Winds of Salem (10 page)

Tonight, though, it was really quite perfect that she had the house to herself, logs burning in the fireplace, scented candles lit. She had prepared dinner and set the table in the dining room. Perhaps she should flick more lights on? Would that be better? She decided to turn the ones in the dining area on, dimmed, in addition to the candlelight, so they could see each other while they ate. She headed upstairs, passing her griffin, Oscar, in the hallway, his lion’s tail looping around her ankle.

“Oh, no, this won’t do, my dear, you have to be out of sight this evening. You are just too scary even though you’re a pussycat.” She grabbed him by his feathery scruff and brought him to the pixies’ old haunt up in the attic. “Sorry,” she said sadly, locking the door. “Not tonight. Another time, perhaps.” She returned down the stairs.
Yes, witches do possess familiars, but they certainly do not suckle them. Good gods!
thought Ingrid.
How gross. They really got so many things wrong back in Salem.

She went inside her bathroom. “Yikes,” she said, glimpsing herself in the mirror. She had worn her hair down, as Matt liked it, but it looked a fright—witchy, really. She ran a brush through it, then sprayed it with some serum Freya had recommended so that it looked glossy and smooth. Ingrid smiled at her reflection. There was a pink flush in her cheeks, her gray-blue eyes shone, but her lips looked pale. She found a berry-red lipstick, but when she put it on, it looked too scarlet.

She dabbed her lips, then finished them off with a touch of
gloss. “There!” She didn’t look half bad, she thought—not too pale or bookish or bland.

The doorbell rang and she started, losing hold of the perfume bottle, which fell to the sink. She placed it back on the counter, deciding against it.
Too overbearing.

Everything had to be perfect tonight.

Tonight was the night!

Downstairs in the front foyer, she took a deep breath. She steeled herself and opened the door.

Matt Noble stood in the doorway with a shy grin. “Hey there!”

Ingrid tingled all over at the sight of him.

Then she turned to the girl beside him. “Maggie! How are you? It’s so great to meet you—I’ve heard so much about you from your dad!”

Tonight was the night Ingrid was finally going to meet the most important girl in Matt’s life. His daughter.

“Likewise,” said Maggie, giving Ingrid an impressively firm handshake for a twelve-year-old. Maggie looked unabashedly at Ingrid, her big brown eyes aglitter. And she was
so
pretty. Beautiful was more like it, but more olive toned and exotic looking than freckly, Irish Matt. “What a pretty dress!” Maggie said. “Is it vintage? And you have such great hair!”

“Well, I could say the same to you.” The child was delightful. “I always wished I could be brunette.” Ingrid nodded.

“The proverbial grass is always greener,” said Maggie.

“Exactly!”

“Um, I’m here,” piped Matt.

“Oh, right!” remarked Ingrid.

“But please, I don’t want to interrupt the lovefest.” He grinned.

Maggie giggled.

“Come in,” said Ingrid, and once Maggie strode through the door into the house, she and Matt took a moment to exchange a kiss.

His cheek came around to hers, tenderly nuzzling it, and she felt his breath on her ear, which made her melt. “You’ve got this one!” he whispered.

“I hope so, I’m nervous,” she said, then softly, “I’ve missed you!”

“Tell me about it!” he boomed.

Maggie was a quiet, watchful child but, at the same time, engaged and inquisitive. She was polite but also confident. Over dinner, she asked adultlike questions, sometimes encouraging the conversation if there was a lull. Matt’s daughter sought to put people at ease, and Ingrid felt grateful for it. She felt insecure about her cooking—she was no Freya in the kitchen. Had she over-grilled the scallops? Was the reduction of blackberry vinegar too tart or too sweet? Did Maggie even like scallops?

“As a matter of fact, I’m a pescatarian. I don’t eat red meat,” Maggie reassured her. “It’s perfect. Really! These are so moist and yummy.”

Ingrid laughed, sipping her wine. “So is it an ideological or health choice to be a pescatarian?”

“Ideological to a degree but also a texture thing. The texture of meat makes me think of the poor animal. I worry about lobsters, but I just love the way they taste. Have you ever read David Foster Wallace’s essay?”

“ ‘Consider the Lobster’?” asked Ingrid.

Maggie nodded, batting her eyelashes. Matt winked encouragingly at Ingrid. She had scored points. “It does make you think. So sad about the author’s suicide. Dad says he was a
genius but he hated all of his footnotes.” She laughed. She was indeed a precocious child, thought Ingrid. “So Dad says you’re doing some research on Salem? The witch hunts and trials?”

Ingrid was a little taken aback and looked to Matt for reassurance. She wasn’t sure how much the young girl knew about her background.

“Maggie’s always been fascinated by the macabre, haven’t you, kid? I thought I’d tell her a little about your work… as an archivist and history scholar.” Matt coughed.

“I’ve been digging into it a little—trying to see if I can figure out what was the spark—what started it…”

“It was the girls, wasn’t it?” asked Maggie. “Girls my age.”

Ingrid nodded. “You’re familiar with the story?”

“A little. I know it started with girls having weird fits.”

“Yes, Betty and Abigail. It was in the parsonage, the house of Reverend Samuel Parris, Betty’s father and Abigail’s uncle, where they started having those strange convulsions. When they wouldn’t stop, rumors began circulating that the girls were bewitched. Things took a bad turn when one of their neighbors, Mary Sibley, decided to take matters into her own hands, asking Parris’s Caribbean Indian slaves, Tituba and her husband, John Indian, to bake a witch’s cake.”

“What’s that?” asked Maggie, her eyes full of wonder. She had pushed her plate aside to lean forward toward Ingrid.

Ingrid looked to Matt. She smiled uncomfortably. “I don’t know if I should… It’s not particularly appetizing.”

“Go ahead, she can take it.”

A witch’s cake, Ingrid explained, was to be used for countermagic. It was to be baked with some of Betty’s and Abby’s urine, then fed to Parris’s dog. If the dog became seized with fits, it would prove that dark magic was at play. Or the animal might also run to the witch responsible for the girls’ fits, thereby pointing out the culprit.

“So what happened?” asked Maggie, breathless. “Did the dog lose it?”

Ingrid shook her head. “Mr. Parris found the cake as it was cooling, before it was actually fed to the dog. He beat Tituba to a pulp once he found out what it was and chastised poor Mary Sibley in church before all the parishioners, stating that with Mary’s actions, ‘the devil hath been raised among us.’ ”

“Sheesh!” commented Maggie, and Matt laughed at the expression.

“Parris’s position in the village was tenuous, and he wasn’t a well-liked man. I think he might have been afraid that his girls would soon be accused of being witches themselves. If that happened, he could lose his job, his home, everything. So he did what he could to shift the focus off his girls, off himself. But with his words to his parishioners, in a sense, the devil
had
been raised. At that point, other girls in the village began having fits, too. Hysteria spread like a contagion. But now Parris needed a culprit, someone to take the blame. He badgered Betty and Abby to tell him who exactly had bewitched them.”

“And did they say?”

Ingrid looked down at her hands. She had lived through the history she was retelling, she knew how it ended. “Sadly, yes. Many people were imprisoned and hanged.”

Maggie shivered. “Do you think any of it was real? Do you think the girls might have been… cursed somehow?”

Before Ingrid could answer, Matt cleared his throat. “Speaking of witch’s cake, I’m having a terrible hankering for dessert. You make us anything, Ingrid?”

Ingrid smiled at Matt’s little inside joke.

“But, Dad, Ingrid hasn’t answered my question,” Maggie admonished.

Ingrid suggested they go into the kitchen for ice cream, strawberries, and whipped cream first before she answered Maggie. She passed around the bowls and took a bite before addressing the issue. “Do I think the girls’ fits were real? No, of course not. They were faking it. In my opinion, it probably started out as a prank that got out of hand and the girls couldn’t recant their statements without being punished themselves. By the time they did take back their words, it was too late. So many of the victims had already perished. The remaining accused were eventually released but still had to pay the jailer’s fees…”

“Ugh! That’s awful!” Maggie scooped up the melted ice cream at the bottom of her bowl, mulling it all over. She attempted to hide a yawn. “I wonder what gave them the idea to even do such a thing.”

Ingrid had been wondering that herself and had recently come across a document that had proven to be very revealing: a pamphlet published in 1689 by an obscure Boston clergyman, a minister who went by the name of Continence Hooker.
An Essay on Remarkable, Illustrious, and Invisible Occurrences Relating to Bewitchments and Possessions.
But they would be here all night if she got into that, and she knew at this point that Maggie wouldn’t be adverse to the idea. She couldn’t do that to poor Matt.

“It’s hard to believe girls could cause so much trouble, huh?” Maggie asked.

“Not too hard.” Matt smirked.

Ingrid nodded. Girls had done this. Young girls, prepubescents, adolescents, innocent of the consequences of their actions. It was hard to believe they had desired to cause so much pain, so much evil. Could they have been manipulated somehow? Used? She wondered…

“Well, it’s late, and it looks like we’re all tired,” she said. “I gave you an earful! Maybe another time we can talk about it more?”

Maggie nodded as she took a last scoop from her bowl.

Matt tilted his head. “Well, I better get this one home to bed.”

Maggie looked at her father, scrunching her forehead. “I’m not tired!”

Matt laughed. “Sure you aren’t, Pidge.”

“Pidge?” asked Ingrid.

“Pigeon? There’s a kid’s book about not wanting to go to sleep,” Maggie explained.

“It used to be her favorite.”

“Dad still thinks I’m three years old,” Maggie said, rolling her eyes. “Fine, let’s go. Ingrid, where’s the bathroom?” she asked.

Ingrid told her, and when she turned to Matt she had a new appreciation for him. He was a good father, devoted, loving. She had the urge to lean over the table and kiss the freckles on his nose. It appeared he had the same idea, as he put his hands on her face and kissed her gently.

After he pulled away, they stared into each other’s eyes, elbows on the kitchen table. “Did I do okay?” Ingrid asked.

“Better. She’s crazy about you! Like I told you she would be.”

Ingrid smiled. She’d always wanted a daughter, and she had to remind herself that Maggie already had a mother.

chapter eleven

Of Gods and Men

By Sunday, Joanna and Norman had made it most of the way across Pennsylvania but not quite to the border of Ohio and had stopped for the night at the Happy Hunting Lodge, a bed-and-breakfast off I-80, smack in the middle of the snowy woods. The two-story centuries-old brick-and-wood saltbox appeared run-down from the outside, but the interior was clean and cozy.

The walls of the room—the “Gleeful Newlyweds Suite” of all things—were lemon, decorated with small oval- and square-framed sepia photographs of stocky-looking men and women with squinty eyes. There was a heavy, antique wooden bed made up with crisp white cotton sheets. In the bathroom, squeezed into a triangular wedge beneath the sloping roof, the brass fixtures gleamed, as did the glossy white claw-foot tub. Joanna found it heavenly to sink inside, washing off the dust from the road. After a long soak, she threw on one of the complimentary plush terry robes.

In the bedroom, she stood over the dresser, her wet silver hair a twist over a shoulder, as she lined up Norman’s evening meds, extracting a pill from each container—high blood pressure, cholesterol, and so on. Altogether, he had four different pills to take. Being immortals didn’t make them impervious to the ailments of
age, and these days they found themselves especially vulnerable with their magic ebbing.

She looked out the window into the darkness of the woods, where a thin stream threaded through the trees. An owl hooted. Norman lay on the bed with an abstracted expression, his hands clasped behind his head.

“Remember the first time we walked to the Bofrir?” Joanna asked as she sat on the side of the bed, offering him a glass of water and the pills in her palm. Everything that was happening now had started back then, in Asgard, when the bridge was still standing. They were Nord and Skadi, gods of the sea and earth, back when the universe had begun, when everything in the nine worlds was new, and even their love was a nascent discovery, fluttering eyelashes against cheeks, a very first kiss, delectable, sweet, untainted. They had walked the Bofrir, that rainbow path wrought of dragon bone, the vessel that entwined the powers of all gods within, connecting Asgard to Midgard.