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“Doesn’t matter. You can torture me with thoughts of food and I won’t care. Besides, I’m not sure anything at Hunky Harry’s is actually succulent. Anyway, have a great time, and drink a beer for me.”
“It’s a good thing Harry didn’t hear you say that. And it’s not true—the food there is good,” Barry protested.
“Yes, you’re right. The food is very good, especially the fish. But I can’t go. Not tonight,” Sarah said.
She hurried into the women’s locker room and quickly changed. Caroline had been right about one thing: she should stop and pick up a six-pack. Maybe a twelve-pack. Gary had a few employees working overtime right along with him.
She managed to escape without getting into further conversation, because when Caroline came in, she headed straight for the showers. Was she primping so hard for Will? Maybe. The two of them had always liked one another, but Sarah had never seen any signs that their relationship was anything beyond friendship. Then again, who knew? They said that friends made the best spouses. She certainly didn’t know.
She’d fallen in love once, and it had been a brief and poignant affair. Clay Jenner had been a soldier. They’d met in Newport News, and had quickly discovered they both loved Buddy Holly, Peggy Lee, lounge music and historic ships. They’d spent a few months laughing, talking, listening to music and exploring historic sites. Then he’d been deployed. He’d been wonderfully romantic, going down on one knee when the cherry blossoms had been exploding all over the park, and he’d offered her the diamond she now wore on a chain.
He hadn’t come home. That had been three years ago now, and although she would probably never get over the pain of losing him, she had accepted that he wasn’t coming back. He had gone into the military for the schooling and the benefits, but, as he had told her, he’d signed the paper swearing that he would obey his superior officers and defend his country. It would have been nice if he could have served out his time somewhere safe, like Germany, but it hadn’t happened that way.
He had been killed in a sniper attack. A bullet straight through the brain. He had probably never known what had hit him.
For that she was grateful. As her dad had told her once, every man and woman would die. An easy death was something that meant even though God might take a man early, he loved him enough to keep him from suffering.
Now she was glad to be home, where there were no memories of Clay, and glad to have moved into her house.
She didn’t drive to work anymore; her house and the museum were in the area that was referred to as Old Town. After stopping for a twelve-pack and walking another four blocks through enclaves of tourist-centric businesses, she was thinking that a six-pack would have been fine.
She was almost at the walk that led up to her house when she saw him. The man she had noticed during her lecture.
While many buildings in Old Town sat right up near the sidewalk, there was actually a stretch of lawn in front of her place, along with a front walk and driveway—they’d needed a place for the cars and hearses to go. The man was only on the sidewalk, but he was right at the start of the coquina shell walk that led to her front porch. And he was staring at the house.
He must have sensed that she was watching him, because he turned, looked at her gravely, then smiled as she walked toward him, eyeing him carefully.
“Well, hello. It’s Ms. McKinley, right?” he said. “Excellent lecture—thank you.”
She nodded, staring at him warily. “Can I…help you?”
“I was admiring the house,” he said.
She wasn’t sure if she should say that it was hers or not. People had a tendency to be friendly in St. Augustine. In fact, there were dozens of B&Bs in the city, most of them homes that were open to strangers. In fact, she couldn’t wait for her own house to be one of them.
But at the moment, she apparently had a bigger-city attitude going. And the first rule was never let a stranger know where you live.
He didn’t look like a stalker. In fact, he was extremely attractive.
She reminded herself that many a serial killer had been attractive. They weren’t all wild-eyed Charles Mansons. Ted Bundy had traded on his boy-next-door good looks.
She decided she was being ridiculous. The odds were strongly in favor of his being a tourist, one with an interest in history, given that she’d first seen him at the museum. Plus, there were still plenty of people about on the streets, and though the day was dying, there was still lots of light.
He didn’t seem to need a reply. “The architecture is striking. It’s quite a compelling place. Haunting, even.”
“Thanks,” she said. When he looked at her curiously, she added, “I own it.”
He studied her for a moment, then laughed. “Of course, I shouldn’t be surprised that a historian owns a piece of history. I see you have a lot of work going on.”
“When you buy an old building, you have to be prepared for a lot of work,” she told him. The twelve-pack was getting heavy but she fought against shifting the weight. She didn’t want him offering to carry it and walk her up to the house. It wasn’t a B&B yet, just a big old place without an alarm, and she didn’t own a dog—not even a teacup Yorkie.
Of course, he didn’t seem the menacing type. He looked far more likely to go after what he wanted with wit and charm. My, how her thoughts had quickly wandered.
“Well, congratulations on owning such a beautiful old place. Oh, by the way, my name is Caleb Anderson. And I know you’re Sarah McKinley. It’s been a pleasure to meet you.”
“Likewise,” she said. Then she startled herself by what she said next, because he had already turned to walk away. “Are you in town long?” she asked him.
She thought he hesitated before answering—only a half second, but a hesitation all the same.
“I’m not sure. I’ll be around a few more days, at least. Thanks again. I really enjoyed your lecture—especially the way you handled those kids.”
“Thanks,” she said.
He lifted a hand. “Hope to see you again,” he said casually and walked on, heading in the direction of Old Town and the shops that stayed open into the night.
She watched him go, then felt the heaviness of the twelve-pack again. She turned and hurried inside, and was immediately glad of her efforts. Gary Morton, all muscles and friendly smiles, kissed her cheek and told her she was brilliant. The two men working with him were equally happy.
“Although I did wonder when you were actually going to make it into the house,” Gary said. “Who’s the hunk?”
“Hunk?” she asked, pretending not to know exactly who he was talking about.
“Tall, well-built guy you were just talking to out front?” he teased.
“Oh. Just some guy who was at one of the lectures today. He was admiring the house. This is the historic district—people are supposed to admire my house.”
He grinned. “Are you sure it was just the house he was admiring?”
She laughed. “Since he was staring at the house before I got there, I’m assuming that, yeah, it was just the house he was admiring. Anyway, we—as in you and me—were invited to dinner,” she told him. “Will, Caroline, and Renee and Brad from the museum.”
“What? You didn’t invite Mr. Gorgeous?” he queried, grinning.
“Gary…” she said warningly.
“Okay, okay. Don’t hit me.” He put up a hand as if to protect himself, smiling all the while. “But pizza is good enough for me. I want to get this place in shape for you, so I need to knock out that last wall. I know it means a lot of work and a lot of mess, but you can’t have a leaking water pipe. It will destroy the whole place on you, given time. You can go ahead if you want to. You don’t have to be here wielding a sledgehammer.”
“No, no, thank you, but I’m just as happy to hang around while you knock down walls,” Sarah assured him, pulling out her cell phone. “I’m dialing the pizza guy right now. What do you guys want…?”
“One cheese, one pepperoni, that’ll be great, thanks,” Gary said, then turned and disappeared down the hallway.
Sarah ordered the pizza, then took a minute and looked around.
At the moment, everything seemed to be coated in a thin layer of white dust. But even as she noted the dust, she was happy. It was such a beautiful place. So what if it had been a mortuary for a while? It had originally been built as the home of an American politician’s aide soon after Florida became a territory. She had a sweeping porch that led to the original etched glass entry door. There was a small mudroom, still with the original tile. The house boasted a huge foyer, with a hall that stretched back toward a multitude of rooms that, while certainly viewing rooms during the house’s tenure as a mortuary, had been planned as an office, a formal dining room, dual parlors—one for ladies and another for gentlemen—a music room and a laundry room. Somewhere along the line, a kitchen had been added to the house proper. The original kitchen had been a separate building out back; it was now empty but would one day make a beautiful apartment. The old carriage house had already been turned into an apartment, and though it, too, needed work, it was livable. The plumbing worked, and she’d put new sheets on the old four-poster bed in the large downstairs room. She’d put in sink, refrigerator and a microwave, just in case some of Gary’s crew should ever need to stay. The carriage house stood just to the left of the driveway, creating an L with the main house. She couldn’t help but take a moment to bask in the fact that she actually owned such a beautiful house. Well, she and the bank.
So far, Gary hadn’t had to rip apart either of the front parlors. The men’s parlor, on the right, was done in wood and dark tones. The ladies’ parlor was light, with soft beige-toned wallpaper and crown molding painted to match. It was peeling, but that was all right. She could handle the cosmetic details later. There was a grand piano in the parlor, out of tune, but it had come with the house, and she intended to have it tuned and lovingly repaired eventually. There was also a small secretary, where she worked when she was home. Now she took one of the beers for herself, sat down at her desk and started looking at the articles she had collected on old St. Augustine, looking for anything about the house.
She found herself musing rather than reading.
There was no reason to think there was anything suspect about the man from the museum staring at her house. There was plenty to admire about it, and this was a tourist town, after all. And that was what tourists did. They stared.
He wasn’t the usual tourist, though. Of that she was sure. He had an air about him. Like a…cop. No, not a cop. A CEO. No, not a CEO, either. She wasn’t quite sure what it was that made him so striking, even over and above his looks. Maybe it was that build, sleek and powerful, and a stance that seemed to speak quietly of confidence.
Strange. Caroline had thought he seemed familiar. There was something familiar about him, but Sarah couldn’t begin to figure out what it was. She was certain she would have remembered if she had ever met the man before.
“Hey!”
She had been so lost in her thoughts that she was startled when she heard Gary’s voice.
“What is it?”
“Sorry, I think you should see this.”
She looked at him, surprised. She didn’t know a thing about construction, and she had told him so when she hired him to supervise the restoration of the mansion. Whatever he came across, he was supposed to deal with it. He knew what would fly with both the contemporary codes and the demands of the historic board. He knew walls and leaky water pipes. She didn’t.
“What?” she asked again, worried by the look he was giving her. Things had been going so well, so incredibly well, and she didn’t want anything to change that.
This wasn’t going to be about leaking pipes. Instinctively, she knew that.
Just the tone of his voice was disturbing as if she had suddenly rounded a corner to find herself in an alien world. A creeping feeling of terrible unease began to fill her, slowly at first, then cold and sweeping, like skeletal fingers of ice reaching from a grave on a winter’s day.
“Bones,” he said, as if he’d read her mind.
“Bones?” she repeatedly blankly. “What, you found a dead squirrel?” she asked weakly, though she knew full well that wasn’t he had found.
“No, Sarah. Human bones.”
“Well, the house was used as a mortuary,” she reminded him, though she knew she was being stupid. She just didn’t want it to be true. It was as if everything had suddenly shifted. The world had been good, and now, from this moment on, it was going to be something altogether worse.
“We found them in the wall, Sarah. The wall. Mortuaries didn’t usually wall up the dead,” Gary said, then looked at her questioningly, as if waiting for her to decide what to do.
She nodded. “I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them we have a skeleton in the wall.”
“A skeleton?” Gary repeated, staring at her blankly.
“Right,” she said slowly. “Bones. A skeleton.”
“Sarah, please. Just come look.”
She stood at last and followed him back to what she intended to one day be a beautiful library.
She knew then what he had wanted her to see. There was no skeleton in the wall.
There were dozens of them.
2
“I heard you found a body,” Adam Harrison said over the phone. Adam never did waste time with pleasantries over the phone, Caleb thought. No “Hey, how are you settling in? Good trip?”
In person, Adam Harrison—Caleb’s boss and CEO of Harrison Investigations—was charming. One of the most dignified and courteous men who had ever walked the earth, Caleb was convinced. But he just wasn’t a phone man.
“Yes, but nothing that has anything to do with our case. I just heard from that lieutenant friend of yours. The body is—”
“Frederick J. Russell, banker, who must have been speeding around that curve. He’s been missing for twelve months, and if there’s anything more, no one will know until the coroner’s finished his report. A fine day’s work, even if there’s no connection,” Adam said.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t get you any closer to what you’re looking for. Have you discovered anything from talking to the locals?”
Caleb smiled, glad that Adam couldn’t see him. “Adam, I’ve only been here twenty-four hours. But I’m out there, meeting people. I’ll do everything in my power to chase down the girl who just went missing and see if we can discover some connection between her case and Jennie’s. Frankly, I’m hoping this girl just ran off with some guy. I’d just as soon not find her corpse.” He was afraid he was going to find her dead, though there was always hope. As for Jennie, her own mother sensed that she was gone.
“Have you gotten a feel for anything?” Adam asked.
Caleb hesitated. A feel for anything. That could mean just about anything when you worked for Adam. Harrison Investigations specialized in the bizarre. The unexplained. The things that went bump in the night. Caleb didn’t think they were going to find anything bizarre connected to this case, though. At any given time, hundreds of serial killers were on the prowl around the world. Most murders resulted from a moment’s fury and were relatively easily solved. The husband who suddenly stabbed his wife with the carving knife over a burned meal usually wasn’t smart enough to hide the prints or other trace evidence that would lead police straight to him.
But serial killers…they were hard to catch. All the DNA in the world couldn’t help if the killer wasn’t in the system. Ditto fingerprints. And they went after strangers, so linking their victims was a challenge, because the pattern connecting them wasn’t obvious. And that was just when the bodies were found. At Quantico he’d once attended a lecture on the number of serial victims who went undiscovered. Swamps were a great place to dispose of bodies. Soft tissue decayed quickly; animals and insects destroyed evidence.
Complicating things further, serial killers were frequently mobile. They attacked when and where the moment—and the victim—was right; they might kill in one location and dispose of the body in another. The killer might move from Florida to Georgia…or Oregon—wherever life took him, killing all the while and counting on geography and competing bureaucracies to keep his victims from being connected into one ongoing case.
Caleb was afraid that Jennie Lawson might have been the victim of just such a killer, and because of that, her mother might never have the peace of burying her precious daughter’s body.
But did any of that add up to a feel for anything?
“No gut intuition, not yet,” he told Adam. It was barely a white lie. He genuinely wasn’t sure he’d had a feeling for anything. Admittedly, he’d been interested in that house, the beautiful old colonial that was undergoing a lot of renovation work, as soon as he’d seen it. But had he actually been drawn to it? Beckoned?
And was it coincidental that it was owned by the gorgeous brunette from the historical museum? He was forced to admit that it probably was. The woman obviously had a passion for history, so there was nothing odd about her owning a piece of it. But was it odd that he had felt drawn to both?
Who wouldn’t be drawn to such a beautiful woman, with her flashing green eyes, the sense of fun touched with a bit of wickedness that had come out as she handled those kids, her obvious intelligence, and the lithe, sleek body that had been obvious even hidden under the dowdy clothing of a long-ago day.
“Caleb—you there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m here. I’m sorry. Like I said, nothing yet. Trust me, I’ll be doing everything in my power to find Jennie Lawson. If she’s here anywhere, I will find her.”
“Of course. Don’t forget, follow up on everything. No matter how off-the-wall you may think your hunch is, check it out. Those are often the signs that will take you where you need to go.”
“Right. I’ll keep in contact. Though I assume you’re getting information from the police faster than I am.”
“I’ll keep you up-to-date on things.”
“Thanks. And likewise.”
Caleb hung up.
He stood and stretched, then wandered to the door.
He had chosen a bed-and-breakfast on Avila Street not for its charm—though it certainly offered enough—but because he could get a room on the ground floor with a private entrance. His doorway was on the side of the building, and a bougainvillea-shaded walk led straight out to the street at the rear of the rambling old Victorian.
Old Town St. Augustine was pretty much an easily navigated rectangle. On the coast, the massive Fort Marion, the old Spanish Castillo de San Marcos, served as the city’s massive landmark, and the town had grown around it in the remaining three directions. Now the bay was lined with restaurants, hotels, shops and B&Bs. Beyond that main stretch were all kinds of smaller but interesting tourist attractions: the oldest house, the oldest schoolhouse, the oldest pharmacy—this was a city that prided itself on being old, and it was a historical treasure trove. Interspersed with the tourist attractions were more B&Bs, one-of-a-kind shops and even a number of private residences. At night, the backstreets were quiet, except when the sightseeing carriages and ghost tours went by.
With St. Augustine’s notoriety as the oldest continually inhabited European city in the United States—with sixty years on Jamestown—naturally it was rumored to harbor a lot of ghosts.
As he stood on the sidewalk, feeling the Atlantic breeze that cooled the city year-round, he was startled as one police car went by, and then another, quickly followed by a third.
