Heather Graham Krewe of Hunters Series, Volume 4

by Heather Graham

  “Which is more proof that the killer’s not Wiccan. Today’s Wiccans don’t sacrifice—no matter what the Druids might have done. And if you’re looking to history to clarify what’s going on, the accused at the witch trials weren’t even witches. They were the innocent victims of paranoia. So if you think tonight’s tour is going to point a finger at the big bad witches, think again.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then...?”

  “I don’t know. But I keep feeling... Well, I have been gone awhile. I just keep thinking that something in tonight’s tour will dislodge a clue from my memory.”

  “Well, you’ll like Brent’s tour even if it doesn’t solve the case for you. There’s no hocus-pocus. No pun intended.”

  Brent’s tour began at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial and ended at his shop—which, being a clever businessman, he opened for business as soon as they arrived.

  It was a busy night. Over twenty people had gathered to take the tour. As they waited, Devin watched Rocky’s face. He was listening intently to those around them.

  “I don’t think tourists really have to worry, do you?” one woman asked another.

  “No, of course not. The victims were all locals,” her friend replied.

  “They haven’t identified the second victim yet,” a man standing nearby pointed out. “And if she were local, wouldn’t someone know her? They posted her picture in the paper, and it’s been all over TV.”

  “Hush, Henry, the children,” said his wife.

  “They need to know to stay with us at all times,” Henry said gruffly.

  “How do you feel about the memorial? Or do you remember when it wasn’t here?” Rocky asked Devin.

  “Yes, I remember,” she told him, grinning. “You’re not that much older than I am.” She’d been very young when it had been erected for the tricentennial of the trials, but it had been a big deal in town, the kind of thing that stuck in your memory.

  There was always controversy when the powers that be made a big change in town, but Devin personally liked the little area—adjacent to the cemetery—where twenty individual stone benches were each engraved with the name of one of those who was executed during the witch craze, nineteen of them hanged and Giles Corey pressed to death. Most tours began here, but she particularly liked the way Brent began his tours at this spot, with the real history of the time and an explanation of the situation.

  The memorial was atmospheric at night; the moon and city lights cast a glow over the graveyard—closed at dusk, but easily visible over the low stone fence. None of the victims was buried there in the Old Burying Point Cemetery, but Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ancestor—John Hathorne, the only witch trial judge never to repent of his actions—was interred near the memorial. Sometimes a low fog would roll in, which made the stories especially poignant and a bit eerie.

  “Hey! You two made it. And on time,” Brent said, smiling, as he found them in the crowd.

  “I’m always on time, Brent,” Devin said.

  “That’s right—Beth is the one who never seems to know what time it is,” Brent said. “I’m glad you’re here,” he told Rocky. Suddenly he turned around and started coughing.

  “Brent, are you sick?” Devin asked him.

  “Allergy. And I don’t even know to what,” Brent said with disgust. “But if I yell for help, you take over, okay? And you might as well have a seat while I do my intro.”

  Devin sat with Rocky on the bench dedicated to Bridget Bishop. She’d always felt empathy for Bridget—she’d actually worn a color other than black at times and had some sass in her. It had proved to be her undoing.

  Brent stepped forward, welcoming the crowd, checking his watch—and moving right into his first speech.

  “If we’re going to think about the deaths of people, first we have to think about the lives they were living. So think about Salem back then—a divided place, one town loosely divided into Salem and Salem Village. The first was near the coast—more urban. The second was made up mainly of farmland. The farmers closest to town didn’t want to break away. They were economically tied to the seaport. Others wanted to separate and make Salem Village an official town of its own.

  “The Putnam family—one of the most affluent in the area—wanted to separate. To that end they hired Reverend Samuel Parris to come and lead services near them. If that didn’t make relations with those in town bad enough, they gave Parris a house and grounds to go with the stipend and firewood they provided. That seemed outrageous to people who felt a minister shouldn’t be compensated to such an unheard-of degree. So even before the claims of witchcraft and pacts with the devil began, the community was at odds.

  “On top of that, remember that it was winter. If you’ve been here for a Massachusetts winter, you know it can be brutal. Imagine winter with no electricity and only a fire for warmth. Such darkness and cold. Not so long ago they had been at war with the Indians, and many still found the woods a terrifying place. There was a devil out there, the strict Puritans believed, and he was ready to seize those who showed signs of moral weakness. And anything fun was a sure sign of sin. I’ve got to say, I’m awfully glad there aren’t any Puritans still living in the area today.”

  Laughter followed Brent’s last statement. He grinned and looked at Devin. “Pipe in here for a minute, will you?”

  She was surprised. Brent loved to tell his stories. She started to demur, but then, as he pointed to his throat and reached for a bottle of water, she remembered what he’d said earlier about helping out. By then, the crowd had turned to her, and Brent, coughing, had turned away.

  Devin stood and stepped forward. “So, leading up to the accusations, arrests and trials, you had dissension in town, with those who were close to town and didn’t want to separate refusing to pay certain taxes—taxes that paid to build the new minister’s house and on Samuel Parris’s property. Now, I don’t think that the young women in his house were horrible people. And why the elders let things go so far, we’ll never know. Somehow a number of books on fortune-telling—prophesy—began to circulate among the young people in the community. I imagine they were greeted with the same enthusiasm as Harry Potter, Twilight or The Hunger Games. Remember, they weren’t allowed to dance, and even hide-and-seek was considered a game for the idle.

  “Parris happened to have two slaves, Tituba, and John Indian, her husband. Tituba was often in charge of the girls who lived in or visited the Parris household, among them Parris’s daughter, Betty, and his orphaned niece, Abigail. They began to form secret little circles, reading their books, even going so far as to break eggs into water, then ‘read’ the patterns to tell the future. Tituba was from Barbados, and she brought with her stories about spells and witchcraft. Betty and Abby undoubtedly got carried away.

  “The two girls began shouting blasphemies, running around on the floor like dogs and scaring their parents. Dr. Grigsby was immediately called. He found nothing physically wrong with the girls and said it had to be a clerical matter. The community prayed, even fasted, but to no avail. The girls were pressured to name the witches who were tormenting them. They named Tituba and two local women, Sarah Good—who was a homeless beggar—and Sarah Osborne, who was very old and hadn’t been to church in a long time—a grievous sin in the community. The three women—all of low social class—were formally accused of witchcraft. Magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne—no W in the name, Nathaniel put that in to disassociate himself—came to investigate.

  “The three women were arrested on March 1 of 1692. Tituba actually confessed to being a witch, though what they did to make her confess isn’t known. Regardless, she told her examiners that she was visited by Satan, sometimes as a large dog, and that there was a coven of witches in Salem. By May, over two hundred people had been arrested on the charge of witchcraft. A court of Oyer and Terminer—from the old English version of the La
tin “to hear and determine”—was called, and soon the frenzy had begun in earnest. Many more were accused and arrested, many of high-ranking status—and most of them those who opposed the Putnam family.”

  “So they had their own neighbors killed?” one lady said.

  “Well, it wasn’t that simple. Remember, the devil was very real to them. And they lived in a time when all of Europe believed in witchcraft. People really believed that witches could harm your livestock and kill your children. So what was really going on with those girls? Were they simply cruel? Deluded? Some think there was ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus, in the wheat, but then the whole town would have been having visions. Or was it something I think we’re all capable of at times? You tell a lie so many times, it becomes the truth. You believe it yourself.” She glanced over at Brent. He had taken a seat and was catching his breath.

  “In June,” she said, “one gentleman of the court, Nathaniel Saltonstall, resigned, horrified by the other members’ reliance on the ‘spectral evidence’ that was being presented. But that didn’t bring any rationality to the proceedings. On June 10, Bridget Bishop was the first to be hanged by order of the court. The hysteria had begun.” She indicated Bridget’s bench; Rocky was still sitting there.

  He smiled at her and winked. For a moment, she stared back at him blankly, thrown off and far too attracted to him and the way he smiled at her.

  But Brent was still sitting down and drinking his water, so she gave herself a mental shake and kept going.

  “One of the oddest things—the way we see it today, anyway—was that some of the accused confessed, then accused others, and none of them were hanged. Instead, they were left to rot in jail. Those who were hanged were, in fact, the true Christian believers, the ones who wouldn’t confess to a lie and admit to being witches. That would be against God, and they were intent on saving their immortal souls.

  “As time went on, some of the accusers became the accused themselves. A woman named Martha Corey was accused of witchcraft on March 12, and her husband, Giles, spoke against his own wife. Then he himself was accused on April 19. Today we see Giles Corey as a sad old man. But in fact, he was a strong old bugger. He knew that his property would stay in his family if he refused to plead either innocent or guilty, so Magistrate Corwin had him pressed in hopes of forcing him to either confess or claim innocence. Heavy stones were piled on his chest until finally he suffocated. A marker commemorating the event stands at the Howard Street Cemetery. But all Giles would say was...” She paused, smiling. “If you’ve spent time here in Salem, you know.”

  “More weight!” a kid called out.

  “Exactly,” Devin said. “He might not have been the kindest of men, but he did know the law, and by dying without giving a plea of guilty or not guilty, he kept his land. And in fact, his heirs are still there to this day.”

  As she finished speaking, she looked over toward Bridget’s bench and frowned.

  Rocky was gone.

  * * *

  He’d seen her standing slightly downhill by the entrance to the cemetery.

  At first she had been nothing but a deeper shadow in the darkness. But then the shape of her shadow had resolved itself into a woman, and not a woman in regular summer tourist clothing. A long skirt had hugged her legs and moved in the breeze.

  He’d quietly left the tour group and walked slowly in her direction. But by the time he reached the cemetery gate she had turned and was headed down to Derby Street.

  He followed her, and when she reached the corner she turned back and saw him―and saw that he could see her.

  He recognized her face. It was the face in the portrait Jane had drawn that afternoon. The face that Mina Lyle had seen in the window the night that Devin had heard the sobbing.

  “Wait, please,” he called softly.

  Her face seemed to whiten; for a minute, he could see her clearly in the combination of moonlight and illumination from the well-lit main street.

  Then she turned and fled around the corner. He raced after her, but there was a crowd of people walking along Derby Street in search of restaurants and bars, or heading home after a long day of exploring the city.

  He moved through the crowd, searching, studying every group he passed. He even walked into the brewery and a few restaurants, looking for her, but after a good forty-five minutes of fruitless effort he gave up and slowly walked back to the cemetery.

  A fine mist had crept in. The kind that made the cemetery ethereal and sad. He waited, watched and considered jumping the fence, but he knew there would be no point.

  She was gone.

  Of course, she could disappear at will. She hadn’t even needed to turn that corner.

  He could never catch her unless she allowed him to.

  He could only speak to her if she wanted to speak to him.

  The tour group had moved on. He wasn’t worried. He had a pretty good idea of the route they would follow, so he would catch up to them eventually.

  He walked down by the site of the old jail, by the Anglican church, then on to a few of the other stops on most of the tours. They wouldn’t have wandered too far; the tours didn’t tend to go more than a few blocks in either direction off Essex Street.

  He caught up with the tour in front of the Gardner-Pingree House. As he joined the crowd, he realized that Devin was still speaking.

  “The house was built in 1804 by Samuel McIntire but was sold in 1814 to Captain Joseph White. Joseph White was the victim of a brutal murder—and his killer’s trial was presided over by Daniel Webster himself. Parker Brothers, a Salem company, bought the American rights to a British game called Cluedo and marketed it as Clue. This house served as a real-life basis for the game. Captain White was bludgeoned in the bedroom with a candlestick, as well as stabbed with a knife. Nearby houses and people involved in the arrest and trial were added to the pieces and characters. In addition, many people believe that both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne used the trial in their works—including Poe’s classic tale of a guilty conscience, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ since one of the men hired to carry out the murder hanged himself in his jail cell.”

  Brent Corbin stepped up to join her. “The trials and other grisly events in the history of Salem have been explored in numerous books, many of which I carry in my shop if you’re interested, so let’s move on and I’ll tell you the last story of the evening.”

  Devin looked around as the group began to follow Brent, and Rocky knew the minute she’d spotted him. She walked over to where he stood, almost directly across the street from Crow Haven Corner, the city’s oldest witch shop.

  She didn’t speak, but she did look at him questioningly.

  “Good thing we came on the tour,” he told her. “Or, I should say, good thing you did.”

  “Every time he tried to speak, he started coughing, poor guy,” Devin said. “So...where did you run off to?”

  He didn’t get a chance to answer, because just then a woman ran up to her, trying to stuff a bill into her hands.

  “Thanks! You were great. We learned so much.”

  “Oh, uh, no...um, please, give this to Brent.”

  But the woman was already gone, racing to rejoin the rest of the group. Devin winced and looked at him. For a moment, with her wry smile, the light in her eyes and the scent of her so powerful, he was tempted simply to touch her...to draw her into his arms.

  Luckily she spoke, and the spell was broken.

  “Looks like I got a twenty. Buy you a drink, Agent Rockwell?”

  “Sure,” he told her.

  They walked across the street to a restaurant that was still open for a few hours. Luckily it wasn’t very full, and they were given a curved table near the window to the street and no one seated near them. There were menus already lying on the table, and they both ordered shepherd’s pie, as
if they’d realized simultaneously that they were starving.

  When the waitress had left them, Devin turned to him and demanded, “Where the hell did you go?”

  “I saw her,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The woman your aunt saw at your window the night our Jane Doe was killed.”

  “You saw her?”

  He nodded.

  “And you chased her?”

  He nodded again, then waited as the waitress delivered their drinks.

  “And you...spoke with her?”

  “No. She disappeared.”

  “Well, that’s not really helpful. But...are you sure it was her?”

  “I’m sure. I think I scared her, but she didn’t disappear right away. She let me follow her down to Derby Street first, which makes me think she wants to talk.”

  Her eyes were on his, glinting like sapphires in the light of the little candle that burned on their table.

  “Then why did she disappear?” Devin asked.

  “Because,” he said softly, lifting his beer in a salute, “I think she wants to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Dinner was actually nice.

  Almost like two people who liked each other being out on a...

  A date.

  They talked about things that had nothing to do with ghosts and murder. He told her he’d lost his dad, who he’d adored, and had always wanted to go into law enforcement because of him. His mom, who he saw as often as his schedule allowed, was happily remarried and living in Arizona.

  “Doesn’t she worry about you—about your job?” Devin asked.

  “She married an ex-sheriff and then a retired cop. She’s accustomed to it. She’d probably be more worried if I worked in a convenience store. What about you?”

  So she told him about her parents, that they were happily retired and she saw them several times a year—sadly, the last time being not so long ago, for her aunt’s funeral.

  As they talked, Rocky said that there were times when he really missed the area. When she asked him if he would ever move back, he shook his head slowly. “Not in the near future. I’ve just gotten where I really want to be, and that’s based in Virginia.”