by Tracy Donley
“But they want to make it into a park, don’t they?”
“Roadside attraction is more like it. Freak show. I can’t have that happen to my meadow.”
“Is this your land then?”
“The town owns it,” Ingrid said, shaking her head. “But that jerk Wright is pulling all the strings. He could tell them all to jump off a cliff and they probably would.”
“That’s why you were . . . keeping an eye on them, in the woods,” said Rosemary.
“Someone’s got to. I know for a fact I’m not the only one who’s against Mayor Wright’s idea of improving this meadow. There are others. Most are too scared to step forward and be named. No one wants the golden boy’s bad opinion. But I don’t care what he thinks of me, and I’m here to tell you, they’ll spoil everything.”
Rosemary nodded. “That would be a terrible shame.”
Again, Ingrid looked surprised. “You agree with me?”
“I agree that this meadow needs to be protected.”
“Maybe the mayor would listen to you. He likes pretty young women.”
“Oh, I doubt an out-of-towner like me would have much pull here.”
Ingrid came a step closer to Rosemary and peered into her eyes. “No . . .” She seemed to be suddenly lost in some distant thought. “You’re not an out-of-towner.”
“Oh, I assure you, I am. I’m from New York.”
“But not really,” said Ingrid, still looking at Rosemary as though she could see right through her.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you’re home.”
Rosemary smiled. “What makes you think that?”
“I have a knack about these things.”
“Uh-huh. Well, I do feel at home here. The truth is, I wander around a lot.”
Ingrid gave a little snort. “Nice jacket.”
Rosemary looked down at Seth’s jacket, confused. “Thanks. It’s not mine. It belongs to—”
Ingrid gave another little snort.
“What?”
“Don’t fight it, sister. Just let it be.”
Ingrid started to walk off.
“Hold on, Ingrid. Um, Ms. Clark. Can I ask you some questions about Hortence? I mean, for the book.”
Ingrid stopped and turned back.
“Also, we’re putting on a little cemetery crawl—to raise money for the Historical Society, and I thought maybe—”
“What? That dog-and-pony show?” Ingrid gasped. “You’re all going to make a mockery of my family! I thought you might be different, but I see I was wrong.” She shook her head and turned to go.
“No! Ingrid! I mean, Ms. Clark. I want to set the story straight, don’t you see? I want to make them all see how amazing Hortence was.”
At this, Ingrid stopped walking but didn’t turn around.
“My friend Jack and his husband bought the farm—the farm that used to belong to your family. Jack found a note Mercy wrote before she left Paperwick.”
Ingrid slowly turned back and looked at Rosemary in disbelief.
“She said some things in the note that don’t make sense. And then there’s the curse. I need to know what these things mean. I want to find out the truth, Ms. Clark. I want to tell Hortence’s story—your family’s story. Would you please let us interview you, so we can hear your side?”
Ingrid scoffed, then looked back at Rosemary.
“Have you seen her cat?” she asked, finally.
“Um. What?”
“You’ve seen her cat, haven’t you?”
“I saw a cat here this morning.”
“Her spirit is on the move again,” said Ingrid, looking skyward, her crazy hair catching in a wind that swept in suddenly. “That’s what it means.”
“On the move? What do you mean?”
“It means another death. It means we need to finally set her free. And the only way to do that is to expose her killer.”
“Are you serious?” Rosemary pulled Seth’s jacket tighter around herself.
“I’ll think about it,” said Ingrid, and she headed back toward the woods.
“The interview?”
“I’ll think about it,” she called grumpily over her shoulder before disappearing into the trees.
It took a while for Rosemary’s heart to stop pounding. It had only been a couple of short hours since Jack had dropped her off this morning and she’d wandered through the graveyard, but it seemed like an age. It had been quite a productive morning so far. She’d taken notes and photos, reviewed the names for the cemetery crawl and found all of their headstones, learned all about a legend and a curse, and met an actual descendent of a three hundred fifty-one-year-old ghost. And it wasn’t even lunchtime yet!
Rosemary’s stomach growled, and she glanced at her watch. Noon. Only another half an hour until Jack would be back and they’d be off to lunch.
Deciding to finalize the plans for the walking route of the cemetery crawl, Rosemary headed back in the direction of the tunnel of trees that led into the graveyard. She was just about halfway across the meadow when suddenly, from somewhere in the trees ahead, someone screamed.
11
It was not a playful scream or a startled scream. It was a bloodcurdling scream.
Even as Rosemary picked up her pace and moved in the direction it had come from, she felt sick to her stomach. Something was very wrong.
When she heard the second scream, she broke into a run and could just make out, in the woods at the edge of the meadow—just before the trees framed the path back to the old cemetery—a woman. Rosemary had never seen this woman before. She was standing, trembling with sobs, her hands over her mouth, her eyes wide.
“What is it? What’s happened?” Rosemary said, approaching the woman who only kept sobbing, and was starting to shake violently. “I’m here to help you, but I need to know what’s wrong. How can I help?”
The woman still didn’t speak, but she calmed down enough to meet Rosemary’s eyes. Then she pointed shakily at the ground, where the grass was stained with blood.
Rosemary’s first thought was that the woman was hurt—that she’d been injured.
“Are you hurt? Can you tell me how to help?”
Rosemary gently touched the woman’s hands and pulled them away from her face, looking for the source of the blood. A quick glance over her showed only one injury—a pretty bad cut on the woman’s right hand. Definitely nothing that would cause that much bleeding.
“You need to wash that cut. It might need stitches.”
“I—I fell,” the woman gulped, looking down at her hand. “I hadn’t even noticed that I’d cut myself.”
Rosemary looked back at the ground, at the blood-soaked grass. This time, she noticed the blood didn’t stop at that spot. It led off into the trees toward the cemetery, and the grass along the way was matted, as though a hurt animal or person had been wounded and then crawled away. Or was dragged away.
Rosemary looked back at the woman, who had collapsed into deep, anguished sobs and had turned as white as a ghost.
“I need you to take a deep breath. Calm down. I don’t want you to pass out,” she said gently, and helped the woman to a nearby bench, where she coaxed her to sit down.
Then Rosemary dug in her bag, found her phone, and with shaking fingers dialed 9-1-1. The dispatcher answered on the first ring.
“Send the police. Right away,” Rosemary said as she left the woman on the bench and hurriedly followed the trail of blood through the trees. “Something terrible has happened near the Old Church Cemetery.”
When the voice on the other end asked her for details, Rosemary realized she didn’t know what to say, because she hadn’t yet located the source of the blood.
“There’s blood. A lot of it. Someone’s been hurt, I just don’t know who yet.” She walked on until she arrived in the graveyard.
“Oh, no.”
She stopped abruptly and dropped the phone on the ground.
She could see where the trail e
nded, and in a split second, she knew exactly whose blood it was. There, in the very back corner, in the Wright family plot, lay the motionless body of a man, face down, his hair caked with blood, his bright orange, gold, and green plaid shirt torn. Rosemary bent and picked up her phone, and then on shaky legs, walked closer and stopped short of the body of Samuel Wright.
“It’s the mayor. Mayor Wright. Send help fast!”
But even as she knelt beside Sam and felt for a pulse, she knew it was too late.
“Oh, Sam,” she said, still in a state of disbelief and shock.
Rosemary stood and wiped her eyes. “I just saw you. You were . . . you were fine. Who would do such a thing?”
She could hear sirens nearby and was grateful that Paperwick was such a small town. Someone would come and help. Someone would make sense of this madness. She looked once more at Sam.
It was then that she noticed it, where his shirt was torn, on his right shoulder.
The witch’s mark.
12
Within minutes, the corner of the graveyard was roped off with yellow police tape, an officer had led Rosemary a few paces away, and a detective and a paramedic were kneeling next to the mayor’s body.
“Can I get you anything, ma’am?” the officer asked Rosemary.
“No, I’m calling my friend Jack,” said Rosemary, whose hands were still shaking as she tried to focus teary eyes on her cell phone. Just then she remembered the woman from the woods.
“Oh, my gosh. Hurry!” she said, walking in the direction of the path and the bench in the meadow.
“Miss!” the officer called. “We need to get a statement from you. Hold up!”
“You don’t understand,” Rosemary called back. “There was a woman here. She was here before I was. She’s the one who pointed me to the body.”
The officer caught up, but when they got to the bench, it was empty. Rosemary looked around, confused.
“I don’t understand. She was right here.”
“Do you think she had something to do with the murder?”
“Murder?” Rosemary almost couldn’t believe her ears. Murder was a thing for the television news. For mystery novels. It was a horrible thing—an unthinkable thing. And it had never touched her life before.
“Well, the death,” the officer corrected himself. “You look pale, Miss. Why don’t you sit down here?” He motioned toward the bench and looked at her with wide, worried eyes.
Rosemary thought he looked awfully young to be a policeman.
“Thank you, Officer—?”
“Harris,” the young man answered.
As Rosemary started to sit, she noticed a smear of blood on the bench.
“Look. See here? The woman’s hand was bleeding.”
Officer Harris looked down, and his eyes registered a split second of panic before he composed himself again. It occurred to Rosemary that she might not be the only one who had never encountered a dead body before.
“Let’s not have you sit here,” Officer Harris said, gently taking her arm and leading her back into the churchyard, to another bench. “Why don’t you sit here instead, Ma’am? You can call your friend, but please don’t leave.”
“I won’t. But the woman I saw: She was very upset. She was hurt. I’m worried about her safety, Officer Harris.”
“I’m going to get Detective Weaser right now. And once he’s here with you, I’ll go in search of the woman. She’s a valuable witness, so we’ll need you to describe her. Stay right here.”
With that, he went over to where Samuel’s body was being loaded onto a stretcher. The detective, in plain clothes, was easy to spot among the other officers who were carefully combing the scene. He was examining the ground where Sam had come to rest, but stood when Officer Harris approached. They had a few words, the detective nodded, and they both walked in Rosemary’s direction.
Rosemary had just enough time to send a quick text off to Jack: Hurry. Come to churchyard.
“Hello, Miss,” said the detective, nodding curtly and then sitting down next to Rosemary while Officer Harris stood by, a little notepad and pencil at the ready. “I’ll need your name and where you’re from, and then I’ll need you to walk me through exactly what happened here today and how you came to find Mayor Wright.”
“Of course,” said Rosemary, taking a deep breath. “My name is Rosemary Grey. I’m from New York—I’m a historian and teacher based at NYU. I was in the meadow doing research, and I was just packing up and walking this way to come back into the cemetery when I heard a scream. It was coming from the direction of the woods, just over that way.” Rosemary pointed, and the detective nodded.
“Go on,” he said.
“I started walking toward the sound when I heard a second scream. So, I ran into the trees, and there was a woman, sobbing and shaking. She pointed at the blood on the ground.”
“Did it seem to you that the same person had screamed twice? Or two different people?”
“It sounded like the same person screaming twice.”
The detective nodded, while Officer Harris scribbled rapidly.
“And where did you say you found the woman—and the blood?”
“I can show you,” Rosemary said, standing and taking another deep breath to steady herself.
They walked back down the tree-lined path that connected the churchyard to the meadow and veered into the trees a bit, until Rosemary was able to find the beginning of the trail of blood.
“Harris, get some more officers over here and rope this area off,” said Detective Weaser. Then he turned back to Rosemary. “Go on, Miss Grey.”
“I tried to calm the woman down, thinking that she’d been hurt—that it was her blood on the ground. In hindsight, that makes no sense, because anyone who’d lost that much blood wouldn’t be standing there crying. But at the time, I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Detective Weaser nodded. “So, she pointed at the blood, you got her to sit down on this bench . . .”
“Yes, she looked faint. I saw that she’d been injured, told her she might need stitches. But then I was confused, because that much blood couldn’t have come from a little cut like the one on her hand. Oh—I remember the woman said she’d fallen.”
“That’s how she cut her hand.”
“Right. But then I noticed the trail in the grass. More blood and the grass flattened down, like someone had been dragged. Or maybe . . .” Rosemary felt tears stinging her eyes again. “Do you think Sam was still alive, and crawled through the grass, trying to get help?”
“Sam? So, you were acquainted with the deceased, then?”
“Barely. I met him yesterday.”
“And so, you followed the trail and found the body. You identified the victim to the dispatcher. But he was lying face down, and you say you’d just met Mayor Wright a day ago. May I ask how you were so sure it was him?”
“I’d just seen him about an hour ago. He said he was here for a meeting. Something to do with the security cameras. And his shirt . . .” Rosemary felt sick to her stomach.
“His shirt?”
“I’d commented that I liked his shirt. Bright fall colors. He joked that he was trying to match the leaves.”
Detective Weaser looked up at the trees and frowned, then looked back at Rosemary. “And tell me again why you were here in the first place?”
“I’m in Paperwick visiting my friend Jack Stone—Dr. Jack Stone, a professor at Paperwick University. I was in the churchyard and the Witch’s Meadow doing research for the upcoming Founders Day Festival.”
“Okay.”
By this time, Officer Harris and a couple of other uniformed officers had returned and were roping off the blood-stained bench and grass. Officer Harris came running up.
“Sir, we might’ve found the murder weapon.”
“Now hold on, Harris. We haven’t ruled it a murder yet. Could still be a freak accident.” Weaser looked at Rosemary, who was still standing by. “You stay here, Ma’am,” he said,
and he and Officer Harris walked into the woods a short distance, where Rosemary could see Harris pointing at something on the ground.
The two men squatted down next to whatever it was, exchanged a few more words, and then Weaser signaled to another officer, who came over with a large, clear plastic bag. The detective pulled on a pair of latex gloves and gingerly picked up something from the ground and dropped it into the bag. When the officer carefully sealed the bag, Rosemary could see what looked like a medium-sized stone, covered in blood.
Detective Weaser peeled off his gloves and walked back over to Rosemary.
“Was Sam hit on the head with that stone?” Rosemary asked.
“Not that it’s really your business, Miss Grey, but let’s just say it looks like he hit his head. Could be he fell. Maybe it was just an accident.”
“Then how could you explain the witch’s mark?”
At this, Detective Weaser turned a very serious and suspicious gaze on Rosemary. “What do you know about the witch’s mark?” he asked.
“I saw it. On Sam’s—on Mayor Wright’s shoulder. His shirt was torn.”
“And you know about these kinds of marks because?”
“Because I’m a historian, like I said, sir. I’ve studied the history of this area extensively, and my area of expertise is the early American witch trials. That’s why Jack asked me to come and help with the festival. I know about the legend of the witch’s mark.”
“Tell me more about this woman you say you saw here. Describe her to me,” said the detective.
“She was shorter than me. About five and a half feet tall, light brown hair, blue eyes . . . She was wearing a tweed skirt and a pale pink blouse with a bow at the neck. Her hair was a bob. Chin-length.”