See No Evil

by B. A. Shapiro

  Lauren remembered her dreams: of Millicent and Rebeka in Gabe’s dining room, of Drew being hanged. None of her dreams matched anything in the chronicle, yet Faith’s story felt so familiar and Lauren felt such a strong empathy for the woman. And there were the fugues: making soap with a high-spirited daughter, arguing with her husband about the witch trials, watching wild rabbits being drawn from the forest as if they were tame circus animals.

  Questions she didn’t want to answer assaulted her. Could Deborah and Cassandra be right? Did the soul reincarnate and perhaps even remember pieces of its previous lives? But then she caught herself: What was she thinking? Was she saying she believed she was the reincarnation of a seventeenth-century soul? That she, Lauren Freeman, had once been Faith Osborne? Forcing her thoughts away from the unthinkable, Lauren reminded herself that one didn’t need a PhD to recognize the similarities between Faith’s struggles and her own.

  She flipped through the remaining pages and found she had to disagree with Gabe on one point: This work was anything but a “nutty book.” The chronicle read like sophisticated history written by a learned and serious scholar. It was also dear that Gabe had been right about another point. This was clearly the work of a contemporary historian.

  For the author, undoubtedly Deborah Sewall, had used a technique that was unheard of until recently—she’d used actual data to compile an equation comparing the economic conditions of various groups in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In another example of twentieth-century scholarship, Deborah had then taken episodes from the lives of ordinary people—one of them Faith Osborne’s arrest for witchcraft—to posit the argument that economics, not religion, was the primary force behind the witchcraft hysteria. Deborah went on to use this as a basis for a reinterpretation of all the institutions in Colonial society. Despite having been written in the twentieth century, this was an extraordinary piece of work, exploring ideas that hadn’t entered mainstream historical thought until Gabe’s own book, A New Social History of Colonial America, was published in 1990.

  Although Lauren knew she should go back to sleep, she couldn’t resist reading a few more paragraphs.

  It has been posited that the witchcraft hysteria, so widespread in seventeenth-century America, was the natural outgrowth of the repressive Calvinist doctrines to which almost all colonists adhered. Other explanations range from mass hysteria to a fungus in the bread that caused wild hallucinations. Based upon careful analysis of dozens of individuals who were accused of witchcraft, it appears that economic considerations are by far the most powerful in explaining the phenomenon. For every …

  Before she could get caught up in the narrative, Lauren stuffed the pages back in the envelope. She reminded herself that, although there was clearly much to interest a student of seventeenth-century America here, she was no longer that student. She knew she should go back to bed, that she would be exhausted in the morning, but she remained at her desk. Lauren closed her eyes and imagined what it must have been like to be married to Oliver Osborne.

  She was in a small room with a low ceiling, the walls covered by wide panels of rough pine. She was scared. Terrified. Unable to see her way through to the thing she must do. She wrung her small hands, hands that had been red and rough from work just a few seasons past, hands that were now pink and white and pampered. Pampered by the wealth of Oliver Osborne.

  Faith’s mind bobbled from one impossible choice to another. To tell Oliver that Rebeka, Millicent, and the others did meet in Glover barn was to bring the witchhunters upon them. The goodmen of Cambridge would arrest them and try them and surely find them guilty of the most absurd of crimes. Crimes for which they would be hung.

  But if she did not tell, Dorcas would face the hangman’s noose.

  Faith pulled at the lace cuffs of her dress. Rebeka was her dear cousin. Rebeka had cared for her as a child, had taught her the fox and glove stitch for knitting suspenders, had brought food and comfort to her home after Ezekiel died. Millicent Glover had always been kind, and the others were without guile.

  But Dorcas was her child. Her only child. And barely of seven years.

  How could she betray Rebeka, who had begged her never to speak of Glover barn? How could she align herself with the witch-hunters she did so detest?

  She thought of Dorcas sleeping soundly on her pallet overhead, of her daughter’s tinkling laughter, of the wonder with which the child gazed at the world.

  Faith stared into the knots of the pine, as if within their design she could find the answers she sought. Oliver had promised that Dorcas would be spared if Faith told where Rebeka and Millicent did their black magic.

  Faith stood and pressed her damp palms to her shirt. Dear Lord, she prayed, forgive me for what I do. Then she stepped out of the room to tell her husband of the goings-on at Glover barn.

  Tuesday dawned gray and forbidding, the first snow of winter huddling within the slate-colored clouds. After Lauren had finally returned to bed, Drew had woken twice, his body quivering with fear, his mind full of monsters. After the second awakening, Lauren brought him in with her. She lay beside him, stiff and wide-eyed, as he thrashed and muttered and cried out in his sleep.

  That morning he didn’t want to go to school, begging her to let him stay home. But Lauren remembered the psychologist’s words and made him go. When they arrived, there was no policeman on duty. She called Steve Conway, but he wasn’t available, and the woman she spoke with was surly, grudgingly offering to send someone over in half an hour. Lauren had waited in the hallway until the policeman showed up.

  Her hands deep in her pockets and her jacket zipped to the neck, Lauren had headed home, reminding herself that Drew was safe and that events had taken a remarkable turn for the better. But she didn’t feel reassured. She felt tired and ill-tempered and had the uncomfortable certainty that something bad was about to happen.

  When she got home, she called Todd to remind him to pick up Drew from school: “I know what day it is,” he snapped. “I only forgot that one time when he was in kindergarten—I think you should let it go.” She tried to explain her nervousness, but he would have none of it. “I’m perfectly capable of caring for my son for the night,” he told her.

  Lauren put the receiver down and glanced at the clock. She had promised Paul that the exams would be on his desk half an hour ago. Annoyed with both Todd and herself, she gathered the blue books and raced over to the university.

  Paul’s door was locked, so she headed for the department office to leave the exams in his basket. The large open room was the usual bustle of activity. Lauren murmured the appropriate hellos while dropping the exams in Paul’s box. She checked her own mailbox, then headed to the ABD office.

  ABD stood for “all but dissertation” and was used to designate those graduate students who had finished their course work and passed their comprehensive exams, having only a doctoral thesis to complete before being awarded a PhD. The ABD office was much larger than the one used by the other graduate students, and each ABD had his or her own desk and phone in a private carrel.

  After checking the other carrels and finding them empty, Lauren put her backpack and mail on her desk. She dropped into her chair and began flipping through the envelopes—the usual assortment of free textbooks she didn’t want, solicitations for more textbooks she didn’t want, and job announcements for which she wasn’t qualified. Full of jittery, undirected energy, Lauren played with her junk mail and watched the clock: more than two hours to kill before Gabe’s speech.

  She could go home, clean the apartment, maybe make a batch of chili for Drew, but there really wasn’t enough time. On the other hand, now that her course work was completed and she was momentarily dissertationless, there wasn’t anything she needed to do on campus. She could begin her research on Lexington women, but it seemed presumptuous to begin work on a job she didn’t actually have—and it might jinx her chances for getting it.

  It was so peculiar; after years of always having too much to do, too much pr
essure, too little time, she was suddenly free. But instead of feeling relief, all she felt was edgy emptiness. She zipped up her backpack and left the office. As she walked out of the building, part of her brain felt uncomfortably vacant and useless.

  Then she thought of Faith Osborne, of the horrible decision she had imagined Faith making in an attempt to save her child—an attempt that Lauren knew had failed. She remembered Drew crying out in the night and wondered where Faith had gone wrong. Walking along the sidewalk, she saw the wide steps of the library spread open before her. The building tugged at her like a magnet drawing her to it. Despite her promise to stay away from the seventeenth century, she knew it was important, imperative even, for her to learn all she could about Faith and Dorcas.

  A computer search netted a sum total of zero citations for her query on Faith Osborne, but she found numerous references to Dorcas Osborne and forty-seven books in the library system that contained “anecdotal accounts” of the Colonial witch trials. She headed down three floors into the depths of the stacks, where the oldest and mustiest of the books were shelved.

  Only four of the sources on Dorcas were in the library, and it didn’t take Lauren long to determine that, with the exception of one, their references to the child were limited. Half the other books were out on loan and a quick skim of the table of contents of most of the others indicated they were going to be useless for her purpose. Six of the titles, including Gabe’s A New Social History, looked promising. Glancing at her watch and noting that over an hour remained before Gabe’s speech, she carried the books to a study carrel and sat down.

  The carrels in this part of the library always made Lauren think of livestock corrals: pens of desks lined up in rectangular configurations in the bowels of the building. Lauren flipped on the study light over a desk, casting a small triangle of brightness into the gloomy, overheated room. Pulling at the collar of her sweatshirt to get more air, she glanced down the spines of the books.

  She couldn’t resist a peek at the jacket of Gabe’s; he beamed out at her, his charisma on full wattage, and she felt a warm, melting sensation. Although the book had been published more than eight years ago, Gabe looked remarkably the same now as he had then: handsome, intelligent, his sense of humor webbing his sexy bedroom eyes. He was a bit grayer at the temples now, she thought, scrutinizing the picture. A few more lines, perhaps. But overall, he was the same “world-renowned scholar of American history,” the same man who had kissed the inside of her elbow yesterday afternoon and told her he hadn’t fallen this fast or this hard since he was sixteen. “It makes me want to do something adolescent and crazy,” he had said. “Like run off to Las Vegas.” She had laughed at his joke then, but she couldn’t help wondering now how much of a joke it had been.

  She closed the book over Gabe’s picture. She had read his book years ago—one couldn’t study American history at the college level without being assigned Phipps—although now that she thought about it, she had done a lot more skimming than reading. Still, she knew it to be a general text that presented a new theoretical overview of Colonial society. Lauren put Gabe’s book down and reached for one of the more promising in the pile.

  She was unsurprised to find a fairly long segment on Dorcas and wondered why she and Jackie hadn’t included this information. Then she remembered that, of course, Dorcas hadn’t been a member of the coven.

  As she read on, her interest mounted. According to this account, Dorcas had been arrested with the other coven members in Millicent Glover’s barn. In September of 1692, Millicent, Rebeka, Foster Lacy, Bridgit Corey, Abigail Cullender, and Mercy Broadstreet as well as Dorcas—“the seven firebrands of hell”—had all been found by Oliver Osborne “doing the devil’s work” at Glover Farm. What was Dorcas doing with them? Lauren wondered. Where was Faith?

  The others were all taken to Cambridge Prison, but in deference to Dorcas’s “young years” she was examined and tried immediately. Upon finding “devil’s marks” on the little girl’s body—”numerous unnatural markings of the flesh upon her cheeks,” which sounded to Lauren like freckles—and eliciting a confession from the confused child, Dorcas was sentenced to death the next day.

  Dorcas was hung the following dawn, from the branches of an ancient oak tree on Gallows Hill. Lauren shivered as she remembered her dream about Drew, once again unnerved by her strange prescience. She was certain that before reading this account, she hadn’t known the details of the girl’s execution.

  The book went on to briefly discuss the fate of the other six, summarizing the story Lauren knew so well: the trial, the imprisonment, the unexplained disappearances. But there was no mention of Faith. As far as this author was concerned, Faith Osborne had never lived, had never been a part of the coven, had never vanished without a trace. Although Lauren knew it was not unusual for a relatively minor player to be missed in historical accounts, she found the omission of Faith ominous.

  Lauren closed the book and stared at the scarred face of the carrel wall. Parkinson was wrong: Time only contracts was scrawled in red-brown ink. You suck was written neatly under it. She swung her chair around to catch a bit of light from the high, narrow windows behind her. Although still morning, the sky appeared to be darkening, its color now the same no-color of the cement foundation framing the small panes. She shivered again.

  Stop it, she scolded herself, turning back to the books. There was no point in coming unglued because she had had a dream about an unknown event whose details she could have easily surmised. Nor was any purpose to be served by wondering why some sloppy historian had failed to include Faith in his discussion of the coven.

  She picked up Gabe’s book and examined the index to see if he had included anything on Faith or Dorcas. As she had expected, he had not. Turning to the table of contents, she saw that his opening chapter summarized his reinterpretation of Colonial life, and she flipped to it to see if his sounded anything like Deborah’s analysis.

  She began to read Gabe’s discussion of how he had turned the philosopher Georg W. F. Hegel on his head to derive a “neomaterialist interpretation, deflecting attention from the institutions traditionally considered to be the seats of social control.” He then described how he had combined Marxist philosophical tenets with the more conservative structural-functional approach of the great sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert Merton, and added in a quantitative analysis to derive his “triangulation of perspectives.” Lauren smiled. All a bit multisyllabic and academic for the witches. Then she skipped down a few paragraphs and read:

  It has been posited that the witchcraft hysteria, so widespread in seventeenth-century America, was the natural outgrowth of the repressive Calvinist doctrines to which almost all colonists adhered. Other explanations range from mass hysteria to a fungus in the bread that caused wild hallucinations. Based upon careful analysis of dozens of individuals who were accused of witchcraft, it appears that economic considerations are by far the most powerful in explaining the phenomenon. For every …

  She reread the paragraph and then raced through the next few, sweat gathering above her lip and prickling beneath her arms. She pulled the pages of Deborah’s chronicle from her backpack and spread them out on the table.

  Lauren now knew why the chronicle had sounded so familiar—and it had nothing to do with witchcraft or reincarnation. Gabe and Deborah’s words were exactly the same.

  Twenty-Eight

  LAUREN SAT FROZEN, THE LIGHT OF HER CARREL THE only bright spot in the dimness. So Gabe had spoken the truth. The chronicle was a wild lie, a hoax, a farce. Deborah had made the whole thing up—after she’d copied Gabe’s work. Lauren looked down at the book and the photocopied pages, stark and three-dimensional in their small cone of light. No wonder the chronicle was brilliant; it had been written by a brilliant man.

  The vertical partitions of the small carrel seemed to bend in toward her. The murky light outside the high windows grew murkier and the low ceilings even lower. Lauren stood. Grabbing Gabe’s book and D
eborah’s pages, she headed through the maze of stacks. She needed air. She had to get out of this dark and musty place.

  As she walked along the deserted rows of forgotten tomes, she was reminded of her long-ago dream of Oliver Osborne, leaves clinging to his bushy hair and mud caking the hem of his cloak, chasing her through the dark library stacks. He had held a shiny knife in his hand. Lauren shivered at the memory.

  She blinked as she caught sight of light over the open stairwell at the end of another narrow corridor of books. A wide shadow appeared at the opening. A dark figure in a long cloak was coming toward her, his cloak brushing the stacks as it passed. The figure was backlit, so she couldn’t see the face, but she could see that he was striding quickly and purposefully toward her. Lauren grabbed onto a shelf for support. Just as she was about to turn and run, she recognized who was approaching and began to laugh. It was no menacing figure; it wasn’t Oliver Osborne or some other evil apparition. It was Gabe, his black cashmere coat billowing open as he walked.

  She grinned and waved. “Gabe,” she cried. “What are you doing here?”

  He was upon her in a second. He grabbed her up in his arms and kissed her passionately. “I had a few minutes before my keynote and I needed to get away from the adoring throngs,” he said with a self-effacing smile. “I came down here because it’s usually deserted, but you, my love, are an unexpected—and extremely welcome—surprise.”

  “As are you,” Lauren said, a bit breathless from both the kiss and the scare she had given herself. She smiled up at him, for a moment forgetting what she had just discovered.

  “What have you got there?” he asked, pointing to A New Social History. “Looks vaguely familiar.”

  “Some boring historian,” Lauren said, raising the book. As she did, Deborah’s pages slipped from her hand and fell to the floor. Together they knelt to pick them up. When Gabe’s hand brushed against hers, Lauren felt the burn of the contact all the way up her arm. She thought of them as they would be later that night, naked and entwined in her bed. Yes, she thought, she was definitely in lust.