The Restorer (31 page)

“That epitaph just seems so personal. ‘A quiet life, a quiet death. Rest now, beloved. Our secret is safe.’”

We had our moments.
Wasn’t that what Temple had told me about her fling with Camille?

“But the inscription wasn’t written for Camille,” Devlin reminded me. “That tomb is over a hundred and fifty years old. Not to say the killer didn’t somehow find out about her personal life. He could have chosen the epitaph for its dual meaning. Maybe he considered Camille’s death liberation from the burden of her secret.”

“You seem convinced the killer is male,” I said.

“Like I said before, most predatory killers are. Just because he’s convinced himself the kills are justified doesn’t mean he’s not tracking his victims.”

Shadowy images crept through my head. “So how do we figure out who his next target is?”

“We try to connect the kills. The greater the time lapse between murders, the harder it is to find a connection, so the logical place to start is with the two most recent victims— Camille and Hannah Fischer.”

I toyed with a paper clip, not certain I wanted to give voice to a terrible suspicion. “Do you think Camille could have been somewhere in those tunnels when we were down there?” I lifted my gaze to his. “We never found out where those flies went.”

I could tell by the look on his face that he’d thought the same thing. “We had personnel all over that cemetery and in those tunnels in less than an hour. There’s no way he could have gotten her out of there and into that tomb without someone spotting him.”

“Unless there’s another way out that hasn’t been found yet. An opening in another mausoleum, maybe. He could have waited until everyone was gone and then brought her up. The guards at the gate wouldn’t have seen him if he was already inside the walls.”

“Even if he’d managed to get the body up to the surface alone, he would have needed help with the lid of that tomb.”

“Wouldn’t he have needed help regardless of when he put her in there?”

“Not necessarily. He seems to have some knowledge of pulleys. With a reasonable amount of time, he could have accomplished it with a rope and a tree branch.”

“But that chair we found in the chamber…”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “That chair.”

The implication of two killers—one a voyeur—was a little too much to take in. I stood abruptly. “I’ll make some tea.” As if a little chamomile or Darjeeling could soothe away the monstrous images our conversation had evoked.

I took my time putting the kettle on, getting cups down and steeping the tea bags. I was still in a quandary as to why Devlin had come here tonight after insisting I needed to distance myself from the investigation and possibly from him. Just when I’d managed to convince myself that he might be right…there he was at my door. How many of my father’s rules had I broken by simply letting him into my house?

Did I dare hope it had something to do with the absence of his ghosts?

When I finally carried the tea out to my office, I almost expected to find him asleep on the chaise. Instead, he stood at the windows, staring out into the night. He seemed so lost in thought, I didn’t want to break his concentration, so I set the tea on my desk and slipped up silently beside him.

The veil of wispy clouds covering the moon gradually peeled away to reveal the luster of a white garden. A moonlight garden, it was called. I’d been utterly enchanted when I discovered it by accident one night. By day, it lay hidden within the larger, more colorful plantings, but by the glow of the moon, the silvery foliage intensified. Once upon a time—before Devlin, before the murders—I would sit out there alone for hours, eyes closed, drinking in the mingled perfumes of flowers with names as romantic as the garden itself: bleeding hearts, forget-me-nots, moonflowers, thyme and white oleander.

It was the perfect setting for Devlin’s ghosts, but the garden was empty tonight. Not so much as a shadow stirred.

Devlin looked exhausted and drained, but when he turned to face me, I saw a spark of what I thought might be longing in his eyes.

“Why did you come here tonight?” I asked softly. “Earlier, you said I need to distance myself from the investigation.”

“And I meant it.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I can’t stay away.”

It hit me then, for the first time, that I wasn’t alone in this. Devlin felt my pull as surely as I felt his.

The knowledge that he found me alluring should have given my confidence a boost, but instead it made me feel more vulnerable. What would he expect from me? I was not an exotic temptress. I was just a cemetery restorer with callused hands and the ability to see ghosts.

He reached up and trailed his knuckles down the side of my face. “You really have no idea, do you?”

I closed my eyes briefly, savoring the warmth of his skin against mine. “I have a lot of ideas. Maybe even some that might surprise you.”

“I’m intrigued,” he said and I could see the shadow of a smile in the lamplight. His hand moved to my hair, curling a loose tendril around one finger. “Do you always wear your hair up?”

I grew a little breathless at the question. It was so unexpected—so intimate. “I like it out of my way when I’m working.”

“You aren’t working now.”

Mariama had had long, glorious hair. I pictured the way the dark curls swayed against her back in my dream and I shivered. Was that why Devlin wanted me to take down my hair? To compare us?

I had to stop thinking that way, reading too much into his every word. He’d come here tonight of his own free will. To see
me.
Not his dead wife’s ghost.

“I like it up,” I said. “and it
is
my hair.”

“Yes, it is. And in this light, it shimmers like pure gold,” he said. “It smells good, too.”

“How can you smell it from there?”

“Exactly.”

He took my hand and pulled me gently to him. I didn’t resist even for a moment, but closed my eyes and tilted my face toward his.

I felt him shudder. Then he bent his head to meet mine and our lips touched. A surge of energy plowed through me. I staggered against him and he drew me close. My arms draped around his neck as he deepened the kiss, and it went on and on, like nothing I’d ever experienced. I could feel an electric charge flowing between us. It rose and fell like the tides of an ocean, heightening my senses even as it weakened my resistance.

I didn’t ever want that kiss to end, but I knew it had to because my strength was waning by the moment. Devlin was literally breathing me in.

He pulled back suddenly, looking shaken. “I don’t know what’s happening.”

“What do you mean?” My voice quivered. I was pretty shaken, too.

He laid his forehead against mine. “It’s strange, but when I’m with you, I can sometimes feel their presence as strongly as if they’re right here beside me. And yet…when I’m with you, I feel them slipping away from me. It makes no sense. It’s like that tug-of-war in your dreams.” He didn’t have to explain. I knew he was talking about the ghosts. But for him, they were memories.

He pulled me close and I lay my cheek against his chest so that I could see out into the garden.

They were still there after all, his ghosts. Or else Devlin had summoned them back. Hardly more than shimmering transparencies, they floated out of the shadows.

Shani went straight to the swing, gliding gently back and forth, and I fancied I could hear some ethereal song emanating from her ghostly lips.

Mariama watched me with the blazing eyes of a phantom. Even through the window, I could feel the power of that gaze—cold, devious and seductive.

The room had grown frigid, though I was still warm in Devlin’s arms. Tiny lines striated the frost that had crept over the windows. I watched in fascination as more and more appeared, realizing almost too late that the fissures were not in the frost but in the glass itself. As if someone—or something—had a hand on the other side of the window, pressing inward. Pressing it in on us.

Even when I heard the cracking sound, I was slow to react. I tried to pull away, but Devlin held me fast, as if he couldn’t bear to let me go. As if he
couldn’t
let me go.

I put my hands against his chest and shoved him away with such force, he stumbled back. Somehow, he clung to my hand, pulling me with him as the window shattered over us. I felt the sting of a thousand pinpricks in my back as I crashed to the floor on top of him.

THIRTY-FOUR

A
dead tree limb had broken off and smashed through my window. Even though there had been no wind that night. Even though I’d seen the cracks before the glass shattered.

But it was the only logical explanation.

The freak accident had apparently been a wake-up call for Devlin. After helping me to drag a piece of plywood up from the basement and nail it over the opening, he couldn’t get away from me fast enough. And in the nearly two weeks since that night, I hadn’t seen or heard from him.

I told myself it was just as well. The accident had also been a warning for me, a grim reminder of the dire consequences for breaking my father’s rules. Devlin and I could have been seriously injured or even killed by flying shards of glass. I considered myself lucky for having escaped with only those tiny splinters in my back.

The timing of the accident chilled me, but perhaps I was giving Mariama too much credit in thinking she could have somehow engineered that falling tree limb. In all my ghostly sightings, I’d never before experienced a physical manifestation of an otherworldly presence, with the one exception being the garnet ring Shani may or may not have left behind in my garden.

But…this was the ghost of Mariama Goodwine Devlin. A woman who had known things. Dark things. Witch things. A woman who believed that one’s power was not diminished in death. That a spirit angered by a violent passing could use that force to interfere with the lives of the living.
Even enslave them, in some cases.

After my talk with Essie, I’d been certain that Shani’s spirit couldn’t move on because she didn’t want to leave her father. But now it seemed clear that Mariama was the one who lingered, caught between her daughter and the husband she didn’t want to leave behind. Maybe Temple had been right. Devlin and Mariama’s connection was such that nothing—not time, not distance, not even death—could keep them apart.

I’d gone home that night after my dinner with Temple and dreamed about Devlin and Mariama. And lately, I’d been dreaming about them again. The visions always started the same way: Temple imploring me to join her at that open doorway. Inside, the swirling mist, the flickering candlelight, the primitive drumbeats that drove the couple’s frantic rhythm. And then Mariama would look over her shoulder and sometimes I would find myself staring back into my own eyes.

I wasn’t possessed, but I very much feared I was on the verge of obsession.

It was a good thing that real life decided to run interference. With the Oak Grove restoration put off indefinitely, financial circumstances dictated that I take on a new project. As much as I had enjoyed dabbling in the investigation—and yes, I freely admitted that now—I could no longer ignore my dwindling bank account.

I kept track of any new developments online and through the newspapers and knew that the remains excavated from the second grave had been identified. Her name was Jane Rice and she’d been an emergency-room nurse at MUSC. She was single, lived alone and by all accounts had been a caring young woman who disappeared nine years ago on her way to work one night and never been heard from again.

I filed this information away in my Oak Grove folder.

Now that I was well away from the investigation—and from Devlin—everything that had happened seemed a little surreal. The killer was still out there somewhere, but I’d found no more suspicious postings to my blog nor had I spotted a black sedan lurking in my neighborhood. As the days passed, I began to breathe a little easier because I really had no choice. The police couldn’t watch my house twenty-four hours a day and I couldn’t hibernate indefinitely.

So I had to move on.

For the past several days, I’d been working in a small cemetery about forty miles north of Charleston. It was a plain country graveyard with simple headstones and fenced-in plots. The trees had already been thinned to allow for plenty of sunlight, and I found the personal mementos and family keepsakes—dolls, toys, framed photographs and bits of cheap jewelry—that decorated the graves touching and rather charming.

The dolls reminded me of the one Devlin had placed on Shani’s grave.

I was thinking about that doll—and Devlin—late one afternoon when I felt a chill at my back and knew that someone watched me.

Twilight had not yet fallen, but I searched the landscape fearfully with my peripheral vision. When I saw no movement, no slithering dark shape at the edge of the woods, I lifted my head and scoured the countryside.

I finally spotted him beneath a live oak, in the deepest part of the shade. Gripped by an icy trepidation, I stared at him across the headstones.

Then I put away my brush, peeled off my gloves and started toward him.

He looked exactly the same as the last time we’d met. Handsome and guarded, with sunglasses shielding his eyes.

I was uneasy but not really frightened even though we were completely alone and the nearest house was at least a mile away. Devlin seemed convinced that Tom Gerrity wasn’t the murderer and I trusted his judgment. But I did not trust Tom Gerrity. There was something about him that made my stomach clench and the hair at the back of my neck lift. He wanted something. And I had a feeling it would be some time before I discovered his true motive.

I walked up to him, scowling. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you.”

I glanced around. “I don’t see a car anywhere. How did you get here?”

“I walked up from the main road. The sign on the gate says no vehicles allowed in here. Being an ex-cop, I wouldn’t want to break the law.”

Why didn’t I believe him?

Shading my eyes with my hand, I gazed down the road.