Diane Burton: BURIED SECRETS by Elizabeth Meyette Blog Tour

It’s a (Ghostly) Mystery

Remember the line from the movie Sixth Sense, “I see dead people?” Well, Jesse Graham, my protagonist in both The Cavanaugh House and Buried Secrets, is a ghost-empath. She shares the emotions of dead people. While some psychics and those who are highly perceptive can “see dead people,” others may sense a spirit who has passed over through smell, touch, or sound. Jesse, senses the presence of a spirit through shared emotion, and, in the course of doing so, she solves mysteries.

In Buried Secrets, Jesse’s first encounter with the Weeping Woman, the ghost of a Seneca Indian woman, is on a dark rain-swept road when she fears she’s just hit and killed someone. She senses that she’s being watched, and is overcome with inexplicable rage and sorrow. She recognizes the presence of a spirit—and wants no part of it. She’s been there once already.

In The Cavanaugh House, Jesse first hears a sound that indicates Helen Cavanaugh’s presence in the house. The “scritch, scritch, scritch” sound is not readily definable. Initially, I used “scratch, scratch, scratch,” but “scratch” connotes something different for each reader. I wanted a sound that was raspy, soft, and eerie, but held no specific meaning. Once Helen had established her presence through sound, she began to affect Jesse emotionally.

Helen’s emotions were the antithesis of the raging fury of the Weeping Woman in Buried Secrets. This ghost assaulted Jesse, filling Jesse with her anger and thirst for revenge—and resolution. Jesse’s encounters with the Weeping Woman sometimes led to physical injury, even the threat of death.

Surrounded by her friends including Joe Riley, who is capturing her heart, Jesse learns to accept her role in bringing peace to ghosts who hold keys to mysteries.

Blurb

When Jesse Graham almost runs over a “body” in the road one night, she is plunged into a labyrinth of secrets, lies and murder. All Jesse wants is a simple life teaching at St. Bart’s… and a chance at love with Joe Riley. She realizes that plan has been thwarted when puzzling occurrences at St. Bartholomew Academy for Girls get increasingly dangerous. The danger doesn’t just spring from the ghost who haunts the grounds of St. Bart’s, but from a sinister presence that is not ghostly at all. As she digs into the mystery, threats on her life and the life of her student escalate.

Which danger threatens her life the most? The ghost haunting her student or the secrets buried in the school?

Buried Secrets

Sequel to The Cavanaugh House

By Elizabeth Meyette

Goodreads | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

Genre: Mystery | Thriller | Suspense | Romance

Published by: Boris Publishing

Release Date: October 3, 2016

Length: 324 Pages

Excerpt

Jesse Graham squinted through the windshield wipers at the rain-swept road ahead of her. In her twenty-eight years, she had never liked being out in a thunderstorm, and this one was a doozy.

“NASA plans to put a man on the moon next year, but nobody can invent windshield wipers that work in a downpour,” she grumbled.

She hadn’t meant to work until after sunset, but she’d obsessed with putting up creative bulletin boards and adding final touches to the course guides to be ready for the first day of school tomorrow. Though she had taught in Rochester for five years, no doubt her obsession stemmed from the fact that she was the newest faculty member at St. Bartholomew Academy for Girls.

Adjusting to the late-summer darkness was hard enough, but add this thunderstorm and visibility was nil. At least upstate New York didn’t suffer through tornadoes or hurricanes. She gripped the wheel, concentrating on avoiding the deep ditch carved out along the shoulder.

A flash of lightning revealed a shape sprawled in the middle of the road ahead. She leaned forward, as if that would help her see if it was a deer someone hit and left to die. Another bolt of lightning illuminated the shape again, revealing blonde hair spread out on the wet pavement. In a moment of clarity—at least she could always count on that oddity in the midst of panic—she knew it was not a deer. Downshifting, she slammed on the brakes, her 1965 Volkswagen Beetle skidding sideways. She broke out in prickles of sweat as her car thudded against the form and halted.

“Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” she cried out.

She was pinned to her seat. Her legs shook, then her whole body. She fumbled for the door handle, unable to find it at first. Finally, she grasped it, threw open the door, and scrambled out onto the road. The sky strobed as a lightning bolt slammed into a nearby tree. Her nose stung with the acrid smell of sulfur. Her knees buckled, but she recovered, stumbling toward the immobile form. Slowing her pace, she neared the cloth-draped figure, afraid it might leap up and attack her. Afraid it might not move at all.

Have I just killed someone?

Trembling, she dropped to her knees beside the form. Bile rose in her throat at the sight of long, blonde hair streaming out from beneath the gray wool blanket that covered the shape. Pulling the blanket back, she gasped. A blonde wig was perched atop a dummy fashioned from burlap stuffed with hay. What the…? Slowly, she realized what she was looking at. She breathed with relief. But her relief was short-lived.

Son of a bitch. This prank could have sent someone flipping end over end. Storms weren’t known to improve traction.

“Who the hell would pull a rotten trick like this?”

She looked around—was the perpetrator standing just off in the trees beside the road? Rain spattered against her hair. As she brushed the clinging ringlets from her eyes, she pulled up the hood of her nylon poncho. Heart pounding, she leaned back on her heels, inhaling deeply to still her trembling. Hot breath escaped through her flared nostrils. Grabbing the dummy, she wrapped the blanket around it and lugged it to the car.

About Elizabeth Meyette

Author, blogger and believer in dreams-come-true, Elizabeth Meyette fell in love with books as a child when her sister read her Goldilocks and the Three Bears. “She had me at ‘Once upon a time…’” Elizabeth confesses. Writing her first book on a dare, she kept Love’s Destiny on her closet shelf for more years than she would like to admit while she taught English and Journalism. Finally she retired early in order to pursue her passion: writing. A friend says she’s not retired, she’s “refired.”

Readers wanted more of the story of Jonathan Brentwood and Emily Wentworth, so Elizabeth got to work on Love’s Spirit. While she loved writing the two historical romances, her muse, Boris, started whispering in her ear characters and plot for The Cavanaugh House. That book was conceived on a trip to upstate New York to visit her family. The Cavanaugh House was a number one paranormal bestseller on Amazon for weeks until Stephen King bumped it to number two. Readers wanted more of Jesse Graham, so Boris nudged Elizabeth to pen a sequel to The Cavanaugh House, Buried Secrets.

Elizabeth has also written several children’s books that she hopes to publish in the near future. Her poetry has appeared in various anthologies.

A native of upstate New York, Elizabeth now lives in Michigan with her husband Richard. They have an agreement that she cannot cook on writing days after he endured burnt broccoli and dry chicken. Fortunately, Rich is an excellent cook.