I am a living ghost, a wanderer in search of my purpose and place...
Im a cemetery restorer by trade, but my calling has evolved from that of ghost seer to death walker to detective of lost souls. I solve the riddles of the dead so the dead will leave me alone.
Ive come to Seven Gates Cemetery nursing a broken heart, but peace is hard to come by...for the ghosts here and for me. When the body of a young woman is discovered in a caged grave, I know that Ive been summoned for a reason. Only I can unmask her killer. I want to trust the detective assigned to the case for he is a ghost seer like me. But how can I put my faith in anyone when supernatural forces are manipulating my every thought? When reality is ever-changing? And when the one person I thought I could trust above all others has turned into a diabolical stranger?
Praise for THE GRAVEYARD QUEEN series by Amanda Stevens
The beginning of Stevens GRAVEYARD QUEEN series left this reviewer breathless. The author smoothly establishes characters and forms the foundation of future storylines with an edgy and beautiful writing style. Her story is full of twists and turns, with delicious and surprising conclusions. Readers will want to force themselves to slow down and enjoy the book instead of speeding through to the end, and theyll anxiously await the next installment of this deceptively gritty series.
RT Book Reviews on The Restorer
The Restorer is by turns creepy and disturbing, mixed with mystery and a bit of romance. Amelia is a strong character who has led a hard andof necessitysecret life. She is not close to many people, and her feelings for Devlin disturb her greatly. Although at times unnerving, The Restorer is well written and intriguing, and an excellent beginning to a new series.
Misti Pyles, Fort Worth Examiner
I could rhapsodize for hours about how much I enjoyed
The Restorer. Amanda Stevens has woven a web of intricate plot lines that elicit many emotions from her readers. This is a scary, provocative, chilling and totally mesmerizing book. I never wanted it to end and Im going to be on pins and needles until the next book in THE GRAVEYARD QUEEN series comes out.
Fresh Fiction
The Sinner
Amanda Stevens
www.mirabooks.co.uk
Contents
Cover
Back Cover Text
Praise
Title Page
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Extract
Copyright
One
The caged grave was an anomaly in Beaufort County. In all my cemetery travels, Id come across only a handful of mortsafes, all of them in Europe. They were a Scottish invention, cleverly devised and manufactured in the early nineteenth century as a means of thwarting the nefarious grave robbers who dug up fresh human remains for profit.
But body snatching wasnt a modern-day concern, and from what I could see through the tall grass, the cage didnt appear that old. No more than two or three decades, if that. The heavy iron grates had rusted in the salt air, but the rods and plates were still intact and I could see the dull gleam of a steel padlock on the gate.
My pulse quickened as I made my way along the overgrown pathway. It wasnt every day I stumbled across such a fascinating find. Although stumbled was perhaps a misnomer because Id been drawn to that desolate spot for a reason. Lured from my work in Seven Gates Cemetery by a presence as yet unknown to me.
For the past several months, Id been working in a small graveyard that was located near the ruins of an old church in Ascension, South Carolina. Until now, there had been nothing unusual about the restoration. I gathered trash, cleaned headstones and chopped away overgrowth until sunset, and then I went home to a cool shower, a solitary dinner and an early bedtime.
It had become a welcome routine. Even my nights had been uneventful and mostly dreamless. The dog days of summer left me so drained that I slept the sleep of the dead as the Lowcountry sweltered in the August heat. The small air conditioner in my rental provided only the barest relief and so Id taken to sleeping in the hammock on the screened porch. There was something intrinsically soothing about the sea breezes that swept in from the islands and the songbirds that serenaded me from the orange grove.
Here in this coastal oasis, Charleston seemed a million miles away and so did John Devlin. I told myself thats what I wanted. After the events that had unfolded over a year ago in Kroll Cemetery, the gulf between us had widened until Id felt I had no choice but to give Devlin the space he seemed to need.
His leave from the Charleston Police Department had turned into a permanent resignation, and the last Id heard he was working for his grandfather, a situation I couldnt have imagined a year ago. A lot of things had happened that I could never have imagined, not the least of which were the changes Id undergone. The one constant, however, was the ache in my heart. After all this time, Devlins absence from my life still pained me.
Which was why a challenging restoration in a new location was a welcome distraction. Seven Gates had come at just the right time after a long, lonely winter of hibernation. Spring had brought resolve and renewed commitment to my work, and the peace and quiet of the cemetery had restored my rocky equilibrium. But I should have known the calm wouldnt last for long. It never did.
A shadow passed across the landscape and I glanced skyward where a buzzard floated in lazy circles over the treetops. The day was hot and still. The Spanish moss hung nearly motionless from the live oaks and the resurrection fern clinging to the bark had curled and browned in the heat.
As I stood watching the vulture, my heart started to pound even harder. Nothing stirred. Animal, ghost or otherwise. And yet I knew somethingsomeonewas there, hidden among the shadows.
Why did you bring me here? I silently implored as I turned to scour the woods behind me. What do you want from me?
No answer. Nothing but the silken rustle of the palmettos.
The mortsafe was an intriguing find, but I didnt think it the sole reason Id been drawn to this place. Nor was the isolation of the interment. Quarantined graves were hardly unique, and in bygone days, any number of reasonssuicide, thievery or suspicion of witchcraftcould have kept the deceased from a consecrated burial in the churchyard. No, something more was at play here. A mystery that had yet to reveal itself.
A stray breeze ruffled the damp tendrils that had escaped from my ponytail, and despite the heat, I felt the dance of frosty fingers up and down my spine. Another vulture joined the first and I tracked them for a moment longer before dropping my gaze to comb the shadowy tree line. I could have sworn I heard chanting coming from somewhere deep in the woods. A distant singsong that dissolved into silence as the wind died away.
I turned back to the path, trudging onward as I slapped at the mosquitoes and gnats rising up from the grass to flog me. The palmettos barely stirred now and no other sound came to me. The utter silence of the clearing engulfed me.
The fingers that tickled the base of my neck now slid with icy precision across my scalp. The hair on my arms lifted as the still air suddenly became rank with the sulfurous odor of the nearby salt marsh. The chanting came to me again, hushed and distant, no more than a whispered repetition that vanished the moment I glanced over my shoulder.
I hurried my steps, driven by a force I had yet to understand. Not once did I consider the alternative of fleeing back along the path to the cemetery. I had come too far and the prodding from the watcher in the woods was too strong.
As I drew closer, I could see the cage more clearly through the weeds. It was a heavy device with a series of rods and plates padlocked together to safeguard the buried remains. In the old days, the contraption would have protected the grave until decay rendered the corpse useless to the medical schools and anatomists that employed the body snatchers. Then the mortsafe would have been unlocked, removed and placed over another grave.
Not so this cage. The edges were anchored in cement, making the safe virtually immovable by human hand or Mother Nature. Thorny vines with heart-shaped leaves coiled around the rods and weeds jutted up through the grates. So thorough the camouflage, a casual passerby wouldnt have glimpsed the cage at all. No telling how long it had remained hidden and forsaken until the watcher in the woods had summoned me here to find it.
I was near enough now that I could see the sunken dirt beneath the grid. At any other time, I would have searched for a marker or headstone, but now I gave the grave only a cursory examination because something else had caught my eye.
About ten feet to my right, Id glimpsed another cage. From what I could see through the weeds and vines, the device appeared identical to the first except for one grisly addition.
Inside the mortsafe, a pair of hands rose up out of a freshly mounded grave to grasp the iron grate.
Two
The hands were tiny and delicate. Pale with a chalky bluish tint beneath the crust of dirt. Smooth and unblemished save for the dried blood around the broken nails. Not the hands of a child, I realized, but of a small woman. Young and Caucasian.
I tried to tear my gaze from the horrifying scene, but I couldnt look away. I stood motionless, sweat soaking through my shirt as a suffocating dread settled over me. I was stunned by the discovery and nearly breathless with fright. I even had a moment of déjà vu that took me back to the Oak Grove murders and to the gruesome discoveries Id made there with Devlin.
But even in such a distressed state, I had the presence of mind to take stock of the situation and make sure I was in no immediate danger. Except for that unknown presence in the woods, I seemed to be alone.
My evolved senses were so attuned to the environment, I could hear the ruffle of feathers high up in a treetop and the distant lap of water against its banks. I could smell the brine from the saltwater marsh and the woodsy aroma of the evergreens, but nothing human came to me. No lingering energy. No telltale malodor of sweat and excitement.
Almost against my will, I drew a deeper breath, testing the air for a hint of decay, which might have given me an indication of how long the body had been buried. The absence of putrefaction suggested a fresh death. The flesh on the backs of the hands and on what I could see of the arms jutting up through the dirt appeared somewhat supple, leaving me to wonder just how recently blood had flowed through the poor womans veins.
Perhaps only a matter of moments before I had come upon the grave. If only I had arrived sooner...
You might also be dead, a little voice whispered. Locked inside one of those metal cages for all eternity.
Shaking off a stifling claustrophobia, I refocused my attention on the properties of the mortsafe. Like the first cage, the edges had been anchored in cement so that it couldnt be easily moved. The metal rods and lattice had rusted in places, but the padlock looked fairly new, having been placed on the gate so recently that the salt air hadnt yet corroded the steel.