She found herself musing rather than reading.
There was no reason to think there was anything suspect about the man from the museum staring at her house. There was plenty to admire about it, and this was a tourist town, after all. And that was what tourists did. They stared.
He wasn’t the usual tourist, though. Of that she was sure. He had an air about him. Like a…cop. No, not a cop. A CEO. No, not a CEO, either. She wasn’t quite sure what it was that made him so striking, even over and above his looks. Maybe it was that build, sleek and powerful, and a stance that seemed to speak quietly of confidence.
Strange. Caroline had thought he seemed familiar. There was something familiar about him, but Sarah couldn’t begin to figure out what it was. She was certain she would have remembered if she had ever met the man before.
“Hey!”
She had been so lost in her thoughts that she was startled when she heard Gary’s voice.
“What is it?”
“Sorry, I think you should see this.”
She looked at him, surprised. She didn’t know a thing about construction, and she had told him so when she hired him to supervise the restoration of the mansion. Whatever he came across, he was supposed to deal with it. He knew what would fly with both the contemporary codes and the demands of the historic board. He knew walls and leaky water pipes. She didn’t.
“What?” she asked again, worried by the look he was giving her. Things had been going so well, so incredibly well, and she didn’t want anything to change that.
This wasn’t going to be about leaking pipes. Instinctively, she knew that.
Just the tone of his voice was disturbing as if she had suddenly rounded a corner to find herself in an alien world. A creeping feeling of terrible unease began to fill her, slowly at first, then cold and sweeping, like skeletal fingers of ice reaching from a grave on a winter’s day.
“Bones,” he said, as if he’d read her mind.
“Bones?” she repeatedly blankly. “What, you found a dead squirrel?” she asked weakly, though she knew full well that wasn’t he had found.
“No, Sarah. Human bones.”
“Well, the house was used as a mortuary,” she reminded him, though she knew she was being stupid. She just didn’t want it to be true. It was as if everything had suddenly shifted. The world had been good, and now, from this moment on, it was going to be something altogether worse.
“We found them in the wall, Sarah. The wall. Mortuaries didn’t usually wall up the dead,” Gary said, then looked at her questioningly, as if waiting for her to decide what to do.
She nodded. “I’ll call the police. I’ll tell them we have a skeleton in the wall.”
“A skeleton?” Gary repeated, staring at her blankly.
“Right,” she said slowly. “Bones. A skeleton.”
“Sarah, please. Just come look.”
She stood at last and followed him back to what she intended to one day be a beautiful library.
She knew then what he had wanted her to see. There was no skeleton in the wall.
There were dozens of them.
2
“I heard you found a body,” Adam Harrison said over the phone. Adam never did waste time with pleasantries over the phone, Caleb thought. No “Hey, how are you settling in? Good trip?”
In person, Adam Harrison—Caleb’s boss and CEO of Harrison Investigations—was charming. One of the most dignified and courteous men who had ever walked the earth, Caleb was convinced. But he just wasn’t a phone man.
“Yes, but nothing that has anything to do with our case. I just heard from that lieutenant friend of yours. The body is—”
“Frederick J. Russell, banker, who must have been speeding around that curve. He’s been missing for twelve months, and if there’s anything more, no one will know until the coroner’s finished his report. A fine day’s work, even if there’s no connection,” Adam said.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t get you any closer to what you’re looking for. Have you discovered anything from talking to the locals?”
Caleb smiled, glad that Adam couldn’t see him. “Adam, I’ve only been here twenty-four hours. But I’m out there, meeting people. I’ll do everything in my power to chase down the girl who just went missing and see if we can discover some connection between her case and Jennie’s. Frankly, I’m hoping this girl just ran off with some guy. I’d just as soon not find her corpse.” He was afraid he was going to find her dead, though there was always hope. As for Jennie, her own mother sensed that she was gone.