The Condemned (Echoes from the Past Book 6)

by Shapiro, Irina

  The Condemned

  Echoes from the Past

  Book 6

  by Irina Shapiro

  Copyright

  © 2018 by Irina Shapiro

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for quotations in printed reviews, without permission in writing from the author.

  All characters are fictional. Any resemblances to actual people (except those who are actual historical figures) are purely coincidental.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Excerpt from The Betrayed (Echoes from the Past Book 7)

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Prologue

  She came to with a hard jolt. Uncontrollable coughing wracked her body and her eyes streamed as she gulped air, but it didn’t seem to fill her burning lungs. She was shaking with cold, and her clothes were wet and smelled of seawater. She tried to move, but her knees slammed into something hard and unyielding, so she held out her hands and tried to straighten her arms, but her palms met with solid wood. She was trapped in a wooden box. A coffin.

  Her chest heaved with panic as the reality of her situation began to sink in. She beat her hands against the lid and screamed for help, but her voice echoed dully, the eerie silence beyond broken only by what might have been the crashing of waves or the flapping of wings. Unbearable anxiety built inside her, rushing at her like an incoming tide, each wave coming harder and faster, and reaching further inland. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, and couldn’t make any sense of what was happening. Her jumbled thoughts scurried like mice, bumping into each other and scrambling in blind panic. And then the pain came, sharp and visceral, a pain that threatened to tear her apart.

  She wrapped her arms around her belly and rested her forehead against the rough wood of the coffin. She was so weak, and so tired. She knew it wouldn’t be long now, and she was glad of it. She was ready. Whoever had done this had sentenced her to death, but perhaps the judgment had come down long before that. She’d gone against the teachings of the Church and the laws of man and attempted to thwart the natural order of things. She had no one to blame, for she’d condemned herself, and her child with her.

  Death would be a welcome release, and as she shivered in its cold embrace, she threw her head back and let out one final cry of anguish.

  A wonderful peace suddenly stole over her, taking away the pain and the unspeakable terror of those final moments. A welcoming white light enveloped her, and she felt as if she were being cradled in loving arms. They wouldn’t let her fall.

  “I’ve got you,” Walker’s voice said softly. “You can let go now. I’ve got you both.” Somewhere, in the deep recesses of her mind, she heard the haunting notes of his death song—but no, this was her own death song, her final act.

  She was nearly gone by the time the infant slithered from her body, its nose pressing against the back of her thighs and its hands balled into fists. Its tiny feet rested against her bottom, but she couldn’t feel the connection. The child whimpered once, and again, and then grew silent as the sodden wool of her skirts smothered it as effectively as a feather pillow.

  Waves crashed against the shore, and a hunter’s moon rose slowly and majestically above the dusky expanse of the sea. A broken mast rose out of the water, its tattered sails hanging on by lengths of torn rigging, and chucks of broken wood floated toward the shore, along with an odd assortment of household items. A man’s body lay face-down in the sand, his dark hair plastered to his head. It had been the first to wash up, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  Chapter 1

  January 2015

  St. Just, Cornwall

  Quinn huddled deeper into her coat as she got out of the car. The day was overcast, the Atlantic a churning, foaming cauldron of granite-colored seawater. The waves crashed onto the beach with relentless frequency, the spray rising several feet off the sand. Several other cars were parked in the tiny car park, one of them Rhys’s Land Rover. Quinn’s hair whipped around her face like Medusa’s snakes as she walked onto the beach and toward the barely visible cave in the craggy face of the rock. Several people milled around, chatting while they waited for her. Rhys was on the phone, as usual, and Darren the cameraman was at the mouth of the cave, positioning the portable light for the best possible exposure. A young woman in a police uniform stood next to Darren, peering into the dark recess of the cave. The police tape had been removed in readiness for Quinn’s arrival.

  Rhys spotted her and waved enthusiastically. He ended his call and pushed the phone into the pocket of his jacket, walking briskly toward her. “About time you got here. I thought you were coming down last night.”

  Quinn didn’t bother to reply to the barb. She’d planned to leave yesterday around noon and arrive in St. Just in the early evening but had wound up leaving at five o’clock that morning. Alex had been fussing and crying, his little face a grimace of misery. His belly aches were not as frequent as they had been before, but still bothered him from time to time, and he had to be walked around the room for hours, until the pain subsided.

  Gabe had tried to comfort the baby, but Quinn had felt awful walking out on a suffering three-month-old, so she’d remained, singing and cooing to him until he finally felt better and fell asleep in her arms. It had been too late to leave by then, so she’d resolved to go first thing in the morning after Alex’s first feeding.

  “Go on,” Gabe had urged Quinn as he took the baby from her. “He’ll be all right.” Alex was pinning her with an accusing stare, as if he
understood she was leaving.

  “When will you be back?” Emma whined.

  “Tomorrow, but I might have to spend an extra night, depending on what I find,” Quinn replied.

  “But you promised to take me shopping. I need stuff for school,” Emma argued.

  “And I will. As soon as I get back.”

  “Go,” Gabe mouthed and blew her a kiss. “We’ll be fine. Send me some photos. I wish I could go with you. This one looks interesting.”

  “I’ll keep you posted. Bye.” Quinn kissed Alex’s sweet-smelling head and Gabe’s unshaved cheek. Emma ducked her kiss and went off to her room in a huff to get ready for school.

  “Has Darren started filming yet?” Quinn asked as she approached the mouth of the cave. Like most working mums, she had to set aside her guilt and focus on the job.

  “No, we were waiting for you,” Rhys replied. “Quinn, it’s not pleasant.”

  “Rhys, at this stage, I think I’ve seen it all.”

  Quinn ducked her head and entered the cave. It was a narrow opening about five feet high. The sand beneath her boots was damp, but there was a natural ledge on which the coffin rested. The wood was warped and bleached, the nails orange with flaking rust. The lid was currently closed, but the coffin had already been opened. When Rhys had arrived in St. Just to follow up on a call to the Echoes from the Past hotline, he’d put in a call to the local constabulary and opened the ancient coffin in the presence of a police officer, on the off-chance that the remains weren’t as old as he suspected. He already knew what was inside. Quinn had only seen a photo of the skull, and it had been a disturbing image. She braced herself for what she was about to find and lifted the lid.

  The skeleton lay on its side, the knees pressed against the wood of the coffin. The arms must have been crossed over the belly, but now rested at an unnatural angle, no longer supported by soft tissue. The head was thrown back, the mouth grotesquely open, as if in a scream, and a hole, the size of a golf ball gaped in the top of the skull.

  Quinn’s hand flew to her mouth as she peered deeper into the coffin. Rhys was right, she’d never seen anything like this. Despite years of damp, she could see brown stains that discolored the wood beneath the skeleton’s pelvic area. A skeleton of a baby lay between the mother’s pelvic bone and the femurs of her legs. It was curled up like a shrimp, its feet pointing toward its mother’s pelvis. The umbilical cord had decomposed after all this time, but it was obvious that the child had been born once the mother was already inside the coffin. Quinn bolted from the cave and grabbed onto the jagged rockface of the cliff for support as her stomach turned itself inside out. Rhys was instantly at her side, handing her a pack of tissues.

  “You could have warned me,” Quinn panted as she wiped her mouth and took a sip of water from a bottle one of Rhys’s assistants passed her.

  “I thought I had.”

  “Stop filming,” Quinn barked at Darren, who was capturing her volatile reaction on camera.

  “Are you kidding me? This is cinematic gold,” Rhys argued.

  Quinn gave him an accusing stare. “You’re not showing that to the world.”

  “All right. I’ll have it edited out. The viewers will see you gasp and flee and then return looking purposeful and composed, the consummate professional.”

  “I’ve never seen anything so horrible,” Quinn confessed as she leaned against the rocks and took several deep breaths to calm her heaving stomach.

  “What are we dealing with here?” Rhys asked, too impatient to give her a few moments to herself.

  “At first glance, I’d say we’re looking at a live coffin birth.”

  “And what’s that, exactly?”

  Quinn sighed. She’d come across one other coffin birth, on a dig in Rome, but it had been nothing like this. The child had been born once the mother was already dead, expelled from the body through the anus by gasses that built up once decomposition began. The baby would have died in utero, so neither mother nor child would have suffered during the birth.

  “Normally, a coffin birth occurs after the death of a woman who’s in the final stages of pregnancy. Both mother and child are deceased by that stage and the birth is a result of decomposition.”

  “And abnormally?” Rhys asked, well aware that what they were looking at was not a normal phenomenon.

  “Based on the position of the skeleton, the bloodstains at the bottom of the coffin, and the position of the child, I’d say this poor woman went into labor after she’d been declared dead and laid to rest. I think both mother and child were alive at the time of the birth.”

  “And the hole in her head?” Rhys asked. “Do you think someone tried to murder her?”

  Quinn shook her head. “The hole is not a result of blunt force trauma. That hole was deliberately made. It’s too perfect to be random.”

  “What on earth would account for someone drilling a hole in a pregnant woman’s skull?” Rhys demanded, clearly shocked by the picture Quinn was painting.

  “I think the hole is evidence of trepanation.”

  “What the bloody hell is that?”

  “It’s an arcane medical procedure used to relieve pressure on the brain.”

  “Are you sure?” Rhys gaped at her, horrified.

  “I’m fairly sure, but I won’t commit to anything on film until Dr. Scott has a chance to properly analyze the remains.”

  “This is strictly off the record,” Rhys replied. “This is you and me talking.”

  “I know, but I’d still like to talk to Colin first.”

  “Absolutely. I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Rhys replied. “Are you ready to go back in?”

  “Yes. I will take photos in situ, then bag and label the bones. I’d like to finish up today.”

  “What’s the rush?” Rhys asked as he followed Quinn back toward the mouth of the cave, where Darren was already adjusting the angle of the camera to film Quinn reentering the cave.

  “Honestly, I just want to get it over with.”

  “I knew this one would get under your skin,” Rhys said joyfully as he trailed her. Unlike Quinn, he had no trouble separating the professional from the personal and never allowed a case to affect him.

  “Are fairies of Sunday night ratings dancing in your head?” Quinn asked, amused by Rhys’s glee.

  “Quinn, I know this is gruesome, and I feel the utmost pity for the poor creature in that box, but when it comes to archeological programs, this is solid ratings gold.”

  “Right. Let me get on with it, then.”

  Quinn took a deep breath and reentered the eerily illuminated cave. The low ceiling made her feel claustrophobic, and despite the glaring light directed at the inside of the coffin, she felt as if she were buried alive. Quinn pushed aside her feelings and went to work, carefully recording her findings, and removing the bones one by one and stowing them in plastic bags. She left the baby for last, reluctant to touch the tiny skull and fragile bones. She hoped the baby hadn’t suffered, but there was no way to tell for certain if it had been born alive. Perhaps Colin would be able to tell her more once he spent some quality time with the remains.

  Finally, having finished with the skeletons of mother and child, Quinn peered into the empty coffin. Her gaze kept straying to the bloodstains, but she forced herself to look away and keep searching. She needed to find something that had belonged to the woman. Despite the cave’s cool interior, nothing was left of the woman’s clothing or shoes. There were no buttons or buckles, no wedding ring or jewelry of any kind. Thankfully, a few strands of hair still clung to the skull. Colin would be able to extract DNA and run some preliminary tests before deciding whether he’d need to grind the woman’s tooth to powder to extract genetic information, a costly procedure that would torpedo the budget for the program.

  Quinn turned on the light on her mobile and shone the sharp beam into the corners of the coffin in the hope that a coin or a button had rolled away and settled between the slats. No glint of metal revealed it
self, but a gleam of white caught her eye. She reached into the top left-hand corner and tugged. The object that had been lodged between the slats came free. It was a hair comb made of bone, a cheap trinket that would have belonged to a woman who couldn’t afford ivory or tortoiseshell. The comb must have fallen out of the woman’s hair while she thrashed about. The comb was narrow and long, the type used to hold hair in place rather than for brushing. Its teeth were broken, but the top remained intact, the bone carved into a flower that would be visible when the comb was inserted into the hair. It would hopefully shed some light on who the unfortunate inhabitant of the coffin had been.

  Having bagged the comb, Quinn was ready to finish up for the day. She pulled off her latex gloves and laid a hand atop the woman’s ruined skull, cradling it through the plastic bag. She bowed her head and whispered, “Don’t worry, we will be respectful of you and your baby.”

  Chapter 2

  By the time Quinn emerged from the cave, the sun had come out and the sea had stilled. A glorious sunset painted the winter sky, bands of crimson and gold dramatically streaking the horizon and reflecting in the now deep-blue water of the Atlantic. The ragged cliff face that had looked dangerous and unyielding during the day was now softened by the deepening violet of the sky, giving the beach a mystical quality.

  Quinn stowed the box of bones in the boot of her car and turned to Rhys, who was standing behind her. “I’ll finish up tomorrow. There’s no need to send the entire coffin to Colin, but I’d like to take several samples of wood for testing. Colin might be able to extract some dried blood from the boards and also tell me the approximate period of construction.”

  “Did you find anything of a personal nature on her?” Rhys asked, his voice low. In England, only Rhys and Gabe knew of Quinn’s ability to see into the past by holding an object that had belonged to the dead. Her half-brother Brett Besson, whom she’d met in New Orleans last spring, also possessed the gift and knew of Quinn’s special talent, but she preferred not to dwell on their brief but volatile relationship. He was currently serving a ten-year sentence in a Louisiana penitentiary for the attempted murder of Quinn and her unborn baby, and although Brett had written to her in an effort to make amends, she’d not read the letter. It still rested at the bottom of her nightstand drawer, where it would remain until she packed her personal belongings for the move to the new house, and she would likely never bother to unpack that particular box. If only she could pack away the memory of what had happened along with the letter and leave it in the furthest, darkest corner of the attic, never to be opened again.