Unhallowed Ground (10 page)

She had last used her credit card at the car rental agency, and no one had accessed her bank account since her disappearance, so presumably she hadn’t been killed in the course of a robbery for financial gain.

She had left with her rental car and, as Harold Sparks had suggested, disappeared as thoroughly as if she had been beamed up by an alien spaceship.

But that hadn’t happened. Which meant that someone, somewhere, had to know something.

Caleb stopped at a few gas stations on his way back down to St. Augustine, but she had left the rental agency with a full tank of gas, so it was unlikely she would have
stopped at any of them. Still, despite what she’d told Mina Grigsby, she might have stopped for a soda or a cup of coffee, even something to munch on or a more detailed map of the area than the rental agency had provided.

A tedious and time-consuming canvas of local businesses was likely to get him nowhere. Still, it had to be done.

If he were visiting St. Augustine for the first time and was anxious to find out the best things to do, the local tourist agencies would be a logical place to start. There were several, not to mention the booking offices for all the hearse tours, carriage tours, tram tours, walking tours and train tours.

He pounded the pavement with Jennie’s picture in hand, and at each stop he was told that no, they hadn’t seen Winona. Each time he explained patiently that this was a girl who had disappeared a year ago.

Finally, toward the end of a long and frustrating day, he entered a booking office offering a variety of tours and went through the usual spiel.

“This isn’t the girl who just disappeared. This girl’s name is Jennie Lawson. She came down a year ago on vacation and disappeared. We think she might have been looking to take a ghost tour,” he explained for what felt like the thousandth time.

The young guy manning the place frowned, taking the picture again. He looked at Caleb, then studied the photograph again.

“Wow. They really could be the same girl, except—” He broke off, his face wrinkled in concentration.

“I can’t tell you how many tourists come through here,” he said apologetically.

“It’s okay, I know that. I appreciate you trying,” Caleb said.

“I’m thinking about what she might have looked like with her hair up, and I’m thinking I just might remember her. Because she was asking about the scariest, spookiest thing it was possible to do. Naturally I told her all our tours are great, it just depended on what she was looking for.”

Caleb waited, tension filling him at the possibility of a break in the case, as the kid remained silent, studying the photo.

At last he said, “I think I do remember her, but her hair wasn’t down like this. She’d put it up, because of the heat and all.”

“Do you remember what tour she decided on?”

“She didn’t. She took all the brochures and said she’d be back, that she’d probably take several of them. It really is uncanny. Those two girls, they really could be the same person.” He looked up at Caleb again. “I’m sorry. I wish I could be more help.”

“You
have
helped. More than you can imagine,” Caleb told him. “Thanks.” He gave the guy his card, asking him to call if he thought of anything else, and left.

The sun was setting, and his feet hurt; it felt as if he had been walking around forever. But thanks to the kid at the tour office, at least he had some new information and an avenue to explore. Because the kid was right. The missing women didn’t just fit a general type. They looked so much alike that it was uncanny.

Whoever had taken Jennie Lawson was the same person who had just snatched Winona Hart. He was sure of it. And the trail leading away from Winona’s last known whereabouts would be much warmer than that of the one leading away from Jennie’s.

He was going to find the person behind Winona’s disappearance, and when he did, he would also find out what had happened to Jennie.

He started back toward his B&B then changed direction.

Five o’clock had come—and gone. Businesses—and museums—would be closed.

And the locals would be headed for Hunky Harry’s.

Caleb stood still for a long moment, remembering, as he watched people moving past him on the sidewalk, how Adam Harrison had asked him if he’d gotten a feel for anything. The tram was running a block away, and he could hear the conductor talking about Henry Flagler and the beautiful hotels he had built.

A cannon boomed from nearby Ft. Marion.

A horse-drawn carriage clip-clopped by, and a cloud slipped over the sun, casting the area into shades of silver and gray. The facades of the old Spanish buildings seemed to catch hold of the resulting shadows and recede back in history.

Had he gotten a feel for anything…?

Yes.

Yes, Adam, I have.

I have a feeling a very old house whose walls have been hiding hundreds of bones is somehow connected to what’s been going on here.

Not only that, but I have a feeling that its very beautiful owner is somehow—innocently, I’m sure—connected to the mystery, too.

Hunky Harry’s it was.

Sarah was tired and aggravated, and longing to get home.

While the morning had gone well, everything seemed to have gone to hell while she’d been gone for her lunch break.

The news about her house had gotten out, turning her world upside down.

The bones had been pretty much the only topic of discussion that afternoon. The receptionist had done nothing but field questions and interview requests from dozens of radio and television stations, not all of them local, which really amazed her. Even the visitors to the museum had heard about the discovery and wanted to talk about it; local history had flown right out the window.

When the first reporter had called, Sarah had taken the call. The man’s questions had all been about ghosts and haunted houses, and how did she feel about living with ghosts and wasn’t she afraid? After that she’d refused to come to the phone and ended up with a stack of messages that were all variations on that original theme.

She opted to work in the bookstore, leaving the lectures to Caroline, Renee and Barry, because that way, at least, when she faced the same ghoulish questions over and over again, she wasn’t interrupting history to answer.

“We’re heading to Hunky Harry’s, just for drinks,” Caroline told her as they closed the doors at last. “And you need a drink more than any of us. My parents said you should take a few days off, by the way.”

Sarah stared at her friend, dismayed. “They don’t want me here?”

“No, no, it’s nothing like that,” Caroline assured her. “They don’t want you pestered to death.”

“Well, tell them thanks, but I don’t want to take any time off,” Sarah said, then almost immediately thought better of it. She
did
want time off. She wanted to uncover the truth. She didn’t want other people telling her about her house. She wanted to do the research herself.

“Come have a drink and then see how you feel,” Caroline suggested.

“Okay, but I’ll have to meet you there. I just want to run by the house, see what’s happening,” Sarah said.

“I can go with you,” Caroline offered.

“No, I’ll be all right. You go with Barry and Renee. You should be with people—preferably including a big strong guy—right now.”

“Why?” Caroline asked, startled. Before Sarah could answer, she said, “Oh. Right. You’re worried because I’m a blonde with big blue eyes, and the hair and eye color of both girls were the same—as noted in the news reports.”

“It never hurts to be careful,” Sarah said.

“And,” Caroline added, a smile teasing her lips, “you want to be alone with your precious…mortuary.”

“It’s not a mortuary anymore, and it’s not likely I’ll
be alone,” Sarah told her. “I just want to see what’s up. You go on, and I’ll be right there.”

“You’ll bail on us,” Caroline said.

“I won’t. I swear,” Sarah promised.

Oddly enough, Sarah found herself hoping that the people prowling her house would be done for the day and really, they should be. After all, what needed to be done had mostly been done the night before. They had brought in Floby, they had taken a thousand pictures of the bones in situ, and they had used special equipment to check the rest of the walls to see if they, too, were hiding something, so they wouldn’t have to tear her entire house apart.

“Okay, okay. I’ll walk over with Renee and Barry, swear,” Caroline said.

“Is Will going to be there?” Sarah asked.

Caroline blushed, nodding in answer to the question.

“I feel like kind of a fifth wheel,” Sarah said.

“Never. So don’t you dare bail,” Caroline told her.

“I won’t, I won’t, Scout’s honor,” Sarah said.

“As if you were ever a Scout,” Caroline countered.

“If I
had
been a Scout, I’d have had tons of honor badges. I’ll be there, promise.”

Sarah managed to get out before Renee or Barry could give her an argument and hurried toward her house, half-afraid that strangers were going to stop her on the street to ask about the bones.

But no one did.

She reached the house and was pleased to see that no one was there. Not a car remained. She hurried up the steps to the porch, fitted her key in the lock, turned it and entered.

The house greeted her with an eerie silence.

“Hello? Anyone here?” she called, even though she already knew everyone was gone. Her voice sounded far too soft and tentative, she thought, so she cleared her voice and called out again. “Hello? Is anyone here?”

Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. She walked through to the back and saw that the library was indeed empty.

Tentatively, she moved forward and looked inside the walls, then breathed a sigh of relief. No bones. They had been removed.

She walked on into the kitchen. On the counter there was a note from Floby, who said he’d been there all day, working with the different experts and agencies. He also said they would probably be in and out over the next few days, just to make completely certain that she wouldn’t be living with more remains.

She smiled. Floby was a sweetie, a charming old guy, despite holding a job many people considered to be morbid. But he simply saw himself as an investigator, discovering clues in the bodies of the deceased, just as detectives sought them on the streets.

She walked back down the hallway toward the front door and froze. The door was open, and an old man was standing there.

He was so thin he was practically skeletal.

Just like the bones in the walls.

Was he real?

He walked closer to her. She could see that his cheeks were hollow. There were only a few silver tufts of hair on his head, and his nose looked like a narrow perch.

To her astonishment, she opened her mouth but no sound emerged.

What on earth was going on? Could he actually be a ghost? But she didn’t believe in ghosts.

Did she?

T
he man had to be real.

He also had to be ninety if he was a day.

“Young lady,” he said, taking another step forward, supporting himself with a cane and moving slowly, yet with purpose. “Young lady, I am Terrence Griffin the Third. How do you do?”

He
was
real, she thought in silent gratitude, and he couldn’t possibly offer her any harm. A breeze would blow him over.

“Hello,” she managed to respond, her voice sounding like a croak. She was angry with herself. She’d left the door open. The discovery of the bones in her walls was bound to bring out the sightseers, and it was likely that a serial killer was at work in the city, and like an idiot, she had left the door open.

“I’ve come to talk to you,” he said. His voice was dry and low, like the rustle of leaves.

“Okay,” she said.

“Because you have to know the truth about your house. It’s evil.”

“A house can’t be evil,” she said, staring firmly at him.

“Think whatever you want, but people do evil here because evil was done here before,” he told her gravely.

She didn’t know what to do. He was so old and looked so frail that she didn’t want to upset him, but his intensity and the craziness of his words were disturbing. She fought the urge to scream, push him aside and rush out of the house, and considered calling the police.

In the end she just kept standing there, still staring at him.

He took another step closer to her. “You must listen. It’s important. You can do something, you can…communicate with them. You need to find out the truth and stop it from happening again.”

She wanted to tell him that whatever had happened here a hundred or more years ago couldn’t happen again now, because whoever had perpetrated the crime was long dead.

“It started during the Civil War,” he told her. “When the house was owned by the MacTavish family.”

He knew his local history, she thought, drawn in despite her best intentions to ignore anything he said.

“Old man MacTavish was ill, and he was against the war, so his heart had been broken when his son Cato went off to fight. Cato was planning to marry Eleanora Stewart after the war and take over the mortuary his father had set up. He and Eleanora were madly in love, but when he was wounded and sent home, he discovered that Eleanora had disappeared right after he’d been back on leave. He had been the last person to see her. His father had died while he was gone, so he was left to run the business alone, with just a housekeeper to
take care of him, and a boarder and his daughter to help. Pretty soon young women started disappearing. Only a few bodies were found, but the others were presumed dead. Everything was in an uproar, with the war still being on and all. And pretty soon Cato was being accused of kidnapping and murder. People started putting two and two together, and they figured he must have killed Eleanora, so he had to be responsible for what had happened to those other girls, too. So he left, he just left. Or hid out in the woods, as some speculated. The housekeeper went away, too, or so some said, though others thought she had been lynched. The only ones left in the house were the boarder, a man named Leo Brennan, who bought the place when it came up for taxes, and his daughter. He must have learned the trade from Cato, because he kept it as a mortuary, and eventually his son took over. And then…well, it happened again.”

“I don’t understand, Mr. Griffin. What happened again?” Sarah asked.

“The disappearances. Young women just…disappearing. I know because my own daughter left the house in the summer of 1928, and she never came back. She came here to get together with Louise Brennan and another friend, Susannah, and she and Susannah both disappeared. They were never seen again,” Mr. Griffin said with the sadness of years in his voice.

He had been the father of a teenager, at least, in 1928. How old
was
he? she wondered.

Once again, the question invaded her mind.

Was he even real?

Yes, he was flesh and blood. She was sure of it.

“The housekeeper…she knew voodoo, the black arts, magic,” he said.

“Mr. Griffin, you said she left right after Cato did,” she reminded him gently.

“The evil remains, it resides inside these walls,” he said.

He was in his dotage, she told herself. He had never gotten over the loss of his daughter. And now, with all the publicity about Winona Hart, he was simply seeing the past reflected in the present.

“I’m very sorry about your daughter,” she offered, not knowing what else to say.

“She’s here, in these walls,” he said. “Like Eleanora, like the others.”

“Mr. Griffin, there’s no one in these walls…anymore. The medical examiner came, and the bones have all been taken away. My house isn’t evil.”

“You’ll feel them. You’ll know. You’ll find out the truth,” he told her.

He was just a sad old man having a hard time, she told herself. Other people, people who weren’t personally involved in any way, were morbidly fascinated by what had happened, but for Mr. Griffin, it was a terrible trip back in time.

“Mr. Griffin, honestly, no one knows for sure what took place in this house, but no one believes it was anything horrible. They think an undertaker was making money by selling coffins, then hiding the bodies in the walls so he could make extra money by reselling their coffins. With the war and then Reconstruction,
people were pretty desperate for money,” she said gently.

He pointed a finger at her, and in the lengthening shadows of evening, the effect was eerie enough to make her shiver.

“You’ll find out the truth. You have to. They’ll haunt these rooms until you do. They have no choice, don’t you see? The evil in this house will keep coming back unless
you
stop it.”

Sarah wanted to do something, to run away screaming or shake the old man and make him see that he was wrong, that her house didn’t have a personality, especially not an evil one. It was just a house.

But she didn’t want to hurt him, not even his feelings. He’d been through enough, losing his daughter, and he was so earnest.

Before she could speak again, or make up her mind what to do, they were interrupted by a voice coming from the porch.

“Mr. Griffin? Oh, dear God. Mr. Griffin, where
are
you?”

The voice was feminine, and clearly concerned.

“We’re in here!” Sarah called.

She heard footsteps, and then, coming up the hall behind Mr. Griffin, she saw one of the most strikingly beautiful women she had ever encountered. Blue jeans and a T-shirt hugged the woman’s perfect form. She had long, curling blond hair, a classically beautiful face and slightly tilted cat’s eyes so brilliantly blue that Sarah could discern their color even in the dim hallway.

She set an arm gently around Mr. Griffin’s shoulders
and looked at Sarah apologetically. “I’m so sorry. We were out walking when his hat blew away, and when I ran to get it, Mr. Griffin walked off on me.” She flashed Sarah a hopeful smile. “I am so, so sorry. I hope he didn’t scare you. He’s the kindest man you’ll ever meet.”

“It’s all right. We were just talking,” Sarah said.

The woman looked relieved as she offered Sarah a hand. “I’m Cary Hagan. I work for Mr. Griffin. Nurse, companion, secretary, all-around best girl. Right?” She turned to him as she spoke, and he nodded. “He’s one hundred and two years old, and absolutely remarkable,” Cary said.

“And standing right here,” Mr. Griffin said flatly. “You needn’t speak about me as if I can’t hear you. I came to see this young lady because I saw her go into the house, and she needed to hear the things I know.”

Cary lowered her head for a moment, then looked back up at Sarah. “It’s the hoopla about the missing girl, and then the bones. His daughter disappeared years and years ago—one of a dozen or so girls who disappeared at the same time—and this has brought it all back,” she explained.

“It’s perfectly all right,” Sarah said. She stepped forward and took one of Mr. Griffin’s hands. “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, sir. Thank you for coming to see me.”

A look of gratitude lit Cary’s eyes. “You’re very kind and understanding.”

“It’s fine, seriously,” Sarah said. “And Mr. Griffin is more than welcome to come back and see me anytime.”

“You’re beyond kind,” Cary said. “Right now, though, he—
we
—need to get back. He’s due for his medication, and timing is important.”

Mr. Griffin was staring intently at Sarah.

“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.

“I’m not frightened, so don’t worry,” she said. And it was true. She
wasn’t
frightened. He was solidly real, and there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for his presence.

And even for most of his words.

“But you believe me, don’t you?” he implored suddenly. “‘It’ happening again. The evil—it’s back again.”

“Mr. Griffin, we really have to go,” Cary said.

Mr. Griffin nodded, but he was still staring at Sarah. “It’s all right. I’ll go. Sarah knows. And she’ll find out the truth.”

He turned and started down the hallway, leaning heavily on his cane. Cary Hagan flashed Sarah one last smile, then turned as well, slipping her arm through his.

They left the door open behind them, and Sarah watched them all the way down the steps and out to the sidewalk. The man
was
pretty remarkable. He was over a hundred years old and still getting around on his own, and he appeared to still have all his marbles. Well, most of them.

But the loss of a child had to affect a person’s reason; she didn’t have children, but she knew that after losing a child, life would be irrevocably changed.

Evil.

Twilight had come, and the shadows were deepen
ing, and his characterization of her house suddenly reverberated in her mind.

She reminded herself that she didn’t believe a building could be evil. Even so, she found herself unnerved.

Suddenly she didn’t want to be there any longer. She felt inexplicably afraid to turn around, afraid to look in the corners and see what might be lurking there.

She grabbed her purse and fled.

Caroline had hit the nail on the head harder than she could have imagined with what she had said earlier.

Sarah was certain she had never wanted—
needed
—a drink so badly in her life.

He’d been right on the money.

As Caleb sat at the bar and sipped a beer, Caroline Roth entered along with her coworkers, Barry Travis and Renee Otten.

Unfortunately, Sarah wasn’t with them.

The threesome took a table. As they got settled, Renee noted him. The look she gave him was slightly wary, which didn’t bother him. He was a stranger, and there were unpleasant things happening in town. But she nudged Caroline, who looked up, smiled and walked over.

“How are you doing? Enjoying the city?” she asked.

“Of course. It’s beautiful,” he said.

She smiled, but her smile quickly faded. “Isn’t it bizarre? The bones they found in Sarah’s place, I mean.”

“Bizarre and sad. How’s Sarah doing?”

“She’s a trouper, but this was a rough day for her. Even the tourists have heard about it now, so on top of the media driving her nuts, visitors were asking her about it all day. And since she just bought the place, really, what could she say to anyone?”

“Sounds like a pretty uncomfortable position.”

“She’s wanted to live in that house since we were kids. Its history always fascinated her. I think she was born to be a historian—she knew every bit of local history, ever, by the time she was about ten.” Caroline was studying him with the look of a matchmaker. He was careful to listen without smiling or showing his awareness of her purpose. “She was always the best student in school. We all thought she should be a model, but she’s a bookworm at heart. Not in a bad way, of course.”

“Of course not.” He allowed himself a smile then. “Where is she now, anyway?” he asked.

“She wanted to run by the house. But she’ll be here soon.”

Caleb felt an almost overwhelming desire to leap up and run to the house to check on her, suddenly worried that she was there…alone.

Of course, maybe she wasn’t alone.

“Why don’t you come over and join us?” Caroline asked.

Bingo.

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you if I thought you’d be an intrusion. Come on. Will’s going to show up, too. He’s totally dependable, and Sarah swore to me that she wouldn’t bail on us.”

“If you’re sure you don’t mind…”

“I’m sure. Really.”

He placed money on the bar for the beer and followed her over to the table. Renee greeted him with a smile, and Barry Travis smiled as if he were welcoming a long lost friend.

“Any luck on finding that girl?” Barry asked as Caleb sat down.

“It’s a pretty old trail,” Caleb said.