The Visitor(36)
“Are you certain it couldn’t have fallen out of a box of your belongings?” he asked. “Maybe the card got mixed in with some of your things when you moved out of your parents’ house.”
“That was years ago and I’ve moved around quite a bit since then. I think I would have found the card before now. Besides, I don’t ever recall seeing any stereograms or viewers in the house, let alone any images of a look-alike. When I was little I used to spend hours and hours poring through family photograph albums. If I’d seen that picture or that woman, I’m certain I would have remembered.”
“Not necessarily. The resemblance wouldn’t have been so noticeable when you were a child.”
I let myself cling to his reasoning for a moment. “I guess that’s possible. Anything’s possible.” As I knew only too well.
“Have you shown the card to anyone in your family?”
“Not yet, but I’m driving over to Trinity to talk to Papa tomorrow. If I’m related to this woman—Rose—he’d be the one to know.”
“That sounds like a reasonable plan,” Devlin said. “Are you still worried that the stereoscope is somehow connected to the break-in?”
“I can’t imagine why Owen Dowling or anyone else would go to so much trouble for an old viewer. But I also don’t see how the timing can be coincidental. My house was broken into only a matter of hours after I took the stereoscope into his shop. And then the very next day, Louvenia Durant and her sister showed up at Oak Grove Cemetery. The whole situation is extremely unnerving, especially seeing my face in an image that must have been taken decades before I was born.” Almost as unsettling as seeing my face on a ghost.
Devlin considered the card for a moment longer before turning his attention back to me. “The resemblance really is uncanny. I can understand why you’d find it spooky. Do you know what happened to her?”
“To Rose? Only that she was the last person to be buried in Kroll Cemetery and her grave is isolated from the others.”
“She didn’t die with the colonists?”
“I don’t think so. Nelda never mentioned how she passed. If Papa can’t tell me what I need to know, I’ll start digging through the county records.”
“You’re really getting caught up in all this, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I am.” I shrugged and tried to play down my growing obsession. “There’s nothing like a good mystery to get the blood flowing. Searching through archives is one of the most gratifying aspects of my job. Tracking down that one piece of the puzzle that makes everything fall into place.”
“The thrill of the hunt,” he murmured as he moved over in front of me. Eyes glinting, he ran a knuckle down the fading mark on my cheek, and I couldn’t help shivering as I remembered his troubling promise. When I find the man responsible for that bruise on your face, I’ll make him very, very sorry.
In that instant with his magnetic gaze upon me, I sensed something dark inside Devlin. A discordant energy that I didn’t yet understand. I put my hand to his chest, outlining the silver medallion through his shirt. Something very strange happened then. My mind emptied and images came flooding in.
The sensation wasn’t a premonition or a hallucination or even my imagination. It was a memory, I realized. Devlin’s memory. Without even meaning to, I’d somehow slipped into his past.
Twenty-Two
He was no longer looking down at me, but at his companion, Mariama. Behind him a dozen or more silhouettes circled a fire, their voices and laughter rising over the music that played in the background. I recognized the song. It was one that had been popular at least fifteen years ago.
Devlin himself looked younger. There were no worry lines around his mouth and eyes. No silver in his hair from his trip to the other side. No dark circles, hollow cheeks or lingering emaciation from being haunted. Instead, he looked predatory and possessive, every bit the young, privileged male.
He moved toward Mariama, eyes hooded from intoxication and gleaming with lust. It occurred to me then that I wasn’t viewing the scene from Devlin’s perspective or even from Mariama’s. I was an onlooker inside his memory, an observer to an event that had happened a long time ago.
“You really get off on this stuff, don’t you?” he teased.
Mariama flung her arms wide as she threw back her head in exhilaration. “You have no idea! It’s the most intoxicating sensation in the world! When the power is fully unleashed, it feels like lava flowing through my veins, lightning in my fingertips.” She drew a long, rapturous breath. “But it’s not just inside me, it’s everywhere. In the trees, the sky, the ground. Even the air. Can’t you smell it?”
Devlin lifted his face. “That’s ozone. A storm’s coming.”
She gave a throaty laugh and passed him a bottle. “That’s magic.”
“If you say so.” He lifted the whiskey and drank deeply.
“I know you feel it, too,” she said. “I can see the throb of your pulse. Your heart is racing.”
“That’s not magic. That’s you.”
She slid her hand up to the medallion around his neck, entwining the silver chain around her fingers. “So much power in this totem. So much history in this emblem. You’ve no idea.”