“It never hurts to be careful,” Sarah said.
“And,” Caroline added, a smile teasing her lips, “you want to be alone with your precious…mortuary.”
“It’s not a mortuary anymore, and it’s not likely I’ll be alone,” Sarah told her. “I just want to see what’s up. You go on, and I’ll be right there.”
“You’ll bail on us,” Caroline said.
“I won’t. I swear,” Sarah promised.
Oddly enough, Sarah found herself hoping that the people prowling her house would be done for the day and really, they should be. After all, what needed to be done had mostly been done the night before. They had brought in Floby, they had taken a thousand pictures of the bones in situ, and they had used special equipment to check the rest of the walls to see if they, too, were hiding something, so they wouldn’t have to tear her entire house apart.
“Okay, okay. I’ll walk over with Renee and Barry, swear,” Caroline said.
“Is Will going to be there?” Sarah asked.
Caroline blushed, nodding in answer to the question.
“I feel like kind of a fifth wheel,” Sarah said.
“Never. So don’t you dare bail,” Caroline told her.
“I won’t, I won’t, Scout’s honor,” Sarah said.
“As if you were ever a Scout,” Caroline countered.
“If I had been a Scout, I’d have had tons of honor badges. I’ll be there, promise.”
Sarah managed to get out before Renee or Barry could give her an argument and hurried toward her house, half-afraid that strangers were going to stop her on the street to ask about the bones.
But no one did.
She reached the house and was pleased to see that no one was there. Not a car remained. She hurried up the steps to the porch, fitted her key in the lock, turned it and entered.
The house greeted her with an eerie silence.
“Hello? Anyone here?” she called, even though she already knew everyone was gone. Her voice sounded far too soft and tentative, she thought, so she cleared her voice and called out again. “Hello? Is anyone here?”
Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. She walked through to the back and saw that the library was indeed empty.
Tentatively, she moved forward and looked inside the walls, then breathed a sigh of relief. No bones. They had been removed.
She walked on into the kitchen. On the counter there was a note from Floby, who said he’d been there all day, working with the different experts and agencies. He also said they would probably be in and out over the next few days, just to make completely certain that she wouldn’t be living with more remains.
She smiled. Floby was a sweetie, a charming old guy, despite holding a job many people considered to be morbid. But he simply saw himself as an investigator, discovering clues in the bodies of the deceased, just as detectives sought them on the streets.
She walked back down the hallway toward the front door and froze. The door was open, and an old man was standing there.
He was so thin he was practically skeletal.
Just like the bones in the walls.
Was he real?
He walked closer to her. She could see that his cheeks were hollow. There were only a few silver tufts of hair on his head, and his nose looked like a narrow perch.
To her astonishment, she opened her mouth but no sound emerged.
What on earth was going on? Could he actually be a ghost? But she didn’t believe in ghosts.
Did she?
5
The man had to be real.
He also had to be ninety if he was a day.
“Young lady,” he said, taking another step forward, supporting himself with a cane and moving slowly, yet with purpose. “Young lady, I am Terrence Griffin the Third. How do you do?”
He was real, she thought in silent gratitude, and he couldn’t possibly offer her any harm. A breeze would blow him over.
“Hello,” she managed to respond, her voice sounding like a croak. She was angry with herself. She’d left the door open. The discovery of the bones in her walls was bound to bring out the sightseers, and it was likely that a serial killer was at work in the city, and like an idiot, she had left the door open.
“I’ve come to talk to you,” he said. His voice was dry and low, like the rustle of leaves.
“Okay,” she said.
“Because you have to know the truth about your house. It’s evil.”
“A house can’t be evil,” she said, staring firmly at him.
“Think whatever you want, but people do evil here because evil was done here before,” he told her gravely.
She didn’t know what to do. He was so old and looked so frail that she didn’t want to upset him, but his intensity and the craziness of his words were disturbing. She fought the urge to scream, push him aside and rush out of the house, and considered calling the police.
In the end she just kept standing there, still staring at him.