It may be most widely known as the site of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692, but this colorful, coastal city has much to offer both residents and visitors: a culturally diverse population, a rich maritime heritage, an impressive display of historic architecture and amazing stories that span almost four centuries.
—The Comprehensive Salem Guide
Callie drove from Northampton, pulling off the Mass Pike onto 128, then following Route 114 to Salem, missing a turn along the way and ending up down by the waterfront. She turned left and drove up by the common, circling the statue of Roger Conant to change direction and head back toward the station.
Rose is alive? How is that possible? They told me she was dead.
After the newscast had ended, Callie simply left the nursing home. She didn’t check in with her supervisor, the longtime prioress of both the nursing home and the children’s home where she’d spent most of her early years. Sister Mary Agatha was her name, but the girls at the home had nicknamed her Sister Mary Agony, and the name had stuck. Though a big part of her wanted to storm into Agony’s office and demand to know why they had lied to her, Callie couldn’t do it. Not right now. Not without losing it altogether. She just had to get out of there. She didn’t tell anyone she was leaving. Instead, she went home, packed an overnight bag, and started driving to a place she had once promised herself she would never set foot in again. She drove as if in a trance.
Rose was alive!
Salem didn’t look at all the way Callie remembered it from her childhood: a struggling city, a historic seaport that had seen better days, its harbor district dotted with hippie houses and a few witch shops. What she saw now was a collection of upscale shops, restaurants, and restored homes whose grandeur rivaled the antebellum mansions of the south. Witch kitsch was liberally scattered through the downtown landscape, along with haunted houses and psychic reading studios.
Though Callie had only a handful of memories from her life in Salem, the moments she remembered were vivid and crystal clear, more like snapshots or videos capturing precise moments in time, with no trace of what came between. Her therapists—she’d had a few; the nuns had seen to that—had tried to get her to fill in the blanks, to paint a more comprehensive picture for them, but Callie hadn’t seen the point. The few times she’d tried their exercise, it felt contrived or, worse, as if she were picking up their cues, giving them what they wanted in a effort to satisfy their morbid curiosity about what happened that night. Eventually she’d stopped therapy and stopped thinking about it altogether. Callie was a practical girl. Re-creating the worst time in her life had done little to heal her; all it did was keep reminding her. If there were times she couldn’t remember, it was just as well.
She did remember Rose, though. Not as much from the night of the murders as from before them. Rose had been a respected scholar of the Salem witch trials who had written several books on the subject and opened a research library in Salem, a place Callie’s mother and her friends referred to simply as the center. People came from all over the world to research the witch trials, both for scholarly purposes and to look up the history of their ancestors. Each of the girls on the hill that night had initially come to the center looking for information about her ancestors, leapfrogging over present-day branches of family in favor of finding roots that traced back to 1692. In that way, Rose had always supposed that the girls were all a family of a sort, and she’d treated them as if she were their mother.
To the rest of the city, Rose had been professional, coldly academic, and dedicated to her research. She’d kept Salem’s elite at a distance. But she’d been different with the girls and even more different with Callie.
Callie remembered how Rose would pick her up from school and the two of them would go walking all over the city together before they made their way back to their house on Daniels Street. It had always been Rose who came for her, or almost always. It certainly hadn’t been her mother, Olivia. She could see Rose’s long braid swinging as they strolled and felt her own shorter, curly ponytail keeping the same rhythm. Auntie Rose had liked to tie Callie’s hair with a satin ribbon, a different color for every day of the week.
Callie took a right onto Derby Street, careful not to miss it this time, and turned right again on Central, following it to the police station. But the station had moved; the building was condos now. She pulled into a space and leaned out the window, asking the first man who passed by for directions, smiling flirtatiously to get his attention and nodding encouragingly as he gave her directions to the new station. She felt his disappointment as she pulled the car away.
She had to circle Riley Plaza twice before she spotted the broadcast vans blocking the stairs. She found a space, locked the Volvo, then elbowed her way through the news crews and up the stairs to the front desk.
“I’m here to see Rose Whelan,” she announced.
“We told you all to wait outside,” the desk officer said. “We’re not dealing with any more reporters today.”
“I’m not a reporter,” Callie explained. “I’m her niece.”
It was a small lie but an effective one. The officer looked surprised. Then he picked up a phone and punched in some numbers.
“I’ve got a girl out here says she’s the banshee’s niece.”
A moment later the door opened and a tall man who seemed to duck more from habit than from necessity stepped through the doorway. He was muscular with bristly dark hair and brown eyes, good-looking in a rough way. He looked as if he were born with the jaded expression that defined his face.
“Rose has no family that I’m aware of,” he said.
“My name is Callie Cahill,” she said, working to keep her demeanor smooth; her therapists had always told her she was very good at hiding her anxiety. She could tell he recognized the name. “I’m not technically her niece—”
“John Rafferty,” he said, holding the door for her as he showed her into his office, then closing it quickly against the officers who had started to gather.
Though he knew the name, he was still suspicious. “You sure you’re not just some reporter pretending to be Callie Cahill?”
“Far from it,” she said. Instead of explaining further, she shoved her hand across the desk, opening her clenched fist to expose her palm.
The stigmata. This was the part of the story that everyone had heard about and what everyone wanted to see. The nuns at St. James’s had claimed it was a miracle when they found Callie the morning after the homicides, calling her a “sacred child” who had been saved from death by the mark of Christ. They’d worked closely with DCF to have Callie entrusted to their group home in western Massachusetts, promising to find her suitable foster care. They had probably thought they’d discovered a church miracle right here in Salem. But later, as the murder investigation had gotten under way and the grim details of the Goddess Murders had come out, rumors had begun to circulate about the “occult ceremony” the young women and Rose had performed on that Halloween night, and she remembered how quickly the narrative had turned.
Rafferty averted his eyes as if the looking itself was a violation. “Is it painful?”
His question took Callie by surprise. She considered it for a long moment before answering. “Sometimes.” She felt awkward and quickly changed the subject, bringing it back to Rose. “How did the boy on the hill die?”
“I can’t tell you that yet.”
“The news called Rose a killer banshee.”
“Yes, they did.”
“What does that mean?”
“Rose says she had to kill the boy because he was turning.”
“Turning? What does that mean?”
“At this point we don’t know what she meant by that. She also claims to have killed him by screaming at him. Which we all know is impossible.”
For a moment, it occurred to Callie that Rafferty might be wrong. The human voice could shatter glass, couldn’t it? Hadn’t she heard something about governments testing sonic weapons with the capacity to both maim and kill? Sound certainly had the ability to heal; she’d used it herself many times at the nursing home. If sound could heal, couldn’t it also kill? But even if it were a possibility, the Rose Whelan that Callie remembered was not capable of intentionally killing anyone.
“Who is the boy?”
“He’s—was—the grandnephew of a local Brahmin.”
“What do you mean?”
“A bad kid from a good family.”
“Does Rose say why she thinks she’s responsible?”
“Rose isn’t saying anything at the moment. I think she believes a banshee that lives inside of her killed him.”
Callie stared at him.
“How much do you know about Rose?” Rafferty asked.
“Up until today, I thought Rose was dead.”
Rafferty looked surprised.
“That’s what the nuns at the children’s home told me. My mother and Cheryl and Susan were all dead. And so was Auntie Rose. Or so they said.”
“They lied to you?”
“Evidently.”
“Rose isn’t well,” Rafferty explained. “She hasn’t been the same since that night in 1989.”
“I’ll bet,” Callie said. How could Rose be the same? How could anyone?
“You were there that night. What happened? What kind of ritual were you performing up there?”
She stared at him. His tone sounded vaguely accusatory. It reminded her of the nuns. “We went there to bless the unconsecrated grave of our ancestors,” Callie replied. “Five accused witches who were executed on July nineteenth, 1692.” She’d recited the story so many times after the murders that it seemed almost like one of the poems she’d memorized as a child.
“Rose had a breakdown,” Rafferty said. “She was in a state hospital for a long time. When she came out, she wasn’t the same woman. She also believed it was a banshee that killed your mother and the others.”
“I just heard that,” Callie admitted. “I’m not quite sure what that means. Especially in relation to Rose.”
“According to Irish folklore, a banshee is a kind of specter who appears to those left behind when a loved one dies. But Rose’s mythology takes things a step further. She believes banshees can kill, if they inhabit a human host who is ‘turning.’ ”
“What does that mean?”
“Rose thinks it was a banshee that killed your mother and the others that night, and, after that happened, the banshee jumped into Rose, who has been holding her captive for all these years in an effort to keep her from killing again.”
“That’s crazy.”
“This is what she believes. I’ve known Rose for a while, but it’s difficult to understand her sometimes.”
The Rose that Callie remembered had never been difficult to understand. Rose was direct, precise. If anything, it had been the other women, Callie’s mother and her friends, who were sometimes confusing.
Callie struggled to recall Rose’s tales about fairies and mythology. A lot of those stories were Irish, probably passed down through Rose’s family, though Rose had grown up here. But all those stories were fairy tales or old myths Rose told her at bedtime. Auntie Rose had been quite the storyteller, but not in a way that was confusing or hard to understand. “She used to talk about fairies sometimes,” Callie offered. “But I don’t remember anything about banshees.”
“I know a little about them,” Rafferty said. “But I’ve never heard anyone but Rose suggest that banshees are killers in any traditional sense. Or human, for that matter.”
Once again, Callie fell silent. Finally she pulled herself back from the dark place her imagination was leading her to. “Can I see her?”
“Of course. I’ll drive you over to the hospital.”
Rafferty parked in a spot marked MEDICAL STAFF ONLY, pulling in too fast and slamming on the brakes, jolting them forward in the seat, then back.
“Sorry,” he said.
Callie looked out her window at Salem Hospital. The place she remembered had been much smaller. She’d stayed in the children’s wing for a few weeks. Long enough for the nuns who had discovered her standing by the edge of the crevasse, with her hand cut and bleeding, to change their opinion of her: She’d gone from sainted to tainted in their eyes. People had kept coming and going: police, newspaper reporters, even clergy, unwrapping her bandage and making her show her wound over and over. She’d answered all their questions and told the truth repeatedly. But now she knew the nuns had lied to her. Those first days had been a bad dream: walking the entire length of the small hospital with the nurse who’d treated her, just trying to understand what had happened, telling the story again and again until it began to sink in that the whole thing was true, that they were all dead: Susan, Cheryl, and her mother, Olivia. They hadn’t told her about Rose right away, hadn’t said she was dead until they had taken her away from Salem, to their group home in Northampton, where nuns of the same order could protect her from the wild speculation and accusations that were to follow.
Today she could see that the hospital was huge, with many new wings and a big sign advertising its association with Mass General.
“Are those more news vans?” Callie asked, pointing.
“They are. Let’s get inside.”
The hospital was built into the side of a hill, with its main entrance at the top on the sixth floor. They took an unmarked stairway up one flight to the psych unit, pausing to be buzzed in at two different locked doors before they finally reached the nurses’ station.
“This is Rose Whelan’s niece,” Rafferty said to the nurse at the desk. “Her closest relation.” He didn’t look at Callie as he repeated the lie.
“You can go in,” the nurse said, “but only for a few minutes. Ten tops. I’m afraid there’s been no change.”
The officer they’d posted outside of Rose’s door jolted awake as they approached and threw them a guilty glance. Rafferty nodded without acknowledging the slip. He hesitated, turning to Callie. “We are required by law to have a guard outside a murder suspect’s room,” he said. Then, as if to redeem himself, he added, “I called a lawyer for her this time. Before we even tried to talk to her. A good one who’s defending her pro bono.” He opened the door.
Callie had seen Rose’s photo on the news, but she wasn’t prepared for the scene before her: Rose was in four-point restraints. Her empty eyes stared at the ceiling, unblinking.
“She’s been this way since last night,” Rafferty explained.
If she was aware they had entered the room, Rose showed no sign. Rafferty saw the look of devastation on Callie’s face and realized she needed a moment. “I have to make a phone call,” he said. “I’ll leave you two alone.”
Callie didn’t know what she’d been expecting; still, this was worse than anything she could have anticipated. Rose isn’t here was the thought that came to mind. She felt her throat closing with the effort it took to hold back tears. In the last few hours, all she’d wanted was to have Rose back in her life. She chastised herself for such a stupid hope. She approached the bed. “It’s me, Auntie Rose. It’s Callie. I’m here.”
She leaned down, trying to penetrate the empty stare, to see past the blankness of Rose’s eyes to something behind them. Rose’s eyes had always been so clear, so focused. Her mother and the other Goddesses had nicknamed her Old Eagle Eyes, because nothing got by her. Not ever, much to their chagrin.
“What happened to you?” Callie whispered. And then she sobbed in a way that erased all of the years she had put between herself and the worst moment of her life.
The lesser of two evils. Rafferty couldn’t get the phrase out of his head.
In all the commotion, he’d never called Towner back. He dialed her number on his cell.
“Sorry,” he said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I saw the news.” Then she continued. “So the little girl who witnessed the murders is back in town?”
“Was that on the news?” Rafferty sounded horrified.
“No.”
“Then how do you know she’s here?”
“I just know,” she said.
He shook his head. He’d seen Towner do this many times—know about things before being told—but it still surprised him every time it happened.
Most of what Rafferty knew about the 1989 case, he’d learned from his wife. Towner hadn’t lived in Salem at the time of the murders, but her grandmother Eva, who had been a friend of Rose’s, had told her the story.
On the way back down the stairs, Callie stopped and turned to Rafferty. “Why would they lie to me? Why would they tell me Rose was dead? She was like my mother. I’ve missed her for so long, and she’s been right here? Why would they do that?”
Rafferty had no idea what to say. It was clear from what he’d heard about the case that Callie had been traumatized. But that anyone would lie like that to a child seemed cruel. Especially since Rose would have been the only person Callie had left. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a half-empty packet of tissues, and handed them to her. “It’s good for Rose that you’re here now.”
Neither of them spoke as they rode back to the station; Callie kept her face turned toward her side window, and Rafferty noticed her taking in everything as they passed.
“Where are you parked?” he asked as they pulled into the lot at the station. Callie pointed. Her face and neck were blotchy, her eyes bloodshot.
“Is that hotel down on the common still open?”
“You’re staying?”
“If I can find a room.” She pointed to the back lot. “My car’s over there.”
He nodded. Then, changing his mind, he U-turned and pulled out of the lot. “We’ll get your car later. There’s someone I want you to meet first.”
Rafferty drove them away from the police station and across town to Salem Common, passing the elegant old Hawthorne Hotel and pulling instead into the long driveway of a massive brick house.
Callie read a sign posted on the side door: EVA’S LACE READER TEAROOM.
“That’s the place,” said Rafferty.
At the end of the driveway, they stopped in front of a smaller coach house. A lean woman with strawberry blond hair stood on a stepladder next to a huge oak tree at the entrance to the courtyard, scrubbing at graffiti that had been spray-painted on its bark.
“Damn it,” Rafferty muttered.
It took Callie a minute to realize that the defaced area looked like a rose. Not like the stylized, five-petaled rose on her palm, but a more realistic one, complete with thorns and an inscription: Kill the banshee!
“Don’t worry. I’ll try painting over it if I can find a color that matches the bark,” the woman said to Rafferty as he got out of the car. She climbed down from the ladder, handing Rafferty the bucket. She kissed him hello, then turned to look at Callie.
“Callie, this is my wife, Towner Whitney. Towner, this is Callie.” Seeing some girls from the tearoom, he stopped short of saying her last name. Towner saw his look and picked up the cue.
Towner extended her hand. “How nice to meet you, Callie. I only wish the circumstances were better.”
“Me, too,” said Callie.
“I thought I’d help Callie book a hotel room,” Rafferty said.
“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Towner said. “You don’t have to pay for a hotel. You can use Rose’s room.”
“I thought you might say that.” Rafferty smiled.
“Rose lives here?” Callie asked, pressing her palms together as she spoke. “On the news they said she was homeless.”
“Well…usually, she sleeps in our courtyard under her tree.” Towner pointed to the huge oak. “That oak actually belongs to Rose. But that’s a story for another day.” She smiled, gesturing to the door. “We set aside a room for her in the house. She sleeps there sometimes. When I can convince her to. Please, come on inside.”
Rafferty and Callie followed Towner up the front steps and into the foyer, where a spiral staircase wound three flights upward, seemingly suspended in the air surrounding it. On either side of the foyer were two matching parlors the size of ballrooms with a black marble fireplace at each end.
“I’ve been here before,” Callie murmured.
“You have, actually.” Towner nodded. “My grandmother once told me that you and your mother stayed in this house for a little while, before you moved in with Rose.”
“I don’t remember that,” Callie said. “But I know I’ve seen that staircase.”
“Rose’s room is two flights up.”
“I’ll leave you two ladies to it,” said Rafferty, excusing himself.
The women took the stairs to a large room with a comfortable-looking bed and a sink in the corner. Lining the walls were framed black-and-white photos of oak trees.
“Did Rose take these?”
Towner shook her head. “I took them. I was trying to lure Rose indoors. It didn’t do much good, I’m afraid. She only comes up here when it’s raining so hard it floods the parks.”
“Strange,” Callie said, unaware she had said the word aloud until she heard her voice echo in the huge room.
“Rose has a mission.”
“What kind of mission?”
“She believes she can find the remains of the hanging tree that was used to execute the victims of the witch trials in 1692. The one that either died or was chopped down—back in, well, no one knows when. She had a vision that the tree was intentionally moved, and she’s set her heart on finding it. She thinks it will lead her to the missing remains of those executed in 1692.”
Callie looked surprised. “How would that work?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Rose believes the oak trees of Salem hold some clue.” Towner looked at Callie before continuing. “She says the trees speak to her.”
“Oh,” Callie said.
“She’s had a tough time of it in the last few years.”
“So I’ve heard.” Callie’s trembling voice belied her calm words. “Still, talking trees…”
“I know,” Towner said. “Sometimes I almost believe her. I think my grandmother Eva did.”
“Really?” Callie said.
“Eva and Rose had a special connection.”
Callie waited for Towner to explain, but she didn’t.
“Rose considers finding the hanging tree her life’s work. The way she once felt about proving the real site of the executions, something she actually managed to do. I can’t figure out how finding the remains of missing victims of the Salem witch trials relates to modern-day oak trees. Or to banshees, for that matter, but I know it must. Or at least it does in Rose’s mind. Maybe you’ll have better luck finding a connection. If you can get her to start talking again.”
There was a long silence as Callie remembered how different Rose had been the last time they’d seen each other, before today. She had taught Callie and her mother so much, telling them stories, and Rose had instructed them all in the history of their ancestors, a history that, even now, Callie could recite the same way she could recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Or the Lord’s Prayer. Rose, not the nuns who ended up raising her, had taught her that prayer. To think of Rose as she’d seen her today made Callie almost unbearably sad.
“I recognize that,” Callie said, fighting tears and gesturing to the opposite side of the room. Framed on the wall was a map depicting Salem as it was in the 1600s, before landfill wiped out most of the North River. “I was raised on that map. Rose used it when she taught us lessons about our ancestors.”
“Sidney Perley’s map? Rose gave it to me,” Towner said. “She said she knew every inch of it by heart.”
“I wouldn’t doubt that at all,” Callie said, looking at the spot Rose had circled in red and labeled “Proctor’s Ledge,” the same location they had gone to the night of the murders, near where the map depicted Town Bridge. A snippet of poetry came back to her. Something written by Sidney Perley. Poetry! the gem that gilds / The world of letters, and gives / Expression to soul beauty. It was one of the first poems Rose had ever made her memorize. She could see the book in her memory, its fraying leather cover and broken spine: The Poets of Essex County.
She touched the circle on the map and remembered Rose sitting her down for her lessons. Teaching her to read before she attended school by memorizing poems and then reciting them, something her mother and her friends had found very amusing. When Rose wasn’t home, her mother’s friends had asked her to recite for them—sometimes in front of guests, sometimes for their own amusement. Rose had also taught her history, the real history of what happened in Salem.
“As I’m sure you remember, Rose was once an important scholar of the witch trials,” Towner said, as if reading her young guest. “She uncovered so many discrepancies between the historical records and their accepted interpretations. When she was a professor at BU, she was awarded research grants from the Massachusetts Historical Society and honors from the Smithsonian, for God’s sake. People forget just how important she was.”
Callie remembered a few of the things Rose had told her about her research. How Puritan Salem had kept detailed expense records. And that none of those records mentioned any gallows being built, which had led her to conclude that it was far more likely the Puritans used a sturdy hardwood, possibly an oak, to hang the accused. How written accounts claimed one could see the bodies hanging all the way over from North Street. This public spectacle had been required by law, a warning to others of the consequences that befell those who signed the Devil’s book. “Those bodies would not have been visible from Gallows Hill,” Rose had always said. Since the accused would have been transported by cart, and since such transportation had been difficult, Rose had believed the condemned would have been taken to the first place beyond city limits with a hill visible from town, not Gallows Hill, but the actual hanging spot, one far more accessible by horse and cart back in 1692.
“Sorry. Let me climb down from my soapbox and show you where the bathroom is,” Towner said, reading Callie’s agitation at recalling this much information. She walked Callie down the hall. A woman was coming out as they approached. She nodded to Towner but looked at Callie with suspicion before moving on. “It’s a shared space,” Towner said. “I hope that’s okay.”
“It’s okay with me if it’s okay with her,” Callie said. Towner opened the linen closet. “Clean towels and sheets are in here, though your bed was changed this morning.” She paused, considering before she spoke again. “Most of the women who live here are from Yellow Dog Island.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a shelter for abused women that my family runs. The ones who are ready to come back to the world sometimes live here and work in the tearoom. It’s a reentry program of sorts. So don’t take it personally if they seem skittish. It’s not you. I’ll introduce you tomorrow—but only by first names. Most of them are part of the Domestic Violence Victims Protection Program. Their identities are kept secret in case their abusers are trying to locate them. So it won’t be odd that I don’t use your last name.”
Callie was familiar with the program and with this type of abuse victim; she’d once volunteered as a music therapist at a shelter in Northampton.
Towner looked at her, then, keeping her voice lowered, she added, “You might not want to tell people your last name anyway. There are a lot of people in town who still remember what happened.”
Callie was quiet as Towner walked her back to her room. At the doorway, she paused, as if to ask a question, then changed her mind. “Thank you for this. I’ll get a hotel room if I’m still here tomorrow.”
“Let’s see what happens with Rose. Her room is yours for as long as you want to stay.”
“Thank you,” Callie said.
“John and I live in the coach house. I don’t know if you’re hungry, but we’re cooking tonight if you want to join us.”
“I’m really tired,” Callie said. It was true. She hadn’t realized how true until she’d heard herself say it.
“Okay, then, just rest. You can raid the fridge downstairs if you wake up starving. I open the tearoom from seven to eight thirty for the hungry and destitute. And then again at ten for our regular customers. If you’re in the first group, you eat free and help serve or clean up. In the second, you pay for your breakfast. The menu’s pretty much the same, so you can decide which category you belong in tomorrow morning. Personally, on any given day, I can fit into either one.”
Callie tried to smile.
“Nice to finally meet you, Callie,” Towner said again. “I’m glad John brought you home.” She was gone then, disappearing down the long staircase.
Callie sat on the bed, looking out the window at the common, with its huge trees and decorative cast-iron fence. In the center of the park was a bandstand. Callie didn’t remember staying in this house with Eva, but she did recall a night when she and her mother had slept on the cold floor of that bandstand, before Auntie Rose had given them a place to live.
Exhausted but far from sleep, she realized her bag was still in her car. She was too tired to walk back and get it, and she didn’t want to bother Rafferty again. She looked through Rose’s closet for something to wear, and, finding nothing, she undressed and hung up her clothes, crawling between the sheets in her underwear. She tried to focus her thoughts on Rose, tried to remember all she could about the woman who was once like a second mother to her. She knew they had some common ancestors. Hanging from each of their family trees was the name Rebecca Nurse. That genealogical connection was how she and Olivia had come to call Rose “Auntie.”
All of the young women who had died that night had ancestors who had been executed on the same day in 1692. That was how they had found one another, why Rose had gotten to know the girls who became regulars at the center. Most had little education and lacked any background in research, so she had coached them, taking them first under her wing, and later, when she’d come to know their circumstances, into her home. In that way, Callie felt Rose and Towner were a bit alike. That was probably one reason Callie liked Towner immediately. It seemed as if both Towner and Rose were dedicated to helping the less fortunate citizens of Salem. Callie hoped Towner’s luck would be better than Rose’s had turned out to be.
Callie started to doze, then jolted awake when she heard a snapping sound. She turned on a light but saw nothing. It was the dream again. That sound was always part of the dream, branches and twigs snapping. Followed by a squirrel scrambling up a nearby tree.
She remembered hearing a snapping sound that Halloween night just before everything happened. Was it only a squirrel? Her memory was reaching too far back, getting too specific. She would not allow herself to remember that part of her past, not tonight. She had to keep from going there. She would fight to stay in the here and now….
Every time she started to sleep, another memory jolted her awake, some detail she’d forgotten, some lesson Rose had taught her. More snippets of poetry: Longfellow, Emerson, Yeats. Rose teaching her to sound out words. Her mother and the others laughing until they cried as she tried to pronounce the new words they’d ask her to recite.
Her hand started to burn, the same way it had when feeling finally started coming back to it after the murders. It had been numb for a long time, more than a year. The doctors had told her that the scarred palm would probably remain numb forever, but, one day, it started to tingle, and then to ache, and finally to burn. The burning went on for weeks before feeling came back completely.
She rubbed at her hand, then buried it palm up under the cool of the feather pillow, the way she’d learned to at the home. If she could get it in the right position, the burning would stop.
Just before she fell asleep and began to dream, she remembered something Sister Agony had said when she’d cried about her burning hand. “They didn’t hang witches back in Europe the way they did your ancestors,” she told Callie. “In Europe, they burned witches at the stake.”
He rowed down the North River, his palms blistered and burning from the six-mile voyage. Heaving the boat ashore, he quickly began to climb the hill, his dread building as he neared the pit. He dared not look up at the hanging tree: Its very existence filled him with rage. Instead, he kept his eyes low, searching for the crevasse where they had thrown his mother, hesitating before he lowered himself among the bodies. There were far too many dead, and the pit was deep. He felt his way among the corpses, touching first a cold leg, then an arm. He followed the skin, and his fingers touched her face. It was Susannah Martin. He gasped as he saw her blackened tongue, her bulging eyes…He began to choke, huge wrenching sobs. He had to leave her here. He only had strength enough to carry one body, and it was his mother, Rebecca, for whom he had come. Even as he told himself he would return for the others, he knew he would not. It would be too dangerous to come back to Salem Town. He had to find his mother, take her home, and give her a proper Christian burial. Standing deep in the crevasse, surrounded by bodies, he searched until he found the hand he knew so well, a hand that had so often held his own. He couldn’t see her face: In its mercy, the sky had darkened against the vision he had no fortitude to bear. With the last of his strength, he hoisted his mother’s stiffening body onto his back and made his way down the hill to the rowboat.