The Prophet (25 page)

Her betrayal must have been a terrible blow to Devlin. Even if the love had waned by that time, something had remained. An emotion so powerful it had brought Mariama back from the dead and kept her here, draining Devlin of his warmth and energy. I had a terrible feeling she would still be at his side long after I was gone.

Pacing back to my office, I allowed Angus a little extra time to explore while I glanced through Dr. Shaw’s book. Then I went to the back door to call him in. When he didn’t come at once, I stepped outside. I hadn’t bothered with slippers, so I went no farther than the terrace. I called again and was just starting to get a little uneasy when he loped out of the shadows, fur bristled in agitation.

Quickly, I scanned the garden, probing all the dark corners. The breeze had risen, and the tinkle of the wind chimes set my nerves on edge. Nothing moved in the garden except for the rustling palmettos. But something was out there. Something wasn’t right about that wind. It didn’t come from any weather front. It came from the other side.

As if to confirm my suspicion, a gust tore at my hair and whipped at my robe. I shivered but held my ground even as Angus growled beside me. I reached down to give him a tense pat, my gaze moving across the yard to where the swing swayed in the breeze. A cloud moved over the moon, throwing the garden into darkness, and I could feel a perverted chill creeping through the shadows toward me. Not Shani or Mariama, I was almost certain, but some unknown spirit that had made its way to me. Some restless phantom seeking my help along with my warmth and energy.

I could see nothing in the darkness. No glowing eyes or aura. No humanlike form floating through the bushes. But I sensed a presence. I could feel it watching me. That dead gaze was like a spider-crawl up my spine.

Was this a test? I wondered. A trial run to see if I had the mettle for a higher calling.

Should I put out a hand? Should I try to make contact?

All of this raced through my mind in the space of a heartbeat. So paralyzed was I by indecision, I didn’t notice at first that the wind had died away. The garden had gone very still as if the night waited in breathless anticipation for my answer.

I didn’t move or utter a sound. Neither did I pretend indifference. I stood there with quivering legs and pounding heart, almost daring the ghost to manifest.

In the split second before the moon popped back out, I could have sworn I saw a revealing shimmer. A fusty odor drifted across the garden, mingling with the datura, and I could almost hear the whisper of Papa’s voice in my ear.
Go inside, Amelia. Hurry! Do not tempt fate, child. Do not acknowledge another ghost’s presence. You are already in far deeper than you know.

The pavers were cold beneath my bare feet, and the sting of an ant bite had me scurrying back inside.

So much for a higher purpose and a noble calling.

I locked the door and peered out into the darkness, remaining at my vigil for several minutes until Angus whined and brushed up against me for attention. I knelt to pet him before busying myself in the kitchen, rinsing out cups and putting away the tea tin.

As I picked up his bowl to replenish his water before bedtime, I noticed what appeared to be blood smears across the floor, as if he’d nicked a paw on something sharp. Dropping down beside him, I examined each pad, but I couldn’t find a wound or any blood. I dampened a paper towel to clean up the floor, and as I turned from the sink, I saw more crimson spots. The blood was coming from me, not Angus.

I danced about, examining first one foot and then the other. As I cleaned away the blood, I saw the glitter of ground glass embedded in my skin. The particles were so fine as to be little more than powder, but the skin had been irritated in several places. Odd, because as far as I knew, nothing had shattered in the garden.

Hobbling to the bathroom, I washed the soles of my feet with antibacterial soap, picked out the glass and then doused the abrasions with peroxide and antiseptic.
There,
I thought as I cleaned up the mess. Surely no germs could survive those precautions.

The chore had given me something concrete to focus on, and now, strangely, I felt much calmer. I crawled into bed, preparing myself for another long night as I stared up at the ceiling, wishing Devlin had stayed.

I fell asleep almost instantly only to awaken sometime later to a powerful thirst. I got up and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. Angus heard me stir and came out of my office to check his food bowl.

“Sorry. It’s not time for breakfast yet.”

Those limpid eyes appealed to the pushover in me, and I went to the cupboard to get him a treat. As I turned, I caught a glimpse of the windows in my office. Someone stood gazing in at me.

I didn’t turn but kept the silhouette in my periphery. The face had the pale translucence of a ghost, but that could have been an illusion cast by moonlight. I wondered why Angus hadn’t growled a warning. Whether human or ghost, he must have sensed another presence. But he merely stood there gobbling his treats with unabashed delight. He never lifted his head, even when another shadow appeared at the backdoor, even when the knob rattled as the intruder tried to force his way in.

I looked around for the phone and couldn’t find it. I looked around for a weapon and couldn’t find one. It was then that I realized I must be trapped in a dream. How else to explain Angus’s apathy? How else to explain my own strange paralysis?

As I stood there watching helplessly, the dead bolt clicked, and the door flew back with a bang, allowing that wind from the other side to sweep in. My hair blew across my face and, as I peeled it away, I saw Darius Goodwine on the threshold. He looked the same as he had earlier, only now he wore several necklaces, including one that looked like a string of human teeth. In his right hand, he carried a wooden bowl and, in the left, an old leather pouch which he shook to produce a rattle.

Into the bowl, he poured the contents of the pouch—bones, shells, pebbles, nuts and a few coins. Then he knelt and threw these items onto the floor. They formed a pattern which seemed to amuse him greatly.

He looked up, topaz eyes gleaming. “Prepare yourself,” he said.

“For what?”

“A long journey.”

“Where am I going?”

He turned to stare out into the darkness, and I looked past him to where the dead had assembled in my garden. Their faces were painted a stark white, their bellies open and distended. Drawn by the light, black beetles with large, snapping pincers crawled from the autopsy gashes and scurried into the house. I spotted one scuttling into the cupboard where I kept Angus’s treats, and another dashed beneath the stove.

Suddenly, his food bowl teemed with the insects, and he looked up at me with a piteous whimper. The beetles were crawling up his legs and moving down through his fur, attempting to burrow under his skin. He howled in pain, and I dropped to his side, picking them off one by one and flinging them toward the door.

But dozens turned into hundreds. The floor blackened, and I could feel them on me now. They ran up my arms, into my hair and down the collar of my pajamas.

I was still flailing when I woke up. Chest heaving, I flung the covers aside and leaped to my feet as I reached for the light. The bed was clear. My hair was clear. It had just been a dream.

Or a visit from Darius Goodwine.

I resolved myself to staying awake for the rest of the night. I even went back to my office and fetched Dr. Shaw’s book.

But my eyes soon grew heavy, and I kept nodding off despite my best efforts. The last thing I remembered hearing was a tree limb scrape against the house. In my drowsy state, it sounded like someone running across the roof.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Z
ombie powder,” Temple said the next morning as she helped me unload my tools from the back of the SUV. Sometime after Devlin had left my house, he’d arranged to have the car delivered and then texted to let me know where I could find the key. I had to wonder if our conversation had precipitated the dream. In the light of day, it seemed impossible that Darius Goodwine had been able to invade my sleep.

“Ground glass is a common component, along with datura,” Temple was saying. “The glass irritates the skin so that the poison is more quickly absorbed into the bloodstream.”

“Zombies in Charleston?” I glanced at her in mock horror as I locked my car and deposited the key in my pocket. “Isn’t that more of a New Orleans thing?”

“By way of Africa and Haiti. Traditionally, all we have to worry about around here are hags, haints and plat-eyes,” she said naming the holy trinity of Lowcountry legends.

“Papa used to tell stories about plat-eyes that would curl your hair,” I said. “Boo hags, too. It got so I was afraid to close my eyes at night for fear one would slip into my room and steal my skin while I slept.” But for all my shivering under the covers back then, I’d never really believed in the mythical plat-eye creatures that supposedly gobbled up willful children, nor the hags that shed their own skin at night to inhabit another’s. But haint was a colloquialism for ghost, and I’d learned all too soon that they were real.

“I can go you one better,” Temple said as we struck out through the weeds toward the cemetery gates. “I once dated a guy from Louisiana whose grandmother practiced voodoo. She claimed when she was a young woman that her brother had been turned into a zombie by a powerful priestess. He was pronounced dead by the local coroner and a funeral and burial ensued. Years later, the sister saw him in New Orleans with that same priestess. The woman had dug him up and kept him as a slave the whole time his family had thought him dead.”

“What happened to him?”

“The last the sister knew, he was still with the priestess.”

“Why didn’t she call the police?”

“Nothing the authorities could do. Nothing she could do, either, because the priestess was too powerful.”

“But you don’t believe that, do you? Not you, Miss Skeptic.”

“Of course I don’t believe it. The point is,
she
believed it. And the brother, too, apparently. As far as I’m concerned, voodoo, rootwork, conjure…all different names for the same con, and the stock-in-trade is mystery and persuasion. People want to believe they can obtain the seemingly unattainable, be it love or wealth or protection from their enemies by virtue of a few spells and incantations. That’s why they’ll spend their last dime on come-to-me potions and go-away-evil candles.” She paused while I unlocked the gates. “This man you told me about, this Darius Goodwine. It sounds to me like he’s trying to mess with your head. A sliver of doubt is all it takes for a particularly clever con artist to worm his way in.”

“But if he possesses no real power, how can he influence me?”

“Mind over matter. Just like all those mishaps we had with Ona Pearl Handy. She created a little doubt and we did the rest to ourselves. Call it the power of suggestion or a self-fulfilling prophecy. The mind has the ability to influence the body on a subconscious level. You know that.”

“The ground glass wasn’t just in my head, though. I saw the blood.”

“Yes, that it is disturbing,” she agreed. “Do you normally go outside barefoot? Enough so that it’s somewhat of a habit?”

“I don’t know about habit, but it’s not unusual.”

“He’d know that if he’s had someone watching you. For whatever reason, this man obviously views you as a threat. And now he’s looking to gain the upper hand.”

“What should I do?”

“If he’s a true believer, you could go to a root doctor and buy some protection. Mind over matter works both ways. But if he’s just a snake oil salesman, then the only thing you can do is be on guard. Keep your eyes and ears open. And for God’s sake, don’t walk around barefoot. If he does anything truly threatening, call the cops. Or Devlin. I have a feeling he’d be only too happy to take care of this guy for you.”

Yes, and that was perhaps my biggest fear of all. What Devlin had in store for Darius Goodwine.

* * *

I spent the rest of the day cleaning headstones, a tedious project that required hours upon hours of squatting and kneeling so my leg muscles had become quite developed over the years. This was not a job I ever recommended to amateurs because even the gentlest scrubbing could cause damage, particularly to older stones. With every cleaning, a portion of the surface was lost, so one needed to approach the project with conservation rather than restoration as the end goal.

Even in cemeteries where a water supply was readily available, I used non-ionic detergents only rarely, preferring instead the low-tech method of soft bristle brushes, sponges, scrapers and plenty of patience. I always started at the bottom and back of the stone to prevent streaking, and normally, once I became absorbed in the task, time would pass quickly. Today, I kept hauling out my phone to check the clock. Earlier, I’d placed a call to Tom Gerrity’s office and left a message. When he returned my call a few minutes later, I pretended to be a potential client in need of his services. If he recognized my name from our previous meeting, he didn’t let on. He would be out for most of the day, he said, but would return to the office late in the afternoon and suggested I drop by around six.

I had no idea what could be accomplished by such a visit or even what I would say to him once I got there. I couldn’t ask him outright what he had on Dr. Shaw, nor could I pretend to be a friend of the Fremont family looking to hire a private detective. Gerrity had seen me in his office last spring, so even if he hadn’t recognized my name, chances were he’d place me the moment I walked through the door. Then he’d remember my connection to Devlin, and given the animosity between the two—not to mention his possible association with Darius Goodwine—I couldn’t imagine he’d be all that cooperative.

Moving to the face of the stone, I wet it with the pump sprayer I’d lugged from the car and scraped at the lichen as I ran through a dozen possible scenarios in my head, none of them particularly appealing. Maybe I just needed to trust in the universe, I decided. Have a little faith that Fremont had a reason for sending me to see Gerrity. He had once been called the Prophet, after all, and apparently, some of his soothsayer abilities had been retained after death. The blood he’d foretold on Isabel Perilloux’s hands came to mind, but this wasn’t about her. This was about Tom Gerrity. What was the worst that could happen if I went to see him? He’d throw me out? Hadn’t he basically done that the last time I’d gone to this office?