The Restorer. Amanda Stevens

come up behind me in the cemetery and must have said my name, but I was so lost in thought, I didn’t hear him. When he placed his hand on my shoulder to get my attention, the hair rose up on my scalp like the aftermath of an electrical jolt. I jerked away from him without thinking.

      He looked taken aback by my reaction. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

      “No, it’s okay. It’s just…”

      “This place? Yeah, it’s pretty creepy. I would think you’re used to that, though.”

      “Not all cemeteries are creepy,” I said. “Most of them are beautiful.”

      “If you say so.” Something in his tone—a cold, brittle undercurrent—made me think of his ghosts. I wondered again who they were and what they’d been to him in life.

      He was still peering down at me curiously. For some reason, his height hadn’t been so obvious to me earlier, but now he seemed to tower over me.

      “Are you sure you’re okay?” he asked.

      “I guess I’m still a little jumpy from earlier. And now this.” I nodded toward the body on the ground, but I kept my gaze trained on Devlin. I didn’t want to stare at the corpse. I didn’t want to put a face with a restless, covetous ghost that I might one day see wandering through the veil.

      “I lead a dull life,” I said without irony. “I don’t think I’m cut out for crime scenes.”

      “There are a lot of things in this world to be afraid of, but a dead body isn’t one of them.”

      Spoken like a man who knew things, I thought with a shiver. His voice was the kind that made one think of dark places. The kind that made the skin ripple along the backbone.

      “I’m sure you’re right,” I murmured, searching the mist behind him, wondering if his ghosts might have slipped through the gates after all. That would explain the unnatural static that seemed to surround him and the sense of foreboding I felt at his nearness.

      But no. There was nothing behind him in the dark.

      It’s this place.

      I could feel the negative energy clutching at me like the ivy roots that burrowed into the cracks and crevices of the mausoleums, the kudzu that wound tightly around the tree trunks, slowly strangling the magnificent old live oaks for which the cemetery had been named. I wondered if Devlin felt it, too.

      He tilted his head and moonlight washed across his face, softening his gaunt features and giving me yet another teasing glimpse of the man he’d once been. I could see the gleam of mist in his hair and on the tips of his eyelashes. His cheekbones were high and prominent, his thick eyebrows perfectly symmetrical and a fine complement to the strong curve of his nose. His eyes were dark, but I’d not seen them in enough light to tell their true color.

      He was handsome, charismatic and intensely focused, and he intrigued me almost as much as he disturbed me. I couldn’t stare at him for long without hearing the echo of my father’s third rule inside my head:

      Keep your distance from those who are haunted.

      I drew a breath of moist air and tried to shake off his strange spell. “Have you found out anything about the victim?”

      Even to my own ears, my voice sounded tentative and I wondered if he would pick up on my unease. He was probably used to a certain amount of discomfort in his presence. He was a cop, after all. A cop with a very complicated past, I was beginning to suspect.

      “We don’t know who she is yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

      So the victim was female. “Do you know how she died?”

      He paused, his gaze sliding away before he answered. “We won’t know conclusively until after the autopsy.”

      It wasn’t so much what he said as what he didn’t say. And the way he hadn’t been able to meet my eyes. What was he hiding from me? What terrible things had been done to that poor woman?

      And then I thought of all the hours I’d spent working alone in this cemetery. What if the killer had happened along at one of those times?

      As if reading my mind, Devlin said, “I can tell you this much. She wasn’t killed here. Her body was brought to the cemetery for disposal.”

      Was that meant to comfort me?

      “Why here, I wonder?”

      He shrugged. “It’s a likely spot. This place has been abandoned for years and the ground over the old graves is soft. Makes for easy digging. Cover it up with a few dead leaves and some debris and a casual observer would never even notice the soil had been disturbed.”

      “But then the rain set in.”

      His gaze returned to me. “The rain set in and you came along. Even if the dirt hadn’t washed away, odds are you would have noticed the fresh digging when you cleaned up the grave.”

      Call me a coward, but I was glad it hadn’t gone down that way. “Who found the body?”

      “A couple of students climbed over the wall for a little private party. They spotted the exposed head and torso and reported it to campus police. Dr. Ashby notified Charleston PD, and then met us at the gate to let us in.” There was a slight shift in his voice. “She mentioned that you also have a key.”

      I nodded. “She gave me one when we signed the contracts.”

      “You haven’t loaned that key out to anyone in the past few days, have you? It hasn’t gone missing or anything like that.”

      “No, of course not.” I stared up at him in alarm. “You’re not suggesting that the killer used my key to get in, are you?”

      “I’m merely asking you the same questions I asked Camille Ashby. It doesn’t appear the lock was tampered with, so the logical conclusion is that the killer used a key.”

      “Maybe he didn’t come through the gate. He could have climbed over the fence like those kids.”

      Devlin glanced around. “Those walls are ten, maybe twelve feet high and overgrown with vines and briars. It would be one thing to climb over with a bottle of Jack or a six-pack. Dragging a body over…not so easy.”

      “He could have had help.”

      “Let’s hope he didn’t,” he said, something dark and chilling running beneath his words.

      I wondered what was going through his head at that moment. He struck me as a very thorough man, one so meticulous and driven he would leave no stone unturned until he found his answers.

      Which brought me back to his ghosts…

      Were they bound here because of him?

      In spite of what my father had told me about the parasitic nature of spirits, I’d come to the conclusion that some did linger because of unfinished business, be it theirs or the unwitting host’s. This made them no less dangerous to someone like me. On the contrary, those entities worried me the most because they were often desperate and confused and sometimes very, very angry.

      We fell silent and the night grew still. The mist muted the voices of the police personnel as they went about their grim business.

      I started to ask Devlin how much longer he would need me, but another officer came up just then and he turned to speak to him in low enough tones that I couldn’t hear. I didn’t want them to think that I was trying to eavesdrop, so I moved away and went back to my silent lurking.

      No one paid me any attention, and after a while, I decided I could probably just leave and no one would notice. The idea tempted me greatly. I wanted nothing more than to be home, safe and sound, in my own private sanctuary, but I resisted the urge. I couldn’t just leave after giving Devlin my word. I was a Southern girl raised by a Southern mother. Duty and obligation were as deeply ingrained into my psyche as the