Innocent Story
Blame it the newspaper or the photographer, blame it on me or on spooky David Merkie, who made up our superstitions. David Merkie was only eleven or twelve then like us, but he was our cult leader,

The Rule, according to David Merkie, was that to join the East Hill Kids Cemetery Club, you had to worm( as one could then) between the chained doors, of one of the mausaleams at midnight, stay there for an hour, and then come out with a dead man's "fingerbone." None of us had ever done anlything like that , but David Merkie insisted to his little brother Dale and my little brother William, that they must perform the feat to join or die eternally in the eyes of the Club .

We had discovered an uncapped vent pipe in the grass on top of one of the mausaleums down which one could moan, scream, and wail, so that it echoed awfully within the stone chamber and crept out under the iron doors. I was the one who did the scream, on the day we deliberately walked William and Dale by there.

Dale ran right down the road and out of the cemetery, but William just stood and looked.
The next morning little William was not in the trundle bed when I woke up.

As I came down to breakfast, he came up from the cellar.

On the way to school he showed me a large ring with a blood red stone.

"Dead Man Finger Bone," is what little William said.

That was the most words he had ever strung together at one time.

I said it was not a dead man's fingerbone, and took it away from him. But he started his horrible howl, which I could not stand, and I did not want Mom and Dad to see the blood stone ring, so I let William carry it.
I made William show the ring to the other boys at school. David Merkie said that William would have to have a witness to prove he was in the tomb at midnight for an hour, and anyway, the ring was not a dead man's fingerbone. For those reasons he would have to take it and throw it into the gorge to protect us all from the wrath of bone. On the way to the cemetery that day, David Merkie appeared to throw the ring as hard as he could off the Stewart Avenue Bridge.
Many years later, I wrote an account of this, and it was published along with a photo essay on the cemetery in the Grapevine, a dear, departed, local weekly.

On the day after the story was published, someone broke into one of the mausaleums and stole a skeleton, leaving the clothes hanging out of the coffin as if the bones had sat up out out of them.

Everyone and the police knew that it happened because of the story, or because someone believed it, but they didn't press charges against me. I don't know what the truth is, but I definitely do not think David Merkie threw the real ruby ring off the bridge that day.

Please take me home now.