Mystery on Graveyard Head. Edith Dorian
5 • The House On Graveyard Head
WHEN Linda slid into the back seat of the station wagon with Steve, she still thought her ears had been playing her tricks.
“Your mother didn’t really say Graveyard Head, did she?”
“Sure she said Graveyard Head. That’s the name of the headland where the Farr house is.” Steve chuckled at Linda’s incredulous face. “Cheerful sort of address, isn’t it?”
“But why?” Linda demanded. “For goodness’ sake, why?”
“Because the Farrs put their graveyard along the shore at the top of the ledges,” Steve explained. “You couldn’t miss it from the water. It’s all tangled up in vines and bayberry bushes so you can hardly find it now, but Grandfather said ships beating up Merriconeag Sound in the old days used to steer their course by the Farr headstones.”
“I still don’t get it,” Linda said in bewilderment. “Why didn’t they use a cemetery like other people?”
“But there wasn’t any regular burying ground when the Farrs settled here,” Steve told her. “All the early settlers had family graveyards, and a lot of them kept on using them even after they built a Meetinghouse in 1758. You would have, too, if you’d had to lug a heavy coffin five miles over rough trails to the church ground in Center Harpswell.”
Linda laughed. “Maybe I would, though I’d never have guessed it if you hadn’t told me. I can’t seem to picture families living in the same house in the same place hundreds of years. Down home in New York hardly anybody we know was even born in the city. Anyway, if I’d been a Farr, I’d have got rid of that graveyard name in a hurry.”
Steve grinned at her. “You’d have had a swell job on your hands. Fifty years from now Grandfather’s house will still be the ‘Lorenzo Purchas place’ even if Dad suddenly sells it to you tomorrow. Besides, the name fits. Wait till you get a look at that house on the Head.”
By that time, the station wagon was turning out of Juniper Point and starting along the main road on Harpswell Neck. Dr. Cobb barely crawled. Half his carload was giving him direcions while they hunted for the break in a tangle of bushes that marked the old entrance to Dr. Sutton’s property.
“There it is, about ten feet in front of you.” Captain Pel pointed to the right of the road. “Better park where you are, Dr. Cobb. There’s no earthly use trying to turn in on the Head. Dr. Sutton’ll need a bulldozer before a car’ll navigate that road again. There’s a footpath, though; duck hunters and berrypickers have kept it open after a fashion.”
Following his lead, they plunged through the bushes, strung out in single file. Steve and Linda brought up the rear. Bayberry thickets and scrub growth hemmed them in on both sides, and overhead, wind-twisted birches nearly locked branches. Linda hardly took a step without turning an ankle or getting tangled up in blackberry creepers.
“Those Farrs certainly had sense,” she admitted. “I’d have made two graveyards right under my front porch before I’d carry anything bigger than a pillbox over a trail like this. You don’t suppose Waity would like to lend me that nice stiff horse collar he’s got on his ankle, do you? His foot’s the only one that’s safe.”
But the narrow rutted path finally opened into a pine woods where the traces of the old road were easier to follow.
“Going’ll be better in a minute,” Captain Pel promised. “The Head’s so rocky it won’t support much except juniper and berry bushes. That’s what made it so good for a garrison in the old days—not much grass to set afire and no cover for the French and Indians.”
But Linda was in no state of mind to brood over the past. She could start thinking about history if she reached Dr. Sutton’s house without a broken ankle, and she continued to pick her way gingerly until she emerged intact from the woods. Then she stopped to stare across the headland at the T-shaped old Farr house, its crossbar facing south down the Bay to the open sea and its tail of barn and additions stretching northward.
“See what I meant?” Steve asked, and she nodded slowly. If there was ever a headquarters for a ghost convention, it was that gaunt, weather-beaten old place with its doors and windows boarded tight and the sea gulls roosting on its chimneys.
“Bright and cheery all right!” Steve said as they started after the others down the field. “When I was in fifth grade, a gang of us used to come over here just before dark and scare ourselves half to death. Jim Moody had nightmares all night because we dared him to stay alone on the back porch fifteen minutes.”
“What did you expect him to have?” Linda demanded. “Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Addams probably dreamed that house up between them. Steve Purchas, if you get more than six inches away from me when we’re inside, I know I’ll drop dead and haunt you!”
But by the time the pair of them had caught up with the rest, the atmosphere around the Farr house had grown so practical that any self-respecting ghost would have taken flight, squalling, with the outraged sea gulls, from the roof. Four men were prowling from one side to another, tapping framework for the hollow tune of rotten wood, and on the front porch Mrs. Purchas was prodding and poking at the floor boards.
“They’ll still hold us over there by the door,” she announced. “You can get busy with that crowbar, Steve.”
The sound of ripping wood brought the men hurrying up the steps, ready to lend a hand, but Steve was not having much trouble. Rusty nails and screws simply broke off under pressure. It was the door itself that presented the real problem. In the end, they had to force it because the lock was so badly corroded. Then Dr. Sutton pushed it wide, and they crowded after him, peering eagerly over one another’s shoulders. Even with only the door open, light streamed ahead of them down the wide hall, and they could see how meticulously Patience Farr had prepared her home for safekeeping before she sailed on her last ill-fated voyage. Yellowed dust sheets covered settles and tables, and on the wall each picture wore a newspaper blanket.
“How Dr. Sutton’s grandmother must have loved her house to take care of it this way,” Linda exclaimed impulsively.
“Loved it and had to leave it again and again to sail with Jude,” Mrs. Purchas said, nodding. “Just as Jude’s mother before her had loved it and left it to sail the seven seas. Farrs were born at sea and died at sea, Linda, but the Head was always home.”
Naturally, upstairs was too dark to explore, but they looked as best they could through every room on the first floor, barking their shins on furniture and stirring up clouds of dust, before they wandered down the hall again to the front door. The shrouded pictures on the wall had roused Linda’s curiosity more than anything else.
“What do you suppose they are?” she asked Steve as the rest trooped out ahead of them.
“Family portraits and pictures of the Farr ships, I guess,” he said. “Most of the old houses around here are full of them.”
Sunlight was streaking across one picture right in front of them, and Linda reached up to tuck its wrapper more securely behind the frame. “Watch it,” Steve warned her, but the paper had already crumbled under her touch, and she looked at him in dismay.
“Never mind,” he said. “Go ahead and pull the rest off. We can wrap it up again. Waity’s got tonight’s paper stuck in his pocket. I’ll go swipe a piece of that.”
Left alone a minute, Linda removed the last dusty shreds and studied the picture in delight. It was a portrait of an oddly beautiful girl with a cluster of flaming red curls in the nape of her neck and strange greenish lights in her eyes. She’s only a little older than I am, Linda thought, but she’s not nearly as tame. Maybe she was born in a storm at sea. She leaned forward quickly to read the name “Loraney Farr” on a brass plate. Then she rewrapped the picture in the newspaper that Steve brought her and they strolled on outside.
“You’ll want electric lights and plumbing,