BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1) by JANE ADAMS (best book reader .txt) 📗

He must indeed. “You saw him yesterday afternoon, you say?” Meaning the visit close to midnight had been his second one.

“Yes sir, an hour before you came home. I threatened him with the dogs.”

And yet he came back. “Thank you, Albert. That will be all.”

He watched Albert leave, stiff backed and disapproving. So. That insignificant little man had taken the brooch away and then returned. There was no knowing what he’d done with it, though there was another who might know and someone else who would enjoy finding out.

* * *

From the writings of Abbot Kendryk of Storton Abbey, Year of Grace 878:

It is the land that best remembers. The earth that preserves, which holds and records each thought and action that humanity lets loose into the world. They are locked tight until such time, perhaps, when one comes who knows how to interpret the message. One who knows that the rivers of time do not flow only in the one direction.

Some memories have strength beyond others. Some last and breathe and haunt the living; perhaps, even, they torment the dead, nagging and tugging at them to put right the wrongs they committed or to preserve those loves they left behind. For the strongest of these memories proceed from love and from death and so often such emotions, such memories are bound as one, guiding and directing the works of those who were not even conceived of when those actions were laid down in the strata of earth.

* * *

THEADING. YEAR OF GRACE 878

He was relieved that there had been so little blood. He was not a fighting man, not even a farmer who needed to butcher his own cattle. Others did that for him, men working with knives and skill and calm focus. But their task was natural and necessary in such a community as theirs. However he looked upon it, what he had done this night could not be seen as natural, or lawful, either in the eyes of God or of his fellow man.

He had followed her when she slipped from the house, letting the latch down softly so that even the dogs barely stirred. Knowing her scent and her step they had merely whined in their sleep. The moon was full, sitting on the horizon, but still bright enough to make her easy to see as she slipped from one low, elongated shadow to the next. The trees seemed to bend to give her shelter, so dense and long did their darkness lie upon the grass as she circled the great pond marking the eastern bounds of their land.

Twice she had looked back and he fancied that she sensed him behind her. The first time, she merely glanced over her shoulder, but the second, pausing at the field’s edge where it gave way to dense hedge and even denser woodland, she gazed long and hard at the steading and he breathed in relief, thinking that in that almost too-late instant she had changed her mind. That divining her impulse and the evil that would come from it, perhaps even sensing that he had followed her, she would turn about and creep home as silently as she had left, and this terrible thing would all be over. Unseen, and so, easily forgiven.

His heart almost stopped when she turned again, pushing her way through a narrow gap in the field hedge and slipping like a shade into the woods beyond. No doubt keeping her tryst with him, that stranger, that waelas, whose arrival all those months before had led to this disaster.

He knew then that he had no choice. He had known before, he supposed, when their whispering in corners and their sneaking and deceit had first alerted him. Weeks ago he had made this weapon, a strong stave of ash whittled to a club, sensing that this night would come and he would have to act.

And so he followed her, time passing and the moon setting beyond the trees so that he lost her track in the dark woods, guessing more than knowing which way she would go. Then, when he had been certain he had lost them — certain and, almost, relieved — he caught the faint whisper of her voice some way ahead.

“What was that? I heard something.”

“Night creatures, nothing more. Allis, you are certain? You know that we can never come back.”

“I am certain. Never more so. I’m leaving nothing to regret. Owain, I would walk through the gates of Hell to be with you even should the angels try to hold me back.” She paused, startled again by some half-heard sound. “But what was that? Owain, do you think . . . ?”

But Owain did not reply, the cudgel brought down upon his head made sure of that. The first blow fetching the waelas man to his knees, the second felling him like a butchered ox.

She screamed once, Allis. Backed away and tried to run, but the ash club caught her as she turned, smashing hard across her temple and crushing the fine bones of her cheek and when she fell, he brought the cudgel down again and again upon her head and neck, obliterating her smile, her soft grey eyes, the curl of hair that fell loose from her coif, trailing down onto that slender neck.

And then he ran, not thinking until he reached the steading to cast his weapon aside. He hurled it as far into the pond as the fast-failing strength of his arms would allow. Then he sank down and wept, tears of shock and anger, though not regret. What needed to be done had been achieved and when he had finished weeping, he told himself that he would think of