As they put the pieces together, Caroline’s MO began to emerge. She had lived with her parents, so every night, after Will saw her home, she had turned around and gone back out to meet Gary. It would always be impossible to know for sure, but apparently they’d started dabbling in black magic years earlier. At first it had been a lark, a fun way to scare themselves, but somewhere along the way they’d started to take it seriously, and their murderous rampage had begun.

And while there was no way to prove it—and in fact, Sarah would never even consider trying, since she had no desire to be branded insane—Sarah suspected that maybe the insanity that drove them had been a result of the original Martha Tyler’s curse. How else to explain not only their actions but those of the forever unidentified killer who had murdered Mr. Griffin’s daughter and the other missing girls back in the 1920s?

The house was gone over with a fine-tooth comb, and Jennie Lawson’s body was found buried beneath the stack of crates in the basement. And because Caroline had been so determined to emulate Martha Tyler, she had left behind a book of her own, which her parents found in her bedroom.

She and Gary had killed Frederick Russell when he had found them trying to stuff a drugged Jennie Lawson into Greg’s truck, then come up with the idea of sending both him and his car to the bottom of the bay.

Given the DNA match, Caleb was able to claim the body of Eleanora Stewart.

Will was stunned. He had never suspected that Caroline had a secret life, and he seemed ready to wallow in his misery for the foreseeable future. But then Cary offered her shoulder, and Sarah didn’t think it would take long for them to do more than commiserate together.

Ten days after the events in the cemetery, Sarah and Caleb headed to Virginia, where they traced the grave of Cato MacTavish and saw Eleanora laid to rest next to him.

Sarah was never entirely sure that she wasn’t dreaming, but she could have sworn she saw the two of them together.

Not at the cemetery.

But when she woke in the middle of the night.

They were standing at the foot of the bed, arm in arm, looking down at her and Caleb with approving smiles.

Caleb moved slightly, reaching to take her into his arms.

Then they faded gently away, and Sarah had the feeling that she would never see them again but that there would be others like them in her future.

Caleb edged closer to her, his body like a sleek spoon against her.

“My love,” he murmured.

She closed her eyes, filled with the sense that so long as she was in his arms, she was exactly where she was supposed to be. She didn’t know what the future would hold, if they would set up housekeeping in Virginia or move back to St. Augustine, or go somewhere else entirely, and she realized with complete serenity that it didn’t matter.

Whatever they did now, they would do together, and that was all that mattered.

ISBN: 978-1-4268-4051-7

UNHALLOWED GROUND

Copyright © 2009 by Heather Graham Pozzessere.

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