Craven Manor(24)

Daniel scanned the area. The tomb would have been a two-minute walk from the house under normal circumstances, but with the garden overgrown as badly as it was, the trip easily took ten.

I’m supposed to fix the garden as much as I can. Why not work outwards from the crypt? I can clear pathways to both the house and my cottage, and tame the surrounding areas in stages.

Daniel retrieved the shovel and began plotting out sections of ground to clear. The path wouldn’t be straight because in some areas, the vegetation grew so thick that it would have taken weeks to remove it. Traces of original pathways and design elements were still visible amongst the plants. Daniel plotted a route that took advantage of them.

He used the shovel to excise leaf litter and smaller plants out of his chosen trail. Most came out easily and were heaped in piles to be carted away with the wheelbarrow, but some of the weeds stuck so badly that he needed to dig them out.

“Come on, stupid thing.” Daniel grunted as he alternately pulled on and hacked at the roots of a particularly stubborn plant. Its leaves tore off in shreds, but its root system was tougher than he’d expected. Daniel was no stranger to hard labour, but his muscles were starting to tire.

He heaved back, and the plant exploded out of the ground and showered dirt across the scene like confetti. Daniel, laughing, used the back of his gloved hand to clear specks off his face. He threw the plant aside and went back to check that no bulbs remained.

Something off-white protruded from the hole. Daniel frowned at it as he tugged broken roots out of the loamy earth. It was a strange shape but deep enough underground that he could cover it up again. A rock?

Just to make sure, he rapped his knuckles on the shape—and recoiled. It felt wrong. Whatever he’d touched wasn’t stone. It had felt hollow.

Daniel dropped the roots and began scooping the dirt away from the object. The ground wasn’t as compacted in that part of the garden as he’d found in other areas, which meant it hadn’t been part of the original path. He kept digging, slowly unearthing more of the shape. It was vaguely round and about the size of a soccer ball. Fissures ran across it. The off-white shade had been stained by the earth, and as Daniel dug deeper, he found a hole in its side.

His hands had turned numb, but he didn’t stop scraping the soil away from the object. He gripped its top and gave it a tug, and a human skull emerged from the ground.





Chapter Eleven





Daniel held up the skull as waves of nausea rose through his stomach. Its jaw had fallen off and remained buried in the loamy earth, leaving just the cranium’s empty eyes and its row of upper teeth to leer at Daniel.

He dropped the skull. Its cracks widened as the bone thudded into the earth.

Is it Annalise’s skull? Is this the reason her spirit isn’t at rest? He turned to where the weeds blocked his view of the mausoleum. That makes no sense. Why did Bran want me to tend to the crypt if there’s no body inside?

Sweat coated Daniel. He used his forearm to wipe it off his face. The skull was too large to belong to a child. It was nearly as big as Daniel’s head.

This came from an adult, then. Someone who died on the property.

His breathing was rougher than the exertion warranted, and every nerve in his body screamed to move away from the bones, but Daniel repressed his instincts as he bent over the hole. Part of the lower jaw protruded from the dirt. It was no more than a foot deep, which meant the grave—if it had been a grave—was shallow. He thought it was possible the body had been left on top of the ground and had, over the last two hundred years, gradually sunk into the earth or been covered by sediment during heavy rains. He looked behind himself. White bone crested out of the earth in multiple places. Weeds had grown around it and hidden it well, but he recognised a knee and part of a rib.

He stood and shifted his weight from foot to foot in an effort to relieve some of his tension. His gloves had protected his fingers from actually touching the bone, but he still rubbed them together as though there were traces of death that needed to be removed.

Calm down, and think it through. There was already a crypt on the property. Maybe it was surrounded by a forgotten graveyard, and he’d simply stumbled on one of the bodies buried there.

He rotated as he placed his location. He was still close to the wall, no more than forty meters from the crypt. It would be a logical place to have a cemetery.

Families buried people on their property all the time back then. This isn’t anything unordinary.

Except it was. Even accounting for two centuries of erosion, the grave was shallow. There was no tombstone in sight, not even a marker, and no sign of other graves.

Paranoia spread through Daniel’s veins like liquid fire. He tore off the gloves and began pacing. This was a secret grave. I’m sure whoever buried this body didn’t want it found again. What could that mean? Murder?

“Damn it.” His tongue was dry. The house loomed over the trees, and the late-afternoon sun made its shadow extend just shy of where Daniel stood. In another half hour, it would swallow him.

Do I need to call the police? The letter said not to allow strangers onto the property, but if there’s a murder involved, I have to tell someone, don’t I?

He tried to picture what that would lead to. Would they dig through the garden, searching for more bones? What if they found them? What if the ground underneath Daniel’s feet was littered with long-rotted corpses?