Ree made the turn onto Cemetery Road, but she had no intention of exploring an abandoned graveyard alone at night. There was curious and there was stupid. Mostly, she just wanted to satisfy herself that she could find it again.
As the woods pressed in from either side, she leaned forward, peering anxiously through the misty darkness. Spotting a break in the trees off to her left, she pulled to the side of the road and let the engine idle while she surveyed her surroundings. Yes, this was the place. She could just make out the primitive trail that led to the entrance. It was too dark to see the gates, but Ree remembered from her previous excursion that they were kept chained. Not that a padlock was much of a deterrent. All one had to do was shimmy up a live oak and drop down on the other side.
Someone might be in there right now, she thought with a shiver. A homeless person, perhaps. Or a serial killer looking to dump a body…
What was that?
For a moment, Ree could have sworn she saw something in the swirling haze of her headlights.
It was nothing. Just a shadow. Or a darting animal perhaps…
It was nothing.
Putting the car in gear, she eased forward. If anything had been lurking in the mist, it was gone now.
She laughed nervously. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. No such thing as magic.”
And as she muttered the words aloud, another memory from that day at Rosehill Cemetery came back to her.
“That girl is a strange one,” her grandmother had said ominously when Ree told her about Amelia. “She has the kind of eyes that can see right down into your soul. My cousin Lula had them, too. She was born with a caul, you know.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s like a veil of skin. When they remove it, the baby is sometimes left with second sight.”
“What’s that?”
“It means they can see things we can’t, child.”
“You mean like magic?”
“Magic? I guess you could call it that.…”
Ree shook off the memory and glanced around. While she sat there reminiscing, her windows had frosted and a preternatural chill crept into the car. The hair at her nape prickled and it took her a moment to work up enough courage to glance in her backseat.
No one was there, of course, and she laughed at herself again.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
But she had to say it twice more before the conviction returned to her voice.
Hayden Priest checked the reading on the electromagnetic field detector and frowned. No fluctuation whatsoever. This was his second night in Oak Grove Cemetery and he’d yet to pick up so much as a flicker despite assurances by one of his colleagues at the Charleston Institute for Parapsychology Studies that the abandoned graveyard was a hot spot for paranormal activity. The area around the Bedford Mausoleum—the oldest monument in Oak Grove—was supposedly known for its orbs. But Hayden had seen nothing. Maybe it was time to pack up and head to another cemetery.
Truth be told, his belief in the unknown was running on fumes these days. For the past nine years—since his sixteenth birthday—Hayden had dabbled in ghost hunting. The closest he’d come to a supernatural finding was an indistinguishable sound that might have been a growl captured on his digital voice recorder in a rural Kansas graveyard dubbed one of the seven lost gateways of hell. Puny evidence for all his effort, but Dr. Rupert Shaw, the institute founder, resident guru and man behind the curtain, had a favorite saying: the field of parapsychology was not for the faint of heart or the impatient.
Few disturbances ever panned out. Out of the dozens of cases the institute investigated every year, only a handful remained without logical or scientific explanation. But it was the handful that kept the investigators motivated.
Or maybe by now it was just habit, Hayden thought. At any rate, he’d always found the lone cemetery vigils far more therapeutic than the group therapy sessions his parents had dragged him to after his brother’s suicide. Hayden hadn’t needed a psychiatrist—then or now—because he already knew he wasn’t to blame for Jacob’s death. His brother had been sick for a really long time. Early childhood schizophrenia was a rare thing, but Jacob had been diagnosed at eight. Even with medication, the voices and visions had steadily gotten worse until one day one of those voices had told him to hang himself from his closet door.
For years, solace had eluded Hayden. All through high school and college, he’d been tormented, not so much from guilt, but with questions that no one could answer—not his parents, not his psychologist, not even his priest. Finally, the cold spots and electrical fluctuations in Jacob’s bedroom had led him to seek answers from unconventional sources. And nearly ten years later, he was still searching. But to what end, Hayden had no idea.
Out on the road, he heard a car approach. Kids probably. Or maybe another ghost hunter. His heart gave an odd thump as he listened and waited. He could feel something in the mist. It was like…an echo. A memory. Some sort of strange vibration. A shiver raced up his spine and his pulse quickened. The night grew unbearably still, as if waiting for the dead to rise. Then after a moment, the car drove on and Hayden went back to his lonely vigil.
Ilsa
As soon as Ree got back to her tiny apartment that night, she put on a pot of coffee and sat down at her desk to work on her thesis—a focus on personality development in old age. But her mind kept returning to the strange events of the evening. Finally she gave in to that incessant tug and scoured the internet for information about the Tisdales—a prominent Charleston family whose roots could be traced to the city’s founding—the Order of the Coffin and the Claw, a secret society that dated back to the mid-1800s—Oak Grove Cemetery, abandoned in the early half of the last century—and finally Amelia Gray.
Following a link to Amelia’s business website, Ree clicked through the portfolio of before and after cemetery images and then scanned Amelia’s bio. Her credentials were certainly impressive. Undergraduate degree in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina. Master’s in Archeology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Two years with the State Archeologist’s Office in Columbia before starting her own restoration business. And she was only twenty-seven. Comparatively speaking, Ree felt like a slacker.
Carrying her laptop to the sofa, she curled up to peruse Amelia’s blog. The wordplay title, Digging Graves, amused her, as did the posted news articles that referred to Amelia as The Graveyard Queen. The whimsical moniker took Ree straight back to that Sunday afternoon in Rosehill Cemetery.
On impulse, Ree dashed off an emaiclass="underline"
My name is Ree Hutchins. You may not remember me. We went to school together in Trinity. I’d like to ask you some questions regarding Oak Grove Cemetery in Charleston. Would it be possible for us to meet?
To her surprise, Amelia responded in a matter of minutes:
Can you come by my place tomorrow at ten?
Ree jotted down the address and phone number, and tucked the note in her bag so she wouldn’t forget. Then she went back to reading the Digging Graves archives. She had no idea how long she’d been engrossed in the entries when she became aware of a chill. The air-conditioning must have cycled on. The outside windows were frosted and a fusty odor hung in the air, which Ree attributed to the moldy vents.
As she got up to adjust the thermostat, she heard the faint strains of a song. She thought at first the plaintive melody was coming through the paper-thin walls of her apartment. Then she realized it was the same tune she’d heard earlier.