Unhallowed Ground

Page 6

“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.
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?”