Aaron went a step further, literally, and climbed into the fountain to look around Mary’s skirts. “No one realized the horse was the Hessian’s horse or the nasty package mentioned was the Hessian’s head. You’re the only one who put that together.”
“As far as we know,” she said. “We don’t know that until we find the head.”
Jerome sighed and joined the hunt around the base of the fountain, though it really wasn’t that large. “This is stupid. There probably isn’t anything here.”
Before she and Chad could bump into each other, Esmie stood up and frowned deeper. “I’m missing something. What did the tour guide say about the fountain? It’s fed by an underground spring, right? So where does the spring come in from? How do spring-fed fountains work?”
“Pressure,” Chad said promptly, gaining Esmie’s surprised attention. “The water has to come from a higher source from the fountain to push water up through the pipe.”
“How on earth do you know that, Mr. History Major?” she scoffed.
He grinned. “How do you think fountains worked before electricity? And who would know that besides a history major?”
“Oh. Huh.”
Shaking her head, she looked around and realized there was, indeed, a hilly area a little ways away. She remembered something about a river in the hills to the north and guessed that must be the north.
“Okay, then, I think we need to go that way.” She pointed with her phone.
“But you saidthiswas the holiest place,” Jerome said as Aaron climbed out of the fountain.
She shrugged. “Meren must have felt otherwise.”
“Let’s just go,” Aaron said, paying his wet boots and soggy cape no mind as he mounted his patient horse. “Esmie hasn’t been wrong so far.”
“None of us has,” she said. “This has been a team project.”
Chad helped her up onto Thunder, then climbed up behind her. Jerome, of course, joined them. He wasn’t really complaining, Esmie knew. It was just his nature to be the token voice of dissent. He was, after all, almost a lawyer.
Grinning, she held onto the pommel as Chad urged the horse into a smooth gallop for the short distance into the hills, then slowed back to a walk as a small stream appeared as if out of nowhere, sinking into the ground to become the underground stream.
“I’ll be damned,” Jerome said. “I take it back,” he said, a grin in his voice.
She winked at him.
They followed the little stream a few hundred feet until they found exactly what they were looking for. It was so unexpected, yet expected, that they sat on their horses staring at it for a long moment without speaking—a large stone cross on a pedestal at the place where the stream branched off from the slow-moving river.
“The most holy place,” Jerome said, his voice quiet.
“It must be where they got all their water pumped into the house at the time,” Aaron explained. “After plumbing, it wasn’t needed anymore, so it’s just been standing here ever since, forgotten.”
Esmie shifted on the saddle, and Chad obligingly let her down, then climbed down after her. Without consulting on it, they stood on either side of the stone cross.
“I’m gonna do something sacriligeous right now.” She eyed him seriously. “You okay with that?”
He snorted. “I dug up a dead guy fully intending to steal his head. Do you really have to ask?”
She grinned. “To my right on three. One, two,three.”
Throwing all her weight to her right, she hefted the cross to that side, then was surprised by how easily it tilted. Either Chad’s undead strength aided them, or the stone’s grip on the ground had been weakened over the centuries, because it almost fell right out of their hands until they caught their grips and eased it down onto its side.
In the pedestal base was a deep hollow, which helped cut some of the weight, and in the hollow was a rotted, tattered old scrap of ancient burlap wrapped around something. Something vaguely round-shaped and filthy.
Her heart beating two hundred beats per minute, she reached down with shaking hands, brushed away the remains of the burlap, and rolled the object, then pulled back, not in surprise but in… disgust? Shock? Dismay?
It was the head, of course. The skull of the Headless Horseman, the Hessian who had died over two hundred and thirty years before and had been cursed ever since. Except, apparently, for the past thirty some years, when he’d been able to rest while someone else did his job.
“Esmie,” Chad breathed, shaken.
