The Road to Grace (The Walk) (25 page)

“That’s me,” I said.

She marked the list on her clipboard. “I’m Doreen. You’re alone, right?”

I felt it accutely. “Right.”

“Just go ahead and find a seat in the van out front.”

I walked back outside. The small group I’d passed on the way in was now seated inside the van. The van’s door was wide open.

There were five of us in the group: a young, fresh-faced couple who, from their glassy-eyed expressions, I guessed to be honeymooners, occupied half the front bench, and two women in their mid fifties sat in the middle row.

The driver was a thin, thirtyish man with a face shadowed with stubble. Even though it was already getting dark he wore Ray-Ban aviators, and he looked a little like Richard Petty, the former NASCAR champion. His head was bowed as he was evidently playing a game on his cell phone.

“Good evening,” I said as I climbed into the vehicle. Only the ladies greeted me back. The driver was fixated on his phone and the couple was still fixated on each other, oblivious to all other life on the planet. I squeezed through to the backseat of the van.

A few minutes later, Doreen poked her head in through the front passenger window. “We’re waiting for one more.”

The driver grunted and scratched his face, but still
didn’t look up. About two minutes later Doreen returned. She was standing next to an elderly gentleman who wore a flat cap and gray sweater and carried a black, metal-tipped cane.

“There you are, Mr. Lewis,” Doreen said. “I’ll take your cane. Watch your step.”

Mr. Lewis was probably in his mid to late eighties, gray and bent with age. He struggled to climb up into the front row, sitting next to the honeymooners. Doreen helped him fasten his seat belt, then slid the side door shut and climbed into the front passenger seat. When she was settled, she turned around and smiled at us.

“Welcome, everyone, to haunted Hannibal. I have been guiding this tour for nearly twelve years now, and let me tell you, in those years I’ve seen some amazing things. Rest assured, your experiences on this tour are your own. We don’t judge the validity of your encounters, we just accept and let things happen. Most of all, you’re going to have a good time.

“Our first stop tonight is rife with paranormal activity: the Old Baptist Cemetery.” She turned to the driver. “Let’s go.”

The driver put down his phone, then looked over his shoulder and pulled out into the quiet, vacant street.

The cemetery was about five minutes from our pickup point and the last of the day’s light was gone when the van stopped. Doreen and the driver helped Mr. Lewis out of the van, then the rest of us followed.

I was the last one out and the small group had already formed a half circle in front of Doreen. Most of the cemetery was draped beneath a canopy of aged oak trees, which left us standing in a darker shade of night.

Doreen handed each of us copper rods that swiveled
in wooden handles, like divining rods, the kind water witches use to find water.

“This little device will help you find spectral energy,” she said. “As you walk through the cemetery, hold the rods in front of you like this.” She demonstrated, holding the rods in front of her with both hands like she was holding a pair of guns. “If they start crossing, you might have found someone who wants to communicate with you. Sometimes the lines will just open up. I’ve even seen them spin. Go ahead and ask the spirits questions. The ghosts up here are used to us, so they know what to do. But do be careful, it’s dark, so watch where you’re stepping. We don’t want anyone tripping over anything. Now off you go. Have fun!”

At Doreen’s dismissal, everyone wandered off with their spirit wands, headed toward different sections of the cemetery. I stood there feeling stupid, holding the pointers in front of me.

Mr. Lewis was still next to me. He was moving slowly, his cane in one hand, both of the rods in the other. I thought that at his age, traipsing around cemeteries at night might be a bit too ambitious.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Certainly,” he said curtly, his voice low and gravelly.

“Have you done this before?”

“Countless times.”

“Oh,” I said, a little surprised. “Have you ever encountered anything?”

“Not what I’m looking for.” He turned and looked at me, his eyes as dark as the cemetery. “I’m looking for my wife.”

His response jarred me. I had never considered looking
for McKale in this way. Nor did I want to. Everything about it seemed wrong.

“You’ve been looking for her for a while?”

“Yes,” he said. Then he hobbled away, mumbling something as he crossed the grounds.

I walked off alone toward the cemetery’s northeast corner, holding the rods in front of me. About ten minutes later, Doreen joined me. “How’s it going?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said.

“Good,” she said brightly.

Nothing had happened, except the rods had moved a little, something that was almost impossible to prevent, even if you were trying.

“Tell me,” I said. “What do you know about Mr. Lewis?”

“Mr. Lewis is a retired insurance salesman from Tulsa, Oklahoma. His wife died a while back and since then he’s spent most of his time traveling the country to séances and ghost tours, looking for proof that she still exists.”

“Has he had any luck?” I asked.

“Apparently not. A lot of people have claimed to find her, but none have passed his test.”

“What’s his test?”

“He had a pet name he called her. If they can’t tell him what it is, he knows it’s not her.”

“When you say a while, how long are we talking about? A few years?”

Her eyebrows rose. “Try forty.”

“Forty years,” I said. “He’s been traveling the country for forty years looking for his wife?”

She nodded. “He’s spent his life and fortune trying to find her. At least that’s what he told me when he signed up for the tour.”

“Doesn’t he have any family?”

“He has four adult children. Sounds like he’s estranged from them. I guess he was pretty broken up about losing her.” Doreen read the look of disapproval on my face, then said, “I know, I wouldn’t do it. But you can’t judge someone until you’ve walked in their moccasins, can you? So have
you
found anyone tonight?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“Well let’s get busy,” she said.

For the next half hour Doreen followed me around the cemetery looking for traces of paranormal activity. My lines crossed several times—actually, several dozen times—and, at Doreen’s encouragement, I found myself in a one-sided conversation with a grave marker named Mary Stewart. My divining rods had rotated backward and Doreen was certain that Mary’s spirit was hugging me.

I’ll admit to one peculiar phenomenon. I kept feeling the sensation of walking through spiderwebs, even when I was out in the open.

An hour later as we reboarded the van, the two women were chatting excitedly, one claiming she’d found a spirit who knew her recently deceased grandmother. The honeymooners were still just staring at each other, clearly desperate to get back to the hotel.

Mr. Lewis was the last to return, only doing so at Doreen’s insistence. As he struggled into the van he looked sad or angry, I couldn’t really tell which, as his face was sufficiently hard that it was difficult to read any emotion except unhappiness. Watching him had a powerful effect on me.

The van took a circuitous route back to Doreen’s office, passing by a series of buildings that were supposedly haunted, including the Old Catholic Church, which was
up for sale. Doreen told us that one of her clients claimed to have placed a recorder in the church and, within minutes, recorded the sound of an invisible choir.

A few blocks past the Old Church, Doreen pointed out a Victorian home. “Up ahead here, to your left, is LaBinnah Bistro. I recommend that you eat there if you get the chance. Can anyone figure out where the restaurant got its name?”

We all looked out at the building, even the honeymooners.

“It’s French,” one of the women said.

“Or Cajun,” said the other.

“No, that’s not it,” Doreen said.

“It was the chef’s wife’s name,” the male honeymooner said, the first word he’d spoken to anyone
but
his wife.

“No,” Doreen said.

“I know,” I said.

Doreen looked at me. “You think you do?”

“
LaBinnah
is
Hannibal
spelled backwards.”

Doreen clapped. “You’re the first person in twelve years who’s gotten that right,” she said. “Twelve years.”

When we’d returned to the office and disembarked from the van, Doreen asked me what I’d thought of the tour. “It was life changing,” I said.

She beamed at my report. “I’m so pleased. Thank you for coming. And come back soon.”

“Good night,” I said, then turned and walked back to my hotel.

I meant what I said to Doreen, just not for the reasons she had likely assumed. The experience had had a profound impact on me. Not the paranormal aspect of the tour—which I had found mildly amusing—but rather my experience with Mr. Lewis. In this man I had seen something far more frightening than any graveyard specter or poltergeist. I had seen the bitterness of unaccepted loss. I had seen the possibility of my own future and my own ruin.

A man’s experiences of life are a book. There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy
.

—Mark Twain

I hated to leave Hannibal. On the way out of town, I stopped at Mark Twain’s Cave, the same cave Twain explored as a boy and referenced in five of his books—most famously in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
, where Tom and Becky get mixed up with Injun Joe.

I left my pack behind the counter at the cave’s gift shop, then entered the cave with a tall, boyish-looking guide and a small group from a Church of God Bible class visiting from Memphis, Tennessee.