The Salem Witch Society

by K. N. Shields

  As they passed the border of the park, marking the city line where Green Street in Portland became the town of Deering’s Forest Avenue, Grey finally spoke.

  “You understand that there is no one else.”

  Lean stared back at him, unwilling to admit he had no inkling of the man’s meaning.

  “To the rest of the city, the tale of this crime begins and ends with Maggie Keene’s murder. They can even forgive that it remains unsolved. In time, those who remember the murder will even revel in that fact. There’s something very appealing to the common man about an unsolved mystery. And even if someone else had been willing to take up this inquiry, they wouldn’t have gotten as far as we have.”

  He knew that Grey was trying to encourage him, but Lean felt cold pincers gripping deep inside his chest. “As far as we have.” When Lean repeated the words, they carried more of a sting of bitterness than he’d intended.

  The cab hurried along, running parallel to the Portland & Rochester line. Grey returned to some private train of thought, and Lean was grateful for the renewed silence. Another mile and they passed into the sprawling suburban neighborhood of Woodford’s Corner, traveling over the unpaved road and bumping across multiple sets of rails. Dr. Steig’s driver steered them past the raucous cheers emanating from the half-mile racing track of the Presumpscot Trotting Park. The cab proceeded along unpaved Stevens Plains Avenue, past the grand residences of newly moneyed merchants and professionals escaping from the city.

  Massive granite posts and a trolley waiting room marked the entrance to Evergreen Cemetery. Broad canopied elms, maples, and arborvitae hedges lined the main avenue, reminding visitors that this was a different space from the two older cemeteries on the eastern and western edges of the Neck. Unlike those constricted fields of granite headstones, bookends bounding in the life of the city, Evergreen was a sweeping, parklike cemetery. It was the last day of July, a Sunday, so the cemetery was alive with parasol-wielding couples on parade and groups lolling on blankets under shade trees. A half mile in from Stevens Plains Avenue, the grounds became slightly hilly. The carriage passed by wide, grassy plots dedicated to single families who sat atop a series of hillocks.

  “This will do, Rasmus,” Grey called out.

  They climbed down and surveyed the scene. Lean moved forward and stood up on a short, two-foot-wide granite border that surrounded a small, houselike burial vault, while Grey consulted his notebook, then peered about the manicured landscape.

  “Over there.” Grey pointed to the right and led Lean across the short, plush grass. He wandered up and down rows of grave markers. “We’re looking for Mrs. Blanchard, I take it,” Lean said.

  “We are indeed.”

  “And to what end?”

  “After meeting her charming husband, I’m curious to see if she has improved the company she keeps. Ah, here we are.”

  Lean stepped forward to see the resting place of Agnes Blanchard. Cut flowers, now dead, were set upon the ground just below the headstone. It was a simple inscription on a plain-faced rectangle of granite: BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER. NOVEMBER 29, 1836 AUGUST 5 1871.

  “The anniversary of her death is next week,” noted Lean. He looked up to see Grey examining the nearby markers. “Find someone interesting?”

  “On the contrary. I don’t see a single name of interest.”

  “The son?”

  “Notable by his absence. There are plenty of burial lots free and others nearby buried in recent years,” Grey said.

  “He might simply be buried elsewhere.”

  “Or nowhere at all.”

  “Why would the colonel lie about such a thing?” Lean asked.

  “The same reason he lied about everything else. To protect himself and his movement. So the interesting question becomes, does this missing son have any bearing on our inquiry? I suppose we shall have to ask the colonel’s daughter on Friday.”

  Lean stared at Grey. “You’ve already located that daughter and scheduled an appointment with her for next Friday?”

  “Not that she’s aware of. But she should be here”—Grey motioned to the week-old flowers resting by Mrs. Blanchard’s headstone—“with a fresh bouquet on the anniversary of her mother’s death.”

  51

  Lean and Grey stood in Helen’s parlor, awaiting her return from upstairs. There was a tall bookcase along one wall, and Lean perused the titles. One of the lower shelves held Delia’s primers and stories. Grey approached, bent down toward the young girl’s shelf, and retrieved a small, pewter-framed photograph. Lean glanced at it and saw a younger Helen Prescott with a handsome man beside her.

  “Dr. Steig mentioned he died not long after Delia was born,” Lean said.

  Grey, still holding the picture, moved along the perimeter of the room, taking in a few paintings and a couple of other photographs of Helen and Delia. Lean heard Helen coming down the stairs, and a moment later she entered from the kitchen.

  “She’s all tucked in. Now, gentlemen. What a pleasant surprise. If I’d known you were coming, I could have fixed something to eat.”

  “No need, Mrs. Prescott.”

  “We’re sorry to impose on you unannounced, Helen,” Lean added. Helen saw what Grey was holding. She stepped forward and took it from his hand.

  “Sorry. It’s just that Delia is very attached to this picture of her father.” Helen strode to the bookcase and set the picture back in its spot.

  “It must be trying for a girl to not have her father around. Difficult to explain, I imagine. Questions that need to be answered and such.”

  “Yes, it is difficult. Very much so.” Helen’s face was flushed, her hands clasped before her. “I don’t think you can imagine, Mr. Grey. But I’ve done all that I can to shelter Delia from the unpleasantness of his death. And I think I’ve done as well as could be expected in the circumstances.”

  “Yes, I would say you’ve done a commendable job.” He offered a quick smile, some veiled sort of truce offering.

  Lean glanced back and forth between the two of them, trying to pick up the thread of the conversation that he had somehow missed.

  Helen gave a little nod and walked around her visitors. “Have you made some discovery? I was just getting ready to have another look at that page you sent.”

  “Any luck so far?” Lean asked.

  She led them over to a rolltop desk, where three pages lay side by side. Lean recognized the page salvaged from the woodstove in Lizzie Madson’s rooms.

  “I have a thought about the first line, but after that it has me utterly confounded,” Helen said.

  The men stood looking over her shoulder as she read, “‘For every dark spirit summoned, every spirit commanded, a dark soul offered.’ He’s killing women he views as sinners—dark souls that he is sacrificing for some diabolical reason.”

  Lean nodded. “I thought the same. He’s not a religious fanatic after all. He’s pursuing some type of black-magic ritual.”

  “It explains the puzzle of why he killed Maggie Keene as a witch, then suckled at her molelike protuberance,” Grey said.

  “Like a witch’s familiar,” Helen said. “Drawing power from her, serving as some link between the witch and the devil.”

  Lean shook his head. “He’s really seeking some connection with the devil?”

  “‘For every dark spirit summoned,’” she said. “It’s essentially the same crime George Burroughs was accused of in Salem. He was the one charged with originally converting the others to witches. He’d have them sign their names in blood or red ink in his devil’s book.”

  Lean snapped to attention. “Maggie Keene’s postmortem—the red ink that stained the inside of her right glove. Our man actually had her sign his devil’s book or some such.” He looked to Grey, whose head was bent in deep concentration. “What do you think, Grey?”

  Grey ignored the question and addressed himself to Helen instead. “There’s another book mentioned in the trial material you provided to us on the Reverend Burroug
hs. A book mentioned by one of the afflicted girls. She’d been a servant in his household here in Maine.”

  “Mercy Lewis,” Helen said as she started to search through her research files. Soon she pulled out a sheet of paper and held it up in triumph. Grey motioned her on and she read the page aloud. “The deposition of Mercy Lewis, who testifies that: ‘At evening I saw the apparition of Mr. George Burroughs whom I very well knew which did grievously torture me and urged me to write in his book and then he brought to me a new fashion book which he did not use to bring and told me I might write in that book: for that was a book that was in his study when I lived with them. But I told him I did not believe him for I had been often in his study, but I never saw that book there. But he told me that he had several books in his study which I never saw in his study and he could raise the devil.’”

  Grey smiled. “Our killer is obsessed with George Burroughs; he’s aware of this supposed book of black magic that the reverend could use to raise the dead. He must think this is it, that these burned pages are from Burroughs’s witch book and he too can use it to summon some dark spirit.”

  Lean pounded the side of his fist onto the desk. “He’s not the only one thinking that. Helen’s scare in the library that night—Simon Gould was sent to look for an old book on magic. It can’t be a coincidence. He was after these same pages. Hopefully we’ve found them before Colonel Blanchard.”

  “Not that finding them has helped us any. It’s all a muddle,” Helen said.

  Lean sat down and weighed an idea in his head for a moment before speaking. “You know, sometimes I don’t truly grasp the depths of a poem’s meanings until I’ve spoken the words. Lifted them off the page and breathed a bit of life into them.”

  Helen picked up the page and read it out loud. She looked up at Lean, awaiting some response. His mind raced. Hearing the words spoken had provided no new sudden lightning flash of understanding. He was left with the same general conclusions he had reached when reading the page himself earlier. “There is a pattern in the paragraphs. A repeating rhythm to the entries.”

  “An order of months,” Grey said. “Then a location, a city, is identified, followed by an action by this master. A reference to visibility and seeing a person who makes a request, which is denied. An offering is taken, and then mention is made of a drink being prepared.”

  “The murders have occurred every month,” Lean said, “though not exactly a month apart.” Grey knew his thoughts on this already, so Lean glanced at Helen and explained. “I’ve been poring over the calendar, trying to find some pattern—number of days, days of the week, full moons. There was a full moon when Hannah Easler was killed in Scituate. But nothing else fits.”

  “Full moon,” Helen repeated. She glanced back at the page. “The first month mentions ‘full’ twice. It says: ‘I saw full the sister … ’ and then, ‘She bade me await the fullness for her offering.’ I suppose it could mean something.”

  Grey stepped forward to look at Helen’s page. He ran a finger down through the lines. “In the second month … ‘There still clearly did I see the man …’” His finger swept on down the page. “Then, ‘In the third month of my travels … There in the half-light did I see the child Zealot.’”

  “Full moon, to still clear, then to half-light. What were the moon phases on the nights of the other murders?” Lean asked.

  “I have an almanac,” Helen volunteered. She moved to her bookshelf and searched for a moment before seizing the thin volume.

  “June fourteenth for Maggie Keene,” Lean announced.

  Helen began to flip through the pages as she wandered back toward them. “That would have been just four days past full.”

  “And July sixteenth for Lizzie Madson.”

  Helen’s face wrinkled up in disagreement. “It says that was the last quarter. Not half.”

  “The lunar cycle is measured from new moon to full and back again, so the full moon is halfway through the cycle,” Grey explained. “What’s called a quarter is actually a moon that’s half lit.”

  “So far we’ve had full moon to about three-fourths lit to a half moon,” Lean said.

  “Now we’re looking for August.” Helen turned the page and studied the almanac. “When the moon’s midway between half lit and new. That would be maybe August nineteenth, or the twentieth. It’s hard to be exact.”

  “We have a few weeks, but no idea where he’ll strike.” Lean picked up the page containing the riddle. “He mentions Rome and Constantinople and Tridentum, wherever that is.”

  “The cities are distractions,” Grey said, “but he also mentions another location—the place of his master’s birth. The first murder was in Scituate.”

  “George Burroughs’s birthplace,” Lean said, and then he stared down at the page. “Second month is the place where the master first took life and himself accepted the Lord of the Air. An old name for the devil, eh? Well, Maggie Keene was killed on the old site of Burroughs’s meeting house.”

  Helen said, “There were several allegations at Salem that Burroughs murdered two of his wives, one in the town of Wells, and also the wife and child of another Salem minister. And that he caused the deaths of many soldiers at the hands of Indians to the eastward, meaning Maine. But I don’t recall anything specific to the meetinghouse area.”

  Lean let out a disappointed grumble. “The third month—‘where the Master’s powers were beheld, the skies made to tremble, and the Master compelled the hosts of the air.’ A perfect match for Witchtrot Hill!”

  “It doesn’t help us, I’m afraid,” Grey said. “Those cover only the first three months. We’re facing the fourth month’s murder now. We need to find out what book this page came from and locate a complete copy for ourselves. Without the next paragraph, we’d be guessing at what event from the reverend’s life is indicated next. The site may be in Portland or Salem, but it could well be in a dozen different spots throughout New England.”

  “So now what?” Lean said.

  “I’ll look for information on this book,” Helen said. “My boss, Mr. Meserve, is quite an expert on the colonial period in Maine. He may be able to help, if I can share the page you discovered.”

  Grey nodded his assent. “We’ll also need your assistance on an additional path of inquiry.”

  “Which is what exactly?” she asked.

  “The one that brought us here tonight in the first place.”

  PART III

  AUGUST 5, 1892

  But here is not a task in which one can advance little by little, along a natural and clearly demarcated route. … There is always a new problem to unravel; the investigator whose work is half done has accomplished nothing. Either he has solved the problem and quite finished the work: that means success; or he has done nothing, absolutely nothing.

  Dr. Hans Gross,

  Criminal Investigation

  52

  The following Friday, Helen sat on the warm grass in front of the strategically located headstone of a long-dead woman she had never known. She cast glances at another nearby visitor to the Evergreen Cemetery. That woman, Miss Rachel Blanchard, had approached almost half an hour earlier and spent several minutes removing the old flowers, pulling a few weeds, and offering prayers. She had remained sitting next to the headstone of her mother, Agnes Blanchard, ever since.

  At thirty yards, Helen was far enough away to be inconspicuous but too far to hear the young woman, who appeared to be speaking in hushed tones. Rachel Blanchard was dressed in black, with her hair pulled back and hidden under a mourning bonnet, revealing a high forehead. Her face was plain, with close-set eyes and a small mouth. Helen thought the woman had the look of a stolid, dutiful daughter, but there was no keenness in her expression, no hint of particularly deep currents of thought. At last the woman rose up and rested her hands atop the gravestone, offering one last prayer. Rachel Blanchard’s body began to shake slightly, and she bowed her head. She reached into her purse and removed a kerchief to dab at her eyes, th
en turned to go.

  Helen walked after her. Rachel slowed a bit and moved to rest a hand against a tree to support herself.

  Helen hurried forward. “Here, dear, are you well?”

  “Oh, thank you. Yes, I’ll be fine. Just a bit overcome.”

  “Don’t apologize. I understand. Visiting your late husband?”

  “Oh, no. Mother.”

  “It’s so difficult sometimes,” Helen said. “Here, take my arm. We can walk together.”

  “You’re most kind.”

  “Oh, think nothing of it. I’d prefer it myself. I always feel so lonely on the walk away. Like I’ve left a bit of myself down there with him, every time I visit. Isn’t that terribly silly?”

  “No, not at all,” Rachel Blanchard said. “I know what you mean. Your husband, then?”

  “No, my brother, actually.” Helen walked in silence for several steps. “He was such a sweet boy when he was younger. Sadly, he was a bit troubled in later years. Of course he’s gone to a much happier place now. I suppose it’s just me being selfish, but I do sometimes wish he were still here with me, even if he was being a bit of trouble, as he usually could be. I suppose that’s always the way with younger brothers.”

  “Yes. It seems to be.”

  “You have a brother, do you?”

  “Yes. Geoffrey.” After a few more steps, Rachel tilted her head in toward Helen in a conspiratorial manner. “Don’t think me a terribly horrid sister to say such a thing, but sometimes I do wonder if … if it wouldn’t have been for the best if he had died along with our mother.”

  “I’d put her in her mid to late thirties and her brother, Geoffrey, several years younger. He was always his mother’s child. She favored him, and he was devoted to her. When she died, Geoffrey was inconsolable with rage and grief, just couldn’t let her go. When he was older, he saw every spiritualist in the state trying to contact her again.”