Sisters of Misery

by Megan Kelley Hall

  Though they had only been in town for a few weeks, Rebecca and Cordelia already felt like a familiar presence in Maddie’s life. It was as if they were the missing piece that Maddie had always been seeking, and now that they were finally here, she couldn’t imagine life without them.

  Luckily, with field hockey camp in full force, Kate, Hannah, Bridget, and Darcy hadn’t had the time to come to Rebecca’s store. And every time Kate suggested that Maddie meet up with them for end-of-the-summer parties, Maddie found a good excuse not to go. While this angered Abigail, it thrilled Tess. When the girls weren’t helping out in the store, Tess whisked them off to the museums in Boston, shopping excursions in Newburyport, and endless sea glass searches along the craggy shores of Rockport.

  Maddie and Cordelia had become inseparable over the past few weeks—staying up late into the night talking, sneaking down to the beach for midnight swims, playing cards and backgammon with Tess after dinner. They were becoming more and more like a family. It was something that they all needed at that point in time.

  But Maddie knew that the inevitable was right around the corner. School would be starting soon, and she’d have to share Cordelia with the rest of her friends. It would be no easy task, for sure. Maddie could already picture Kate’s reaction to her free-spirited cousin. Kate with her Lilly Pulitzer attire, blond hair perfectly highlighted and swept back neatly with a pastel headband. And then there was Cordelia with her long floral skirts, muted tanks layered over her long torso, untamed red hair flowing down her back with tiny braids woven intermittently throughout, arms and neck wrapped with strands of semiprecious stones. The two couldn’t be more different, and Maddie went to great lengths to keep them apart for as long as possible.

  While Maddie didn’t have the expensive wardrobe that matched Kate and the other girls in her group, over the years, she had mastered New England preppy attire in order to fit in. Yet the peasant blouses, crystal necklaces, and colorful skirts that Rebecca and Cordelia had given her just seemed to feel more natural and refreshing than stiff Oxford shirts and khaki pants.

  Maddie walked into the store one afternoon wearing a Polo golf shirt with a long patchwork skirt, her wrists adorned with lapis lazuli, aventurine, and rose quartz bracelets. She completed the look with her beat-up Keds, a silk, multicolored scarf knotted around her head with the ends trailing down her back, and large hoop earrings. The outfit, which Cordelia could have carried off with ease, made Maddie look like she was playing dress-up. Cordelia raised an eyebrow, amused at her cousin’s transformation.

  “What?” Maddie asked defensively.

  Rebecca and Cordelia eyed each other, obviously trying not to laugh.

  “You look like Martha Stewart and Bob Dylan’s love child,” Cordelia said.

  Rebecca swatted her daughter and opened her arms, inviting Maddie into a big bear hug. “I think you look beautiful. It’s an essential part of growing up to develop your own style.”

  “I think that you’re being generous with the word style, Mom,” Cordelia said again. Maddie made as if to hit her. “Kidding, kidding! You look very cool.”

  Rebecca returned to her paperwork, totaling up the vast number of sales that they’d raked in ever since the store opened.

  “I hope that this store isn’t just a flash in the pan,” she said, almost to herself. “If people keep buying like this, we’ll be having an excellent Christmas this year.” She smiled.

  “Mom, let me read your fortune,” Cordelia said, spilling rune stones across the old farm table. Maddie rubbed her nail-bitten fingertips over the carved symbols in the stones.

  “How ’bout I read yours instead?” Rebecca suggested.

  “Nah, I already know mine: Cordelia LeClaire will run off with a handsome prince who shows up on horseback, whisking her off to his castle a million, trillion miles from Hawthorne, Massachusetts. And she’ll never look back.”

  “You’re going to leave your favorite person in the world here?” Looking at Maddie, Rebecca mouthed the word Me and then pointed to herself. “All by my lonesome?”

  “Hey, it was your choice to come back here, not mine. And I don’t think that as long as there is a man alive in this world, you can ever say that you’re lonely,” Cordelia joked. Rebecca pretended to whack her daughter. “No, really, let me read your rune stones.”

  Listening to their happy banter made Maddie feel like a third wheel. The strength of Cordelia and Rebecca’s relationship was so foreign to her, so very different from any other mother-daughter relationships she knew, with her own at the very top of the list. Maddie’s friends barely tolerated parents, only giving them the time of day during holidays or some other gift-giving event. And even then, the amount of affection was almost always in direct proportion to the dollar value of the gift.

  “Why don’t you do Maddie’s?” Rebecca smiled at her. “Wouldn’t you like to know what the future holds for you?”

  “No, that’s okay. I really should be getting home to help my mom get dinner started.” Maddie desperately wanted to stay and learn more about fortune telling and hear all of the stories of their travels and the interesting people in their lives back in California, but she knew that her mother would be furious if she shirked any more of her chores.

  As Maddie started gathering her things, Cordelia squeezed her eyes shut and thrust her hand into the black bag of stones. She pulled her closed fist from the satchel and opened her palm flat toward Rebecca. They both peered at the blank stone. Cordelia flipped it quickly to display the other side.

  “Hey, I got a faulty one. There’s nothing on this.”

  Rebecca flipped through the Rune handbook. “No, that’s an actual stone. It’s called the Odin or the Wyrd stone,” she continued reading. “This is the Fate stone, the unknowable. It is the stone that represents both the beginning and the end. It symbolizes the unknowable, that which cannot be known or controlled. Only Fate will decide the outcome.”

  Cordelia’s eyes widened. “Ooooh, scary,” she giggled as she jumped from her perch on the table. “Maddie, did you hear that? My future is unknowable and uncontrollable.”

  Maddie felt a sudden wave of nausea as her dream of Cordelia out on Misery Island came back to her. She had mentioned the Sisters of Misery to Cordelia once or twice without going into great detail, but Cordelia had laughed it off, comparing them to the Junior League or a silly sorority.

  “I don’t need a rock to tell me that you’re uncontrollable, my dear,” Rebecca joked. She lit an October Harvest incense stick, and the store quickly filled with the scents of autumn—cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and apples.

  Maddie smiled, wishing that she didn’t have to leave the cozy scene behind. Waving a reluctant good-bye, she walked home where surely, her mother waited to pounce on her and start yet another argument.

  Abigail was always eagerly waiting to point out all the things Maddie hadn’t done recently. Maddie didn’t go to field hockey camp; she didn’t secure an invitation to the Endicott’s end of the summer party; she didn’t place high enough in the sail meet for them to attend the awards banquet at the yacht club. All the things that Maddie didn’t do represented the one big thing that her mother didn’t do for her—love her unconditionally.

  When she got home, Maddie found her mother furiously cleaning the kitchen. Maddie quelled the urge to run upstairs before her mother caught sight of her, demanding help with the chores, and instead joined her in the kitchen.

  “Hey, Mom,” Maddie said tentatively, trying to gauge her mother’s mood, “How about going out for dinner tonight?”

  Abigail turned, and from the look on her face, Maddie was expecting a lecture on not having enough money to go out to restaurants or how Maddie should try cooking a meal once in a while. She was taken aback when her mother said, “Well, that would be nice. What’s the occasion?”

  Maddie felt a surge of excitement, not quite understanding her mother’s change of heart, actually spending money—and time—with her daughter.

&
nbsp; “Oh, no occasion, Mom. I just—well, I thought that we could go someplace nice together.” She hesitated, adding, “Maybe even bring Tess, Rebecca, and Cordelia?”

  “Oh,” Abigail said dryly, trying to keep the disappointment out of her voice but not sufficiently hiding it. “I just thought—well, I assumed you had been over to the Endicott’s this afternoon, that, well…never mind.”

  “What do you mean, Mom?” Maddie’s earlier excitement was crashing and burning, leaving her insides feeling like leaden carnage.

  “Well, I haven’t been to Crestwood Yacht Club in ages, and I assumed that you and I had been invited by the Endicotts for dinner. I mean, that’s the only place around town that’s worth paying for dinner, and you can’t eat there if you’re not a member, and it’s been such a long time since we’ve done anything socially with Kate’s family. Don’t you remember how much I adored Crestwood’s Cobb Salad?”

  Abigail droned on, touting the merits of Crestwood’s menu, but Maddie stopped listening. She felt like one of those cartoon characters that had smoke steaming out of its ears in anger. Maddie couldn’t hear anything but the sound of her own fury and disgust. Of course, her mother wouldn’t want to waste time going out to dinner with her own daughter. To Abigail Crane, spending time with Maddie was only worthwhile if it was a social event.

  She felt a flash of jealousy toward Cordelia, back in the store, laughing with Rebecca. Rebecca loved her daughter no matter what she did. Cordelia had no idea how lucky she really was.

  Maddie quickly excused herself and ran up the stairs to her room to change, so consumed by her feelings that she barely noticed the darkening swell of the ocean that churned outside her bedroom window. If she had looked more closely, she would have noticed that the sea had turned to the color of slate. If she had listened to Tess’s advice about paying attention to the signs that were all around them, perhaps Maddie could have glimpsed the future and would have known that the lives of all of the women in her family were in greater peril than any of them realized.

  Chapter 4

  ISA

  ICE

  Coldness Between People; Obstacles, Challenges,

  and Frustration; Slippery and Unsafe

  SEPTEMBER

  On the first day of school at Hawthorne Academy, Maddie and Cordelia left early, as the sun was barely rising over the ocean. Maddie wanted Cordelia to register for classes, but Cordelia had other, less practical things on her agenda. As they passed the sun-dappled forest, Cordelia gushed, “It’s so beautiful here, so surreal! Let’s come back later tonight and look for forest elves and nymphs. I’ll bet there are fairy trees in there.”

  Maddie laughed. “There’s no such thing as fairies. I stopped believing in that stuff when I was five.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Cordelia sniffed. “Considering where you grew up.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind. Let’s come back here later, and I’ll prove to you that there are fairies. I’ve seen them. I visited Ireland when I was a little girl, and I came across a real live fairy circle. I watched them as they drank elderberry wine from crystal goblets and wore dresses made of gossamer thread and velvet. They danced until their snapdragon shoes fell apart.”

  Cordelia danced down the street, doing pirouettes and making silly faces. Cordelia’s wild imagination melted Maddie’s cynical side, and for a moment, she almost entertained the idea that something magical like fairies could, in fact, exist. Maddie laughed, but then looked past Cordelia into the grove, feeling a chill creep through her skin. Something felt wrong—it felt like they were being watched, studied.

  “They’re haunted. The woods, I mean.”

  Cordelia stopped dancing, and her eyes widened. “Then let’s go! Why should that stop us?” She spun around once, twirling her floral skirt, and then sprinted into the woods. She wove in between the trees, expertly avoiding fallen branches, as if she’d run through there hundreds of times. Maddie tried desperately to keep up with her, but she kept losing sight of her cousin. The deeper they went into the wood, the more intense Maddie’s sense of foreboding became.

  “Who are they haunted by?” Cordelia called.

  “Cordelia!” Maddie yelled. “Come on! We don’t have time for this. You’re going to make us late for school.”

  “Who cares.” Her voice sounded miles away, echoing through the trees.

  Maddie stopped to catch her breath in a dim clearing. The branches overhead were so thick that no sunlight filtered through. Maddie felt the chill again. The last place she wanted to be was deep inside Potter’s Grove searching for Cordelia. With all the creepy stories she’d heard over the years, Maddie had sworn that she’d never enter the place. “Where are you?”

  Cordelia’s voice came in a whisper from behind her. “Right here. Boo!”

  Maddie jumped, and Cordelia laughed uncontrollably.

  “Don’t do that,” Maddie snapped. “Not here. Not in these woods.”

  “So, who are these ghosts you’re scared of?” Her eyes twinkled despite the few weak rays of sunlight that made it through the canopy of trees.

  “I don’t know. This place is supposed to be filled with all sorts of spirits, according to local legends,” Maddie whispered, suddenly aware of the growing silence around them. But she liked having Cordelia’s undivided attention, so she pushed aside her fears and continued.

  “The site of Old Captain Potter’s Tavern is somewhere around here. We’re probably standing on top of it, for all I know. Anyway, the townspeople hated the tavern. They were sick of all the creeps from neighboring towns coming here, so they decided to burn the place down. To get revenge, Captain Potter had one of his slaves, who also happened to be a voodoo priestess, put some kind of a curse on the woods and the entire town of Hawthorne.”

  Cordelia’s eyes grew wider with every word. “So that’s where the rumors of witchcraft came in?”

  Shaking her head, Maddie explained that the infamous witchcraft trials took place in the neighboring town of Salem, but that Hawthorne had its own witch scandal of sorts. When the beautiful Pickering sisters—Honor, Constance, and Patience—moved into the small town of Hawthorne, they were quickly accused of practicing witchcraft.

  “Back in those days, anything you did could be reason enough to get you called a witch,” Maddie explained. “You could cook with a strange spice or wear bright clothes and get called a witch. Some women were even called witches if they were really pretty and the men in town had dreams about them—they were accused of ‘bewitching’ the men and forcing them to have ‘impure thoughts.’”

  Cordelia surmised, “So basically, it’s the same as being called a slut today, right?”

  “Only now, you can’t burn sluts at the stake,” Maddie said.

  The two girls giggled.

  As they picked their way along the meandering, overgrown path through the grove, Maddie filled Cordelia in on the legend of the Pickering sisters. As soon as the women had moved into town, they became well-known for their fiery tempers and were often credited with having “fits of hysteria”—something that was a sure sign of a practicing witch. Then people started saying they had “spectral evidence” of the beautiful sisters’ powers of witchcraft: curdling milk with a single glance, ruining entire crops with a harsh word, and even luring married men into adulterous situations in their dreams.

  Cordelia almost fell over, hysterically laughing when she heard that.

  The woods were eerily quiet, and Maddie wanted to finish the story quickly. They were on the verge of being late to school, and Maddie knew Cordelia wouldn’t leave Potter’s Grove until she heard every detail. Maddie told her how the women ran and hid in that very forest in order to escape their trials, hoping they could stay until the witchcraft rumors ended. What few friends and family they had, used to sneak into the woods, bringing the women supplies and food to help them survive. Many were too afraid to go in after the sisters because of Old Man Potter’s curse. Plus, tow
n officials tortured, imprisoned, or killed anyone caught helping the three women. The official town documents contained severe punishments for those they called “The Witches’ Brethren.”

  “Tess told me once that people born within the town lines have the power to hear the cries of the Pickering sisters on certain nights,” Maddie said quietly. “The sounds are like low, mournful wails and high-pitched hysterical shrieks. Tess swears that on some nights, she gets woken up by those cries.”

  “Have you ever heard them?” Cordelia asked excitedly.

  “Lucky for me, I was born in Boston,” Maddie laughed.

  They stopped walking, and Cordelia stared into the depths of the woods. A stiff wind picked up, swirling dead leaves around the forest floor.

  “So, then what happened?”

  “Well, then the witchcraft hysteria ended, but not for the Pickering sisters,” she continued. “They thought it was safe to return to town, but the people of Hawthorne weren’t done with them just yet. They were put into the jail at Fort Glover and tortured for days and days. The town officials seized all of their belongings as payment for their incarceration—they basically had to pay for their own torture. And then they were labeled lunatics by the town doctors, so they were put into Ravenswood State Asylum, or at the time, what they called The Witches’ Castle.”

  “The Witches’ Castle,” Cordelia spoke slowly, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Did they ever get out?”

  Maddie nodded. “Legend has it they escaped. But no one knows how they managed it. Many people thought they would come back seeking revenge for what happened to them. But they never did. There were other rumors that they were sold into slavery and prostitution or that they were murdered. Some people think that they were forced out onto Misery Island and that they died out there, either froze or starved to death. People think that the Pickering sisters haunt both the island and these woods.” Maddie hugged herself as a chill came over her.