Ghost Writer - Pandora Pine Page 0,10

Jude opened the website for the Salem office of the Registry of Deeds and entered the property address. It still amazed him how well-preserved records from the seventeenth century were.

The house had originally been owned by Nathaniel Beecher. It had stayed in the family until 1972 when the final Beecher heir passed away. It was at that time the Salem Historical Society had taken over and had the property declared a historic landmark. It had been renovated and refurbished to bring the house back to its former glory. With that, caretakers were allowed to move into the home and were required to open the house to visitors and tour groups.

Once Jude had the names of all the people who’d lived in the home, he started in on the research for each resident. All members of the Beecher family had died natural deaths from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. It wasn’t until Jude reached the 1900s when he found a possible suspect for the haunting.

Geneva Beecher had been twenty-five years old at the time of her passing in 1917. She hadn’t died from natural causes, but by suicide. The newspapers never came out and said a death was at someone’s own hand, but rather burial information often told the tale. In this case, Geneva had been buried in the potter’s field adjacent to the Harmony Grove Cemetery, which was the place where Bertha Craig found her own final rest.

Jude hadn’t done this type of research in ages. While Cope had been home with the baby, he’d utilized Ronan and Fitzgibbon’s decades of police service to investigate cheating spouses, insurance fraud claims, and the occasional missing child. It reminded Jude of the time before he and Cope had met each other.

He’d had his private investigator license since he was nineteen years old. At that time, other people’s drama had been his bread and butter. It was different working on these types of cases with Ronan and Kevin. Before arriving in Salem, he’d always been a loner, preferring his own company to that of others. Now that he’d forged such strong ties with Kevin, Ronan, and the others, Jude recognized now that he’d only been a loner by choice.

Their group of friends loved him to the moon and back. They accepted him for who he was, and it didn’t matter to them one bit that he’d been born the son of a Navajo and a white woman. In his friends, he’d found the kind of acceptance he’d never known was possible. The same had been true when they brought Wolf home from Navajo Nation. None of their friends had batted an eye when they saw his obvious ethnicity. They’d all been crazy for Wolf. Just as crazy as Jude and Cope had been about their baby. It meant the world to him that his son would have a kind and loving family to grow up in.

Today was proof of that, not that Jude needed any additional proof to know they were in the right place with the right people. Everyone had been so kind to Cope, stopping by his desk and making sure he was doing well.

He turned back to his research. The best thing for Cope right now would be for him to have a juicy case to sink his teeth into. Geneva Beecher was a good place to start. Step one would be to find out if the girl left behind a diary of the days and weeks leading up to her suicide. It would also be helpful if other members of her family had done the same thing.

The only problem with assuming Geneva was their prime suspect, was the fact that the first haunting in the Beecher home wasn’t documented until the 1960s. Jude supposed it was possible the spirit had been there all along and had just become part of the fabric of the home. Family members may have known it was Geneva’s spirit causing so much trouble, and since she had died by suicide, which was against the church, her spirit was never spoken of.

The Salem Public Library would be a good place to start to look for additional documentation on the Beecher family, as well as the three subsequent families who had lived in the house after it was turned over to the Salem Historical Society.

Jude made quick work of finding their names and gathering as much information as he could about them online. He’d never been much of a reader as a child, but found