True Believer (5 page)

He checked his watch; it was a little after two, and he figured that the lunch rush at Herbs was probably ending. Might as well talk to Doris. Maybe she could shed some “light” on the subject.

He smiled lamely to himself, wondering if the woman he’d seen at the cemetery would have laughed at that one.

True Believer

Three

Only a few tables on the porch were still occupied when Jeremy reached Herbs. As he climbed the steps to the front door, conversations quieted and eyes drifted his way. Only the chewing continued, and Jeremy was reminded of the curious way cows looked at you when you approached the pasture fence. Jeremy nodded and waved, as he’d seen the old folks on the porches doing.

He removed his sunglasses and pushed through the door. The small, square tables were spread through two main rooms on either side of the building, separated by a set of stairs. The peach walls were offset by white trim, giving the place a homey, country feel; toward the rear of the building, he caught a glimpse of the kitchen.

Again, the same cowlike expressions from patrons as he passed. Conversations quieted. Eyes drifted. When he nodded and waved, eyes dropped and the murmur of conversation rose again. This waving thing, he thought, was kind of like having a magic wand.

Jeremy stood fiddling with his sunglasses, hoping Doris was here, when one of the waitresses ambled out from the kitchen. In her late twenties or so, she was tall and reed-thin, with a sunny, open face.

“Just take a seat anywhere, hon,” she chirped. “Be with you in a minute.”

After making himself comfortable near a window, he watched the waitress approach. Her name tag said rachel. Jeremy thought about the name tag phenomenon in town. Did every worker have one? He wondered if it was some sort of rule. Like nodding and waving.

“Can I get you something to drink, darlin’?”

“Do you have cappuccino?” he ventured.

“No, sorry. We have coffee, though.”

Jeremy smiled. “Coffee will be fine.”

“You got it. Menu’s on the table if you want something to eat.”

“Actually, I was wondering if Doris McClellan was around.”

“Oh, she’s in the back,” Rachel said, brightening. “Want me to get her?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

She smiled. “No problem at all, darlin’.”

He watched her head toward the kitchen and push through the swinging doors. A moment later, a woman whom he assumed was Doris emerged. She was the opposite of Rachel: short and stout, with thinning white hair that was once blond, she was wearing an apron, but no name tag, over a flower-print blouse. She looked to be about sixty. Pausing at the table, she put her hands on her hips before breaking into a smile.

“Well,” she said, drawing out the word into two syllables, “you must be Jeremy Marsh.”

Jeremy blinked. “You know me?” he asked.

“Of course. I just saw you on Primetime Live last Friday. I take it you got my letter.”

“I did, thank you.”

“And you’re here to write a story about the ghosts?”

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.”