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Gerty rung her hands together. “Even the horse knows there’s something not right in here!”
Gracie slapped her arm. “Calm yourself, Gerty! Panicking won’t help us find out what’s haunting Father’s burial plot!”
Gerty swallowed the lump in her throat and nodded. “Y-you’re right, Gracie, but what can anybody do?”
“Let us search the area first and then make our plans,” Ben suggested as he swung around Ferox’s front and moved over to us. “Now show us where you were when you were startled.”
CHAPTEREIGHT
“Father’s buried over there,”Gracie told us as she pointed to the far middle of the plots where the low fence met the wall of an adjoining house.
Gerty nodded at the stone shed. “And we saw that. . .that thing behind the shed.”
Ben set a hand on Gracie’s shoulders. “Stay here a moment while I go see if it’s still there.”
He slipped around her and into the graveyard. I hurried after him and couldn’t help but shudder as a cold chill fell over me. “This place doesn’t feel right.”
Ben’s face was grim as his eyes darted over every shadow. “No, it doesn’t.”
He slowed his pace to a crawl as we approached the shed, and I couldn’t help but notice that he reached into his vest. A shimmer of a sharp blade reflected the sun as Ben stretched his neck out while his eyes scoured the area. I followed behind as we inched our way to the far side of the building and out of sight of the gate.
I was so focused on the way ahead that I didn’t watch the ground beneath. A yelp escaped me as my foot struck something hard and I was sent tumbling to the ground. I caught myself with my hands, but my knees hit the ground soft.
Ben was at my side in an instant. “Are you alright?”
I leaned back onto my haunches and brushed my hands together to get off the dirt. “Yeah. The ground here is even bumpier than everywhere else.”
His eyes fell on something behind me and the corners of his lips tightened. “Let me help you up.”
My pulse quickened. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Give me your hand, Millie.”
I whipped my head around and beheld what I had tripped over. It was a rotten bit of wood that jutted out a few inches from the soft ground. Inspecting the wood is when I noticed the dimensions of the mounded earth upon which I lay, and which was slightly raised from the rest of the graveyard ground. Or rather, it was its shape that attracted our attention.
The elevated earth was in the shape of a coffin.
The color drained from my face as I latched my hand onto the one Ben offered. He helped me to my shaking feet and drew me away so we could get a better look at what I had fallen onto. The discolored dirt formed a rectangle with the piece of wood being at one end opposite a weathered tombstone.
I swallowed the lump in my throat as I looked up at Ben’s grim expression. “What’s going on?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure, but stand here for a moment.”
Ben eased his hands off of me and knelt beside the disturbed earth. He brushed his hand over the surface before he lifted his attention to the grave marker.
I took a shaky step closer and read aloud a few hand-chiseled words, or what hadn’t been worn off by my time and weather. “Here before. . .is. . .Hearth. Taken. . .Illness.” A few numbers at the bottom caught my attention. “BS six hundred fifty-four to seven hundred and fifty-two.” I wrinkled my nose. “What do those mean?”
“The ‘BS’ refers to the Bright Spring, otherwise known as the founding of the empire and the city,” Ben explained as he moved closer to the tombstone.
“Is that a long time ago?” I asked my native guide.
“The gentleman passed away roughly a half-century ago.”
I wrinkled my nose. “There can’t be much left of Mr. Hearth.”
Ben’s eyebrows crashed down as he reached out and plucked something from the loose earth. “Perhaps more than we might assume.” He held up what he had found and I recognized the tattered remains of some sort of cloth.
My breath caught in my throat as I remembered what one of the sisters had mentioned. “Something covered in rotten clothes?”
