She frowned. “Why do I get the feeling you’re leading up to something?”
I hesitated as the waiter brought her a fresh drink. “It did occur to me that you might have some inside knowledge about the Claws.”
“I already told you I didn’t.”
“I know, but the other night at dinner, you mentioned that you and Camille were roommates for a time when you were juniors. You said you were thrown together by circumstances. And I read recently that the Order’s bylaws were changed to include women. Two from every junior class. So I just thought—”
“That I’m a Claw?” She gave a low chuckle. “Now that would be an unexpected twist, wouldn’t it? Especially if I’d dated Afton.”
That stopped me cold. An involvement with Afton Delacourt had never even occurred to me.
“Before you ask, no,” she said flatly.
“I wasn’t going to ask. And I don’t think your being a Claw is so far-fetched. I imagine you were just what they looked for in a recruit—smart, ambitious, attractive.”
“And poor. I was at Emerson on a full scholarship. Big black mark against me.” She stirred her drink. “Not that it mattered. I was never much of a joiner or a follower and I detest ceremony and ritual. Probably why I’m a lapsed Catholic.”
Not exactly an outright denial, I noted.
“Speaking of ceremony and ritual, have you ever heard of something called an egregore?”
“An egre-who?”
“An egregore. A thoughtform. A physical manifestation of collective thought. Some secret societies create them through ceremony and ritual.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Where are you getting all this stuff?”
“I saw Rupert Shaw today.”
“Aha! Now it’s all starting to make sense.”
“What is?”
“You. These questions.”
I shrugged.
“Look, I’ve known Rupert for years. He was a favorite professor of mine at Emerson and I consider him one of the last true Southern gentlemen. But let’s face it. His knapsack’s been short a few biscuits for years.”
“He seems perfectly fine to me.”
She smiled. “That’s one of his talents. He’s so sweet and down-to-earth and
reasonable
that you don’t realize you’re buying into his crap until you find yourself glancing over your shoulder for the bogeyman.”
I didn’t need Rupert Shaw to make me watch out for bogeymen.
“He’s been unstable for a long time,” she said. “I’m sure that’s why he was asked to leave Emerson.”
“I thought you said he was fired because of unfounded rumors.”
“The rumors may have been unfounded and I do believe somebody deliberately set out to ruin his reputation, but none of that stuff would have had legs if not for his previous behavior.”
“By previous behavior, you mean the séances he conducted with some of his students?”
“It wasn’t just the séances.” She glanced away, her expression troubled. “He had an obsessive interest in death. I always wondered if it had something to do with his wife passing. She was sick for a long time. Years, I think. Maybe the agony of watching her suffer and the guilt of waiting for her to die unhinged him somehow. I don’t know. As I said, he was one of my favorite professors, but I’m not surprised he’s taken up permanent residence in Crazy Town. Aka, his ridiculous institute.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Dr. Shaw and except for an occasional memory lapse he seems perfectly lucid and very in the moment,” I said. “
Unhinged
I don’t get from him at all.”
“That’s just it. Even someone truly sick can hold it together for a while.” Her smile turned hard. “Then one night you wake up and find them coming at you with a pair of scissors.”
That night I tucked Essie’s amulet underneath my pillow again. I had no idea if the pouch contained anything more than dirt and cinnamon—a root doctor’s placebo—but I felt better having it nearby.
Propping myself against the headboard, I opened my laptop and started a search. As I skimmed through article after article on shadow beings and egregores, I realized that something Temple said earlier had been bothering me all night. That seemed typical of our conversations. The impact sometimes didn’t hit me until much later.
“She was sick for a long time. Years, I think. Maybe the agony of watching her suffer and the guilt of waiting for her to die unhinged him somehow.”
I hadn’t made the connection before, but now I realized why I felt so uneasy about Temple’s speculation. It went back to Dr. Shaw’s theory about death—and back to my father’s warning about the Others. When someone died, a door opened that would allow an observer a glimpse into the other side. The slower the death, the longer the door would stay open, so that one might even be able to pass through and come back out.
Was it possible Dr. Shaw had tried to open a door to the other side by murdering Afton Delacourt? Had he been that desperate to make contact with his dead wife?
I tried to shove such a nasty, baseless thought from my mind, but already an insidious seed had been sown and I felt the chill of something dark creeping over me.
Listen to me, Amelia. There are entities you’ve never seen before. Forces I dare not even speak of. They are colder, stronger, hungrier than any presence you can imagine.
Sitting up, I scoured every nook and cranny of my bedroom. I was alone, of course, with nothing but the nighttime sounds of my apartment to keep me company. Settling floorboards. A noisy air vent. My neighbor walking around upstairs.
My gaze lifted to the ceiling.
Macon Dawes was hardly ever home, so it surprised me to hear him up there now. In a way, I felt better knowing another warm body was so nearby.
Slipping out of bed, I padded over to the window to glance out. The garden wall blocked my view of the driveway, but it also gave me privacy from the street and from my next-door neighbor’s windows. I didn’t always bother with the blinds. Now I pulled them tightly closed before I got back into bed.
As I settled under the covers, my thoughts returned to Dr. Shaw.
I remembered how his voice had sharpened when he asked if I’d had a near-death experience. I could see in my mind the way his eyes had gleamed with…curiosity? Obsession?
The very thing that Temple had accused me of.
See how easy it is to distort someone’s intentions?
I was getting myself all worked up over nothing more than hearsay. Dr. Shaw was a harmless introvert with an interesting profession. The same could be said about me.
Time to move on.
I needed to cleanse my brain with more agreeable thoughts before trying to fall asleep. And for once, I would not dwell on Devlin.
Digging Graves
was always a pleasant diversion, although now my blog had also become a lucrative business endeavor. Writing steady and interesting content was both challenging and time-consuming, but on most evenings, I had nothing better to do, anyway.
I’d yet to moderate the comments from my latest entry— “Poisoned by His Wife and Dr. Cream: Unusual Epitaphs”—and now as I sifted through the responses, I began to relax. I was in my element here, sharing my passion and my experiences with taphophiles and online acquaintances from all over the world. In cyberspace, I didn’t have to look over my shoulder for ghosts.
Halfway down the page, an anonymous post caught my eye—not because the poster hadn’t used a screen name. That was common enough. But because I recognized the epitaph:
The midnight stars weep upon her silent grave,
Dead but dreaming, this child we could not save.
It was the headstone inscription on the grave where Hannah Fischer’s body had been buried.
How odd. And more than a little disturbing.
I glanced up from the screen to search my room once again. Still alone. But now the house was completely quiet. The air wasn’t running at the moment and the footsteps above were silent. Macon Dawes had finally settled in for the night.
I went back to the epitaph.
The comment had been published several hours earlier, well after the last time I’d logged on. I wanted to believe it was just some random posting, one of those bizarre coincidences, but that was asking too much.
Who else would know about that epitaph?
Devlin, of course.
And the killer…
Grabbing the phone from the nightstand, I scrolled to Devlin’s number in the directory, then hit Send before I could change my mind. The call went straight to voicemail and I left a quick message.
The moment I hung up, I regretted the impulse. What if the post
was
just a strange coincidence?
And what could Devlin do about it tonight, anyway? Anyone with even a basic knowledge of the internet knew how to use a proxy server. And anyone who had something to hide—like murder—would undoubtedly access a public computer at the library or an office store.
Besides, a number of people could have seen that epitaph. Regina Sparks. Camille Ashby. All the cops and crime scene techs that had been at the cemetery the night of the exhumation and on the day of the search.
I thought of Tom Gerrity’s contention that my knowledge of cemeteries could be the key. Was the epitaph a message?
While I waited for Devlin to return my call, I opened the Oak Grove image folder and began a meticulous search through the hundreds of photographs I’d taken on the day after Hannah Fischer’s mother had last seen her alive. It was tedious work made even more difficult because I had no idea what I was looking for.
Thirty minutes later, I still hadn’t found it.
And Devlin had not returned my call.
I glanced at the clock. Eleven twenty-two. Still early. He might be tied up on another case. Charleston was a small city with an understaffed police force and an alarming murder rate. A homicide detective would always be on call.
Opening the Oak Grove document folder, I started reading through my notes.
Eleven fifty-five. Still no Devlin. Still no clues.
I got up and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water. As I stood drinking at the sink, my gaze strayed to the clock over the stove. So strange that Devlin hadn’t called me back.
I wandered out to my darkened office, a room I’d been avoiding since the heart had appeared on the window. The night was clear and still. Moonlight shining down through the tree branches cast an opaline glow on the garden. I thought about the ring I’d buried there and the doll Devlin had left on his daughter’s tiny grave. How long had he searched for such an exquisite offering?
At the farthest corner of the garden something stirred. My heart quickened as I stepped back from the window.
It wasn’t her. It wasn’t anything. Just a random pattern of shadow and light. A pareidolia.
I went back to bed and resumed my search. A little after one, the phone finally rang and I snatched it up. “Hello?”
“Amelia?” The way he said my name sounded very proper. Very Southern. Very controlled.
I slid down under the covers with a shiver. “Yes.”
I heard something in the background then—a soft, feminine query followed by Devlin’s muffled reply.
Then he was back on the phone. “Sorry. Are you still there?”
My heart had started to beat a very painful tattoo against my chest. He wasn’t alone. He had a woman with him. “Yes, I’m here.”
“What’s wrong? You didn’t leave much of a message.”
“I know…” I trailed off, my fingers clutching the cover. This was so awkward. “I thought I’d found something, but…I may have overreacted. It’s nothing that can’t wait until morning.”
“Are you sure—”
“Yes, quite sure. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I couldn’t hang up fast enough. A part of me thought he might call back, but no. The silence from the phone was deafening.
Falling back against the pillow, I closed my eyes. How funny that I should be so upset by this. I hardly knew Devlin. He was nothing to me. Could
be
nothing to me.
And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about that soft voice in the background.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Essie’s assertion that one day soon, he would have to make a choice.
TWENTY-THREE
I
didn’t see or speak to Devlin again until the next day at the exhumation and we only had time then for a quick word. I explained about the epitaph posting on my blog and he agreed it was a curious development, though hardly a smoking gun.
“I doubt it’s enough to warrant a court order to access the ISP’s logs, and I’m willing to bet the poster used an anonymizer service, anyway. That information can’t be subpoenaed because they don’t store it. Or so they claim.”
“That’s what I thought, too.”
“I’d like to go over the Oak Grove images with you again, though. I think you could be right. You may have captured something in one of those shots that we just haven’t found yet. We need to spend some time with them.”
“Sure. Whenever you want.” He seemed to be over his anger with me, and I was happy about that, although a part of me had to wonder if his improved state of mind had something to do with the company he’d kept the previous evening.
He was more casually attired today than I’d ever seen him—jeans, a cotton shirt rolled up to the elbows and a lightweight jacket that he’d removed in the heat to reveal a belt holster and sidearm.
Carefully, I averted my gaze from the weapon, but I was transfixed by it just the same. It tied in so well with the persona Temple had painted of him as a dangerous man.
“I’ll also see about getting the patrols in your neighborhood beefed up.”
“So you do think the killer posted that epitaph,” I said in alarm.
His eyes were hooded, as though he was trying very hard to disguise whatever concern he might have. “I think it’s always better to be safe than sorry.”
Hardly a comforting platitude under the circumstances.
A small crowd had started to gather and Devlin went off then to speak to one of the other detectives. I moved into the shade and watched as Ethan laid out a grid pattern over the grave. Then he and Temple set to work with trowels, easing away dirt from the skeleton, while his assistant manned the screen and Regina Sparks shot stills.