The perfect sandy spot to stop and get off our boards. Lots of tracks here that looked like they could’ve been made by canoes or kayaks. “Who comes out here? I wonder. Military history buffs?”
“Who knows,” Jazmine said. “Might just be a spot local kids like to explore.”
“Hope they haven’t explored any graves,” Seb said, glidingup to the bank with the nose of his board and stepping off after Punkin.
We all followed suit, pulling our boards onto shore. Then we took a look around. White pines circled an open area that was overgrown with creeping vines and tangled underbrush. I spotted the remnants of a few structures—old bricks, and what might have been a log cabin at one time but was now just half a wall. If you squinted, you could see how it would’ve made the ideal spot for a snug encampment at one point in time. But now it was nothing but blight and ruin.
The ruined stone lookout stood tall in the center of it all. It was crudely built from mismatched hunks of stone, and when it was still intact, it probably stood four stories high. Now, the back half of the tower was missing. Definitely not climbable unless you wanted to feel what it was like to have a building collapse around you and get buried in stone.
“Bastards!” Seb said, slapping his neck. “These mosquitoes out here are no joke.”
We had insect repellant. I got him to turn around so I could retrieve it from the front pocket of his backpack, and when we’d all doused ourselves with it, we explored the encampment. The good thing was that there wasn’t much to look through but what we’d already seen when we paddled up. The bad thing was that the wild grass was to our waists, so it was difficult to see anything on the ground.
Seb and Jazmine got out the collapsible shovels and extended their handles so they could use them to swat at the grass. “Where’s a machete when you need one?” Seb asked.
“Let’s focus, shall we?” Jazmine said. “Tell us what the letter said again so we know where to look.”
“Behind the tower,” I remembered. “Mabel said it was behind the tower marked with a cross. So, over there...”
Where an entire wall of the tower had collapsed into rubble.
“What if the grave is under all this stone?” Benny asked. “No way we can move all this, even if we did it all day.”
He wasn’t wrong, and I shared his worry. But we carried on, splitting up and combing the grounds around the rubble, swatting at the high grass, searching for anything. After slapping my millionth mosquito and nearly reinjuring my weak ankle on a loose rock, I stopped to take a breath. A dark shape caught my eyes in the nearby woods. I cautiously took a few steps into the trees.
It was a cemetery.
A ruined one, covered in moss and juniper shrub. I quickly counted seven simple gravestones that all seemed to be made from the same rock used to build the tower.
“Guys!” I called over my shoulder. “Come here, quick!”
I pulled aside foliage to make my way closer to the graves while the gang ran up behind me.
“Oh. My. God,” Jazmine said, letting her mouth drop open.
“It makes sense,” I said, excited. “Why would they bury soldiers right next to the lookout tower? Off here in the woods is more ideal.”
“Are they solider graves?” Seb asked while Punkin sniffed around.
None of them had names. One of them had a date of 1811. “That’s my guess. How could this be left out here, forgotten like this? It’s so sad. That guy who talked to you about this place—had he seen these?” I asked Seb.
He shrugged. “Didn’t mention them. But I didn’t tell him Iwas looking for a grave, either. Wait, do any of these have crosses, or are they all these plain stones?”
Benny crouched and brushed away a blanket of decomposing leaves.
There it was. A flat cross made up of several pieces of stone was embedded in the forest floor.
“Holy shit.”
“Is that the only one?” I asked. “Check around before we start digging.”
We ran around the graveyard, buzzing with excitement as we searched.
“Nothing,” Benny said. “This is it. Has to be.”
We’d take turns digging, starting with Jaz and Seb. It wouldn’t be easy, I knew that much after digging up the time capsule. In movies, people always dig graves in minutes when it would really take hours with a shovel. And when Seb’s and Jazmine’s arms grew weary—harder to dig with these little camping shovels than the full-sized ones we used before—we were about to trade off.
But Seb thrust his shovel into the ground, and went very still.
