The Sinner

by Amanda Stevens

  As I sat there staring out at the road, a white sedan pulled up alongside the entrance and the elderly driver craned his neck for a look inside the gate. No doubt one of the gawkers Kendrick had warned me about the day before. I was still surprised that more hadn’t come. Murder and mayhem were common attractions. People who led otherwise mundane lives often found crime scenes irresistible.

  The driver’s window lowered as the car inched along. A snowy-haired woman in the passenger seat leaned across the console toward her husband in order to get a better look. When the man spotted us beneath the trees, he stopped the car and got out. Putting up a hand to shade his eyes, he walked through the gate and called out to us. “Hello! We saw the police cars and wondered what happened.”

  “There’s nothing to see here.” Kendrick gave a dismissive wave. “Just go on about your business.”

  “Young man, we have people buried in this cemetery,” the woman scolded from the open car window. “If something happened here, it is our business.”

  “Nothing happened in the cemetery,” Kendrick said. “Now get back in your car and move along. You’re blocking the road.”

  His harsh admonishment drew twin scowls of disapproval and embarrassment from the couple. The man hustled back to the car and climbed in, grumbling furiously to his wife before shooting Kendrick a contemptuous glare. Then he put the car in gear and drove off.

  “Don’t you think you were a bit hard on them?” I asked. “You said yourself the curious would come.”

  “They always do. Predictable as clockwork.”

  “I would think predictability an asset in your line of work.”

  “Depends on your perspective,” he said with a shrug. “When you’ve done what I do long enough, it all starts to seem depressingly the same. Even the victims. Predictability becomes less of an asset and more of an albatross. It’s wearing.”

  “Do you really have that much crime in Ascension?” I asked. “It seems like such a sleepy town.”

  “I haven’t always lived in Ascension. But human nature is basically the same wherever you go.”

  “I understand your point, but I find it difficult to imagine a world in which a woman buried alive inside a caged grave could be considered predictable.”

  “As I said, it’s all about perspective.”

  I couldn’t tell if his viewpoint was that of a cynic, a sociopath or a little of both.

  I set the water bottle aside and leaned back on my hands as I gazed out over the cemetery. I saw nothing among the graves to indicate Darius Goodwine or anyone else had been there only moments earlier. The scent of ozone had faded and the storm clouds that darkened the landscape earlier had now moved back out to sea.

  Kendrick kept his distance, standing several feet away in profile, arms at his sides, feet slightly apart. As I studied his silhouette, I became overly aware of the curl of his long lashes, the slight arch of his dark brows. He’d discarded his jacket in the heat so that I couldn’t help but take in the definition of his forearms and biceps and the broad expanse of his chest beneath the dark gray of his shirt.

  I wasn’t attracted to Lucien Kendrick, although I could certainly appreciate his attractions. It took nothing away from my feelings for Devlin to admit this. Not that it mattered now that Devlin had removed himself from my life. I felt a pang at that thought and drew in a breath to dispel it.

  Kendrick looked up sharply and I felt my face warm as our gazes connected. His expression was hard to define, but the glint in his eyes made me remember yet again Darius Goodwine’s warning to trust no one.

  I stirred restlessly on the cooler. “Can I ask you a question?”

  He turned once again to watch the road. “What is it?”

  I picked up the water bottle, rolling it between my hands. “Your accent. It’s hardly discernible except for the way you pronounce certain words. I’m usually pretty good with dialects, but I haven’t been able to pinpoint it. You’ve a bit of the Sea Islands in certain inflections, but sometimes I would almost swear I hear the trace of a French accent in your vowels.”

  “That’s not a question,” he said.

  “Where are you from?”

  I wasn’t sure he would answer. There was something very dark and furtive about Lucien Kendrick, but to my surprise, he seemed to relax a bit as he moved in a few steps. “You’ve a good ear. Not many people pick up on the accent. I thought I’d lost it years ago.”

  “So you are French?”

  “A quarter on my father’s side.”

  “Is that where you grew up? In France?”

  “I was born here in Beaufort County. We lived on Port Royal Island until I was nine, and then after my parents split, my father moved us to New Orleans. When I was thirteen he sent me to Paris to live with his mother. Once I turned eighteen...” The slightest hesitation. “I moved around a lot. Prague, Istanbul...” Another hesitation. “Ghazni.”

  I wondered if he’d been in the service. That would explain the way he carried himself, but the eyebrow piercing and body art was at odds with what seemed to be a military bearing.

  “What brought you back here? Do you still have family in the area?”

  “I’m told my mother lives around here somewhere.” He was silent for a moment. “What about you? Native Charlestonian?”

  “I grew up in Trinity. I’ve only lived in Charleston for a couple of years, but I feel as if I have roots in the city. My mother and aunt were born there.”

  “Roots are not always good,” Kendrick said. “Sometimes all they do is drag you down.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s true.’’ I gave him another quick study. “How long have you been back here?”

  “Apparently, not long enough to lose my accent.”

  He seemed amused, which emboldened me. “Can I ask you another question?”

  “You can always ask.”

  “You said yesterday that the house I’m renting has a history. What did you mean?”

  He lifted a hand to scratch the stubble on his neck. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Yes, of course. And it must be something you think I should know or you wouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “I only brought it up because I found your choice of living arrangements...odd.”

  “Why?”

  His gaze darted to the church ruins and to the woods beyond. “People say that place is evil.”

  Six

  Kendrick’s words faded away, leaving a sinister silence. I thought instantly of that shadow moving through the trees, quick and furtive. Then I thought of the inked skull on Kendrick’s hand. The triskele that Darius had drawn in the dirt. The curlicue of a tattoo on the inside of the dead woman’s wrist.

  A pattern was starting to form. I felt the tiniest prick of a dark premonition.

  “It’s not haunted,” I said, and then realizing he might find my definitive tone curious, I hurriedly added, “At least, I haven’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary in the nearly three months I’ve been living there. My stay has been quite peaceful, in fact.”

  “Maybe that has more to do with you than the house,” Kendrick suggested.

  “So what happened there?”

  He seemed to measure his response before answering. “I’ll tell you what I’ve heard on one condition. If you’re still curious once we’re done, you’ll limit your research to the internet.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not a good idea to go around talking about that house. People here don’t particularly like it when strangers start asking questions and they get more than a little defensive about the town’s past.”

  “I’ll be discreet. You have my word. But now you have to tell me.”

  He turned back to the woods. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed ill at ease.
He twisted a silver ring on his finger, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he scanned the trees. I followed his gaze, peering intently into the deepest part of the shadows, but nothing glided among the tree trunks. Nothing floated up into the branches. Whatever I’d glimpsed earlier had fled with Darius Goodwine’s disappearance. Or perhaps Detective Kendrick had once again chased away the watcher.

  I glanced up at him, my gaze settling unexpectedly on his mouth, which was not as aesthetically pleasing as Devlin’s. But the bloom of his bottom lip cast an intriguing shadow in the hollow of his chin and softened the harsher line of his upper lip and jaw. It was a purposeful mouth and there was sensuality in the resoluteness of its lines.

  I tore my gaze away with a shiver. Where on earth had that come from? I didn’t like having such thoughts about Lucien Kendrick. They were foreign to me and I didn’t trust they were my own rather than another of Darius Goodwine’s manipulations. Why he would want to foster an attraction between Detective Kendrick and me, I couldn’t imagine, but I put nothing past him. Maybe he wanted to prove how easily he could control me, or more likely, he wanted to drive a deeper wedge between Devlin and me so that I would be more receptive to him. I could be reaching, but it was the only way I knew to explain my feelings.

  Unless the manipulation came from Kendrick himself. For all I knew, he was as masterful at head games as Darius. He was certainly no ordinary cop. My instincts had warned me from the start to keep a safe distance, and now that I knew he had a connection or at least an acquaintance with Darius Goodwine, I would be even more careful.

  Darius’s negative reaction to Kendrick’s name should have fostered a kinship with the detective if for no other reason than the old adage the enemy of my enemy is my friend. But Kendrick was just a little too slippery, a little too mysterious, and I couldn’t shake the notion that he had already known about those cages before he arrived on the scene.

  His stillness now was so absolute, his silence so intense, that I couldn’t help wondering if he was trying to slip past my defenses. Was he inside my head even now?

  It seemed as though the quiet had stretched on forever, but only a few seconds had passed before Kendrick turned back to me. “A couple by the name of George and Mary Willoughby once lived in that house, along with their young daughter, Annie. By all accounts, they were a close family. God-fearing, church-going, salt-of-the-earth types. Then seemingly overnight, George became delusional. He told his neighbors that his wife was not who she seemed to be. She’d gotten involved with some very bad people. Satan-worshippers, he said, but there was never any evidence of the practice in this area. He insisted he’d caught them conducting the devil’s business right in his own home.”

  “What did he mean by the devil’s business?”

  “Séances. Rituals.” Kendrick’s gaze darkened. “Who knows what else? He claimed they were trying to raise the dead.”

  Raise the dead.

  I felt the dart of cold apprehension in my veins. I wanted to take all this in calmly, but it was hard to keep a neutral expression in light of my conversation with Darius Goodwine.

  “Raise the dead...how?”

  “There were ceremonies. Certain spells and incantations. The leader of the group was a root worker named Atticus Pope, who claimed to have descended from a powerful witch doctor. Willoughby swore he saw Pope change forms right before his eyes. From man to beast and back. Like the loup-garous my grandmother used to tell me about when I was a boy.”

  “Loup-garous? As in werewolves? Shape-shifters? You don’t believe that, surely.”

  “People see what they want to see,” Kendrick said.

  Or were persuaded to see by the likes of Darius Goodwine. I thought about how easily and subtly he had planted the notion of corpse beetles in my subconscious so that I’d manifested one on my arm and another on my neck. If the root doctor named Atticus Pope had been half as cunning and powerful as Darius Goodwine, he could have made poor George Willoughby see almost anything.

  “I assume there’s more to the story,” I said as I turned my attention back to Kendrick.

  “Willoughby chased away the group with a shotgun, but things were never right with his wife after that. He was convinced something evil had taken over her body.”

  “He thought she was possessed?”

  “Apparently.”

  According to Darius’s simplistic and disturbing explanation, possession was like a hostile takeover, but transference was a peaceful merger between the living and the dead. Had Mary been willing?

  “What happened to her?”

  “Her husband murdered her in her sleep and buried the body in an unknown location. Or so the story goes. But that’s mostly an assumption because all that was ever found of the woman, apart from the blood-soaked bedclothing, was a hank of her hair clutched in George’s hand. The police discovered him in the shed behind the orchard where he’d gone after he disposed of her body. He’d put the barrel of the shotgun in his mouth and used his toe to pull the trigger.”

  “That’s quite a gruesome tale,” I said with a shiver.

  “How much of it’s true is anyone’s guess. We’ll probably never know what really happened.” A shadow flickered in Kendrick’s eyes. “You said you haven’t seen or heard anything out of the ordinary in the house, but I would think that if any place is haunted, it would be that shed.”

  “Do you really believe a place can be haunted?” I tried to keep any telltale inflection or inference from my voice, but it wasn’t easy. “Do you believe in ghosts?”

  He didn’t scoff at the question as I’d come to expect, but instead he took a long moment to consider his answer. “I’ve seen a lot of things in my lifetime. Unexplainable things. I learned a long time ago that it’s best to keep an open mind.”

  How different he was from Devlin, who seemed to have an almost pathological need to disavow the supernatural.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Me?” I smiled. “Like you, I try to keep an open mind.”

  Our gazes held for a moment, and I had the strangest notion that if I told Kendrick about my gift, he wouldn’t bat an eye.

  The prospect was at once exhilarating and terrifying, and I reminded myself that I knew nothing about him. He was a perfect stranger. For all I knew, a man as dangerously sly and powerful as Darius Goodwine.

  “I’ve often wondered about that old shed,” Kendrick said. “And whether or not there’s anything still to be found there. Especially when I drive by the Willoughby place at dawn and see patches of the roof peeking through the treetops.”

  “You’ve never stopped to explore?” I asked.

  “That would be trespassing.”

  “Just as well. There’s a padlock on the door and you can’t see much through the windows.”

  “You’ve tried, I take it.”

  “Once or twice. You mentioned a daughter.” Very deliberately, I steered the conversation back to the story. “Where was she when all this happened?”

  “The police found her huddled on the porch. They figured she must have heard the shotgun blast, got up from bed and went out to the shed to investigate. She may even have tried to resuscitate her father because the police said she was covered in blood. So much so that she looked as if she’d been rolling around in a puddle of gore.”

  “That poor child. How old was she when it happened?”

  “Around ten, I think. As I said, a lot of this is assumption and guesswork. The girl was the only witness and she’d fallen into some sort of catatonic trance or fugue state. She couldn’t tell the authorities her name let alone what had transpired between her parents.”

  “What became of her?”

  “She was in a psychiatric hospital for a long time. Then one day she came out of her trance and decided to carry on with her life as though nothing had happened. She cl
aimed to have no memory of that night.”

  “I suppose that’s possible. Trauma-induced amnesia isn’t all that rare.”

  “Anything’s possible,” he said in a strange tone. “She married and moved away when she was still very young, but after her husband died a few years ago, she came back here. As a matter of fact, you know her. Annalee Nash.”

  I stared up at him in shock. “Annalee? But she seems so...”

  “Normal?” he supplied with a sardonic lift of one brow. “That’s a relative term.”

  Didn’t I know it?

  “It’s just that, on the few occasions we’ve spoken, I would never have guessed she’d gone through something so harrowing,” I tried to explain.

  “It’s been my experience that people only let you see what they want you to see.” He shot me another knowing look and I returned his shrewd appraisal.

  “Yes, I’m sure that’s true,” I said slowly, meaningfully.

  He glanced away. “It’s also been my experience that the people you would least expect of guile and subterfuge are the most adept at hiding their true nature—at least for a while. But it almost always surfaces sooner or later, sometimes violently.”

  “I’ve never sensed anything remotely violent in Annalee Nash. She seems quite gentle.”

  “I wasn’t talking about her specifically. We’re all capable of violence under the right circumstances.” Kendrick’s voice hardened ever so slightly. “Even you, I would imagine.”

  “Perhaps so.” But I didn’t like to think about my capabilities in that regard. “They never found Mary’s body?”

  “Not a trace.”

  “Where was her husband buried?”

  “Here in this cemetery. They put him over by the back gate, facing north.”

  Kendrick’s specificity in the location seemed to suggest that he knew the significance of such an arrangement. Most bodies were laid to rest from east to west, facing sunrise and the Second Coming. But not those who were compromised.