He raised his hands. “So it seems.”
“Well, I’ll be.” Her accent made it sound like she was pronouncing the letters L-I-B. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”
“I like to surprise people. Sometimes it makes it a little easier to obtain accurate information.”
“L-I-B,” she said again. After the surprise had faded, she pulled out a chair. “Mind if I take a seat? I suppose you’re here to talk to me.”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble with your boss if you’re supposed to be working.”
She glanced over her shoulder and shouted, “Hey, Rachel, do you think the boss would mind if I took a seat? The man here wants to talk to me.”
Rachel poked her head out from behind the swinging doors. Jeremy could see her holding a pot of coffee.
“Nah, I don’t think the boss would mind at all,” Rachel responded. “She loves to talk. Especially when she’s with such a handsome fella.”
Doris turned around. “See,” she said, and nodded. “No problem.”
Jeremy smiled. “Seems like a nice place to work.”
“It is.”
“I take it that you’re the boss.”
“Guilty as charged,” Doris answered. Her eyes flickered with satisfaction.
“How long have you been in business?”
“Almost thirty years now, open for breakfast and lunch. We were doing the healthy food thing long before it was popular, and we have the best omelets this side of Raleigh.” She leaned forward. “You hungry? You should try one of our sandwiches for lunch. It’s all fresh—we even make the bread daily. You look like you could use a bite, and from the looks of you . . .” She hesitated, looking him over. “I’ll bet you’d love the chicken pesto sandwich. It’s got sprouts, tomatoes, cucumbers, and I came up with the pesto recipe myself.”
“I’m not really that hungry.”
Rachel approached with two cups of coffee.
“Well, just to let you know . . . if I’m going to tell a story, I like to do it over a good meal. And I tend to take my time.”
Jeremy surrendered. “The chicken pesto sandwich sounds fine.”
Doris smiled. “Could you bring us a couple of the Albemarles, Rachel?”
“Sure,” Rachel answered. She looked him over with an appreciative eye. “By the way, who’s your friend? Haven’t seen him around here before.”
“This is Jeremy Marsh,” Doris answered. “He’s a famous journalist here to write a story about our fair town.”
“Really?” Rachel said, looking interested.
“Yes,” Jeremy answered.
“Oh, thank goodness,” Rachel said with a wink. “For a second, I thought you’d just come from a funeral.”
Jeremy blinked as Rachel moved away.
Doris laughed at his expression. “Tully stopped in after you swung by for directions,” she explained. “I guess he figured I might have had something to do with you coming down, and he wanted to make sure. So anyway, he rehashed the entire conversation, and Rachel probably couldn’t resist. We all thought his comment was a hoot.”
“Ah,” Jeremy said.
Doris leaned forward. “I’ll bet he talked your ear off.”
“A little.”
“He was always a talker. He’d talk to a shoe box if no one else was around, and I swear I don’t know how his wife, Bonnie, put up with it for so long. But twelve years ago, she went deaf, and so now he talks to customers. It’s all a person can do to get out of there in less time it takes ice cubes to melt in winter. I even had to shoo him out of here today after he came by. Can’t get a speck of work done if he’s around.”
Jeremy reached for his coffee. “His wife went deaf?”
“I think the Good Lord realized she’d sacrificed enough. Bless her heart.”
Jeremy laughed before taking a sip. “So why would he think you were the one who contacted me?”
“Every time something unusual happens, I’m always to blame. Comes with the territory, I guess, being the town psychic and all.”
Jeremy simply looked at her and Doris smiled.
“I take it you don’t believe in psychics,” she remarked.
“No, not really,” Jeremy admitted.
Doris tugged at her apron. “Well, for the most part, I don’t, either. Most of them are kooks. But some people do have the gift.”
“Then . . . you can read my mind?”
“No, nothing like that,” Doris said, shaking her head. “At least most of the time, anyway. I have a pretty good intuition about people, but reading minds was more my mom’s thing. No one could hide a thing from her. She even knew what I planned on buying her for her birthdays, which took a lot of the fun out of it. But my gift is different. I’m a diviner. And I can also tell what sex a baby’s going to be before it’s born.”
“I see.”
Doris looked him over. “You don’t believe me.”
“Well, let’s just say you are a diviner. That means you can find water and tell me where I should dig a well.”
“Of course.”
“And if I asked you to do a test, with scientific controls, under strict supervision . . .”
“You could even be the one to supervise me, and if you had to rig me up like a Christmas tree to make sure I wasn’t cheating, I’d have no problem with that.”
“I see,” Jeremy said, thinking of Uri Geller. Geller had been so confident of his powers of telekinesis that he’d gone on British television in 1973, where he’d appeared before scientists and a studio audience. When he balanced a spoon on his finger, both sides began to curve downward before the stupefied observers. Only later did it come out that he’d bent the spoon over and over before the show, producing metal fatigue.
Doris seemed to know just what he was thinking.
“Tell you what . . . you can test me anytime, in any way you’d like. But that’s not why you came. You want to hear about the ghosts, right?”
“Sure,” Jeremy said, relieved to get straight into it. “Do you mind if I record this?”
“Not at all.”
Jeremy reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved the small recorder. He set it between them and pressed the appropriate buttons. Doris took a sip of coffee before beginning.
“Okay, the story goes back to the 1890s or thereabouts. Back then, this town was still segregated, and most of the Negroes lived out in a place called Watts Landing. There’s nothing left of the village these days because of Hazel, but back then—”
“Excuse me . . . Hazel?”
“The hurricane? Nineteen fifty-four. Hit the coast near the South Carolina border. It pretty much put most of Boone Creek underwater, and what was left of Watts Landing was washed away.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. Go ahead.”
“Anyway, like I was saying, you won’t find the village now, but back near the turn of the century, I guess about three hundred people lived there. Most of them were descended from the slaves that had come up from South Carolina during the War of Northern Aggression, or what you Yankees call the Civil War.”
She winked and Jeremy smiled.
“So Union Pacific came through to set the railroad lines, which, of course, was supposed to turn this place into a big cosmopolitan area. Or so they promised. And the line they proposed ran right through the Negro cemetery. Now, the leader of that town was a woman named Hettie Doubilet. She was from the Caribbean—I don’t know which island—but when she found out that they were supposed to dig up all the bodies and transfer them to another place, she got upset and tried to get the county to do something to have the route changed. But the folks that ran the county wouldn’t consider it. Wouldn’t even grant her the opportunity to make her case.”
At that moment, Rachel arrived with the sandwiches. She set both plates on the table.
“Try it,” Doris said. “You’re skin and bones, anyway.”
Jeremy reached for his sandwich and took a bite. He raised his eyebrows and Doris smiled.
“Better than anything you can find in New York, isn’t it?”
“Without a doubt. My compliments to the chef.”
She looked at him almost coquettishly. “You are a charmer, Mr. Marsh,” she said, and Jeremy was struck by the thought that in her youth, she must have broken a few hearts. She went on with her story, as if she’d never stopped.
“Back then, a lot of folks were racist. Some of them still are, but they’re in the minority now. Being from the North, you probably think I’m lying about that, but I’m not.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you don’t. No one from the North believes it, but that’s beside the point. But going on with the story, Hettie Doubilet was enraged by the folks at the county, and legend has it that when they refused her entrance to the mayor’s office, she put a curse on us white folk. She said that if graves of her ancestors would be defiled, then ours would be defiled, too. The ancestors of her people would tread the earth in search of their original resting place and would trample through Cedar Creek on their journey, and that in the end, the whole cemetery would be swallowed whole. Of course, no one paid her any attention that day.”
Doris took a bite of her sandwich. “And, well, to make a long story short, the Negroes moved the bodies one by one to another cemetery, the railroad went in, and after that, just as Hettie said, Cedar Creek Cemetery started going bad. Little things at first. A few headstones broken, things like that, like vandals were responsible. The county folks, thinking Hettie’s people were responsible, posted guards. But it kept happening, no matter how many guards they put out there. And over the years, it kept getting worse. You went there, right?”
Jeremy nodded.
“So you can see what’s happening. Looks like the place is sinking, right, just like Hettie said it would? Anyway, a few years later, the lights started to appear. And ever since then, folks have believed it was the slave spirits marching through.”
“So they don’t use the cemetery anymore?”
“No, the place was abandoned for good in the late 1970s, but even before that, most people opted to be buried in the other cemeteries around town because of what was happening to that one. The county owns it now, but they don’t take care of it. They haven’t for the last twenty years.”
“Has anyone ever checked into why the cemetery seems to be sinking?”
“I’m not certain, but I’m almost positive that someone has. A lot of powerful folks had ancestors buried in the cemetery, and the last thing they wanted was their grandpa’s tomb being broken up. I’m sure they wanted an explanation, and I’ve heard stories that some folks from Raleigh came to find out what was happening.”
“You mean the students from Duke?”
“Oh, no, not them, honey. They were just kids, and they were here last year. No, I’m talking way back. Maybe around the time the damage first started.”
“But you don’t know what they learned.”
“No. Sorry.” She paused, and her eyes took on a mischievous gleam. “But I think I have a pretty good idea.”
Jeremy raised his eyebrows. “And that is?”
“Water,” she said simply.
“Water?”
“I’m a diviner, remember. I know where water is. And I’ll tell you straight up that that land is sinking because of the water underneath it. I know it for a fact.”
“I see,” Jeremy said.
Doris laughed. “You’re so cute, Mr. Marsh. Did you know that your face gets all serious-looking when someone tells you something you don’t want to believe?”
“No. No one’s ever told me that.”
“Well, it does. And I think it’s darling. My mom would have had a field day with you. You’re so easy to read.”
“So what am I thinking?”
Doris hesitated. “Well, like I said, my gifts are different than my mother’s. She could read you like a book. And besides, I don’t want to scare you.”
“Go ahead. Scare me.”
“All right,” she said. She took a long look at him. “Think of something I couldn’t possibly know. And remember, my gift isn’t reading minds. I just get . . . hints now and then, and only if they’re really strong feelings.”
“All right,” Jeremy said, playing along. “You do realize, however, that you’re hedging yourself here.”
“Oh, hush, now.” Doris reached for his hands. “Let me hold these, okay?”
Jeremy nodded. “Sure.”
“Now think of something personal I couldn’t possibly know.”
“Okay.”
She squeezed his hand. “Seriously. Right now you’re just playing with me.”
“Fine,” he said, “I’ll think of something.”
Jeremy closed his eyes. He thought of the reason Maria had finally left him, and for a long moment, Doris said nothing at all. Instead, she simply looked at him, as if trying to get him to say something.
He’d been through this before. Countless times. He knew enough to say nothing, and when she remained silent, he knew he had her. She suddenly jerked—unsurprising, Jeremy thought, since it went with the show—and immediately afterward, released his hands.
Jeremy opened his eyes and looked at her.
“And?”
Doris was looking at him strangely. “Nothing,” she said.
“Ah,” Jeremy added, “I guess it’s not in the cards today, huh?”
“Like I said, I’m a diviner.” She smiled, almost as if in apology. “But I can definitely say that you’re not pregnant.”
He chuckled. “I’d have to say that you’re right about that.”