Original Stories Fan Fiction ❯ Vampire Summer ❯ Revelations ( Chapter 6 )

 

 

The archives were downstairs in dusty old boxes. The lady at Town Hall I had spoken to over the phone was more than happy to direct me to the correct stack. She and her two co-workers had greeted us at the door. They didn't often get visitors who were interested in their town history, and seemed to have no problem with me nosing around down there.

 

Crystal stayed upstairs with the ladies, who gave her her own desk to sit behind, complete with a typewriter and pads of paper for her to draw on. Crystal even borrowed one of their mugs and had her own `coffee' of juice that I'd brought with us for a snack. Town Hall didn't get many visitors at all, aside from the occasional resident who stopped by for a permit of some sort or other. We had the place to ourselves.

 

I began by sorting through piles of birth and death records, keeping an eye out for the name `Price.' There was not one Price that I could find. I did find records for Jonny Crew and his family, including his little sister Emily. Again I noticed the waves of deaths, coming at approximately fifty year intervals, for the last few centuries. It even continued into the early 20th century, although by that time my cemetery had stopped being utilized.

 

“Can I help you find something, dear?” One of the ladies came down to see how I was doing.

 

“No—yes.” I changed my mind. “In the cemetery by the lake I found an old gravestone with the name Jonathan Price, but I can't seem to find any records for him.” I quickly consulted my notebook, where I had jotted down the information I'd gathered at the little library. “There were other Prices through the years, but I don't see any records for them, either.”

 

The secretary knelt on the floor beside me and all the boxes I had pulled down. “What year did he die?” she asked.

 

“1692.”

 

“And what year was he born?”

 

“It didn't say on the gravestone. It just said he came from Rhode Island.”

 

“Aah,” the woman replied. “Rhode Island. That explains it.” She got up, brushed off her skirt, and went to the very back of the archive room. In a little corner all by itself sat a box similar to the ones I had spread out all around me. She huffed a little with effort, so I went over and helped her pull it off the shelf. It was heavy, mainly because it was stuffed full of files. “We keep the out-of-staters in here,” she explained.

 

Insular little town, I thought.

 

The records went all the way back to the late 17th century—and all the way forward to the early 20th. They must keep the most recent records upstairs. It said a lot about the town that their records for people who had lived and died here, but not been born here, fit into one, admittedly heavy, box.

 

“Thanks,” I said, when we had got it over to my little area. “I'll put it back when I'm done.” The woman nodded and turned to go back upstairs. I stopped her with a brief touch on her arm. “Is Crystal being good? She's not bothering you, is she?” I felt kind of guilty that they had volunteered to watch her while I did my `research.'

 

“Oh, no, she's no trouble at all. We enjoy having her,” the woman answered me. “She's drawing us pictures right now.”

 

“All right. Thank you, again. Tell the other ladies I appreciate it, too.”

 

“It's our pleasure.”

 

I heard her footsteps recede and a door closed at the top of the stairs. The dim yellow light in the otherwise dark basement reminded me I had a time limit—I had to be finished and back to the cottage before dusk.

 

I fished out the oldest files first and skimmed through them. Sure enough, there was Jonathan Price, died 1692. Even the official record was vague. Born in Rhode Island, it said, date unknown. But he had been sixteen, the stone in the cemetery had said so. I was looking for confirmation and I found it, in one sentence: Jonathan left behind his fiancée, Elizabeth Smythe, age 15, who died of grief one year later. Smythe—Smith. There were tons of Smythes or Smiths in the cemetery.

 

The records I was searching weren't the originals. According to the ladies upstairs, those had burned in a great fire in the late 1800's, but not before they had been transcribed into more modern script. The old writing on the graves was hard enough to decipher. S looked like lower-case f, and spellings seemed to vary even in the same families.

 

So now I had to research the Smythe family as well. I continued on in the out-of-state box, since I was already in there. Elizabeth Smythe might have been an out-of-stater too, for all I knew. I did come across one other Jonathan Price—the one from 1860. I hadn't found his headstone in the cemetery, but his name had been in one of the books at the little library. So he was an out-of-stater, too. There was no date of birth listed for him, but what was interesting is how he died—lost in the woods, presumed eaten by wild animals. In this town, it didn't even merit him a memorial headstone, apparently. Unless it was one of the ones I'd seen stacked amid the stone wall bordering the cemetery, smashed by vandals who knew how long ago. I'd have to check that out later. But at least it gave me a time frame for this Jonathan Price's death—it was right around the same time, to the day, that Jonny Crew and his sister Emily had died in the well.

 

My neck was killing me from bending over. I stood and stretched, before I replaced all the files in the out-of-stater's box, and hauled it back to its resting place on the back shelf. Elizabeth Smythe must have been a townie. I thumbed through the records for the late 1600's until I found her name. She had been born in 1678. They married early in those days, then again, they died early too, so they had to get in a lot of living in the few years they had. It really did say she died of grief. She had several brothers and sisters, however, and not all of them died young. There were descendants. I got out my notepad and busily searched through years of records, tracing the path of the Smythes over the generations. There were still Smythes in town today.

 

It wasn't much of a lead. I had proved that Jonathan Price had existed—twice—and that he had died—twice. Not that he was my Johnny, or even that he was the same Jonathan Price. But I knew more now than I did before. I yawned. Research was tiring work, even if it was life or death. Enough for today. Hopefully the kind ladies of Town Hall would let me come back another time.

 

Crystal was still drawing when I went back upstairs. There were crayon renderings of flowers, the lake, herself and me and a brown-haired man with long teeth. “Look, Mommy!” She showed me her pictures. “I drew Johnny, see?”

 

Embarrassed, I glanced around at the ladies, but they didn't seem to notice anything unusual in the drawing. I guess if you didn't know they were teeth. . . .

 

“See—there are his vampire teeth!”

 

They did now. But they chuckled, chalking it up to a little girl's overactive imagination, I hoped.

 

“Did you find everything you were looking for?” asked the lady who had helped me downstairs.

 

I nodded. “For now. I'd like to come back, if I could.”

 

They all nodded. “Any time.” The woman I'd first spoken to added, “Let us know if we can help.”

 

I wondered what they thought I was doing—writing a book? But it wouldn't hurt to ask. “Do you know if there are any Smythe's living in town?” I pronounced it “Sm—eye—th” so they could hear the correct spelling.

 

The third lady, the only one whom I hadn't spoken to directly, looked surprised. “Smythe?” she asked, and she pronounced it `Smith.' “My great-aunt is a Smythe.” A delighted grin lit her face. “She has all kinds of stories about the family. Antiques, pictures. I'm sure she would love to meet you!”

 

She ran off to call her great-aunt, while I helped Crystal straighten out her temporary desk. I hoped Ms. Smythe wouldn't want to meet with us today. I needed to get back and put my notebook safely under my mattress before too much longer. Johnny had a bad habit of appearing when it was only starting to get dark, and I couldn't let him know what I had been doing.

 

 

Great-aunt Beth lived in the big white house at the bend of the paved road, right before it joins the main road. I had driven by it every time I went into town for supplies. The little library was just up the road.

 

“Call me Aunt Beth,” she told us, holding out her hands to clasp each of ours in turn. She was a petite woman, a little on the plump side, with snow white hair she wore done up in a bun.

 

Betty, the lady from Town Hall—I wondered if she had been named after her great-aunt—had arranged for us to meet Aunt Beth the following morning, much to my relief. So I had had a `normal' night at the cottage with Johnny, or as normal as it could be, considering he was a bloodthirsty vampire. Lately, he had been getting his nourishment elsewhere and left me alone.

 

“Come in, come in,” Aunt Beth said, holding open her screen door. Her house was crammed full of the accumulations of a lifetime and then some. If I didn't know this was a private residence, I would have guessed it was an antique shop. Every nook and cranny was filled with photographs in ornate frames, small colored glass, and the occasional odd or end that really didn't belong on a tabletop or a shelf, but which would have been quite at home in an antique store. Or a museum. Like the old adze or the rusted two-handled hacksaw which decorated a sideboard.

 

Aunt Beth caught my startled glance. “Those belonged to my late husband,” she said. “He collected hand tools.” Her eyes roved meaningfully around the cluttered room. “I'm a collector too, as you can see.”

 

Before we could discuss my `research,' Aunt Beth insisted we sit down with her and have some light refreshments. Crystal got a big kick out of being served real tea in a porcelain cup, just like a grown-up.

 

“I'm a Smythe by birth,” Aunt Beth said, as we munched on assorted cookies. Crystal had to try one of each kind, with a slurp of tea in between each cookie. “Our family goes back several generations. My father was a Smythe. He used to tell me stories about his ancestors. The original Smythes settled this town in the late 1600's. Betty said you were interested in the first Elizabeth Smythe?” She looked at me expectantly.

 

“The first Elizabeth Smith?” I repeated, pronouncing it the way I heard it.

 

Aunt Beth smiled. “There have been a lot of Elizabeths in our family over the years,” she said. “The first Elizabeth died at the turn of the century—the 18th century—in. . . 1693 if I'm not mistaken. I have a family tree I'll show you later. I am descended from her older brother Robert. Betty's family is descended from another brother, Daniel.”

 

“The archives said she died of grief after her fiancée drowned,” I said. “Do you know anything about that story?”

 

Aunt Beth laughed, and it made a pleasant, tinkling sound. “Ah, the romance. It was said that she lost her true love and wandered every night by the lake pleading for him to come back to her. They found her there, dead as a stone, one morning, with not a mark on her. That's why they said she died from grief.”

 

“But she's not buried next to him—Jonathan, I mean,” I said.

 

“Goodness, no. They weren't married yet. She's buried with the rest of the Smythes.”

 

Crystal had lost interest in our conversation soon after the cookies gave out, and she wandered around the room looking at all the pictures on the walls. She picked up a bone-white statuette.

 

“Don't touch, Crystal,” I cautioned her, afraid she might break something. She put it back and picked up an old picture frame instead. Inside was a black and white photo of three children—two boys and a little girl. All three had the serious face of people you see in very early photos, as if back then smiling was not allowed. Maybe it wasn't.

 

“Who are these people?” Crystal asked Aunt Beth.

 

“Hmm? Oh, those are actually relatives of Betty. The Crews. That's Jonny, his brother Daniel, and their younger sister Emily. She had a different mother than the boys. Their father, Jackson Crew, remarried after his first wife passed away. He was a Crew, but his mother, another Elizabeth, was a Smythe.”

 

Most of that went right over Crystal's head. She studied the photograph. “The little girl looks like me,” she said.

 

“Is that the brother and sister who fell in the well?” I asked.

 

Aunt Beth nodded. “You have done your research,” she said. “That one's Jonny.” She pointed to the boy on the left. It definitely wasn't my Johnny; neither was the other boy. “And the little girl is Emily. Such a sad, sad story.”

 

“What happened? The accounts in the library and the archives were very brief.”

 

“It was around the time of the Civil War—Jonny and Daniel were so much older than their sister but she loved to follow them around. On that particular day, the boys had left the house early and didn't realize Emily had followed behind them. They cut through a neighbor's field, and that's when Emily fell into the well. It had been covered by an old plank and was not in use. Jonny heard her scream as she fell, and he went after her. He went down into the well to get her while Daniel ran for help. By the time Daniel got back with his father, it was too late. The sides had fallen in. They dug them out, eventually, but they had both suffocated. I have the newspaper account of it somewhere in here. I'll see if I can find it for you.”

 

“That's all right,” I murmured, faintly disturbed at how matter-of-factly she had related the story. “You gave us the jist of it.” I glanced at Crystal, but she hadn't been paying attention. Instead, she was running her finger lightly over the picture and repeating the children's names softly under her breath.

 

“That's only half the story,” Aunt Beth replied. “Jonny's very best friend was so distraught by the deaths that he ran into the woods and was killed himself by wild animals a few days later. A tragedy all the way around.”

 

I remembered something like that from the archives. A chill went down my spine. He was Jonny's best friend? “In that case, I'd be very interested in reading the newspaper article.”

 

Aunt Beth bustled around the room, moving things out of her way. “Ah, here it is,” she exclaimed triumphantly. She held up a small box filled with yellowed newspaper clippings and dug through it until she found the one she wanted. “Be careful with it,” she cautioned me as she handed me the brittle paper.

 

Half-afraid it would crumble right in my hands, I read the article quickly. It basically repeated what she had told me. However, it did give the name of the friend who had so tragically died in the woods days after the incident. It was Jonathan. Jonathan Price.