Unhallowed Ground

Praise for

HEATHER GRAHAM

“Mystery, sex, paranormal events. What’s not to love?”

—Kirkus Reviews on The Death Dealer

“[A] sinister tale sure to appeal to fans across multiple genre lines.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Death Dealer

“Heather Graham will keep you in suspense until the very end.”

—Literary Times

“[A] solid trilogy opener…Dream messages and premonitions, ghostly sightings, capable detective work and fascinating characters blend to make a satisfying chiller.”

—Publishers Weekly on Deadly Night

“There are good reasons for Graham’s steady standing as a best-selling author. Here her perfect pacing keeps readers riveted as they learn fascinating tidbits of New Orleans history. The paranormal elements are integral to the unrelentingly suspenseful plot, the characters are likable, the romance convincing, and, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Graham’s atmospheric depiction of a lost city is especially poignant.”

—Booklist on Ghost Walk

“Graham peoples her novel with genuine, endearing characters.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Séance

“An incredible storyteller.”

—Los Angeles Daily News

Heather Graham

Unhallowed Ground

To the city of St. Augustine, and especially to Derek and Pablo-the-cat and our road trip.

To the carriage and tour companies—and everyone who’s fascinated by the unique legends of our nation’s oldest European-founded city.

It’s a remarkable place to visit.

Thanks, also, to the Inn on Charlotte, Victoria House, and Casa de Suenos (where they welcomed Pablo as well as the rest of us!)

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Prologue

Then, during the War of Northern Aggression

St. Augustine, in northern Florida, was beautiful, especially by night. It was the image of everything graceful and lovely in the Deep South and, when seen by the gentle glow of the moon, as serene a place as one might ever hope to see. Spanish moss dripped from old oaks like the sweep of a gentle lace blanket, and a low ground fog swirled in a faint breeze that seemed to carry with it the whisper of a moan. The silver mist curled around the mournful beauty of the cemetery, caressing the cheeks of stone angels and cherubs standing atop newly dug graves, as well as those that had been there for centuries.

The moon that night had a haze promising rain the following day. The misty halo around the full orb cast an eerie glow over the earth, turning the cemetery into a magical vision with its praying virgins, weeping guardians and majestic display of marble statuary, all bathed in the pale and eerie light.

Two women came with a lantern, one with purpose, and one carefully picking her way around the gravestones and funerary art.

“This way,” Martha Tyler said, lifting her lantern higher.

“How much farther?” Susan Madison asked nervously as the moon slipped behind a cloud and the shadows deepened.

Martha paused to stare back at her, contempt in her eyes. “If you are afraid, there is no reason to go any farther at all.”

Well, of course, I’m afraid, Susan longed to shout. She hadn’t been afraid before; it had all seemed like a lark, and why not? Life was a mess right now, and maybe Martha did have some kind of wonderful power to make everything better.

But now she was afraid. The beauty was gone from the night.

Only death seemed to remain.

Yes, she was afraid. She was walking in a shadowy graveyard by night, hearing nothing but the rustle of the leaves and the moan of the wind in the branches, and she was a fool ever to have thought that this would be an adventure.

She had convinced herself that she had to play this game, had to skirt the edge of social and moral insanity. The news in her life was always terrible, all about the war, death, advancing armies, defeats.

There was no guarantee that Thomas Smithfield would be alive in a matter of months, much less have anything left of his home, finances or wits. A love ritual might well be useless.

“We’re here now, anyway,” Martha said.

“We’re here? Where is here?” Susan demanded, looking around. They had passed the MacTavish mausoleum, the giant sculpted dogs that guarded the eighteenth-century entrance to the section containing the graves of children, and even the oldest and most chipped and broken stones in the cemetery. They were standing by a small broken wall, where trees grew tall and broad, breaking through the stones of the dead, and the moss dripped almost to the ground. The earth itself didn’t seem as if it belonged in any place created by man at all. It was more like a pit of churned dirt and broken pottery.

“Right here,” Martha said, pointing. Her voice dropped to a whisper, so soft that Susan could barely hear it. “We’re outside hallowed ground here. This wall—or what’s left of it—marks the boundary beyond which they buried the indigents and the…the unhallowed.”

Susan felt a sudden chill. It was summer, and even the nights could be sweltering here in the humid lowlands, with only the occasional breeze off the ocean to alleviate the wet heat. But tonight she was suddenly cold with a bone-deep sensation that came from far more than just the temperature.

Of course she was cold, she told herself. Martha was frightening her. That whisper she was using, the cemetery itself, bathed once again in the unearthly glow of shimmering moonlight filtered through haze and fog.

“You still have it? You didn’t drop the sacrifice?”

Susan told herself that the ominous tone was all part of Martha’s act, but even so, she shuddered as she reassured herself that she still had the little vial of blood, wrapped so tightly in her hand that she had practically forgotten she was carrying it.

“Yes.”

“You killed the creature yourself?” Martha asked.

“Yes.”

Martha approved her answer with a solemn nod as she took the vial of blood from her. “Now the black drink.”

Martha held up a small bottle filled with an inky liquid.

Susan stared at her.

“It’s herbs, child, just herbs. But they create magic.”

Susan wanted to refuse.

What was the matter with her? she wondered. All her friends had gone to Martha for potions and palm readings. Martha did have a talent for knowing what was going to happen. Not only could she foretell the future, but sometimes she could also actually make things happen. And always she was an amazing show-woman.

This was an adventure, Susan told herself, and maybe—just maybe—the potion would work.

Martha was standing in front of her, smiling, looking as gentle as a kitten, as well-meaning as a doting grandmother. She pressed the small bottle into Susan’s hand and helped her lift it to her lips. The concoction was sweet, not bad tasting, but it carried an aftermath of fire that sent slivers of steel running through her blood.

Suddenly crimson darkness descended, making a stygian pit of the cemetery, a fiery globe of the moon.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” Susan said. Her voice sounded like a whimper, appalling her. “I’m sorry, I just want to leave.”

Martha laughed, but the sound was husky and taunting, frightening her further. “Such a terrified little girl. We’re here now, you’ve had the black drink, the worst is over. It’s time.”

The darkness lifted, and once again Susan found herself standing in the moonlight in the old cemetery she had walked through dozens of times before. There was nothing dark or terrifying or eerie about it; it was just a field of the dead.

And still, she wished she had never come.

But she didn’t want to run away and leave Martha to tell the tale of her cowardice. It would be mortifying if everyone knew what a silly coward she had been. The things that were said about her already were bad enough.

But what were her choices.

Stay and dig up a grave? Or run out of the cemetery alone? Tamper with the dead, or flee through a haunted world of shadow and decomposition, with no companion other than her own thundering heart?

“In seconds, my pet, you will be on the road to all that your heart desires. A passion and a tempest unlike anything even you have imagined. You came to me for help. You wanted magic. You’ve come this far, don’t stop now. Not before you secure all that you hope for on behalf of your babe and for your own life. It’s time,” Martha said. She sprinkled the blood across the disturbed earth of an antique grave, then lifted her arms to the night sky, the very image of a Druid priestess in a field of ancient stones or one of the voodoo queens of Jamaica, from where she had come long ago. She was not a colored woman, but neither was she white. She had no definitive color, really. She was a pasty shade, like the moon behind the haze, and her eyes were a strange and watery blue.

She didn’t give Susan a chance to respond. She began to chant, her face lifted toward the sky, her arms still upraised. The words were unintelligible, a mix of English, French, Spanish and something more ancient. As Susan watched her, she felt herself becoming almost hypnotized by the magic lilt of the words. It was as if her limbs grew leaden, and any desire to be anywhere else left her. The tombstones and vaults, cherubs and angels, even the great guardian dogs, began to appear as natural a setting as the cozy parlor of her home, welcoming her.

The low-lying fog, caught in the amber glow of the moon, seemed to dance around her, wrapping her in an exciting warmth, fanning an ember deep inside her. She watched, she waited, she heard the music of the words and felt strength in the growing heaviness of her form. When she could move, she told herself, she would do so with passion and vitality. She would be vibrant and alive, filled with magic herself.

But even as the sense of well-being warmed her like a cup of cocoa on a cold night, something else was growing, as well. An inner voice warning her that she needed to shake off the leaden sensation. That she needed to run.

Because the ground was moving, erupting as if from a force deep inside, shifting the old stones that lay askew nearby. A shower of dust rose as something solid and large emerged from the ground, like a tree growing at a fantastic rate. Particles of dirt and dust and marble were caught in the faint glow of the tainted moon, gleaming like the snowflakes she had read about in books.

That inner voice screamed at her to run, but it was too late.

She saw what had risen, and a scream rose in her throat, but she couldn’t move, and no sound issued from her lips. She could still see Martha, standing there now with a satisfied smile, and she knew that she was no more to the woman than a rung in a ladder, a stepping stone toward power over the darkness. She saw it all so clearly now.

And then she saw what was rising from the ground.

Saw that all Martha’s promises had been no more than a ruse to get her there.

The horror approached her, malignant, evil, and she was paralyzed. She knew that whatever had been in the black drink was paralyzing her, saw everything so clearly now that it was too late—oh, God, far too late—to know and see and understand, to know that this had nothing to do with wonder and fantasy and magic.

She saw and felt the essence of evil, heard the rasp of its fetid breath, smelled flesh and blood and bone and the pungence of the earth as her fate stepped closer and closer still, drawing pleasure from her terror and her newfound knowledge…

She had not come to make a sacrifice.

She had come to be the sacrifice.

1

Now

The area near the nature preserve was overgrown. Salt flats and marsh met Matanzas Bay and the Intra-coastal, and the water went from shallow to deep, from sloping sand to a sudden drop-off leading to a misty and strange world of fish, tangled plant growth and, despite the best efforts of local and federal lawmakers, de facto garbage dumps.

Caleb Anderson had been drawn to a shopping cart down at about twenty feet, then on to a tire rim beneath a tangle of seaweed at thirty-five, but neither one turned out to be hiding what they were looking for.

The problem was, the authorities were searching blindly. A girl named Winona Hart had disappeared. She had been at a party, but none of her underage drunken friends—half of them potheads to boot—seemed to know when she had left, where she had gone, or with whom.

He looked at his compass, then up through the filter of light to the cable from the police cruiser serving as their dive boat. In his mind, if anything was going to be found, it was going to be closer to the shore. Unless, of course, she’d been kidnapped by a boater and dumped somewhere beyond the bay and out in the Atlantic. If that was the case, their chances of finding her were almost nonexistent. The ocean was huge. True, if caught in a current or an undertow, a body might wash up on land. And if they came up with a suspect who regularly followed a certain route, even a weighted body might somehow be discovered.

But at the moment they were searching blindly. Still, he hadn’t wanted to miss the opportunity to be in on the search, not when he had promised he would do everything humanly possible to find Jennie Lawson. Admittedly, this grim attempt was not to find Jennie but a local teen who had now been missing for nearly forty-eight hours, a case that might or might not be connected to Jennie’s. No one knew if Jennie Lawson had actually made it to the beach in St. Augustine, her intended destination. They only knew that she had landed in Jacksonville, gotten off the plane and picked up a rental car. Neither she nor the car had been seen since.

He didn’t have much hope of finding Jennie alive. Her mother had told him that she knew Jennie was gone, because her daughter had come to her in a dream the night before her disappearance was reported and said goodbye. Caleb wasn’t sure what to believe, because Mr. Lawson seemed to think that Mrs. Lawson had lost her mind when their daughter had disappeared, and he had, in fact, made a motion behind his wife’s back to indicate as much.

Caleb had heard of stranger things than ghostly midnight visits, however, so he had simply smiled and vowed to Jennie’s mother that he would do everything he could to find out the truth, even if he couldn’t return her daughter to her. That had comforted her. Closure was something people needed. Perhaps it was too painful to live with eternal hope.

So Caleb was also looking for Jennie, or any sign of her, even if he was officially on the trail of another young woman for whom many were still holding out hope. But this dive was important for other reasons, too; it was giving him a chance to get to know the local authorities and the local expert on the surrounding waters.

As he moved toward the marshy shore, he couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of him, but he was accustomed to such conditions. His dive light illuminated the surrounding area as he searched, and he was methodical in covering his assigned section of the bay. He had seen the grid, and he meant to search his assigned area thoroughly, leaving no possibility that anything had been overlooked. As an out-of-stater, he was the odd man out here. If he did anything to make the other men—and the one woman—on the local forensic dive team resent his presence, he would end up ostracized, and that would be a real problem in his search for Jennie. For that reason, getting along with the police lieutenant in charge of the case, Tim Jamison, and Will Perkins, the dive master, was crucial. Caleb was there mainly as a courtesy. He worked for a private agency, Harrison Investigations. The cases they took generally had an unusual twist, something inexplicable, even supernatural, that required their very specific professional services, but in this instance it was Adam Harrison’s personal friendship with Jennie Lawson’s father that had brought Caleb here.

He noted a glitter of light, just this side of the drop-off. He focused his dive light, and headed toward the glint, knowing full well that it might be just another shopping basket.

But as he neared the object in the water, he knew that this was no shopping cart.

It was far too large, for one thing. The full size of it became clear as he drew closer. It was an automobile.

All too often, people intentionally discarded cars in the water. Sometimes they were just junkers and nothing more.

Sometimes they held human remains.

And as he approached the Chevy mired in the mucky, seaweed-laden sand, he saw that this car was not empty. A solid kick with his flippers brought him to the driver-side window.

A face stared out at him, the mouth widened in a giant O, as if in a desperate quest for breath.

The eyes…

Did not exist. Already, the creatures of the deep had started to feed.

“Maybe Osceola was a hero, but they still tricked him and caught him and cut his head off. They chopped it right off!” a young boy said. He was about ten, cute and normal-looking in a T-shirt that had clearly just been purchased at the local alligator farm, jeans and sneakers. But he spoke with a relish that unsettled Sarah McKinley. Caroline Roth, seated at the computer and running the audiovisual end of the Heritage House presentation, let out a soft laugh, stared at Sarah, then grinned wickedly and shrugged.

“No,” Sarah said firmly, and smoothed down the skirt of her period outfit. She was a good storyteller and knew how to handle a large—and diverse—group like the one in the lecture hall that day, which was a mix of kids and adults, tourists and locals, couples, groups and singles. They were into the tail end of summer, so she was getting classes from schools that started early and teachers from schools that started late. There was a Harley event down in Daytona that week, so she was getting a lot of bikers, too.

One man in the crowd, though, seemed to stand out. He was tall, but not inordinately so, maybe six-three. He was dressed as casually as the next tourist in blue jeans and a polo shirt, but he didn’t look like the usual tourist. He wore sunglasses throughout her lecture—not an odd thing, lots of people didn’t take them off when they came in. He was built as if he were in the service and worked out heavily on a daily basis, or as if he were an athlete. He was tanned and rugged, the way a man who spent his day sailing might be, tawny-haired and attractive. What was odd about him, though, was that he was alone. He seemed the type who should be with a beautiful woman, one who was as lithe and athletic as he was himself.

“Decapitated!” another kid called out.

Sarah’s attention was drawn back to her lecture. She had been talking about Osceola, the most famous leader of the Seminole people, who had galvanized friend and foe alike when he had struck a knife into a treaty that would have been a death knell for his people. Like so many others, he had been imprisoned at the Castillo de San Marcos, the coquina shell bastion built by the Spanish that was the most imposing architectural feature of the city.

Leave it to a kid to dwell on the most gruesome fact he could think of—not to mention that he had it wrong.

“History records lots of terrible things that were done, but that wasn’t one of them,” she said.

“Hey, I heard he was decapitated, too,” a grown man interrupted.

Sarah took a deep breath. She couldn’t really blame the guy—who had a sunburn identifying him as out-of-state—when even Florida schoolchildren often had the story wrong. “Osceola was a great leader, and respected even by his enemies. The treachery that led to his capture was deplorable, and despite the Indian wars raging across the country at the time, people despised General Jesup for the way he treated Osceola, who came in peace, with his safety guaranteed, and was taken anyway. But he wasn’t decapitated by the U.S. Army. He was held for a while at Fort Marion, originally known as the Castillo de San Marcos, but he died of malaria up at Fort Moultrie, in South Carolina. He was attended by a shaman from his own clan, and an American doctor, a man named Frederick Wheedon, who did have his head removed and embalmed, but only after he was already dead. And,” she said, unable to resist, “legend has it that Dr. Wheedon used the head to punish his children. If they behaved badly, he would leave the head on their bedposts at night. In fact, he bequeathed the head to his son-in-law—just in case his grandchildren misbehaved. His son-in-law passed it on to a man named Valentine Mott, another doctor, who kept it in a pathology museum, but the museum burned down, and the head was lost.”

She had gained the silent stares of everyone in the room, of every age, and she offered them a broad smile. “You can learn a lot about Osceola and Florida’s Native Americans over at Fort Marion, and we have wonderful books on Osceola and the history of the area in our bookstore. Remember, St. Augustine is over four hundred years old.” She grinned at the boy who had first brought up the subject of decapitation. “All kinds of gruesome things have happened here.”

She announced that her speech was over and was given a nice round of applause, and a number of people thanked her as they walked out of the lecture hall. A few lingered to examine the artifacts in the cases that lined the walls, but she noticed that the tall stranger who had drawn her attention wasn’t among them.

Caroline, rising and stretching, started laughing as soon as the last of the four o’clock lecture group walked out of the room. “A few of those kids are going to wake up in the night imagining a head on their bedpost.”

“Yeah?” Sarah asked. “I don’t think that many kids have bedposts anymore.”

“I’m sure lots of them are staying at local B and Bs. And lots of those beds have bedposts,” Caroline reminded her.

“Well, what’s a story without something scary?” Sarah asked, sinking into one of the front row seats. “And I didn’t make anything up.” She looked at Caroline and sighed. “Now you’re going to give me a speech on being nice to tourists and downplaying our more gruesome history, right?”

Caroline shook her head. “No, not today, I’m not.” She frowned suddenly, distracted. “Do you think we know him from somewhere?”

“Him who?” Sarah asked.

Caroline looked at her and laughed again. “Him who was studly and cool. Oh, come on. You couldn’t possibly have missed him.”

“Yeah, I saw him,” Sarah said. Caroline could only be talking about the man she had noted earlier in the crowd. “But what about him?”

“I felt like I knew him, or should know him, from somewhere.”

“He was good-looking—”

Caroline stared at her hard.

“Okay, I admit he looked a little bit familiar, but maybe he’s just so gorgeous he reminds me of a movie star or something.”

Caroline shrugged. “I don’t know, I just had a feeling about him…. It’s like he looks like someone we once knew, only…different. I wonder if he signed in? I’ll go look. And as for you scaring tourists, have some patience with the kids, huh? It’s no wonder they’re sounding a little gruesome. Have you seen this?”

She picked up the local newspaper, which had been lying next to her computer.

“Seen what?” Sarah asked. “I didn’t read the paper today—I left right after I woke up and came here.” She winced. “It’s all that hammering, you know?”