It would be good to find out who, though.
Lights. Amelia had seen lights. She’d been convinced her ancestors were haunting the house, that they were coming for her. Those lights could be explained now, as could the noises. Someone sneaking around back here would undoubtedly have made noise.
But then there was the bone.
This was actually pretty high ground—on the river, yes, but above sea level. How high had the water come? High enough to shift bones from old coffins?
He rose and surveyed the domain that was now the Flynn brothers’ legacy. It was in sad shape, at least cosmetically, but comparatively speaking, it had survived the centuries well. The house and stables were intact; the slave quarters decaying and in need of repair, but they were still standing.
Just as they had stood for nearly two hundred years.
Maybe his brothers were right; maybe this place really was important and represented their chance to do something good, to make a difference.
He looked across the overgrown lawn and untended brush to the family burial ground, its white mausoleums and stone monuments just visible through the trees. There was a line of bent and twisted old oaks, dripping with moss, that more or less defined the edge of the cemetery.
He walked toward it.
A low wall of stone, covered with lichen and crumbling with age, ran alongside the trees, a truer demarcation of where the cemetery began and ended.
An angel sat atop a sarcophagus that stood at least five feet high. Only one name was listed on it: Fiona MacFarlane. Below her name, the etching grown faint with time: Beloved in this house.
Nice sentiment. He wondered what her connection to the family had been. He really should get hold of some of the old family records and trace the connections.
There was a row of in-ground graves with simple plaques to mark them, each one etched only with a first name, making Aidan think they might have been graves for the family slaves, as well as those who had chosen to stay on to work for the plantation as free men after the war, since several were from the 1870s and ’80s.
None of them seemed to be disturbed.
His attention was drawn next to the large family vault he’d noticed the day before. It was an imposing stone structure with a marble facade. Clearly, it had been built long ago, when the family had been flush with money. Before the War Between the States. He walked up the broken stone path to the heavy iron door. He assumed it would be locked, but it wasn’t.
He pushed open the door and stepped inside. It was cool—and dark, so he drew his keys from his pocket and switched on the little flashlight attached to them, then shone it around.
He had expected more cobwebs. And there were dying flowers here and there, so apparently someone still came now and then to honor the dead.
Amelia had been dying of cancer. In the end, she had almost certainly been bedridden. So who had it been? Kendall?
He didn’t think it possible that any of his ancestors’ bones had escaped from the tombs that lined the walls, or from the two sarcophagi that sat in the middle of the mausoleum, facing a small marble altar backed by a tall golden cross. Behind that, a stained-glass window depicted St. George slaying the dragon. The window faced the trees, rendering its purpose moot, since the heavy branches of the oaks prevented the sun from showing off the beauty of it.
He walked back out of the mausoleum, wondering what he was looking for, what he was expecting to find. There was a simple and reasonable explanation for everything that was bothering him. Shifting earth and rising water had resulted in bones showing up in all kinds of odd places. Amelia had been sedated, so was it any wonder she had seen and heard things, that she had talked to ghosts? Some down-on-his-luck guy had been living on the property, eating chicken and making soup.
Whatever was bugging him, it was something he had to shake, and he should start by getting the hell out of the cemetery. He and his brothers weren’t rolling in cash, but they could afford this project. He was between cases and had time to plunge into the restoration of the house. It might be good for all of them.
He started back toward the house and almost tripped over a broken gravestone.
Swearing softly, he regained his balance, looking down to see what had nearly made him fall.
He frowned, noticing a suspiciously familiar stain on the stone.
He hunched down and studied it more closely. It looked as if something had splattered or…dripped onto the stone. It was brownish and, up close, completely recognizable.
Dried blood.
6
Kendall groaned. “Mason, no. I can’t go out tonight.”