Free When Falcons Fall by C. S. Harris

that not only is our killer literate; he’s also literary.”

Chapter 12
    A fter Archie and his band of volunteers had gone off to search the area around the old pack bridge, Sebastian lingered at the banks of the river, his gaze on the turgid, slow-moving water before him as he ran through everything they knew about Emma Chance and her death.
    It wasn’t much.
    The woman herself was an enigma. Young, beautiful, and wealthy enough to outfit herself with fine new clothes and a silver-backed hairbrush, she’d embarked on a sketching expedition through one of the more remote areas of the county, accompanied only by her abigail. An abigail she’d employed just days before arriving in Ayleswick.
    It told them something of the kind of woman she was: independent minded, eccentric, and courageous enough to do what she wanted even if it meant braving the conventions of their day. Yet beyond that her identity remained essentially a mystery. Was she actually from London? Or had she simply claimed London as her residence because the capital’s enormous size made it a safe lie?
    As he watched the pond skaters and water boatmen scuttling through the shallows at his feet, Sebastian couldn’t get past Peg Fletcher’s suggestion that Emma Chance might not even be the dead woman’s real name. If so, was it a ruse intended simply to protect her reputation from those who might be outraged at the idea of a young woman traveling alone? Or was it something more serious, more . . . nefarious in purpose?
    Turning his back on the river, he walked to the stand of alders at the edge of the meadow where they’d found Emma’s body.
Why here?
he asked himself again. She obviously hadn’t walked all the way down to the river, and they’d found no evidence to suggest that she’d been attacked on the path through the wood. So why bring her body here?
    Why?
    What they’d learned thus far of her movements the day of her death helped little in their efforts to understand what had happened to her. After sketching Ayleswick’s ancient Norman church in the morning, she’d walked out to the old priory and spent several hours drawing the ruins. Then, shortly after five, she’d climbed back over the stile and disappeared toward the village.
    As far as they knew, that was the last time anyone had seen her alive.
    Listening to the hum of the insects hidden in the drying grass, Sebastian knew a rising sense of frustration. They still had no idea where she had been killed, or why, or by whom. All they knew was that her death had been brutally slow, her killer physically strong and ferociously cold-blooded.
    And
educated
, Sebastian reminded himself. Her killer was obviously well educated. Which eliminated not only Reuben Dickie and his brother, Jeb, but also a considerable portion of the village population.
    A glint of sunlight on glass in the grass at Sebastian’s feet caught his attention. Reaching down, he picked up the small laudanum bottle from where it must have fallen when Constable Nash removed Emma’s body. The bottle was too common to tell them anything about the killer. But the fact that it had simply been abandoned here disturbed Sebastian enough that he spent the next half hour crisscrossing the meadow, looking for anything else that might have been missed.
    He found nothing.

    That evening, as the sun slipped toward the western hills and the sky faded from a hard blue to a pink-tinged aquamarine, Hero left Simon with Claire and climbed the lane that wound gently past the ancient Norman church, to the top of the low, round hill that overlooked the village of Ayleswick. The air smelled fresh and clean, a cool breeze rippled through the long grass, and a hawk circled effortlessly overhead.
    At the crest of the hill she came upon the crumbling remains of what looked like a medieval watchtower, the upper reaches of its once-massive sandstone walls now broken and tumbled across the daisy-strewn grass. She sat on a large block still warm from