The Salem Witch Society (36 page)

Grey smiled. “Our killer is obsessed with George Burroughs; he’s aware of this supposed book of black magic that the reverend could use to raise the dead. He must think this is it, that these burned pages are from Burroughs’s witch book and he too can use it to summon some dark spirit.”

Lean pounded the side of his fist onto the desk. “He’s not the only one thinking that. Helen’s scare in the library that night—Simon Gould was sent to look for an old book on magic. It can’t be a coincidence. He was after these same pages. Hopefully we’ve found them before Colonel Blanchard.”

“Not that finding them has helped us any. It’s all a muddle,” Helen said.

Lean sat down and weighed an idea in his head for a moment before speaking. “You know, sometimes I don’t truly grasp the depths of a poem’s meanings until I’ve spoken the words. Lifted them off the page and breathed a bit of life into them.”

Helen picked up the page and read it out loud. She looked up at Lean, awaiting some response. His mind raced. Hearing the words spoken had provided no new sudden lightning flash of understanding. He was left with the same general conclusions he had reached when reading the page
himself earlier. “There is a pattern in the paragraphs. A repeating rhythm to the entries.”

“An order of months,” Grey said. “Then a location, a city, is identified, followed by an action by this master. A reference to visibility and seeing a person who makes a request, which is denied. An offering is taken, and then mention is made of a drink being prepared.”

“The murders have occurred every month,” Lean said, “though not exactly a month apart.” Grey knew his thoughts on this already, so Lean glanced at Helen and explained. “I’ve been poring over the calendar, trying to find some pattern—number of days, days of the week, full moons. There was a full moon when Hannah Easler was killed in Scituate. But nothing else fits.”

“Full moon,” Helen repeated. She glanced back at the page. “The first month mentions ‘full’ twice. It says: ‘I saw full the sister … ’ and then, ‘She bade me await the fullness for her offering.’ I suppose it could mean something.”

Grey stepped forward to look at Helen’s page. He ran a finger down through the lines. “In the second month … ‘There still clearly did I see the man …’” His finger swept on down the page. “Then, ‘In the third month of my travels … There in the half-light did I see the child Zealot.’”

“Full moon, to still clear, then to half-light. What were the moon phases on the nights of the other murders?” Lean asked.

“I have an almanac,” Helen volunteered. She moved to her bookshelf and searched for a moment before seizing the thin volume.

“June fourteenth for Maggie Keene,” Lean announced.

Helen began to flip through the pages as she wandered back toward them. “That would have been just four days past full.”

“And July sixteenth for Lizzie Madson.”

Helen’s face wrinkled up in disagreement. “It says that was the last quarter. Not half.”

“The lunar cycle is measured from new moon to full and back again, so the full moon is halfway through the cycle,” Grey explained. “What’s called a quarter is actually a moon that’s half lit.”

“So far we’ve had
full moon to about three-fourths lit to a half moon,” Lean said.

“Now we’re looking for August.” Helen turned the page and studied the almanac. “When the moon’s midway between half lit and new. That would be maybe August nineteenth, or the twentieth. It’s hard to be exact.”

“We have a few weeks, but no idea where he’ll strike.” Lean picked up the page containing the riddle. “He mentions Rome and Constantinople and Tridentum, wherever that is.”

“The cities are distractions,” Grey said, “but he also mentions another location—the place of his master’s birth. The first murder was in Scituate.”

“George Burroughs’s birthplace,” Lean said, and then he stared down at the page. “Second month is the place where the master first took life and himself accepted the Lord of the Air. An old name for the devil, eh? Well, Maggie Keene was killed on the old site of Burroughs’s meeting house.”

Helen said, “There were several allegations at Salem that Burroughs murdered two of his wives, one in the town of Wells, and also the wife and child of another Salem minister. And that he caused the deaths of many soldiers at the hands of Indians to the eastward, meaning Maine. But I don’t recall anything specific to the meetinghouse area.”

Lean let out a disappointed grumble. “The third month—‘where the Master’s powers were beheld, the skies made to tremble, and the Master compelled the hosts of the air.’ A perfect match for Witchtrot Hill!”

“It doesn’t help us, I’m afraid,” Grey said. “Those cover only the first three months. We’re facing the fourth month’s murder now. We need to find out what book this page came from and locate a complete copy for ourselves. Without the next paragraph, we’d be guessing at what event from the reverend’s life is indicated next. The site may be in Portland or Salem, but it could well be in a dozen different spots throughout New England.”

“So now what?” Lean said.

“I’ll look
for information on this book,” Helen said. “My boss, Mr. Meserve, is quite an expert on the colonial period in Maine. He may be able to help, if I can share the page you discovered.”

Grey nodded his assent. “We’ll also need your assistance on an additional path of inquiry.”

“Which is what exactly?” she asked.

“The one that brought us here tonight in the first place.”

T
he
following
Friday, Helen
sat on the warm grass in front of the strategically located headstone of a long-dead woman she had never known. She cast glances at another nearby visitor to the Evergreen Cemetery. That woman, Miss Rachel Blanchard, had approached almost half an hour earlier and spent several minutes removing the old flowers, pulling a few weeds, and offering prayers. She had remained sitting next to the headstone of her mother, Agnes Blanchard, ever since.

At thirty yards, Helen was far enough away to be inconspicuous but too far to hear the young woman, who appeared to be speaking in hushed tones. Rachel Blanchard was dressed in black, with her hair pulled back and hidden under a mourning bonnet, revealing a high forehead. Her face was plain, with close-set eyes and a small mouth. Helen thought the woman had the look of a stolid, dutiful daughter, but there was no keenness in her expression, no hint of particularly deep currents of thought. At last the woman rose up and rested her hands atop the gravestone, offering one last prayer. Rachel Blanchard’s body began to shake slightly, and she bowed her head. She reached into her purse and removed a kerchief to dab at her eyes, then turned to go.

Helen walked after her. Rachel slowed a bit and moved to rest a hand against a tree to support herself.

Helen hurried forward. “Here, dear, are you well?”

“Oh, thank you. Yes, I’ll be fine. Just a bit overcome.”

“Don’t apologize. I understand. Visiting your late husband?”

“Oh, no. Mother.”

“It’s so difficult sometimes,” Helen said. “Here, take my arm. We can walk together.”

“You’re most kind.”

“Oh, think nothing of it. I’d prefer it myself. I always feel so lonely on the
walk away. Like I’ve left a bit of myself down there with him, every time I visit. Isn’t that terribly silly?”

“No, not at all,” Rachel Blanchard said. “I know what you mean. Your husband, then?”

“No, my brother, actually.” Helen walked in silence for several steps. “He was such a sweet boy when he was younger. Sadly, he was a bit troubled in later years. Of course he’s gone to a much happier place now. I suppose it’s just me being selfish, but I do sometimes wish he were still here with me, even if he was being a bit of trouble, as he usually could be. I suppose that’s always the way with younger brothers.”

“Yes. It seems to be.”

“You have a brother, do you?”

“Yes. Geoffrey.” After a few more steps, Rachel tilted her head in toward Helen in a conspiratorial manner. “Don’t think me a terribly horrid sister to say such a thing, but sometimes I do wonder if … if it wouldn’t have been for the best if he had died along with our mother.”

“I’d put her in her mid to late thirties and her brother, Geoffrey, several years younger. He was always his mother’s child. She favored him, and he was devoted to her. When she died, Geoffrey was inconsolable with rage and grief, just couldn’t let her go. When he was older, he saw every spiritualist in the state trying to contact her again.”

Lean sat up at that news, his eyes shooting over to Grey, ready to give him a triumphant, just-as-I-suspected look. But Grey’s head was tilted back a bit, and he was staring at some point on the ceiling.

Helen continued. “At some point their father would no longer tolerate his grieving. He said Geoffrey’s stubborn refusal to come to terms with the loss and accept the matter as final revealed a disturbing weakness of spirit. Trips away to relatives failed to cure him. He was always shuttled back, the relations being unable to deal with the boy’s morbid outbursts. He was sent to schools throughout the northeast, but never for long. There were incidents, more than one, the nature of which she wouldn’t say
but grave enough that the boy was sent on rather quickly. He was enrolled in the army but discharged for medical reasons. Finally, at his wit’s end and thoroughly shamed by his son’s behavior, Colonel Blanchard had Geoffrey committed. He’s been in and out of asylums for the past ten years. The last three at the Danvers Lunatic Hospital, where he remains today.”

“Amazing, she let all that out in a half hour,” Lean said.

“Rather a sad and lonely person. I think she desperately wanted to tell it.”

“But so much family history, and to a perfect stranger?”

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger,” Dr. Steig noted. “They’re usually more polite and less likely to judge.”

“We may need more details. Did you manage to leave it on terms that you might speak again?” Grey asked.

Helen pursed her lips and shook her head. “She clearly needed to speak, but afterward she was a bit taken aback at her own openness. I think she’ll be relieved not to come across me again anytime soon. I must say, that’s my wish as well—I don’t think I could go on with the deception.”

Grey looked at Lean. “What do you think?”

“It’s possible that Geoffrey Blanchard knows something of Old Stitch. He was in a rage at his mother’s death. Perhaps he was there when the mob burned her out from Back Cove. He may have seen what happened.”

“We won’t know until we question him,” Grey said.

“Perhaps,” said Dr. Steig, “but if the fixation on his mother’s death is still so strong, after twenty years, and with so much time spent in asylums, who’s to say what state he’s in now?” He showed his palms and shrugged. “I have a few colleagues at Danvers. I’ll make some initial inquiries about this Geoffrey Blanchard.”

F
.
W
. Meserve’s rooms
on Oak Street occupied part of the third floor of a narrow brick building that appeared to be compressed skyward by the shorter, blocky neighbors attached on either side. The exterior façade of sturdiness was immediately betrayed by the sagging and tilting steps of the inside staircase. Meserve clutched onto a handrail that gleamed from the steady polishing under his palms, always sweaty from the climb up in the summer heat. The historian ascended the stairs, with his nose peeking over a load of books carried in his free arm. Atop the stack was a thin packet that Mrs. Prescott had asked him to review. He took every step with patience, double-stepping, one foot before the other onto each tread, like a toddler still learning to trust the length of his own legs. A bell tinkled as he pushed the door open and let himself in. The alarm was redundant, as any hypothetical visitor would be heralded well in advance by the tortured creaking of the staircase, each step like another turn of the wheel, stretching the wood’s very fiber almost to its breaking point.

The layout of the apartment was haphazard at best, a series of halls and small rooms meandering through the building at improbable angles. It was as if some mad builder had broken through a side wall and then snaked his way along, repartitioning the closets, storerooms, and hallways of other tenants. All in all, the result was an act of architectural gerrymandering that would have made any old-time politician proud. Meserve had selected these accommodations because the various spaces allowed him to catalog and store all his diverse texts and documents according to an indecipherable system of his own design.

He heated up some leftover soup and found a stale heel of bread for his dinner, which he ate sitting behind his broad desk, glancing at research notes. The unpolished oak desktop was obscured by piles of books and papers that formed a protective phalanx around the man. He felt most
at home there, temporarily shielded from the endless barbaric forces of all those things yet to be studied and learned. A few minutes later, he set the remains of his supper on the floor beside him, to let his cat, Herodotus, lick the bowl clean. Meserve was a lifelong bachelor, somewhat by choice, and now approaching fifty years. This placed him comfortably past the age when his slovenly habits concerned him in the slightest.

He took out his pocketwatch and angled his head back to peer over the tip of his nose, where his reading glasses perched: two smudged, rotund lovers clasping wire hands and contemplating a united plunge over the edge, to end it all in one grand gesture. It was twenty minutes until eight o’clock. He would allot that much time to Mrs. Prescott’s request. She had given him the packet days earlier, but he’d set it aside while he finished an ongoing project. Her appeal was made with urgent tones, but Meserve was always loath to alter his existing work schedule. Upon standing to get a better view of his various piles, he spotted the large envelope and searched about for his letter opener.