Page 43 of Camino Ghosts

Mayes smiled, took another one on the chin, and reminded himself to stick to the questions. “Right, well, now, so she was only forty-two when she died.”

“That’s right.”

“Where did she die?”

“Here in Santa Rosa, at the hospital.”

“May I ask the cause of her death?”

“You’re asking me if you can ask me a question?”

“No, sorry. What was the cause of Ruth’s death?”

“She caught cancer.”

“Where were you living when she died?”

“Down in The Docks, same place I live now. Round the corner with a friend who took us in when we left the island.”

“And when did you leave the island?”

“When I was fifteen. Summer of 1955.”

“And why did you leave the island?”

Lovely paused for a moment and looked down at her robe. Without looking up she said, “We were the last two. Everybody else had died. Life was just too hard and we couldn’t live there anymore. One day Jimmy Ray Bone came out to the island, he had a boat and checked on us now and then, and he said it was time for us to leave, said he’d found a place for us to stay in town, said he was tired of checking on us and everybody who knew us thought it was time to let go of the island. And so me and Mama got our clothes and things together, wasn’t much, and he helped us pack up and load it all in his boat. And then he waited while we went up to the cemetery and said goodbye to our people. It was terrible, after so many years. We were upset and crying and Mama began speaking in tongues but I could understand. She was saying goodbye to her parents and grandparents and all the way back to Nalla, one of my great-grandmothers. They were all buried there, still are.” She stopped, looked up, and said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Barrow. I wasn’t answering your question.”

Her lawyer had told her more than once that she should not volunteer anything. Answer the questions directly, if possible, but give them nothing extra. If you don’t understand the question, say nothing. Steven would step in and clear things up.

“That’s okay,” Mayes said. “You did answer it. Let’s talk about your father.”

5.

The genealogy consumed the first two hours. Without notes, Lovely recalled the names of many of her ancestors, along with the approximate spans of their lives. She could not remember all the dates of their births and deaths, but then who could?

Her memory was remarkable and Mr. Barrow asked if she had refreshed it with notes of any type. She explained that she once had some notebooks and diaries, and she had used them when she wrote her book, but they had been misplaced, or lost.

For lunch, Bruce hosted her, Miss Naomi, and Steven and Diane in the upstairs café at Bay Books. He gave them a corner table and left them alone so they could debrief. Steven whispered that Lovely was a fine witness so far—collected, certain, and believable. But she was showing signs of fatigue.

6.

Back in the old days, a deposition was “taken” by a court reporter using either the really old method of rapid shorthand or the more modern stenographic machine. Once it was taken, the court reporter would then translate the language into a readable form by typing every word. Lawyers would sometimes wait weeks to get a copy of the deposition or a court proceeding.

Nowadays, though, the technology was so advanced that the voices of the witnesses and the lawyers were captured and printed in real time. A deposition was not official until reviewed and signed by the witness, but it was not unusual for a lawyer to get an unofficial copy of, say, a 100-page depo emailed to him by the court reporter within hours of the testimony.

Diane had a copy before 5:00 p.m. the day of Lovely’s deposition, and though she was technically not supposed to share it with anyone until it became official, she sent it to Mercer anyway. Late that night they compared notes. The more they talked, the more they worried. There were plenty of discrepancies between Lovely’s book and her deposition; wrong dates, names, and events.

Steven and Diane had urged Lovely to reread her book to refresh her memory, but they did not know whether she had. Evidently not. She had self-published the book ten years earlier, at least fifty years after leaving the island as a young teenager, and her memory was obviously clouded. But what eighty-year-old could recall the names of her great-great-great-ancestors without notes? Lovely had tried, but there were too many mistakes.

Late in her deposition, Lovely described the cemetery where the dead were buried on Dark Isle. It was a big square area on the “high ground” and enclosed with a fence of heavy logs lashed together with ropes and vines. There were many graves there, some dating back to the 1700s. Where else were the people supposed to be buried, she asked? Since there were no rocks or stones on the island, the only markers were small wooden crosses with the names carved into them. Over time, these faded and rotted and disappeared, but the bones were still in the ground. As a child she had watched the men build a simple casket for her grandfather and cried as it was lowered into the ground. She knew exactly where it was located. Every person on the island attended each burial, even the small children. She and the others were taught about death from early on. In Africa, death was not to be feared and the dead often rose again as spirits, even ghosts.

At trial, the state, along with Tidal Breeze, would attempt to discredit her story and claim that there was simply no proof of anything she had said in either her book or her lawsuit. There was no record of anyone ever having lived on Dark Isle. No proof of a settlement, buildings, roads, cemetery, of anything, other than the suspicious stories of an old woman.

In their view, Lovely was an opportunist being used by others to litigate a false claim. The attorneys for Tidal Breeze had made enough off-the-record comments for Steven Mahon to know that they suspected he and his organization had latched on to Lovely’s claims as the easiest way to block the resort.

By the time Mercer read the deposition for the second time, she had a knot in her stomach. There were too many conflicts between what Lovely wrote and what she was now remembering. At trial, the lawyers would pick her apart.

7.

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