The Visitor(47)

“Rose had a fascination, a fixation, if you will, with keys. She must have collected dozens, if not hundreds, of lost keys over the years.”

“Did she ever explain her fascination?”

Nelda shrugged. “I don’t recall that we ever asked her.”

I stared down into the teacup for a moment. “Dr. Shaw said there are those who believe the cemetery is a puzzle or riddle that no one has ever been able to solve.”

Nelda smiled. “Perhaps because it’s unsolvable. You have to take into account Rose’s mental state when she designed Kroll Cemetery. What made sense to her would undoubtedly seem nonsensical to the rest of us. By the time the cemetery was finished, she was already living in her own world. Withdrawn and paranoid even with me. At some point, she suffered a complete breakdown. That’s the only way to explain why she did what she did.”

“Build the cemetery, you mean?”

“No, dear. Rose killed herself.”

My hand jerked slightly, clattering the porcelain cup against the saucer. “How tragic, especially after all those other suicides.”

“You’ve no idea. I was the one who found her hanging in the tiny dark room, a key still clutched in her lifeless fingers. I’ll never forget the way the blood dripped down her face like crimson teardrops.”

“There was blood?”

Nelda lifted her gaze to mine. “You see, before Rose died, she used that key to put out her eyes.”





Twenty-Eight

I left the shop with more questions swirling in my head than when I had arrived. Nelda was so preoccupied with the viewer that she barely noticed my exit. I’d meant to ask about her insistence that I come see her before I agreed to the restoration, but after her grisly revelation about Rose, I hadn’t felt like lingering.

My look-alike and namesake had lost touch with reality, put out her own eyes with a key and then hanged herself. Of course, Nelda had been little more than a child at the time and she may not have known all the facts. If someone had murdered Ezra Kroll and the colonists in cold blood, who was to say Rose hadn’t met the same end?

But what if the ghosts had driven her insane? What if she’d killed herself to escape them?

What if the same fate awaited me someday?

I always assumed my destiny was a dark one. I had only to look at Papa. He’d withdrawn inside himself to escape from the ghosts, and he kept things from me about my past and my gift because he wanted to shelter me. His motives were selfless, but his secrets made me vulnerable. I could see that now. The rules had hobbled me as much as they had protected me. Instead of growing stronger and learning how to fight for my future, I’d spent most of my life sequestered behind cemetery walls, hiding and pretending.

That time was long gone. My eyes were open now and I could no longer deny the changes that were happening inside me any more than I could hide from the ghosts.

But I was tired of dwelling on the direness of it all. It was a beautiful May morning, cloudless and breezy. I didn’t want to think about my gift or Rose’s prophecy or the unbound power left behind by the dead. I wanted to shove every bad thought to the furthest corner of my mind and retreat into my work as I always had.

There would be time enough later to reflect on Rose Gray and Ezra Kroll and the cemetery she had built for him. Time enough to obsess over those keys on my nightstand and the motes in my eyes and the gruesome way in which Rose had met her end. But for now, for a little while longer, I would lose myself in the withering beauty of one of my forgotten graveyards.

And for most of the day, I was able to do exactly that in a little cemetery just outside Charleston. But on my journey to Trinity late that afternoon, the forbidden images crept back in. The possibility that a key I’d found on a headstone in Rosehill Cemetery nearly twenty years ago had turned up on my nightstand made me contemplate again the notion of predestination and how all the strange occurrences in my life were somehow connected.

The sun still hovered over the treetops when I pulled into the empty driveway. I knew from an earlier phone call that my mother was away for the day with my aunt. I’d started to go straight to the cemetery to look for Papa, but I’d wanted to spend a few minutes with Angus. He bounded across the yard to greet me as I climbed out of the car, but the moment I held out my hand to him, he stopped short, his lips curling back in a low growl.

His threatening behavior stunned me. He wouldn’t have forgotten me in so short a time. I could only surmise that he had intuited the supernatural turmoil around me. Maybe he’d even sensed the unbound energy of death that I had unwittingly attracted.

Still in shock, I knelt and spoke to him in my softest voice. “It’s me, Amelia. Don’t you recognize me? You know I won’t hurt you.”

His head came up and he stared at me for the longest time with those dark, soulful eyes. Then he took a cautious step closer as if he wanted to believe I was still the old Amelia. Almost immediately he halted with a snarl, his tail dropping and his hackles rising.

He looked to be on the verge of more serious aggression so I stood slowly and began to ease back to my car. “It’s okay, Angus. It’s okay, boy,” I soothed over and over.

He was getting ready to lunge. I could tell by his stance. If I made one wrong move, I had no doubt he’d be on me.

As I felt for the door handle, he rushed forward and then retreated, repeating the action until I was back inside my vehicle. Then he began to pace, teeth bared, body hunched low as I started the engine and drove away.