“Either she had a child before she died and someone managed to hide the fact and get the child out of the city—or he went on to find a wife when he left St. Augustine,” Caleb said. “You were the one who discovered the connection—what did the records say?”

“They didn’t say anything. There was no mention of a wife, just the reference to his son being named Magnus. And then his son’s family and so on.”

“Where and when did Cato die?”

“In Virginia, in 1901.”

“So why is he back here?” Caleb asked.

“Aha!” Sarah said.

“Stop it. Please. If we tell Jamison that a ghost is leading us around—and I’m not admitting or denying that fact—I guarantee you, he and everyone else will call us crazy,” Caleb said.

They stared at one another for a long moment.

Then she smiled slowly. “You wear dust well,” she assured him.

He grinned and pulled her close, his expression grave as he said, “Thank you for the compliment, but I have to go see Floby and then bring him out here. Let’s get showered and dressed before we do anything else.”

“Sounds like a plan,” she told him.

A few minutes later they stepped into the shower together. Sarah looked at him and said, “You know, our world is going to go crazy again when the media finds out that we’ve discovered another corpse in this house.”

“I know,” he said.

“We might want to spend a little more time…just us, before everything goes to hell,” she said somberly.

He nodded and pulled her into a tight embrace.

Water. Heat. Steam. Slick bodies in close proximity, and a feeling that every second now was unique…precious.

Eventually they stepped out of the shower and got dressed.

Eleanora and Cato had been in love, their relationship cruelly ended, Caleb thought. And now, together, he and Sarah were going to exonerate Cato and put Eleanora to rest at last.

It wasn’t until Caleb called Will and asked him to come over to Sarah’s, then headed out of the house, that he realized he might have discovered the remains of his own great-great-great—however many greats—grandmother. It was a poignant thought, and surprisingly painful.

“I’ve gotten back some of the tissue samples,” Floby said from behind the desk in his office.

“Right. You said the victim had taken some kind of a hallucinogenic drug?”

“Nature’s own,” Floby said. “Yaupon holly—and poppy seeds.”

“Poppy seeds? You mean opium?”

“More or less. An extract from the seeds.”

“And yaupon holly?” Caleb was thoughtful for a minute. “Isn’t that one of the ingredients in the black drink a number of Native Americans—including the Seminoles—use in their rituals?”

“Exactly,” Floby told him.

“So was she high enough that she was hallucinating?” Caleb said.

“Given how she ended up, let’s hope she was very high and seeing beautiful sights,” Floby told him.

Caleb nodded. “Okay, now I need you to come with me back to Sarah’s place. I want you to see something before we call anyone else in.”

“Oh, God. You’ve found another body,” Floby said, staring at him.

“A woman. In a trunk in the attic,” Caleb admitted.

Floby shook his head. “What is it with you and corpses?” he asked. “I just wish you could find Winona Hart—alive.”

“I wish that, too,” Caleb assured him.

“Have you called Jamison?” Floby asked.

“Not yet. I will.” Caleb hesitated. “There’s some mummified tissue on this body. I’m hoping you can figure out if there were any drugs—like the black drink—in her system when she died…if you can figure out how she died, before we get the zoo back in.

“I think there’s some kind of connection between what went on back then and what’s going on now, and I can’t wait for the historians and the anthropologists to do whatever it is they do. I need to know now.” He hesitated. “And I also want you to do a test for me—on the side, without telling anyone.”

“Oh?”

“A DNA test.”

“I’ll need someone to compare her DNA to.”

“You have someone. Me.”

Will sat in the kitchen, shaking his head over a cup of coffee, not looking at Sarah. She had brought him up-to-date on all the reading she had done, and the details of Caleb’s investigation.

“The man’s a corpse magnet,” he said.

“Stop it! He’s an investigator, Will—corpses are a part of his work,” Sarah said and stood up, suddenly impatient. She was glad that her cousin was with her. Not that she was afraid to be alone, she told herself, but things had been so strange lately that she was glad of the company. With nothing to worry about on the safety front, she was free to focus on the one thing that seemed impossible to believe and yet had to be true.

She’d thought about it a lot, and as crazy as it seemed, as much as it went against the grain of everything she’d always believed, she’d come to the conclusion that Cato MacTavish was a ghost. He might have been buried in Virginia, but he was here now, because girls were disappearing again, and he wanted it to stop. He didn’t want to see a repeat of what had happened before.

“This place is creepy, Sarah,” Will was saying now. “I mean, sure, it could be a beautiful bed-and-breakfast. For ghouls,” he said. “And I don’t like just how much you seem to be getting involved in everything that’s going on. Okay, the bones in your house weren’t your fault. But since Mr. Corpse Magnet is trying to find whoever killed that woman on the beach—and maybe those other two girls, as well—I don’t think you should be hanging around with him so much. I mean, I like him, I honestly do. But I’m worried sick about you. What if he finds out something…and people decide you know it, too? You could be in danger, Sarah.”

“Stop it,” she warned him. “You’re with me now, right? So I’m safe.”

He groaned and leaned his head on the table. “It’s barely eight in the morning, and I don’t have to work until this afternoon.”

“Quit whining.”

“I’m tired.”

“I’m sorry.” Then she brightened and said, “Let’s go pay a social call.”

He stared at her as if she had lost her mind.

“I want to see Mr. Griffin.”

“Why?”

“His daughter disappeared—in or around this house.”

“Do you think she’s the corpse in the attic? And why the hell haven’t you called the cops yet?”

“No, she isn’t the corpse in the attic.”

“How do you know?”

“The clothing is Victorian, certainly not from the 1920s. And we haven’t called anyone in yet because we want to hold off—just a bit—on causing another frenzy. Please, Will, you have to pay attention to me and help me out with this. Do it my way. Caleb is going to bring Floby here to see the body, and I want to talk to Mr. Griffin.”

“What about Caleb? Shouldn’t you wait ’til he gets here?”

“I’ll just send him a text message, in case he gets back before we do. We’re just going around the corner.”

“All right,” Will said with a sigh. “Let’s go.”

Floby sat in the car, staring straight ahead. “You certainly do have a knack for finding bodies.”

Caleb groaned aloud. “We were diving—hoping to find a body—when I found the guy in his car. Wrong body, but a mystery solved.” He fell silent for a moment. They had assumed that his first discovery had nothing to do with the missing girls. Had they been wrong?

Frederick J. Russell, banker. That was who he’d turned out to be.

“Floby, you finished the autopsy on Frederick Russell, right?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“And what did you find?”

“He drowned.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“No.”

“So how did he wind up in the water?”

“I assume he was speeding.”

“Did he have a lot of speeding tickets?”

“How should I know? I’m the M.E., not a traffic cop,” Floby said. “I give the police my findings, and they take it from there.” Floby looked at him. “You can’t think Russell was involved with the missing girls, do you? At the very least, the man was in the water before Winona Hart disappeared.”