See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  “A committee?”

  “It’s a committee of one,” Gabe said. “All you have to do is pass muster with the board of directors, which, with my endorsement and your background and charm”—he flashed her a grin—“will be no problem at all.” He reached over to his desk and twirled his calendar around. “There’s a meeting a week from today. If you give me a résumé, I’ll fax it to all the members—we’ll take it up next Monday and set up an interview then.”

  “You’re going to hand this job to me on a platter?” Lauren asked, afraid it was too good to be true. “What’s the catch?”

  “Don’t you see?” Gabe asked. “You’re doing me the favor. We’ve had a bitch of a time trying to find the right person to take the reins.”

  A jolt of electricity zapped through Lauren as Gabe smiled into her eyes. She remembered the feel of his naked body against hers, the way he had cupped her breasts, the fact that Todd now had a girlfriend.

  “It’s new territory for the society, and I’ve been worried that if we couldn’t find anyone,” Gabe was saying, “I’d have to direct the damn thing myself.”

  Lauren’s mind whirled with the possibilities. It was as if her fairy godmother had flown down from the sky and waved a magic wand. But before she could say anything, Gabe leaned over and kissed her. It started as a light kiss, but Lauren found herself responding with a passion she wouldn’t have thought possible a few hours earlier. Then they were standing and Lauren felt him hardening against her as she melted into him. “Whoa,” she said, finally pulling away.

  “Got those personal issues taken care of?” Gabe asked.

  Lauren hesitated for a second, then nodded. “It’s all been worked out—I think.”

  “Then do you want to go out and celebrate?”

  She glanced at her watch and laughed. “It’s eleven o’clock in the morning.”

  “We’ll have an early lunch in the square,” Gabe suggested, grabbing his black cashmere coat.

  They had an elegant lunch at Rialto, the restaurant at the Charles Hotel. When they walked up to the maîtred’, he bowed deeply to Gabe and showed “Dr. Phipps and his guest” to “the best table in the house.” Gabe smiled broadly as he waved Lauren to precede him.

  Lauren wished Todd could see her being fawned over by pretentious waiters as she ate endive and walnut salad with a world-renowned man. But as lunch progressed, Todd grew further and further from her mind. They talked about Drew and the NEH lawsuit and the Lexington job. They giggled over a story Gabe had heard in Washington about a senator who got caught where he shouldn’t have been. When lunch was over, they went to Gabe’s house.

  “So was this Lexington job just a ruse to get me here in the middle of the afternoon?” Lauren teased as they stood in the vestibule smiling foolishly at each other.

  “Not even funny, Lauren.” Gabe’s expression was suddenly serious. “The society’s professional, not personal. You could walk out of here right now—never talk to me again—and I’d still recommend you to the board.” He stepped away and gestured toward the door.

  Lauren closed the distance between them and wrapped her arms around him. “And if I don’t?” she asked.

  “That’s even better,” Gabe said.

  Their coats ended up on the floor, along with Gabe’s jacket and Lauren’s sweater. As he kissed her and pressed her to him, she felt a warmth flowing through her limbs. This was a good thing, she thought. Gabe was a good man. A great man. She was lucky to have found him. She began to unbutton his shirt, kissing his neck and chest as she worked her way downward. “Where’s your bedroom?” she asked, her knees beginning to buckle. “I don’t think I’m going to be able to stand up much longer.”

  Gabe took her hand and led her up the wide staircase to a large, airy room at the front of the house. Bay windows at the treetops let in light but allowed privacy. They undressed each other slowly, savoring the anticipation in a way they had been unable to do that first night in Lauren’s apartment. The afternoon sunlight danced suggestively over their bodies, increasing Lauren’s passion.

  “Let me look at you,” Gabe said when they were naked. He reached out and trailed a finger along her hipbone. “You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice husky with desire. “So beautiful.” Lauren pulled him to her.

  Afterward, lying in Gabe’s arms and staring at the treetops, Lauren felt strangely let down. Although the sex had been great, she had a hollow feeling inside, an empty place Gabe had been unable to touch. She realized she missed Todd and the silliness that always accompanied their lovemaking. She missed the teasing about her prehensile toe, the giggling while haying sex on the kitchen floor, the playacting that she was a nurse. Gabe was a wonderful lover, skilled and serious, but she longed for Todd’s laughter.

  Stop it, she told herself as she turned toward Gabe. Todd had someone else.

  After leaving Gabe, Lauren wandered through Harvard Square, wondering what she was getting herself into. She felt lonely for Todd, but there was a warm, pleasant throbbing between her legs. She recalled Gabe’s serious dark eyes, deep with passion, watching her as he brought her to orgasm. She thought of how thoughtful and dependable Gabe was, how handsome and charming—not to mention rich and famous. Any other woman would be thrilled that such a man wanted her. As Lauren headed down the stairs to the subway, she decided that she was too.

  Emerging from the glass triangle of the Porter Square T station, she glanced up at the red metal sculpture turning in the wind above her; three abstract shapes floating past each other at different rates and angles, each carried by the breeze on its own path. She stood in the middle of the brick plaza contemplating the inexplicable gyrations of life. Then she noticed the time. She had less than twenty minutes before she had to pick up Drew at school. Lengthening her stride as she headed toward home, she realized with a pang of guilt that she had hardly thought of her son since arriving at Gabe’s house.

  Lauren climbed the porch stairs, lost in thought, and was disturbed by the sense of another presence. Someone was in the shadows, sitting in the creaky rocker some long-ago tenant had left behind. With a start, she realized it was Deborah.

  Deborah was holding a large manila envelope in her lap. A bulky package wrapped in brown paper rested against her leg. She had the appearance of a woman who had been waiting patiently for some time and, as she silently watched Lauren’s approach, Lauren had the uncomfortable feeling that Deborah knew exactly where—and with whom—she had been.

  “What are you doing here?” Lauren demanded, looking up and down the street.

  “I’ll only be a moment,’’ Deborah said, rising from the chair but staying in the shadows. “I have some things for you.” She proffered the envelope but held onto the package.

  “I told you to stay away,” Lauren said, not moving forward. “I’m afraid for Drew.”

  “Take this,” Deborah said, her calm voice brooking no argument. “It may help you help him.”

  Figuring that the best way to get rid of Deborah was to do as she asked, Lauren took the envelope.

  “The answers you need are in ‘The Book of Mahala’—the portion of the chronicle that tells the story of the first Immortalis—and that, as I’ve explained, I can’t give you until you’ve completed a waxing moon ritual with us.”

  Throwing another look over her shoulder, Lauren stepped into the shadows. “Then what’s this?”

  “Our chronicle is different from your Bible in that it has two distinct parts—call them the sacred and the profane. The profane is a series of historical analyses of the places and epochs in which the coven has lived. It’s much closer to history than religion. It’s not about witchcraft or magic or anything personal.”

  “So who wrote this?” Lauren couldn’t help asking, remembering Gabe’s story of finding Deborah typing the chronicle on an IBM Selectric. “Who did the historical analysis?”

  Deborah smiled and shifted the package from one hand to the other. “As I told you before, we did. Harriet Reardon Smit
h wrote the portion I just gave you in the late nineteenth century.”

  Lauren placed the envelope under her arm. “Thank you,” she said with a curt nod, indicating it was time for Deborah to leave.

  “A portion of Faith Osborne’s story,” Deborah continued as if Lauren hadn’t spoken, “along with pieces of lots of other people’s stories, is used to analyze the economic and social conditions in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692. Oddly enough, Jackie was interested in this particular piece.”

  “How do you know that?” Lauren demanded, curious despite her nervousness.

  “She phoned me the morning she died and said she needed to talk to me about the part of the chronicle that reinterpreted the importance of religion in Colonial America—the Faith Osborne part. But I was handling the store by myself and couldn’t talk with her. We arranged to meet the next day to discuss it.”

  “You need to go now,” Lauren said, motioning toward the stairs. She had forgotten Jackie had said she was going to call Deborah that morning, but it sounded as if Jackie had wanted to speak to Deborah about something very different from what she had wanted to speak to Lauren about. Whatever it had been didn’t matter now. What mattered was keeping Drew safe. “Thanks for your help. I appreciate it—really I do. But I need you to leave.”

  Deborah moved out of the shadows. “What’s in there is only a small part of what happened to Faith and Dorcas. The rest—the part I think will help you figure out how best to protect Drew—is in ‘The Book of Mahala.’” She thrust the bulky package into Lauren’s free hand. “This is Jackie’s Deodat Willard print. My way of making amends for the trouble we’ve caused you.”

  “The best way to make amends is for you to leave me—”

  “The Immortalis will be held at midnight tomorrow,” Deborah added. “If you change your mind, we’ll be at White Horse Beach.”

  Then she swooped down the stairs and disappeared around the corner.

  Twenty-Seven

  SCOTT CAME HOME WITH DREW AFTER SCHOOL. AFTER giving the boys a snack, Lauren meandered into the living room and sat down at her desk. Noticing Jackie’s Deodat Willard print leaning against the wall, she was reminded that she had to call Simon Pappas. But she also had sixty exams to grade and return to Paul Conklin by tomorrow. As grading was now her only source of income; grading came first.

  Pushing aside stacks of books and scribbled notes for Rebeka Hibbens, as well as piles of unpaid bills and unopened mail, Lauren searched for the exams she had picked up from Paul last week. She found them under the envelope Deborah had just given her. Fingering the edge of the envelope, Lauren thought of her promise to stay out of the seventeenth century. She glanced at the Deodat Willard and remembered she had also vowed to find out what Faith Osborne had done to cause Dorcas’s death.

  An explosion of giggles jolted her as Drew and Scott bounded through the doorway. “Can Scott stay for dinner?” Drew asked. “Dinner’s part of the game we’re playing and it won’t work if Scott has to go home,” he explained.

  Lauren was overwhelmed by an almost irresistible urge to reach out and touch her son, to reassure herself that he was indeed alive and safe. But for Drew’s sake, she restrained herself. “If it’s all right with Scott’s mom, it’s all right with me,” she said. “But we’re just having frozen pizza.”

  “Couldn’t we have hot dogs over the fire again?” Drew begged. “That’s what would fit our game the best.”

  Lauren shook her head, uncomfortable with the memory. “That was a special treat.”

  “Okay,” Drew said, knowing when to quit. “Thanks,” he added over his shoulder as the boys raced back to his room, slamming the door behind them.

  Lauren pushed Deborah’s envelope under the blue books and grabbed a handful of exams. It was safer for Drew if she stayed away from Deborah Sewall and the seventeenth century. She opened the first blue book and skimmed a few paragraphs to geta feel for the general level at which the students were working. She opened a second and did the same. But by the time she was skimming the third, she found her thoughts driftingback to the afternoon she had just spent with Gabe.

  What exactly did she feel for Gabe? It wasn’t love. She had been in love once—perhaps she still was—and she wasn’t experiencing any of the dizzying ups and downs of that state: the feverish excitement, the terror that her feelings might not be reciprocated, the intense longing to be with Todd every minute. Nor was she having any problem thinking about other things. Like Ed Zaleski’s report that he had been unable to find any covens or sorcerers who worked with Bellarmine urns. Or Steve Conway’s discovery of an abandoned apartment with a broken basement window near where Drew was found on Beacon Hill. Or Todd’s tormented expression as he had left her apartment yesterday.

  So what was it? Lust, Lauren decided. She was in lust with the great Dr. Phipps, the country’s best known living historian. For although they had had a great afternoon, filled with candid conversation, good sex, and the savoring of their easy companionship, she wasn’t the least obsessed.

  They had talked about everything from Todd and Deborah, to the existence of God, to Gabe’s longing for a child. “Deborah felt it was unfair to bring kids into a world that was so screwed up,” Gabe had told her. “And ironically, by the end, when all those weird people with their crazy ideas and nutty books were all over the house, I was just as glad. Can you imagine the effect that kind of insanity would have had on a child?”

  Although she had enjoyed Gabe’s company immensely, Lauren found herself more than happy to have time away from him. Between now and noon tomorrow, when he would open the week-long American Historical Association conference with his plenary session address, he was “doing the media bit,” as he had put it: flying to New-York City to be on “The Today Show;” taping a simultaneous public radio broadcast that was to be aired by over fifty stations nationwide; being interviewed for a feature article by The Boston Globe. Then, after opening the conference, he would have to play host for the rest of the day to the world’s most renowned historians.

  He had apologized profusely for not being able to include her at dinner and had promised to meet her at her apartment as soon as he could get away. “I’ll be out of there no later than nine,” he had told her as she left his house this afternoon. “Thirty-two hours away from you seems like thirty-two years.” Lauren glanced at the clock. Only thirty more to go.

  With great resolve, Lauren pulled a copy of the test from the first blue book, once again reminding herself that until she got the Lexington job, grading was a financial imperative. After scanning the complicated essay questions, she groaned. It might take her all thirty hours to complete the damn exams.

  It was one o’clock in the morning and Lauren had been lying in bed for hours, unable to sleep. Deborah’s envelope had been calling to her and she felt her willpower crumbling. She slipped out of bed and with a furtive glance over her shoulder, slunk into the living room.

  Her heart was pounding and her palms were damp. Like a thief in the night, she closed the blinds before turning on the light. Then she went right to the envelope. With the relief of a dieter reaching for that forbidden bag of cookies, she opened it. And with the gluttony of that same dieter, she sat down and began to read.

  She flipped quickly though the more academic portions of the pages until she found what she had been longing to read: the Faith Osborne story.

  Following the execution of her seven-year-old daughter, Dorcas, for witchcraft in 1692, a warrant was issued against Faith Osborne, wife of Oliver Osborne, a powerful magistrate of great renown in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. An extremely beautiful woman, Faith married Oliver after the death of her husband, Ezekiel Hoar, a landless man who hired himself out. It was well-known that Faith had been content as a poor woman, tending to Ezekiel and her pots and her daughter, but after two years of raising her daughter by herself, she had sought to escape her poverty and loneliness by entering into a loveless marriage with Oliver Osborne, a man twenty years her senior
.

  It was this marriage that led to her downfall, for Oliver was an ambitious and prideful man. After Dorcas was executed, Faith refused to live in Oliver’s house, claiming that she too was a witch. She wandered around the town, crying out her guilt to any who would listen. Despite the fact that a declaration of guilt usually freed a woman accused of witchcraft, Oliver had Faith arrested to prove to the colony that no one, not even his own wife, was above God’s law.

  The accusations against Faith Osborne were numerous. Her neighbor, Sarah Walcott, claimed that she, Sarah, went into a fit after Faith “did steadfastly fix her eyes upon me.” She also alleged that the day after Faith Osborne warned that the chimney on Goody Walcott’s house “shall be falling down,” it did. Another neighbor, Elizabeth Cloyce, claimed that Goody Osborne’s “shape did come into my room at night” and that “her specter was biting and pinching and pricking my body.” But by far the most damning evidence was given by Oliver himself, who, after watching Elizabeth Cloyce enter his house, had seen a blue boar run back through the gate only moments later. This proved beyond a doubt that Faith was a witch. Had he not seen with his own eyes that she did turn Goody Cloyce into a boar?

  Faith Osborne was imprisoned in Cambridge Prison, tried, and found guilty. When she changed her story and refused to acknowledge her sins, she was subjected to peine forte et dure—an English procedure in which heavy weights were progressively piled on a prisoner’s body—until a confession was procured. She was then reprieved and released. When Oliver Osborne refused to pay her prison fees, claiming that “no witch is any wife of mine,” she was imprisoned once again.

  The luckless woman, Lauren thought as she rubbed the goose bumps on her arms. Faith was struggling to support and raise a child on her own and, because she had allowed herself to become dependent upon a man whose ego and ambition were greater than his feelings for her, she had been destroyed.