“Not yet. I will.” Caleb hesitated. “There’s some mummified tissue on this body. I’m hoping you can figure out if there were any drugs—like the black drink—in her system when she died…if you can figure out how she died, before we get the zoo back in.
“I think there’s some kind of connection between what went on back then and what’s going on now, and I can’t wait for the historians and the anthropologists to do whatever it is they do. I need to know now.” He hesitated. “And I also want you to do a test for me—on the side, without telling anyone.”
“Oh?”
“A DNA test.”
“I’ll need someone to compare her DNA to.”
“You have someone. Me.”
Will sat in the kitchen, shaking his head over a cup of coffee, not looking at Sarah. She had brought him up-to-date on all the reading she had done, and the details of Caleb’s investigation.
“The man’s a corpse magnet,” he said.
“Stop it! He’s an investigator, Will—corpses are a part of his work,” Sarah said and stood up, suddenly impatient. She was glad that her cousin was with her. Not that she was afraid to be alone, she told herself, but things had been so strange lately that she was glad of the company. With nothing to worry about on the safety front, she was free to focus on the one thing that seemed impossible to believe and yet had to be true.
She’d thought about it a lot, and as crazy as it seemed, as much as it went against the grain of everything she’d always believed, she’d come to the conclusion that Cato MacTavish was a ghost. He might have been buried in Virginia, but he was here now, because girls were disappearing again, and he wanted it to stop. He didn’t want to see a repeat of what had happened before.
“This place is creepy, Sarah,” Will was saying now. “I mean, sure, it could be a beautiful bed-and-breakfast. For ghouls,” he said. “And I don’t like just how much you seem to be getting involved in everything that’s going on. Okay, the bones in your house weren’t your fault. But since Mr. Corpse Magnet is trying to find whoever killed that woman on the beach—and maybe those other two girls, as well—I don’t think you should be hanging around with him so much. I mean, I like him, I honestly do. But I’m worried sick about you. What if he finds out something…and people decide you know it, too? You could be in danger, Sarah.”
“Stop it,” she warned him. “You’re with me now, right? So I’m safe.”
He groaned and leaned his head on the table. “It’s barely eight in the morning, and I don’t have to work until this afternoon.”
“Quit whining.”
“I’m tired.”
“I’m sorry.” Then she brightened and said, “Let’s go pay a social call.”
He stared at her as if she had lost her mind.
“I want to see Mr. Griffin.”
“Why?”
“His daughter disappeared—in or around this house.”
“Do you think she’s the corpse in the attic? And why the hell haven’t you called the cops yet?”
“No, she isn’t the corpse in the attic.”
“How do you know?”
“The clothing is Victorian, certainly not from the 1920s. And we haven’t called anyone in yet because we want to hold off—just a bit—on causing another frenzy. Please, Will, you have to pay attention to me and help me out with this. Do it my way. Caleb is going to bring Floby here to see the body, and I want to talk to Mr. Griffin.”
“What about Caleb? Shouldn’t you wait ’til he gets here?”
“I’ll just send him a text message, in case he gets back before we do. We’re just going around the corner.”
“All right,” Will said with a sigh. “Let’s go.”
Floby sat in the car, staring straight ahead. “You certainly do have a knack for finding bodies.”
Caleb groaned aloud. “We were diving—hoping to find a body—when I found the guy in his car. Wrong body, but a mystery solved.” He fell silent for a moment. They had assumed that his first discovery had nothing to do with the missing girls. Had they been wrong?
Frederick J. Russell, banker. That was who he’d turned out to be.
“Floby, you finished the autopsy on Frederick Russell, right?” he asked.
“Of course.”
“And what did you find?”
“He drowned.”
“Had he been drinking?”
“No.”
“So how did he wind up in the water?”
“I assume he was speeding.”
“Did he have a lot of speeding tickets?”
“How should I know? I’m the M.E., not a traffic cop,” Floby said. “I give the police my findings, and they take it from there.” Floby looked at him. “You can’t think Russell was involved with the missing girls, do you? At the very least, the man was in the water before Winona Hart disappeared.”