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They were turning down St. George Street.
Caleb followed.
“Oh, my God. This is ghastly,” Caroline breathed.
“Caroline, please,” Sarah said.
“Horrifying,” Caroline went on.
“Caroline!” Will protested. “Please, they’re bones.”
“Human bones,” Caroline reminded him. “Human bones.”
Will looked at Caroline, then rolled his light green eyes at Sarah as he ran a hand through his dark chestnut-colored hair.
St. Augustine could be a very small town. One officer had talked to another after Sarah had called the police, and the story about the bones in her walls had traveled like lightning, with a cop friend of Will’s reaching him while he and the others were waiting for a table. The police had barely arrived before her cousin and her friends showed up, as well.
“This is history in the making,” Barry Travis said, looking far more contemporary in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.
“History?” Renee Otten protested. “As if we need more ghost stories in St. Augustine.”
“I’ll bet the undertaker was selling coffins to the families of the dead, dumping the bodies in the walls, then selling the coffins again,” Sarah said. She felt tired. And despite the logic of her words, she was still unnerved. She loved this house, and she was pretty certain that she was right. In a few cases, something like mummified tissue remained on the bodies—enough to hold them together. And there were stained scraps of fabric left, as well, which seemed to date the interment to the mid to late eighteen-hundreds.
She felt terrible, of course, that human beings had been treated with no respect and no reverence whatsoever. But she found it criminal, not ghastly. And she was aware, above all, that this discovery meant bringing in a team of historians and anthropologists, on top of the forensic specialists. She would be like a visitor in her own house. She had learned enough about dig sites when she worked as a historian in Arlington, charting relics and remains, to know that for a fact.
“How can you be so sure? Maybe someone who lived here was a monster. A murderer. There was a guy in Chicago who did away with whole families in the late eighteen-hundreds. He was worse than Jack the Ripper—but they caught him,” Will offered.
She glared at her cousin. “Will!”
“Sorry,” he told her.
They were standing just inside the doorway. Behind them stood Tim Jamison, the police lieutenant who’d been handed the case. He was convinced that these weren’t modern-day homicides, but there were still plenty of questions to be answered. He was supervising the arrival of medical personnel and forensic anthropologists. Gary was sitting in the kitchen, drinking beer. He had already given Tim his statement but didn’t want to leave yet.
There were already a few reporters hanging around, and Gary didn’t want to deal with them. He just wanted to eat his pizza, drink his beer and stop the leak.
“Look at it this way,” Caroline said, brightening. “They’re obviously very old bones. They’ll get them all out quickly and start studying them in some lab somewhere. You’ll be able to get back to work on the house, and when you do open for business, it will be fabulous. People love to stay at haunted houses. There’s some castle in Ireland that’s supposed to be haunted and you can’t even get a reservation there for years.”
She offered Sarah a bright smile, then turned pale. “Those poor people. I bet they really do haunt the house. Can you imagine how terrible it must be to just get dumped out of your coffin? Oh! And we were just talking about Pete Albright this morning—and how we’d made up stories about people being buried in the house. And now it turns out those stories were true. I know I’d be furious enough to be haunting the place if my body had been dumped out of my coffin, wouldn’t you?”
Sarah laughed at that. “Caroline, if someone dumped my body out of my coffin, I wouldn’t care because I’d already be dead. My friends and family would have to be furious for me. And I don’t believe we hang around after we’re dead.”
“You an atheist or something?” Barry asked, surprised.
She shook her head. “No, I believe in God and the afterlife, and I even like going to church. That’s my point. We go to heaven or…wherever when we die. We’re no longer tied to our bodies. So if I was dumped out of a coffin, I doubt if I’d know it, and if I did, I wouldn’t care. I mean, we’re organic, we rot. So I don’t think that I’d be hanging around to haunt anyone, that’s all.”
“It’s that time she spent in Virginia,” Caroline said, shivering. “She worked in a bunch of old graveyards. I guess she got used to hanging out with dead people.” She gave an exaggerated shudder.
“If you go over to the old cemetery just down the street, they tell you that you’re only seeing half of it, that the street is paved right on top of hundreds of graves,” Sarah said. “And the tourists eat it up. So if I get a good haunted-house story out of this, is that so bad?”
Renee shivered and moved closer. “When they said human bones, it scared me to death, I have to admit. I mean, with that girl missing and all…”
“Renee! You thought someone murdered her, then hid her body in my house—behind a wall, no less—and I never even noticed?” Sarah asked sarcastically. Renee turned bright red, and Sarah instantly felt sorry. Renee was a good docent; she just seemed to be a bit of an airhead in real life. She was pretty and sweet, and kids loved her, but Sarah couldn’t quite understand how she and Barry had ended up in a relationship. Barry was inquisitive and intuitive, and knew a lot more history than what was contained in the training material the docents received. And Renee was…Renee.
“Well, of course…not,” Renee said. “I’m sorry. It’s just that that poor girl is missing and it has me worried, you know?”
“No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump on you,” Sarah assured her quickly. “Of course that missing girl was the first thing you thought of. I’m just grateful that ‘my’ bones do seem to be very old ones. You know, I’ve heard stories about this house, but never anything about a crazy undertaker filling the walls with his…clients. I’m going to have to do some more research and see what I can find out.”
“The only way you would have heard the story would have been if someone had already discovered the bones and dug them out,” Will said, his tone ironic.
She cast him an exasperated stare, but he didn’t notice. He was looking out the open door to where a crowd had gathered on the street, a uniformed officer keeping them back. “Hey, I know that guy.”
“What guy?” Sarah asked.
“Don’t go staring,” Will said.
“Why? Whoever he is, he’s in front of my house,” Sarah said. She gripped Will’s shoulder and looked past him, then gasped.
“What?” Caroline asked, jumping.
“It’s him.”
“Him, who?” Caroline demanded, then gave a little gasp of her own and said, “Oh, my God, it’s the guy from the museum!”
“He was here when I got home, staring at the place,” Sarah said.
“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.
