Unhallowed Ground by Heather Graham Read Free Book Online Page B

of his “clients.” Tim Jamison hadn’t seemed surprised to see him standing on the sidewalk, but then again, a couple dozen people had been standing there. Still, he was glad when the police lieutenant asked him in. Maybe the fact that he had found a corpse in the water earlier that day somehow made him worthy.
    Jamison had just finished clearing everyone unofficial out of the room where the skeletons had been found.
    “Is this something, or what?” the cop was saying now. “I remember the newspapers being filled with something similar just a few years ago—the mortician comforting the grieving relatives, then dumping the bodies of the deceased and selling the coffins again.Coffins aren’t cheap. Even cheap coffins aren’t cheap, and the satin-lined, down-stuffed ones will really cost you. There’s lot of money to be made selling those suckers over and over again. I guess there have always been people willing to make an extra buck or two off the dead, no matter how they do it.”
    Caleb looked around the library. Most of the plaster had been torn out, revealing piles of bones between the studs. Some of the bones were still attached to each other by bits of mummified sinew and tendon, preserved inside their plaster prison.
    It was a gruesome sight, even for him. In some cases shreds of clothing remained. One of the corpses was wearing the remnants of a Civil War-era hat. It looked as if they had stumbled on a particularly bizarre scenario for a haunted house. Someone might easily think the remains were the result of an exhibit designer’s mad imagination.
    “Have you ever seen anything like it?” Jamison asked. “Hell, I’m a homicide cop. I’ve worked in Jacksonville, Miami and Houston—tough towns, all of them—and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
    The lieutenant shook his head, staring at the remnants of what had once been living, breathing human beings.
    A small man was standing close to the wall, the epitome of the absent-minded professor with his glasses and tufts of wild gray hair, peering closely at the remains, a penlight in his hand. “You know, embalming started becoming popular after the war—the Civil War. They had to try to get those dead boys back hometo their mamas and sweethearts. But it really came into vogue for most Americans because of Abraham Lincoln. When he died, his widow wanted him buried back in Illinois, so they held a public viewing as the body traveled cross-country by train, so they had to keep Abe looking good for the mourners. He was embalmed by injecting fluids through the veins, but I think these poor souls were embalmed in the much less efficient fashion of the day, such as disemboweling a corpse and stuffing it with charcoal, or perhaps just immersing the body in alcohol. I imagine they were given proper viewings to satisfy the families, and then they were walled up. You can see here—” he pointed out different shades of plaster that had been chipped from the walls “—that they were put in at different times. Just guessing from the look of the corpses, I’d say this was all done within a ten-year period. See how the bones have darkened just a bit more? That ten-year span was a very long time ago. Fascinating, the way some of the corpses have mummified. My office will retrieve the remains in the morning. Legally, we could arrange removal right now, but I want to bring in specialists to make sure everything is handled correctly. This is quite the find.”
    The man finally turned from his macabre monologue, saw Caleb and sized him up. He pocketed his penlight and offered him a hand. “How do you do? You’re that out-of-towner who found that fellow who’s been missing a year, aren’t you? I did his autopsy this afternoon. I’m the M.E. here in town, Florence Benson—my parents were fans of the Ziegfeld follies,I’m afraid—so they call me Doc Benson or Floby around here. Nice to meet you. You solved a sad mystery today.”
    “Pleasure to meet you, Doc