The Restorer (16 page)

As we stood there watching, Mariama glanced over her shoulder, eyes hooded, lips slyly curled, a temptress’s invitation that aroused and unnerved.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I said, backing away.

“Don’t be so vanilla. You know you like watching him.”

Mariama’s taunting laughter followed me down the steps.

I felt a chill at my back and turned to glance over my shoulder. Something dark flashed at the corner of my eye and I whirled to run, but the ghost child blocked my path.

The scent of jasmine filled my nostrils as she lifted a hand and beckoned for me to follow. I tried to summon my father’s rules, but I couldn’t remember them. Nor could I resist her silent command.

She led me away from the mausoleum, into an area of the cemetery where I’d never been before. Off to the side, I noticed a gathering of people around a headstone. They all turned when they heard me and I recognized their faces— Camille, Temple, Ethan, Daniel Meakin. Even Dr. Shaw. With an enigmatic smile, he stepped aside to make room for me in their circle.

Moving up beside them, I stared down at the ground, searching for what had captured their attention.

I saw nothing but an empty grave.

Then I felt pressure on my back and suddenly I was falling, falling into that dark, fathomless pit.

My grave…

Gasping, I bolted upright on the chaise.

It took a moment to orient myself, another to calm my racing pulse.

The office had grown cold while I slept. I’d turned down the air when I got home from dinner because the house had been hot and stuffy. I hadn’t thought to adjust the thermostat before I fell asleep, and now the room was so chilly the windows had fogged over.

I reached for the afghan draped over the foot of the chaise, then went completely still, my hand suspended in midair as I sniffed. The scent of jasmine floated across the room, so faint and delicate it might have been a remnant from my dream.

But I knew it was real. She was here.

Drawing the spread over me, I lay shivering in the dark. I couldn’t see the garden through the frosted windows, but I knew she was out there.

Light from the kitchen filtered into my office, illuminating the beads of condensation that ran down the glass.

I caught my breath, waiting…

A pattern emerged in the frost, as though an invisible finger traced it from the other side. A heart.

Like the one I’d formed in the garden with pebbles and seashells.

The image was there one moment, gone the next, melting into rivulets of condensation as the jasmine scent faded.

She, too, had vanished back into the mist, but I knew she’d be back. She wouldn’t leave me alone until I figured out what she wanted.

FIFTEEN

S
ometime during the night, the drizzle turned into a downpour. The exhumation had to be delayed until the weather cleared and the ground had time to dry out so that the loose dirt could be sifted through a screen.

Since I couldn’t work outside, I spent the rest of the morning at Emerson. A number of unmarked graves near the north wall had yet to be identified, and ironically, I couldn’t locate graves for two names that had turned up in an old family Bible I’d come across.

Creating a site map for a cemetery as old as Oak Grove was always a challenge, not unlike putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Missing markers, lost records, illegible headstones, overgrown graves—time wreaked havoc on the dead as well as the living.

I was so engrossed in the task at hand that the scrabbling sound didn’t register at first.

Then my head came up and I sat very still, wondering if a mouse might have chewed its way into one of the file boxes.

Located in the basement of the Emerson library, the archives room was a crowded space of shadowy alcoves and dim corridors that traced through rows and rows of packed shelving.

Normally, I didn’t mind the gloom of closed-in places, but with the unidentified sound came a slight panicky sensation of isolation. I was all alone down there. The desk where I worked faced the wide staircase that led up to the first floor. I hadn’t seen anyone come down since I’d been sitting there.

It was nothing, I told myself. The place was old and creepy, filled with the sounds and smells of the past. No different from the dozens of other basement archives where I’d spent many a contented hour immersed in the lives of the long dead.

Shrugging it off, I went back to my work.

The sound came again—fierce scratching followed by a loud thud.

One of the boxes must have fallen to the floor. Not the work of a mouse, I was quite certain.

Fear tapped along my spine as I tilted my head, listening.

A shadow appeared at the end of one of the corridors, and I gasped before I realized it was a person instead of that frightening silhouette I’d encountered on the path at Oak Grove.

“Hello?” I called out.

“Hello!” came back the surprised rejoinder. “I had no idea anyone else was down here. Have you been sitting there long?”

“A couple of hours.” I peered into the gloom. “I didn’t see you come down the stairs.”

“I used the back stairwell. I guess that’s how we missed one another.” He came toward me then, but I didn’t recognize his face or his voice until he was almost upon me. “Ms. Gray, isn’t it? Daniel Meakin. We met at Rapture.”

“Yes, of course. Nice to see you again, Mr. Meakin.”

“Daniel, please.”

I inclined my head. “Amelia.”

He glanced down at the files and record books strewn across the desk. “More Oak Grove research?”

“Yes.” I explained about the graves without names and the names without graves.

“Quite a grave dilemma, isn’t it?”

I smiled. “Indeed.”

“They don’t match up then?”

“Unfortunately, no. But you may be able to help me out. I understand there used to be a church next to Oak Grove.”

“Yes, in fact, the old section of the graveyard was owned by that church. When the building was destroyed, city officials took advantage of what was then a remote location to open a new, more parklike cemetery right up against the old churchyard. In time, people forgot about the boundary and both sites became known as Oak Grove.”

“Do you know if any of the registries were lost or destroyed when the church came down?”

“It’s certainly possible. A lot of the old records were burned during and after the Civil War. Perhaps some of them have been misplaced or misfiled in here.” He glanced around with a frown. “Like Oak Grove, the archives have been shamefully neglected for years. The system is in dire need of a complete reorganization.”

“I won’t argue with that. I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time down here poking around in all these old boxes.”

“My favorite pastime,” he said with a smile.

“Mine, as well.”

“You don’t mind the solitude?” he asked. “So many people find this place depressing.”

“I’ve never minded being by myself.” Loneliness was an old friend. “I just wish I could find what I need.”

“You know, I believe I have some books in my office that reference Oak Grove. I’ll have a look when I get back and see if I can find anything that might be useful to you.”

“Thank you. I’d appreciate that.”

The whole time we spoke, he’d been holding his left wrist awkwardly at his side, reminding me of Temple’s speculation about his scar and a possible suicide attempt.

As if reading my thoughts, he began to edge back into the shadows. “I should let you get back to work.”

“Just one more thing before you go…”

He waited obligingly.

“The other night at dinner, Temple and Ethan mentioned that you’d attended Emerson with them as undergrads. You have a long history with the university, it seems.”

“Too long, I sometimes think.” That deprecating smile again.

“During my research, I ran across a reference to a secret society on campus. It was called the Order of the Coffin and the Claw. Do you know anything about it?”

He didn’t look too keen on answering. His eyes flickered with indecision. “I know a bit about it, but I don’t think that information will help solve your grave problem.”

“No, I know. But cemetery art includes a lot of symbols and imagery from secret societies. I thought I might have run across something from this organization in Oak Grove.”

“I can’t tell you anything about the symbols. They’re secret for a reason. What I can tell you is that the Order of the twentieth century became a very different organization from the one founded in the 1800s. The evolution, to my way of thinking, was not always successful.”

“I read somewhere that the bylaws were amended in the eighties to include women.”

“One of the more enlightened phases. Though ‘enlightenment’ is a bit of a misnomer when describing an organization that is, by its very nature, exclusionary.”

“I take it you don’t have much regard for these kinds of societies.”

He shrugged. “I have a problem with elitism in general. I’m more a storm-the-Bastille type.”

His self-assessment gave me an inward chuckle. I could barely imagine Daniel Meakin with a pocketknife, let alone brandishing sword and musket.

“The exclusivity of a secret society’s membership is for one reason and one reason only,” he said. “To empower and protect the status quo. At any cost.”

“What do you mean, at any cost?”

“Exactly that.”

“Do you think the Order had something to do with Afton Delacourt’s murder?”

The question seemed to make him very nervous. He glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs. “That’s still a very tender subject in certain quarters. I think it might be best to let that poor girl rest in peace.”

“But now that there’s been another murder, questions are bound to arise,” I said.

“Those questions are a matter for the police, surely.”

“Of course, but—”

“I’m sorry. You really must excuse me. I’m late for an appointment…”

He couldn’t get away from me fast enough.

His rapid retreat reminded me of the way Temple had shut down my questions about Afton Delacourt’s murder. Fifteen years after the fact and apparently the blackout was still in place.

I watched Meakin disappear down one of the corridors and it was only then I realized we were not alone. I had no idea how long Camille Ashby had been in the basement or why she hadn’t made her presence known. She stood in the shadows beneath the stairwell, well within earshot of our conversation. I caught only a glimpse of her before she stepped back, and a second later, I heard a door click.

After that, I didn’t care to spend any more time alone in the archives. The basement was too isolated from the rest of the building. I packed up everything and left for an early lunch.

As it turned out, I never made it back to Emerson that day. By midafternoon, when the rain finally stopped, I found myself on the Coastal Highway heading toward Beaufort County.

Ever since leaving the archives room, I’d battled a morbid compulsion—I desperately wanted to see the place where Mariama and Anyika had died.

The impulse wasn’t at all logical, but then, neither was the heart that had been traced in the frost on my window or the dark figure that had come out of the woods at Oak Grove. I was a young woman who saw ghosts. Nothing in my life had been logical since I was nine years old.

Perhaps I should have gone home first and dug up the garnet ring from my backyard the way Papa had told me to, but I didn’t. Keeping a connection to the ghost child certainly wasn’t logical, but now that I knew who she was, I couldn’t bring myself to throw the ring into the river where she’d drowned. That seemed too cold, an affront to both her and Devlin.

Once I left US 17, the route became trickier, and if not for the SUV’s navigation system, I could have easily become lost in the tangle of two-lane blacktops and back roads that crisscrossed the rural area. However, I’d programmed the course carefully before leaving Charleston and the efficient, computerized voice led me straight to my destination.

Pulling to the side of the road, I got out and walked up the slight embankment to the bridge.

The whole time I was there, I saw only one other car, and as the driver passed by, he rolled down his window to ask if I needed help. I thanked him and waved him on, then resumed my contemplation of the river.

The water level rose to only a few feet beneath the bridge. If the river had been full when Mariama’s car crashed through the guardrail, the impact might have been cushioned, though the outcome would have probably been the same.

What had made her lose control that day? I wondered. The lanes were narrow, so maybe she’d swerved to miss an oncoming car or perhaps an animal had darted in front of her. If the bridge had been slippery, the car might have gone into a skid and hydroplaned right through the railing.

It was all useless speculation. No one would ever really know what happened.

The sky was gray, the air heavy with moisture and the scent of brine from the tidal creeks. Everything around me was silent and still.

I stood there for the longest time, but I never felt their presence.

Finally, I walked back to my car, reset the navigator and drove across the bridge without looking back.

My next stop was Chedathy Cemetery, located a few miles northeast of Hammond, down a single-lane gravel road that tunneled through thick rows of leaning live oaks.

I’d learned from the obituaries where Mariama and Anyika were buried, but I didn’t understand my obsessive need to visit their graves any more than I could make sense of my compulsion to see that bridge. I only knew that I wouldn’t rest until I did both.

A rusted metal arch marked the cemetery entrance, but the shoulder was too narrow to pull over. I drove around to the back and parked at the edge of a ditch filled with blackgreen water.

The graves here were old and decorated in Gullah tradition: clocks set to the time of death, battered lamps to light the way to the afterlife, broken pottery—pitchers, bowls, cups, tureens—to break the chain of death. Whole sections of the cemetery were covered in white sand to protect against the
bakulu,
restless spirits that lingered in our world to interfere with the living.