I could look no further.

I wrapped my arms around my waist as my stomach clenched. I wasn’t sick, but only because I was too horrified, too stunned even to breathe. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus, to move, to think, but was incapable of anything. I spun around at the sound of a sharp crack, like a branch breaking behind me, then turned back as my horse made a hideous shriek and reared. Realizing I’d neglected to tie him to the tree, I started towards him, but was too late. He’d already broken into a run.

Which left me six and a quarter miles from home, alone with the murdered girl.

Trees and grass and flowers spun around me as I tried to regain enough composure to take stock of the scene before me. I should have been better equipped to deal with this. In the past two years, I had become something of an investigator after solving the murder of my first husband, Philip, the Viscount Ashton, whom everyone had believed died of fever on a hunting trip in Africa. Since then, I’d thrice more been asked to assist in murder cases, the last time while on my wedding trip in Constantinople. Colin, my second husband (and Philip’s best friend), worked for the Crown, assisting in matters that required, as he liked to say, more than a modicum of discretion. Because no man could gain entrance to the sultan’s harem, he had asked me to work with him in an official capacity when a concubine, who turned out to be the daughter of a British diplomat, was murdered at the Ottoman Palace.

Successful though I’d been, none of my prior experience had prepared me for the sight before me now.

I squinted, blurring my vision so the field of poppies beyond the tree and the body melted into a wave of crimson buoyed by the wind.