Dad. She heard Leah’s voice again.
Please.
She squinted to focus her eyes, erasing the dream image. Lacy frost etched the window. Beyond the glass, she could see only milky whiteness, growing brighter as the sun lifted itself above the horizon, creating a shapeless luminosity. It was as if a blanket of nothingness had descended on the house, made even lonelier by the moans of distant foghorns. She needed to get outside to clear her head. Putting on her coat, Callie descended the stairs slowly, letting herself out through the pantry door.
The mist was so thick outside it was difficult to tell which way to walk. She couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of her. The blank whiteness stretched in every direction now, and, for a moment, she panicked, afraid of stepping over the edge of the cliff and falling into the ocean below. But then she heard the horns again, and the faint sound of waves, and so she turned and headed the opposite way. Pulling her coat tighter around her, she took baby steps until she felt the crunch of stones, then followed the driveway toward the barn, where her car was parked.
By the time she reached the road, the fog had lifted enough to see a few car lengths in front of her. Callie pulled onto the shore road as if in a trance, and instead of turning left toward Salem, she turned right toward Gloucester.
Route 127 wound in and out through misty woods and oceanfront, crossing and recrossing the tracks of the commuter rail, thumping her tires once, then twice, each time she went over them. She drove as if summoned, as if a magnetic pull was taking her north and east toward Cape Ann. The rhythm of driving had a sedative effect; she wasn’t sure where she was going, and she didn’t care.
She felt the vibration of the train before she saw the red crossing lights and heard the clang of warning bells. Her brakes shrieked as she slammed her foot down, the front bumper pushing against the crossing gate, bending it forward to the point where she feared it might snap. The nose of her car was so close to the passing train that she could see the horrified expression on a woman’s face looking down from her window seat.
Long after the train disappeared, Callie sat at the crossing, her breath heaving, both feet pressed on the brake pedal, wondering what the hell was wrong with her.
Twenty minutes later and still shaking, she crossed the town line into Gloucester and pulled into the parking lot at Hammond Castle. This had been her destination all along, she realized. She turned off the engine and rested her head against the steering wheel, trying to breathe herself back to calm.
“May I help you?” An older man slapped her driver’s-side window with his open palm, then motioned for her to roll it down.
“I just want to look around—”
“We’re closed for the season,” he said, pointing to a sign. “And this is private property.”
“Sorry,” she said, restarting the engine.
“Come back in the spring.”
She couldn’t shake her nervousness. She felt dizzy as well. She needed to eat something, she decided, so she drove to downtown Gloucester, pulled into a diner near the harbor, and ordered a full breakfast of eggs and bacon, toast, and orange juice.
By the time she finished, she felt better. The fog had cleared, and the sun was shining. Even so, she didn’t take the shore route again. She opted for Route 128 and headed over to the hospital to see Rose.
“Stay back,” Rose said. Her eyes darted wildly around the room. “She’s gotten loose. I don’t have her anymore.”
The nurses said Rose had spent the whole morning pacing the perimeter of her room. Circling once, twice, then reversing direction as if to undo the circles she had just created. Apparently, Rose had tried, just last night, to escape the confines of Salem Hospital to get back to her oak trees. They’d had to restrain her for several hours.
“Who don’t you have?” Callie asked.
“The Sidhe.”
Callie looked past Rose—the cabinet that held her belongings had been pried open, the lock broken. Rose’s clothing was ripped and shredded. And whole pages of her book were torn out and crumpled. Callie picked one up. Across the top was a sentence she’d seen before, written in caps: KILL THE BANSHEE.
“Who did this?” Callie asked.
“The banshee!” Rose said. “She’s gotten loose and I can’t stop her!”
“I don’t understand.”
“I had her inside of me. But she escaped. I saw her face. Right here in my room!”
“The banshee?”
“The goddess who turned!”
Rose was shaking. “The creature who killed your mother and the others. She got loose that night, and she killed them all. Then she jumped into me. I tried to hold her there, tried to stop her from killing again, but I couldn’t keep her there forever. When I saw the boy, saw the violence he was capable of, and what they could do together, I could feel her bloodlust rising. She wanted to inhabit him. If I hadn’t stopped him, everyone around him would have died,” Rose cried. “It was the lesser evil.”
Both the nurse and the aide were standing in the doorway staring at Rose.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Callie said, reaching out, trying to calm Rose down.
“I’m going to call Dr. Finch back in,” the nurse said and hurried off.
Callie tried to calm Rose, but Rose squirmed away from her touch. “You don’t understand! The goddess is out there. She tried to kill me!”
An orderly appeared at the door. “I hear you need help in here.” The aide stood behind him.
“No,” Callie said. “Stay where you are.”
More than her words, she knew it was the sound of her voice and the look on her face that stopped him. Locking him in place with her stare, Callie grabbed her phone and called Zee’s number.
“The nurse just paged me. I’m on my way.”
She called Rafferty next and reported the vandalism. “Rose says the goddess tried to kill her! Or the banshee!” Callie said. “Someone was definitely here. They vandalized the room. Do you think it could have been Leah? Maybe she saw Rose on the news and came back to try to hurt her.”
“Did Rose say it was Leah?”
“No. But someone was in here, that’s for sure. There’s been a lot of damage.”
“Stay there. I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything.”
The nurse started into the room.
“Stay where you are,” Callie warned. “The police are on their way.”
As his 1693 book, Wonders of the Invisible World, demonstrated, Cotton Mather felt little remorse for his part in the hysteria. To Mather, witches were a very real threat in the colony he called “the devil’s country.” He considered them to be “among the poor, and vile and ragged beggars upon Earth.”
—ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem
“It’s not Leah Kormos’s father,” Mickey told Rafferty. “He wasn’t related to Sarah Good. You’re going to have to get me her mother’s name.”
“I’m working on it,” Rafferty said.
He’d called several New Hampshire numbers looking for the sister, since the neighbor said that was where she’d moved. Though Kormos was a common surname in the Greek community, there were fewer listings than he’d expected, and he called them all. He checked online real estate transactions for Vermont and Maine as well. Arrest records and tax filings told him nothing. He checked the other Department of Criminal Justice Information Services websites: missing persons, Victim Services, military records, even the firearms registry, but came up short on any family names. He was going on the idea that the sister was using her maiden name. He didn’t know her married name.
“Do you want me to start in on the other Goddesses?” Mickey asked. “This research takes a while.”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Rafferty said. Everything about this case was taking a while.
What hadn’t taken him long to discover was who’d vandalized Rose’s room. It wasn’t Leah Kormos. Though there had been an unconfirmed report of a female doctor visiting Rose earlier in the d
ay, the vandalism had happened later. It was an orderly, not the one in Rose’s room when she arrived, but another man with a long record of offenses, his fingerprints all over the ruined property. He was a troublemaker, someone who’d heard the public opinion and decided to do a little damage, not unlike the growing number of people who were writing messages of hate online or gathering in front of the hospital to protest the police’s “inaction.” The man had an open bench warrant on charges completely unrelated, and was immediately taken into custody and held at the jail in Middleton.
Rafferty had gone to Pride’s Heart to give Callie the news. He sat across from her at the partners desk in Finn’s study and said, “There’s one more thing you need to know, Callie. It’s about Rose’s release.”
“They’re releasing her?” Callie sounded horrified. After all that had just happened, the thought made her worry for Rose’s safety. Before Rose’s recent outburst, Callie had been thinking she should start looking for a permanent place, somewhere they could both live. But this was happening a lot faster than she’d expected. “Rose isn’t well enough to be released.”
“Her commitment hearing only granted her thirty days. She’ll be heading over to the Crisis Abatement Center on Arbor Street as soon as they have a bed.”
“When will that be?” Zee had already briefed Callie about Arbor Street. Patients were allowed to come and go during the day but were provided with meals, meds, counseling, and shelter. “There are other options around Salem, but I think Arbor Street is the best,” Zee had said.
“Sometime before Christmas,” Rafferty said.
“They told me that Rose tried to escape from the hospital again yesterday…She’s likely to have run-ins with the people of Salem when she gets to Arbor Street.” Callie sat silent for a moment. “Maybe I should say yes to that interview they keep asking me to do. Try to change a few of the opinions about what really happened that night in 1989.”
“No one knows exactly what happened that night,” Rafferty said. “So what would you tell them?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I just think it might help to say something on Rose’s behalf.”
Towner had told him about the interview requests. When Rafferty learned that Callie had refused them, he’d been relieved. Now he was concerned that she might change her mind. “That’s a tough call,” he said now. “Talking to the press can make things worse.”
“You sound like Rose,” Callie said.
“You asked Rose about doing the interview?”
“I mentioned that I was considering it.”
“And what did she say?”
“She told me not to court the strike.”
He nodded. It was one of Rose’s catchphrases.
“But I think it might lead to information about Leah. Someone must know something about where she is.”
He’d told Callie that Leah, who’d rapidly become his number one suspect, had been reported missing right after the murders. They sat in silence for a long moment.
“Maybe,” he said. “Or it could make her go deeper into hiding.”
“But if it helps make Rose safer,” Callie said.
Rafferty said nothing. He was as worried about Rose’s release as she was.
“It’s just too soon to release her,” Callie said again. “Only yesterday she was ranting about the banshee being loose.”
He sighed. “It’s a flawed system.”
Lately, every official system seemed flawed to Rafferty. They’d talked about the mental health cutbacks, how the state hospitals had closed their doors while the promised local facilities never materialized. The mentally ill often ended up on the streets, like Rose, or, worse, in jail. Which brought him to the criminal justice system, which was even more troubling. Why, in the twenty-five years since a triple homicide, was Rafferty the only cop serious about finding the murderer?
The police chief’s cell rang. He checked the number and then apologized to Callie. “I have to take this.” He stood up and walked toward the window.
It was the ADA. “I wanted to give you a heads-up. We have approval for the exhumation. We dig up the bodies on January twenty-seventh.”
“So Helen Barnes wins,” Rafferty said, ending the call with a few terse words. It had played out just as Helen had threatened: Her political influence was going to bring the Goddesses back from the grave. Literally. And the timing couldn’t be worse for Rose and Callie. He sat back down.
“Trouble?”
“That was the ADA. They’re going to exhume the bodies of your mother and the others.”
There was a long pause before Callie spoke. “When?”
“The end of January.”
“What does this mean, exactly?”
“Unfortunately, exactly is not something I can predict. It might mean we find evidence that will lead us to the real murderer. Which would be great. It could mean we find something that implicates Rose. Or it could mean that we’ll find nothing.”
Slowly, through snippets he was picking up from his detective friend in Beverly and follow-up on the neighbor’s story, Rafferty was cobbling together Leah’s history. Her mother had died when the girl was fourteen, leaving only her father and a younger sister. After her disappearance, the younger sister, Becky, was the one who tried hard to find her. She was only twelve at the time, and they hadn’t paid too much attention to her persistent requests for help. Though they did some perfunctory searching, they hadn’t followed it up. The father hadn’t tried very hard to find her. She was a runaway, he said, and had always been troubled. They didn’t question him further. There was no record of any coordinating efforts between the Beverly and Salem police.
On the way back from Beverly, Rafferty took a detour to Rice Street in Salem.
Tom Dayle, his predecessor, was in the yard, bringing in empty trash barrels. He looked like a man burdened by life, Rafferty thought, bent at the waist and crippled by arthritis and stress. Even the empty barrels seemed a struggle.
“Want some help with that?” Rafferty parked and got out of his car.
Tom looked up. “I’m all set,” he said, frowning.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Is it about the exhumation of those girls?”
Rafferty was surprised. “Wow, word travels fast in these parts.”
“That why you came by? To let me know?”
“Nope.”
Dayle stopped and looked at him.
“There’s a box of evidence missing.”
“So?”
“So I thought you might have some idea where to look.”
“Did you try the archives?”
“A couple of times,” Rafferty said.
“Then I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What do you know about Leah Kormos?”
There was a long pause before Tom answered. “I don’t know anyone by that name.”
“She was one of the Goddesses.”
“Never heard of her,” he said, this time with more conviction.
“She wasn’t on the hill that night, but she was at the party at Hammond Castle. The young woman in the red dress that people talked about? The one who had the argument with the girls the night they were murdered? That was Leah Kormos. Not sure how you guys missed that part.”
“I’ve never heard of any Leah Kormos.”
Rafferty looked at Dayle for a long time. “Funny that you guys never made that connection. Especially since Leah Kormos is now my number one suspect.”
“I’m retired,” Dayle said. “I’m not interested.”
“Sorry,” Rafferty said. “My mistake. You seemed interested enough in the exhumation.”
“I’m hoping the exhumation will prove Rose Whelan’s guilt once and for all. And finally end all this nonsense.” Dayle turned around and began limping toward the house, leaving an empty barrel midlawn.
Rafferty picked up the barrel and followed. “If we had their clothing, we might not need to do the exhumation. You guys di
d keep the clothing as evidence, didn’t you? You wouldn’t have been stupid enough to let that go.”
Dayle reeled around, grabbing the barrel from Rafferty and shoving it into a corner of the garage. “Of course we kept the clothing. This may not be New York City, like you’re used to, but it isn’t Mayberry, either.”
They stood there looking at each other for a long moment. “Sorry,” Rafferty said. “That was uncalled for.”
“It’s probably in that box you can’t seem to find,” Dayle muttered.
“Probably,” Rafferty said.
Dayle stood looking at him.
“I’m guessing you’re not going to invite me in.”
“Hell, no.”
“Merry Christmas then,” Rafferty said and walked back to his car.
Rafferty sat in his car at the end of the dead-end street. He watched as Dayle closed the garage door behind him, then walked into the kitchen, passing the front window of the cape. He saw him pick up the wall phone and dial.
Rafferty pulled the car around, swearing as the cruiser didn’t quite make the U-turn, forcing him to back up and pass Tom Dayle’s house once again. He slowed his car.
This time he saw Dayle open the cellar door and flip on the stair lights.
Late that same afternoon, Rafferty officially reopened the investigation.
That these Witches have driven a Trade of Commissioning their Confederate Spirits, to do all sorts of Mischiefs to the Neighbours, whereupon there have Ensued such Mischievous consequences upon the Bodies, and Estates of the Neighbourhood, as could not otherwise be accounted for…
—COTTON MATHER, The Wonders of the Invisible World
True to his word, Paul had transformed the spa in the wine cellar into a healing room, moving the couch into the center of the cavern and adding a treatment table for massage. He’d cleaned the floor and polished the wooden rim of the sea well and placed an Aubusson rug on the granite to mute some of the harsher acoustics, cutting the floor-to-ceiling movement of energy in favor of the clockwise ellipse Callie had told him she needed. He’d hung a still life of apples and oranges on the wall opposite the couch and placed small tables around the perimeter of the room to hold the singing bowls.
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