BURY ME DEEP an utterly gripping crime thriller with an epic twist (Detective Rozlyn Priest Book 1) JANE ADAMS (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📖

“You expect Kendryk’s help in this? If so, then you’re a fool, Treven, and remember also, that this land is given under the King’s deed. Aelfred can take away what he has given. Don’t forget, my family have the ear of the king and should I have them whisper in that ear that Treven betrayed a comrade and cast him aside? A comrade in arms that the King himself appointed to serve, how long then will you keep this precious place?”

Treven rose from his stool and stared at Hugh with a mixture of incomprehension and pain. Hugh returned his gaze, looking upon Treven’s puzzlement and misreading it. He spoke with a quiet urgency, leaning still closer to his one-time friend. “Treven, I will do none of that, I swear. You only have to let me stay.”

“So you may wait and bide your time and then one day take it from me?” Treven asked him.

He took a deep breath, ignoring Hugh’s protests and then he stepped away towards the door. “Come to me tomorrow, if you can ride. Or the day following if not. I have things to show you. Plans I have made that I would share with you.”

He heard Hugh’s sigh of relief and was glad that the smoke and heat between them, together with the twilight, hid his face. Treven knew that he could never lie without it showing in his eyes.

CHAPTER 38

Rozlyn lost a full day. It passed in a fevered haze. The doctor came, gave her pills and went. Sometimes Ethan sat beside her and read aloud. The words permeated Rozlyn’s dreams, seeped down into her memories so that she was a child again and her grandfather’s voice imparted tales of great adventure.

“Call me Ishmael . . .

“Leave this place and don’t look back. Keep playing and keep your eyes looking forward, Euridice will follow you . . .

“. . . Sir Knight, your honour doth enjoin . . .”

“Treven was a man who knew how to touch the earth and read what was written there . . .”

Most of all, she remembered the day of her parents’ funeral. After, she and her grandfather had walked together in the cemetery and the realisation had dawned, more poignantly than ever, that the two of them were alone and that death had torn from them a whole lifetime of promise. Rozlyn’s parents had divorced when she was nine. Life between nine and sixteen had been lived between two countries. Term time, she had lived her mother’s life and gone to school, first in an English village and then, from eleven, joined the throng of uniformed children in the nearest town. Oakham, almost drowning in history and tradition, with its castle that looked nothing like a castle, but that had, to the child Rozlyn’s eyes, more in common with a large barn and the collection of upside-down horseshoes, the rows of tiny shops and the formal school that took up half the town, filled with kids in blue uniforms.

In the summer she had travelled stateside to her grandparents. New York sweltered in the heat and dust of traffic. Buildings blocked the sky, their tops shimmering in a haze that made them seem unreal. Manhattan was loud with a capital L. Loud and bright and brash and, in her grandfather’s neighbourhood, she went from being one of only a handful of black kids in her school to being one that was counted among the handful of almost white. Her accent was all wrong, the things she learned in school different from those of her peers. Life in a tiny English village and school in a small English town separating her culturally in ways that as a child she found hard to define and even harder to bridge. That as an adult still seemed to set her apart. In both worlds she had been a liminal being and that liminality had not diminished as she had grown to adulthood.

She had friends in both places, often kids that, for one reason or another, shared that sense of being just a little outside of things. A little awkward, a little different. Though as the years passed and lives had gone in different directions those friendships had drifted. In her dreams Rozlyn thought now of those friends, most now settled with families and jobs that absorbed their time. The sense of regret, rarely acknowledged, that she had not accepted invitations to visit, responded to suggestions that they should speak more regularly or, for those old friends who lived more locally, that they should meet up for a drink now struck her forcefully.

“Loneliness is not something we should seek out as if it were a vocation. Friendships matter.”

Was that her grandfather’s voice or was it Ethan’s? Either way she both resented the insight and acknowledged the truth of it.

She missed so many English summers that when she had turned sixteen and spent her first full season there, she had been shocked by the soft rain that fell so often in the evenings and the sudden cold that could blow up before a storm and the high blue skies with no tall apartment buildings to block the view.

The Christmas before her sixteenth birthday, her grandmother had died. She went back for the funeral, grieving for the soft-eyed lady who had loved her so well and so intently. Who taught her to cook, whose little book of recipes Rozlyn still used. Who told her stories and, from one year to the next, kept Rozlyn’s artwork and hesitant attempts at poems pinned to the corkboard on the kitchen wall and who only took the pictures and the poems down when she had new treasures to replace them.

For her parents, this time had been a revelation. Rozlyn’s mother and her father’s parents had always remained friends, even after the divorce. Grief drew her parents together once again and they rediscovered what had brought them close in