before had I interacted with a ghost. How could this be happening when I’d followed my father’s rules to the letter?
Somehow everything had changed. The rules had been broken and I didn’t even know how.
Emotions stormed through me, a mass of swirling confusion. The sensation lasted for only a moment and then the darkness passed.
The ghost lowered her hand, stepped back into the shadows and slowly vanished into the mist.
FIVE
The next morning, I awoke to the half-light of dawn. It was nearly six o’clock, an hour before the alarm would sound, but I switched it off, anyway, then draped an arm over my eyes as the events of last evening came drifting back.
Maybe because I wasn’t yet fully alert, everything seemed a bit hazy. The unearthed body in the cemetery. The visit from the ghost child. Even my strange reaction to John Devlin.
I rolled to my side and stared out the window as I contemplated calling my mother later. I knew she’d be worried if she heard about the Oak Grove story on the news, but I was afraid my voice might give too much away if Devlin’s name came up, and how could I explain something I didn’t even understand myself? He was haunted and, therefore, taboo, so a certain amount of appeal was inherent to the situation. But I wondered if it was more than that. Why else would he unnerve me even without his ghosts?
I’d dreamed about him last night. That rarely happened even with men that I dated. It was nothing graphic or erotic, just a series of strange vignettes that ignited an already unhealthy curiosity.
Of course, if I were wise, I would put Devlin out of my mind entirely. I’d done what he asked and now there was no reason for further contact. And if we did meet again, I would need to engineer an effective defense somehow, because I couldn’t chance another visit from his ghost child. What if next time she managed to advance beyond the garden? The thought of such a breach scared me, but even so I couldn’t deny that last evening had been stimulating in more ways than one. The encounter with Devlin had shaken things up in my safe little world and given me a lot to mull over as I dressed and brought in the paper.
The Oak Grove story had made the front page of the Post and Courier. I skimmed the article as I stood at the kitchen counter sipping a glass of juice. Very few details were given, but as Devlin predicted, in the university’s official statement to the press, Camille Ashby had cited me as an “expert consultant” brought in to protect the historical integrity of the cemetery. Not my actual job, but close enough.
Refolding the paper, I set it aside and left the house for my daily walk, heading south on Rutledge Avenue. Two blocks later, I turned east, where the first scorching fingers of sunrise began to creep over the horizon. A mild breeze stirred the palmetto fronds and deepened the scent of the magnolia blossoms that peeked like roosting doves from nests of dark, glossy leaves.
On a morning like this, with the ghosts floating back through the veil, I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful place. The Holy City, some called it, because of all the church steeples that dotted the low-rise skyline. Charleston was old South, a state of mind, the luxuriant landscape of lost dreams. Everywhere I looked, everywhere I walked, the past enveloped me.
I’d only lived in the city for the past six months, but I had deep roots here. My mother had been born and raised in Charleston. She’d left her childhood home to marry my father four decades ago, but she remained to this day a Charlestonian through and through. She and her sister, Lynrose, had been raised in a comfortable household in the Historic District. Their parents were teachers, well-read and well-traveled, but it was their sense of tradition and refinement that allowed them to mingle at the fringes of society despite their middle-class upbringing.
By contrast, my father grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Hill trash to the gentry that lived south of Broad Street. In 1960s segregated Charleston, Papa’s Blue Ridge heritage would have placed him only a rung or two above the black men with whom he’d tended garden at St. Michael’s, where he’d worked before they married.
Like my maternal grandparents, I was educated and traveled. I’d received an undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of South Carolina at the age of twenty—what else had I to do but study?—and a graduate degree in archaeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was a member of the American Institute for the Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works, the Southeast Regional Conservation Association, the Association for Gravestone Studies and the Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation. I owned my own business, was considered by some to be an expert in my field and, thanks to that viral YouTube video, had become a minor celebrity among Charleston taphophiles and ghost hunters. But for all my accomplishments and fleeting notoriety, there remained a segment of Charleston’s dying mansion class that would never accept me because of my father’s people.
This bothered me not in the slightest.
I was proud of Papa’s heritage, but I did still wonder how he and my mother had managed to meet and fall in love, considering the social chasm that had separated them. Over the years, my queries to both parents had been met with little more than vague details and outright dismissals.
The only clue I’d ever uncovered was in an overheard conversation between my mother and Aunt Lynrose when she’d come to visit us in Trinity, the small town north of Charleston where we lived when my father worked as caretaker for the county cemeteries. Every evening, the two sisters would sit out on the front porch sipping sweet tea from tall, frosted glasses while twilight settled around them as softly as the silk scarves that held back their hair.
Chin propped on the sill, I would sit and listen to them through the open parlor windows, mesmerized by the lyrical quality of their lovely drawls. As I grew older, I learned to pick out the French Huguenot and Gullah influences that made the Charleston accent so distinct. My mother had never completely lost those long midvowels, and to a sheltered child such as I, her exotic speech patterns made her seem glamorous and mysterious.
On one particular evening, as I sat listening through the window, I’d detected a note of sadness in Mama’s voice as she and my aunt reminisced.
Aunt Lynrose had reached over and patted Mama’s hand. “Things don’t always work out the way we planned, but we have to make the most of what we’re given. You have a good life, Etta. A lovely home and a hardworking husband who loves you. And don’t forget what a blessing Amelia is. After all those terrible miscarriages…”
“A blessing? Sometimes I wonder…”
“Etta.” There was a note of censure in my aunt’s tone. “Why dwell on something you can’t change? Remember what Mama always said. No good can come of living in the past.”
“It’s not the past I’m worried about,” my mother murmured.
Long after they’d moved on to another topic, I remained at the window, frightened and lonely, and not understanding why.
I’d never asked my mother about that conversation. As any good lawyer would advise, a query should never be posed unless one already knew the answer. Or was prepared to deal with the consequences. I wasn’t. I preferred to remain in the dark as to why my adoption had not been considered a blessing by my mother.
Turning right on Tradd Street, I left that dark memory and the bells of St. Michael’s behind me.
Before me, the city was coming alive. The delectable aromas of coffee and fresh pastries wafted from the bakeries and open-air restaurants that catered to the breakfast crowd.
As I neared the water, the air thickened with brine. Keeping a brisk pace, I retraced last night’s steps past the stretch of colorful homes on Rainbow Row and the grand East Bay mansions with their elegant piazzas and jewel-box gardens.
I walked to the very southernmost tip of the peninsula and paused to watch the sunrise. A lone pelican circled overhead and I tracked it for a moment before letting my gaze drop to Fort Sumter, a hazy outline of crumbling walls and Southern history in the middle of Charleston Harbor.
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