The Prophet (6 page)

Not coincidence, I thought uneasily. Synchronicity.

“A friend of mine is the director of the Institute,” I said. “I notice your sister’s place every time I visit. There’s a neon hand in the front.”

“Yes, that’s it. But don’t let the name fool you. Isabel takes her work very seriously.”

The last time I’d been to the Institute, I’d spotted Devlin on the front porch with a shapely brunette who I had assumed was the palmist. Now I was sure of it, and I was equally certain that the woman I’d seen him with last evening hadn’t been Clementine Perilloux, after all, but her sister, Isabel.

We both fell silent as we finished our coffee, and, given this new development, I wondered if I should just make a graceful exit and forget about the broken statue. I’d waited too long. Now a confession would be terribly uncomfortable. Still, Clementine had been nothing but gracious, and I felt I owed her the truth and some manner of compensation.

I nodded toward the garden. “I see your statue’s been broken.”
 She followed my gaze. “Oh! Isabel said she and John heard someone in the garden last evening.”

My heart skipped a beat. “John?”

“He’s a police detective. He and Isabel…”

I leaned in.

“…are very close friends.”

Friends? I was both hoping for and dreading an elaboration, but when none was forthcoming, I let out a breath. “You’re not upset about the statue?”

Her eyes flickered. “There was one very like it in the garden at…where I lived before. I didn’t care for that place so I’m happy to be rid of the reminder.”

I felt a tiny prick of unease, that prescient tingle along my spine and scalp that made me say quickly, “This has been lovely, but Angus and I really should be going.”

“I’ll walk you around,” she said. “Promise you’ll come again. Next time I’ll invite Isabel. I’d love for you to meet her. I know I’m biased, but she’s…well, you’ll just have to see her for yourself. I think the two of you would really hit it off. You have a lot in common.”

Chapter Seven

T
hat night I fixed a light dinner for myself, and after the dishes were washed and put away, I made a cup of tea and settled down to work. My office at the back of the house was a converted sunporch, surrounded on three sides by windows. By day, the sunlight shining in from the garden was warm and relaxing, but by night, the darkened panes spurred the imagination, especially on evenings like this when I sensed the nearby presence of restless spirits.

But I refused to give in to the sensation at my nape. I wouldn’t look around. I wouldn’t scour the garden for the telltale illumination of a manifestation. Instead, I powered up my laptop and opened a new document file.

For weeks, I’d been ignoring my blog, but now that I found myself in between restorations, the ad money generated by
Digging Graves
was an important source of revenue. I’d already come up with a new topic—“The Crypt Peeper: Communing with the Dead”—a piece about the popularity of graveyards during the Victorian era. Tonight, however, that subject seemed prophetic because I’d spent a little too much time lately conversing with ghosts.

I continued to work until I’d eked out a rough draft, and then I saved the file and logged onto the internet to do some research. If I was going to help Robert Fremont find his killer, I would need to study every scrap of information I could lay my hands on. I was still uneasy about my role as detective, but I’d always loved a good mystery and research was the backbone of cemetery restoration. I knew how to dig for the most obscure details, but unfortunately, I found precious little information about the murder. Fremont had worked undercover so I imagined that even after his death, cases and informants needed to be protected. I did run across the occasional mention of him on a site that archived old articles involving the Charleston Police Department and even managed to turn up a brief piece about the shooting and a sparse obituary.

Fremont had been thirty when he died. I’d already known he was close to Devlin’s age because the two had gone through the police academy together. I’d seen a picture of them at graduation, along with a third man named Tom Gerrity, who was now a private detective in Charleston. He and Devlin made no bones about the contempt they held for one another. The bad blood had something to do with Fremont’s death, but I knew none of the details, and the online article mentioned neither of them.

No witnesses to the shooting had ever come forward, and no information regarding motive or suspects had been released to the press. The case had apparently been kept under close wraps by both the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office and the Charleston Police Department.

Two items from the article and the obituary leaped out at me. One, Fremont had grown up near Hammond, a small town in the coastal plain of South Carolina where Mariama had been raised. And two, the shooting had occurred the day after her accident. Fremont’s time of death had been placed somewhere between two and four in the morning, several hours after Mariama’s car had gone over a guardrail at dusk, trapping her and Shani inside the sinking vehicle.

I’d seen Robert Fremont’s headstone last spring during the restoration of Coffeeville Cemetery, but I hadn’t known who he was at the time so his date of death hadn’t registered. Now, given what I’d learned of his connection to Devlin and possibly to Mariama, the proximity of their deaths intrigued me.

Grabbing a notepad and pen, I made a little diagram of names with arrows:

Devlin > Shani > Mariama > Fremont.

Then I added

Clementine > Isabel > Devlin.

As I stared down at the linked names, I became more and more convinced that nothing about the recent events was coincidental. Not Mariama’s assault, not Shani’s request and certainly not Fremont’s haunting. All three ghosts had come back into my life for a reason, and the timing was important. Everything was connected, and the pieces of the puzzle were already starting to fall into place.

The stars have finally aligned,
Fremont had said.
The players have all taken their places.

I continued to search until the words on the screen blurred and a sharp pain stabbed between my shoulder blades. I got up and stretched, telling myself I should turn in early and try to get some rest. I was exhausted, drained, and who knew what the days ahead held for me, let alone the nights. I hardly dared contemplate them.

But after everything that had happened, I knew I would never be able to sleep. I was too wired, too certain that something dark was headed my way. And Devlin was somehow involved. I could feel it. That was why he’d been reaching out to me, why even now I could sense his irresistible pull.

The walls of my sanctuary started to close in on me, and not for the first time, I found myself resenting the legacy that kept me pinned to hallowed places. All my life, I’d followed Papa’s rules, kept myself sequestered in loneliness, but now I felt an unaccustomed rebellion welling up inside me. The bloom of an unwise impulse that had very little to do with a noble purpose or a greater calling.

I wanted to see Devlin.

Not from afar as I had last evening and certainly not with another woman. I wanted him here with me, in my haven, where his ghosts couldn’t come to us. I craved his touch, his warmth, the sound of my name on his lips.

Rising abruptly, I walked to the window and pressed my forehead to the cool glass. Why not go to him? I asked myself. Why not throw caution to the wind yet again? The rules had already been broken. The door had been flung wide. I’d seen the worst. What more could possibly happen?

Famous last words.

I glanced down at Angus. He was already in his bed and looked to be fast asleep, which reassured me that, despite my terrifying thoughts, all was well inside and outside the house. His ear nubs twitched, and I wondered if he dreamed about his dark past, about his time spent as a bait dog. I hoped with the passage of enough time, we might both leave our nightmares behind us.

As if sensing my attention, he opened his eyes and gave me a mournful look.

“Sorry,” I murmured. “I don’t like to be stared at, either, when I’m sleeping.”

He settled more comfortably into his bed, snout on paws, and drifted off again. I turned back to the windows, my gaze searching the moonlit garden. The wind had picked up. The Spanish moss hanging from the old live oak billowed like gossamer curtains and the wind chimes jangled discordantly.

A storm brewed where only an hour ago the sky had been clear. For some reason, I thought of Mariama’s wrath. Was this her doing? Just how much power did she wield from the grave?

I put a hand to my chest where I had felt the force of her anger. I’d experienced the touch of a ghost before, but mostly a chill breath down my back or the occasional trail of icy fingers through my hair. With Mariama, I felt physically threatened. She frightened me in a way that went well beyond my ingrained fear of ghosts.

She wanted to keep me away from Devlin. That much was obvious. From everything I’d heard about her, she’d been a volatile woman in life. Passionate and tempestuous. I was very much afraid that death had only intensified her anger.

As I turned away from the window, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the glass. A pale, gaunt creature with wide eyes and sunken cheeks stared back at me. Hardly a match for Devlin’s memory of the lush and exotic Mariama. Or for the mysterious Isabel Perilloux.

If I peered closely enough at my reflection, I could still see the scars from my time in the mountains, those thin, white lines that crisscrossed my face and arms where dozens of deep scratches had healed. I’d almost died in Asher Falls, but I was back in Charleston now, and like those scratches, the memory of that withering town was already fading.

My time with Thane Asher seemed like nothing more than a long-ago dream, distant and hazy. There were days when I would think of him suddenly and experience a pang of fleeting regret. I missed him, but I didn’t ache for him the way I ached for Devlin. I didn’t yearn for him in the middle of the night, didn’t awaken to his conjured whisper in my ear, the phantom caress of his fingers along my spine. My time with Devlin haunted me as surely as his ghosts haunted him.

Doggedly, I went back to work, but I couldn’t concentrate. My thoughts were too scattered, and the house felt claustrophobic. I told myself it would be foolish to go out after dark when I was already safely sequestered for the night.

But…maybe the fresh air would do me good, I reasoned. A short drive along the Ashley River might help to relax me so that I could finally sleep.

A few minutes later, I was still lying to myself as I turned down Devlin’s street.

Chapter Eight

I
n all the months we’d been apart, I’d never once driven by Devlin’s house, never once chanced to arrive at a place where I thought he might be or called his phone only to hang up when he answered. At twenty-seven, I was far too old to resort to such adolescent behavior, and truth be told, such tactics were foreign to me.

Growing up, I’d had very few friends, let alone boyfriends. My free time had been spent helping Papa groom graves or sequestering myself in the hallowed section of Rosehill Cemetery, away from the ghosts and alone with my books. Left to my own devices, I’d cut my teeth on the romantic classics:
Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca.

Little wonder, then, when Devlin had appeared out of the mist that first night, so dark and brooding, so tragically flawed, the pump had been primed, so to speak. I never stood a chance.

But I’d had no experience in dealing with a real-life Byronic hero. My friend Temple had once pointed out that, until Devlin, I’d only ever been attracted to safe men. Scholars and intellectuals. Milquetoasts, she’d called them, and she’d warned me about getting too close too quickly to a man like John Devlin. Mariama, she’d said, would have known how to use her considerable wiles to control him whereas someone like me would only get her heart broken.

She’d been right about that, but it wasn’t Devlin’s fault. He couldn’t help that he was haunted by his dead wife and daughter. He couldn’t help that he wasn’t ready to let them go.

So why had I come? What could I possibly hope to accomplish? Nothing about our situation had changed. Devlin’s ghosts were still with him and Mariama’s warning couldn’t have been clearer.
Stay away.

A warning I should have heeded.

But the adrenaline was already rushing as I pulled to the curb and parked down the street from Devlin’s house. The clouds rolling in from the sea intermittently blocked the moon, and the neighborhood lay in deep shadow.

Thankfully, I saw no ghosts as I hurried along the sidewalk. It was just after ten, still early enough for the living. Up ahead, bicycle reflectors flashed around the corner and a young couple out for a pre-bedtime stroll murmured a greeting as we passed. It all seemed so normal.

But nothing about this night was normal. Certainly not my impulsive behavior. I could only imagine what my mother would say if she could see me slipping through the darkness.
No woman with a decent upbringing would ever arrive unannounced at a man’s house in the middle of the night. I taught you better than that.

She had. But here I was, anyway.

Of course, my mother had more important things to worry about these days. Her battle with cancer had taken a toll, and, though her doctors had assured us that she’d made it through the worst of the treatment, she still had a long road ahead of her.

On nights like this, when I felt lonely and confused and out of my depth, I wanted more than anything to go to her and rest my cheek on her knee while I poured out my heart to her. I wanted to tell her about Devlin and have her smooth my hair while she murmured reassurances that everything would work out in the end.