“Oh, my God. This is ghastly,” Caroline breathed.
“Caroline, please,” Sarah said.
“Horrifying,” Caroline went on.
“Caroline!” Will protested. “Please, they’re bones.”
“Human bones,” Caroline reminded him. “Human bones.”
Will looked at Caroline, then rolled his light green eyes at Sarah as he ran a hand through his dark chestnut-colored hair.
St. Augustine could be a very small town. One officer had talked to another after Sarah had called the police, and the story about the bones in her walls had traveled like lightning, with a cop friend of Will’s reaching him while he and the others were waiting for a table. The police had barely arrived before her cousin and her friends showed up, as well.
“This is history in the making,” Barry Travis said, looking far more contemporary in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt.
“History?” Renee Otten protested. “As if we need more ghost stories in St. Augustine.”
“I’ll bet the undertaker was selling coffins to the families of the dead, dumping the bodies in the walls, then selling the coffins again,” Sarah said. She felt tired. And despite the logic of her words, she was still unnerved. She loved this house, and she was pretty certain that she was right. In a few cases, something like mummified tissue remained on the bodies—enough to hold them together. And there were stained scraps of fabric left, as well, which seemed to date the interment to the mid to late eighteen-hundreds.
She felt terrible, of course, that human beings had been treated with no respect and no reverence whatsoever. But she found it criminal, not ghastly. And she was aware, above all, that this discovery meant bringing in a team of historians and anthropologists, on top of the forensic specialists. She would be like a visitor in her own house. She had learned enough about dig sites when she worked as a historian in Arlington, charting relics and remains, to know that for a fact.
“How can you be so sure? Maybe someone who lived here was a monster. A murderer. There was a guy in Chicago who did away with whole families in the late eighteen-hundreds. He was worse than Jack the Ripper—but they caught him,” Will offered.
She glared at her cousin. “Will!”
“Sorry,” he told her.
They were standing just inside the doorway. Behind them stood Tim Jamison, the police lieutenant who’d been handed the case. He was convinced that these weren’t modern-day homicides, but there were still plenty of questions to be answered. He was supervising the arrival of medical personnel and forensic anthropologists. Gary was sitting in the kitchen, drinking beer. He had already given Tim his statement but didn’t want to leave yet.
There were already a few reporters hanging around, and Gary didn’t want to deal with them. He just wanted to eat his pizza, drink his beer and stop the leak.
“Look at it this way,” Caroline said, brightening. “They’re obviously very old bones. They’ll get them all out quickly and start studying them in some lab somewhere. You’ll be able to get back to work on the house, and when you do open for business, it will be fabulous. People love to stay at haunted houses. There’s some castle in Ireland that’s supposed to be haunted and you can’t even get a reservation there for years.”
She offered Sarah a bright smile, then turned pale. “Those poor people. I bet they really do haunt the house. Can you imagine how terrible it must be to just get dumped out of your coffin? Oh! And we were just talking about Pete Albright this morning—and how we’d made up stories about people being buried in the house. And now it turns out those stories were true. I know I’d be furious enough to be haunting the place if my body had been dumped out of my coffin, wouldn’t you?”
Sarah laughed at that. “Caroline, if someone dumped my body out of my coffin, I wouldn’t care because I’d already be dead. My friends and family would have to be furious for me. And I don’t believe we hang around after we’re dead.”
“You an atheist or something?” Barry asked, surprised.
She shook her head. “No, I believe in God and the afterlife, and I even like going to church. That’s my point. We go to heaven or…wherever when we die. We’re no longer tied to our bodies. So if I was dumped out of a coffin, I doubt if I’d know it, and if I did, I wouldn’t care. I mean, we’re organic, we rot. So I don’t think that I’d be hanging around to haunt anyone, that’s all.”
“It’s that time she spent in Virginia,” Caroline said, shivering. “She worked in a bunch of old graveyards. I guess she got used to hanging out with dead people.” She gave an exaggerated shudder.