The Secret of Bourke's Mansion by Carolyn (Moyer) Swayze

Author:Carolyn (Moyer) Swayze [(Moyer) Swayze, Carolyn]
Language: en-us
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

She backed out of the door, the screams still rising from her throat. She wanted to run, run to safety. Where? Where was safe? “Oh, Casey, why, why, why?”

She thought she saw a flash of movement in the garden. Looking again, she could see nothing. “I have to go in. Maybe he’s not dead.”

Shakily unlocking the door, she steeled herself for the awful sight. Averting her eyes, she dragged a chair below the still-swinging cat. With a butcher knife, she cut the thin rope from his neck. He was quite dead, she realized, as she stared at the stiff body.

Tears coursed down her cheeks. He looked so different. Different. With a moan of pain she realized his tail had been brutally hacked off. There it was, on the table. With a scream of frightened rage, she saw that next to the tail was scrawled the bloody message, “You next.”

She ran hysterically through the house, searching everywhere for the person who had done this monstrous thing. “How could you?” she cried again and again and again. Only the wind echoed her cry. She flopped onto the bed in exhaustion, letting the tears have their way. At length the sobs came less rapidly, giving way to a remorse of greater heaviness than she had ever known. With dull detachment she made her slow way to the

kitchen, where she gently wrapped Casey and his tail in a towel. A shovel. That was the solution. There was a shovel in the woodshed. She stepped out into the yard, eyes darting nervously while she placed the stiff body on a stump, retrieved the shovel and began to dig in the garden. The ground was stubborn, hard packed, unwilling to yield easily. She persevered, chopping with the energy of pent-up anger until at last the surface was broken.

She dug methodically, strangely calm and intent on her task. The grave was large enough, but she continued to dig, strangely mesmerized by the therapeutic effect of pushing and lifting and tossing the dirt into a neat pile. Eventually she stopped and tenderly lowered Casey into the grave. The therapeutic benefit had ended. Now anger and determination spurred her on. She rapidly refilled the hole, anxious to be finished, to forget what she was doing. When she had patted the ground smooth, she replaced the shovel and returned to the cold, unwelcoming house. If she simply went to bed as she wanted to, it would only get colder, she knew. She lit the lamps and built a careful fire in the stove and fireplaces. She washed the sickening words from the tabletop. Who could be sick enough and vindictive enough to do such a thing? Had all of the islanders been witness to it? Surely they weren’t as emotionally ill as that, even if they did want the property! Now they had gone too far.

She deliberately paced through each room in the house, looking for a sign or clue as to who the murderer could have been. Nothing appeared to be disturbed.

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