Unhallowed Ground

Page 5

“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.”