his hands had started to shake ever so slightly.

“You have to understand: Richard loved both those children. He was going to do everything he could to save that little girl. He started spending all his money on medicine for her, but he couldn’t make enough to take her to the doctor. It became a strain on the family.

“And then one night… Richard got home and Rosemary was standing over that little baby girl. The girl was stone dead and Rosemary was just babbling on and on about how that baby was destroying the family. They didn’t have the money to take care of her, she said. She’d done them a favor by killing her, she said.

“Well, Richard went crazy. He loved his babies more than anything in the world, including Rosemary. He never could tell my dad exactly what happened, but he showed up at the cemetery a few hours later with a bloody sheet in the back of his car and a baby wrapped in his arms.

“I told you, Richard was very close with my father. Now, I don’t know if what my father did was right or not, I only know that he walked out there with my father and they buried that woman under the fake stone. The whole town knew what that stone was really for, so no one was going to go looking into it. They took their time, put some turf over it… no one looked close enough to see the difference.

“My father wanted the baby buried with Rosemary, but Richard wouldn’t hear of it. Not after what she’d done. He insisted that baby be inside the stone. So that’s exactly what they did. Put her inside in her christening gown and sealed it up. I never imagined you’d go looking for it near a hundred years later.” He looked at me accusingly.

I blanched. “You saw?”

He shook his head. “I take a look at the stone from time to time. I took a closer look at it, since you’d been asking about it. I could tell the bolts had been loosened. I figured it was you that’d been in. But I trust you, Meredith. I knew you wouldn’t go running your mouth off about what you’d find. Figured I’d let it go.”

I blushed at my little crime being so easily found out, but I pressed on, anyway. “What about Peter? He disappeared too, didn’t he?”

“What happened wasn’t really Richard’s fault… he loved Peter and his daughter more than anything in the world. But he still blamed himself for not seeing the signs, not anticipating what Rosemary was going to do. He thought he had failed Peter and so he sent him off. Sent him to an orphanage. That’s all there is to tell.”

I should have been satisfied with that response, but I’m glad I wasn’t. “No, there’s more, isn’t there?”

Andrew looked genuinely surprised at that. “What are you talking about?”

“The reason I came asking about the grave is that a woman down in Oklahoma started asking about Richard. After I found Richard’s daughter, I messaged her asking why she was looking into Richard in the first place. She said it wasn’t for her…it was for her uncle Peter. Andrew… if Peter was in the orphanage, how would he know who is father was? Why is he looking now?”

Andrew was silent for a long, long time. I could see him struggling. I wanted to reach out and help him, but I knew this was a struggle he would have to endure himself.

Finally he spoke.

“When Richard killed himself, he left a note for Peter. He also left a note telling my father he wanted it sent to Peter on his 18th birthday. The thing is, my father couldn’t find Peter. That was before the invention of the Internet, you know, and he just couldn’t find him. That letter sat in our house for years. Until I decided to take up the search. I was pretty sure I found him a few years ago, down in Oklahoma. I sent the letter on a whim. Never got a response back.”

Andrew took another nip from his flask. He looked as though a weight had been lifted off his heart. “I guess it got to him after all.”

I called Emily and let her know what happened. I told her I wanted to talk to Peter. I don’t know if she’ll let me or not – she’s still fairly shocked about what happened. She cried when I told her she had another aunt. Telling her the fate of her aunt was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

I hope I get a chance to tell Peter what happened. I hope I get a chance to tell him face-to-face. As difficult as it is, he deserves to know the truth. He deserves to know his father loved him so deeply that he let him go.

He deserves to know who his biological family was. And I think it may be up to me to tell him.