I rolled to my side and stared out the window as I contemplated calling my mother later. I knew she’d be worried if she heard about the Oak Grove story on the news, but I was afraid my voice might give too much away if Devlin’s name came up, and how could I explain something I didn’t even understand myself? He was haunted and, therefore, taboo, so a certain amount of appeal was inherent to the situation. But I wondered if it was more than that. Why else would he unnerve me even without his ghosts?
I’d dreamed about him last night. That rarely happened even with men that I dated. It was nothing graphic or erotic, just a series of strange vignettes that ignited an already unhealthy curiosity.
Of course, if I were wise, I would put Devlin out of my mind entirely. I’d done what he asked and now there was no reason for further contact. And if we did meet again, I would need to engineer an effective defense somehow, because I couldn’t chance another visit from his ghost child. What if next time she managed to advance beyond the garden? The thought of such a breach scared me, but even so I couldn’t deny that last evening had been stimulating in more ways than one. The encounter with Devlin had shaken things up in my safe little world and given me a lot to mull over as I dressed and brought in the paper.
The Oak Grove story had made the front page of the
Post and Courier.
I skimmed the article as I stood at the kitchen counter sipping a glass of juice. Very few details were given, but as Devlin predicted, in the university’s official statement to the press, Camille Ashby had cited me as an “expert consultant” brought in to protect the historical integrity of the cemetery. Not my actual job, but close enough.
Refolding the paper, I set it aside and left the house for my daily walk, heading south on Rutledge Avenue. Two blocks later, I turned east, where the first scorching fingers of sunrise began to creep over the horizon. A mild breeze stirred the palmetto fronds and deepened the scent of the magnolia blossoms that peeked like roosting doves from nests of dark, glossy leaves.
On a morning like this, with the ghosts floating back through the veil, I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place. The Holy City, some called it, because of all the church steeples that dotted the low-rise skyline. Charleston was old South, a state of mind, the luxuriant landscape of lost dreams. Everywhere I looked, everywhere I walked, the past enveloped me.
I’d only lived in the city for the past six months, but I had deep roots here. My mother had been born and raised in Charleston. She’d left her childhood home to marry my father four decades ago, but she remained to this day a Charlestonian through and through. She and her sister, Lynrose, had been raised in a comfortable household in the Historic District. Their parents were teachers, well-read and well-traveled, but it was their sense of tradition and refinement that allowed them to mingle at the fringes of society despite their middle-class upbringing.
By contrast, my father grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Hill trash to the gentry that lived south of Broad Street. In 1960s segregated Charleston, Papa’s Blue Ridge heritage would have placed him only a rung or two above the black men with whom he’d tended garden at St. Michael’s, where he’d worked before they married.
Like my maternal grandparents, I was educated and traveled. I’d received an undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of South Carolina at the age of twenty—what else had I to do but study?—and a graduate degree in archaeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was a member of the American Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, the Southeast Regional Conservation Association, the Association for Gravestone Studies and the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation. I owned my own business, was considered by some to be an expert in my field and, thanks to that viral YouTube video, had become a minor celebrity among Charleston taphophiles and ghost hunters. But for all my accomplishments and fleeting notoriety, there remained a segment of Charleston’s dying mansion class that would never accept me because of my father’s people.
This bothered me not in the slightest.
I was proud of Papa’s heritage, but I did still wonder how he and my mother had managed to meet and fall in love, considering the social chasm that had separated them. Over the years, my queries to both parents had been met with little more than vague details and outright dismissals.
The only clue I’d ever uncovered was in an overheard conversation between my mother and Aunt Lynrose when she’d come to visit us in Trinity, the small town north of Charleston where we lived when my father worked as caretaker for the county cemeteries. Every evening, the two sisters would sit out on the front porch sipping sweet tea from tall, frosted glasses while twilight settled around them as softly as the silk scarves that held back their hair.
Chin propped on the sill, I would sit and listen to them through the open parlor windows, mesmerized by the lyrical quality of their lovely drawls. As I grew older, I learned to pick out the French Huguenot and Gullah influences that made the Charleston accent so distinct. My mother had never completely lost those long midvowels, and to a sheltered child such as I, her exotic speech patterns made her seem glamorous and mysterious.
On one particular evening, as I sat listening through the window, I’d detected a note of sadness in Mama’s voice as she and my aunt reminisced.
Aunt Lynrose had reached over and patted Mama’s hand. “Things don’t always work out the way we planned, but we have to make the most of what we’re given. You have a good life, Etta. A lovely home and a hardworking husband who loves you. And don’t forget what a blessing Amelia is. After all those terrible miscarriages…”
“A blessing? Sometimes I wonder…”
“Etta.” There was a note of censure in my aunt’s tone. “Why dwell on something you can’t change? Remember what Mama always said. No good can come of living in the past.”
“It’s not the past I’m worried about,” my mother murmured.
Long after they’d moved on to another topic, I remained at the window, frightened and lonely, and not understanding why.
I’d never asked my mother about that conversation. As any good lawyer would advise, a query should never be posed unless one already knew the answer. Or was prepared to deal with the consequences. I wasn’t. I preferred to remain in the dark as to why my adoption had not been considered a blessing by my mother.
Turning right on Tradd Street, I left that dark memory and the bells of St. Michael’s behind me.
Before me, the city was coming alive. The delectable aromas of coffee and fresh pastries wafted from the bakeries and open-air restaurants that catered to the breakfast crowd.
As I neared the water, the air thickened with brine. Keeping a brisk pace, I retraced last night’s steps past the stretch of colorful homes on Rainbow Row and the grand East Bay mansions with their elegant piazzas and jewel-box gardens.
I walked to the very southernmost tip of the peninsula and paused to watch the sunrise. A lone pelican circled overhead and I tracked it for a moment before letting my gaze drop to Fort Sumter, a hazy outline of crumbling walls and Southern history in the middle of Charleston Harbor.
From the corner of my eye, I saw someone step up to the rail and I turned, almost expecting to find John Devlin. The stranger beside me was the same height and build as the detective, and he had the same guarded air. And yet he made me think—not of Devlin—but of his ghosts. This man, too, had the café au lait complexion that suggested a mixed heritage, but his bearing was straight, not regal, his features more handsome than exotic. At least what I could see of them beneath the sunglasses. He wore faded clothes, but he did not strike me as homeless. Nor, for some reason, did I think he was a tourist.
He didn’t so much as glance at me as he stared out over the water, seemingly absorbed in the vastness of the harbor.
I grew apprehensive. It was very quiet where we stood, too early for anyone to be about. Whoever had broken into my car and stolen my briefcase was still out there somewhere. The killer of that poor girl whose body had been found in Oak Grove Cemetery had yet to be caught.
Was it just a coincidence that this stranger had appeared on the Battery at the precise time I took my morning walk?
I wanted to move away, but was reluctant to call attention to myself and even more hesitant to turn my back on him.
As if sensing my unease, he waited a moment longer for the sunrise, then turned and slowly walked away, disappearing into the lush foliage of White Point Gardens.
I headed for home, stopping for a bagel and coffee on the way. With each step that brought me closer to my sanctuary, I felt a growing trepidation. A creeping dread that left me wondering…
How had Devlin’s ghost child managed to penetrate my defenses? And what would I do if she came back?
When I got home, I went straight to the garden. The moonflowers had withered in the heat as the rising sun slowly awakened the morning glories.
I walked along narrow beds of purple phlox to the spot where I’d seen the little girl’s ghost. I don’t know what I expected to find. Nothing as earthly or as human as footprints. But something had been left behind.
A tiny garnet ring lay embedded in the soft earth.
I might not have seen it at all had I not been searching so closely for evidence of a ghostly visit.
The ring looked as if it had been buried there for a very long time. Perhaps like the body in Oak Grove, it had been uncovered by the recent rainstorms. I wanted to believe it had been lost by some former occupant of the house, but I couldn’t help remembering the sparkle on the little ghost’s finger as she pointed to the window where I had stood watching her.
I knelt in the grass, hands on thighs and stared for a long time at that ring.
Had it been left there as a message? A warning?
Could a ghost do that?
I’d felt the spidery crawl of their fingers in my hair, the whisper of their cold breath down my collar, but I’d never found any physical evidence of their presence. And yet there lay a ring in the very spot where one of Devlin’s ghosts had vanished back into the mist.
It didn’t seem proper to leave it half buried in the dirt, but neither did I want the thing in my house or on my person. Already I had too much of a connection to this entity. The last thing I needed was to issue an unwitting invitation.
After a bit, I got up and went inside to retrieve an antique silver trinket box from my dresser, along with a basket of pebbles and seashells I’d collected from the old part of Rosehill Cemetery, my childhood playground. The artifacts had come from hallowed ground, as had the polished stone I wore on a silver chain around my neck. Whether they held any protective properties of their own, I had no idea. I liked to think that they did.
I went back out to the garden and, using the tip of a spade to carefully tease the ring from the moist ground, I placed it inside the silver box, dug a hole and buried it. Then I fashioned a heart on top of the site with the pebbles.
Working quickly and in deep concentration, I tuned out the sounds from the street along with the soft spit of my next-door neighbor’s lawn sprinkler. I only looked up when I heard footsteps on the paving stones, and by then it was too late. John Devlin was already upon me.
I had a feeling he’d been watching me for some time through the wrought-iron gate. Some part of me had sensed him there, I think, but I chose to ignore the warning.
Now as his shadow fell over me, I stared up at him, my pulse reacting erratically.
“What died?” he asked.
SIX
“N
othing died.” I spoke in a casual tone that I knew disguised the startled thud of my heart. As did my practiced expression. I never gave any of my feelings away. I couldn’t afford to when a nervous tic or the dart of my gaze might betray my awareness to a ghost.
And speaking of ghosts, Devlin was alone. Not surprising with the sun fully over the horizon. His unearthly companons would have drifted back through the veil, waiting for twilight, waiting for an in-between time at an in-between place to reemerge.
“I thought I’d use my unexpected time off to do a little gardening,” I told him. “Normally, I would have been at the cemetery by now trying to beat the heat.”
“Murder tends to throw a monkey wrench in the best-laid plans,” he said, without a trace of irony or a smile. He nodded toward the outline of stones on the ground. “What’s the heart for?”
“It’s just a decorative symbol. It can mean anything you want. Peace. Love. Harmony.” I squinted up at him. It was the first time I’d seen him in daylight, and he looked both younger and older than I’d originally thought him. His face was smooth except for the fine lines around his eyes and mouth, his hair dark and luxurious. He wore it short and styled in a manner that gave him some edge, as did the cut of his trousers and the trim fit of his shirt. He appeared to be a man that took pride in his appearance, and with good reason. He was very attractive, with the kind of brooding intensity that had made women’s hearts patter throughout the ages. Mine was no exception.
I placed him somewhere in his early to mid-thirties, but the shadows under his eyes and the hollow cheekbones aged him by at least a decade, depending on the angle and light. There was something troubling in his eyes. Something that made me think again that here was a man who knew things. Here was a man who had seen many dark things.
But such morbid speculation seemed out of place in a sun-dappled garden perfumed by my neighbor’s magnolia trees.
He put out a hand and reluctantly I took it, allowing him to help me to my feet. A thrill raced up my arm, an electric charge that made the world stop for a moment as I caught my breath.
I pulled my hand away, wondering if he had felt it, too. He was either totally unaffected or as much an expert as I in disguising his feelings.
Then he turned his head slightly and I noticed a curious throb at his temple, as if maybe, just maybe he wasn’t quite as impassive as he would have me believe.