Page 116 of A Good Heart is Hard to Find
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Buried Treasures
Shock to the Spirits,yet another macabre offering from horror writer Cass Leigh, certainly lives up to its title. I am never going to see the word ‘goulash’ (or should that beghoulash?) on a menu again without wanting to throw up…
Surprise! Magazine
There was silence except for the sound of soil being shifted, then a rather incongruous crockery-rattling noise.
‘Careful,’warned Jason, muffled. ‘It seems to be some kind of china bird, loosely wrapped in sacking. And there’s another …’
‘A collection of porcelain cockatoos?’I quoted.
Dante looked up. ‘I suppose it must be. Let us hope he didn’t bury the Tunbridge Ware boxes down here too, or the damp will have ruined them.’
‘What? Why cockatoos?’ demanded the others, baffled, and I explained about Jack Craigand the missing valuables.
The excavation revealed a lot of birds, none of them Tanya, and a couple of nice bits of Chinese pottery.
‘So it’s just a cache Jack Craig’s hidden away meaning to recover later?’ Jason asked. He was still pale, but sweating from his exertions.
Orla, brushing earth from bright cockatoos, said indignantly: ‘He might have packed them up a bit better! Some of these lookvaluable.’
‘Oh well, that’s good news then, isn’t it?’ asked Leo. ‘I mean, Nancy wasn’t quite sure she’d found what Jason was looking for, but she did findsomething.’
Dante was exploring the bottom of the hole to see if they’d missed anything. ‘The soil’s loose at the bottom – I think there’s something else here,’ he said, brushing more earth away, ‘Something that feels like …’
He stood upsuddenly, staring down, and we all crowded up and stared too.
A hand as white as marble, the fingers curled upwards, seemed to be pushing its way up from the dark soil like yet another resurrection.
…pushing through the dark soil, the white fingers clawed for…
No, as you were, I’d already done that inLover, Come Back to Me.
Jason said hoarsely: ‘Oh God, it’s not …?’
‘It’s Diana, I think,’Dante said coolly, and bending down irreverently tapped the naked white arm with the end of his trowel.
‘Diana?’ echoed Jason.
‘Second niche on the left in the rose garden wall?’ I asked. ‘The missing statue, possibly Roman, or an Italian copy?’
‘That’s the one,’ he agreed, excavating further. ‘But that seems to be it – the ground’s like a rock below her. Well, I suppose I’d better let thepolice know …andthe insurance company.’
He eyed the collection of cockatoos with disfavour, but actually I thought they were quite jolly.
Jason was sitting on the ground looking white and a bit sickly. ‘For a minute there, Cass, I thought it was Tanya,’ he said faintly.
‘Really, Jason!’ I said impatiently. ‘That statue is half life-size and Tanya was a strapping woman, how could it possiblybe her?’
‘But you must admit that arm looked a bit grisly, pointing out like that,’ Orla agreed, sitting down next to Jason and putting a comforting arm around him. ‘And after all, wewerelooking for Tanya, weren’t we?’
‘Yes, but not in the form of a calcified midget,’ I pointed out a trifle tartly. ‘Still, I suppose it was unexpected. We all seem to be having shock therapy this weekend, don’twe? Let’s hope that’s it.’
‘Except for pleasant shocks, like good manifestations tonight when we’ve got the cameras and recorder set up,’ Frank said.
We trooped back to the house with our booty just in time to see the departure of one problem: Madame Duval was seated in a taxi on the drive, while Reg was taking his leave of Rosetta and Eddie. As we came up he extended a hand to Dante, too.
