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Miscouche, Prince Edward Island, Canada
2nd of February, 12:45 p.m. (GMT-4)
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Geneviève Samson stomped the snow off her boots and wiped them across the mat while she fished out the key to the door. It was freezing and overcast, and the tall blue, white, and red flags in front of the building waved furiously and snapped in the wind. In other words, it was just another winter day in the maritime.
With three hundred years of history on the island, Acadian pride ran strong here, and the Evangeline region was its cultural heart on Prince Edward Island. People spoke French with an Acadian patois, and their side of Confederation Bridge bid everyone coming from New Brunswick “Bienvenue.” Homes flew the Acadian flag: vertical blue, white, and red stripes with a gold star in the upper left hand corner. Village Musical Acadien kept the beat going all year round, and summer was one long kitchen party. It even held the honor of hosting the World Acadian Congress—a giant festival held every five years to celebrate all things Acadian.
The area was also home to the Acadian Museum, where Geneviève was just coming into work. She still had fifteen minutes until opening—plenty of time to put her things away, turn on the lights, and open the front doors to the public. Not that she was expecting a rush. Peak season was summer. This time of year, it was the sort of attraction people went to when the weather prohibited winter sports. No doubt the latest batch of dry powder would call everyone to the slopes.
Which suited her just fine. The museum ran on a skeleton crew during the off-season, and if she wasn’t needed up front, she could whittle away the hours in the library, officially called the Acadian Research Center. Before the British campaigns of expulsion, French Acadie centered on current day New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, and many families that settled elsewhere after deportation had their roots on the island. Thus, genealogy was a big draw for those tracing their ancestry.
All the records in the Research Center were donations, and family collections were often a cobbled mess, not unlike the kitchen drawer that holds all the manuals, extra screws, and unidentified parts that one dared not throw away. They knew to keep it, but not necessarily how to read it or take care of it.
A little more family knowledge slipped away with each handoff, and the only hope of preserving the knowledge of the past was rejoining them to the larger body of archives in hopes connections could be found. When a family did decide to turn over their treasured documents to the Research Center, preservation was the first priority. Only after further deterioration was prevented did they try to put them in some semblance of order.
The Research Center was slowly digitizing records to make the information more readily available to researchers and genealogists, but there were major hurdles in the process. Taking high-resolution pictures and uploading them was easy enough, but completely unhelpful in a world that ran on databases and Boolean searches. That meant that documents had to be transcribed before they could be used in a meaningful way.
Transcribing for the Research Center was a labor of love, especially since there was no money to pay anyone to do it. The Prince Edward Island Museum and Heritage Foundation kept the museum lights on, and the money that was allocated to the Research Center went straight into preservation. The actual transcription was all volunteer based, and Geneviève contributed to the effort herself.
The primary difficulty was that everything had been written by hand up until very recently, and subsequently susceptible to transcription errors. In a cursive script, m, n, r, and u were often confused for one another, and no matter how careful one was to get it right in the present, it was all too easy for a past priest to have inadvertently changed the spelling of a name when he copied it from another church document recorded in a different person’s handwriting. But that was just the tip of the iceberg, as Geneviève had learned over the years.
When the museum officially opened at one, she unlocked the doors and made sure the girl working the ticket counter was settled before heading to the library. She was anxious to continue the work on the large donation from the LaGroix family, and it wasn’t something she could do in fits and starts.
It took deep concentration, because after she finished transcribing a document, she had to check it against other records to see if it shed light on something she’d previously done or perhaps linked with something else held in the archive. It was like doing a puzzle without a reference picture, and she knew full well that pieces were missing before she even started. Some would find it maddening, but as a seasoned genealogist, Geneviève found it an enjoyable challenge.
She was elbow deep in the past when a woman with long wavy brown hair entered the library and called out, “Hello? I’m looking for the Acadian Research Center.”
“You’ve found it but it’s not open to the general public,” Geneviève curtly responded. She was pretty sure she had finally found Virgile LaGroix’s father in the 1820 census before she had been interrupted.
Martinez traced the voice back to its speaker and cast her will long. “I’m Tracy Martin, correspondent for the Institute of Tradition. I’m writing an article on the Great Upheaval for our quarterly publication and was told you might be able to help given your experience with the genealogy records.”
Geneviève’s initial impulse to shoo away the interloper suddenly softened. Martinez’s will poked and prodded, trying to find an in. “Martin,” she said ponderously as it seeped into her subconscious. “There were Martins on Prince Edward Island before the expulsion. Do you have a familial connection here?”
Martinez had her hooked but she wanted to secure the line before reeling it in. “Maybe, I’m not sure. I recently found out that I have Acadian ancestry on my father’s side and it’s been a real learning experience. That’s what prompted my interest in writing about Le Grand Dérangement. People just don’t know the kind of persecution the Acadians went through.”
Martinez’s well-chosen words elicited the desired effect, and the genealogist nodded in complete agreement. “That’s so true. Take a seat and tell me what you had in mind.”
Martinez smiled and reinforced the connection. “I wanted to tell the story of forced deportation using a real family to show how devastating it was. With the press around the return of the Duke William artifacts, I found my way to Île Saint-Jean. I found a good candidate, but I couldn’t find out more about his wife and child. Do you think you could help me?”
“I can certainly take a look,” Geneviève answered. “What’s the name?”
“Hugo Dubois. He died on Duke William and I know he was married and had a son named Jean before his death, but when I searched your archives, I could find anything, not even his wife’s name,” she spun her will with her tale.
Geneviève’s mind thought about the heaps of old photos in the archives whose subjects’ names had been forgotten. The best they could do was identify it with the donating family and give an approximate date based on the context clues in the picture. What she wouldn’t do to give them back their names.
The older woman put the LaGroix documents back into the box and took off her gloves before going to the computer. “Can you spell that for me?”
“D-U-B-O-I-S.”
She typed away at the keyboard. “Nothing in the years preceding the expulsion, but they make a reappearance in the 1830s. Let’s try a different spelling,” she suggested as she ran her fingers over the keys, including in the search as many creative spellings of Dubois as she could think of. “There was no standardized spelling back then and most people were illiterate,” she explained. “I once had a Madam Baret recorded under three different spellings.”
“That must make things complicated,” Martinez observed.
The genealogist peered over her readers. “You have no idea.” Her face lit up when her eyes returned to the screen. “We have something around the right time.”
She opened on the earliest record in its own window. “A record of marriage between Hugo Debose and Simone Patry on March 13, 1756.”
Martinez smiled—Pauline had a name. “That’s amazing. Any record of what happened to her after Hugo died?” she asked.
Geneviève plugged “Simone Patry” into the search engine. During colonial times, French law had women keep their family name from birth on official documents after marriage, including church records. It was undeniably helpful in tracing linage and making lateral connections because a woman’s familial history wasn’t lost or erased at the altar. However, married women often went by their husband’s surname in the community, making it difficult to connect the women in informal records to the ones listed on marriage and baptismal certificates. It was rarely cut and dried in the world of genealogy.
“Looks like she returned to the island after the expulsion. I have a Simone Patry married to Edmond Debose in 1761,” she replied.
“Any relation of Hugo’s?” Martinez asked curiously.
Geneviève opened another window and did some cross-referencing. “His cousin,” she said matter-of-factly before flipping back to the other screen. “I have a census that indicates they had seven children in the house, but I don’t have birth records for all of them. And I have a record of her death in 1800.”
“Was Jean one of the children living with them?” Martinez wondered.
“There is a Jean Debose but there is no way of knowing if that is the same one fathered by Hugo. Acadians were big on reusing Christian names, and if Jean was a family name, there would be more than one,” Geneviève said authoritatively. Putting an Acadian family tree together was a lot like trying to keep track of who’s who in a Gabriel García Márquez book.
“There is a death recorded in a village parish record for a Jean Du Bois in 1822. That would put him in his 60s, not impossible if he was long-lived. Or course, he could have died before Simone return to the island. He would have been very young during the deportation.”
“Do you think I could have a copy of those so I could include them in the article?” Martinez requested politely.
The older woman smiled. “I can do you one better. I can email them to you. Where should I send them?”
*****
Morris ambled through the Acadian Museum at a leisurely pace, playing the part of interested tourist while he noted the entryways, checked the corners for cameras and motion sensors, and examined the display cases for signs of enhanced security. Their plan was to divide and conquer. Martinez would take the archivist while he looked for traces of the poltergeist.
The museum took their responsibility to preserve the items very seriously. The cases were climate controlled for temperature and relative humidity, and once he’d passed through the front foyer, there were no windows or bright lights in order to minimize ultraviolet light damage to the already aged items. The ambient light was dimmed with incandescent accents to draw the eye to displays and their informational placards in French and English. Incandescent bulbs may be passé with environmentalists, but they were inexpensive, readily available, and emitted very little UV light. It put the Acadian Village in Lafayette to shame, but it was par for the course in his estimation. Everything in Louisiana was slowly rotting and falling into the sea and they were sustained by it. In that way—and only that way—it was the Venice of the American south.
The permanent collection was organized chronologically, starting with the arrival of the first Acadians to the island in 1720 to the present. The items from Duke William were located in their own case between The French regime, 1720-1758 and The Restoration, 1758-1860, and that was where Martinez found him when she returned.
“Did you find anything?” she murmured. There were only a handful of people in the entire place and little risk of anyone overhearing them, but she had been conditioned to speak quietly in sacred spaces and extended the courtesy to museums and public libraries.
He pointed to the display case. “The ring, third item from the right.” All the other surviving personal items were almost exclusively gold or silver, but this was iron—pitted and blackened, but intact.
“How the hell did it survive sitting in salt water for centuries?” she marveled. She’d seen videos online of Coke eroding metal.
“My guess is that the spirit of Hugo Dubois was bound to the ring, and that very connection made it hardier than usual,” he replied.
Martinez appraised the lock and the security under the guise of being really interested in the items within. After tonight, the Acadian Museum would be short one ring. “If the poltergeist was tied to the ring, why isn’t he here?” she asked.
“That is a very good question. I’ve never known poltergeists to haunt items, but ghosts are sometimes tied to possessions that were significant to them in life. I suspect he wasn’t always a poltergeist,” he said prosaically.
Martinez frowned. “Even if he became a poltergeist on Prince Edward Island, that still doesn’t explain how he ended up in southwest Louisiana.”
“Correct. Something must have happened here. The timing is too coincidental. A month after this ring arrives in North America, the first set of bones appeared. But how did he get free of his tether?” Morris didn’t even bother to hide his exasperation.
She had no answers but offered what she could. “If it helps, I hit pay dirt on Pauline.”
He gave her a hopeful glance. “Do tell.”
“Her name is Simone Patry. She returned to the island after the expulsion and remarried her late husband’s cousin. They stayed here and had seven children, one of which may or may not have been Hugo’s son, and she died at the ripe old age of 61,” she reported.
“Keeping it in the family,” he commented. “Any idea about what happened to the boy?”
“I hit a bit of a dead end there—no marriage records and he wasn’t listed as the father on any baptism certificates. There was a death listed that could be within the expected lifespan of a man born in 1757, but it’s impossible to know if that’s Hugo’s son. Alternately, the archivist said that he could have died before Simone returned to the island or moved away from the area as a young man. It’s also possible he was here the whole time and the records have been lost over time,” she relayed all she’d been told.
Martinez felt him feeding a nascent idea and quietly read the informational wall plaque while he schemed.
“We need to talk to someone in the know,” he said resolutely when he finally spoke.
“What do you have in mind?”
He gestured around him. “This place is littered with personal items. I bet there are plenty of ghosts that could fill us in after dark.”
Martinez raised an eyebrow and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Just to be clear, you want to hold a séance in the middle of a B&E.” She had already accepted that breaking in was inevitable, but she didn’t think they were going to stay around for a tea party.
He nodded his head in commiseration—he didn’t like the idea any more than she did, but he needed to know what happened here. “You do know which side of the border we’re on, right?” she subtly reminded him her FBI credentials meant jack squat in Canada.
“You’ve seen the security here...it’ll be fine,” he projected effortless confidence. “We’ve got the rest of the day to work out the details. In the meantime, there’s a textile display I think you’ll really like. Right this way, next to that door.”