The Salem Witch Society (10 page)

Lean took the ten-minute walk to Grey’s apartment on High Street. As he approached the building, he noticed a grubby-faced boy of about ten perched on the granite steps, a shoeshine box next to him.

When Lean started up the steps, the boy piped up. “You’re the cop come to see Mr. Grey, then?”

“Yes. How’d you know?”

“Mr. Grey said you’d look like a cop, with scuffed-up shoes.”

Lean chuckled. “Did Mr. Grey have anything useful to say?”

“He said I should charge you ten cents for a shine and this message.” The boy took a small folded note from his pocket and waved it.

Lean reached into his pocket to find a dime, then took the note. It was a rectangle of heavy-grade paper folded over with an ornate capital “G” pressed into the red wax seal. Lean broke it open with his thumbnail. “Dr. Steig’s—9 tonight. We begin in earnest.”

Lean looked up; the boy was already halfway down the block, shine box under his arm.

“Hey, kid! What about my shoes?”

T
om Doran stood silent
in the dim light of Maine General’s morgue. His selection of suits was somewhat limited, since tailoring to his size was expensive. Still, he wanted to dress for the somber occasion and had selected a decent imported worsted in a dark brown corkscrew pattern. It was not the first time he had ever been there. Working as muscle for Jimmy Farrell ensured that he made the trip down to claim a body every so often, whenever trouble broke out with McGrath’s outfit or some newcomers looking to make a name. Other times it would be a scrape between a few of Farrell’s young toughs, each with more thirst than brains. Sooner or later one would pull a blade. But this was the first time in almost twenty years he had come to collect the body of a woman.

“Right this way.” The morgue attendant led Doran past the covered bodies on the first two tables. He set his papers on the edge of the last table and lifted the sheet, folding it down to reveal nothing lower than the young woman’s chin. Tom Doran stared at the underfed face. His eyes moved over the sheet. It was hard to believe that such a small frame had actually held an entire soul just two days before.

Doran drew a gold picture locket from his coat. It looked absurdly small as he rolled it about in his massive, callused hand. Eventually he noticed that the attendant was staring, waiting for eye contact to be made. Doran nodded. “That’s her.” He tried not to think too much about where he was, tried to let his mind go blank.

The attendant replaced the sheet and gathered up his papers. He stared down at his clipboard while he talked. “Full name?”

“Margaret Keene.”

“You’re family?”

“Ahh … employer.”

“She have any family?”

“No.”

“Address?”

Doran paused. Maggie moved
around a lot, finding rooms or a spare bed wherever she could. Same as most of the girls. Of course, the answer didn’t really matter anymore, so Doran just picked a recent lodging. “Merrill Street.”

“Occupation?” The attendant peeked over his glasses as he asked the last question.

“Domestic,” said Doran. He kept his voice flat, not caring whether the little man believed him.

“If you can just mark here on the bottom line.”

“I can sign my name,” answered Doran, who focused and proceeded to do so. “I can take her now? If I bring my wagon around to the back door?”

“Oh, legally I can’t release the body to anyone other than a licensed undertaker. City ordinance. And of course there’s the standard two-dollar fee associated with the handling and the paperwork and whatnot, additional charges depending on where the body is delivered. Or we could make the arrangements and take care of things.”

“Arrangements?”

“Pauper’s grave. It’s what’s usually done for … domestics.”

Doran stared at the man, who looked away and cleared his throat.

“That is, it’s done sometimes when there’s no family.”

Doran produced two dollar bills and slapped them down into the attendant’s hand. “I’ll be back with the undertaker directly.”

As soon as Doran was out of sight, the attendant rang a thin bell cord. Within a minute a boy appeared at the doorway. The attendant handed him a quickly scrawled note.

“Take this to Dr. Steig at the Soldiers’ Home.”

H
elen Prescott’s eyes darted over the audience in the reading room on the first floor of the Portland Public Library. The twenty-eight-year-old assistant researcher at the Maine Historical Society was in charge of organizing the summer lecture series and had worn one of her handsomer suits for this evening’s event. The Assabet cloth was trimmed with Hercules braid and had a pointed waist, diagonally buttoned and trimmed to match the skirt, also braided in six wide rows along with knife plaiting at the bottom.

The chairs were
almost filled, and she glanced at the clock. It was just after eight. Her daughter, Delia, was staying with a neighbor for the evening, and Helen had promised to be home no later than nine thirty. Her boss, the speaker for tonight’s topic, nodded to signal his readiness, and Helen moved to the lectern at the front of the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen, friends of the Portland Public Library and the Maine Historical Society, and those who simply have a morbid curiosity.” Helen threw a smile at the audience of several dozen and was greeted with polite laughter. “I’d like to welcome you to the second of our Wednesday-evening lectures remembering the bicentennial of the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials. So now, without further ado, I present the society’s chief historian, Mr. F. W. Meserve.”

Helen sat where she could observe her boss, the audience, and also see into the lobby. The library was closed, but the front door was unlocked for any late arrivals to the lecture. She watched Meserve arrange himself at the podium. He was a paunchy fellow in a well-worn tweed coat. Thick glasses sat atop his upturned nose. A mustache with arrow-sharp tips stretched out across his pale, flabby face. Helen always had difficulty shaking the image of a highly literate mole that had burrowed up into a closet of ill-fitting clothes, then wandered blindly into the library.

“As we discussed last time, the witchcraft delusion of 1692 has rendered the name of Salem infamous throughout the world. Those who know nothing else of the history and character of New England surely know, and are pleased to remind us, that our Puritan ancestors hanged witches. We are familiar with the setting in Massachusetts, two hundred years ago: how political and religious persecutions, along with early hardships here, left the Puritan settlers with a gloomy, superstitious view of the world. To them, anything strange or outside the normal course of events was attributed to supernatural powers. They believed that the devil, having failed to prevent the progress of Christianity in Europe, had withdrawn into the American wilderness, to rule over his pagan Indian allies.”

Helen heard the
library front door open and close, followed by what she thought were hesitant footsteps. She craned her neck and waited for the person to come into view. It was a man in a dark wool coat with a flat cap pulled forward and wearing dark, tinted glasses. He paused for a second, looked in the doorway, and then moved off to a nearby bookshelf that held volumes related to the lecture series. Helen returned her attention to the lecture.

“I had planned to continue on with the course of chronological events,” Meserve said. “However, given the excitement caused within the city by the recent tragedy at the Portland Company, I thought I might seize this opportunity to speak on a related topic: the role of the Maine Indians in the Salem witch trials.”

The crowd members were a sufficiently staid lot that this announcement generated a murmur of anticipation. Helen was pleasantly surprised as well, not at the substance of the change in topic but by the fact that Meserve was claiming to have seized the opportunity. It’s not that her boss was a timid man, but he was so methodical and ponderous in his work that in her few years’ acquaintance she couldn’t recall him ever seizing an opportunity, a moment, or anything else to speak of.

“Though it is hard to imagine in our modern times, the wilderness of that age was a hostile place, home to a strange race of savages that were widely believed, even by the scholars of the day, to be worshippers of the devil. Within decades,” Meserve went on, “provocations on both sides led to a series of devastating wars. By the time of the witchcraft trials, there was hardly a town, or even a family, in all New England untouched by the violence. We Portlanders understand that history, our frontier town having been raided by Indians in 1676 and then wiped from the map in 1690. In fact, several of the most prominent figures in the Salem tragedy had close connections to Maine or were even refugees from here after those brutal Indian attacks. This fear of the Indians created such anxiety and paranoia in the minds of the populace that the stage was well set for the tragedy of Salem Village.”

Helen was having a
hard time focusing on the lecture. She knew that Meserve was doing his usual good job of quickly summarizing in minutes what seemed to occupy hundreds of pages in Charles Upham’s bloated and rambling two-volume opus,
Salem Witchcraft.
Instead she found her gaze returning to the lobby, where the latecomer seemed transfixed by the bookcase dedicated to treatises on Salem and the general history of witchcraft. There was something disturbing in his demeanor.

“It was during an early examination of Martha Corey that one of the afflicted girls added a new element of terror to the proceedings. She cried out that she could see a ‘black man’ whispering to the accused. This dark figure was understood by all to be the devil, or his servant. The term ‘black’ was commonly meant to refer to the dark complexion of the natives. This marked the first open connection between the two deadly threats facing the English: the spiritual war waged on them by the devil and the devastating attacks recently launched by the Indians along the northeastern frontier.

“The scope of the witchcraft investigations shifted dramatically again on April nineteenth, when teenager Abigail Hobbs, who already had a reputation for odd behavior, confessed to being a witch. She stated she had first seen the devil and had signed his book four years earlier while living here to the eastward at Casco Bay. Satan had taken the shape of a black man in a hat. This confession of the devil’s initial appearance at what is now Portland, a place of great conflict in both the Indian wars, proved to the people of Salem that there was a common source for the assaults launched by both the witches and the Abenakis.

“The next day Ann Putnam Jr. reported seeing an apparition of a minister who tormented her and tore her to pieces. She said his name was George Burroughs and that he had killed his first two wives as well as Reverend Lawson’s wife and child. Further, he had bewitched a great number of soldiers to their deaths on Sir Edmund Andros’s eastern Maine expedition years earlier.

“It is very likely that information on Burroughs had been provided by another of the afflicted teenage girls, Mercy Lewis. One of the more active accusers, she was a small child in Portland when our town was overrun by Indians in 1676. Several of her uncles, cousins, and grandparents were killed. Her own parents escaped with her to an island in Casco Bay with a party led by Burroughs, before moving to safety in Massachusetts. The Lewis family returned seven years later, and she actually lived in Burroughs’s house in Maine at some point. She would have been very well acquainted with the rumors and gossip that surrounded the man.”

The sound of a book
slapping against the floor of the lobby finally gave Helen enough reason to excuse herself from the lecture. Once in the lobby, she saw that the man had not yet retrieved the fallen book. She took a deep breath, trying to restrain her ire. After all, perhaps the man wore those tinted glasses due to some malady of the eyes that prevented him from picking it up. The more likely explanation was that he was drunk, or otherwise just too much of a discourteous lout to bother.

As she approached, she felt a twinge of remorse upon noting the wide scar that was visible around his eye despite the dark glasses. “Is there something I can help you with?”

The man looked at her and offered a thin, humorless smile. He was middle-aged, with short blond hair and a hard face. She couldn’t see his eyes, but the rest of his expression betrayed no real trace of interest in her. “No.”

It was a plain dismissal, and Helen was speechless for a moment. Her irritation at the man’s callousness returned even more forcefully for having been held in check.

“The library does actually close at eight o’clock on Mondays. Of course, you’re more than welcome to stay for the lecture.”

“Thank you, no.” He took a thin brown volume from the shelf. “Tell me, is this your full collection on the subject of occult matters?”

“No. Were you looking for something in particular?”

“Yes. An older book. Quite a bit older than these, I think.”

“What’s the title?” Helen asked.

“I’m afraid I can’t recall.”

“The author?”

The man shook his head.

“Well, I really don’t think I can help you tonight.”

“But you do have additional books? Older ones?”

Helen nodded. “In our special-collections room upstairs.”

The man looked toward
the staircase, his body leaning enough to make Helen think he might actually walk off in that direction.

“The head librarian will be available around ten in the morning to help you.” Helen motioned toward the front door. “Now, I really should be getting back to our speaker.”

“This book here”—the man motioned toward a shelf—“there’s a slip noting it’s on loan from a private library. But the owner’s name is missing.”

“Some patrons with extensive collections have loaned volumes to support our lectures on the Salem witch trials.”

“Personal collections? I’d like to see the names of those people.”

“Oh, I’m afraid I can’t do that. Several have contributed on the condition of anonymity.” Helen felt the weight of the man’s gaze on her, although more than once his head turned slightly as he glanced away from her. Helen listened, hoping someone was approaching, but in her gut she knew that the opposite was true. The man was looking to make certain there was no one else.