Time Well Spent as a Ghost

Chapter 9

Later that afternoon, I drove home from the city with mixed feelings, trying to think of a reasonable explanation for the $5,300 dollars in my purse. After finding the coins in the laundry room, I had gotten myself and Cody dressed and dropped him off at Tricia's. I started at the bookstore, stopping at a cafe for an espresso while I looked up the approximate values of the three coins. The ones from the laundry room were larger than the one from Cody's window. One was from 1857 and featured "lady liberty," and the other was a twenty dollar Double Eagle gold coin, also from 1857. All three were well used and a little worn looking but the border markings, the date, and the smaller details of the figures were still visible. When I asked the dealer for estimates, he told me there was a pretty good market for civil war era coins.

Mrs. Biddle had said something about how the original Crickler family had sold milk and eggs to Union soldiers. If these coins were from those years, who had collected them and why were they appearing around the house now? And how? I'm home during the day and when I'm running errands the house is locked up tight. Did I really believe they just floated out from whatever hiding place they'd been in for the past century and a half? I couldn't understand what any of this was supposed to mean. Dozens of people had lived in the house through the years.

And the broken glass ... a ghostly warning?

With that possibility in mind, I decided to approach this from the opposite direction. I spent the evening measuring windows and room dimensions and then went online and ordered curtains and area rugs for the downstairs and for Cody's room. If Myles questioned the expense, I'd just tell him that the money came from Mrs. Biddle.

***

That was two months ago. Myles actually didn't question me about the new carpets and they were laid just in time. The cool fall temperatures in the northeast had been on a steady decline and there was snow in the forecast for the holiday weekend.

I'd been cutting, peeling, cooking, and baking apples for the past few days. The orchards hadn't been cultivated for years, but despite growing out of control there were plenty of trees with ripe, unmarred fruit. I was at the sink, laughing to myself that the next time a mysterious coin showed up I was getting a dishwasher. I looked up and saw a large gray dog loping through the backyard. Grabbing the broom, I stepped out onto the back porch to scare him off but he seemed to be harmlessly making his way east in the direction of the neighboring farms. He wasn't in much of a hurry, though, and had stopped in the thicket of overgrown brush and weeds near the edge of the road.

An hour later when we came back from the store he was still digging around, so I put Cody down for a nap, and shrugged on my coat and boots. Halfway across the yard I yelled, and as he looked up I swung the rake at him and he quickly trotted away. As I got closer, I saw he'd been nosing around a rabbit or groundhog den. A crumbling rock wall separated where I was standing from what used to be the blackberry grove farther south. The tree line that had concealed this area from the house had been recently cut away, but whoever was trying to tidy things up had stopped at that. I kicked around the dirt and stones and noticed something odd. There were chunks of cement hidden under the mix of dried grass and wildflowers. A creepy realization set in that these were broken gravestones. The old Crickler family burial ground.

I quickly went back to the house for gloves, a shovel, and Cody's monitor. After an hour's worth of digging, I had pieced together parts of about thirteen different gravestones. Mrs. Biddle had been right, the oldest ones were from the late 1850's. Cody was starting to make noise so I quickly jotted down names, dates, and some personal sentiments that were still visible in the weathered, dark gray stones.

The oldest ones told the most interesting story...

Bruce Gettins, March 4, 1827 – July 24, 1858, "beloved husband"

Benjamin Gettins, September 12, 1852 – July 24, 1858, "precious son"

Sylvia Gettins, May 4, 1834 – July 12, 1862

Stanley Crickler, October 9, 1797 – August 8, 1858

Margaret Crickler, April 2, 1804 – May 31, 1875

Bonnie Crickler Tiller, December 1837 – November 3, 1905

Eliza Crickler, August 18, 1835 – January 13, 1899

Julia Crickler, March 14, 1839 – April 16, 1901

From what I could piece together, Stanley and Margaret had been the original Cricklers who built the farmhouse. They had three, possibly four daughters. It looked like Sylvia was in the same age range as the three other girls born in the 1830's, so possibly she'd been a Crickler before marrying Bruce. What had happened on July 24 when five-year-old Benjamin died on the same day as his father? An accident on the farm? In the middle of July in the mid-1800's, the most likely explanation was a fire. Then Stanley died less than a month later, possibly from his injuries? Sylvia was the oldest daughter and the first to pass away, less than four years after losing her husband and son. That left just Margaret and her three daughters. Two of them stayed single and Bonnie married but I didn't find a gravestone for her husband.

Is the spirit of one of these women trying to get noticed?