Unhallowed Ground (22 page)

I stayed in the bushes.

I stayed there for a very long time.

At last, having no true concept of how much time had gone by, I slipped back into the house, only to find that she was there. Martha Tyler.

Martha always wore a bandana wrapped around her head as if it were a crown and she some kind of queen. One drop of African blood made a man or woman a slave, and Martha could have been a slave. But she wasn’t, even though she came to us from the South and made no complaint when we brought her back there. I think she had been a slave, though, that she killed her master and escaped. But perhaps I only think that because I hate her. The girls in town who giggle and come to her for love potions don’t know her the way I know her. They don’t see her when she sits in front of a mirror, looking at her reflection. They don’t hear her voice when she speaks to me, disdaining me.

They have never seen anything like the malicious evil in her eyes when I entered the house that night.

“Ah, little girl, little girl. Poor little ugly girl.” She came to me and took me by the ear, hurting me, but when I would have cried out, she brought a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she warned me, but she didn’t let go. “Where have you been, little girl? You should not be nosy. Such bad things can happen to nosy little girls. There are panthers out there. And bears and alligators and snakes. Predators that own the night. They love to feed upon little girls, for no meat is so sweet as girl-flesh.”

“Let me go,” I pleaded, but I didn’t cry out for my father. I knew he wouldn’t have helped me. He
had never loved me, because I wasn’t a beautiful child.

He would have helped her feed me to the creatures of the night, the snakes and alligators and panthers.

She released me, laughing. “You had better forget all that you’ve seen and heard, or else…” She made a hissing sound through her teeth and slashed a line across her throat with her finger. “Nosy little girls go to feed the creatures in the woods, and in the end, they are consumed by the worms.”

I raced past her, terrified.

I prayed for the day that she and my father might die. I knew I would go to hell for such a cruel thought, but I could not help it.

For I would prefer hell to this evil house, and the company of my father and Martha Tyler.

“That poor girl,” Sarah found herself saying aloud. She quickly turned the page, but it was blank. Mystified, she kept looking through the journal.

The girl had never written in it again.

She stood up, stretching. Every muscle in her body hurt; without even noticing, she had huddled into a tight, defensive ball while reading. She didn’t feel the chill anymore, though. Instead she felt angry that a father could be so cruel to his daughter and allow his housekeeper to be even worse. And yet, if perhaps that father had been a serial killer, as the historical record seemed to imply, perhaps she had been lucky simply to have survived.

And yet, had she survived? Those blank pages might be telling.

Vicky came into the room. “Well?”

“Fascinating—and awful. I think you have to read this yourself. It looks like there was a serial killer in the city during the Civil War.”

“So the local hero
was
a killer?” Vicky asked. “Cato MacTavish was a war hero, but his fiancée did disappear mysteriously, and he was the last person known to have seen her. And there were other girls who went missing, too. In fact, there were rumors about Cato at the time, so it’s no wonder he left town when he did.”

“I don’t think Cato MacTavish was the killer,” Sarah told Vicky. “The timeline doesn’t make sense, because girls kept disappearing while he was away fighting, and after he abandoned the house and disappeared. Oh, people said he was still around. But what—living in trees? You have to read the journal. Brennan’s daughter says some pretty wild stuff about her father and a Sergeant Lee who was sheriff here during the war.”

“Maybe you could do an article on it, Sarah. You have a master’s in history, and you own the house the Brennans owned back then.”

“Good idea. The whole thing is terrifying but fascinating.”

“Cool,” Vicky said, reaching for the journal. “Sorry, but I have to lock up now.”

“No problem. Thanks, Vicky.”

She had intended to head straight for Hunky Harry’s when she finished at the library, but for some
reason she found herself walking home first and staring up at her house.

So little had changed. The bushes where Nellie Brennan had hidden were still there. The driveway was much as it would have been all those years ago.

And that driveway was empty now, which meant no one was inside. It was just after five, though, so that didn’t mean everyone was done and she could get started on her renovations again. She hesitated, then let herself into the carriage house and called Tim Jamison, as she’d promised Gary she would.

When he picked up, Tim sounded distracted. The police and M.E. were finished, he said, and there was no evidence of any more bodies, but she needed to call the professor from the university to make sure he was done, too. He gave her a number.

She called Dr. Manning, who was friendly and appreciative, expressing his gratitude that she had let the university handle the find. He assured her that they were currently looking into all the documents in the university collection, trying to solve the riddle of who had been responsible for walling up the bodies. As far as he was concerned, her house was her own again, though he hoped to stay in touch as more information came to light.

She agreed to meet him the following week for lunch, and assured him that the university was more than welcome to come back.

After she got off the phone, she went and stood staring up at the front of her house again.

Houses weren’t evil.

Determinedly, she walked up to the porch, then let herself in. It was
her
house.

Her
dream
house.

Inside, she started turning on lights; it wasn’t dark yet, but it was late enough in the afternoon that heavy shadows were starting to fill the place. She decided that she would call Gary Morton in the morning and get him to come back in and resume working. She could get her plans back on track.

She walked through the house and saw that, once again, everything had been left ship-shape. Except, of course, for the gaping hole in the wall. But that was all right. Dry wall was easy. Okay, not for her, maybe, but for Gary, dry wall was a piece of cake.

She went to the kitchen and reached into the refrigerator for a cold can of soda. She looked around the room, curious to see whether she would feel anything. Fear. Discomfort. Anything. She smiled after a minute. It was a house, made up of building materials and the imagination of an architect.

With her soda in hand, she walked up the stairs to her bedroom.

She was moving back in tonight. Taking possession again. This was her house. And everything would be okay, because…

Caleb would be staying there with her. At least, she was pretty sure he would be.

She jumped when she heard something, a bang from downstairs. She tensed, her heart thundering. What the hell?

Had the sound come from inside the house—or outside?

Another question: had she remembered to lock the door?

She looked around for her purse—and her cell phone—then realized she’d left them in the kitchen. She had a landline from the cable company, but she hadn’t bothered to have them run it into her bedroom.

Of course, even if she had her phone, what was she going to do? Call the cops and tell them she’d heard a bang downstairs? And maybe it hadn’t even come from downstairs. It could have come from the street.

She walked over to the wardrobe, determined not to be a total coward. She reached in, past her clothing, and found her old softball bat. It was good and sturdy—and she knew how to use it.

Cautiously, she started down the stairs. When she reached the main hall, she saw no one, and nothing seemed to be stirring in the house. She looked out the front window, then stepped out to the porch—relieved to find that she
had
remembered to lock the door. A couple of tourists waved to her, and she waved back. For a second she thought they were going to ask about the house, even ask for a tour, but then they turned away and kept walking.

She went back into the house, feeling like an idiot. This was her home. She wanted to be comfortable in it. Deserved to be comfortable in it. She walked from parlor to parlor, through the library-to-be, the dining room and, finally, back to the kitchen.

The basement door was standing ajar. It hadn’t been open before…had it? Could someone—maybe Gary—have come back for some reason?

“Hello?”

She walked over to the open door and looked warily down the stairs.

There was a light on down there, a lone naked bulb hanging from the ceiling. Over the years, the basement had been used to store bodies and as a hiding space for a totally different kind of spirit—booze during Prohibition. Now it was pretty much empty.

“Hello?” she said again, cursing the tremor in her voice.

She told herself that she wasn’t actually going to go all the way down the stairs, just a few steps so she could look around. And if someone was there-someone who didn’t belong—she would hightail it back up. She could just imagine Caroline reminding her that in bad horror films, only fools went down into dark basements alone.

She started down the steps, but all she could see were shadows cast by the stark light of the naked bulb.

Okay, that was it. She’d been determined not to be spooked out of her own house, but she wasn’t about to be an idiot, either. Time to return to the kitchen, grab her purse and head over to Hunky Harry’s. Later, with Caleb beside her, she would come back and try to figure out if anyone had even been there, or if it had just been the drafts common to an old house that had caught and opened the door.

If Caleb returned. It wasn’t as if he’d promised her undying devotion or anything.

If he didn’t…well, she had Will and her friends. She wasn’t alone here.

She had descended four steps, her softball bat in hand, when she heard the door above her creaking.

She looked up just as it slammed shut.

At the same time, that single glowing lightbulb below her flickered and went out, turning the world around her to black.

T
he Cassadaga Spiritualist Camp Association had been founded in 1894 by a man named George Colby. It wasn’t an actual camp, but spiritualist meetings had once been referred to as camps, and the term had persisted. There were only fifty-some homes in town, and at least half of them were inhabited by mediums.

Caleb had never been there, but he knew that Adam respected many of the inhabitants and had once explained to Caleb the way legit mediums, not the sideshow posers, operated. First, mediums weren’t fortune tellers. The best readings didn’t zero in on something that was about to happen but focused on what
was,
giving a person guidance to help forge his own future. And because mediums communicated with the dead, they didn’t always have instant answers—even the dead had to think about a question sometimes.

Martha Tyler was not just a medium but an ordained minister of a religious group called The People Faith, and she saw people at her home for readings. Caleb found the house without difficulty, a charming whitewashed Victorian. As he shut his car door, he realized
with an inner smile that he felt as if he were going home to Grandma’s house—the porch boasted a swing, beautiful flowers in planters and vines twining through the railings, and two cushioned rocking chairs.

The sense of coming home to Grandma’s house grew stronger as he walked up the steps toward the door and smelled fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies.

As he lifted his hand to knock on the wooden frame of the screen door, he found himself trying to picture the woman who lived here as a murderer who lured young women to their deaths.

“Hello? Mr. Anderson?” The voice from within didn’t sound like a murderer, either.

The door swung open, and Martha Tyler smiled at him in welcome.

His immediate thought was that this couldn’t be the same woman who had approached the kids on the beach.

Martha Tyler was tiny, no more than five feet. She was also eighty, if she was a day. She had brilliant, sparkling blue eyes and couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds soaking wet. Despite that, she didn’t look frail. Her hair was snow-white and smoothed back in a bob.

“Yes, I’m Caleb Anderson,” he said, thinking that this was a complete waste of time. She clearly wasn’t the woman he was looking for. “I’m awfully sorry,” he began.

She cut him off pleasantly. “Come in, come in. You’ve come this far, young man. If you’ve changed your mind about a reading, that’s just fine. Have some cookies and tea, anyway.”

She drew him into the living room, and talk about Grandma’s house…

As she steered him to a seat on a quilt-strewn sofa, he told her, “Ms. Tyler, I have to be honest with you. I’m a private investigator. I’m here because your name was given to me by a young woman when I was questioning her about the disappearance of another girl. I believe someone is impersonating you.”

“Please, call me Martha,” the woman said. “I can only imagine this has to do with all the terrible troubles going on up in St. Augustine?”

“Yes.”

She was heading for the kitchen. “What is your pleasure, young man? Coffee, tea? I’m fond of tea myself, and I’ve just brewed a pot, but don’t let that stop you from asking for something else.”

“Tea is fine.”

“It’s my pleasure,” she told him.

She disappeared into the kitchen but returned quickly with a tray holding two kinds of cookies—not just chocolate chip, but shortbread cookies, as well—and an old teapot with a cozy wrapped around it, along with cups and saucers. She set the tea tray down on the coffee table in front of the sofa, took a seat in a huge wingback chair and began to pour the tea.

“I do love tea,” she told him. “Not just drinking it but serving it. It’s such a pleasant old custom. In our world today, everyone is moving at the speed of light. It’s nice just to take time in the afternoon to sit down with a pot of brewed tea. Sugar? Milk?”

“No sugar, and just a drop of milk, please,” he told her,
leaning forward, anxious to waste as little time as possible.

And she seemed to be aware of it. Though her eyes were on the tea service, she was wearing a small, patient smile.

She handed him his cup and said, “So now you’re worried that someone’s using my name.” She leaned back and sipped her tea. “You must have a cookie. I couldn’t call myself a proper hostess if I let you out of here without tasting one of my fresh-baked cookies,” she told him, her patient smile more obvious.

To his own surprise, he blushed. “I’m sorry. I don’t intend to be rude, but several girls are missing, as you know, and yesterday we found a body. I’m not sure how much you know, though there’s been a fair bit written in the papers and on the news.”

“I read about it on the Internet first, actually,” she told him, then added, when his eyes widened, “even we old folks have discovered the Internet, you know.”

He blushed again and started to apologize, but she waved him to silence and went on.

“Let me tell me you what I know, and then you can tell me if you think I can help you,” she said.

“I don’t think this is a matter for a palm reading,” he said.

“I didn’t intend to read your palm. And I didn’t suggest that my help would be of the spiritual kind. Don’t you think it’s time you stopped patronizing me?”

“I’m sorry,” he assured her. “I don’t know why I—”

He broke off, startled, when she took his teacup and
set it down, then put her hands on his cheeks and looked into his eyes.

“You suffered an early trauma, and your dedication to what you do stems from that. I believe you have an exceptional soul, but not a trusting one, maybe because of everything you’ve seen. You like to go by the book—although I admit yours is a rather unorthodox book—because you’re convinced that methodology can take you where you want to go. But there’s more to you—others have seen it, but you don’t accept it yourself. Yet.” Then she sat back and was suddenly all business.

“All right, let’s start with what’s going on. Are you here because of Winona Hart or the woman whose body was found?” She must have seen something in his face, because she suddenly said, “You found the body, didn’t you?”

He nodded. Unsure why he was so comfortable sharing with her, he admitted, “Yes, I found the body. I wasn’t there looking for her—whoever she is. I came down here to look for a girl who disappeared a year ago. The police aren’t officially connecting her disappearance to Winona Hart’s—not yet, anyway—but I’m sure there’s a link. Actually, I don’t think the cops even believed they had a possible serial killer until I found the body yesterday.”

She nodded knowingly. “Too often we don’t see what we don’t want to see, I’m afraid.”

“Well, what I’ve discovered so far is that the two girls who are still missing were both fascinated by ghosts and the occult. They were both looking for more than the usual ghost stories. So far, I have no idea where
Jennie Lawson, the girl I’m looking for, was when she went missing, but Winona Hart disappeared from a beach out on Anastasia Island. No one saw her leave. The police have pretty thoroughly investigated the other kids who were out there that night, and I don’t believe any of them had anything to do with Winona’s disappearance. The only possible suspect I’ve discovered so far is a woman calling herself Martha Tyler of Cassadaga who was talking to Winona earlier in the evening.”

“And you don’t believe I was out on that beach that night?”

He cast her an apologetic smile. “You don’t look like a hippie in your thirties or forties.”

“I’m ninety,” she said, smiling. “My last birthday party was a hoot.”

“I’m sure it was,” Caleb said. “But this is serious. That woman was handing out your cards, with your address here in Cassadaga.”

“Business cards are very easy to print. And I suppose it’s still a point of amusement that there’s a Martha Tyler in Cassadaga.” When he looked at her curiously, Martha gave a decisive nod and explained. “My name is the same as that of a ‘witch’ who lived in St. Augustine over a hundred and fifty years ago. She didn’t call herself a witch, of course. In fact, I don’t think she called herself anything at all. Back when I was a little girl, kids up here in the north of the state had a nursery rhyme of sorts about her. ‘Martha Tyler, Martha Tyler, trust me, child, there’s no one viler. One, two, three, four, whatever you do, don’t open her door or she’ll see you buried far under the floor.’”

“That’s quite a story. I appreciate you helping me,” Caleb said, finishing his tea and dusting cookie crumbs from his fingers. “Thank you,” he said, taking her hand to say goodbye.

She smiled, then surprised him by turning his hand over to look at his palm. “Looks like I’ll be doing a palm reading after all,” she said, laughing. Then she turned serious and looked closely at his hand. “You need to stop doubting yourself,” she told him.

“I’m actually known as a pretty confident guy,” he said lightly, but he didn’t pull his hand away. Her grasp was unexpectedly strong for a woman her age, he realized.

She looked up into his eyes and smiled. “It’s the fear in you that’s holding you back. No, no—don’t get defensive,” she said when he started to object. “You’d risk your life for someone else. What you’re afraid of is risking your mind, but you shouldn’t be. Let your imagination go. Don’t demand a logical, provable explanation for everything. If you…just open your mind, you’ll find the answers you need. Don’t be afraid of being judged, don’t be afraid of the opinions of others. Let yourself be you.”

“Thank you. Good advice,” he said.

“It’s only good advice if you take it,” she told him, then frowned suddenly, and her grip on his hand tightened. “Someone you care about is…in danger. She’s very close to the situation. Too close. And you need to stay near her. Everything is connected. She’s treading too close to the truth, and…you need her if you’re to see this situation through.”

He pulled his hand away, startled by the wave of electricity shooting between them as she spoke.

“Look, Martha, I’m not the doubter you seem to think I am. I work for a man named Adam Harrison, who—”

“Adam Harrison?” she said, clearly delighted. “I don’t know him myself, but I have friends who speak very highly of him and the work he does.”

“Good. Then you’ll believe me when I say I know a number of people who…who believe they communicate with spirits, and I have to admit, they’ve solved some pretty impossible mysteries through whatever it is they do. So—”

“Her name is Sarah McKinley,” Martha said.

“What? How…?”

“The woman. And don’t worry, it’s just a simple deduction,” Martha said. “In the nineteen hundreds Martha Tyler was the housekeeper at a mortuary. Sarah McKinley owns the old place now. I’ve seen it on the news—they found skeletons in the walls,” she said. “You do know the young woman, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re close to her.” It wasn’t a question.

It was impossible to be closer, he thought, then wondered how Martha had known. Definitely more than simple deduction going on there.

He gave himself a mental shake. This was getting a little too weird.

“We’ve become pretty good friends,” he said, wondering just how much this woman saw with her brilliant blue stare.

“The future is always and only what we make of it,” Martha said. “So please open your heart and soul to everything that’s possible—and even impossible. I believe that there’s a deep evil sweeping over us right now. Be careful, very careful.”

She stood, and he realized that she had said her piece, had done what she could for him, and now she was done and ready for him to leave.

He rose, as well, both glad that he had come—it was interesting that this woman’s name was the same as that of the long-ago witch but more crucial to know that she wasn’t the woman who’d been on the beach that night—but also sorry he had come, because she had unnerved him by urging him to open his mind and explore his abilities further. And by making him afraid.

For Sarah.

She wasn’t a blonde and that made her safe, she’d joked, but the woman whose body he had found on the beach had been a brunette.

This was not a killer—and now there was, beyond a doubt, a killer—who selected his victims by the color of their hair. He was selecting them by his—or her—ability to charm them into the woods or into a back alley…or off the side of the road.

He was selecting victims with an interest in the paranormal. Women who wanted to be afraid.

“Martha, it was a true pleasure to meet you,” he said. “Thank you. And since I did make an appointment and take up your time, of course I’m happy to pay you whatever you normally charge for your time.”

“That’s very sweet of you,” she said. “But I hope I’ve
helped you with your investigation, and I can’t charge you for that. I would feel guilty.”

“Then I sincerely thank you again,” he said.

She watched from the porch as he pulled away. Even as his car rounded the corner, he knew that she was still watching him.

And he couldn’t forget the electric current he had felt when she held his hand. It was almost as if truths hidden in the shadows of his own soul had come surging forward, drawn by her words, her power.

Open your mind,
she had said.

He really didn’t want to.