Excerpt of Gone and Done It by Maggie Toussaint

“I’m doing my job. Call the sheriff.” Taking a deep breath, I turned my back on Virg and lowered my chest to the ground so that the skull was within arm’s reach. Memories flashed in my head of the last time I’d touched an object belonging to a murder victim.

Horrifying, gut-wrenching, nauseating memories. My body chilled. The smell of the freshly dug earth wafted up through me as if I wasn’t even there. I splayed my hand above the empty eye sockets, focusing my awareness to my trembling fingertips. Virg muttered something else, but his words didn’t register. I was doing this. For me. For Larissa.

I dropped my mental shields and reached for the skull. Light flared around me as if I were at the center of an orb, brighter than I could stand. I squinted into the glow. Energy pulsed above me, but only a faint trace ebbed through my hand. There was a soft sound, mournful, the way the wind sighs through the pines, but fuller. Like restrained weeping.

Hazy images flashed into my thoughts.

A man and a woman burying a child. A daughter. The man held his hat in his hand; the woman clung to an infant and wept as if her heart were cleaving in two. The image shifted, and I saw the same grieving man throwing dirt on two bodies in a hole. The sun hung low in the sky. He shoveled fast, with a grim expression and terse movements. A name slipped from his lips, too soft for me to catch.

The image winked out. Darkness filled in behind the image. Dismay roared through me. I was so close. I almost had it. I fumbled for the skull, but I flailed in vain.

Suddenly my back arched as excruciating pain shot from head to toe and back again. Screams ripped through the air. My screams.