Unhallowed Ground (14 page)

“Wow. He laid a lot on you,” Caleb said.

“I don’t believe in ghosts, or that a house can be evil,” she told him.

“I don’t believe it, either. But I believe that human beings are capable of some pretty hideous things, and that madmen can walk around looking like saints. And if there’s a legend that goes with the house, some bastard may find it useful in carrying out his own crimes.” He lifted her chin, looking into her eyes. “Look, Sarah, you don’t have to believe in ghosts to have been subconsciously influenced by what Mr. Griffin said. You had a dream, and I was the last person you saw before you went to sleep, so…”

“So…” she repeated softly, staring at him. “So where did the mud come from?”

“We tracked it in somehow.”

She stood. “I’ve got to call the museum and leave a message. Caroline’s parents suggested that I take a few days off, and I’m going to. I want to look at the historical records and whatever newspaper files I can find. I want to see what went on in the house over the years. So you can go on to the police station without me.”

“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Caleb asked her.

“I’ll be fine. So go do whatever you have to do,” Sarah said.

“I’m going to help hunt for Winona Hart,” he said.

“What about Jennie Lawson?” she asked.

“Jennie was here. I found someone who saw her. She wanted to go on the spookiest ghost tours she could find.” He hesitated. “When I showed her picture around yesterday, a lot of people thought I was showing them a picture of Winona Hart, so logic says that the same person snatched both girls. If we can find Winona, I’ll find out the truth about Jennie.”

“Do you think Winona might still be alive?” Sarah asked. “She hasn’t been missing that long.”

“We can hope. But I want to get moving quickly. That means a trip to the station to tell Tim Jamison what I learned yesterday and find out everything the police have on Winona, and then I need to follow up on every last person who was near her and every possible clue.”

“I hope you can find them both. Alive.”

He nodded. “I hope so, too.”

“You don’t think it’s possible, though, do you?”

He shrugged. “I saw Jennie’s mother. She said she knows that her daughter is gone. And Jennie was a
good kid. She wouldn’t have just disappeared. She wouldn’t have run away with a man. So…quite frankly, it doesn’t look good. But people need closure. They need to bury their dead, and they need to grieve.” He stepped toward the door. “Maybe I should walk you wherever you’re going.”

She smiled. “Thanks. But it’s broad daylight now. Someone will be by to get into the house soon—Floby left me a note that they still had some things to do. And I can walk to the library on my own when it opens. It’s a whole three blocks away—maybe.”

He paused at the door, looking back at her. “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Yes, it’s just that…it was so real.” It took her a minute but she finally gave up. “I’m sorry,” she said slowly. “I’m sorry about your room and your stuff. I can go clean up if you want, since you’ll be busy.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s all right. I can manage. But, by the way…”

“By the way…what?”

He grinned. “If you ever show up at my room again, it had better be for sex.”

She flushed, and her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.

He let himself out.

Sarah knew that legal documents would only back up what she already knew.

What she needed were newspaper articles, diaries and letters from the period. Such things existed, she was sure. St. Augustine had been occupied by Union forces
long before the war’s end, and it had never been burned to the ground. Many of the old houses had attics, and those attics often yielded treasures offering insights into the past. Even now, despite the intervening years, people often found old trunks in crawl spaces, or stashes of Confederate bills stuffed into cubbyholes or under old floorboards. Even Spanish coins still surfaced now and then.

It wasn’t a hopeless case.

Vicky Hind, one of the librarians, was happy to assist Sarah.

“Those old bones got you thinking, huh?” she asked sympathetically. “Well, legend and history are often one and the same, you know. Here’s a memoir written in 1908 by a woman whose father came down after the Union established command of the city. She was born in 1860 and came here with her mother when she was just two years old. She self-published her journal in 1908, when she was nearly fifty. She died a few years later, so we’re lucky she got it out there. Anyway, take this and have a seat in the General’s Room, and I’ll see what else I can find for you.”

Sarah thanked her and took a seat in the room that had gotten its name because a Confederate general had been born there. He hadn’t surrendered when Lee had. Instead, he’d gone to Texas, hoping to lead his unit into Mexico to establish a new order. His mother had remained in the house until her death, a feisty old woman who reveled in causing trouble for the “damn Yankee invaders,” as she called them.

Sarah started reading and found a charming person
ality developing as she turned the pages. She found herself fascinated by the writing alone. The author, Sadie Hanrahan, didn’t remember much about the war, but she did recall the days after. There had been a great deal of bitterness in the city, despite the fact that it had been in Federal hands for years, and that many of the citizens had never wanted Florida to secede—they had always needed their Yankee tourist dollars. It had been a difficult time. President Lincoln had been assassinated. John Wilkes Booth had been hunted down and shot, and his co-conspirators hanged, but many blamed all Southerners for the death of the president. And so many in the South had been stripped of their homes, their heritage and more.

Sadie’s first pages were filled with tales of growing up and vivid descriptions of buildings that hadn’t changed to this day. There were also some very funny anecdotes about learning to deal with the cumbersome clothing women had to wear, even in the summer heat. And then Sarah hit the jackpot.

It was on a Saturday late in 1865 that I walked by the old Grant place with Scotty Kehoe. It was near dusk, and in front of the building, in the drive, we saw the mortuary’s glass-encased hearse with a coffin inside. At first I was enthralled by the two horses that were to draw the funerary wagon; they were glorious big black beasts, wearing black-feathered headdresses. But Scotty was drawn by the coffin within the hearse. “Come on!” he said to me. “What are you doing?” I protested. Then he
called me a chicken. Well, I couldn’t have that. He’d cluck at me every single day at school. So I crept with him through the brush that was kept neatly trimmed around the entrances to the main mansion and the carriage house and then we crawled up on the conveyance to look in. I’d never been to a funeral. I was shocked by the coffin. It was beautifully carved, but there was a glass window above the face. I saw the girl in the coffin. She was young, with beautiful wheat-colored hair, and she had pale skin, like all her blood was gone, but her lips were a bright red. She looked as if she was sleeping. “Look, she’s opening her eyes!” Scotty teased, and I nearly screamed. I did slide from my perch. That was when the elder Mr. Brennan came out on the porch. I had always hated him. We weren’t bad people, not most of us—even if they did call us carpetbaggers. But Mr. Brennan had rather taken over the place before he had bought it. We’d heard tales that the previous owner’s father, Mr. MacTavish, had been a kind man, forced to turn his home into a funeral parlor to survive once his plantations had failed and his son was gone to war. MacTavish had died, and his son had returned from the war only to have his heart broken when he found his father dead and his fiancée gone, so I’d been told. Some people remembered the son kindly, too. He had been dashing, and a valiant soldier. Always charming and kind and caring, especially to children and the elderly. But other people whispered about
him, saying that he was really the devil incarnate and a murderer. But at least some people had liked him, and no one liked old man Brennan. I especially didn’t like Mr. Brennan after that day. He was furious; he yelled at us and promised that kids or no kids, next time, he’d have his shotgun out, that we were defiling the dead. We ran. I thought he would tell our parents about the incident, but he never did.

I found out who the girl in the coffin was that night, when my father’s housekeeper was talking to him about it.

“A carriage accident, my foot. That young’un disappeared more’n three weeks ago. It’s something afoot, just like that Madison girl who disappeared in ’sixty-two. She died in a carriage accident, too—so they said. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now. Not Miss Della Bentley. It’s them carpetbaggers that run this place that say what isn’t is, and ignore what’s going on. They say one girl rode off with her Rebel lover, and another girl ran off to meet her Yankee lover, and it just ain’t so. They’re just saying it was a carriage accident ’cause poor Mr. Cato MacTavish isn’t around for them to be blaming this on! Why, they’ve even tried to start the rumor that Cato is out hiding in the woods—that he comes back to stalk and hunt women—just in case someone realizes there weren’t any carriage accidents.”

My father was a good man. He tried to soothe her. He said it was a tragedy about the poor girl,
but we couldn’t go believing in wild fantasies made up by folks who were bitter about the war and had little else to do.

Our housekeeper walked away, muttering.

My father kept a sharp eye on me after that, though. I wasn’t allowed to walk around town anymore with the other children. But by then, we weren’t really allowed to be children at all anyway. Maybe it had to do with it being the aftermath of the war. I was a child at the time. My father trusted the authorities. I trusted my father.

After that day, whenever I saw Mr. Brennan on the streets, I ran. One day, when I was much older, I asked my father about Brennan and the house on St. George. He was silent for a long time. “There was a lot of tragedy there,” he told me at last. I asked him why the young Mr. MacTavish had left. I understood a broken heart—half the women not too many years older than I was had broken hearts, on account of their fellows had died in the war. But he had abandoned such a beautiful house.

“The disappearances,” my father said. “Or the murders,” he added after a moment of reflection. “I didn’t believe it at the time.” He rattled off a list of names. Women’s names. “They all disappeared, starting right when Cato MacTavish came home. We assumed then that they had run off—it was a war, conditions were miserable. Only two of the girls were ever found—and the doctor on call said that both had died in the streets. Carriage acci
dents. But…they didn’t look right.” He stopped. He wasn’t going to tell me any details of the corpses that had been found. “Cato’s fiancée had disappeared right after he left to fight, and since he wasn’t here, he was a good scapegoat. When he returned from the war, people said he’d killed her because she was pregnant or he was just tired of her. He tried to fight the accusations—they weren’t official, there was no evidence—but bear this in mind, child. Words can be as cruel as any weapon; they give rise to battles and wars, and in the end, he was a soldier who could not win the battle of words, I’m sad to say. Thing is, soon after he left, the housekeeper disappeared, too. She wasn’t actually his housekeeper, she had come with Brennan. But the whole city was terrified of her.” “Why?” I asked. “Black magic.” “You don’t believe in black magic,” I told him. He shook his head. “I didn’t want to believe. They said that she mixed voodoo with Indian lore, black magic and more. Some thought it was her spells that made the girls disappear. Or made them run away. Or perhaps she was the one who killed them. The truth, Brennan was allied with the powers that controlled the city at the time. Cato MacTavish was not. And MacTavish was a man who could bear no more. Perhaps he changed his name when he went north—or south. All anyone knows for sure is that he rode out of town one day on his father’s big bay, crying out his innocence and cursing the city, never to be seen again. Brennan,
now, Brennan is a dangerous man. He conned Cato into teaching him the business, and he managed to make MacTavish leave and get hold of the place for himself. It’s always dark, that house, always covered in a pall of black and mourning. I told you once, years ago, to stay away. And I want you to do so now and forever, even if you’re growing into a woman.”

And so I did. But as the years went by, I found myself walking past the house, time and time again. It was on St. George, just a block from my home, so it was easy to take that route. The house remained sheathed in black, black veils, black drapes, black wreaths. And the death carriages came and went, and I still wondered why old man Brennan had never told my father about my crawling up on his hearse and looking into the coffin of the beautiful young woman.

Sarah just finished the entry when her cell phone rang, nearly sending her flying from the chair as it broke into her intense concentration.

“Hello?” she said a bit breathlessly.

“Sarah?” It was Caroline.

“Yes, hi.”

“Are you all right?”

Sarah laughed. “Yes. The sound of my phone just startled me, that’s all.”

“I know you’re taking the day off, but can you stop by the museum for a minute? Come in the back. No one will even know you’re here.”

“Okay. But are
you
all right? You sound…disturbed.”