Excerpt: The Buried Box

He was herding. Cows, he thought, though their shapes were vague in the fog swirling between him and their stocky forms. The air was tepid on his face and dampened the curls of his hair to his neck and forehead.

My hair is short. And straight.

A figure moved between the cattle, a broad-shouldered man with a light step. He prowled between the cows like a mountain cat. He carried a pole that might have been a shepherd's crook, except it had no crook on the end. The wan light struggling through the fog glinted off the tip of the pole when it caught it.

Fear sunk deep into his belly, but he moved toward the figure. He held his own crook with both hands, carrying it ready to defend himself or the cattle he was charged to protect.

The man stopped to watch his approach. He stood easy, balance on both legs, the pole nestled in the crook of one arm. The fog cleared from between them until he could see the man's shorn head, his heavy black beard, and the beaten bronze chest plate belted over the leather fringe of his war skirt.

"Shepherding like a boy," the man said in a baritone that echoed across the foggy hillside like a war drum. "This is beneath the son of a god."

The fog swirled and melted away and the hillside flattened into a broken field. The man's shoulders became less broad, his hair more full, his beard trimmed. His trousers were muddy to the knee, and his shirt was sweat stained. The grey coat he wore over it was torn at the hems, with dark stains dotting it. In one hand he carried a musket with a bayonet fixed to the end. In the other, a head.

"Put it in the box," he demanded, holding out the head.

Ryan sat up in alarm. He didn't know when the dream had started, but he knew that for the last few moment, he hadn't been asleep and the images had kept coming. His mouth was cottony and he was slick with sweat. He waited for the images to fade, but they didn't. Instead, he could feel the severed head in his hands, feel the rough hewn wood of the newly made box under his fingertips as he set the head inside.

Ryan got out of bed and paced the room twice, his fists pressed against his temples. A dream, that's all. Just a dream. He couldn't have had anything to do with that box.

But in the field, hunched over it after sliding down the slope, he'd touched it and felt . . . sickened. Like he knew what he'd find inside.

How could he have known?

Ryan forced himself to stand still. The clock on his bedside read 4:27. His alarm would have gone off by five.

Instead of dressing, he went into the bathroom and showered, letting hot water soak him as he tried to push the images from his mind. But the smells, the tepid earthiness of the hillside, the fragrant of blooming trees nearby, the stink of cows and sweat. And the mud and decay of that ragged field. The stench of death and fresh cut wood.

The water started to turn cold. He switched it off, wanting to leave some of Audrey when she woke.

He toweled off and dressed before going to the kitchen. It was dark outside. Not a year ago, he'd be heading out to feed the horse and the pigs and check on the rabbits. There was nothing to feed now, no animals warming up the barn, no cats pawing at the back door for kibble.

But he wasn't alone. Audrey was here. Thank god, Audrey was here.

He set up the coffee maker and went to the office. It seemed all too soon that the computer was up and humming, brightening the dark confining space of the cluttered little room. He pulled up the search history until he found the one for Harper's Ferry.

Shock drove a stake through his middle.

'Sheriff Robert Dunstan with local man Matthew Arning and unknown woman with the box Mr. Arning discovered in Cooper's field.'

Margaret Meadows. Her name had been Margaret Meadows. Ryan knew it with the same certain as he knew his cousin's name.

But how did he know.

And that box, that box, with the leg poking from it. He could see it lying in the hole at the edge of a field. Always a field.

A battlefield, the man had scoffed.

Ryan's head sunk into his hands.

What was wrong with him?