Unhallowed Ground (25 page)

Except for her. She had discovered so much today. And while she hadn’t been ready to talk to Caleb about her experience earlier—she was still sorting it out in her own mind, now—she found herself anxious to talk to him. Alone.

She picked up her rum runner and sipped quickly. She was frightened suddenly by the intensity of the relationship they had developed so quickly. If she had any sense, she would step back.

She would take a vacation to the Bahamas or Paris.

She would do anything but be here. And yet, everything she’d said about her house was true; she had never felt more…
needed.

Had her mind created an illusion to help her figure out a way to escape? Or had she really been helped out of the basement by a ghost? Maybe she had seen that window at some time and not really noticed it. Maybe she had imagined the ghost because she was desperate and afraid. Had it been her way of dealing with panic?

But she had to face it, the entire thing had been…weird. First the noise. Then the basement door closing just as the light went out…

There hadn’t been anyone else in the house—or had
there? Tim Jamison had a key. Gary had a key. And Dr. Manning must have been given a key, too.

There were definitely too many keys to her house in other people’s hands.

“Looks like Tim Jamison has gotten smart enough to stop coming here,” Renee said, leaning in close to be heard over the music and surrounding conversations.

“I should hope so,” Barry said indignantly. “He should be spending every second looking for the murderer.”

“No one can work all the time,” Caleb remarked.

True enough, Sarah thought, and yet it often seemed that
he
was always working. He was watching everything around him all the time.

When he was with her…

No, she wasn’t going there. He sure as hell wasn’t with her because of the case, so she wasn’t even going to think in that direction, wasn’t going to question everything that was going on between them.

“There’s been no word on Winona Hart, right?” Barry asked.

“No, I’m afraid not,” Caleb said.

“What about the woman you found on the beach?” Renee asked, her eyes wide.

“They don’t even know her identity yet,” Caleb says. “It takes time. Forensic science is pretty amazing, but it doesn’t always produce instantaneous results.”

Caroline shivered. “I think it’s scary, so…” She paused and looked around. “How come nobody looks panicked?”

“That’s true,” Will said. “I hope people are being
careful, though. Three women missing or dead, all in one year.”

“It’s possible that the woman Caleb is looking for and Winona Hart will still show up,” Renee offered hopefully.

“It’s possible,” Caleb agreed. As he spoke, he reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone. He glanced at the caller ID and excused himself, saying, “I’m going to take this where I can hear. I’ll be right back.”

When he was gone, Barry said, “Business?”

“I guess,” Sarah said.

Renee looked across the table at her. “We need another round. Poor Sarah! You must have been scared to death in that basement.”

Will, at her side, pulled her close in a hug, then knuckled the top of her head. “My cousin can handle anything.”

“But that house! I’d be terrified if I were locked in a basement. And then to find out the door was really unlocked all the time. Here’s what I think, and I can’t help it. The house locked you in. Then, just to make you look like an idiot, it opened the door again.”

Will burst out laughing. “Oh, Renee! Come on.”

“I’d be creeped out,” she said. “You wouldn’t catch me living there.”

“The house is just a house. Those bones were old, but there’s a real killer out there now,” Will said.

Barry rolled his eyes. “I think we’re obsessing on this more than the cops are. So let’s forget all about it and dance,” he said, nodding toward the dance floor. When no one moved, he said, “Renee?”

“Sure,” she said, and shrugged unenthusiastically.

As she and Barry walked out to the dance floor, Will leaned closer to Sarah and spoke directly to her, his eyes intense. “Sarah, maybe you
should
come stay with me. Or maybe I should get someone to cover for me at work and take you to…I don’t know. New York City. The Bahamas. Anywhere else, just for a while.”

Ignoring the fact that only a few minutes ago she’d contemplated running away to the Bahamas herself, she said, “I’m okay. Really. Anyway…” She blushed, then went on. “Caleb’s staying with me.”

“And I’m supposed to find that reassuring? We don’t know enough about that guy yet,” Will said.

She smiled. She loved her cousin and was grateful for his protective nature, but she knew in her heart that this time there was no need for it. “I know everything I need to know,” she said. “I met Adam Harrison in Virginia, and anyone working for him is by definition aboveboard. And just so you know,
I
know everything I need to about Caleb.”

“Oh, really?” Caroline said, shifting around to her other side. “What do you really know? That he looks good in boxers. Or naked? You can’t let yourself be blinded by the physical thing, Sarah. I know I wanted you to start dating again, and I even kind of pushed you two together, but…”

“Would you two have some faith in me?” Sarah demanded. “I’m fine, and so is Caleb. I’m worried about
you,
Caroline. Will, you need to stay close to her. She’s a beautiful blonde, and both the missing women were—
are
—blondes, too.”

She stopped speaking when she saw Caleb returning to the table. Whatever he had heard during his phone call had made him thoughtful. He sat down, then said, “I think I need to call it a night. Sarah, you ready?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’m all set,” she said, then frowned. Barry was coming back, weaving between tables, and he was alone. “Where’s Renee?”

“With friends,” he said, sliding into his chair, sounding disgusted.

“We all have friends,” Will offered.

“She left me in the middle of the dance floor,” Barry said.

“We were going to take off,” Sarah told him. “But if you need me to stay…Are you all right?”

He looked startled; then he smiled. “Of course I’m all right. I’m a big boy. I’ll be fine.
We’ll
be fine. I’m just aggravated, not suicidal. Go ahead. We’ll see you tomorrow.”

“We’ll hang out for a few more minutes,” Caroline said, looking at Will. “That way you won’t have to sit here alone.”

Barry smiled again, shaking his head. “You’re all free to go. Honestly. I
have
been in a bar by myself before.”

Sarah took him at his word and gave him a kiss on the cheek, then told him to tell Renee good-night when she returned.

Will and Caroline left with them, but at the plaza, they split up to walk their separate ways.

Caleb glanced at her. “You’re sure you want to stay in the house? The carriage house is just fine, you know.”

“I want to stay in the house,” she told him firmly.

“What really happened today?” he asked her.

“I honestly don’t know. I thought I saw him again—your ancestor,” she admitted, glancing at him sideways.

He frowned. “Please tell me that my ancestor didn’t lock you in the basement.”

“No, he helped me out of it. Or I hallucinated he helped me out of it, because thinking he was really there…that’s ridiculous.”

“The front door was unlocked when I got there—and so was the basement door,” Caleb said.

“Do you think someone might have been trying to scare me, locking me down there?” she asked, perplexed. “Tomorrow I need to get all my keys back.”

“It’s not just a matter of getting your keys back,” he said. “Tomorrow, you’re getting a locksmith out there to change the locks.”

She nodded. “That’s not a bad idea,” she admitted, then asked, “Who was that on the phone?”

“Floby,” he told her.

“Floby?” she echoed, surprised. “What’s up?”

“He found traces of a hallucinogen in the dead woman’s system.”

“She was on LSD?”

“He’s not sure what. He doesn’t have all the results in yet. I’ll head over to see him in the morning,” Caleb said, his tone thoughtful.

“I found out something interesting recently, too,” Sarah said. “This same scenario occurred before—years ago, during the Civil War. A bunch of women disappeared, and people assumed they’d been murdered,
though only a few bodies were ever found. And I read two memoirs that talked about it—one written by a woman who moved down here after the Yankees occupied the city in 1862, the other one a journal kept by Nellie Brennan, the daughter of Leo Brennan, the man who forced MacTavish out and kept running the mortuary business. The first woman saw the body of a dead girl in a coffin. She said that the corpse was so white it was as if all her blood had been drained. Brennan caught her and a friend staring at the girl, and threatened them with a shotgun the next time they ventured onto his property. Nellie said that her father was furious when a Sergeant Lee brought a corpse to the house. She snuck out and looked at it, and it sounded as if that woman had been drained of blood, too, though maybe that was because her whole body looked as if wild animals had been feeding on it. The sergeant wanted her father to cover up the fact that the woman had been murdered. In both cases, the cause of death was listed as being run down by a carriage.”

“Really? Is there a way I can read those memoirs?” Caleb asked her.

“I still have the first one, but the other is one of the library’s newest acquisitions, so they won’t let it out. But you can go to the library and read it.”

“Maybe,” he said contemplatively. “There are certainly correlations between the past and the present that are…extraordinary,” he said. “You know about the historical Martha Tyler, right?”

“If what Nellie wrote was true, she was horrible. She
threatened Nellie. She told her that she could wind up like the dead woman.”

“And a woman who called herself Martha Tyler but wasn’t the real woman by that name was at the beach when Winona Hart disappeared,” Caleb said.

He looked as if he was going to say more. When he didn’t, Sarah demanded, “What? Caleb, I’m a part of this. If someone is repeating the past and these disappearances have something to do with my house, then I’m in it as deep as you can get. You have to tell me what you know.”

He paused, then studied her. “She was drained of blood,” he said at last. “The woman I found on the beach—she’d been drained of blood.”

Sarah paled, then pulled herself together and said, “We need to see Mr. Griffin again. His daughter disappeared, too. It was years later, but maybe history just keeps in repeating itself. He wants to help, and it’s possible he knows something, that his memory will trigger something…. Maybe we can even help him by finding out what happened to his daughter.”

They had reached the house and paused to look up at the facade. They had left the lights on, and now the place looked beautiful and inviting.

“You’re sure you want to sleep here?” he asked.

“You do have a gun, right?” she asked him.

“Yes.”

“Then yes, I want to sleep here. I’m not afraid of ghosts, and I have you to protect me from the living.”

They went in, careful to make sure that the door was locked behind them. Caleb wasn’t content with the fact
that he’d secured the house earlier. He went back through and checked everything again, including the chair by the basement door, which was still securely in place.

When he was done, she looked at him teasingly, then raced up the stairs. He followed, and after that they gave themselves up to learning about each other, just exploring, savoring their freedom to discover. Clothing went flying, and there was laughter and breathlessness….

It was explosive; it was sweet; it was magic.

Touching his flesh, feeling the flex and fire of his muscles, Sarah thought it was like falling in love again, something she had almost forgotten, almost given up on.

They were fervent, urgent, but not frantic. There was something about being together…. What they shared wasn’t superficial, not something destined to end quickly, and they both felt confident about that.

When Sarah slept, she did so feeling more secure than she had in all her life. She didn’t fear the darkness, didn’t fear ghosts, and in his arms, she also had no fear of the living.

She was awakened suddenly by his abrupt movement. She blinked, then jackknifed into a sitting position, wondering what had happened, fear seeping into her blood.

“Caleb, what is it?” she whispered.

He was sitting up himself, staring toward the foot of the bed.

Suddenly he rose, as if he hadn’t heard her.

As if she didn’t exist at all.

“C
aleb?”

He heard Sarah call his name, but it seemed to come from a distant place, or maybe he was only hearing it in his mind.

He opened his eyes…

And saw himself.

No, not himself. His double. That other Caleb was standing at the foot of the bed, his hair longer than Caleb’s own, and he was wearing a gaudily plumed hat. He had a moustache and goatee, and long sideburns. He was handsomely dressed in Victorian attire, silk waistcoat, tailored overcoat and white shirt.

And his expression was grave.

Help me.

Caleb stared, sure that he was dreaming, yet he couldn’t shake the dream.

Help me, please. And help yourself. I know what happened to her, and who did it. I loved her, and it wasn’t me.

As he continued to stare, the apparition beckoned to him.

Please.

Caleb rose slowly, still staring at the man who was—and yet was not—himself.

Cato MacTavish. He was staring at Cato MacTavish.

At last, certain that he had Caleb’s attention, Cato turned and walked from the room.

Unable to help himself, Caleb followed.

They left the bedroom and walked along the hallway to the small, narrow staircase that led up to the attic.

There were two small eyebrow windows, and the pale pastel light of the early dawn was just beginning to seep in. The light fell over old trunks, broken chairs and several dressmakers’ dummies, headless sentinels guarding the attic realm. Motes of dust danced in the pastel light.

Cato MacTavish paused in the center of the room, surrounded by the past, and looked at Caleb with great sadness.

I have looked forever,
he said.
And finally I have found her.

He moved to stand by a huge wooden steamer trunk with tarnished metal strapping.

Brighter light flooded the room as the sun continued its inevitable rise, and Cato began to fade. Caleb realized he was standing naked and alone in the dusty attic in the coming light of day.

“Caleb!”

He started and turned, feeling the warmth of Sarah’s delicate touch on his arm. She was staring at him with deep concern shining from her enormous silver eyes.

She was so enticing, her hair a wild mane around her
head, her skin so soft, the silk wrap she had grabbed to follow him seductively draping the curves of her body. The sight of her, the feel of her, triggered something within him.

“Caleb?” she repeated.

He looked at the trunk and gave himself a mental shake, pulling himself free from the mists of sleep and dreams.

“The trunk,” he said hoarsely, pointing.

He knew he was awake at last, but memory of the dream was vivid. He walked closer and saw that the trunk was padlocked, preventing him from opening it. He looked around and saw that someone had stowed a set of dumbbells in a corner—years ago, judging by the coating of dust, and yet not so many years as the trunk had been there. He strode across the room, oblivious to his own nakedness, and picked up one of the dumbbells.

“Caleb?” Sarah said, louder now, firmly. “What are you doing?”

Without answering, he smashed the lock and lifted the lid of the trunk, revealing a trove of loosely piled Victorian clothing. He drew out hose, capes, petticoats, stays, throwing things aside…until at last he found what he was seeking.

Bones.

Bones nestled in decaying silk and satin. Wisps of hair still clinging to a skull with leathery skin still covering the bone. Dried and mummified flesh adding substance to the bones. She was real, and yet she appeared to be nothing but a decorative prop for a macabre haunted house.

“Oh, my God…” Sarah breathed from behind him.

“It’s Eleanora,” Caleb said with grim certainty.

“How do you know?” she whispered.

“There’s a locket around her neck—with a likeness of Cato,” he said. “Cato didn’t do it. He loved her.”

“What?” Sarah asked, shaking her head in concern and stepping back, as if she were afraid to touch him. “I don’t understand.” She studied him for a moment, and then realization lit her eyes. “You saw him, didn’t you? I didn’t dream him. He’s a ghost,” she whispered.

“I had a dream,” he said, but even as he spoke, he wasn’t sure he believed his own words. And if not, what
did
he believe?

What had he seen, and how had he ended up in the attic?

“It was a dream,” he insisted. “We were talking about the past and what happened here, and I had a dream that led me here, that’s all,” he said. “Call Jamison. And then you might as well call that professor—Dr. Manning. I need to shower and dress—we both do. She’s been in that trunk for over a hundred and fifty years. Another hour isn’t going to make any difference. In fact, I don’t want to call anyone yet. I’m going to go see Floby anyway, and then I’ll bring him back here and we can figure out how to proceed and whether this has anything to do with everything else going on.”

“Caleb, it all
has
to be connected,” Sarah said. “Whatever you say, I know we both saw a ghost. And he’s not trying to haunt anyone or hurt them—he’s trying to help. People accused Cato of having killed Eleanora and the others, and he left because he couldn’t prove the truth.”

He set his hands on her shoulders and wondered why he of all people—a man who worked for Adam Harrison and spent his time investigating the incursions of the paranormal into the real world—couldn’t admit to having seen a ghost.

Sarah was still staring at him as if he had changed in some fundamental way. She looked wary. She looked…

Afraid.

He winced and tightened his grip on her shoulders. “All right, here’s what I think. Something terrible happened here years ago. Maybe that housekeeper, Martha Tyler, conned people into believing she had some kind of power, like the tricks Marie LeVeau used in New Orleans. She would
listen.
She would get people to tell her things they didn’t even know they were telling her. That way, she could tell one heartbroken woman that there was nothing she could do to help, then tell another that she could help her win the man of her dreams. She would have mixed her potions and convinced people of their efficacy, and maybe she even had a certain power of her own. But, she couldn’t have been working alone.”

“Brennan,” Sarah said. “Brennan was working with her. She worked for him, not Cato—he was the one who brought her here. He got here ahead of the Union occupation, and old Mr. MacTavish needed money, so he took him in as a boarder. And then Brennan talked MacTavish into using the house as a funeral parlor. MacTavish would have been willing to do anything to survive the war and save the house so his son could inherit the
old mansion when he returned. But MacTavish died, and when Cato finally came back from the war, Brennan was already established in his house. There were all kinds of ways for the carpetbaggers to keep a man from reclaiming his property. And with Eleanora missing, and then the other women, the accusations would have started—fed by Brennan, no doubt—and eventually Cato MacTavish must have had enough, and he left. Brennan was a nasty man—his own daughter wrote about how much she hated him. She stopped writing, though, and I don’t know what happened to her, but a son inherited this place. I don’t know where he came from. Maybe he was born later, or maybe he was fighting with the Union army when his father and sister moved down here.” She paused, staring first at him, then sadly down at the trunk and its pathetic contents. “If this is Eleanora, how did the line go on? How can you be his descendent?” she asked.

“Either she had a child before she died and someone managed to hide the fact and get the child out of the city—or he went on to find a wife when he left St. Augustine,” Caleb said. “You were the one who discovered the connection—what did the records say?”

“They didn’t say anything. There was no mention of a wife, just the reference to his son being named Magnus. And then his son’s family and so on.”

“Where and when did Cato die?”

“In Virginia, in 1901.”

“So why is he back here?” Caleb asked.

“Aha!” Sarah said.

“Stop it. Please. If we tell Jamison that a ghost is
leading us around—and I’m not admitting
or
denying that fact—I guarantee you, he and everyone else will call us crazy,” Caleb said.

They stared at one another for a long moment.

Then she smiled slowly. “You wear dust well,” she assured him.

He grinned and pulled her close, his expression grave as he said, “Thank you for the compliment, but I have to go see Floby and then bring him out here. Let’s get showered and dressed before we do anything else.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she told him.

A few minutes later they stepped into the shower together. Sarah looked at him and said, “You know, our world is going to go crazy again when the media finds out that we’ve discovered another corpse in this house.”

“I know,” he said.

“We might want to spend a little more time…just us, before everything goes to hell,” she said somberly.

He nodded and pulled her into a tight embrace.

Water. Heat. Steam. Slick bodies in close proximity, and a feeling that every second now was unique…precious.

Eventually they stepped out of the shower and got dressed.

Eleanora and Cato had been in love, their relationship cruelly ended, Caleb thought. And now, together, he and Sarah were going to exonerate Cato and put Eleanora to rest at last.

It wasn’t until Caleb called Will and asked him to come over to Sarah’s, then headed out of the house, that he
realized he might have discovered the remains of his own great-great-great—however many greats—grandmother. It was a poignant thought, and surprisingly painful.

“I’ve gotten back some of the tissue samples,” Floby said from behind the desk in his office.

“Right. You said the victim had taken some kind of a hallucinogenic drug?”

“Nature’s own,” Floby said. “Yaupon holly—and poppy seeds.”

“Poppy seeds? You mean opium?”

“More or less. An extract from the seeds.”

“And yaupon holly?” Caleb was thoughtful for a minute. “Isn’t that one of the ingredients in the black drink a number of Native Americans—including the Seminoles—use in their rituals?”

“Exactly,” Floby told him.

“So was she high enough that she was hallucinating?” Caleb said.

“Given how she ended up, let’s hope she was very high and seeing beautiful sights,” Floby told him.

Caleb nodded. “Okay, now I need you to come with me back to Sarah’s place. I want you to see something before we call anyone else in.”

“Oh, God. You’ve found another body,” Floby said, staring at him.

“A woman. In a trunk in the attic,” Caleb admitted.

Floby shook his head. “What is it with you and corpses?” he asked. “I just wish you could find Winona Hart—alive.”

“I wish that, too,” Caleb assured him.

“Have you called Jamison?” Floby asked.

“Not yet. I will.” Caleb hesitated. “There’s some mummified tissue on this body. I’m hoping you can figure out if there were any drugs—like the black drink—in her system when she died…if you can figure out how she died, before we get the zoo back in.

“I think there’s some kind of connection between what went on back then and what’s going on now, and I can’t wait for the historians and the anthropologists to do whatever it is they do. I need to know now.” He hesitated. “And I also want you to do a test for me—on the side, without telling anyone.”

“Oh?”

“A DNA test.”

“I’ll need someone to compare her DNA to.”

“You have someone. Me.”

Will sat in the kitchen, shaking his head over a cup of coffee, not looking at Sarah. She had brought him up-to-date on all the reading she had done, and the details of Caleb’s investigation.

“The man’s a corpse magnet,” he said.

“Stop it! He’s an investigator, Will—corpses are a part of his work,” Sarah said and stood up, suddenly impatient. She was glad that her cousin was with her. Not that she was afraid to be alone, she told herself, but things had been so strange lately that she was glad of the company. With nothing to worry about on the safety front, she was free to focus on the one thing that seemed impossible to believe and yet had to be true.

She’d thought about it a lot, and as crazy as it
seemed, as much as it went against the grain of everything she’d always believed, she’d come to the conclusion that Cato MacTavish was a ghost. He might have been buried in Virginia, but he was here now, because girls were disappearing again, and he wanted it to stop. He didn’t want to see a repeat of what had happened before.

“This place is creepy, Sarah,” Will was saying now. “I mean, sure, it could be a beautiful bed-and-breakfast. For ghouls,” he said. “And I don’t like just how much
you
seem to be getting involved in everything that’s going on. Okay, the bones in your house weren’t your fault. But since Mr. Corpse Magnet is trying to find whoever killed that woman on the beach—and maybe those other two girls, as well—I don’t think you should be hanging around with him so much. I mean, I like him, I honestly do. But I’m worried sick about you. What if he finds out something…and people decide you know it, too? You could be in danger, Sarah.”