He didn’t look too keen on answering. His eyes flickered with indecision. “I know a bit about it, but I don’t think that information will help solve your grave problem.”
“No, I know. But cemetery art includes a lot of symbols and imagery from secret societies. I thought I might have run across something from this organization in Oak Grove.”
“I can’t tell you anything about the symbols. They’re secret for a reason. What I can tell you is that the Order of the twentieth century became a very different organization from the one founded in the 1800s. The evolution, to my way of thinking, was not always successful.”
“I read somewhere that the bylaws were amended in the eighties to include women.”
“One of the more enlightened phases. Though ‘enlightenment’ is a bit of a misnomer when describing an organization that is, by its very nature, exclusionary.”
“I take it you don’t have much regard for these kinds of societies.”
He shrugged. “I have a problem with elitism in general. I’m more a storm-the-Bastille type.”
His self-assessment gave me an inward chuckle. I could barely imagine Daniel Meakin with a pocketknife, let alone brandishing sword and musket.
“The exclusivity of a secret society’s membership is for one reason and one reason only,” he said. “To empower and protect the status quo. At any cost.”
“What do you mean, at any cost?”
“Exactly that.”
“Do you think the Order had something to do with Afton Delacourt’s murder?”
The question seemed to make him very nervous. He glanced over his shoulder toward the stairs. “That’s still a very tender subject in certain quarters. I think it might be best to let that poor girl rest in peace.”
“But now that there’s been another murder, questions are bound to arise,” I said.
“Those questions are a matter for the police, surely.”
“Of course, but—”
“I’m sorry. You really must excuse me. I’m late for an appointment…”
He couldn’t get away from me fast enough.
His rapid retreat reminded me of the way Temple had shut down my questions about Afton Delacourt’s murder. Fifteen years after the fact and apparently the blackout was still in place.
I watched Meakin disappear down one of the corridors and it was only then I realized we were not alone. I had no idea how long Camille Ashby had been in the basement or why she hadn’t made her presence known. She stood in the shadows beneath the stairwell, well within earshot of our conversation. I caught only a glimpse of her before she stepped back, and a second later, I heard a door click.
After that, I didn’t care to spend any more time alone in the archives. The basement was too isolated from the rest of the building. I packed up everything and left for an early lunch.
As it turned out, I never made it back to Emerson that day. By midafternoon, when the rain finally stopped, I found myself on the Coastal Highway heading toward Beaufort County.
Ever since leaving the archives room, I’d battled a morbid compulsion—I desperately wanted to see the place where Mariama and Anyika had died.
The impulse wasn’t at all logical, but then, neither was the heart that had been traced in the frost on my window or the dark figure that had come out of the woods at Oak Grove. I was a young woman who saw ghosts. Nothing in my life had been logical since I was nine years old.
Perhaps I should have gone home first and dug up the garnet ring from my backyard the way Papa had told me to, but I didn’t. Keeping a connection to the ghost child certainly wasn’t logical, but now that I knew who she was, I couldn’t bring myself to throw the ring into the river where she’d drowned. That seemed too cold, an affront to both her and Devlin.
Once I left US 17, the route became trickier, and if not for the SUV’s navigation system, I could have easily become lost in the tangle of two-lane blacktops and back roads that crisscrossed the rural area. However, I’d programmed the course carefully before leaving Charleston and the efficient, computerized voice led me straight to my destination.
Pulling to the side of the road, I got out and walked up the slight embankment to the bridge.
The whole time I was there, I saw only one other car, and as the driver passed by, he rolled down his window to ask if I needed help. I thanked him and waved him on, then resumed my contemplation of the river.
The water level rose to only a few feet beneath the bridge. If the river had been full when Mariama’s car crashed through the guardrail, the impact might have been cushioned, though the outcome would have probably been the same.
What had made her lose control that day? I wondered. The lanes were narrow, so maybe she’d swerved to miss an oncoming car or perhaps an animal had darted in front of her. If the bridge had been slippery, the car might have gone into a skid and hydroplaned right through the railing.
It was all useless speculation. No one would ever really know what happened.
The sky was gray, the air heavy with moisture and the scent of brine from the tidal creeks. Everything around me was silent and still.
I stood there for the longest time, but I never felt their presence.
Finally, I walked back to my car, reset the navigator and drove across the bridge without looking back.
My next stop was Chedathy Cemetery, located a few miles northeast of Hammond, down a single-lane gravel road that tunneled through thick rows of leaning live oaks.
I’d learned from the obituaries where Mariama and Anyika were buried, but I didn’t understand my obsessive need to visit their graves any more than I could make sense of my compulsion to see that bridge. I only knew that I wouldn’t rest until I did both.
A rusted metal arch marked the cemetery entrance, but the shoulder was too narrow to pull over. I drove around to the back and parked at the edge of a ditch filled with blackgreen water.
The graves here were old and decorated in Gullah tradition: clocks set to the time of death, battered lamps to light the way to the afterlife, broken pottery—pitchers, bowls, cups, tureens—to break the chain of death. Whole sections of the cemetery were covered in white sand to protect against the
I was in the land of superstition, the land of the Lowcountry Boo Hag. A woman—according to Papa’s old tales—practiced in the ways of sorcery and witchcraft. When night fell the hag would leave her body and roam unbridled over the countryside, draining life force through the breath of her victims. She couldn’t be seen, but she could be felt. Her touch was warm, Papa said, and had the texture of raw meat.
“She’s not a ghost then,” I’d pointed out with what I considered perfect logic. “Their touch is cold and damp. It makes me think of being trapped in a tomb.”
“Shush,” Papa warned. “Don’t let your mother hear you talk about such things.”
I’d clammed up like the obedient daughter I was, but it bothered me that I couldn’t share this part of my life with Mama. After an encounter with a ghost, I’d longed more than anything to feel her warm arms around me, holding me close, keeping me safe from the dangers that floated by our windows at dusk.
If my first ghostly sighting had changed my relationship with Papa, his rules had created a chasm between my mother and me. We could never have the kind of bond I wanted because I kept things from her.
Papa kept things from her, too, and his secrets had become a heavy a burden for both of us.
Mariama and Anyika’s graves were in the newer section of the cemetery, near the entrance. They’d been laid to rest side by side beneath the gnarled branches of an ancient live oak.
Mariama’s grave was decorated similarly to the others, but Anyika’s tiny burial site had very little adornment. A simple headstone and a few scattered sand dollars and whelks.
But what struck me the most was the date of birth on the marker. Today would have been her birthday.
I knelt and with gentle hands cleared away the dead leaves from the grave, exposing a heart that someone had fashioned from cockleshells.
Slowly, I traced the outline with my fingertip, seeing in my mind’s eye the heart forming on my frosted window.
I heard the crunch of gravel out on the road as a car approached. I waited for it to pass by, but it pulled to a
