The Fifth Petal

by Brunonia Barry

  “It might be best to rethink your choice, Finn,” Marta said. Callie could tell she was seething.

  “I don’t want to rethink anything. I want my son to make the toast.” Finn turned to Paul, waiting for an answer. “So will you?”

  Callie tried to catch Paul’s eye, but he wouldn’t look at her. Instead he looked from his father to Marta and back to his father. “When Hell freezes over.”

  Paul pushed back his chair and left without another word. Incensed, Finn threw his napkin on the table and stormed up the stairs, leaving Callie and Marta alone.

  “I’m sorry,” Callie said.

  “What do you have to be sorry about?” Marta huffed. “You didn’t do anything.”

  Callie flushed. At a loss for words, she simply stood and said good night.

  “May I give you a piece of advice?” Marta said, looking at the emerald ring on Callie’s left hand.

  “What?”

  Marta directed Callie to look out the window at Paul, who was stumbling at the edge of the woods. “He will betray you,” she promised. “The Whitings always betray the people who trust them most.”

  Callie stared at her. “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, yes, it is.”

  “You were betrayed?”

  “I was, many times.”

  “Well, it looks as if you’ve ended up getting everything you wanted.” Callie came back at her hard.

  “That remains to be seen,” Marta said, holding her gaze.

  “Really, there’s more?” Callie stared back at her. She was beginning to think Paul had been right about Marta.

  Marta shook her head and sighed, as if to say that Callie was very naïve.

  Then Marta forced a smile, and her tone softened. “Look, I know things worked out for me, but it took a very long time. There was a lot of disappointment. A lot of…humiliation.” She looked at Callie sincerely. “I don’t want you to go through what I did. Paul’s very spoiled and entitled. You’ll have to wait a long time for him to grow up.”

  Callie could feel her anger rising, her cheeks reddening.

  “You’re only angry because you know I’m right,” Marta said.

  If anyone else had proffered this judgmental advice, Callie would have told them off, but Marta and Finn were her future in-laws. Paul had already caused a rift that would be hard to close. Much as she wanted to tell Marta to mind her own damned business, Callie held her tongue. This was doubly difficult because Callie knew that what Marta had said was partly true. Tonight Paul had certainly behaved in a rude and childlike manner, but under the circumstances, it wasn’t hard for her to understand where he was coming from.

  “Take my advice,” Marta said. “Give him back that ring and run for your life.”

  A night terror, an erotic dream, a vision of any sort wherein the victim claimed to be visited or tormented by the accused, served to condemn. If one had a complaint against a neighbor, the accusation itself often became the most damning evidence.

  —ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem

  “What the hell is that?” Paul moaned the next morning, covering his head with a pillow.

  Callie heard the shrill whine of machinery, too. “I’ll find out,” she said, happy for any excuse to get some distance from him. They’d had a fight when she’d gotten back last night, their first big one. Callie had tried to avoid it, but Paul had finished off a few more drinks after storming home and kept following her from room to room, going on and on about the wedding and about Marta, a continuing loop he’d been reciting for days.

  “I have no intention of even going to the wedding!” he’d said, his words slurred and angry. He’d ranted about his father and about Marta.

  “You’re drunk,” she’d said finally. “Go to bed.”

  She’d been relieved when he took her advice, passing out on the bed. But she was so tense that she couldn’t sleep at all. She was still agitated this morning, both by Paul’s behavior and by Marta’s words. She didn’t want to talk to either of them today.

  Pulling on shorts, she walked through the woods to see what was going on.

  “It’s an impossible task!” Callie heard a male voice.

  “I don’t care,” Marta was saying. She stood next to a man who was operating some sort of machine. The two were near the remainder of the oak Rose had died under. The rest of the grounds crew was shifting about, looking uncomfortable. “I want it out of here. Remove the entire root and put in grass. By this afternoon.” She turned and went back inside.

  “This stump grinder isn’t strong enough,” one of the groundsmen complained.

  “I’ve ordered an excavator,” the head groundsman replied.

  As if he had summoned it, the huge machine arrived.

  Callie stayed to watch, sitting on the ledge by the cliff to keep out of the way. The stump was easily removed as the excavator got to work, but the root proved more difficult. With each dig, the hole the machine created grew larger, but the root was still deeply planted in the earth. It radiated at least fifty feet from the stump.

  “This is ridiculous,” one of the workmen said. “We’ll never get it all.”

  “She wants all of the goddamned thing removed,” the head groundsman said. “If you expect to keep your job, I suggest you follow her orders.”

  Eventually, Paul came out. He was showered and dressed. “I’m going for a drive,” he said.

  Callie nodded. “Okay. I think I’ll go to the tearoom to see Towner.” And enjoy our time apart. “This is crazy, huh?”

  Paul looked at the root. “No crazier than the whole wedding celebration.”

  After Paul left, Callie sat in the sun, trying to relax…but she couldn’t stop staring into the gaping hole, listening to the swearing of the crew as the crevice grew deeper and wider with no sign of stopping. Looking into the blackness, she could see why the taproot was giving them so much trouble. It stretched downward and toward the house and was tangled with another underground root system. When the crew finally tried to pull it out, the earth began to crack, the root slowly splitting the ground as wide as an earthquake might, the crevice expanding all the way across the lawn, sinking the corner of the back steps.

  “Stop!” the head groundsman yelled.

  “Damn,” one of the workers said, shaking his head.

  “That’s it! Enough! Fill it in. All of it. And then get someone in here to repair the goddamned steps before Mrs. Whiting sees this mess.”

  The head groundsman went back to his truck and unhooked the chain they’d been using to pull the stump. Callie looked at the root; the knotted mass was as thick as a tree trunk and extended all the way under the house. As she stared, the hole began to fill with water. Was it seawater, seeking its own level? But no, the ocean was at least fifty feet below the cliffs. Even at the highest tide imaginable, it could never rise far enough to fill in the hole. Perhaps the workmen had nicked a pipe?

  “Guys?” she called, pointing. They didn’t hear her. She left her perch and ran forward. And then she noticed something strange. The water threatening to fill the hole was a deep crimson. It wasn’t water. It looked like blood. Rising inch by inch.

  “Watch yourself!” A crew member shoved her out of the way a moment before the excavator would have hit her. She hadn’t heard it approaching. She could feel the eyes of all the men on her as she quickly walked back to the boathouse.

  Once inside, she took a long shower, trying to calm herself. She couldn’t quiet her thoughts. Nor could she stop the anger that was building inside her. Why had they come back here? Why hadn’t they returned to Matera right after the funeral? Paul was becoming a different person, different from when she’d first met him in Pride’s Crossing, and far different from the relaxed, happy guy she’d fallen in love with in Italy.

  She dressed and dried her hair. Then she drove to Salem. Just as she crested the top of the Beverly Bridge, a car veered left into her lane. She blasted the horn, but the car kept coming. The driver finally jerked to the r
ight, but not quickly enough. Refusing to brake, she hit his driver’s-side door.

  They both got out and examined their vehicles.

  “You were in my blind spot!” the man said by way of explanation. She handed him her insurance information without a word.

  She could tell he knew she’d hit his car on purpose. And she didn’t feel bad about that. Didn’t even ask if he was injured. It wasn’t like her, and it felt odd. Afterward, she drove straight to Towner’s.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Not really,” Callie said. “I just had an accident.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No one was hurt, thank God. I’m just shaken.”

  “Sit, have a cup of tea.”

  As she sipped the tea, Callie was surprised to realize she felt better than she had in a while. Was it the jolt of adrenaline from the accident? It made her feel the opposite of what she might have expected: It was a good feeling, strangely calm. Her heart was no longer racing.

  “Do you have your dress for the party?” Towner asked. “You want to borrow those pearls again?”

  “I’m all set,” Callie said. She didn’t want to say that if Paul had his way, they wouldn’t even be going.

  “So how does Paul feel about this whole situation?” Towner asked.

  It really was strange how Towner could read her.

  Callie shrugged. She didn’t want to talk about any of it. “We’re both just trying to get through this thing on Saturday.”

  Callie’s cell rang. It was Rafferty, asking her to come to the station. “I have something to give you,” he said. “It belonged to Rose.”

  There was something so pretentious about naming a house. Pride’s Heart took it to a new level. Rafferty understood the intention. Someone had decided that, as the largest house in the area, it was the heart of the town, or should be, and had named it accordingly.

  He couldn’t blame Finn Whiting’s ego for that, though he wished he could. The house had been christened long before Finn. He looked at the invitation again. “Pride goeth before a fall,” he said to himself, quoting biblical verse.

  There was another biblical quote about pride and the heart, he thought, trying to recall it. As a student at Fordham, when he had actually considered becoming a priest, he could have told you both chapter and verse. But now he had to look it up. He searched the web for biblical quotes on pride.

  Obadiah 1:3: The pride of thine heart hath deceived thee…

  Rafferty wasn’t looking forward to attending the marriage celebration. Ann had told Towner that Marta was planning to have a hundred flower girls serve the luncheon, evidently girls from a school Marta raised money for. No one had said it outright, but it was obvious that she was trying to outdo the previous Mrs. Finn Whiting.

  Poor Emily. How had she first found out about Marta? Why hadn’t she left Finn? Rafferty rubbed his hands over his eyes. Infidelity. He wished he could wipe the word from his brain. The energy it took not to think about that night, in the hope that Towner wouldn’t read his thoughts, was exhausting.

  Jay-Jay buzzed Rafferty to tell him Callie was at the front desk.

  “Send her in,” he said, forgetting until the last moment that the contents of the evidence boxes were spread across his desk and office. He’d managed to find and interview sixteen of the men the Goddesses had been involved with, including two older officers on his own force. He’d had to threaten suspension, but, in the end, they’d cooperated. One suspect led to another, with each adding a bit more of the story, though never enough to solve the mystery. He was able to confirm one thing that proved Helen wrong. Rose’s house had not been a brothel. When he asked if the Goddesses ever took money for services rendered, every man replied that they did not. He believed them.

  But when it came to who committed the crime, he had no idea whom to believe. The fifth petal of the rose he’d drawn when Callie first arrived now had so many names crossed out and rewritten under Sarah Good’s that he’d worn a hole in the paper and had to attach another piece, taping it to the edge and drawing an arrow from the petal to a list of possible suspects that was so long he’d had to fold the paper in half in order to fit the whole thing back in his desk drawer. It seemed everyone had a motive of some kind. Or, if they didn’t, then their wives did. Now he had too many suspects, and they were still no closer to locating Leah Kormos. But Rafferty had a nagging idea he wasn’t able to shake. If he was right, he might have started more trouble than if he’d left the case alone and the boxes of evidence in storage, as old Tom Dayle had suggested.

  He tried to clean up the papers he’d spread out, but it was too late. Callie spotted the photo on his desk the moment she walked in.

  “The mural!” she said, picking up the picture and staring at it. She studied it for a long time. “They were amazing looking, weren’t they?”

  “They were,” he said.

  “I remember the painter,” she said. “He was a friend of Rose’s.”

  “Was he one of their conquests?” Rafferty asked.

  “No, he wasn’t one of them. I remember him as a very nice older gentleman. I think…well, as I recall him, he was probably gay.”

  Rafferty had heard this from one of the officers as well. It seemed to be the best-kept secret in town; one of the only people who didn’t know it was Helen.

  “I’m glad you found this,” she said. “I don’t have any photos of them.”

  “Actually, this isn’t why I called, though I will gladly make you a copy.” He reached down, opened his desk drawer, and pulled out a small box. On the back, someone had written RETURN TO ROSE WHELAN.

  “I’m not certain why they never gave this back to her, but I am sure she’d want you to have it.”

  Slowly, Callie opened the box. When she saw what was inside, she started to cry.

  It was the rosary.

  “Oh,” he said. “I didn’t mean for it to upset—”

  She held up her hand. “No, it’s good. I’m fine. Thank you for giving it to me.”

  She held it in her hand, the five petals fitting into her scar, which had stretched as she’d grown, so the rose that had once barely fit in her palm now seemed miniature. “It’s pretty, isn’t it?” she asked.

  Rafferty nodded. “It is.”

  She put the rosary around her neck, the same way Rose had worn it. “Thank you,” she said again. “This makes me happy.”

  “You don’t look very happy.” He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake, giving her this reminder of her past. He noticed the ring she was wearing; he knew of the engagement, had already congratulated both of them, but now he said nothing. “You want to talk?”

  “It’s nothing beyond the obvious,” she admitted. “The ‘celebration,’ ” Callie punctuated with air quotes. “I’m happy that you and Towner are coming.”

  “Looking forward to it,” he said, hearing how hollow his lie sounded.

  Callie laughed. “My sentiments exactly. As well as Paul’s.” Then she looked at him curiously. “This wasn’t the only reason you asked me here, was it?” she said, fingering the rosary.

  “Jesus, what is it with the women in this town? Is every one of you a goddamned mind reader?”

  She looked surprised by his outburst but said nothing.

  “No,” he said. “It wasn’t the reason. Not entirely.” He hesitated, then pulled out the rules and put the list down in front of her. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  Callie stared at the paper filled with girlish writing, titled “The Goddess Rules.” “No,” she said, softly.

  “As I told you, Leah was pregnant,” he said. “So we know for certain she broke at least one of these rules. I have a feeling that the man you saw in your dream, the blue-eyed man in bed, the one they were fighting about—I think he might have been the father.”

  Callie said nothing.

  “There’s one more question I need to ask. You mentioned in your memory—dream—at Hammond Castle that the woman in red gave you a drink to sn
iff. This drink, tell me again what it smelled like.”

  “Licorice,” she said. “She said it had fairies in it.”

  “Could it have been absinthe?”

  “It might have been,” Callie said. “If one whiff a long time ago can be any judge. Where are you going with this?”

  “Nowhere special,” he lied. “Probably just another dead end.”

  “Absinthe.” Callie thought about it for a moment. “But Finn’s eyes are brown, not blue,” she said, feeling a chill pass through her.

  “That’s true,” he said. “And there are a number of places to get absinthe besides the Whiting family, or someone could have procured it from them for the costume party. After all, the Whitings were in the business of selling alcohol.”

  “Very true,” she said, touching the rosary to get her bearings.

  “Thanks for coming down.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  As soon as Callie left his office Rafferty went online and pulled up the results of a search he’d done right after Emily died so suddenly. Because it was well known that she’d had cancer, no autopsy had been performed, as was often true in such cases. He’d called her pharmacist, a guy he knew from the program. Rafferty had asked for records of all the Whitings’ prescriptions. He’d spent a few days researching each drug. Emily had been looking like a woman in remission up until the day she died, and Rafferty didn’t have to be a genius to know there were ways to hasten a cancer patient’s demise, if you were so inclined. He’d talked to an ER doctor he’d known in New York, who told him opiates would be the obvious choice, that they would likely have been prescribed to Emily as a treatment for her pain. But the list he’d gotten back from the pharmacist showed no sign of opiates—no sign of painkillers at all. Odd, he thought—especially if her cancer was progressing fast enough to kill her.

  But something else he’d discovered was even stranger.

  Among Finn’s medications were two different treatments for glaucoma. The first drug was latanoprost, which had, in the past several years, become the default treatment for the condition. The second, bimatoprost, had been prescribed initially and did roughly the same thing, but was slightly less effective. So why was Finn still taking it? Rafferty wondered. Then, digging deeper, he read about an odd side effect common to both drugs but a bit more significant in the earlier one, something that made the drug popular for an off-brand reason, so popular it was now endorsed by movie stars and marketed under the brand name Latisse: It made the user’s eyelashes lengthen and thicken. Finn Whiting was nothing if not vain. He had long lashes, and stopping the drug would halt the effect, which, Rafferty had concluded, must have been why he continued taking it.