of the local businessmen want to petition the legislature to close the grounds so they can be given over to more shops and houses. They say the village will never amount to anything as long as it has a cemetery in the middle of it.”
“But what about the people already buried here?”
“They’d move them all over to the new Necropolis. There’s been talk of it for years, but the Board of Trustees seems to be taking the notion seriously this time.” Spicer shrugged. “The grounds are getting full anyway, so even if nothing happens, I probably wouldn’t be needed that much longer.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
Just then Sally reappeared with a pot of tea and two mugs on a tray. She set it down on the table. “I’ll leave you two to talk,” she said. “I know Morgan has something to ask you.”
“Yes, your puzzle,” Thaddeus said. “Luke delivered your entire message, you know. He said you needed my advice on something.”
“Something very odd happened, and I’d like your opinion of it.” Morgan briefly filled him in on the strange desecration, and the constable’s reaction to it. “I don’t see how it could have been grave robbers,” he said. “And I don’t believe it was hooligans, either. They seldom do more than topple the grave markers.”
“I agree, although I must admit that my first thought would have been of resurrectionists.”
“They weren’t interested in the body. They threw it aside. He wasn’t very fresh anyway. He had been in the grave a long time. He died in 1848.”
“Then there must have been something of value in the coffin.”
“I don’t understand how that could be. The man had no relatives and was buried by the county,” Morgan said. “But if there was anything there, it was taken.”
“Who, exactly, was it who was dug up?” Thaddeus asked.
“A man by the name of Abraham Jenkins.”
“And who was he?”
“I don’t know. Just another poor soul who died alone, as far as I can tell. I don’t even know how old he was. There wasn’t a birthdate to put on the stone. He died of a pain in the stomach, but other than that, there was no other information in the record.”
It certainly wasn’t much to go on, Thaddeus thought, but in the interest of being thorough, he supposed he should have a look at the disturbed grave itself.
Morgan led him out of the cottage to the laneway that led through the burying ground. The twins materialized, seemingly out of nowhere, and followed them, a little parade that straggled past a small building in the centre of the cemetery. A chapel, perhaps? Or a deadhouse? Probably useful for either function, Thaddeus figured.
Morgan turned into one of the right-hand rows and stopped in front of a grave with loose soil heaped over it. As soon as their father stopped, the twins hunkered down on their haunches to watch, two of them with thumbs in their mouths. They were like little imprinted chicks, Thaddeus thought, programmed by nature to follow. Morgan appeared not to notice that they were there.
“This is it,” he said.
The raw soil looked out of place next to its undisturbed neighbours, but that was the only extraordinary thing about it as far as Thaddeus could see. Abraham Jenkins’s headstone revealed little. It was a plain square piece of granite, as befitted one buried by charity, with a simple statement of name and date of death. Other than the fact that the grass on the nearby graves had been trampled and suffered a spade mark or two, there was nothing nearby that offered any other clue.
Thaddeus made a slow survey of the grounds. It was an old-style cemetery, more thought given to the efficient use of space than to the comfort of dead souls, the graves laid out in regimented rows with a minimum of space left between them. It would be a sorry place to spend eternity, Thaddeus reflected, but then, he supposed, it provided a last resting place for the sorriest of people.
Nearly the entire ground appeared to be filled, except for small empty sections at the back, and there was no direction in which it could be expanded. Yonge Street and the concession line along Tollgate Road hemmed it in on two sides. Buildings crowded up against it on the other two.
“Show me where they went over the fence.”
Morgan led him to the back of the cemetery, the twins flapping in a line behind them.
“I think it must have been here,” he said. “At least this is where they ran to when I surprised them.” And then he stood back and waited while Thaddeus examined the fence and stared at the buildings beyond it. There was nothing at all remarkable about any of it: an ordinary paling fence and a huddle of wooden houses. He turned and walked back to the gravesite, but the backside view of it was no more informative than the front side had been.
“Can you think of any reason at all why they would have chosen this particular body to dig up?” he asked.
Morgan shook his head. “No. The grave has been here for several years. There’s nothing special about the headstone that marks it. Nothing special about the person in it. I have no idea why this happened.”
Thaddeus knew that Morgan was expecting him to discover some piece of information or small item that would set them on a path to resolution of the mystery, but there seemed to be nothing that suggested so much as a line of inquiry. He would make a circuit of the grounds, he decided, just to be thorough, but he had little expectation that anything useful would come of it.
As soon as he moved, Morgan made to follow.
“Just stay here for a minute,” Thaddeus said. “I’ll shout if I have any questions.”
To his relief, the children stayed with their father. He was finding their presence hugely distracting.
The burial ground wasn’t large, only five or six acres in all, he judged. Back in the 1820s, when the field was established, no one could have foreseen that there would be so many strangers to bury, although it had obviously found favour with some affluent families, as well, for here and there more elaborate stone and marble memorials towered over the plain blocks that were planted for the indigents. He went up and down the rows, idly scanning the information recorded on the markers. Most of the names meant nothing to him, but one small slab with two familiar names caught his attention. Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews were buried here, a fact that he had not known, but he supposed he should have guessed it. When Mackenzie fled the colony after his failed rebellion, it was Lount and Matthews who were fingered as ringleaders. In spite of pleas from across the colony, they were both hanged and their bodies buried with strangers. Ironic that Mackenzie himself had now been welcomed back, all forgiven. Thaddeus wondered whether or not the little rebel had ever visited the graves of the men he had led to their deaths.
He continued his survey, but no clues presented themselves. The key to the riddle must lie elsewhere. He returned to where Morgan was waiting, his brood of identical children hunkered at his feet.
“I’m sorry,” Thaddeus said. “I can’t see anything that would explain what happened, unless someone was after the body itself. And without knowing who he was, it’s unlikely that we’ll ever think of any reason for him to have been dug up.”
Morgan’s face fell. “At least you tried, which is more than the constable
