Krewe of Hunters 8 The Uninvited (19 page)

“Kat, get Kelsey—she’s out in the yard. If we’re lucky, you can
reach the records office before they close and at least start seeing what you
can dig up. I’ll spell Sean at the screens so he can get some rest.” Logan
looked at Tyler, and Tyler looked at Allison.

“We have to get back into the office and sort out those
papers,” he said. “But before it’s too late and too dark, I’d like to see the
rest of the grounds—through your eyes. I’ve been wanting to do that and
circumstances keep getting in the way. Let’s do it now. I’d like you to show me
the stables and the family graveyard.”

“All right,” Allison said slowly.

Julian shuddered. “Graveyard! I think I’ll sit with Jane for a
while.”

“As long as you don’t drive me crazy!” Jane warned him.

Julian grinned at Allison. “I woulda had a big crush on her!”
he said. He spoke lightly, but she saw the sadness in his eyes. She wanted to
give him a warm hug filled with comfort but, of course, she couldn’t. And he
bent down instead as if he was trying to hug her. “It’s going to be okay,
Allison. Maybe Sarah…maybe she’ll be like me. She’d love to stay in this old
place forever. She adored the house.”

“That’s not helping me, Julian,” Allison said.

“Whoa, I’m sorry, not the right thing to say. Okay, well…hmm. I
guess I’ll go ‘haunt’ the gorgeous Jane.”

“You were gorgeous yourself, my friend,” Allison told him. “You
were.”

He smiled wistfully at her and turned to head into the salon.
Sean stood and stretched, and Logan took over his seat.

“Shall we see the property now?” Tyler asked.

“Yes,” Allison said. “Give me a minute. I want to rinse my
face.” She drew in a deep breath. “We’ll hear from the rest of the board soon, I
imagine. They’ll want to arrange something for Sarah.”

Tyler nodded. He watched her rise stiffly and walk toward the
pantry.

She hadn’t been as close to Sarah as she had to Julian.

But she’d lost someone, and everyone deserved a few tears.

“I’ll be right back,” she promised.

* * *

Allison was true to her word. She just needed cold water
on her face and a moment alone to breathe.

Now Sarah was dead, too.

But these people, the Krewe, were here to help.

So she was going to help them by doing whatever she could.

She met Tyler back in the salon and motioned for him to follow
her.

The narrow hallway in the foyer led straight to the back door;
the Tarleton-Dandridge was, despite its grandiose styling, still a shotgun
house. The hall had allowed the breeze to sweep right through on hot days.

“The back can be accessed through the pantry and the music
room,” Tyler noted.

“It’s the same door, but the music room and the pantry lead
toward it from either side of the house.”

“No other doors? Nothing we might have missed?”

She shook her head. “There’s a fire escape out of Lucy
Tarleton’s room. If you look out the right-hand window, you’ll see it. It’s a
legal requirement,” she said.

Tyler stopped at the twenty-foot expanse between the house and
the stables.

“What?” she asked him.

“I saw the horse,” he said. He looked at her. “And the
dog.”

“Firewalker and Robert?” Had he
seen
them or had he
imagined
them?

“The horse was beautiful, a huge black stallion, about
seventeen hands tall,” he told her.

“And the dog?”

“Big old hound or maybe some kind of hound mix. Huge and
tawny.”

“He was a wolfhound mix,” Allison said.

“Nice dog,” Tyler said. “I wouldn’t mind a dog like that. Of
course, I guess back then, he had lots of room to run. He wouldn’t really make
an apartment dog.”

“You live in an apartment?”

“For the moment.” He scanned the property as they spoke and
then his eyes settled on her. “I lived most of my life in San Antonio, but as
you know, our main office is in Arlington, Virginia. Our permanent homes are
there now. I want to get a house, and there’s still plenty of land around us.
The closer you get to the Capitol, of course, the harder it becomes to have much
of a property. But I’d like to have a horse again, and a dog—something like the
ghost dog, an enormous old hound, loyal to the core.”

“Also furry, muddy and dirty,” Allison said.

“Ah, you’re not a dog girl.”

“I love dogs! I’ll have you know that my little mutt lived to
the ripe old age of nineteen. I got him when he was six weeks old and I was
four, and we didn’t lose him until I’d graduated after my first stint at
college.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t ready for another dog after him, I
guess.”

He looked out over the property, glad that she seemed to be
speaking calmly, that she wasn’t in shock the way she’d been after Julian’s
death.

“Robert must have been a great dog,” Tyler said. “I suspect he
went everywhere with Lucy Tarleton and that she had to convince him to
stay—maybe with her sister, maybe she got a servant to lock him up—every time
she made one of her rides down to Valley Forge.” He pointed across the stables.
“How do you suppose she pulled it off? The family groom must have been loyal to
her, and she had to be an excellent rider to slip through the British military
that surrounded the city at the time.”

“She was passionate about her cause. She’d grown up here and
knew the area well, while the British were on foreign soil. I think you’re
right—the groom knew what she was doing and helped her. If she was caught, she
could act the part of a stricken woman, just trying to reach a wounded cousin or
friend. She probably played the ‘I’m just a woman’ card many times. We can’t
know the details.” Allison paused, shrugging lightly. “We get history in one big
package, all tied up with the outcome known.”

“That’s true—and it’s human nature to invent or embroider some
of those details. We do know she died, but no one was there when it
happened—except her father, according to what I’ve read. There could be no
torture worse for a father than seeing his daughter killed.”

Allison nodded. “That was the outcome. I like to think about
her before the end. Lucy Tarleton didn’t
know
she’d
get caught when she was riding through the night. But so many people took huge
risks, even though they knew the punishment for what they were doing could be
death. It’s strange, you make me think of the colonists’ day-to-day life in a
way I haven’t for a while. And about Lucy. She was like any other woman of any
other time. She loved her dog, and her dog was fiercely loyal and loving to
her.” Allison shivered. “I can only imagine the day Beast Bradley caught her.
She was returning from one of her spy missions, but I don’t believe he ever
proved
she was spying. I think he found out
about Stewart Douglas—that’s how the story came down to us, anyway.”

“A girl with a dog and a horse,” Tyler murmured.

“The dog was killed, you know. According to the legend. I’m
hoping he ripped his attacker to shreds before he went down.”

“I’m sure he fought tooth and nail,” Tyler said. “Maybe he
stays around because he’s looking for Lucy.”

“But the horse wasn’t killed,” Allison told him. “Actually, the
fate of the horse is a curious one. The British took him when they
evacuated Philadelphia. But he wound up back
here—he’s buried in the graveyard, too. So is the dog. There’s an area toward
the rear for family pets.”

“Let’s go see it, shall we?”

“Okay.” Allison smiled at him.

There’d been something about their conversation here that was
wistful and poignant. Allison wasn’t sure what she’d thought about him before,
other than that unmistakable attraction, but they seemed to be drawing
closer.

Maybe she needed to back away. She’d lost friends. She was
learning all about the world beneath what was seen, and she was coming in
contact with
entities
that were uninvited.

But it felt as if Tyler had now been part of her life forever,
although it had just been a few days. She was becoming dependent on him. He
could be harsh, but only to make her see.

He was definitely an imposing person.

Maybe any time a tall man with a gun came from Texas, the rest
of the world automatically assumed
cowboy.
He was
tall, extremely well-built, and now that they’d shared a quiet moment thinking
about the
lives
of others rather than their deaths,
she knew she liked his mind and the way he thought. She suddenly knew that he
wasn’t just attractive, he was…sexually appealing. For the past few months,
she’d refused to even consider a relationship with anyone, not after her last
fiasco....

Another person had died. And here she was, thinking about this
man.

“Yes!” she said, turning away from him. “The graveyard! The
family plot. Well, let me get into tour guide mode here.” She moved past him.
Allison wondered if, when this mystery was solved, he would go back to Virginia,
or on to another city to solve another problem. She would always remember this
moment, standing in the yard, reflecting on the life of a long-dead woman and
the simple human fact that she had loved her dog.This moment, because it was
when Allison discovered she was intrigued and excited by being near him. She
wondered what it would be like to really touch him....

She launched into her talk. “The stables, as you see, are to
your right. There’s actually work space in the old servants’ quarters over the
stables. There are stalls for eight horses, a tack room and a little office. The
watering trough is still there—it’s the original stone trough. The stalls
themselves are wood and have been repaired over the years, but the circular
carving on the gates to the individual stalls is original. As we pass the
stables, we come to the family graveyard. It was a huge property back then, so
it was natural that household members were buried here. During the yellow fever
epidemic, the family moved out of the city and came back afterward. They were
blessed. None of the Dandridge family died.” She paused. “You probably know that
a yellow fever epidemic swept through Philadelphia in the summer of 1793.”

“I’ve been reading up.” He smiled at her. “I don’t know as much
as you do, but yes, the then-capital city had a population of about fifty-five
thousand. Dolley Madison lost her first husband and two of her children during
the epidemic.”

“Well, the Dandridge family was smart—they got out. They
weren’t here when the criers went through the town saying, ‘Bring out your dead,
bring out your dead!’”

She looked at the stables; she went through them so often.
Cleaned out now, as they’d been since the turn of the twentieth century, they
still smelled of leather, horses, cigars and polish. The upstairs had been
converted to caretaker apartments long ago,
before
the house was bequeathed to Old Philly History.

“Graveyard now?” Tyler asked. “Or are you stalling?”

She laughed. “Why worry about a graveyard? A ghost appeared to
me in my living room. What else is there to fear?”

“From the dead, usually nothing. Although…”

“What, the dead can be evil?”

“I wasn’t involved with the cases, but a few times, when
someone really evil died somewhere—that somewhere being a place where they’d
killed and tortured others—there was a remnant of evil that lingered. But the
ghosts
didn’t kill. Sometimes, maybe evil
attracts evil.”

“I don’t believe the Tarleton-Dandridge family was evil in any
way, so the family graveyard should be safe,” she said. “And thankfully, it is
broad daylight.”

She started walking ahead, leading him past the stables.

The old family graveyard had the right aura. There were several
vaults dedicated to the family, and there were plots with large angels and
obelisks, memorials to other family members.

“A lot of people found a last resting place here,” Tyler
commented.

“They often had big families back then. Sophia and Tobias
Dandridge had seven children, and those children went off and had more children,
and that was over two hundred years ago, so…”

A small brick wall, about three feet high, surrounded the
burying ground. There was a little picket fence at the entry, and stones had
been laid out as walkways.

“I take it you’re looking for Lucy first?” Allison asked
Tyler.

“Yes, I’d like to see her grave. But I’m guessing it’s in the
chapellike vault over there—center, toward the rear. The one that says
Tarleton.”

“Yes, she’s in there. Lucy, her father, her mother, her
father’s parents, one aunt who never married and an uncle who’d been an
Episcopal priest,” Allison told him. “A few of the family who came before Angus
are there, too, but the vault was constructed while the Revolution was being
waged, so the others were reentombed. At least I assume so.”

They skirted angels and cherubs and two smaller vaults to reach
the largest and finest of the vaults, which was guarded by a metal gate and a
wooden door. Allison thought Tyler was surprised when she pulled open the
gate.

“It’s not locked?”

“No. It’s actually a nice little chapel, as well. It has an
altar, a few benches and a stained-glass window in back. Lucy’s uncle James is
buried under the altar. There’s a pretty monument to her aunt Cecilia toward the
front, and we believe she’s buried there. You’ll see monuments on the other
walls, and those are to Angus’s parents and a few other family members. And
Lucy, Angus and Susannah—Lucy’s mother—are in marble tombs just behind the
altar, beneath the stained-glass window. They’re really striking—reminiscent of
Renaissance tombs.”

Allison wasn’t sure why, but when she entered the vault, she
bypassed the old stone benches and walked around the altar to come to the middle
of the tombs at the rear. Light was streaming through the cut-glass windows high
above, casting dancing rays upon the effigies of the three Tarleton family
members.