He took another step closer to her. “You must listen. It’s important. You can do something, you can…communicate with them. You need to find out the truth and stop it from happening again.”
She wanted to tell him that whatever had happened here a hundred or more years ago couldn’t happen again now, because whoever had perpetrated the crime was long dead.
“It started during the Civil War,” he told her. “When the house was owned by the MacTavish family.”
He knew his local history, she thought, drawn in despite her best intentions to ignore anything he said.
“Old man MacTavish was ill, and he was against the war, so his heart had been broken when his son Cato went off to fight. Cato was planning to marry Eleanora Stewart after the war and take over the mortuary his father had set up. He and Eleanora were madly in love, but when he was wounded and sent home, he discovered that Eleanora had disappeared right after he’d been back on leave. He had been the last person to see her. His father had died while he was gone, so he was left to run the business alone, with just a housekeeper to take care of him, and a boarder and his daughter to help. Pretty soon young women started disappearing. Only a few bodies were found, but the others were presumed dead. Everything was in an uproar, with the war still being on and all. And pretty soon Cato was being accused of kidnapping and murder. People started putting two and two together, and they figured he must have killed Eleanora, so he had to be responsible for what had happened to those other girls, too. So he left, he just left. Or hid out in the woods, as some speculated. The housekeeper went away, too, or so some said, though others thought she had been lynched. The only ones left in the house were the boarder, a man named Leo Brennan, who bought the place when it came up for taxes, and his daughter. He must have learned the trade from Cato, because he kept it as a mortuary, and eventually his son took over. And then…well, it happened again.”
“I don’t understand, Mr. Griffin. What happened again?” Sarah asked.
“The disappearances. Young women just…disappearing. I know because my own daughter left the house in the summer of 1928, and she never came back. She came here to get together with Louise Brennan and another friend, Susannah, and she and Susannah both disappeared. They were never seen again,” Mr. Griffin said with the sadness of years in his voice.
He had been the father of a teenager, at least, in 1928. How old was he? she wondered.
Once again, the question invaded her mind.
Was he even real?
Yes, he was flesh and blood. She was sure of it.
“The housekeeper…she knew voodoo, the black arts, magic,” he said.
“Mr. Griffin, you said she left right after Cato did,” she reminded him gently.
“The evil remains, it resides inside these walls,” he said.
He was in his dotage, she told herself. He had never gotten over the loss of his daughter. And now, with all the publicity about Winona Hart, he was simply seeing the past reflected in the present.
“I’m very sorry about your daughter,” she offered, not knowing what else to say.
“She’s here, in these walls,” he said. “Like Eleanora, like the others.”
“Mr. Griffin, there’s no one in these walls…anymore. The medical examiner came, and the bones have all been taken away. My house isn’t evil.”
“You’ll feel them. You’ll know. You’ll find out the truth,” he told her.
He was just a sad old man having a hard time, she told herself. Other people, people who weren’t personally involved in any way, were morbidly fascinated by what had happened, but for Mr. Griffin, it was a terrible trip back in time.
“Mr. Griffin, honestly, no one knows for sure what took place in this house, but no one believes it was anything horrible. They think an undertaker was making money by selling coffins, then hiding the bodies in the walls so he could make extra money by reselling their coffins. With the war and then Reconstruction, people were pretty desperate for money,” she said gently.
He pointed a finger at her, and in the lengthening shadows of evening, the effect was eerie enough to make her shiver.
“You’ll find out the truth. You have to. They’ll haunt these rooms until you do. They have no choice, don’t you see? The evil in this house will keep coming back unless you stop it.”
Sarah wanted to do something, to run away screaming or shake the old man and make him see that he was wrong, that her house didn’t have a personality, especially not an evil one. It was just a house.
But she didn’t want to hurt him, not even his feelings. He’d been through enough, losing his daughter, and he was so earnest.
Before she could speak again, or make up her mind what to do, they were interrupted by a voice coming from the porch.
“Mr. Griffin? Oh, dear God. Mr. Griffin, where are you?”
The voice was feminine, and clearly concerned.