Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3)

by Sheila Connolly

  Sarah was the first to speak. “I hate to ask a stupid question, but when do kids start learning about the birds and the bees these days? Back in my day Mom didn’t say anything to me until it was inescapable, but things have changed.”

  Leslie sighed. “What you’re not saying is, when do I think Ellie is going to figure out that Ned’s her father? Or more than just some guy we know? I’m still wrestling with that, and I need to include George in any decisions we make, because Ellie believes he’s her father—which he is, in every way except biological. Heck, you probably know as well as I do that some girls are entering puberty by the age of ten, thanks to all those hormones in the hamburgers and such. And like I said, I won’t lie to Ellie, especially not about something this important. But can I wait just a little bit longer? We can phase you into our lives gradually, and let things evolve. And I guess that includes you, Sarah—I suppose you have some rights in this, if there is such a thing.”

  Sarah reached out a hand and laid it on Leslie’s arm. “Thank you, Leslie. I’ll respect your boundaries, but I really would like to get to know my granddaughter.”

  Leslie looked a lot less stressed than when she had arrived. “So, we all agree? Details to be determined? You’re still on for Wednesday, Abby?”

  “Of course. And I’m taking it slow with Ellie. Not so different from the way you’re handling it, I guess. I’ll answer her questions, but in terms she can understand as a seven-year-old.”

  “Fair enough.” Leslie stood up briskly. “Well, that’s all I came to say.”

  “Wait—do you have to be home right away?” Abby asked.

  “I guess not—George is watching the kids. Why?”

  “Because we’re in the middle of solving the riddle of the Salem witch trials, and you might be interested.”

  Leslie looked confused for a moment, and then the light dawned. “You mean this thing you’ve got actually helps you understand what happened?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t tell me—you had ancestors who were witches,” she said.

  Abby grinned at her. “Yup. And the politically correct term is accused witches.”

  Leslie sat down again. “This I’ve got to hear.”

  “Great. Let me bring you up to speed.” Abby gave her an abbreviated version of what she had told Ned and Sarah, and Leslie nodded impatiently. Not surprising, in that Leslie managed a history museum not far from Salem, and would know more about the topic than most people. When she was done, Abby said, “Since I’ve set aside the physical causes as the primary trigger for this series of events, I want to touch on another couple of factors. Let’s start with religion. Samuel Parris called himself a minister, and was accepted as such by the village, but in those days that was kind of all it took. There’s some question whether he was ever officially ordained. He’d been a plantation owner in Barbados and a merchant in Boston earlier in his life, and he gave up the ministry after he left Salem, so it doesn’t look like it was a lifetime calling. But that’s not the same as saying that people did not believe in God or the Devil—although they seemed to worry a lot more about the Devil. God was a distant figure, but they were prepared to believe that the Devil appeared among them, and held face-to-face conversations with people they knew. I know, it’s hard to imagine these days, at least for most of us.”

  Leslie looked like she was sincerely interested. “So you’re saying there wasn’t a religious element to this?”

  “I think religion was a convenient hook to hang this on, but that’s not what started things. I’m getting to it. Let’s take another detour to the socioeconomic side of things. One author I read thought there was a strong resentment of older women who held substantial property, and that accusing them of witchcraft was a convenient way to get them out of the way and free up their land. Although there was a substantial age range among the accused, so that might not make sense in a general way. Other recent studies have looked at the social makeup of Salem Village, where there were two basic factions, which very broadly can be broken down into the haves and the have-nots. The town committee, which managed municipal matters, kept shifting in their membership and their allegiances. And the town was pretty split between the pro-Parris faction and the anti-Parris people—so much so that they circulated and signed petitions for each position. Men and women alike. You can see the records, and even scanned images of the original documents online—it was that important to people then. Whatever else you say, Parris provoked strong feelings both ways. You could argue that that was about religion, but it was really more about local politics—the standing of Salem Village versus the town of Salem, and what rights and privileges the members of Salem Village had. As I told Ned and Sarah, this was a group that liked to fight, and they left a surprisingly good public record of it.”

  “Wow, you really have done your homework, Abby,” Leslie said with admiration. “I know something about the history, but I’ve never gone into this kind of detail. I didn’t even know most of this information was easily available.”

  “Neither did I. Most people we know say, ‘Ah, yes, Salem,’ because they learned about it in school and they think they know what happened. Maybe I’ve been watching too many procedural shows or reading too many mysteries, but I keep finding myself saying, ‘Okay, we have all this information, but where’s the why?’ Why did a small village go berserk all of a sudden? And I’ve yet to see a single coherent argument that explains everything. Just a lot of interesting theories that explain one bit or another. So here we are three-plus centuries later, and people are still trying to understand it.”

  “It was certainly a memorable event, whatever the cause,” Leslie said thoughtfully. “People remember the horror of it—that ordinary people could suddenly turn on their neighbors, and the neighbors were publicly disgraced and hanged. Maybe it’s a good thing that capital cases now take a long, long time to work their way through the system.”

  “Exactly!” Abby said. “So that’s why I’ve been trying to look at this in terms of what we now consider evidence that wouldn’t have appeared to matter earlier.”

  “What, DNA? Fiber analysis? That kind of forensic stuff?”

  Abby smiled. “There’s not much physical evidence to look at now, unless someone digs up a trunk buried in a cellar hole in Danvers. Stranger things have happened. But what I’m thinking is that we need to look at events and timing based on a more modern understanding of psychology, and most important, motive. I think there are some people who had a strong motive to trigger something like this.”

  “Wow,” Leslie said. “So you, Abigail Kimball, waltz in from out of state and solve a mystery that’s been bugging people for three centuries? Bravo!”

  “Leslie,” Ned said sharply. “You don’t need to mock her. What’s wrong with that approach?”

  “Ned, I can defend myself,” Abby said. “Leslie, I’m just laying out the evidence as I see it. I’m not about to call the Boston Globe and announce a major breakthrough—not that they’d listen to me anyway. But I do bring something new to the table, and you know what it is. I’ve seen part of what happened in Salem in 1692, because I had lineal ancestors who were there. I’ve looked some of these people in the eye, and I’ve watched how they interact. You may not want to believe it, and I can’t blame you for that, but to the best of my knowledge, no one else has ever had that perspective.”

  Leslie looked silently at Abby for a long while, and Abby could almost see warring emotions battling inside her. It was a lot to dump on someone, and a year earlier she wouldn’t have believed it either. But she had seen it. Finally Leslie spoke. “Will Ellie be able to see this?”

  “I’m not sure. I haven’t worked out where her genealogy fits, except where we overlap. This was much earlier than what I do know about us. Ned and Sarah have been there with me in Salem, and they didn’t see what I saw, so maybe Ellie won’t be affected.”

  “But you can’t rule it out?”

  “No, I can’t.”

&n
bsp; Leslie looked at Ned, and he nodded his agreement without speaking. Then she turned back to Abby. “Part of me wants nothing more than to walk out now and declare all of this a load of crap. But if Ellie may be involved, I have a responsibility to hear you out. So tell me: What do you think happened at Salem?”

  27

  “I think this would be a good time to break for lunch,” Sarah said, standing up.

  “Is it that late already?” Leslie said. “Time flies when you’re having fun. Oh, sorry, Abby—that came out wrong. Actually I am having fun, kind of. This is really interesting stuff. Anyone would think you’d been researching this for quite a while, not just—what, weeks?”

  “More or less. I don’t think what I’ve put together would make it into a prestigious publication—I can’t imagine trying to explain where I got my information. ‘Oh, my ninth great-grandfather told me, while he was watching his wife’s aunt get hanged.’ Not going to fly.”

  “Wait, what? Are you serious?”

  “Leslie, I wouldn’t joke about it, not with you. Yes, my ten times great-grandmother was one of the infamous Towne sisters—the one who survived.”

  “This just gets better and better,” Leslie said. “And you’re saying you were there, by proxy?”

  “That’s about it.”

  Leslie was shaking her head. “I feel like I’ve walked into la-la land. How can this be?”

  “I can’t tell you, but it’s real. Let’s go see what’s happening in the kitchen.”

  Ned and his mother were bantering cheerfully as they assembled sandwiches—apparently Ned had done some grocery shopping while she was immersed in the seventeenth century. Abby vowed to make it up to him, once she’d put the whole Salem mess to bed. He’d been carrying the load for a while now, not that he complained.

  Sarah greeted Leslie and Abby with a smile. “Ham? Chicken? Cheese? Help yourselves. Abby, I made more coffee. Hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course I don’t. And I have to say, you trained your son well.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  They took their sandwiches back to the dining room to eat. Abby could see Leslie relaxing. She had to feel sorry for the woman: she’d been going along happily raising her children, and by doing the simple good deed of giving Abby a job Leslie had tossed a grenade into the heart of her life. Not that anyone could have foreseen such a thing, but it would be traumatic no matter how it happened. Abby was willing to give Leslie all the time she needed to come to terms with her new reality—she knew all too well that it wasn’t easy, and that was without involving a child. She was so lucky to have Ned and Sarah to prop her up, although in a way they were all learning together.

  Sandwiches finished, table cleared, they were ready to plunge in once again. After she had described her findings, Abby was getting more and more comfortable with her narrative. Maybe there would never be hard evidence to support any of it, but to her mind it fit in terms of human emotions and interactions, even allowing for the centuries between. Humans were still humans, weren’t they?

  “Hey, Abby—can we get this rolling?” Leslie demanded. “I’ve got to get home sometime today.”

  “Of course. I gave you the basic picture of Salem Village at the time this began in 1692, and who some of the major players were. I think it all comes back to the Reverend Samuel Parris.”

  “So what’s new about that? It’s not like he’s exactly a mystery figure,” Leslie said, her voice tinged with skepticism.

  “Hear me out. Pretend this is forensic psychology, if you want. Samuel Parris was born in London in a wealthy family, but he was the second son, so when his father died all he got was a crummy small sugar plantation in Barbados, and even that was wiped out by a hurricane. So he decided to try his luck in Boston, and he moved there in the 1660s. He bought himself a warehouse and a wharf and tried to be a businessman, but not terribly successfully. He married and had three kids. Somewhere in there he put in two years at Harvard, but sources take some sort of glee in saying he left without getting a degree. Then he decided he wanted to be a minister and started shopping around for a church.”

  “You could do that then?” Sarah asked.

  “So it seems, although I can’t claim to be an expert on how the church operated then. Anyway, he set his sights on Salem Village. Maybe he thought that getting in on the ground floor with a relatively new church would pay off in the long run. Still, even if he had a long-range plan, he made the villagers jump through hoops before he agreed to take the position. He wanted better pay. He wanted to own the parsonage and its land, which was unusual at that time. He wanted free firewood. It took him a full year to say yes, and he did get most of what he asked for. What does this tell you about the man?”

  “He was a self-serving jerk with a sense of entitlement?” Leslie suggested.

  “That’s pretty much the way I see it,” Abby agreed. “Although there’s no shortage of those. So in November 1688 he gives a trial sermon to the villagers, and he’s officially hired in June of 1689. He moved to Salem Village with his wife and three kids: his son Thomas, who would have been about eight, his daughter Elizabeth, about six—who we will meet again—and his daughter Susannah, who was a babe in arms. He also comes with an Indian couple, Tituba and her husband John. They originated in South America, but apparently our Samuel bought them in Barbados. And then there’s Abigail Williams.”

  “Who was one of the first accusers, right?” Leslie asked.

  “Yes. If you want a mystery figure, she’s it. Some early sources say that she was a niece of Samuel’s, but no one has ever found any proof, and I didn’t see any Williamses in his genealogy. More recently people have suggested that ‘niece’ is a kind of honorary term, and she might have been no relation at all, just someone the family adopted and was willing to raise. Maybe a refugee from one or another of the Indian massacres that took place farther north—I’ve read that Salem took in a number of orphans from those. Now, you might suggest that Abigail was there to help mother Elizabeth with the new baby, but she was awfully young for that, and besides, there was daughter Elizabeth, who was only a year or two younger than Abigail, not to mention the slave woman. Why was Abigail there? But we’ll come back to her. By the way, I’ve found no mention of what happened to the son Thomas, and his name doesn’t come up in any court records during the witch trials. Baby Susannah would have been too young to take any part. As an aside, she lived to 1706, and never married. Are you with me so far?”

  Nods all around. Abby resumed her tale. “So, fast-forward to the winter of 1692. Parris has been the minister for three years, and they haven’t exactly been smooth sailing. Reading between the lines, I get the feeling that Parris didn’t get the respect he thought he deserved. He did have his supporters in the village, as well as his critics, and they were pretty evenly split, but there were a lot of arguments. And here’s where things get interesting.”

  “How so?” Sarah asked.

  “Did it never seem odd to you that the first accusers were living under the roof of the town’s minister? Abigail and young Elizabeth were the instigators of the whole thing. Why? Girls didn’t get much respect in those days. Why did anyone believe them?”

  “Because they were under the minister’s roof,” Sarah said triumphantly.

  “Yes—sort of authentication by proxy. If the reverend believed them, he had enough followers who would accept his word. After all, he didn’t get fired until years after the whole witchcraft episode. So he said he believed they were telling the truth. And one of the first victims they turned on is the Indian slave Tituba, who has lived with them for years. Why?”

  “Isn’t there some story about how they were playing with magic, with Tituba showing them how?” Leslie asked.

  “Yes, that came up in an early source, and has been repeated ever since. But didn’t you ever do anything like that, when you were their age? Play with a Ouija board? A Magic Eight Ball? I know I did. Both are still around—are they so different? And
I have always wondered, once I heard the story—when did these girls, and the female servant, find the time to sit around playing at spells? I didn’t think anybody had that kind of free time back then.”

  “Tituba made a convenient scapegoat,” Leslie said. “She was not English, and she must have had some kind of dark skin. Plus, she confessed pretty fast. So it was easy for everyone to point a finger at her.”

  “All true. What’s more, the Arawak Indians had a tradition of magic rituals, and they even used hallucinogens in some of them.”

  “Wait—you’re saying the slave Tituba dosed the girls with something to produce the symptoms?” Ned asked, sounding incredulous.

  “No, I’m not. Think about it: whatever herbs or roots or seeds she was familiar with were most likely not available in Salem. I guess you could argue that as a port some particular items might have been brought in, but she lived maybe eight miles away and had no transport and presumably she had household duties. When was she supposed to go off to buy supplies like that?”

  “Her husband?” Sarah volunteered.

  “Maybe. The records say little about him—after he apparently helps brew a witch cake that was supposed to prove whether the girls were telling the truth. Before you raise objections, an awful lot of this information comes from sources that might be suspect, but once they’re out there, they get repeated over and over. What did he know about magic and brews? We don’t know. There’s no way to find out.”

  “If there were some plant native to Barbados that can be found growing in or around Salem, that might be a clue,” Ned suggested.

  “I’m pretty sure the climates in Barbados and the colony were not exactly similar. But please feel free to look for such a plant,” Abby said, smiling to soften her sarcastic comment. “Anyway, are you willing to accept that it’s unlikely that Tituba played the role that history has assigned to her?”

  “There’s no record about how any other villagers felt about Tituba? Or the fact that the Parrises had servants at all? Did many other households in the village have them?” Sarah asked.