My father was angry; furious. But Sergeant Lee was a powerful man. Watching them together, I felt ill. It was as if they knew things about each other that created a strange bond between them. They weren’t friends, but there was a connection binding them. I waited in silence as they picked up the body, still wrapped in the tarp, and carried it to the back door. Still I didn’t move. I didn’t dare.

I stayed in the bushes.

I stayed there for a very long time.

At last, having no true concept of how much time had gone by, I slipped back into the house, only to find that she was there. Martha Tyler.

Martha always wore a bandana wrapped around her head as if it were a crown and she some kind of queen. One drop of African blood made a man or woman a slave, and Martha could have been a slave. But she wasn’t, even though she came to us from the South and made no complaint when we brought her back there. I think she had been a slave, though, that she killed her master and escaped. But perhaps I only think that because I hate her. The girls in town who giggle and come to her for love potions don’t know her the way I know her. They don’t see her when she sits in front of a mirror, looking at her reflection. They don’t hear her voice when she speaks to me, disdaining me.

They have never seen anything like the malicious evil in her eyes when I entered the house that night.

“Ah, little girl, little girl. Poor little ugly girl.” She came to me and took me by the ear, hurting me, but when I would have cried out, she brought a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she warned me, but she didn’t let go. “Where have you been, little girl? You should not be nosy. Such bad things can happen to nosy little girls. There are panthers out there. And bears and alligators and snakes. Predators that own the night. They love to feed upon little girls, for no meat is so sweet as girl-flesh.”

“Let me go,” I pleaded, but I didn’t cry out for my father. I knew he wouldn’t have helped me. He had never loved me, because I wasn’t a beautiful child.

He would have helped her feed me to the creatures of the night, the snakes and alligators and panthers.

She released me, laughing. “You had better forget all that you’ve seen and heard, or else…” She made a hissing sound through her teeth and slashed a line across her throat with her finger. “Nosy little girls go to feed the creatures in the woods, and in the end, they are consumed by the worms.”

I raced past her, terrified.

I prayed for the day that she and my father might die. I knew I would go to hell for such a cruel thought, but I could not help it.

For I would prefer hell to this evil house, and the company of my father and Martha Tyler.

“That poor girl,” Sarah found herself saying aloud. She quickly turned the page, but it was blank. Mystified, she kept looking through the journal.

The girl had never written in it again.

She stood up, stretching. Every muscle in her body hurt; without even noticing, she had huddled into a tight, defensive ball while reading. She didn’t feel the chill anymore, though. Instead she felt angry that a father could be so cruel to his daughter and allow his housekeeper to be even worse. And yet, if perhaps that father had been a serial killer, as the historical record seemed to imply, perhaps she had been lucky simply to have survived.

And yet, had she survived? Those blank pages might be telling.

Vicky came into the room. “Well?”

“Fascinating—and awful. I think you have to read this yourself. It looks like there was a serial killer in the city during the Civil War.”

“So the local hero was a killer?” Vicky asked. “Cato MacTavish was a war hero, but his fiancée did disappear mysteriously, and he was the last person known to have seen her. And there were other girls who went missing, too. In fact, there were rumors about Cato at the time, so it’s no wonder he left town when he did.”

“I don’t think Cato MacTavish was the killer,” Sarah told Vicky. “The timeline doesn’t make sense, because girls kept disappearing while he was away fighting, and after he abandoned the house and disappeared. Oh, people said he was still around. But what—living in trees? You have to read the journal. Brennan’s daughter says some pretty wild stuff about her father and a Sergeant Lee who was sheriff here during the war.”

“Maybe you could do an article on it, Sarah. You have a master’s in history, and you own the house the Brennans owned back then.”

“Good idea. The whole thing is terrifying but fascinating.”

“Cool,” Vicky said, reaching for the journal. “Sorry, but I have to lock up now.”

“No problem. Thanks, Vicky.”

She had intended to head straight for Hunky Harry’s when she finished at the library, but for some reason she found herself walking home first and staring up at her house.

So little had changed. The bushes where Nellie Brennan had hidden were still there. The driveway was much as it would have been all those years ago.

And that driveway was empty now, which meant no one was inside. It was just after five, though, so that didn’t mean everyone was done and she could get started on her renovations again. She hesitated, then let herself into the carriage house and called Tim Jamison, as she’d promised Gary she would.

When he picked up, Tim sounded distracted. The police and M.E. were finished, he said, and there was no evidence of any more bodies, but she needed to call the professor from the university to make sure he was done, too. He gave her a number.

She called Dr. Manning, who was friendly and appreciative, expressing his gratitude that she had let the university handle the find. He assured her that they were currently looking into all the documents in the university collection, trying to solve the riddle of who had been responsible for walling up the bodies. As far as he was concerned, her house was her own again, though he hoped to stay in touch as more information came to light.

She agreed to meet him the following week for lunch, and assured him that the university was more than welcome to come back.

After she got off the phone, she went and stood staring up at the front of her house again.

Houses weren’t evil.

Determinedly, she walked up to the porch, then let herself in. It was her house.

Her dream house.

Inside, she started turning on lights; it wasn’t dark yet, but it was late enough in the afternoon that heavy shadows were starting to fill the place. She decided that she would call Gary Morton in the morning and get him to come back in and resume working. She could get her plans back on track.

She walked through the house and saw that, once again, everything had been left ship-shape. Except, of course, for the gaping hole in the wall. But that was all right. Dry wall was easy. Okay, not for her, maybe, but for Gary, dry wall was a piece of cake.

She went to the kitchen and reached into the refrigerator for a cold can of soda. She looked around the room, curious to see whether she would feel anything. Fear. Discomfort. Anything. She smiled after a minute. It was a house, made up of building materials and the imagination of an architect.

With her soda in hand, she walked up the stairs to her bedroom.

She was moving back in tonight. Taking possession again. This was her house. And everything would be okay, because…

Caleb would be staying there with her. At least, she was pretty sure he would be.

She jumped when she heard something, a bang from downstairs. She tensed, her heart thundering. What the hell?

Had the sound come from inside the house—or outside?

Another question: had she remembered to lock the door?

She looked around for her purse—and her cell phone—then realized she’d left them in the kitchen. She had a landline from the cable company, but she hadn’t bothered to have them run it into her bedroom.