The Sinner. Amanda Stevens

watching me with those dark, soulful eyes as if to say, I know who you are but I don’t know what you are and that worries me.

      We’d made some headway during the past year, but he wasn’t yet ready to accept me wholeheartedly. Until such time, I could do nothing but give him his space. The same as I had done for Devlin.

      Kneeling, I put out a hand so that he could catch my scent. He eyed me from a safe distance. When he finally ambled over, he didn’t relax as he once would have done, but instead held himself in rigid acquiescence as I stroked his scarred head and scratched behind his ear nubs.

      “I know,” I murmured, smoothing the fur on his back. “I know you don’t like the changes inside me. I don’t like them, either. But there’s nothing I can do about them.”

      Unless I located Rose’s long-lost key. Unless everything I’d heard about it was true. That still seemed a remote possibility, an improbable fairy tale, but if the key I wore around my neck could hold the ghosts at bay temporarily, who was to say another key couldn’t lock them out forever?

      Angus put up with my attention for as long as he could stand before trotting off to explore the front yard. He wouldn’t go beyond the ditch. No matter his reservations, he still felt protective of me and for that I was both humbled and grateful.

      I let him nose around for a bit and then called to him to follow me into the backyard. As I closed the gate and turned, my gaze lifted to the flat roof of the shed jutting up through the treetops. The outbuilding was located at the back of the property, separated from the marsh by a salt-tolerant forest of loblolly pines and from the backyard and house by a small grove of orange trees.

      As best I could tell from the windows and roofline, the shed was divided into three distinct rooms, one leading back into the other in the shotgun fashion of an old farmhouse. The structure looked to be in decent condition so I assumed someone had taken care of it over the years. It was painted white like the house with a high window on either side of the front room to allow in light. On a few occasions, I’d stood on tiptoes and taken a peek through the glass, but other than a jumble of old furniture, boxes and garden tools, I hadn’t been able to tell much about the interior.

      I sat down on the back porch steps, my gaze still fixed on the roof. As the horizon deepened, the moths came out, flitting among the bee balm and catmint that grew at the side of the porch. The breeze blowing in from the sea was cool and fragrant, and I could hear music somewhere in the distance. Closer in, cicadas and bullfrogs serenaded from the marsh as the bats flew out of their houses. It was a lovely time, a lonely time, with the last rays of the sunset valiantly staving off twilight.

      Angus and I sat there until the shadows thickened at the edge of the yard and dusk crept over the orchard. I felt nothing unnatural in the breeze, but there was a sense of wrongness about the house and yard that I had not experienced before.

      Perhaps it really was nothing more than my imagination fueled by Kendrick’s story. Or perhaps my finding those caged graves had somehow stirred a dormant evil. Whatever the reason, I found myself lingering on the steps and then on the screened porch because I didn’t want to enter the house.

      “Oh, just get it over with,” I muttered as I pushed open the back door and stepped across the threshold. Fumbling for the light switch, I paused just inside the doorway as my gaze darted about the kitchen.

      Most of the fixtures and cabinets were original to the house and created a vivid sense of time and place. I had a sudden vision of a woman in a black dress standing at the old farmhouse sink washing dishes. She wasn’t a ghost or a mirage or even one of Darius Goodwine’s illusions, but rather another product of my imagination. My gaze drifted to the table where a man with wire-rimmed glasses sat reading the Bible. What had driven a gentle, God-fearing man to murder his wife in her sleep and hide her body so well she’d yet to be found?

      I watched the Willoughbys for a moment longer before allowing them to fade back into the past.

      For the next few minutes, I busied myself attending to Angus’s dinner needs and then left him to his food as I walked slowly from room to room, searching for cold spots, listening for inexplicable sounds and sniffing the slightly musty air for peculiar scents.

      Nothing seemed amiss even in the large front bedroom, which I assumed had belonged to George and Mary. I’d chosen the space for myself because of the southern exposure, but I’d spent very little time in the room. On most nights, the summer heat chased me out to the back porch where I would lie in the hammock watching the stars until I grew drowsy.

      I wondered now if I had avoided the room because I’d subconsciously picked up on a disturbing feel—that sense of wrongness I’d experienced on the back steps. My gaze traveled over the room, searching every corner and crevice. If I peeled back the area rug at the end of the bed, would I find bloodstains on the floorboards? If I emptied my mind, would I feel the reverberation from Mary Willoughby’s screams?

      There was nothing here, I told myself. No ghosts. No evil presence. Just that slight fusty odor that came from aging places. The house remained at peace.

      Even so, I quickly packed up all my belongings and hauled my suitcase down the hallway to one of the smaller bedrooms at the rear of house. After I stored my things, I took a long, cool shower and put on a fresh nightgown before wandering back out to the kitchen.

      Angus had finished his dinner by this time. He seemed content to curl up in a corner and watch drowsily as I ate a bowl of cereal standing at the sink. Then fetching my laptop, I settled down at the table for an evening of research.

      So much had happened I hardly knew where to start. As on edge as I already was about the house, I decided to leave the topic of the Willoughbys for another day, concentrating instead on memento mori symbolism and the concept of triplism. I found a wealth of information on the transmigration of souls, but nothing at all on the Eternal Brotherhood of Resurrectionists or their enemy, the Congé. Finally putting all that aside, I searched through dozens of mortsafe images trying to find a duplicate or similar design to the cages in the clearing.

      I had hoped once I began my research, a pattern would emerge that would help define my investigation, but by the time I finally closed my laptop for the night, enlightenment still eluded me.

      Angus followed me out to the porch and I stood at the screen door, gazing into the darkness while he took care of business. I saw no ghosts hovering at the edge of the yard, no in-betweens skulking through the shadows, but the dead world seemed closer than it had in months.

      Little wonder I felt so unnerved. It wasn’t every day Darius Goodwine came to me with a dangerous proposition. I half expected to catch a glimpse of him lurking in the shadows, but nothing stirred. The night was calm and yet my heart continued to race.

      As if sensing my unease, Angus came trotting over to the door, whimpering to be let in. I placed a hand on his back and felt the bristle of his fur.

      “What’s out there?” I murmured.

      If only he had been able to warn me.

      * * *

      That night I dreamed about Devlin. He appeared to me in the cemetery in much the same way as Darius Goodwine had. I looked up from cleaning headstones and there he was, standing so deeply in the shadows of the old church ruins that I thought at first he must be a mirage. When I tried to speak to him, he lifted a finger to his lips to silence me. And when I would have gone to him, he shook his head as if to warn me away. The dream seemed so real and I felt his presence so strongly that, when I awakened, I almost expected to find him standing over me. Instead, I saw Annalee Nash peering down at me in the dark.

      I bolted upright in bed. The moonlight streaming in through the windows was so bright I didn’t bother with the lamp. Clutching the covers to my chest, I glanced around, certain I would find Annalee hiding in one of the corners, but no one was there. I must have still been dreaming when I saw her.

      Angus was nowhere to be found so I climbed out of bed and padded down the hallway to look for him. He stood on the back porch peering through the screen into the yard. He didn’t seem alarmed or frightened, but when I opened