Ghost Memories by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page A

be scared silly? I’m going to see ghosts?”
    â€œGhosts will seldom hurt you. Living people, bad people, criminals, rapists, murderers and thieves—they will hurt you,” Bartholomew said sternly.
    â€œJust one more minute… We’ll check out the downstairs, and I’ll call the cops. Or Liam. Liam is a cop. All right? I just don’t want to cry wolf.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI don’t want to create an alarm when there’s no need. Maybe Liam was here earlier and left the light on.”
    â€œAnd the door open?” Bartholomew said doubtfully.
    Katie shrugged.
    She walked to the left, where the tour began once visitors reached the first floor. The first room offered one of Key West’s most dramatic tales—the doll story. As a little boy, Robert Eugene Otto had been given a very creepy doll, supposedly cursed by an angry family servant who knew something about voodoo. Robert Eugene Otto became obsessed with the doll, even naming it Robert, after himself. Robert the Doll moved about the house and played pranks. In later years he drove the real Robert’s wife quite crazy.
    From the somewhat psychotic, the history in the museum became sad and grimly real with a memorial to the sailors who had died aboard the battleship Maine when it had exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898. The museum’s exhibit showed sailors working on the ship. From there, curtains segued into an area where dancers moved about at the Silver Slipper. World War I came and went. Prohibition arrived, and bootleg alcohol made its way in an easy flow from Havana to Key West.
    A pathway through the pantry in back led around to the other side of the house. It was dark, with little light from the glow in the foyer seeping through. Papa Hemingway made another appearance as 1931 rolled in and Pauline’s uncle bought them the house on Whitehead Street as a wedding present.
    Katie knew what she was coming up to—the exhibit on Count von Cosel and Elena de Hoyos. Just a small piece of the museum, really, in a curtained sector through an archway. It had always been a popular exhibit. Until, of course, the re-created figure of poor Elena had been replaced by the strangled body of a young Conch woman. The beginning of the end.
    People liked the bizarre, the romance and even the tragedy of history, but with this event fear had suddenly come too close. It was one thing to be eccentric in the Keys.
    Real violence was not welcome.
    There was more, she thought, so much more, to the museum. It was sad, really, that the story got so much attention.
    There was fun history. Sloppy Joe moving his entire bar across the street in the middle of the night, angry over a hike in his rent. Tennessee Williams, working away at La Concha Hotel, penning the words of his play A Streetcar Named Desire. Another war, soldiers and sailors, the roadblocks that caused Key West to secede and become, if only for hours, the Conch Republic.
    The rest of history paled beside the story of von Cosel and Elena. So it had always been.
    Morbid curiosity. Had he really slept with the corpse? Ooh, Lord, disgusting! How?
    Katie knew the story, of course. She’d heard it all her life. She’d retold it at college a dozen times, with friends denying the truth of it until they looked it up on the Internet. It was tragic, it was sad, it was sick, but it always drew people.
    As it had tonight. She put her hand out to draw back the curtain leading to the exhibit.
    â€œDon’t, Katie, don’t!” Bartholomew whispered.
    She closed her eyes for a moment.
    She was suddenly terrified that she would draw back the curtain—and stumble upon a corpse herself.
    And yet…
    She had to draw back the curtain.
    She did so, and screamed.

New York Times bestselling author Heather Graham has written more than a hundred novels, many of which have been featured by the Doubleday Book Club and the Literary Guild. An avid scuba diver, ballroom