The Sinner. Amanda Stevens

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СКАЧАТЬ against my will, I drew a deeper breath, testing the air for a hint of decay, which might have given me an indication of how long the body had been buried. The absence of putrefaction suggested a fresh death. The flesh on the backs of the hands and on what I could see of the arms jutting up through the dirt appeared somewhat supple, leaving me to wonder just how recently blood had flowed through the poor woman’s veins.

      Perhaps only a matter of moments before I had come upon the grave. If only I had arrived sooner...

      You might also be dead, a little voice whispered. Locked inside one of those metal cages for all eternity.

      Shaking off a stifling claustrophobia, I refocused my attention on the properties of the mortsafe. Like the first cage, the edges had been anchored in cement so that it couldn’t be easily moved. The metal rods and lattice had rusted in places, but the padlock looked fairly new, having been placed on the gate so recently that the salt air hadn’t yet corroded the steel.

      The more obvious observation and by far the more chilling had occurred to me immediately, but I’d managed to push the revelation to the farthest corner of my mind. Now as I stared at those dainty hands, I had to face the horror head-on. The woman inside the grave had been buried alive.

      Buried. Alive.

      I shuddered and moved in even closer until I was staring down through the grate directly over the hands. They were filthy, the nails caked and ragged from digging. Through the grime, I could see the curlicue of a tattooed word on the inside of her left wrist and the gleam of a silver ring on her right hand. The intricate design made me think that the jewelry was old, perhaps even an heirloom. The kind of piece that could easily be traced. I couldn’t help but wonder why the killer had left it. Had he or she been that certain the body would never be discovered?

      Killer.

      The silence deepened as the reality of my find gripped me. Only a few moments had passed since I’d first come upon the hands, but it seemed as if I had been standing there for ages, wasting precious time. A homicide had been committed and the sooner I called the police, the sooner they could identify the victim and start searching for her murderer. I knew the procedure, knew what I had to do. Yet I still hesitated because I sensed this was just the beginning of something dark and sinister. A riddle from the dead that would test me in ways I had never before experienced.

      And so I remained rooted to the spot, breathing deeply and drawing out those last moments of calm before the storm hit.

      As it turned out, I had very little time to vacillate. From somewhere in the woods, the warning tremolo of a loon sent a sharp thrill along my spine and I spun once more to rake the tree line. It occurred to me in the split second before the crack of a rifle sent me scrambling for cover that the killer might still be nearby.

      I hit the ground as something hot seared my face. My hand flew to my cheek and I drew back bloody fingers. I’d been hit. Shot.

      Propelled by fear and self-preservation, I flattened myself in the dirt and covered my head with my arms, certain that at any second another bullet would rip through my scalp. That would be the end of me because neither my gift nor my calling could save me from a mortal wound.

      Eyes squeezed shut, I braced for the impact as the reverberation from the first shot died away in the stillness. As always in moments of extreme crisis, I thought about Devlin. If I died here in this desolate clearing, would he sense my passing? Would he come here to search for my body? Or was my absence from his life such a relief that he would ignore the twinges of premonition and gut instinct that had been honed during his years on the police force?

      As the disturbing notion flashed through my head, I again became aware of the absolute stillness and I tried to corral my senses. What could I see, hear, smell, taste? Focus!

      When nothing moved in the weeds, I lifted my head to reconnoiter. Touching a finger to the blood on my cheek, I realized the wound was superficial and had come from nothing more sinister than a smilax vine. And in hindsight, I decided the shot had sounded from the direction of the marsh instead of the woods, leading me to believe that a gator was most likely the target, not I. In my already heightened state of agitation, I’d overreacted.

      Even so, I remained prone in the dirt for several minutes longer as I tried to quiet my flailing heart. Using the weeds for cover, I listened for the telltale sound of a sliding bolt or the snap of a twig beneath stealthy footfalls. When nothing came to me, I eased to a kneeling position and then to my feet as I dusted off my jeans and walked back over to the second mortsafe.

      I almost expected the cage to be empty, those pale hands having withdrawn back down into the grave. But no. They were still there, still clutching the metal grate.

      A breeze swept over me, cold and unnatural. My head came up and I made a slow turn to once again survey the clearing. As the tall grass parted in the wind I saw now what had been hidden to me earlier.

      A dozen identical cages peeked through the undulating vegetation to form a large circle around me.

      * * *

      Dr. Rupert Shaw, the founder and administrator of the Charleston Institute for Parapsychology Studies, had once suggested that my affinity for cemeteries stemmed in part from the unbound energy left behind by the dead. According to Dr. Shaw, it was my ability to absorb this lingering force that fueled my gift and enhanced my senses. It was why I could see and hear things that others could not. I didn’t dispute Dr. Shaw’s theory, although I liked to think and truly believed that my love of old graveyards was far more emotional than the assimilation of unbound energy.

      In any case, there was nothing to absorb from the caged graves. It was as if someone or something had been there only moments earlier and sucked out all the oxygen, leaving an eerie, vacuum-like quality to the circle.

      My pulse continued to race even as I drew in several calming breaths. I didn’t want to be in that circle. I didn’t want to be drawn into whatever horror remained hidden beneath the other cages. I wanted to be back in Charleston with nothing more pressing on my mind than my next blog update.

      But I didn’t retreat because I knew from experience I couldn’t run away from my gift. The days of pretending that ghosts didn’t exist were long behind me as were the rules that had once protected me. I had entered a new phase of my life, accepting if not embracing who I was and what I was meant to be.

      So I emptied my mind to see if anything of the dead woman’s last moments drifted in.

      Nothing came to me. It was as if a deliberate barrier had been erected to block whatever emotions or memories that might have remained. I’d never felt anything like it. The obstruction was cold and impenetrable. An unscalable wall of darkness.

      As I knelt in the weeds, eyes closed in supreme concentration, I began to tremble even harder. The suspicion that a supernatural force had played a role in the young woman’s demise terrified me because no normal police officer or investigator would be equipped to track such a culprit. Not even Devlin.

      And I very much feared that was why I had been summoned.

Three

      Despite the isolation of that forlorn circle, the area surrounding Seven Gates Cemetery was located just inside the city limits and, therefore, fell under the jurisdiction of the Ascension Police Department rather than the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office.

      The dispatcher had promised СКАЧАТЬ