The task of the banshee is twofold: to sing souls across the divide between the living and the dead, and to ease the hearts of those they leave behind.

—ROSE’S Book of Trees

Callie sat at the partners desk in the library while her husband napped on the huge leather couch. Paul was still recuperating. Every day she treated him with the singing bowls—not in the spa but in the orangerie. Once it had been Emily’s favorite room, now it was hers. They never talked anymore about returning to Matera. The lure of Pride’s Heart was far too strong. Since they’d moved in, she’d discovered many places in the house she adored, but she hadn’t set foot in the cellars again. She doubted she ever would.

She felt the changes in herself, the heightened connection to everything around her: the oak, newly planted where Rose’s oak had once stood, and the owl who had taken up residence in its young branches. She could hear their whispers to each other carried on the breeze from the harbor. She felt the turning of tides in the pulsing of her own blood.

And she could see death on people she met now; she knew how and when they would die, and how gently their passings would go. Unlike Rose, she didn’t tell the truth she knew they had no capacity to understand. Today, as she was talking with Rafferty, she’d seen how he would meet his final end. He would live a long and happy life and die in his nineties, his grown daughter, grandchildren, and Towner at his bedside.

She wondered about Rose’s goddess, real or imagined; about the diminishment and the turning. Just as she knew it was possible for healthy cells to vibrate an unhealthy cell back into balance, she now wondered if it would be possible to return the goddess, who had turned killer, to one who was both powerful and compassionate—and if it was possible to hold her in stillness long enough to try.

In the meantime, she had set up practice in Salem, and returned to working with the elderly and the ailing. She’d begun to treat the dying as well, spending part of each day in music therapy with hospice patients, comforting their pain and easing their passage.

Today, she sat at the computer, finishing a thank-you e-mail to the mayor of Salem and another to the group of scholars who had confirmed, once and for all, that, as Rose had always insisted, it was Proctor’s Ledge and not Gallows Hill that was the real hanging site of 1692. The same group had planned the plaque to commemorate that spot. Downtown, there was already a larger, serene memorial where the tourists could linger, but honoring this true place was long overdue.

The first thing Callie had done when she’d taken over the Whiting Foundation was to offer funds to help make the memorial happen. She hoped it would lift the curse that seemed to plague that neighborhood and lessen the collective guilt that Salem still suffered. Whether the tourists ever visited it or not, the city needed this for itself and for all the descendants of those who had been lost.

Callie finished her last e-mail, hit send, then checked in on Paul, who was sleeping soundly.

She made herself a cup of tea and sat looking out at the water. Then she opened Rose’s Book of Trees. Gazing into the space between the branches, she finally saw what Rose had been depicting since the night of the murders. She took out her pen, turned to an empty page, and began to translate into prose the mysterious puzzle she was just beginning to understand.

I am a cipher…