couldn’t be a log. The surface beneath her hand was too pliable. Too smooth.
Too familiar.
She stared down at her arm, where it disappeared inside a mound of too-fresh earth. “Oh, God.” Water rolled down her temples and streamed into her eyes. She blinked to clear her vision, only to have them fill up again.
“Mrs. Ashcroft, are you injured?”
Catherine heard the vicar’s voice, but her full concentration resided on her exploratory fingers. She didn’t speak. She daren’t breathe. Her fingers and her heart were the only things that moved.
When she came across an object that had the distinctive features of a hand, she screamed.
***
Sebastian was already racing through the relentless sheet of rain when he heard Catherine’s scream. He knew what it meant. Had heard that type of scream too many times to count. But once was enough to have it seared onto one’s brain like a brand scorching one’s flesh. Painful. Memorable. Permanent.
It was the sound of horror.
A sound dredged up from one’s most primitive core, when the sight before one is so heinous, so unexpected as to terrify one’s soul.
Catherine had found death in those woods.
“Mrs. Ashcroft, what are you doing?” the vicar cried.
“Help me!” she commanded.
Sebastian broke through the underbrush and took in the macabre scene with one glance. Catherine and the vicar were bent over a mound, scooping up handfuls of mud and throwing them to the side. Their frenzied movements told him all he needed to know.
He hauled her up and set her behind him, nudging her toward the meadow. “Do what you can to keep McCarthy away from here. He will likely have heard you.” He dropped to his knees and focused on what he hoped was the upper end. “Vicar, start praying.”
Neither Catherine nor the girl’s father should see death in such a horrendous form. No one should. Sebastian had feared this ending, though he had held out hope for something more palatable like an elopement. But his instincts could not ignore the signs of foul play anymore than a sailor can ignore a red sky in the morning.
A man’s roar of pain sounded from behind him. “Faster, Vicar.”
No sooner did he give the command than the side of his hand glided over flesh. He stilled, as did the vicar. More carefully, he scraped away the mud. Section by section, they revealed parts of the girl’s face. First, her mouth, open and full of wet dirt. Then her nose and cheeks. And finally, her eyes. They stared straight ahead, the rain rinsing them clean to reveal the vacant gray irises of death.
Too late. Too damned late.
“Mr. McCarthy, please don’t!”
Catherine’s entreaty was the only warning Sebastian had before the distraught father pushed him aside.
“Oh, Jesus, no.” Declan McCarthy stared down at his dead daughter. Anguish like nothing Sebastian had ever seen crumpled the rugged man’s face. “No. Not my Meghan. Not my baby girl.” He dropped to his knees and picked up where Sebastian left off, removing great heaps of mud, apologizing and promising retribution in the same heaving breath.
“Catherine, stay back,” Sebastian ordered when she made to move to his side. “McCarthy, allow me to do this for you.”
The brawny carpenter ignored him, shoveling away layers of mud and dirt until finally his daughter’s body was revealed. Meghan lay squeezed inside a shallow grave, with no visible wounds or signs of trauma. Only a small bump on her stomach, marking a second, much smaller grave.
“Sweet Jesus.” The scene was so horrific that even Sebastian had to avert his eyes. He looked for Catherine and found her several feet away, her mud-slicked hands covering her silent sobs. He wanted to go to her, wanted to wrap her small frame within the safety of his arms. But he knew in these situations that those involved needed to stay occupied in order to hold back the shock. He noticed she no longer wore the vicar’s coat.
“Catherine.” He drew her hands from her face, but she continued to stare straight ahead. He bent to peer into her eyes. “Catherine, I need Mr. Foster’s coat.”
She blinked once, then several more times in quick succession before her gaze cleared.
“Did you hear me?” he asked. “Please find where you dropped the vicar’s coat.”
“Yes.” She nodded and swiveled to find the fallen garment.
“Vicar, please relieve Mrs. Ashcroft of your coat once she finds it and bring it to me.”
“Yes, my lord.”
McCarthy bent to lift his daughter from her watery grave, and Sebastian laid a hand on the man’s shoulder. “I’ll help you.”