Her demands upon him were few enough, to be sure. As Simon's manager, he had limited access to Simon's bank accounts, so that he was able to provide Rowena with whatever money she needed from week to week. Inasmuch as she was seventeen years old, the fact that the court had appointed him as her guardian was a mere formality. She was to remain in Bradford, and he had neither the inclination nor the obligation to move to New Hampshire from New York. It was only on days such as this that his responsibility for the girl seemed inconvenient, when he was asked by her to drive her from Bradford to Boston, which entailed, of course, the six-hour drive from New York to Bradford, two hours from there to Boston, two hours back, and another six hours back home.
But there's nobody else to do it, Schroeder thought. After what the poor kid's been through, I can't very well tell her to hop on a bus.
"Miss Proctor?" the nurse said from behind the reception desk. Rowena rose quickly to her feet. "Your father is waiting for you in visiting lounge four. Please leave your purse with me, and I'm afraid that I must ask you to empty your pockets.
"Yes, I understand," she said, having gone through this each time she came to visit her father, both in Concord, where the court had originally assigned him, and here in Boston, when he had been remanded for extensive observation. Security measures, she thought. Makes sense from their standpoint. To them, Daddy is obviously a deeply disturbed man. Can't let him get hold of anything he could hurt himself with.
As she emptied her pockets into the small wooden bowl which the nurse had provided, Schroeder said, "Tell your dad that everything's going okay with the legal end of this. He should be out of here and home within a month, if everything works out right."
"That's great, Mr. Schroeder," Rowena said without enthusiasm. "I'm sure he'll be happy to hear that."
"Of course, nobody's gonna believe his story about witches and all that stuff. Sounds too much like a publicity stunt, and—well, you know your father's reputation and everything."
"I know," she said quietly as she handed her purse over for safekeeping.
"But with all the other evidence, the stuff that happened on the Campbell show, your own statements about those two crazy people—well, the lawyers think that the court's gonna just declare the whole thing homicide by person or persons unknown. I'm sure the cops'll keep looking for Gwen and Adrienne, but I doubt they'll ever find them."
Rowena laughed softly. "I'll go along with that, all right."
She began to walk toward the doors at the end of the corridor, and Schroeder walked beside her until they reached the sign which said Authorized Persons Only beyond This Point. "I know it was hard for you not to back your dad up at the hearing, but everybody understood your situation. I mean, when you started agreeing with him about all that supernatural stuff, the judge was very patient and tolerant."
"Yes, he was," she agreed, eager to go through the doors and see her father but not wishing to be rude to Harry Schroeder. She waited impatiently for him to finish his needless monologue.
"I knew that you'd tell the truth once the judge gave you a chance to change your story, without punishment or anything. I mean, if you were unconscious from the time of the car crash until after all the murders, you couldn't very well—"
"Yes," she interrupted him. "I had to say that, didn't I? I had to say that I didn't remember anything, that I didn't see anything, or else they'd have locked me up too, right?"
"Exactly," Schroeder replied, missing her point completely. "Well, you go and have a nice visit with your father, and I'll wait for you right here." He watched her walk through the doors, and then he returned to the sofa and sat down heavily. "Hope she hurries up," he muttered. "I'm too old to do all this driving around in one day."
He looked up again at the clock, and then shut his eyes. Maybe I can catch forty winks while she's in there. Couldn't hurt to give it a try. Probably won't be able to, though. I never have an easy time falling asleep. Probably prone to insomnia.
He was snoring loudly a few minutes later, his hands folded in his lap, his head leaning back against the sofa. An hour passed before he felt himself being gently shaken by Rowena. His eyes snapped open and he looked up at her with momentary confusion, and then he smiled. "Oh! Back so soon?"
She smiled. "I've been in there for nearly an hour, Mr. Schroeder."
"You don't say!" He rose to his feet and yawned, stretching. "I guess I must have drifted off for a while."
Rowena retrieved her belongings from the nurse and then she and Schroeder left the hospital and went to his car in the visitors' parking lot. As they got in and he turned on the engine, he asked, "How's Simon doing?"
"Fine," she replied, "just fine."
"You tell him what the lawyers said?"
"Yes. He was happy to hear it."
"Good. I figured he would be. What else did he have to say?" He began to drive out of the parking lot and onto the boulevard which bordered the hospital.
"Oh, this and that," she replied.
"Such as what?" he asked. "What did you two talk about for an hour?"
She laughed softly. "You really want to know?"
"Sure," he said as he stopped for a red light.
"Okay," she smiled. "He spent a good deal of time talking about predestination and free will, and the problem of reconciling the need to obey a moral code with the doctrine of justification by faith."
"That's nice," Schroeder said, staring up at the traffic light, waiting for it to turn green. Some small part of what she had just said reached his brain and he snapped his head to his right and looked at her. "What? What did you say?"
She laughed again softly. "Daddy's been doing a lot of reading about religion lately, since—well, you know, since everything happened."
"Sure," he nodded. "That makes sense. A lot of people get religion when trouble happens. I mean, he just went through a real bad time."
"Mr. Schroeder, you have no idea," she muttered. She looked out the car window as Schroeder began to drive through the intersection beneath the now green traffic light. "Are you sure you can find the address?"
"Sure, no problem," he replied. "I checked it all out on a Boston street map yesterday, after you called me. We’ll be there in a couple of minutes." He paused. "What's at that address, anyway?"
She shook her head. "I have absolutely no idea."
"Huh?"
"It's a long story" she said tiredly. "I’ll explain it all to you someday. But for now, I just want to get there and—" She paused for a moment and then said quickly, "Mr. Schroeder, can you pull over for a minute? I want to get something from that store over there."
Schroeder obligingly moved the car toward the curb and came to a stop beside a fire hydrant. "Sure, Row. Whatcha getting?" But she was out of the car before he could finish his question. He watched as she entered a florist shop and emerged a moment later, holding a simple wreath made of roses, violets, and fronds. "What's that for?" he asked.
"I'll explain it to you sometime," she repeated.
"Right," he laughed. "It's a long story, right?"
"Right." She smiled and then turned away to watch the streets of Boston drift by.
Weird kid, Schroeder thought. Spends too much time in that little cemetery up there in Bradford. It isn't healthy. Probably bought those flowers to bring back and put on the graves.
But Rowena had already decorated the graves earlier that day, before Harry Schroeder had picked her up in Bradford and begun the drive to Boston. She had placed flowers on Jeremy's grave, on the grave of her grandfather, on the grave of Reverend Wilkes, and on the grave where the charred remains of her brother had been placed. The graves would be unmarked for at least another week as the markers were carved and their names and dates emblazoned upon them. It was of no matter. She knew exactly where they lay in the old Bradford grave yard. She knew exactly where each one of them lay.
The bodies of Mark Siegal, Larry Herricks, Tom Mahoney, and Carl Strube had been claimed by their families and had been la
id to rest in various places around the country. Someday, Rowena had decided, she would find out where they were buried and would visit their graves and leave wreaths, tokens of regret, acceptances of responsibility on the part of her family, past and present.
Simon had voiced a slight, tentative disapproval of her preoccupation with the graves, but he was understandably reluctant to make an issue of it under the circumstances. He had willingly paid for the funerals and the tombstones for Jeremy and Reverend Wilkes, and of course for Lucas, and had sent a veritable greenhouse of flowers to the funerals of his band members.
But no funeral for Karyn, Rowena thought sadly, no marker and no grave. She knew what had happened to Karyn's body and felt sadly certain that her soul and that of Lucas were in the same place. Rowena shuddered and shook her head. I don't want to think about that, she told herself. It's too horrible. Poor Lukie.
Traffic was heavy on Boylston Street, and nearly an hour passed before Schroeder broke into her reverie by saying, "Here it is, Rowena. Boylston and Francis. Which way now?"
"Left, Mr. Schroeder, up to that hospital in the middle of the block."
As Harry Schroeder turned left and drove up the steep incline of Francis Street he said, "A hospital? This is what you've been trying to find? A hospital?"
"Yes," she said, opening the car door as he pulled over to the curb. "I'll be right back."
"What do you want with—?" But again her speed at climbing out of the car left him without a reply. He shook his head in bemusement as the girl walked toward the entranceway.
As she walked into the main lobby of Brigham and Women's Hospital, she remembered the difficulty she had had finding the entry in the old record books, the old colonial registries, the crumbling, yellowed volumes housed deep in the basement of the large municipal library in central Boston. But find it she did, after hours of effort, buried amid a hundred thousand other entries in the records of the old colonial constabulary, a notation dated January 5, 1702, to the effect that two women were found hanged to death in a stable. The identities of the women were unknown, but Rowena had known who they were, and she had known why they went into that stable to die.
It had taken her another month of painstaking research to discover precisely where the old potter's field of colonial Boston had been, precisely where the place was where they buried the bodies of the poor, the unknown, the unwanted, back in the early eighteenth century. Her persistence had again been fruitful, and she had at last found the information she needed. The potter's field had been paved over in the early nineteenth century. Homes and other small structures had rested upon it through that century into the next, and today a well-known, ultramodern hospital stood upon the ground into which the bodies of the miserable, the unfed, the unhappy, and the unloved had unceremoniously been cast back in the sixteen- and seventeen-hundreds.
As she stood in the center of the lobby and watched as the doctors and the nurses and the patients went about the business of healing and being healed, she could not but reflect upon the irony of it, that what was once the final abode of the unwanted dead was now a shrine to the enemies of death. Where once was nothing but dust and decay, now the struggle to prolong life was daily being waged. The ground which once held only the remnants of broken dreams and shattered lives, of lost hopes and bitter tears, now rested beneath a medical complex devoted to hope, to life, to dreams. She took another moment to look at the people who were going about their lives all around her, and then turned her attention away from them. It was not the living who had brought her here. Ignoring them, she looked down at the shiny floor of the hospital lobby.
Mary was down there somewhere. Somewhere in the earth beneath the floor of the hospital was the dust which had once been Mary Warren. Somewhere beneath Rowena's feet, beneath the hundreds of thousands of feet which had passed over this ground over the past few centuries, was Mary Warren's nameless, eternally unmarked grave.
Rowena knelt down in the midst of the bustle of people and gently placed the wreath upon the floor. She stood up and gazed at it for a few moments and then turned and walked away. She knew that someone would in all likelihood kick the wreath out of the way in a short while, and then the custodial staff would surely sweep it up and throw it away; but she did not care. No one had ever placed a wreath on the poor girl's grave before. No one had ever known where she was buried, no one had ever cared where she was buried. But Rowena knew, and Rowena cared, and so Rowena had laid a wreath.
She walked out into the warm sun of the Boston summer, glancing over at the car to see Harry Schroeder watching her with quizzical concern. Then she looked up at the clouds which billowed white in the blue sky. "Rest in peace, Mary," she whispered. Then she walked back to the waiting car to begin the ride home.
Candlemas Eve Page 43