Ghosts in the Gulch: An Evergreen Cemetery Mystery (Evergreen Cemetery Mysteries Book 1) Read online

  Ghosts in the Gulch

  (Based on true events)

  Evergreen Cemetery Mysteries #1

  S. L. Hawke

  ©2014 S.L. Hawke

  For Eddie

  (my brother)

  1953-1977

  Extracted from http://quod.lib.umich.edu/

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo courtesy of Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History

  Map illustrations courtesy of Llamo

  For a complete historical background

  on A.J. Sloan and his family

  Please view

  Author’s Notes Page

  At

  www.evergreencemeterymysteries.blogspot.com

  Or

  Visit Evergreen Cemetery

  Located in Santa Cruz, California

  Owned and managed

  By

  The Museum of Art and History

  Remember, this is historical FICTION!

  You will be entertained by facts, be immersed in an historically accurate world but you will be exposed to the PERILS of fiction, science fiction, and its twisting affect on your mind.

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  Historical Timeline

  1848 Santa Cruz’s first public school started by Mary Amney Case.

  1850 Formation of Santa Cruz County. Evergreen’s first Burial-Julia Arcan aged 19 days. Henry Speel, the first local judge helped build a wagon road over the hill. 17 people followed, including Engineer Grove Cook, of the New Almaden Mine. Evergreen Cemetery Land belonged to Robert Kirby and Hiram Imus.

  1850 Population County 643, City unknown (noted as 100 above) – Buried at Evergreen, 28

  1852 Flooding in Sacramento Delta, Grove Cook murdered and buried at Evergreen.

  1853 Quake in San Diego, unknown magnitude, but frightens inhabitants.

  1856 Santa Cruz’s first newspaper, The Pacific Sentinel is created.

  1857 Government opens a school ‘system’.

  1858 Land sold for $1.00 to the Town Trustees to create Evergreen Cemetery. Masons then buy their plot. Dispute between an unknown man, Hiram Imus and RC Kirby was settled by this donation.

  1860 African American resident Louden (London) Nelson dies and leaves land to the county schools-

  1860 Population County 4994, City 398 – Buried at Evergreen, 117

  1861 Civil War starts, first Chinese burial recorded at Evergreen in newspaper. Flooding locally.

  1862 Earthquake wakes residents of downtown Santa Cruz at 5:30am, unknown magnitude, no one hurt, no property damage. San Lorenzo River Levee built. IOOF Santa Cruz Memorial Cemetery is built.

  1863 First Vandalism of Evergreen Cemetery Shrubbery with a reward of $25 dollars offered( about $565 dollars today 1$ + $22.79)The Pajaro Times is created by Msrs. Kearney, McQuillan and Duehow. They refer to Evergreen Cemetery as “the City of the Dead.”

  The Methodist Church calls on their congregation to move their dead relations out of their private small cemetery to Evergreen or the “City” Cemetery, known as IOOF Santa Cruz Memorial.

  1864 Minor Quakes two weeks apart, Powder Mill nears completion, Chinese workers harassed by hooded men. Construction of jail approved. Confederate Thieves arrested in Corralitos.

  1865 A murder of a white man named A.J. Sloan in Arana Gulch ignites racial tensions and gives government reason to shut down and seize Branciforte Pueblo, Rodriquez Rancho, and surrounding parcels. Drought begins. Two severe quakes rock downtown, damaging buildings.

  1866 Santa Cruz incorporated

  Each small parcel 10+ acres, large parcels 60+acres [scale is off.]

  Origins

  Ohio, 1841

  Thunder began. Then rainfall. A great flash of lightning illuminated a freshly dug grave. Thunder exploded above the huddled group of mourners. There were fourteen in all, gathered at the edge of this sudden burial. Eight of the mourners were white, the rest African. Those Africans were once slaves, but no longer. Marks of the manacles they recently cut from their wrists seeped with home grown mendicants. Wet hands faltered on the support rope of a white pine casket. The box fell flat into the deep hole, landing with an ominous crack. The oldest white woman among them began to cry, deep and howling, like a banshee.

  Andrew had never seen his mother like this. As he watched his father’s casket sink into the wet ground, she had begun to cough, deeply and without pause. He wanted to comfort her but his sister Cynthia held him back.

  “Let her cry Jack,” Cynthia said softly.

  “She’s just sobbing from the deep places within her soul,” Cynthia’s husband Jonathan said, just as Andrew’s father would have done, on a day like this, in front of the dinner fire.

  How Andrew loved his father’s fireside story telling. Grief welled up into his throat. He wanted to vomit but heard his father’s voice instead as if he were standing beside him.

  “Never forget that the African is like the Scots in America, like the Catholic Jacobites and us Presbyterians- they were too poor to stand against the English who killed any, even women and children, who so much as sniffled in their presence.”(Here Pah would pinch his sister Elizabeth’s usually runny nose.) “Your great grandfather Roy stood against these wealthy aristocrats, exclaimed that Robert the Bruce was his true king, and ran into the hills and heather,” (Andrew loved the way he rolled his ‘r’s when he said this word) “He drove them from our village. No more would they do terrible hurtful things to our children and their mothers, no more would they force them to labor and serve against their will because they were the English. And so must we remember that no man has the power over another. May we always fight for those who cannot defend themselves,“ (Pah said this last part with a grand gesture of uplifted arms like a preacher in a pulpit, making all of those who listened want to rise up against slavery and save the Africans from these New English Plantation owners in the South. ) The present came back to Andrew with the sharp crack of thunder and the bite of a lightning flash.

  Andrew studied what remained of his family. His eldest sister Sophia and her husband Henry stood arm in arm by the graveside. His baby sister Elizabeth, clung to Sophia like a vine. Cynthia, two years younger than Sophia, held their baby brother Uriah, who blessedly slept upon her shoulder, while Jonathan spoke to the fugitive slaves. Margaret, his favorite sister, two years younger than Andrew, held Andrew’s hand. And then, his mother, leaning between his older sisters Cynthia and Sophia, became utterly quiet.

  The world around him was without sound. Margaret clenched Andrew’s hand. Elizabeth, cried relentlessly. Andrew noticed how tall Elizabeth had gotten, almost as tall as Sophia, who at her best posture came only to Andrew’s shoulder. Andrew himself had just grown again, this summer of his fourteenth year.

  The fugitive slaves they had been sheltering only days ago, quickly grabbed the handles of waiting shovels. Anxious, looking up at the dark clouds, their foreman held up his hand for a pause, waiting for the lightning to strike. It did, like a command from God. Why then, Andrew cried to himself, did He allow Pah to die?

  For months, their family had sheltered, fed, and protected runaway slaves, helping them find the same freedom Andrew’s father Isaac himself had searched for, and found, in America. But now Andrew saw, with Pah and the Southern policemen
who had come to arrest them, all dead, their work here was finished.

  Isaac Sloan had just died in the barn, collapsing as a Southern bounty hunter had tried to beat the truth out of him. The passion Pah had held for helping the runaway slaves had given him strength enough to endure several blows to his face and several kicks to his gut. But the beating was a brutal one, regardless of age.

  Pah’s belief that his own life was worth the freedom of those who suffered now infected all of them and all of them were now fugitives.

  “We need to get to Fort Wayne,” Jonathan said under his breath.

  “We need to do a lot of things,” Cynthia answered her husband sharply.

  “California is the only place for us to go to now,” Henry, Andrew’s other brother-in-law stated quietly. “I hear there are mountains of gold there.”

  “Henry, more would go every day, including the Union Army if that were true,” Sophia chided.

  “I simply think we should join the wagon train to San Bernardino, or at least to El Dorado,” Henry added, urgently, and quietly.

  “First let‘s get to Fort Wayne,” Jonathan said, looking at his wife for permission.

  Andrew saw that Cynthia didn’t want her new husband to go to the Gold Country, but what else could any of them do? They could not stay here. More Southerners crossed the River every day looking for runaway slaves and the folk who gave them refuge.

  “I will miss him,” Margaret whispered and clutched Andrew’s hand. Andrew merely nodded, closing his eyes, willing the voice of his father to be in his mind.

  ‘You see ma bairns, the Africans are our cousins, in the shame and tyranny of the English.’ His father’s voice echoed within him.

  “It’s our duty to help all those under the thumb of English rule.” Andrew felt the words leave his own mouth. Margaret rested her head on his shoulder and wept silently. Andrew was the man in the family now.

  “I’m so sorry, Missus,” said Josiah, who was large and strong, and African. Andrew had learned horse riding from him between the times of helping the runaways. “It’s our fault. We should have never let him shelter us so long.”

  “Nonsense.” His mother, though breathless, pulled herself up to her full height, equal to that of the former plantation groomsman. “Slavery killed Isaac. The animals who hunt men for bounty killed him. Get going on to Illinois or Michigan. Get free. War is coming over this. Don’t make Isaac’s death meaningless,“ here she paused. The rain fell harder, hiding the tears on all their faces. “Don’t you dare give up your God given right to live as a free human being,” Elizabeth Sloan pronounced the words with strength, then toppled, coughing, sobbing, and groaning. Josiah bowed his head and came over to Andrew.

  “Keep what I taught you, A.J.,” Josiah said to Andrew. He embraced the large man warmly. Josiah’s fate was sealed. He had put bullets in the two men who tried to harm Andrew’s mother and youngest sister. By the time Josiah was free to help Father…

  Andrew did not see what had happened next. Josiah had told Andrew to carry his father’s body back into the house in a soft-spoken voice that meant, Andrew could feel, certain destruction for the bleeding, beaten Southern man at Josiah’s feet. The echo of rifle shots still rang in Andrew’s ears.

  Andrew stared down at his father’s open grave. He made a silent vow to fight the English from the Southern States. He let go of Margaret’s hand and grabbed a handful of mud. He threw it onto his father’s casket. The rain washed it off. More mud fell as the pelting sounds from shovels moved in time to the thunder. Finally, only a mound of dirt marked the spot.

  “Never forget,” Andrew said in Gaelic.

  “Here here!” said Sophia as she put down Elizabeth. Elizabeth rushed into Andrew’s arms, shunning the open arms of Margaret. One by one, the Sloans left the graveside of their buried patriarch, heading west in their hastily packed wagons. They made Indiana by nightfall and spent it shivering in the barn of the Old Germans.

  The next day, they followed the long caravan of westbound wagons to Fort Wayne. Jonathan found them a place to stay, his mother’s old farm. Henry and Sophia stayed in town, helping an elderly woman turn her house into a small hotel for those traveling on to Missouri and the wagon trail to California. Andrew’s mother, Margaret, and Andrew tried to sell small things, but no one was buying handmade lace or bobbins. Andrew went out every day to work for a meager handful of pennies caring for the horses that were stabled at the big hotel livery or the town’s smithery. Uriah had grown out of his nappies, but had to be constantly watched.

  The rumor of gold grew, and Jonathan departed, but with hope and a promise to send for them when he and Henry both had made enough money. Henry reassured the women that they were to come ‘round by boat’ and not risk the perils of a wagon crossing. Time passed too slowly. Letters came even less and less.

  Andrew couldn’t stand the weeping of his sisters. The house where they now lived was small and crowded, a testament to the poverty that they were trying very hard to rise above.

  His mother took in laundry, his sister Sophia rented out what rooms they did have at her husband’s family’s house and kept a decent income from those passing through as part of the wagon trains. Margaret’s hands turned red and bleeding from washing dishes and floors at the boarding house, making Andrew vow to provide them with a better life even if it cost him his own.

  After getting a tiny pinhead nugget of gold as a tip from a boarder passing through and hearing the man’s claims that North Dakota was rich, but not as flowing as California, Andrew knew it was time for him to go.

  Andrew left Indiana in the company of other young men to fight a war for a western territory. Andrew didn’t understand why the United States was fighting Mexico, but he knew that they must, and that the soldier’s pay would help.

  The summer of 1846 was terribly hot. The I Company could barely grant him a uniform that fit. Andrew did his best to stay well, despite the lack of food, poorly fitted boots, and the incessant biting of vermin. He wondered about Jonathan and Henry. They had not sent money or a letter in quite some time. Some blamed the Mexicans, some blamed the Apaches, the Sioux, the wild lands in between. Andrew walked, with the rest of his company into the wetlands, through the swamps of Arkansas. He survived, remembering the tricks of the slaves he had sheltered. Others in his unit simply died, from snake bite, from fever, from heat.

  Andrew sent his pay home. He caught the camp sickness and the camp fever. He made friends, and watched them fight over scraps like animals and then, when they arrived at what their leader thought was Texas, they fought another company for food. Andrew forgot what he was fighting for. He was too sick to carry his own duffle. He shot others; he saw violence. Andrew couldn’t remember what it was like to have a dream, a belief, or a cause. He craved an end to his life. He had failed his family.

  The Army discharged him and offered Andrew a boat ride up the Mississippi back home but instead, Andrew, keeping company with his only best friend, wandered west, thinking to find his brothers-in-law. His best friend found love. Andrew found the sea. He did not look back.

  California

  County of

  Santa Cruz

  1860

  Evergreen Cemetery

  Santa Cruz Township

  The funeral cortege was small. A barouche inscribed with the Crest of the Czar and the Kingdom of Hawai’i, an elegant new velvet lined hearse from across the San Lorenzo, and a buckboard that had seen too many dusty days, lined the rutted funeral road. A mucked and wet mound of equine manure and urine grew as the carriages’ horses snorted and shifted in their harnesses.

  The conveyances’ occupants became a procession which entered Evergreen’s wrought metal gates in silence. Two men held above their heads a magnificent koa wood platform festooned with greens and rare flowers. Amidst the strange gaiety of the splay of floral bounty was a small casket of pure white.

  A young man bore a black armband and kept his pale face still. He had deeply cut eyes, a dar
k red goatee, and a thin harsh chin. On his left arm, he held a woman obscured by a dark black veil. Her mourning dress was of velvet and black European lace, and her gloves the finest dyed silk, her wrap that of pure mink.

  They were not the only funeral that day. Two others were coming up the cortege road. Those pallbearers carried long caskets and gathered elderly mourners who stood aside as the elegant procession passed by. The child’s palette was regarded with silent respect as the tender flower adorned palanquin made its way up the main cobbled path to the very top of Evergreen Cemetery. There the mourners gently laid their cargo down, lifted the white vessel tenderly and with shaking hands, and lowered the child’s casket into the waiting earth.

  A brief shower of rain drenched them, then just as suddenly, stopped. Two rainbows appeared across the sky. The veiled woman tore off her hat and fell on her knees. A wail, vibrato and keen, echoed through the cemetery as this Hawaiian woman chanted her loss to the sky. Then with difficulty, the pale young man who had accompanied her, held her to him in a fierce as in each other’s arms.

  The cortege threw the exotic flowers into the tiny grave and the sexton with his men, put out their hand rolled cigarettes, going straight to work to lay the child to rest. A well-made wooden plaque, hastily created to mark the location of the grave, was placed upon its muddy mound.

  The cortege began their descent, the grieving mother and father frank with their tears now. The other funeral to the left of the path had begun their solemn services and hymns. Another cortege had entered the gates and was heading towards the right hand side of the gate.

  The grieving couple and their mourners paused to let those casket bearers walk in front of them. A man suddenly came forth from that crowded procession and approached the pale young father. He shook the young man’s hand, covering his Sheriff’s star with his hat as he did so.

  “You have my condolences, your Highness, Mr. MacAree,” He mumbled but did not look directly at the now unveiled, grief stricken Hawaiian Princess, wife of the man before him.