The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  When they had died so mysteriously and brutally, accusations had begun to fly in Rose’s direction. A grand jury had been convened, but—not surprisingly, in his opinion—it hadn’t found sufficient evidence to indict Rose. All anyone could agree on was that Rose Whelan, once a respected local historian and authority on the witch trials, had not been in her right mind since that awful night on Proctor’s Ledge. Rafferty believed in Rose’s innocence. Besides Rose, there had been one witness to the crime; well, a witness of a sort, the other survivor, the five-year-old daughter of one of the victims. This child steadfastly insisted that Rose Whelan had helped her hide “from the bad thing” and then had gone back to try to save the others.

  At the end of the day, instead of going to jail, Rose had been sent to a series of state mental hospitals. And after a full year of remaining mute, she’d regained her voice and begun to tell a wild story about what had happened to the three slain women, who by then had been dubbed “Goddesses” by the media and everyone in town. This was the reason Barry Marcus didn’t want Rose to talk to Rafferty without an attorney present: Years ago, after prolonged questioning, Rose had alleged that the young women had been killed by a banshee. Rafferty knew of the banshee from his own grandmother’s stories of Ireland: a banshee was a mythological female spirit whose mournful cries were considered omens of death. His grandmother had always claimed that Rafferty’s family had a banshee that had predicted every death for generations.

  But he’d never heard of a banshee actually doing the killing. Rose had claimed that, after the murders were committed, this banshee had jumped into her and that she was keeping the creature trapped inside herself to stop her from killing again. If she’d had a lawyer, she would have been advised against telling this tale to anyone, least of all the police.

  Rafferty knew Rose well enough to know that she had fallen on hard times—she’d lost her home, for God’s sake—but she was no killer. His cop’s instincts had always been good; he’d stake them against the best out there.

  “You want to tell me what happened?” Rafferty sat across from the two boys in the interrogation room. He drank the last of his coffee and stared at them. He’d seen them before, had a few run-ins with them during the last year. There was no lawyer present, but the two had had an extended phone consultation with someone before agreeing to proceed. No parent or guardian had yet come to the station.

  He was far more familiar with the dead boy, Billy Barnes. Billy had been a bad kid. There was no way around it. Last year on Halloween, he had started a knife fight with a kid from Lynn, someone rumored to be a member of the Latin Kings. Though he was not a gang member himself, his OG tattoo was there to tell everyone he liked violence, that he wouldn’t back down. “Original Gangster” like hell, Rafferty thought. Couldn’t have been further from the truth. Billy Barnes was about as far from gangster as you could get. He was a poseur, a wannabe, as entitled as they come. Even so, he was dangerous.

  No one had pressed any charges then, nor had they done so any of the numerous times Barnes had been picked up before or since. Some fancy lawyer had always bailed him out, and no charge Rafferty had filed against him ever stuck. Rafferty didn’t think that did the kid any favors. If he’d been Rafferty’s son, he would have left him in jail overnight or even longer, to give him a taste of what the correctional facility in Middleton would feel like. Probably do the kid some good—hopefully straighten him out. If his own daughter ever acted like Billy Barnes had…

  “We told you. Rose Whelan is the killer.”

  “Right,” Rafferty said. They were getting nowhere fast. The boys had clearly been advised to say nothing beyond the simple statement “Rose Whelan is the killer.” He leaned across the table. “What about the cut on her cheek? Which one of you did that?”

  The two boys looked at each other. Neither said a word.

  “You two want to go home tonight, or do you want to share the cell across the hall from Rose Whelan?”

  “You can’t hold us,” said the older one—whose last name was Monk.

  Rafferty laughed. “Who told you that?”

  When they didn’t offer any answer, Rafferty sent them to a holding cell, not across from Rose but near enough to shake them up a bit. He waited for a new pot of coffee to brew before he called them back in, this time separately. Monk came first, avoiding eye contact. “I know what I saw,” he said. Then he amended the statement. “What I heard.”

  The younger boy, the one called James, was different. Once Rafferty got him alone he was less reticent. “She warned him she’d have to do it,” he said. “She thought he was going to kill her.”

  “Was he?”

  “I don’t know,” James said. He shrugged. “Maybe.” He looked like he was going to cry.

  “What happened to the knife?” Rafferty asked. The knife that Billy Barnes had threatened Rose with had conveniently disappeared.

  “Monk threw it into the woods.”

  “If I send someone out to retrieve it, is it going to be there?” Rafferty said.

  “I don’t know.”

  Rafferty kept eye contact but didn’t speak.

  “I don’t think so,” James said. “Not anymore.”

  “Was that your phone call, one of your gangster friends? Someone who would get rid of the knife?”

  James quieted. His whole body was shaking.

  Rafferty looked at the kid for a long time. “Tell me again. Exactly what happened. Between Billy and Rose.”

  “Monk told her to leave, but she wouldn’t.”

  Rafferty wasn’t surprised. People often harassed Rose. She’d learned to hold her own. Over the years, the skills she needed to survive on the streets had developed into a defiance that others perceived as either craziness or arrogance, or both.

  “She should have gone,” James said, starting to cry.

  “What happened after that?”

  “Billy threatened her. And then she threatened him.”

  Rafferty raised an eyebrow. “How exactly did she threaten him? Wasn’t Billy the one with the knife?”

  “Yes,” James said.

  “So how could Rose threaten him if he had the weapon?”

  “She—she told him to sit down. Said she’d have to kill him if he didn’t.” Now the kid was hyperventilating. “It’s the truth!” he said. “She said crazy things. About banshees and goddesses and bleeding trees that got hit by lightning.”

  Rafferty was familiar with some of Rose’s musings. She was quite the storyteller, actually, though most of her yarns made little sense.

  “Take a deep breath and hold it,” Rafferty suggested.

  The kid obeyed. Then, at Rafferty’s direction, he exhaled slowly. Rafferty got up and got him a drink of water from the cooler. He sat back down and watched while the kid sipped.

  “Okay?”

  James nodded, wiping his eyes.

  “Okay, then, tell me what happened next.”

  “A huge wind. Like a howling sound and then screeching. Horrible screeching. I’ve never heard anything like it. It hurt, man! I couldn’t see, and everything went black—and then Billy was on the ground.” James started to cry again. “His eyes were all bugging, like he was still seeing the thing that killed him.”

  “I thought you said Rose killed him?”

  “It was her!”

  “You said ‘the thing that killed him.’ ”

  The kid stopped crying. “She said she would do it, and she did.”

  “Dr. Finch is here,” Jay-Jay announced when Rafferty came out of the interrogation room. “I put her in the cell with Rose.”

  Rafferty doubted Jay-Jay’s judgment, and not for the first time. He hurried toward Rose’s cell. Before he started interviewing the witnesses, he had checked in on Rose again. She seemed calmer, thank God.

  Zee Finch was sitting on the cot next to Rose when he arrived, dressing her wound. She looked up when she saw Rafferty and tucked an errant strand of auburn hair behind her ear. “She’s going to
need stitches.”

  Rafferty nodded.

  Rose appeared to stare at something no one else in the room could see.

  “How long has she been like this?” Zee asked, as she finished bandaging the cut. “Has she said what happened?”

  “She hasn’t said anything to me,” Rafferty said. He was standing at the opposite wall, keeping an eye on the hallway to make sure no one interrupted them.

  “Are you charging her?”

  “With what?” Rafferty asked. “Killing a kid by screaming at him?”

  “Jay-Jay said there is a written confession.”

  “Yup,” Rafferty said.

  “You’re not going to show it to me?”

  “Not until I’ve shown it to her attorney,” he answered.

  “That’s acceptable. But she needs to be in a hospital tonight. I’ll call Salem and secure a bed in the psych unit.”

  Rafferty sighed. He hated the thought of Rose in a psych ward, but he couldn’t release her, nor could he charge her, confession or no confession. According to the paramedics, the boy’s body had been clean. No signs of violence or marks anywhere. “I think that’s the best option. I can’t do much of anything until I know what we’re dealing with. At this point, I don’t even know if a crime has been committed. We won’t know that until we get the kid’s autopsy results and tox screen. This isn’t CSI; this is Salem.”

  They both knew that getting those results was going to take a while.

  “Rose,” Zee said. “I’m calling the hospital, and I’m going to get you a bed. You can rest there until we figure this whole thing out.”

  Rose made no response.

  Zee took Rose’s hand. Rose hadn’t reacted at all when Zee cleaned her wound, but now, curling her fingers like a cat’s claws, she went for the eyes, scratching Zee’s face from temple to chin. Rafferty grabbed Zee by the arm, pulling her away from Rose.

  “What the hell happened to her on that hill?” Zee asked, as she regained her composure.

  “Tonight or twenty-five years ago?” Rafferty replied.

  The first time he’d met Rose was soon after he and Towner had started living together. He’d come home late one night to find her sleeping under an oak tree in Towner’s courtyard. “Well, you’ve certainly had a harrowing day, haven’t you?” Rose had said without preamble.

  “Who the hell are you?” he’d asked. “And what are you doing in my yard?”

  “It’s not your yard. It’s Eva Whitney’s yard, and she gave me this tree.”

  He’d realized the woman before him was Rose, whom he’d only heard about until that moment. She was right. Eva Whitney, Towner’s grandmother, had been clear about that oak in her will. She’d left the huge brick house, the tearoom, and all her worldly possessions to Towner, but she had, in fact, left the oak tree to Rose. I hereby bequeath life rights to the oak tree to Rose Whelan, the will had specified. If I could, I would leave her every oak in Salem. May it help her learn their secrets.

  After that initial meeting, they began to hit it off. She was always there, a fixture of the place, and she always said hello and asked about his day. Rafferty took to sharing bits of small talk and sometimes even philosophy with Rose when he’d come home from the late shift. He thought of her as his sage, his oracle. Not that she was always prescient. A lot of what she said and the fanciful stories she liked to tell were nonsensical ramblings. But every so often, something she said resonated with him in a profound way. He’d come to like their interchanges.

  It was Towner who’d told him about the woman’s history. Rose hadn’t always been strange. Before the Goddess Murders, she’d been a well-respected scholar. Rose had been credited with establishing the true location of the 1692 witch trial hangings, for centuries erroneously believed to be part of Gallows Hill Park. She’d also come up with the recently accepted theory that there were no gallows used in the executions back in 1692, but rather a hardwood tree, one that had long since disappeared, along with the bodies of the executed.

  But Rose had changed since the murders. Her fixation on death gave folks the creeps. She would tell people how and when they were going to die. It made everyone uncomfortable, to say the least. To make matters worse, some of her predictions had come true. As a result, most people avoided her, crossing the street when they saw her coming.

  The one case people always talked about was a death Rafferty could have predicted himself: a drunk with yellow skin and rheumy eyes he’d known from the Program who’d been off the wagon more than he’d ever been on it. Anyone could have predicted what would happen to him, but in front of a sidewalk full of witnesses, Rose had pronounced his death imminent. The next morning, his body had been sprawled on Lafayette Street in front of Red Lulu Cocina. It had simply been the law of averages, but people had wanted to believe it was sinister. And they’d wanted to believe Rose was to blame.

  Some nights, when Rafferty came home late, Rose might make a comment that kept him thinking for days. “No one comes out of the womb and sees death on everyone. It happens over time and by degree, until, one day, you’ve seen so much horror that it turns you. That’s when the banshee can jump in.”

  There were a lot of strange things in Salem that Rafferty didn’t put any stock in, but he did believe in banshees, though he didn’t go around advertising that fact. He’d told Towner the story once. He’d heard a banshee wail and moan the night his mother died; he was certain of it. He’d seen her, too: an old crone behind his childhood home, keening. When he’d approached, she’d disappeared, just evaporated like a water spirit. Of course, it had been back in his drinking days. He and his brothers had shared a few pints that evening. They’d kidded him about “seeing that old woman” for years. But Rafferty had seen her, a boggy spirit sitting on an aluminum lawn chair in Queens, mourning the death throes of his mother.

  But Rose’s flesh-and-blood banshee was something he didn’t believe in. He and Rose had debated the subject on several occasions. Eccentric as she was, or even crazy as most Salemites believed, Rose was a well-educated woman; her arguments were often backed by her extensive reading on almost any subject Rafferty could imagine, mythology being one of her favorites. You almost always learned something talking to Rose Whelan.

  Yet sometimes Rose was too strange and creepy even for Rafferty. Sometimes she looked at him as if she could see straight into his soul, and what she saw there was lacking.

  One night he’d come home after a particularly gruesome day dealing with a victim of domestic violence who’d landed at the shelter on Yellow Dog Island, and he’d hoped Rose might be asleep under her tree, as she often was when he worked late.

  Tilting her head, she’d looked at him curiously. “Do you think, inside, every one of us is a killer?”

  “What?”

  “If you thought killing was the lesser of two evils, would you be capable of taking a life?”

  “I don’t think about that kind of thing,” Rafferty had said.

  “You should. In your job.”

  Rafferty had hurried toward the steps.

  “Have you ever killed?”

  “No,” Rafferty had said and hurried inside.

  He’d heard her whispered reply as he closed the door.

  “Liar.”

  If that wasn’t a straight shot at his soul, nothing was.

  You know who you are. You have always been other.

  —ROSE’S Book of Trees

  The women sat in a circle, their eyes closed. The note echoed as it orbited the room, the sound softening everything it touched, removing rough edges, rounding corners, relaxing those who were seated.

  Callie stood at the front of the room, drawing the wand around the singing bowl. From a distance, she appeared to be stirring some great stew or tending a witch’s cauldron, but the wand was actually being drawn along the outside rim of the bowl, not the inside. The tone it created was clear and true, circling and building in volume until it was so loud that Callie could feel the vibration in her bones. Pl
acing the wand on the table, she listened to the sound waves the bowl continued to generate.

  She had tried treating them separately, but the group energy was so strong when they meditated together that it had become obvious that this was their best healing modality. Today it was working for all but one of them, poor Margie, who was suffering from late-stage Parkinson’s. Callie walked over, placing a hand on Margie’s shoulder.

  “Are you having trouble?”

  “I can’t concentrate with all that racket,” Margie said.

  “The bowl? You’ve never objected before,” Callie replied, confused. Then, as the sound of the singing bowl faded, Callie heard the news at noon blaring from the next room. Many of the elderly women at All Saints’ Home, where Callie worked as a music therapist, had some degree of hearing loss, so the television in the rec room was always cranked high.

  “The TV,” Margie said. “It’s bothering me.”

  “Hang on.” Callie held up a finger and headed next door. “I’ll be right back.”

  She closed the door behind her and walked into the hall. The smell of boiled cauliflower hung in the air. She poked her head into the rec room. The set was tuned to WCVB. “We were there for the entire week,” a newscaster intoned. “We saw witches, pirates, and even an ugliest dog contest, as we do every year when we cover Halloween in Salem. And though it has been hokey and even otherworldly at times, it has always been safe and family friendly.”

  “Not always,” the second newscaster commented.

  “Too loud?” asked Edith as Callie walked in. Edith was one of the ladies who refused to come to Callie’s music therapy sessions, even though Callie knew her arthritis was truly painful. She’d have to talk with Sister Ernestine—she’d be the one to convince Edith to join.