Chapter 21
“Zoe!” Jasper cried, and I heard him run toward me. “Are you all right?”
I’d landed with a smack on a hard wooden surface, breaking the fall with an elbow and a hip. Ouch! It took me a second to realize I was in a grave and another moment to comprehend that I was lying on a casket. I let out a shriek and, despite the pain, scrambled to my feet.
Jasper’s flashlight beam hit me full in the face and I held up my hand and turned away.
“Sorry!” He set the beam aside and reached a hand down. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t think I broke anything except my spirit, if that’s what you’re asking,” I said. He grunted a laugh and I clasped his wrist with my hand and he did the same with mine.
“Count of three,” he said. “One, two, three…” He hauled me out of the hole as if I weighed no more than a sack of potatoes. I dropped to my knees on the cool grass and let the scent of the earth calm my beating heart.
Jasper knelt beside me and rested his hand on the center of my back. “On a positive note, I think you found it.”
“Yay, me,” I quipped. The heat of his hand helped to calm me even as it made me uncomfortably aware of him.
In my previous, quiet life, I hadn’t run into men like Jasper often.
Okay, ever. With his wavy dark hair, pale eyes, British accent, and impressive physique, he was so far out of my compatibility zone, I couldn’t think of him as anything more than a colleague.
To do otherwise would be disastrous for so many reasons, not the least of which was the inevitable heartbreak from unrequited love.
Truly, there wasn’t anything worse than that.
I’d rather fall into ten more graves than suffer pining for someone who saw me as the plain Jane I was.
With that thought in mind, I pushed up to my feet and his hand dropped away.
My elbow and my hip throbbed, but I took comfort in the fact that I hadn’t landed on my face.
Amazingly, I had kept my grip on my flashlight when I’d fallen and its beam still shone brightly.
I moved it over the grave, pausing at the headstone.
I couldn’t make out the words, so I carefully picked my way around the hole until I could read it.
The headstone was a solid slab of granite, austere but softened by the words Beloved Husband and Father .
I skipped over the dates and looked at the name: Milton David Moran .
This was it. I moved the light beam down to the casket.
The lid was obviously closed— hallelujah!
—otherwise, I would have landed in the casket when I’d fallen and I didn’t think my psyche was up for that.
“You’re right,” I said. “It’s his.”
“Excellent. Now we get him back inside and let him rest in peace.” Jasper moved his flashlight across the piles of earth.
I frowned. “I just don’t understand. Who did this and why? I mean, I get that it has to be a necromancer, but it seems like they went to an awful lot of trouble just to keep us from asking about my mother.”
“More trouble than sending an undead Viking after you?”
“Fair. It just seems like a lot of effort to have him in place at Mystwood Manor if the intent was to keep us from asking about my mother’s death.”
“I think there is much more happening than trying to block your questions about your mum.” Jasper’s voice was low and cautious as if he didn’t want to offend me. “Olive said that Moran reached across the desk and tried to strangle you.”
“Or her,” I protested. “It could have been her.”
Jasper stared at me with his lips pressed together and gentle patience in his eyes. I glanced away. I was not enjoying the turn this conversation had taken.
“Let’s get to it, then,” I said. “I want to hear what Olive has discovered in the medical file.”
“Fair enough,” Jasper agreed. He took my uninjured elbow and guided me around the grave as if he feared I might fall in again. Not the unlikeliest of possibilities.
We arrived back at the bus to find it exactly as we’d left it. Jasper opened the back doors and there was the body bag with Moran. He hefted him back up over his shoulder and we returned to the grave.
Jasper laid him on the ground and we considered the casket below, the six-foot drop, and Moran’s very heavy body.
“Can we lower him, using the body bag, and then remove it once we’re down there?” I asked.
“It’d be easier to open the casket and just pop him in, body bag and all.”
“His family most likely went to great expense to have him laid out just so,” I said. “We can’t disrespect that.”
Jasper considered me for a long moment. I suspected he wanted to refuse, but finally he nodded. “All right, then.”
He jumped down into the hole and opened the lid of the casket. This was no small endeavor, as the hole that had been dug—I tried not to picture Moran clawing his way out—was a tight squeeze.
Kneeling on the edge, I reached a hand down, offering to help Jasper out as he’d helped me. To my surprise, he took it and I had to clench my entire body to keep from dropping him back into the hole. I tried not to look at him, because I didn’t want to be distracted.
As he used me to pull himself up, I slid across the grass to the edge of the hole.
When his head cleared the grave, we were face-to-face and I found my brain shorting out as I noticed he had the thickest, darkest eyelashes of anyone I’d ever known.
He reached past me and planted his hand on the ground and hauled himself out of the grave inch by inch.
I should have helped, but he seemed to have it under control and I didn’t think touching him would help me with my vow not to fall for him.
“Are you sure we can’t just drop him in?” Jasper collapsed on the grass beside me.
The question brought me back to the situation at hand and I said, “Yes, very sure.”
Jasper shrugged. “All right. I’ll bring him down. You follow and you can help arrange him in the casket.”
“Wait, if we’re both down there, how will we get out?” I asked.
“I can lift you out from below and you can pull me out again,” Jasper said. “Shine the light for me?”
He didn’t wait for my response but pushed to his feet and hefted the body bag over his shoulder once again.
I held the light steady while he slid down the side of the hole, barely keeping his balance when he landed in the bottom beside the casket.
He placed the body bag inside and glanced up, waiting for me.
I half fell, half slid, just as he had, and together we unzipped the body bag and rolled what was left of Moran into the casket.
The scent of lavender and whatever else Olive had used to mask the decay was still working, but the rotting flesh, which had begun to slide off his bones, made my knees weak and I thought I might be sick.
As Jasper rolled up the body bag and tossed it out of the grave onto the ground above, I gently tried to arrange Moran’s arms as they would have been for his initial burial. I crossed them over his chest, hoping the look of peaceful repose would allow him to have just that.
I straightened his tie one last time. When I went to rise, Moran sat straight up in his coffin. I shrieked and his eyes flew open, one eyeball hanging a bit lower than the other, and he made a garbled sound in his throat as if he was trying to speak.
“Oy!” Jasper reached for me, but he was too late.
Moran clutched me by the throat with one bony-fingered hand and started to squeeze.
“She’s too strong…I…don’t…want…to…kill…you.” Moran was muttering, clearly fighting to get every word out.
I grabbed at his arm, trying to break his grip.
I felt Jasper lurch forward and his hands joined mine as he attempted to pry Moran away from me.
My breath turned into a wheeze as my airway got smaller and smaller.
I thrashed against Moran’s hold as panic surged inside me.
My vision went blurry and I felt myself start to black out.
I heard the sickening crunch of bones being crushed. My eyelids flickered as I fought unconsciousness. I was petrified that sound had been Jasper’s bones and that this was to be our ill-fated end. Weird to think that right now I rather missed our homicidal Viking.
Focus, Zoe! I berated myself. I had to help Jasper!
“Corpus regressus ad mortem,” I murmured, causing my throat to burn with pain. I didn’t care. Whatever I had to do, I was willing if it meant we survived this. Inhaling through my nose, I forced the words out more emphatically this time. “Corpus regressus ad mortem.”
The hand around my throat dropped away and Moran fell back into his coffin. I fell into the dirt on the side of the casket, no longer caring about arranging his limbs. Jasper reached around me and slammed the coffin shut.
He collapsed beside me and I turned to find his fierce gaze boring into mine, “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”
“I’m okay,” I said through chattering teeth.
“Totally okay…” But I wasn’t. I wanted to run, cry, scream, punch somebody—basically I was on the brink of a complete and total mental breakdown.
“How did he rise again? I sent him back. He even wanted me to. How did he return?” My voice got higher with each word.
“I don’t know.” Jasper frowned and pulled me into his arms. He hugged me tight until I stopped shaking. When he released me, I stepped back, feeling awkward and shy. I wasn’t a hugger by nature and I was never clear on what I was supposed to do when the hug was over.
“He’s gone now, but given that we don’t know how he came back, I think it’s best we get out of here as quickly as possible.
” Jasper took my hand and guided me to the side of the grave where I’d dropped my flashlight.
He picked it up out of the dirt—it was still working—and handed it to me.
He laced his fingers together and said, “Are you ready?”