The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  “I meant to tell you, Callie. The Whitings and Marta are next-door neighbors,” Towner said, to fill the awkward pause. “Their family histories go back generations, all the way to the Salem Witch Trials.”

  “Marta moved back to the ‘provinces’ a few years ago,” Emily said, her air quotes showing she was still annoyed by Marta’s rude correction of Callie. “She’s far too sophisticated for us. I’m sure we bore her to distraction.”

  “Not at all,” Marta said, recovering her composure and smiling sweetly at Emily. “Actually, I find Essex County both exciting and rather decadent.”

  Before Emily had time to reply, Towner tried to redirect the conversation. “Callie recently moved here,” she explained to Emily and Paul. “Though we don’t yet know if she’ll be staying.”

  “I’ll be staying for a while at least,” Callie said.

  “Marta’s mother left her a beautiful First Period house,” Towner said. “Marta, you should show it to Callie.”

  “I’d be happy to,” Marta said.

  Towner continued, turning to Callie. “You really should see the place. Emily and Marta always host a holiday house tour to benefit local charities. Combined, the properties have buildings and outbuildings from five different architectural periods, though Marta’s 1630s saltbox and Pride’s Heart are the only two opened for the public to tour.”

  “What is Pride’s Heart?”

  “Pride’s Heart is the Whitings’ mansion in the very ‘heart’ of Pride’s Crossing,” Marta indicated with air quotes of her own.

  “It’s really quite remarkable. The land is part of the town of Beverly now but was once considered Salem. It’s picture perfect over the holidays. We go to Thanksgiving dinner at Pride’s Heart every year,” Towner said.

  “You should join us this year,” Paul said. “Mother, don’t you think Callie should join us for Thanksgiving?” He wasn’t looking at Emily but was keeping his eyes on Callie and grinning. He was playing with her.

  “You really should,” Marta chimed in quickly. “Emily’s Thanksgiving feast is legendary in these parts.”

  Callie saw a look pass between Towner and Emily.

  “You’d be more than welcome,” Emily said.

  “I appreciate the invitation, but really I don’t even know if I’ll be here on Thanksgiving—”

  “You’ll love Pride’s Heart,” Towner added.

  “Come for the weekend,” Paul said. “Towner and Rafferty always do.”

  “Don’t you go to see May on Thanksgiving?” Callie asked Towner.

  “We go out to Yellow Dog Island for a few hours first, but we always arrive back in time for dinner,” Towner said, in a coaxing voice.

  “It’s a very generous invitation, but I’m not sure…” Callie said.

  “Oh, you must come,” Marta said, jumping in. “I’ll pick you up myself.”

  “Wow,” Callie said, not quite certain whom she should address but choosing Emily. “Can I let you know in a day or two?” The minute she posed the question, she heard her mistake. Rose had corrected her almost daily. You can, but you may not. Now Callie corrected herself; “I mean, may I?”

  “Of course,” Emily said. “Take your time. And don’t let my son talk you into something you don’t want to do.”

  “I’d like to,” Callie said. “Really. I just need to check my schedule.” She knew she sounded both inane and rude. What person doesn’t know whether or not they have plans for Thanksgiving when it’s less than a week away?

  Marta excused herself and went to speak to a woman a few tables over.

  “Let us know,” Emily said, managing a smile, then turned back to her son. “I think we’ll be heading home now.”

  Paul took the cue and stood to hold the chair for his mother.

  “Nice to meet you, Callie,” he said, sounding as if he meant it.

  They said polite good-byes, and this time Emily seemed sincere. “Very nice to meet you, Callie. I hope we see you again.”

  As Paul hurried to retrieve her coat, Emily handed Towner an envelope. Towner opened it and gasped. Callie could see the amount of the check: $300,000.

  Towner was clearly stunned. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re very welcome.”

  Paul helped his mother on with her coat, then offered his arm. “I hope you’ll consider joining us, Callie.”

  Emily took her son’s arm, and they walked slowly toward the exit.

  “What in the world was that all about?” Callie asked Towner as soon as she was sure everyone else was out of earshot.

  “What do you think it was about?” Towner laughed. “I’d say from the invitation and from what I know of him, that Paul Whiting is interested in you.”

  “I picked up on that pretty quickly.” Callie laughed. “But what was all that…other stuff?”

  “Other stuff?” Towner feigned innocence.

  “What was going on between Marta and Emily? Air quotes. Subtext and innuendo. I felt like I was at a new staging of an Albee play.”

  “Oh, that. Well, there’s some history there.” Towner laughed again. “Come to Thanksgiving, and you’ll find out more, I’m sure.”

  The deeds of witches are such that they cannot be done without the help of Devils.

  —Malleus Maleficarum, 1486

  “What do you normally charge per session?” Towner asked Callie. “I want to pay the going rate.”

  “No, no, it’s on me. They’ve invited me for the weekend.” Callie glanced at the gift certificate Towner had prepared to present to Emily as a hostess gift of sorts. It entitled her to one music therapy session with Callie O’Neill. Callie was still wondering if she should have accepted the spontaneously issued Thanksgiving invitation, though it had been followed by Emily’s handwritten one the next day. When Towner had asked her to do a treatment on Emily, she’d asked about the cancer. “How bad is it?”

  “It’s bad. Metastatic breast cancer. Stage four.”

  “Damn,” Callie said.

  “She said they used music therapy on her after her first surgery, so she knows what it is. Emily’s fairly traditional, though. I might hold off on the singing bowls.”

  “That’s fine,” Callie said. They were two different treatments, really. Traditional music therapy involved three elements: the music, the patient, and the therapist. Sound healing with the bowls, on the other hand, worked directly on the patient, removing the middleman. And even if Emily Whiting was open to it, Callie’s full set of bowls was still in Northampton; all she had here was Towner’s salad bowl. “But I’m not taking your money.”

  “I’ll see you at Pride’s Heart,” Towner said, leaving a check on the table anyway. “Wish Rose Happy Thanksgiving for me when you see her later.”

  Rose was fully dressed and sitting at a table by the window, sketching the tree that sat on the hill across from the hospital parking lot.

  Callie flashed on a memory of another Thanksgiving, at Rose’s house on Daniels Street.

  Callie was sitting with everyone at the table, sketching a turkey wearing a Pilgrim’s hat that Rose found quite amusing, when a pounding on the door interrupted them. Olivia excused herself and went outside to talk to the uniformed policeman standing on the porch. The other women watched them through the window. Callie could hear her mother and the man arguing. Rose stayed seated.

  As the argument escalated, Callie started to cry.

  “What’s the matter, sweet girl?” Rose asked.

  “Is he going to take her to jail?”

  “No,” Rose said. Then, to Susan and Cheryl, “Though jail might do the whole lot of them some good.”

  The memory took Callie by surprise.

  “What are you frowning about?” Rose asked, pulling her back to real time.

  It took a moment for Callie to regain her composure. She made herself smile. “That’s very good,” she said, pointing to Rose’s drawing. She looked out at the hill where the single oak stood in winter silhouette. Rose wasn’t drawing
the entire tree; rather she was rendering an impressionistic suggestion of it in light and darkness, the branches and twigs weaving over and under as it moved across the page. “It looks like lace.”

  Rose turned to look at her. “What else do you see?”

  Callie gazed at the sketch. In the negative spaces between the branches, Rose had placed a series of check marks.

  “What are those?” Callie asked.

  “You tell me. What do you see?”

  “Just some marks.”

  “Not people?”

  “People? No. Where do you see people?”

  Rose pointed to the spots she had marked. “You don’t see anyone at all?”

  “No,” Callie said.

  “Good,” Rose said, and then shushed Callie and leaned in toward the window. “She’s singing to us.”

  “Who is?”

  “That oak.” Rose scrunched her face in concentration. “Listen.”

  Callie could not hear anything through the closed window. “What song is she singing?” she whispered. Over the past two weeks, she’d found that agreeing with Rose’s more fanciful statements kept her talking; challenging them could shut her down.

  “That Thanksgiving song,” Rose said. “You know it.”

  Callie started to sing: “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing…Is that the one?”

  “That’s it!” Rose said, excited.

  “It’s the only Thanksgiving song I know. I didn’t hear it from the tree,” she confessed.

  “I know that, silly girl,” Rose said playfully, reminding Callie of the old Rose. Silly girl had been one of Rose’s nicknames for her when she was little. Silly girl, sweet girl, sweetie, honey, all pet names, and all uttered fondly, always followed by a pat on the head or a kiss on the cheek.

  “And just how do you know that?”

  “Because you’re singing it in a completely different key.” Rose laughed. “And you should know that your singing was flat.”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  Rose smiled.

  It had been Rose who’d once told Callie she had perfect pitch, something Callie later found out was true. Perfect pitch was something they’d recently discovered was genetic. It must have come from her father, the musician. Olivia couldn’t sing a note.

  “Tell me more about the trees,” Callie said. “I know they talk to you. What else do they say?”

  “Did Dr. Finch tell you to ask me that?”

  “No. Has she been asking you the same thing?”

  “For years.” Rose sighed, closing her journal.

  “And what have you told her?”

  “I haven’t told her anything. She wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’ve talked to Towner about the trees.”

  “Towner’s different. She’s one of us.”

  “What does that mean, ‘one of us’?” Callie sat forward in her chair.

  “You know.”

  Callie shook her head. “I really don’t.” But did she?

  “I’m pretty sure Towner could hear them if she listened.”

  “The trees?”

  “Only the oaks.”

  “What do they tell you, Rose?”

  “A lot of things.”

  “And they sing. Better than I do, evidently.” Callie smiled.

  A shadow crossed Rose’s face.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Towner says you are documenting all the oaks in Salem. That you think they can lead you to the current location of the old hanging tree and to the missing remains of our ancestors.”

  “They will.”

  “Is there a connection between the oak trees and the banshee?”

  “There has always been a connection.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a long story.” Rose sighed.

  “I like your long stories.” Callie remembered sitting at Rose’s feet, listening to myths and fairy tales she’d never heard before or since, epic stories Rose seemed to make up as she went along.

  “You have to go to Thanksgiving,” Rose said.

  “I have time.”

  Rose seemed reluctant, something Callie had never seen before. Finally, taking a deep breath, she began. “It was an oak tree who was her jailer.”

  “The banshee?”

  Rose shook her head. “She wasn’t a banshee then, she was a goddess.”

  Callie nodded. “Got it.”

  “The goddess’s captors imprisoned her in the tree, stealing her power, as well as that of the oak, and changing the nature of both. When she finally escaped, she had turned.”

  “Turned?” Callie repeated. Rose had used the word turning in her written confession to Rafferty. Was this where she’d gotten the expression? “What do you mean by ‘turned’?”

  “Imprisonment changed her nature, as it tends to do. She ‘turned’ from a goddess to a banshee.”

  Callie considered Rose’s own imprisonment. After she’d gotten out of the state hospital, she’d never been the same. She had “turned” into a different person. Was Rose talking about herself? Hadn’t she told Rafferty that she, herself, was a banshee?

  “The banshee hid in the tree’s upper branches, sending her mournful cries on the wind to herald death. When she was finished with the Old World, she voyaged to the New, on a sailing mast made from the bloody trunk of the stricken oak, landing in Salem in 1630 with the second wave of Puritans. It was a difficult voyage and only a handful of the passengers and crew survived. She nested in the rigging of the cursed ship and whispered doom on the chilling winds, then followed it with blame. When the crops failed, when the savages bloodied the border settlements, her winds whispered tales of devils into the ears of sleeping Puritans. The whispers built into wails and then to shrieks. As the snows came, the shrieks were heard in every home in Salem Village, turning neighbor against neighbor. When she took her final revenge, it was the oak who paid the most dearly. For they didn’t burn those condemned as witches in the New World as they had in the Old, they hanged them from the branches of the sacred oak.”

  Callie stared. Rose had spoken as if the words were memorized, a combination of poetry and fairy tales. It was disturbing.

  “You don’t believe me,” Rose said.

  “You…surprised me, that’s all.”

  “You asked a question. I answered you.”

  “I never heard that story before,” Callie said, quite certain Rose had never told her anything like this.

  “There’s a lot you haven’t heard.” Rose considered her. “You don’t like the story.”

  Callie reached for something neutral to say. “It sounds like the kind of story you were dead-set against when I was a child.”

  Rose looked at her curiously. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean the kinds of superstitious beliefs that got our ancestors hanged as witches. You’re an academic, Rose. You know better.”

  “I’m not speaking of witches, I’m explaining the banshee.”

  “And why is this banshee—this evil thing—a woman?”

  “She’s a diminished goddess. Trapped by the priests who made her small, imprisoning her and stealing her powers.”

  “And a devil?”

  “Not a devil, no.”

  “But evil. And female.”

  “Yes, but not in any human sense. She was once a goddess. So of course that’s female. After her imprisonment, she turned into something else entirely.”

  “The banshee.”

  “That’s right,” Rose said. “Look at me. And you’ll see her.”

  “You’re a banshee?” Callie said without disguising her disbelief.

  “Rafferty told you…You know that I am.”

  “I don’t accept that, Rose.”

  Rose grabbed Callie’s hand urgently and held it tight. “The banshee isn’t a woman in any traditional sense. She represents the change. The turning.” Rose held eye contact as she spoke. She squeezed Callie’s hand and leaned forward. “Do you understa
nd?”

  Callie shook her head.

  “It’s important that you understand.”

  “I’m sorry,” Callie said. “I really don’t.” Rose’s eyes were the most focused and intense Callie had ever seen. “I’m trying, but I just don’t get it.”

  “You will,” Rose said. The proclamation sounded like something between a warning and a curse. “Go,” she said, dropping Callie’s hand and turning away. “Go to your stupid dinner. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” Then, blinking her eyes, pointing a finger at Callie, she spoke again, in a voice that was nothing like her own: “God will give you blood to drink!”

  Rose’s voice echoed off the walls.

  A chill ran down Callie’s spine. Unlike the unfamiliar story Rose had just told, Callie was certain that she’d heard this phrase before. She waited for Rose to say something else, something that would give her a clue, but Rose was pulling away, turning inward. Her eyes had taken on the same emptiness Callie had seen when she first arrived.

  Callie had accepted Marta’s offer to drive her to the Whitings’. But she hadn’t expected to leave Rose so soon, so she sat in her car in front of the tearoom and called Zee. “I think I may have set her back,” she admitted, telling Zee what Rose had said. “I wish I hadn’t pushed her about the banshee—I don’t know what got into me.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Zee reassured her. “She has these outbursts. You witnessed it yourself, the day she woke up.”

  “She said something different that day.”

  “She has catchphrases. Ciphers. Courting the strike. Blood to drink. She’s used that phrase before. When I asked her about it, she said those were the words the banshee spoke to her before the murders.”

  For a moment, Callie felt as if she couldn’t breathe. God, was that where she’d heard those words? The night of the murders?

  Zee was still talking, but Callie had lost track of the conversation.

  “Are you still there?” Zee asked.

  “Yes. Sorry. My phone must have cut out,” Callie lied.

  “Look, I wouldn’t worry about it. I’ll stop by the hospital tonight and sit with her. You enjoy the holiday.”

  Callie sat in the car for a long time after she hung up. Her mind was reeling. “Stop,” she said aloud to herself. Marta was due any minute, and Callie couldn’t be a nervous wreck when she showed up. Why had she said yes to this invitation?