True Believer by Nicholas Sparks

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