The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  Callie looked a lot like a teenager standing in front of him, staring at her shoes.

  “Am I under arrest?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he said. He turned on the flashlight he was carrying, which was about a hundred times more powerful than hers. There was nothing in the front room except a few old McDonald’s bags. The kitchen was empty: both sink and stove removed, copper pipes ripped out of the wall, probably stolen. It looked as if someone had started to sweep but abandoned the project, leaving a pile of debris in the corner: It had a network of cobwebs running from it to the handle of a base cabinet and down to the floor.

  In a back bedroom closet was a dead water rat.

  “Oh God,” Callie said, stepping back quickly to get out of the closet. As she shifted, her foot pushed through a rotting floorboard, and she nearly fell.

  Rafferty caught her by the arm. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Thanks,” she said, still shivering from the sight of the rat.

  “Be careful,” he said. “A lot of these boards look rotten.” He shone his light up to a damp-looking patch of plaster in the corner. “Water damage.” He pointed the beam back at the floor in an effort to identify other rotting boards.

  Rafferty shone the flashlight into a crack between floorboards, then stepped over the rotting one to retrieve an envelope that had fallen in. Shaking the dust from it, he turned it over. “To Dagda from Morrigan,” he said, reading aloud. “Are those names of Goddesses?”

  Callie shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t remember hearing them before.”

  “There’s something else,” he said, squinting. He brought the flashlight in closer, making the envelope translucent and revealing a faded lipstick kiss.

  “A love letter maybe?” she said, and it triggered a memory. “My mother and the others used to receive ‘love letters’ from their…‘friends.’ Sometimes I’d recite them.”

  “Love letters?”

  She nodded. “Rose gave me elocution lessons. She made me memorize, too, and I’d perform poems in front of my mother and the others. In the elocutionist’s pose.” She indicated one hand poised over the other, palm up against palm down at chest level. “At the end I had to curtsy.”

  “Sounds adorable.”

  “It was meant to help me gain poise in front of an audience. Not sure the poise thing worked, but it did help me learn to read.”

  “And the love letters?”

  “Rose worked nights at the center. Most people came in to do their research after work or on Saturdays. When she was out, my mother and the Goddesses had me recite passages from love letters. I’d struggle with words I didn’t recognize. They found it hilarious.”

  Callie could feel herself blushing as she remembered the words she’d had to sound out, words she was all too familiar with now.

  “I didn’t have to take the elocutionist’s stance when I was reading those letters, but they did insist on the curtsy at the end.”

  She remembered the Goddesses giggling and whooping throughout the reading, but it was the curtsy that sent them over the edge. They would laugh until they couldn’t breathe, then they would be silent catching their breath, and one of them would start to giggle and they would be off again. Callie had counted these times as happy ones, with all the Goddesses together and herself as the center of their attention. Now, as she recalled more of the context, she had a different feeling.

  She could see Rafferty’s quick look of disapproval before he covered it. “But you don’t recall any of them being called Morrigan?”

  “I really don’t,” she said. “Is this a clue?”

  “I don’t know,” Rafferty said. “It might be, Nancy Drew.”

  A beam from headlights moved across the walls, lighting the room as the backup cruiser pulled up out front. Rafferty looked out the window to see the neighbor coming over to talk to the officers Jay-Jay had predictably dispatched.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Rafferty said. “Before we both end up in jail.”

  He ushered Callie out the back door, then left by the front himself, stopping to talk to the policemen and the neighbor before getting into his car, giving Callie time to get away unnoticed. Then he drove around the corner and pulled up next to her, opening the passenger door. “Where are you parked?”

  She pointed up toward the common.

  “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

  Montserrat College of Art called the station the next morning with Leah’s last known address.

  The three-decker where she’d lived in Beverly was long gone; he’d found a condo development in its place. He’d talked to one of the neighbors. “The kid was a runaway,” he said. “She was in school, I think, but then she came home. She didn’t stay long. She and the father never got along.”

  The man couldn’t remember when Leah ran away, but it certainly hadn’t happened before the murders, Rafferty knew that much.

  The father had died a long time ago, the man said. “Lung cancer. There was a younger sister, Becky. She moved away. Had a kid. Last I heard she was living in New Hampshire.”

  The man didn’t know where, said he’d heard somewhere that the guy had run off, leaving her a single mother. He hadn’t found anything online, but Rafferty had recently found a copy of Leah’s birth certificate at the town hall in Beverly, though the original had been handwritten and was almost illegible, and he couldn’t quite make out the parents’ names. He’d managed to locate the father’s name from online real estate records, then had found his birth certificate; he was born in Beverly, his parents having come over from Greece just after the war. Rafferty found nothing on either the mother or the sister.

  He dialed Mickey from his cell.

  “Greece, huh? Then it’s probably not the father’s lineage we’re looking for. Plus it’s really hard to trace records back to Europe.”

  “Give it a try.”

  “Get me the mother’s records.”

  “I’m working on it.”

  On his way back to Salem, Rafferty stopped at the Beverly Police Station on the off chance that someone had been looking for Leah and had filed a report. He spoke to a detective he knew, another transplant, who had moved north from Connecticut. When Rafferty mentioned the name Leah Kormos, he thought he noticed one of the older cops shoot a quick look at his buddy.

  It took a while for the detective to locate the records. “She was a runaway all right. Disappeared into thin air.”

  “When did she disappear?”

  “Let’s see,” he said, looking at the screen. “It says here that she was reported missing on November fifth, 1989.”

  Witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.

  —Malleus Maleficarum

  They stood at the “four corners of the circle,” each woman holding a candle representing east, west, north, or south. As he sat on the bench watching them at the far end of Derby Wharf, the wind was off the ocean and the candles kept going out. Rafferty had seen this ceremony performed before. Ann named it “calling up the seas.” Once it was drawn, you couldn’t penetrate the circle, not without cutting an entrance of some kind, a metaphorical door to pass through.

  “Circles don’t have corners,” he’d said when she’d tried to explain the process.

  “Don’t be so literal,” she’d replied.

  “What would happen if I just walked in?” Rafferty had asked. “If I just stepped inside to say hello?”

  “At the very least you’d break the spell,” she said. “That’s the best-case scenario.”

  “And the worst?”

  “You’d be exposing those inside—and probably yourself—to some danger. Inside the circle, you are protected. By the gods and goddesses you’ve invoked to join you.”

  “And outside?”

  “Outside are the ones you didn’t invite. Fairies and impish creatures. And they can be a jealous lot. They love to crash a party.”

  Rafferty had listened with the amused detachm
ent of a nonbeliever. Even so, today he kept his distance and waited until the ceremony was over and the circle had been uncast before talking to Ann. He watched until she pointed with her wand, undoing the circle counterclockwise or, as he’d once heard her refer to it, “widdershins.”

  “Three times in one week?” she said, spotting him waiting for her as she and the witches walked back toward shore. “People will start to talk.”

  “Raising the sea again? The climate change people will be all over you,” he replied.

  “Just the opposite, actually. It’s a spell called Time and Tides. It’s meant to turn back both. As a cure for climate change.”

  “And is it working?”

  “Time will tell,” she said.

  “I thought time didn’t exist,” he answered.

  “Linear time doesn’t exist,” she grouched. “Enough. What do you want to ask me this time?”

  “I need to know more about goddesses.”

  “Goddesses in general or those poor girls from 1989?”

  “In general. You have a particular goddess you worship, right? From a specific group?”

  “My coven has chosen the Celtic pantheon, though it more or less matches the Greek, Roman, and Norse ones. We worship all of the gods and goddesses from our group, each of us choosing one with whom we identify. Mine is Danu, mother goddess of water and war.”

  “Isn’t that a contradiction in terms?”

  “Not at all,” Ann said. “I can handle her. But you do have to be careful who you choose, and remember that, by calling down your goddess, you are summoning all of her powers. Which is why we discourage novices from making the choice too early.” She sighed. “I know you don’t believe in this, so what’s your real question, Rafferty?”

  He got to the point. “Do you think the 1989 ‘Goddesses’ might have had a special goddess they worshiped, a goddess named Morrigan?”

  Ann suddenly looked interested.

  “Is she one of yours?”

  “She’s Celtic, yes, but she’s not someone to emulate.”

  “Is it Morgan le Fay?”

  “No, completely different derivation. The Morrigan comes from the Gaelic. Loosely translated as the Phantom Queen.”

  “That sounds ominous.”

  “It also means ‘terror.’ She’s a powerful lady. I’d stay away from her.”

  “What about Dagda?”

  “Dagda is a god, not a goddess. Legend says he trysts with Morrigan on Samhain.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Rafferty said, pulling out his phone to take notes.

  “I have a particular interest in Dagda,” admitted Ann. “He is a good god. Either Danu’s father or her son.”

  “That’s quite a wide range of possibility.”

  “It’s all in the interpretation.” Ann shrugged. “This has something to do with those girls?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “It was a random name written on an envelope—”

  “Probably not random,” she said. “But not good, either.”

  She thought about it before speaking again. “Some describe the Morrigan as a triple goddess in the usual sense: the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Others say she’s three sisters: Nemain, Macha, and Badb.”

  Rafferty handed his cell to her. “Spell those for me, please.”

  She typed in the names, handing it back to him.

  “Pronounce them again?”

  Ann spoke slowly, highlighting each syllable: Ne-main, Ma-cha. She stopped before she got to the last one.

  “And this one?”

  “Badb,” she said, looking as if she’d just realized something. “Which, in some parts of Ireland, is the same thing as this.” She typed it slowly, then turned the phone so he could see. B-E-A-N S-I-D-H-E.

  He looked at it, trying to sound it out. “Bean what?”

  “Banshee.”

  I am a cipher. I carry no weight, no worth, no influence. I represent nothing. I do not exist.

  —ROSE’S Book of Trees

  “Paul and I are friends. We’re not sleeping together, if that’s what you’re wondering, Mrs. Whiting.”

  “Yet that’s what everyone in Pride’s Crossing is thinking,” Emily said.

  Callie watched Emily look around the boathouse. Paul’s research papers for his dissertation were spread all over the table. There were scattered photos of images found in the rock caves and some open reference books. On the computer screen was an article on the cave restoration that his adviser had written and Paul had contributed to for National Geographic.

  “At least you’re still getting some work done,” Emily said to Paul. She turned to Callie, her face pinched. “And you still have a job and an apartment in Northampton?”

  “Would you like me to leave, Mrs. Whiting? Is that what you came to say?”

  After Callie had confessed and apologized to Paul, they’d started meeting for coffee every day at the Atomic Cafe in downtown Beverly, since Salem was becoming more and more problematic for Callie. There had been several incidents in Salem, and people were beginning to recognize her. One confrontation at the hospital had particularly unnerved her. On her way to visit Rose, Callie had been followed into the stairway by an older man, who’d stepped in front of her, blocking her way.

  “I knew it wasn’t true.” He had leaned in so close she’d felt his breath and seen his eyes filling up with tears. “I knew you’d come back to me.”

  She’d let Rafferty know about the man.

  She’d heard from Towner that Rafferty had been called on the carpet for his “bias” toward Rose, and the fact that Callie was living at their house was fanning the flames. Around town, more hateful graffiti about Rose kept appearing, one adding Callie’s name. Someone had thrown a rock through a window at the tearoom. Reporters were harassing her. She suspected it had been Ann who’d passed the word—she was the only one besides Rafferty, Towner, and Paul who knew her identity for certain—but Towner said no, that Ann wouldn’t do that. Callie wasn’t so sure.

  A few days later, Towner had come to her. “I’m so sorry to have to do this, Callie, but I need you to find another place to stay.” Towner’s concerned expression reflected her words. “Rafferty’s always been worried about your well-being in Salem, and frankly I’m worried about his as well.”

  “I understand. I’ll find another place.” The truth was, Callie had already been looking online for other places to stay. “You’ve gone way past the call of duty by putting me up.”

  “Thank you,” Towner had said, adding, “please don’t stop coming for tea. I love seeing you. You’re like the daughter I never had. There’s just some trouble with you living here.”

  Callie still visited Towner for tea, but far less often. She stopped going to the cemetery altogether. Now, when she visited Salem, it was almost always to see Rose. She drove around to the back side of the hospital and used a little-known entrance. She’d also begun looking at short-term sublets in Beverly not far from Pride’s Crossing.

  When Paul had heard what was going on, he’d invited her to stay at his boathouse. “I’m leaving for Italy sometime in February,” he’d said. “Then you can have the place to yourself. Meanwhile, I’m happy to share.”

  “Just as friends, right?”

  “Of course. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

  He’d turned away as soon as he said it, which probably meant he’d had something else in mind, so it was good she’d brought it up.

  He’d generously given her his bed, and for the past three days she’d slept in it while he camped on the couch in the tower’s reading nook.

  With the exception of the first night, it had gone smoothly.

  “You sleep with your eyes open, did you know that?” he’d said the next morning as he handed her a cup of coffee. “You were doing it that day at Norman’s Woe, and again last night.”

  “You were watching me sleep?” Callie, horrified, had put down the coffee.

  “No. I mean yes. Just for a few minutes. I hea
rd you talking and sort of moaning, and I came down to see what was wrong. I thought you were having another nightmare.”

  Waking memories, that’s what her psychologists had called them. The nuns had called them visions, another reason they’d found her frightening. Sleeping with her eyes open had been one of the things that had scared them about her. For a short time, she had even sleepwalked, which had made the nuns start locking her inside her room every night, fearing her escape. Her dreams were vivid, if disjointed, and she’d often awakened in a cold sweat, unable to get back to sleep until sunrise. For the most part, the dreams were snippets of memories from the night of the murders, details that came back unbidden and unwelcome.

  “You didn’t think to wake me up?” she’d asked Paul, incredulous.

  “By the time I got up the stairs, you had stopped moaning.”

  “But you watched me anyway.”

  “Yes,” he’d said, holding her gaze. “I did.” There was a definite sexual undertone.

  “Well, stop it.” She’d scowled at him.

  Now Emily’s disapproving expression mimicked her own that morning. It was clear Emily didn’t believe Callie and Paul were just friends.

  “I’ll go if that’s what you want,” Callie said. She was getting used to being asked to move on. She tried to sound sincere, but her tone had an edge.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Then what’s the point of this visit, Mother? Callie is trying to help Rose. And whomever I have as a guest is none of your business.”

  “Given that this is still my house, and you’re still my son”—Emily frowned—“I’d say it’s very much my business.”

  “Callie was accosted in Salem a few days ago. Did you know that?”

  “No.” Emily’s tone was tentative.

  “Well, she was. You may not realize this, but everyone in Salem seems to have picked up on it. Callie was the little girl who survived the Goddess Murders.”

  Paul had already explained to Callie that Emily hadn’t moved to Pride’s Crossing and married Finn until a few months after the murders. Just months after that, Paul had been born. They hadn’t been in town when the murders happened, but they knew about them. Everybody did.