“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 information I could lay my hands on. I was still uneasy about my role as detective, but I’d always loved a good mystery and research was the backbone of cemetery restoration. I knew how to dig for the most obscure details, but unfortunately, I found precious little information about the murder. Fremont had worked undercover so I imagined that even after his death, cases and informants needed to be protected. I did run across the occasional mention of him on a site that archived old articles involving the Charleston Police Department and even managed to turn up a brief piece about the shooting and a sparse obituary.
Fremont had been thirty when he died. I’d already known he was close to Devlin’s age because the two had gone through the police academy together. I’d seen a picture of them at graduation, along with a third man named Tom Gerrity, who was now a private detective in Charleston. He and Devlin made no bones about the contempt they held for one another. The bad blood had something to do with Fremont’s death, but I knew none of the details, and the online article mentioned neither of them.
No witnesses to the shooting had ever come forward, and no information regarding motive or suspects had been released to the press. The case had apparently been kept under close wraps by both the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office and the Charleston Police Department.
Two items from the article and the obituary leaped out at me. One, Fremont had grown up near Hammond, a small town in the coastal plain of South Carolina where Mariama had been raised. And two, the shooting had occurred the day after her accident. Fremont’s time of death had been placed somewhere between two and four in the morning, several hours after Mariama’s car had gone over a guardrail at dusk, trapping her and Shani inside the sinking vehicle.
I’d seen Robert Fremont’s headstone last spring during the restoration of Coffeeville Cemetery, but I hadn’t known who he was at the time so his date of death hadn’t registered. Now, given what I’d learned of his connection to Devlin and possibly to Mariama, the proximity of their deaths intrigued me.
Grabbing a notepad and pen, I made a little diagram of names with arrows:
Devlin > Shani > Mariama > Fremont.
Then I added
Clementine > Isabel > Devlin.
As I stared down at the linked names, I became more and more convinced that nothing about the recent events was coincidental. Not Mariama’s assault, not Shani’s request and certainly not Fremont’s haunting. All three ghosts had come back into my life for a reason, and the timing was important. Everything was connected, and the pieces of the puzzle were already starting to fall into place.
The stars have finally aligned, Fremont had said. The players have all taken their places.
I continued to search until the words on the screen blurred and a sharp pain stabbed between my shoulder blades. I got up and stretched, telling myself I should turn in early and try to get some rest. I was exhausted, drained, and who knew what the days ahead held for me, let alone the nights. I hardly dared contemplate them.
But after everything that had happened, I knew I would never be able to sleep. I was too wired, too certain that something dark was headed my way. And Devlin was somehow involved. I could feel it. That was why he’d been reaching out to me, why even now I could sense his irresistible pull.