“Do you remember what she was wearing?” Caleb asked.
“Yes. Jeans and a red T-shirt, and she was pulling a black, white and purple suitcase. She said it was wonderful—she could always find her luggage at baggage claim.”
“You’ve been very helpful,” Caleb assured her.
“Really?” She seemed genuinely pleased. “It’s terrible. And sad. And now another girl’s missing, and she looks…so much like Jennie Lawson.”
“Yes, she does,” Caleb acknowledged.
“I hope you find her. Jennie Lawson, I mean. And the other girl, too, of course,” Mina told him, then stood and offered her hand. He thanked her again as they shook, and then she left and went back to work. He would have thanked Harold Sparks again, but the man was behind the counter, pretending to be busy. He nodded Caleb’s way, so Caleb nodded in return and left.
He had learned something new, something no one had mentioned, something that wasn’t in any of the police files. Jennie Lawson hadn’t been on her way to explore Ft. Marion. She hadn’t been planning to explore the bar scene or seek out a dance club.
Jennie Lawson had been in search of something scary.
Sadly, it seemed that she had found it.
The United States took control of Florida in 1821, and it became a territory in 1822.
Sarah already knew that her house had been built that year as a home for Thomas Grant, a statistical consultant advising the politicians and military men intent on making Florida a state. Apparently he’d been talented enough with numbers to parlay his own earnings into a small fortune. The home had originally been built to accommodate his wife and seven children, and he’d owned it for thirty years, after which it had been sold to the MacTavish family. It had remained in their possession through the Civil War, after which it had been abandoned when Cato MacTavish had suddenly left the state.
Sarah had always known the basic facts and figures that went with the house, and she’d heard the rumors that it was haunted in the way all old places were supposedly haunted. There was a rumor that Cato’s father had a woman working for him who was the child of a Haitian—descendent of refugees from the Haitian revolution—and an Indian, though no one knew exactly what tribe. There was a white man somewhere in her genetic background, as well—a plantation owner or an overseer. She had been the “spell queen” of the area, selling love potions and other such supposed magic.
There were stories, too, that women had died and disappeared during those years, and that Cato MacTavish had killed his wife, or possibly his fiancée, and that he had abandoned the property rather than face justice and the hangman.
What she knew for a fact was that the MacTavish family had used the house as a mortuary at the beginning of the Civil War, and that it had been abandoned after the war, then bought for back taxes by the Brennan family—who had used the house as an address both before and after the sale, which was very strange, unless it was an error in the record keeping. They had used it as a mortuary again, and it had remained in the family until it had been more or less abandoned once more, before finally being then purchased by Mrs. Emily Douglas, who had eventually sold it to Sarah.
What she wanted to do was hunt down the truth behind the rumors, to see what was smoke and what was fire. She knew how to dig through old records—she had a master’s degree, after all—and the historical library was very good, so she didn’t expect to have too much trouble.
The first thing she came across were a number of blueprints showing the changes that had taken place in the house over the years. She was immediately grateful to the person who had put the kitchen in at the turn of century—one of the Brennan clan—and even more grateful that the house had been built from the start with full plumbing and bathrooms. Electricity had gone in during 1904.
None of that seemed to have anything to do with the bones in the walls, other than the fact that she discovered that nothing had been done to the walls in the library where the corpses had been found—not on record, at least—since 1857, when some cosmetic work had been done after a fire had damaged the plaster. Of course, then as now, people had often done whatever they wanted to inside a house, despite codes and regulations. These days St. Augustine had a very strict historical preservation policy, but even so, and even by those who honored it when it came to the exterior of their houses, inside work was generally at the discretion of the owner.
The guilty mortician must have been one of the MacTavishes or the Brennans, since it was highly unlikely that an outsider could have sauntered in with a string of bodies and walled them up. Now all she had to do was find the criminal in question.