The Prophet

hips.”

I took another and I placed it on my plate.

“Well, I’ve certainly been the chatterbox, haven’t I?” she said cheerfully. “I don’t know what’s gotten into me.” A pause. “You’re very easy to talk to.”

“I am?” I would never have thought so. I’d spent too much of my life in my own company.

“You have a kind face and a soothing manner.” She held out her hand. It was perfectly steady now. “May I?”

I felt myself immediately withdraw. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m not much for fortunes. I’ve never wanted to see my future.”

“Don’t worry. I know little beyond the basics. Both hands, please. The future is shown in the left, the past in the right.”

I placed my hands palm up on the table. She scrutinized both without touching either. “What do you do for a living, Amelia?”

“I’m a cemetery restorer.”

She glanced up. “Really. How interesting. What does that entail, exactly?” She bent back to my palms.

“In a nutshell, I reclaim old graveyards that have been abandoned or fallen into a state of neglect.”

“You mean like family burial sites?”

“And old public cemeteries, as well. Graves are forgotten and rarely visited after a generation or two. Neglect takes a rapid toll. The ground sinks. Headstones crack. Whole cemeteries get swallowed up by forests… .” I trailed off. “Now I’m talking too much.”

“Not at all. I love old graveyards. I’ve just never given much thought to the care of them. I imagine vandalism is a big problem.”

“Vandalism, acid rain, moss and lichen. The problems vary. Every cemetery is unique. The time and attention required will vary from place to place, stone to stone. My motto is to do no harm.”

“Like the Hippocratic oath,” she said. “I suppose that’s a good life’s motto for any of us.”

“Yes, it is.”

“When I was little, my grandmother and I spent many a Sunday afternoon exploring churchyards all over Charleston. The Unitarian was always my favorite. I loved all the wildflowers and the story about Annabel Lee. She was supposedly the inspiration for Poe’s poem, you know. I would beg my grandmother to tell her story every time we visited, even though I was terrified of running into her ghost. Luckily, I never did.” She gave a little shudder as she fixed her gaze on my palms. “Hmm…that’s interesting.”

“Interesting good or interesting bad?” I asked with more than a shade of trepidation.

“You have water hands,” she said. “I would have guessed earth.”

“Because of my profession?”

“Among other things.”

I curled my fingers and withdrew my hands to my lap. She didn’t object.

“You have some unusual lines,” she mused as she sipped her coffee. “But I don’t know enough to give you a proper interpretation. You should let my grandmother do a reading for you sometime. Or my sister. She’s very talented. Maybe the most gifted of us all.”

“Thank you, but as I said, I’d rather not know what the future holds.”

She leaned in. “I’ll let you in on a secret. Chiromancy has very little to do with psychic ability. It’s both an art and a science. A good palmist is more of a psychologist than a prophet. She bases her predictions on a particular set of factors she gleans from the client and then suggests a likely outcome. But my sister says that no one is interested in the actual methodology. People who visit palmists do so because they’re drawn to the mystique. They want the show, in other words, and Isabel obliges in her own irreverent manner. She calls herself Madam Know-it- all.”

“She’s a professional palmist?” Madam Know-it-all. Why did that name ring a bell?

“She has a place right on the edge of the historic district, near Calhoun.”

Something was starting to niggle. “Is it across the street from the Charleston Institute for Parapsychology Studies, by chance?”

Clementine’s eyes widened. “Don’t tell me you’ve been there. Now that is a coincidence.”

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

That 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