“She died. But she had been away for a long time by then.”
“How old were you when she left?”
“Nine or ten. I don’t rightly recall anymore.”
“Did you already know about the ghosts?”
“Yes. My first sighting was the ghost of a boy named Jimmy Tubbs. He’d been killed in a logging accident a week before I spotted him at the end of our lane.”
“What did you do?” I asked, remembering my first sighting and how Papa had sat me down in this very cemetery and told me what I had to do to remain safe.
“I ran across the yard to the porch where my mother sat peeling peaches. I told her I’d seen Jimmy standing at the end of our road staring up at our house as if he was contemplating paying us a visit. A part of me wanted her to scold me for making up stories, but instead she made me promise to never tell anyone about Jimmy, especially my father. If I saw the ghost again, I was not to look at him or speak to him. I was not to acknowledge him in any way.”
“She gave you the rules,” I said.
“After that, I saw other ghosts, mostly in the woods behind our house. My mother said they came because of her. It was dangerous for me to be around her now that I had come into the sight.”
I tightened my arms around my legs, trying to ward off the growing chill of his words. “Go on,” I urged.
“One day my father came home and found a note from her. She wrote that she was tired of living in the mountains and wanted to go back to her own people. He was livid at her betrayal, but I knew the truth. She left to protect me.”
“Did you ever see her again?”
“Only once, the summer I turned twelve. I’d just come in from doing the evening chores when I overheard Pa and his new wife talking about her. I thought it peculiar because we never spoke of my mother. They forbade it. I was never allowed to even mention her name. But I heard them say that someone had seen her down here in South Carolina. They said she’d taken up with some man that she’d known before she married my father.”
Ezra Kroll, I thought. “What did you do?”
“The next morning, I packed a change of clothing and what little money I’d saved up and hitchhiked down the mountain. It was just getting on dusk when I finally came upon her house.”
He paused for a breath, and in the ensuing hush, I could hear the cicadas. Their abrasive serenade filled me with dread. Overhead, night birds circled and swooped and outside the safety net of hallowed ground, the veil to the dead world thinned.
“What happened then, Papa?”
“The ghosts came. Dozens of them swarming her house like a horde of locusts. I never saw anything like it.”
Resting my chin on my knees, I thought of those ghost voices I’d heard in the hospital morgue. The invisible bodies pressing in on me through the walls. After all these years, I only now had an inkling of my destiny. A nebulous understanding of just what my gift entailed and what I might have to do to protect the people I loved.
“Did you see your mother?” I asked Papa.
“Not until daybreak. When the sun came up and the ghosts disappeared, I left the woods and went up to knock on her door. I barely recognized the woman who answered. She’d aged far beyond her years. Her hair had gone gray and she was frail. So slight a puff of wind could have blown her away.”
“Was she alone?”
“Yes. I’d heard in town there’d been some tragedy. A lot of people had died, and I thought maybe that explained the ghosts.”
I shivered thinking of all those entities seeking my great-grandmother’s help, needing retribution before they could finally move on. And I wondered again why I was being summoned to Kroll Cemetery. “Did she recognize you?”
“She seemed leery of me at first, but then she brought me inside, fixed me some breakfast and sat with me while I ate. After that we took a walk in the woods.”
“How long did you stay with her?”
“Just for the day. When the sun went down, she sent me away and made me promise not to come back. I was never to return even after she was gone.”
“After she was gone? Why?”
“She wouldn’t say. But I had the sense she was afraid of something.”
Afraid of something or someone? I wondered. By that time, Rose must have had her suspicions about what had happened at Kroll Colony.
“Sometime later, I received a package from a girl who had known her,” Papa said. “My mother had taken ill and died. The girl’s family had seen to the burial. She’d put together some remembrances—photographs, trinkets and such that she thought I might like to have. She even included a picture of my mother’s grave.”
“Who was this girl?”
“She never gave me her name.”
I wondered if it was Nelda Toombs. She and Rose had been so close it seemed only natural that she would have reached out to Rose’s son. “You never went back to visit her grave?”
“I made her a promise that day. Keeping my word was the last thing I could do for her.”