“And it’s one I refuse to utter until he stops attacking me.”
“Accord him the same sort of respect as Belle, and he just might.”
“Belle doesn’t claw the hell out of my hand the minute she sees me.” Although I daresay she’d been tempted to swat me over the head on more than a few occasions over the years.
Monty snorted. “Eamon says he did sense something in passing, but lost the trail in that clearing. Have you tried to track the owner of the watch yet?”
“No, because someone rang before I could. Hang on.”
I brought the watch into the light. “There’s an inscription on the back—Congrats on graduating, love Mom and Dad.”
“Which suggests the watch isn’t something the owner would have lost willingly. Is the catch broken?”
“Yes.”
He grunted. “So it’s minutely possible that—despite the strips of skin—he didn’t realize it had fallen off. Can you hustle and do that reading?”
“If you’d stop bloody talking, I might just be able to.”
He grunted again. It was not a happy sound.
I half smiled and wrapped my fingers around the watch face, trying to avoid the bits of dried skin, but nevertheless catching a couple. I shivered at the papery feel of them, but concentrated on the faint caress of energy and unleashed the psychic part of me.
For several seconds, nothing happened. All I could feel, all I could sense, was shadows and darkness. I frowned and tried to go deeper—tried to get some sense of not only who owned the watch, but also what might be happening to him.
Nothing.
Frustrated, I tightened my grip and pressed it harder into my palm. A dark force rose to resist me—one tha
t didn’t belong to the watch’s owner, or even to whoever he might have been with.
That barrier was death—one that had occurred days ago.
Which was rather odd, given how deeply the watch had been buried—or was that merely the result of someone covering their crime? Was there, perhaps, a whole lot more than just a watch to be found here?
“Anything?” Monty said.
I eased the fierceness of my grip. “No. Whoever owned the watch died a few days ago.”
“No ghost?”
“Not that I can sense, but Belle’s the spirit talker, not me.”
“You can’t contact her? Get her out there?”
“No, I can’t, because she’s in Melbourne rather than here.”
“What’s she doing in Melbourne?”
“That’s none of your damn business, dear cousin.”
He chuckled softly. “So I guess this is basically a false alarm.”
“Not necessarily.” I carefully placed the watch on the top of the leaf pile, then scooped up a bigger stick and began shoveling more dirt aside. “It strikes me as odd that it was buried so deeply.”
“You think it was deliberate?”
“I do.” And we’d find out soon enough if I was correct or not—if whatever else might be buried here wasn’t too deep.