The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  Where would you hide if you really didn’t want to be found? he asked himself now. May’s words came back to him.

  He’d tried every Kormos in bordering Massachusetts towns, but there was no one with the name Leah. Or Becky or Rebecca. And searching on first names was too unwieldy. Then he thought about how his daughter had said Leah was a Jewish name. It was true: Leah and Rebecca weren’t traditional Greek names, but they were definitely Old Testament. Maybe their mother, whose name he hadn’t been able to decipher on their birth certificates, had been Jewish?

  He’d already looked for the father’s marriage certificates. There was nothing in Beverly. Now he widened his search, checking neighboring towns. Trying different spellings of the father’s last name, he finally found a match in Peabody listed under the misspelled surname Courmos. The mother’s maiden name was Rosenfeld, and she’d married Leah’s father in Peabody in 1969.

  Rafferty searched the name Leah Rosenfeld, first in Peabody and then in all surrounding North Shore towns. He found two matches: The first was a widow in her eighties, and the second was a two-year-old. Neither had any connection to Leah Kormos or to her mother or sister.

  He widened his search, looking once again at the Massachusetts border towns, remembering Towner’s words: “Hide like with like.” Leah may have been part Jewish, but she’d grown up in a Greek community. He didn’t find Leah. But, in searching the records for Lowell, he finally found Becky.

  First he called Mickey and finally gave him the name he’d been waiting for, and then he headed to Lowell.

  She was living in the Greek community under the name Becky Rosenfeld, working in a diner and living in a three-decker that was almost identical to the one they’d torn down in Beverly.

  She didn’t want to talk to him. She knew what he wanted as soon as he introduced himself.

  “She didn’t do it,” Becky said, putting the cup of regular coffee he’d ordered on the counter in front of him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re a cop. I’ve been all through this with the cops. My sister didn’t kill those girls.”

  “I’m not accusing her,” Rafferty said, taking a sip. Too much cream and too much sugar. “I’m just trying to find her, that’s all.”

  “I’ve been trying to find her for twenty-five years,” Becky said. “No help from any of you.”

  Rafferty knew Becky had hounded the Beverly Police, who had essentially ignored the girl’s efforts.

  “Your father didn’t try very hard to find her,” Rafferty said.

  “No big surprise there,” she said. “Leah and my father never got along.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I’m not doing this,” Becky said, starting to turn away.

  “This is difficult for you,” Rafferty said.

  “Hell, yeah, this is difficult. I lost my sister!”

  “And I’m trying to find her.”

  “For what? So you can arrest her and make yourself a hero? The supercop who solved the case that couldn’t be solved?”

  “I don’t think she did it,” he said, keeping his eyes on hers, “but I think she might know who did.”

  She looked at him as if trying to assess his sincerity. “How are you going to find her, if I couldn’t?”

  “I found you, didn’t I?”

  A customer sitting at the far end of the counter held up his coffee cup, and she grabbed the pot to refill it.

  She replaced the pot on the burner and turned to Rafferty, who hadn’t looked away. “Five minutes,” she said, motioning to a corner booth. He took his cup and moved to the booth. She took a seat opposite.

  He asked about Leah’s history, about her involvement with the Goddesses.

  “I didn’t know them,” Becky said. “I know she had friends in Salem.”

  “What about magic?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you know if Leah practiced witchcraft?”

  “Oh, please,” Becky said, with a snort.

  “Were you related to any of the Salem witches, the ones who were executed in 1692?”

  “If we were, I never heard anything about it.”

  “Your sister never told you anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “You really can’t tell me anything about her location?” Rafferty finally asked.

  “No,” Becky said, her eyes filling with tears.

  Rafferty could feel her sorrow.

  “You still miss her.”

  “Of course I do.” She wiped her eyes. “She’s my only sister.”

  “And you really don’t know where she is?” Rafferty waited for her answer.

  “I haven’t seen her since she got pregnant, and my father kicked her out.”

  This was news to Rafferty. “Leah was pregnant?”

  “Oh, don’t pretend you guys didn’t know. I was standing right next to my father when he told the police the whole story.”

  I’ve been all through this with the cops.

  Why was none of this in the files he’d read?

  Rafferty drove directly to Rice Street in Salem. He stood on the top step of Tom Dayle’s house, ringing the bell for almost five minutes before Tom finally opened the door. He was wearing a robe and slippers, but he didn’t look as if he’d been sleeping.

  “Do you want to take me down into your basement and show me box number nine, or do you want me to get a warrant?”

  The ex-detective slowly opened the door.

  Tom had a hard time walking down the cellar stairs. He clutched the railing so hard he was white knuckled, his other hand holding on to the wall as he descended.

  Box number 9 was not sealed as the others had been but sat opened on the workbench. Rafferty shouldered past Tom Dayle and reached inside the box, spotting a sheet of paper with big letters scrawled across the top:

  THE GODDESS RULES

  1. Never take a man against his will.

  2. All the Goddesses must be present when we take a man.

  3. Practice safe sex.

  4. Never take anyone back to Rose’s house again.

  5. Don’t get pregnant.

  Rafferty picked up a photo of the wall mural next, featuring all four girls: Leah, Olivia, Susan, and Cheryl. The artist had captured their beauty and their youth. It was, as Callie had described, a stunning painting, but, as he looked at it, Rafferty immediately figured out what had made Rose so angry. Though the portrait was exquisite, it was the setting that stood out. The artist had dressed the Goddesses skimpily and depicted them lounging on the brass bed Callie had described. They looked like they belonged in a bordello. Rafferty couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. In the middle of the bed, dressed in a lacy nightgown that left nothing to the imagination, was the most beautiful of the girls they called Goddesses: Leah Kormos.

  It took a moment for Rafferty to pull himself away from the photo. Then he spotted the letters. All made out to the Goddesses, and evidently once tied with the pink ribbon that was still knotted and sitting next to them in the box.

  From first glance, he could tell these were the love letters Callie had told him about. That the Goddesses had kept them, had collected them. The smudged lipstick kisses all over the envelopes seemed to illustrate just how young they had been. Something about this touched Rafferty in a way he couldn’t quite explain. The number of letters seemed far fewer than the ribbon would have held. To make sure, he slipped the ribbon back over the pile. There was a gap of at least an inch.

  “Where are the rest of them?”

  “You don’t want to know the answer to that.”

  But he already knew. He’d begun to suspect as soon as he’d talked to Leah’s sister. The report of Leah’s pregnancy had never been in any of the police records that Rafferty had seen. Nor was it in the database the police had created to track the ongoing investigation. Callie had told him the police were at the house all the time, but there had been only three records of them ever being called. That meant that the rest of the poli
ce visits had been purely social calls. The missing letters belonged to them.

  “How many officers were involved?” Rafferty asked.

  “A lot,” Tom answered. “From both towns.”

  “You?”

  “No,” he said. “Never me.”

  “All this covering up because they found out she was pregnant?”

  “That baby could have belonged to any of them.”

  Rafferty shook his head in disgust.

  “The force couldn’t take the scandal. Even if there hadn’t been a child.”

  Rafferty counted the letters that hadn’t been destroyed. There were thirty remaining, every one of the writers a suspect, or at least a person of interest. To say nothing of the cops themselves—even if their letters were destroyed. If he poked this hornet’s nest, a lot of people were going to get stung.

  “What about the costumes they were wearing?”

  “They were the first things to go,” Dayle said, looking toward the furnace.

  “I said some things I shouldn’t have said. And so did my father. Let’s leave it at that,” Paul said.

  They’d been staying at the boathouse since they returned from Italy, and their luggage was still not unpacked. It gave Callie hope each time she looked at it: As soon as they fulfilled their obligations, they would return to Matera. That packed luggage made her feel optimistic.

  She hadn’t attended the reading of Emily’s will. Paul assured her there would be no surprises; his parents had put the houses and grounds into a trust long ago. The surviving spouse would take control, and one day it all would be passed down to Paul. The only things that would be at issue at the reading were his mother’s personal items.

  But things hadn’t gone well or as expected. Paul and his father had had a terrible argument.

  “Why do you insist on fighting with him?” she asked, when she heard the story.

  He sighed. “At least neither of us was drinking this time.” And then he started unpacking, putting his clothes back into his bureau.

  Her heart sank as she watched him put his things away, leaving the two top drawers for her. He paused, took a ring off his pinkie, and handed it to Callie.

  “What’s this?”

  “I’d say it’s my mother’s seal of approval,” he said.

  Callie had no idea what he was talking about. She recognized the emerald and diamond ring as the one that Emily had always worn on her right hand.

  “She changed her will right after we went to Matera. This ring was always supposed to go to the girl I’m going to marry. She left it to you.”

  Callie stood looking at him. “Are you asking me to marry you?”

  Paul managed to smile. “I am.”

  The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.

  —HOMER, The Odyssey

  “Leah Kormos isn’t related to Sarah Good. She’s related to Elizabeth Howe.”

  Mickey’s news didn’t come as a complete shock. For quite a while now, and certainly ever since he’d talked to her sister, Rafferty had become certain that Leah was no longer the primary suspect. But if Leah wasn’t related to Sarah Good, if she wasn’t the fifth petal, then who the hell was?

  He’d already erased Rose’s name from under Good’s. He’d made Mickey recheck the others against their ancestors, not with Sarah Good this time, but confirming the corresponding names and ancestors now written on each petal. They’d checked out; the positions were right. Now he erased Rose’s name from Elizabeth Howe’s petal, inking in Leah’s instead. Finally, he removed Leah’s penciled-in name from under Sarah Good’s, but the eraser smudged the paper so badly it would have been impossible to add another name, even if he had one. He found an old bottle of Wite-Out in the desk drawer and painted the petal until it became as white as Susan Symms’s albino skin, which made it stand out even more. Four of the petals now had correct links from ancestors to women in modern times. All that was missing was the name of the descendant of the fifth petal, Sarah Good’s, which was now more mysterious than ever.

  One thing was beginning to become obvious. There hadn’t been just one petal missing from the blessing that night on the hill. There had been two people who were absent that night: Leah Kormos and someone else.

  “No luck?” Towner said, looking over his shoulder at the blank white petal.

  “I’m at a loss,” he said, shrugging. “I know each of the girls was related to one of the executed, and that Callie said Rose was related to more than one of them. But Rose wasn’t related to Sarah Good, Mickey has already established that.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Towner said. “I seem to remember hearing that Rebecca Nurse had a sister who was also accused. So I just checked it out online. Actually, she had two sisters who were accused of witchcraft, and one of them was executed. Not on July nineteenth, though.”

  “Rose never told Callie it was on July nineteenth, just that she was related to more than one of the executed. I guess that means Callie and Olivia were also related to more than one.”

  “That still doesn’t tell you who the fifth petal was.”

  “There was someone else on the hill that night. Someone who was related to Sarah Good. Was there another Goddess we don’t know about?”

  Towner was silent for a long moment. “Why does it have to be a woman? Didn’t the blessing simply require a descendant?”

  “True enough,” Rafferty said. It wasn’t as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him, but that he was hoping it wasn’t a possibility. If it were a man, there were so many as yet unrevealed suspects that Rafferty might have to check half the population of Salem before he found the one he was looking for.

  He’d already told Callie that he didn’t think it was Leah who had killed the Goddesses. “Leah got pregnant, Callie. That was the rule she broke.”

  He started looking for another suspect. And the place he started was the love letters.

  If Rafferty had been moved by the youthful romanticism of the letters when he’d first discovered them, reading them now had the opposite effect. They were very personal, and he found himself embarrassed, so much so that he got up and closed his office door. Each letter contained a description of the sender’s fantasy and how the Goddesses had fulfilled it in a way he had never dreamed possible. These weren’t love letters per se. They were thank-you notes. That any man had put such personal details down on paper amazed him. That one man had actually signed his letter with his full name was even more astonishing. If the young women weren’t witches, they were certainly bewitching.

  Rafferty looked up the number and phoned the man who’d signed his letter.

  “I spoke to you people about this years ago,” the man said.

  “We people, as you so politely refer to us, have been replaced by newer people. Which means drop your attitude because you’re going to have to talk to us again.”

  “Okay,” the man agreed, put in his place. “But not at my house. I’ll come to you.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t want my wife to know.”

  The man, Donald Booth, was in his midfifties, a successful lawyer and married for the second time. Once he started talking about the Goddesses, he became energized, much less reticent than Rafferty had expected.

  “It was only one night, but it was the most memorable of my life. It wasn’t just the number of them. There was something magical about those girls.”

  Rafferty didn’t react.

  “As far as the trouble they caused around town,” he went on, “it wasn’t the sex. It was the obsession.”

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “The night I was with them, guys showed up at the door twice; each time they were begging to see the girls again, but the girls refused. The thing was, they would only consent to be with you the one time. Then you had to write them a note. Those were the rules. There were exceptions to the one-night thing, I heard, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to be one of them.”

  “Do you know who the exceptions were?”

  �
�I don’t.”

  “What about the two stalkers who showed up while you were there?” Rafferty asked. “Did you know them?”

  “I wouldn’t call them stalkers,” the lawyer said. “I’d describe them as…moonstruck. It’s difficult to be possessive of four women at the same time.”

  “Four? Are you sure of the number? It wasn’t five?”

  “You tend to remember the number when you’re being seduced by four women,” he said. “Even if you’re high as a kite.”

  “High on what?”

  “Pretty much anything we could find,” he said. “Grass, X, ludes, coke, scotch. Everything was around in those days. Anyway, you couldn’t possess those girls, even if you wanted to.”

  “Not sure who’d want to take that on,” Rafferty said, meaning it.

  The man laughed knowingly. “I think those guys just wanted another night with them.”

  “Is that what you wanted?”

  “Absolutely. Why not? I was single at the time. And hey, it was the best sex I’d ever had. But it wasn’t just sex. I mean it was, but it was more than that. It was a transcendent experience.”

  Rafferty paused but didn’t comment. “Did you ask to see them again?”

  “Several times. But they declined, which was probably a good thing. I might never have finished law school if they had said yes.” A shadow of sadness passed over his face. “Terrible, what happened to them.”

  “It certainly was.”

  “There’s a double standard, don’t you think? If men had behaved like they did, a group of them with one woman, it would be called gang rape.”

  “Are you saying they forced themselves on you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Not against your will, then.”

  “Hardly.” The man laughed.

  “Then it’s not gang rape, is it?” Rafferty saw too much of that these days. Cell phone postings with drunken young women and alcohol-fueled men.