Read Unhallowed Ground for Free Online

your hunch is, check it out. Those are often the signs that will take you where you need to go.”
    “Right. I’ll keep in contact. Though I assume you’re getting information from the police faster than I am.”
    “I’ll keep you up-to-date on things.”
    “Thanks. And likewise.”
    Caleb hung up.
    He stood and stretched, then wandered to the door.
    He had chosen a bed-and-breakfast on Avila Street not for its charm—though it certainly offered enough—but because he could get a room on the ground floor with a private entrance. His doorway was on the side of the building, and a bougainvillea-shaded walk led straight out to the street at the rear of the rambling old Victorian.
    Old Town St. Augustine was pretty much an easily navigated rectangle. On the coast, the massive Fort Marion, the old Spanish Castillo de San Marcos, served as the city’s massive landmark, and the town had grown around it in the remaining three directions. Now the bay was lined with restaurants, hotels, shops and B&Bs.Beyond that main stretch were all kinds of smaller but interesting tourist attractions: the oldest house, the oldest schoolhouse, the oldest pharmacy—this was a city that prided itself on being old, and it was a historical treasure trove. Interspersed with the tourist attractions were more B&Bs, one-of-a-kind shops and even a number of private residences. At night, the backstreets were quiet, except when the sightseeing carriages and ghost tours went by.
    With St. Augustine’s notoriety as the oldest continually inhabited European city in the United States—with sixty years on Jamestown—naturally it was rumored to harbor a lot of ghosts.
    As he stood on the sidewalk, feeling the Atlantic breeze that cooled the city year-round, he was startled as one police car went by, and then another, quickly followed by a third.
    They were turning down St. George Street.
    Caleb followed.
     
    “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 thepolice, 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 guyin Chicago