The month with Paul had been a good one as well. They’d started spending more and more time together, settling in for winter as people tended to do in New England, cooking dinners and sitting by the fire. Everything had been wonderful and romantic. Until the night of that first snow.
She still couldn’t believe Rose was gone. It seemed inconceivable that after she’d just found Rose again, God had once again taken her away.
Callie had booked a few sessions with Zee; since Rose’s death she’d found herself crying at the oddest times. Her nightmares had changed, too: They were a jumble of trees, frozen darkness, and severed limbs harnessed and swinging. Over and over, each limb was cut away, until all that was left of the tree was the trunk itself. Beyond the severed limbs was a vast nothingness that stretched on forever.
But even worse were the memories that had begun to come back unbidden, from the night of the murders:
Susan’s fall and the gash on her neck, bleeding into the earth below.
A maze of tangled trees, woven thick and impenetrable.
The blood glazing the dying grass.
The dark heart of the hedge bush where Rose had hidden her.
The pit and their blood grave below.
“How much did you grieve when it happened?” Zee wanted to know.
“There didn’t seem to be any time to grieve,” Callie said. “I was too scared of what might happen next.”
Zee nodded. “And the glimpses of memory you’re having now, how do they make you feel?”
“Sad and scared,” Callie said. “Very scared.” The images were more intense than her nightmares. She started crying again.
“The woman is dead, for Christ’s sake!”
Rafferty sat at his desk talking on the phone and lobbing darts at the exhumation order he’d tacked to his bulletin board as a makeshift target. The dart arced too high, looking as if it might miss the target altogether, then dove suddenly at the last minute, finding its mark dead center. “Can’t you people let her rest even now?”
He slammed down the phone.
There had been such a great amount of snow over the past few weeks that they hadn’t been able to bury anyone, let alone dig people up.
“I can’t believe they’re still going to open those graves,” Towner said later that evening.
Despite Rafferty’s protest to the ADA, his attitude about the exhumation was changing. The truth was, now that Rose was dead and could no longer be directly hurt by the results, he was curious about what the procedure might reveal. Increasingly, he wanted to solve this case. He made the mistake of confiding this feeling to Towner.
“I thought you were afraid the exhumation might implicate Rose.”
“Rose is dead.”
“So you don’t care anymore? What about Callie, for God’s sake? Didn’t you say her DNA is bound to be discovered as well?”
“No one believes a five-year-old girl was responsible.”
“They believe a lot of weird things in this town.”
“Look, I just need to solve this case, okay?”
Ever since the first snow, Rafferty’s tension level had been rising. He’d been reading the online posts, and now most of them were targeting him for the lack of closure to this case. But no one wanted closure more than he did.
“Let’s change the subject,” Towner said now, reading his expression and seeing where this was headed. “What else happened today?”
Rafferty had to rack his brain to come up with something. “So,” he said finally, “have I told you what some of our more industrious citizens have taken to doing to keep using their cars?”
“Do tell,” Towner answered.
“They are shoveling out spaces on the street and then ‘marking’ them: We’ve seen lawn chairs, buckets full of wood, trash barrels. In the McIntire District, someone set up a bistro table and chairs with two place settings, complete with wine bottles and candles.”
“That’s kind of funny.”
“It is, but God help the interloper who tries to steal a parking space. Last night, Jay-Jay hauled in a guy who’d been smashing windshields and deflating the tires of cars parked in ‘his’ space. The guy was wielding a sharpened screwdriver, swiping the air like a swashbuckler and bragging, ‘I flattened four tires in under a minute!’ ”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see it coming,” Callie said to Zee, remembering Rose’s words on Christmas: Sometimes the only healing is death.
“You’ve got to let yourself off the hook,” Zee said. “I was Rose’s therapist, and I didn’t see it coming, either.”
Zee quickly returned Callie to the original reason she had booked the hour. There had been an incident the previous weekend. She’d dropped a coffee cup in the kitchen, breaking it cleanly in two. As she bent down to pick up the mess, she saw the blood, just a few drops of it at first, falling on the floor she’d just wiped. She opened her hands to find her left palm cut, a slice across one of the petals of the rose-shaped scar. Holding her palm under the faucet to wash the wound, she watched the water run red. She pulled her hand out and pressed a paper towel to her palm to stanch the bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop. She felt faint and called for Paul, who’d been sleeping upstairs.
“Let me see,” he said, taking her hand, which she’d clutched around the towel.
“How bad is it?” she asked, squeezing her eyes shut, unable to look for fear she might actually faint.
Paul was quiet for a long time. When she finally opened her eyes, he was still holding her hand, but he was looking at her with a worried expression. She looked down at her palm. There was no blood, no sign of any wound at all. The coffee from the broken cup still coated the floor, and he leaned down to clean it up. “I think you were dreaming,” he said. “Or maybe walking in your sleep.”
She nodded. But she hadn’t been sleeping, she’d been wide awake. And it wasn’t the first time this week that she’d had a vision. Earlier in the week, she’d thought she’d seen Rose, sitting out by the oak where she died. And then, on Monday, there was a far more serious incident by that same tree. She immediately booked an emergency appointment with Zee, fearing that if she didn’t get to the bottom of what it meant, her visions could start, like Rose’s, to take unhealthy control of her actions.
“Tell me more about these visions.”
“I’ve always had them,” Callie admitted. After Rose’s death, they’d become more invasive: moments of clarity so extreme that they magnified sights and sounds, rendering them indistinguishable from one another, making everything she perceived seem too loud and vibrant. Her heart pounded so hard she could feel her pulse in her hands, from the scar on her palm to the tips of her fingers. “But they’re getting worse. I’ve never acted on one so impulsively before, never been as out of control as I was that day they started cutting down the old oak.”
“Why was Finn cutting it down?” Zee asked.
“He claimed he didn’t want to be reminded of what had happened to Rose. And he said that Emily felt responsible. Which she wasn’t; I was the one who made Rose come for Christmas…”
Zee let the silence hang.
“What I did terrified them all.”
The sound of the chain saw had been so loud, so violent—it had felt as if it were tearing through her head. “Stop!” she’d screamed at the groundsman, unable to stand it another second.
He hadn’t heard her through the noise. She’d stepped in front of him just as he lifted the saw and lunged, trying to wrest it out of his hands. By the time the saw had gone silent, the pristine snow had been dappled with his blood.
“They all tried to help me,” Callie said, shaking as she retold the story. “The man’s wound wasn’t as severe as the amount of blood suggested, thank God, though he required several stitches in his left arm. Luckily, he didn’t want to press charges.” She shivered. “The next morning, Paul took me to see what was left.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He wanted to show me the growth
rings. So I could see that the tree wasn’t as old as Rose had believed. I mean it was old, but not three hundred years old. He thought it would make me feel better to know that.”
“And did it?”
“No,” Callie said. “Finding out—it just negated Rose completely. For all those years she’d been searching, and she finally thought she had found it. And now…” She started to cry.
Zee handed her a box of tissues she kept on her desk. “Tell me about the sound the cutting of the tree made.”
“I don’t want to talk about the tree anymore,” Callie said, annoyed. “I want to talk about the guilt I feel. The guilt that Rose’s life was wasted—”
“Humor me.”
Callie crossed her arms and frowned.
“You said it was the sound that triggered your outburst.”
“It did.”
“What did it sound like?”
“A chain saw.”
Zee waited.
“It was a whining, shrieking kind of thing.”
“Did it remind you of anything?”
Callie thought for a moment, then dismissed it.
“What? Don’t edit, just tell me what came to mind.”
“Trees.”
“What trees?” Zee prompted.
“Rose’s oaks,” Callie said. “All the ones she searched out in Salem before she found this one.”
“The images that come back to you, where do they come from?”
“The night of the murders,” Callie said.
Zee waited.
“The trees,” Callie said. “On Proctor’s Ledge.”
“What was it about those trees?”
“They weren’t oaks. They were just a tangle of branches close to the ground, and we had trouble walking through them. They seemed to be holding us back. And then later the hedge that Rose pushed me into saved my life.”
“How?” Zee said.
“I was trapped.” Callie felt how the prickly branches had held her. Rose had said not to move, not to make a sound. But she couldn’t have even if she’d wanted to. It was as if the bushes had imprisoned her, had put a binding spell on her the way Ann Chase had done on the day they met. “I couldn’t move. Not even when the screaming started.”
“Who was screaming?”
“Rose said it was the banshee.”
“Is that what you think it was, a banshee?”
“I don’t know.”
Zee looked at her. “Was it one of the Goddesses?”
“I don’t…I don’t think so.” Susan’s fall had been silent. Her mother had cried out briefly, but that long piercing noise…
“What did it sound like to you? The shrieking and whining.”
“It sounded like a chain saw,” Callie said, making the connection.
Zee sat forward in her chair, holding Callie’s gaze. “And where was the sound coming from?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know.”
“I don’t!” Callie insisted.
“You know,” Zee said again, this time more gently, never breaking her gaze.
Callie stared back but said nothing for a long time.
“Oh my God,” Callie said as she finally understood something she realized the nuns must have known all along. “It was coming from me. The screaming banshee…it was me.”
The nuns were at Vespers when she arrived. Callie sat on the cold stone bench right outside the chapel, where she could hear the last words of the Magnificat, followed immediately by the Lord’s Prayer.
The nuns filed out silently. Callie did not meet anyone’s eye.
Sister Agony was the last to leave the chapel. At first, she looked surprised to see Callie on the bench. When she caught her expression, Agony’s surprise turned to worry.
“What’s wrong?”
“Rose is dead. Really, this time.” Callie tried unsuccessfully to hold back tears.
“How?”
“She froze to death under a tree.”
Agony stared at her.
“It’s my fault.”
Agony watched Callie carefully, trying to understand.
“She always thought it was a banshee she heard screaming the night of the murders, but it wasn’t.” Callie began to choke. “You knew all along that it was me, didn’t you?”
“Come inside,” the nun said, taking Callie’s arm and walking her toward one of the wooden benches in the back of the chapel. Callie took a deep breath, willing herself to stop crying.
The old nun folded her hands the same way she had the last time Callie confronted her. This time, though, it wasn’t to stop her anger, but to pray. When she finished her prayer, she crossed herself and took a deep breath. “Your screams were heard all night long by the nuns at St. James’s.”
“They never told me that.”
“No, they wouldn’t have.”
“Why didn’t they call the police?”
“That’s a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time,” Sister Agony said, her voice far softer than Callie had ever heard it. She wrung her hands together in remorse as she continued. “I believe they honestly thought it was a Halloween prank.”
Callie looked at her in disbelief.
“When they finally found you the next day, you were in horrible shape.” The nun glanced at the stigmata. “The police only made things worse. You were questioned so much they feared for your sanity. You were an orphan, so Catholic Charities got involved with DCF, and they decided to move you here, away from the investigation. We really thought they would question you again at some point…they had every right to, but then Rose started talking about the banshee. We wanted to tell you Rose was alive, but she was clearly delusional, and maybe even a killer. So we decided not to tell you. Which was the second sin of omission committed against you by people who wanted nothing more than to help. But people don’t always make the best decisions, Callie. Even with the best intentions.”
Callie just looked at her.
“After that you were fostered. The same way we fostered all of our orphans.” The nun forced herself to make eye contact but had trouble holding Callie’s chilling stare.
Callie made a sound between a laugh and a choke. “Except that I was returned. Because I was surrounded by death.”
Now the nun held her stare. “You don’t remember all of what happened, do you?”
“Please tell me.”
She spoke slowly. “Your foster mother died of cancer. Her husband couldn’t handle his loss, and he brought you back to us. By that time word of your story had gotten out, and he was a little afraid of you. He was the one who said you were surrounded by death, not us.”
Callie recited Proverbs 5:5, the note he had pinned to her shirt. “Her feet go down to death; her steps lead straight to the grave.”
“Your memory is accurate on that part, though your presentation is somewhat different from the way you first recited it to us.”
“I was just a child,” Callie reacted.
“You were.”
“And you all scared me.”
“I’m sorry,” the nun said, meaning it. “I’ve been thinking about this since you were up here the last time. We should have discussed all of this with you at the time. Of course we should have. We honestly thought it was for your own good.” She looked as if she might reach for Callie’s hand, but Callie straightened, weaving her fingers together in the same angry pose she had so often seen Agony use.
“We are an old-fashioned order. Not new millennium certainly. Some say we aren’t even of the twentieth century. There was a lot of fear and superstition surrounding your case, particularly from the older sisters. At first we thought we had witnessed a miracle, an amazing example of Christ’s intervention. The hand, once healed, would sometimes bleed for no apparent reason. Some believed that a miracle as well, a holy sign. It took me a long time to realize you were probably cutting yourself; we didn’t see such things much back then. Soon after that, the rumors about the murders began to circulat
e and the stigmata began to raise fears, not only about the murders but about you. You were a strange child, sleeping with your eyes open, sleepwalking. And just knowing things you could never have known. But it was your recitation that terrified everyone. When we returned from mass that morning, we found you sitting on the top step of the children’s home. When we asked you what happened, you stood up, as if in a trance, and began to recite that psalm. Holding your hands like this.” Sister Agony put one hand over the other in the elocutionist’s pose. “At the end of the psalm, you smiled. Then you curtsied.”
And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
—GENESIS 2:9
They flew overnight to Rome, arriving on Saturday morning, then immediately took a train to Bari, where Paul hired a car to drive them to Matera, as no train line ran to their destination. As they rode away from the coast, the vista broadened, revealing a painter’s landscape of olive groves, vineyards, and the occasional hill town. The ride took almost an hour. Callie was exhausted from all the travel, and her mind, blissfully, was an empty canvas, too tired to host haunting images.
The view narrowed again as they reached the city limits. Matera looked like other European cities: old architecture contrasting with new, street vendors, scooters, and automobiles. But then their car turned, and they began to climb into the Sassi district. The lane narrowed to an impossible width, and the driver shifted to a lower gear. The look of the buildings began to change: They seemed to be made of stone and light. It’s tufo, she realized, the stone she’d heard so much about from Paul.
Callie rolled down her window. The smells on the wind, the bright, clear air, reminded her of the ocean breeze in Pride’s Crossing, but it was lighter here, somehow. The lack of sound was punctuated occasionally by, what was that, music? She strained to hear and then recognized the singing notes of a violin. Someone was practicing scales.
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