Page 67 of Witches of Dubious Origin
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 wordsBeloved HusbandandFather. 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.”
