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
“Zombie 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?”
“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?
On and on my thoughts rambled as I continued to work. By the end of the day, I had been rewarded with several lovely inscriptions. As I rinsed away the grime from the final headstone, an anchor appeared, a symbol as old as the catacombs. In its straightforward interpretation, an anchor symbolized hope and steadfastness on the graves of sailors, but in olden times, it had often been used as a disguised cross to guide the devoted and the persecuted to secret meeting places. On this day, I found new significance in the symbol because it reminded me that something as innocuous as an anchor—or a songbird—could have hidden meaning.
At four o’clock, I gathered up my tools and supplies, leaving the heavy water jugs behind so that I wouldn’t have to cart them back and forth. Temple had finished her survey of the exhumed graves and left mid-afternoon. Her job was done. From here on out, I’d be working in the cemetery alone. Maybe it was a blessing I had so many things occupying my thoughts these days. I had little time to brood about the past or worry about the perpetual pall that hung over Oak Grove Cemetery.
Still, as I locked the gates and turned my back on the graveyard, I felt a little chill go through me. I didn’t glance over my shoulder but instead ran my gaze along the edge of the woods, searching for movement in the deep shade at the tree line. The sun hung low, but there was still plenty of daylight left. No reason in the world to be frightened, I told myself. And yet…I was.
I tried to shake off the disquiet as I started down the overgrown path to the road. My imagination really was doing a number on me because at one point I could have sworn I heard footsteps behind me. Nothing was there, of course. It was too early for ghosts. Too early even for the shadow beings that stirred just before dusk.
Storing my tools in the back of the SUV, I climbed behind the wheel and turned the ignition. Nothing happened except for a faint, ominous click. The battery was dead, which made no sense since it was fairly new.
I popped the hood and checked the cables, then used one of my wooden scrapers to clear away the chalky corrosion around the posts. Sliding back in, I tried the ignition once more. The engine kicked over immediately, and with a sigh of relief, I hopped out to lower the hood. As I moved back around to the door, I saw that a beetle had climbed onto my shoe, and I bent down to examine it. Unlike the beetles from my dream, which were rounded and huge, this insect had a flattened body and a pale yellow platelike cover near the head.
Goose bumps rose on my arms and at my nape as I shook it off. Until my dream the previous night, I wouldn’t have been disturbed by such a sight. Since childhood, I’d suffered from a mild case of arachnophobia, but insects never worried me, even the giant cockroaches—palmetto bugs—so prevalent along the southeastern coast. Now I had to wonder if the beetle was a warning or a sign. A creepy-crawly with a hidden meaning.
I climbed back into the car and locked the doors as I scanned my surroundings. I told myself I was being ridiculous. Because of a nightmare, I now had a thing about beetles?
But no rationale could convince me that the one crawling on my shoe had been an accident. I no longer believed in the randomness of the universe or the happenstance of everyday occurrences. Everything happened for a reason, and I was very much afraid this current synchronicity would be the death of me.
Chapter Thirty
I drove straight home and took Angus for a quick walk, then showered, dressed and headed out again. In a way, it was a relief to have a mission, because it kept me from stewing about that blasted beetle or, worse, worrying how Devlin intended to stop Darius Goodwine.
He’d been adamant that his quarrel with Darius had nothing to do with Mariama, but I was hard-pressed to believe it. Darius and Mariama had been raised together as siblings by their grandmother, Essie, so they must have been close. According to Robert Fremont, there had been many in the community who considered Devlin taboo because of his race and background, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Darius was one of his detractors.
Despite his impressive résumé in academia, he obviously identified closely with the magic and mystique of his heritage, going beyond Essie’s teachings as a local root doctor to study and practice with an African shaman in Gabon. By bringing gray dust back to Charleston, he’d placed himself on the wrong side of the law. As a cop’s wife, Mariama mig
ht have felt she had to make a choice.
Of course, all of that was based on nothing more than wild conjecture, exhaustion and my overstimulated imagination. I reminded myself that time would be better spent on how to approach Tom Gerrity. As I fought my way through the rush hour traffic on Calhoun, I once again tried to decide what I would say to him. I needed a goal for this meeting, something a little more concrete than Fremont’s assertion that he felt very strongly about it.
And speaking of Robert Fremont, where was he? He’d told me he would be around if I needed him, so why hadn’t he materialized to help me devise a plan? He was the one with the expertise in this partnership, and yet, he’d offered very little in the way of guidance or advice.
I’d never tried to summon a ghost—far from it—but now I focused my thoughts on Fremont, hoping the energy shift would pull him to me. I even said his name aloud three times but to no avail. Either he was unable to come through the veil or he was patently ignoring me, which made no sense because this whole investigation was his idea. He was the one who needed to move on.
By the time I reached Gerrity’s street, I was thoroughly annoyed, although some of my irritation might have been due to nerves and lack of sleep. I drew a few calming breaths as I looked for a parking space.
The shabby neighborhood had once been a quaint, residential haven, but developers had ruthlessly crushed many of the lovely old homes. Now squatty monstrosities of progress resided alongside the fading grace of Victorian-style houses with sagging verandas and long-neglected gardens.
Gerrity’s office was located in an old, two-story clapboard that hadn’t seen a paint job in decades. I couldn’t find a space near the building, so I parked one block over and checked the clock. I was nearly half an hour early and decided I’d prefer to pass the time in my locked car rather than loiter in the dingy hallway outside his office.
The Prophet (Graveyard Queen) Page 20