Unhallowed Ground (5 page)

“I told you, I thought I knew him from somewhere…oh, my God!” Caroline said. “You don’t think that—”

“He was a creepy old undertaker after the Civil War and stuffed a bunch of bodies in the walls?” Will asked, laughing.

Caroline flushed. “No. It’s just that—”

“I know who—” Will began. But he didn’t get a chance to finish. Lieutenant Tim Jamison was striding their way.

“Let him in, Fred,” Tim Jamison said into his radio, obviously speaking to the uniformed officer who was holding the onlookers back.

Sarah watched as Fred let the man from the museum step past.

“Hey!” she said as she caught Tim’s arm.

He turned back to her. “What?”

“Tim, who is that? Why are you letting him in?”

“I know who he is,” Will said. “I’ve been trying to tell you. He’s a diver, and he just did some work with us.”

“A diver?” Sarah repeated, confused.

“He’s actually a P.I. with some firm out of Virginia or D.C.—
and
he’s a diver,” Tim told Sarah. “He’s connected, too. The captain told me to help him out as much as I can. Will you excuse me?”

Sarah let him go, though she wanted to protest that it was
her
house everyone was traipsing through, and she should be the one to tell any nonessential personnel whether they could or couldn’t enter.

“He’s a damned good diver. He found a body this morning,” Will said.

“What?” Sarah, Caroline and Renee demanded in unison.

“The plot thickens,” Barry said, twisting a pretend moustache.

Sarah shot him a glance telling him that his joke was in poor taste, then turned to Will. “The missing girl?” she asked.

Will shook his head. “We were looking for her, but it was a crapshoot. We don’t know exactly when she disappeared, much less where she went, we don’t know if she was killed…the bosses decided to send divers down since she’d been at a beach party when she was last seen. They called me in as the dive master and coordinator. We didn’t find her—but your guy did discover a submerged car with a man in it. He knows his stuff—he’s a good diver.”

So he’d found a body. And now there were bodies in her house. Did that mean anything?

“His name is Caleb Anderson,” Will supplied.

“I could swear I know him from somewhere,” Caroline said.

And then, walking beside Tim, he was coming up on
the porch. “I don’t think this discovery can possibly impact your search,” Tim was telling him. “This is a case for the history books—and new fodder for the ghost tours around here. Intriguing, though.”

Caleb Anderson reached the group standing just inside the door, then reached out and shook hands with Will, nodded at the others, then walked over to stand next to Sarah. “Quite a discovery,” he said to her.

“Yes, not what I was expecting, certainly,” she said.

Caroline moved forward, offering her hand. “Hi. I’m Caroline Roth. I saw you at the museum earlier. And these are our fellow docents, Barry Travis and Renee Otten.”

“Nice to meet you,” Caleb said, shaking hands all around before turning back to Sarah. “You haven’t owned the house very long?” he asked her.

“A few months,” she said.

“But she’s been in love with it forever—since we were little kids,” Caroline said. “She was working in the D.C. area and just came home a few months ago to help out at the museum. And then she got the opportunity to buy this place and jumped at it.”

Sarah stared at Caroline, wondering if her friend was going to give him her full biography. Then she wondered why it mattered. It wasn’t as if her life were a secret in any way. Still, for some reason, she thought that the stranger should have to work for his information regarding any of them—maybe because she didn’t think info about him was going to be easy to come by.

“I see. Well, it is a beautiful place—and the bones
will add a nice touch of the macabre to its history—” Caleb said.

“Anderson?” Tim Jamison said, breaking in. “This way.”

“Excuse me,” Caleb said, and left them, following Tim to the almost-library, where the walls had been torn out.

“Come on,” Will said to Sarah. “Pack a bag and let’s head out. You can stay at my place tonight.”

“Or you can stay with me,” Caroline offered.

Sarah shook her head. “Will, you live in a studio. And, Caroline, no offense, because you know I love her, but your mom will just mother me to death. I’ll go to Bertie Larsen’s Tropical Breeze.”

Bertie owned a charming little B&B around the corner. At any given time there were twenty to thirty such establishments operating in town, and the owners tended to help each other out. Sometimes business in the city was the proverbial feast, and sometimes it was famine, but the owners tended to stay friends, or at least allies. As a group they could advertise or petition the city for benefits like tax breaks, benefitting them all when they worked together. And since some places accepted pets, some accepted kids and some neither, they often passed on a competitor’s name when they didn’t meet a potential guest’s criteria.

Bertie wasn’t just a fellow businesswoman, she had become a good friend who had already given Sarah lots of advice. Best of all, her inn had a number of rooms with private entrances, and Sarah was in the mood for privacy. She crossed her fingers that a room with a private entrance would be available.

“If you’re sure…” Will said.

“I am,” Sarah insisted. “I don’t mind spending the night away from home, but I want to be able to get in and out of my own house easily if I need to. And since we all agree I can’t stay here tonight, please excuse me. I’m going to gather a few things.”

Sarah didn’t wait for an answer as she hurried up to her bedroom. She’d meant to just grab her toiletries and an outfit for the next day, but she found herself sitting down on the foot of her bed instead.

“This…sucks,” she muttered aloud.

She loved her bedroom. The mattress was new, but the bed was original to the period, a massive four-poster, intricately carved. The dresser, free-standing mirror, secretary and bedside occasional tables matched the bed. The floor was hardwood, and she had stripped, stained and waxed it herself, then purchased the elegant Oriental carpet on eBay. Her clothing was hung in the wardrobe she’d gotten from Annie’s Antiques, just down Ponce. The private bath featured a claw-foot tub and porcelain taps. She felt real pride in everything she had accomplished here and in the rest of the house.

But tonight there would be people in and out. Gary had agreed to stay to help as they used echo-location to discern whether there were additional bodies entombed in the walls. And despite her own credentials, Sarah—who had worked on many burial sites but had never managed one—had agreed that the excavation of the bones should be supervised by Professor Manning, an expert from the college who had one doctorate in
history and another in anthropology. She was far too close to the situation here, too involved.

She just wanted those skeletons out of her walls and respectfully interred—somewhere far away.

It was definitely going to be one hell of a story. So far the police had agreed to her request that no press be let into the house until the researchers and police had carried out the necessary investigations. The bones wouldn’t be going to a mortuary any time soon. While the circumstances leading to their presence in her walls were being determined, the bones themselves would be going to various institutes for study.

Study that would take time.

She let out a groan of frustration, stood up, grabbed her things and stuffed them into a small rolling suitcase, and then paused, looking around the room and catching sight of herself in the standing mirror. She looked too thin and too pale, she decided.
Why?
She wasn’t afraid of the bones, wasn’t afraid of being haunted by ghosts crying out for help. She firmly believed that the soul did not remain in the body after death.

Still, this discovery had somehow changed everything.

Her house had now become a small part of history, a part of local lore and legend, in a way she had never anticipated or wished for.

There was nothing genuinely tragic about the discovery—an undertaker of long ago had done all the right things in public, then made money by selling the same coffins over and over again. The souls of the people in the walls were long gone, and anyone who had loved them was long gone, too.

But for some reason it felt as if her life was going to be different from now on, and that made her uneasy.

At least I’m not a blonde,
she found herself thinking, then winced. Where had that thought come from? A young woman, a blonde, was missing, and that was sad, but it had nothing to do with her house. It
was
odd, though, that there had been two disappearances in two years—two young women, both with blond hair. Maybe it wasn’t the most admirable way to be thinking, but it was reassuring to know that at least she didn’t seem to fit the profile of those recent victims.

She sighed and turned to leave. For tonight, she wanted out of here. Rolling her bag behind her, she hurried downstairs.

There was no one in the entry or hallway, but she could hear voices coming from the library.

The room where the grisly discovery had been made.

As she stood there, wondering whether she should let someone in charge know she was leaving, Caroline reappeared.

“Come on, at least come get a drink with us,” Caroline suggested.

“All right, but let me run over to Bertie’s and get a room first.”

“I still say you could stay with me,” Caroline told her, then gave in when she saw that Sarah’s mind was made up. “Never mind. Go on and get your stuff over to Bertie’s, then meet us at Hunky Harry’s.”

“It’s a plan,” Sarah agreed.

“You’ll really show?”

“Yes, I’ll really show,” Sarah said. “I promise.” She
quickly gave Caroline a kiss on the cheek and headed out. From the corner of her eye she’d seen Will, Travis and Renee heading toward them from the hallway, and she wanted to get away from everyone. She desperately needed a little respite from the day’s excitement.

She made it down to the sidewalk, where there was still a throng of tourists and a few locals. Friends. She found herself caught up in conversation, whether she wanted to be or not.

Luckily, the cops were there, too, clearing the area. As soon as she could manage it without being hated by every friend and acquaintance in the area, she escaped.

There was something about the house, definitely. It had drawn him from the first, and Caleb didn’t think it was because he had somehow sensed that a long-ago funeral director had been playing fast and loose with the corpses of his “clients.” Tim Jamison hadn’t seemed surprised to see him standing on the sidewalk, but then again, a couple dozen people had been standing there. Still, he was glad when the police lieutenant asked him in. Maybe the fact that he had found a corpse in the water earlier that day somehow made him worthy.

Jamison had just finished clearing everyone unofficial out of the room where the skeletons had been found.

“Is this something, or what?” the cop was saying now. “I remember the newspapers being filled with something similar just a few years ago—the mortician comforting the grieving relatives, then dumping the bodies of the deceased and selling the coffins again.
Coffins aren’t cheap. Even cheap coffins aren’t cheap, and the satin-lined, down-stuffed ones will
really
cost you. There’s lot of money to be made selling those suckers over and over again. I guess there have always been people willing to make an extra buck or two off the dead, no matter how they do it.”

Caleb looked around the library. Most of the plaster had been torn out, revealing piles of bones between the studs. Some of the bones were still attached to each other by bits of mummified sinew and tendon, preserved inside their plaster prison.

It was a gruesome sight, even for him. In some cases shreds of clothing remained. One of the corpses was wearing the remnants of a Civil War-era hat. It looked as if they had stumbled on a particularly bizarre scenario for a haunted house. Someone might easily think the remains were the result of an exhibit designer’s mad imagination.

“Have you ever seen anything like it?” Jamison asked. “Hell, I’m a homicide cop. I’ve worked in Jacksonville, Miami and Houston—tough towns, all of them—and I’ve never seen anything like this.”

The lieutenant shook his head, staring at the remnants of what had once been living, breathing human beings.

A small man was standing close to the wall, the epitome of the absent-minded professor with his glasses and tufts of wild gray hair, peering closely at the remains, a penlight in his hand. “You know, embalming started becoming popular after the war—the Civil War. They had to try to get those dead boys back home
to their mamas and sweethearts. But it really came into vogue for most Americans because of Abraham Lincoln. When he died, his widow wanted him buried back in Illinois, so they held a public viewing as the body traveled cross-country by train, so they had to keep Abe looking good for the mourners. He was embalmed by injecting fluids through the veins, but I think these poor souls were embalmed in the much less efficient fashion of the day, such as disemboweling a corpse and stuffing it with charcoal, or perhaps just immersing the body in alcohol. I imagine they were given proper viewings to satisfy the families, and then they were walled up. You can see here—” he pointed out different shades of plaster that had been chipped from the walls “—that they were put in at different times. Just guessing from the look of the corpses, I’d say this was all done within a ten-year period. See how the bones have darkened just a bit more? That ten-year span was a very long time ago. Fascinating, the way some of the corpses have mummified. My office will retrieve the remains in the morning. Legally, we could arrange removal right now, but I want to bring in specialists to make sure everything is handled correctly. This is quite the find.”