“I don’t see any farms, Dr. Livingstone. Just this muscadine grapevine shit,” Sampson complained and pushed away more branches with his long arms.
“The big tobacco farms used to be west of here. They’ve been deserted for almost sixty years. Remember I told you that a student from UNC was brutally raped and murdered back in nineteen eighty-one? Her decomposed body was found out here. I think Rudolph, and possibly Casanova, killed her. That’s around the time they first met.
“Dr. Freed’s map shows the locations of the old Underground Railroad, most of the farms in the area where runaway slaves were hidden. Some of the farms had expanded cellars, even underground living quarters. The farms themselves are gone now. There’s nothing to see from aerial surveillance. The honeysuckle and brambles have grown thick, too. The cellars are still here, though.”
“Hmmph. Your handy-dandy map tell us where all the old-time tobacco farms used to be?”
“Yup. Got a map. Got a compass. Got my Glock pistol, too,” I said and patted my holster.
“Most important,” Sampson said, “you got me.”
“That too. God save the miscreants from the two of us.”
Sampson and I walked a long, long way into the hot, damp, buggy afternoon. We managed to find three of the farm sites where tobacco leaf had once flourished; where terrified black men and women, sometimes whole families, had been taken in and hidden in old cellars, as they tried to escape to freedom in the North, to cities like Washington, D.C.
Two of the cellars were located exactly where Dr. Freed said they would be. Antique wood planks and twisted, rusted metal were the only signs left of the original farms. It was as if some angry god had come down and destroyed the scene of the old slave-owning ways.
Around four in the afternoon, Sampson and I arrived at the once-proud-and-successful farm of Jason Snyder and his family.
“How do you know we’re here?” Sampson looked around at the small, desolate, and deserted area where I had stopped walking.
“Says so on Dr. Louis Freed’s hand-drawn map. Same compass points. He’s a famous historian, so it must be true.”
Sampson was right, though. There was nothing to see. Jason Snyder’s farm had completely disappeared. Just as Kate had said it would.
CHAPTER 105
PLACE GIVES me the creeps,” Sampson said. “So-called tobacco farm.”
What was once the Snyder farm was particularly eerie and otherworldly, creepy as hell. There was almost no visible evidence that anyone human had ever lived here. Still, I could feel the blood and bones of the slaves as I stood before the disturbing ruins of the old tobacco farm.
Sassafras trees, arrowwood shrubs, honeysuckle, and poison ivy had grown up to the level of my chin. Red and white oaks, sycamores, and a few sweet gum trees stood tall and mature where a prosp
erous farm had once been. But the farm itself had disappeared.
I felt a cold spot at the center of my chest. Was this the bad place, then? Could we be near the house of horror that Kate had described?
We had worked our way north, and now east. We weren’t too far from the state highway, where I wished I had the car parked. According to my rough calculations, we couldn’t be more than two or three miles from the state road.
“Search parties for Casanova never came all the way back in here,” Sampson said as he prowled around. “Undergrowth’s real thick, real nasty. Not trampled down anywhere I can see.”
“Dr. Freed said he was probably the last person to come out and examine each of the old Underground Railroad sites. The woods were getting too thick and overgrown for casual visitors,” I said.
Blood and bones of my ancestors. That was a powerful, almost overwhelming, notion: to walk where slaves were once held captive for years.
No one ever came to rescue them. No one cared. No detectives back then went looking for human monsters who stole entire black families from their homes.
I used natural landmarks from the map to locate where the original Snyder cellar might have been. I was also trying to brace myself—in case we found something I didn’t want to find.
“We’re probably looking for a very old trapdoor,” I told Sampson. “There isn’t anything specific marked on Freed’s map. The cellar is supposed to be forty to fifty feet west of those sycamores. I think those are the right trees, and we should be right over the cellar now. But where the hell is the door?”
“Probably where nobody would walk on it by mistake,” Sampson figured. He was making a path into the thicker, wilder undergrowth.
Beyond the tangle of vines there was an open field or meadow, where tobacco had once been planted and grown. Beyond that was more thick woods. The air was hot and still. Sampson was getting impatient, and he knocked down honeysuckle with a vengeance. He was stamping his feet, trying to locate the hidden door. He listened for a hollow sound, some kind of wood or metal under the tall grass and thickly tangled weeds.
“This was originally a very large cellar on two levels. Casanova might have even expanded it. Built something grander for his house of horror,” I said as I searched through the heavy undergrowth.
I thought of Naomi kept underneath the ground for so long. She had been my obsession all these days and weeks. She still was. Sampson had been right about these woods. They were eerie, and I felt we were standing at an evil place where forbidden, secretive things had been done. Naomi could be somewhere close by, underneath the ground.