Devil's Night (22 page)

Rebecca and her kin kept to themselves after that. No one saw her in the village; nor did anyone venture out to their lonely residence in the woods to trade or purchase her herbs. I suppose, brother, there wasn’t much to trade with. The weather had seen to that.

It was a cruel summer, you see. It was as if Heaven and Hell had exchanged places, with the infernal heat of the underworld bearing down on us from above. Crops withered and died within days. Animals became mere piles of bones and fur before they, too, succumbed. A few villagers went mad from the heat, begging for relief, even though there was none to be had. One man, who
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After several months of these unbearable conditions, some in the village began to whisper that it was the work of Rebecca and her sisters. They had cursed the village, some said, as revenge for accusing her of witchcraft. Soon the whispers got louder until everyone in the village was discussing it outright. Soon, it appeared to me that everyone was convinced that the heat and drought were not the work of our Lord but of one woman and her wretched kin.

My employer took it upon himself to travel to the home of the women. He returned with tales so horrifying that
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ripped off their clothing next to the lake and danced naked in the moonlight, chanting foreign words to the sky and cursing his very name. Outraged and frightened, the men of the village cursed the judge who came to the village and did nothing
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vowed that justice would prevail.

In the dead of night, they summoned every able-bodied male and marched to the woman’s cottage to confront her. The widow, wearing only her nightclothes, was roused from her sleep
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took the son back to the village, where he would be tended to by the womenfolk. As the men pulled Rebecca from her house, her sisters tried to fight them off, to no avail. The door was pulled shut and barricaded, preventing them from leaving. Outside, Rebecca was thrust onto her knees and told to admit that she was doing the Devil’s work. One of the men gathered there demanded that she prove her loyalty to the Lord by saying a prayer. If she refused, they warned, they would burn down her house with her sisters still inside. All the cursed woman needed to do was say a prayer, but she refused, claiming she was a follower of the rules of nature, as dictated by our Creator.

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set fire to the nearby house, which was still occupied by Rebecca’s sisters. The women screamed as the flames grew. I have never known such terrified cries, dear brother. I hear them still, resounding in my nightmares—an endless echo that cannot be silenced. As the house burned, the screams died away one by one, until there was nothing but silence as the dwelling was only smoke and ash.

While the fire raged, my employer dragged Rebecca to a thin birch tree. He pressed her writhing body against it while throwing a loop of rope at me. He then ordered me, as his humble servant, to bind her wrists behind her back. The difficulty was great. She struggled so, thrashing and biting with all the force of a deranged animal. My hands trembled while I fashioned the knots that held her in place. I was frightened, brother, not only of her power but of the prospect that what was transpiring was somehow against the will of the Lord.

Others scoured the forest floor for sticks for kindling, which were placed at the pitiful woman’s feet and set ablaze. Rebecca stayed mostly quiet through her ordeal, even as she watched the fate of her sisters and the flames engulfed her legs. She spoke only when the pain became too much to bear.

“Curse you!” she screamed to those of us still assembled there. “May the fires of Hell rise up to consume this place.”

A good many of my compatriots interpreted her words as final proof that she danced with dark spirits. They were pleased to be rid of her and felt none of the creeping guilt that tortures me now. How I wish I could be similarly certain of my actions. Yet, dear brother, my doubts linger. It is my
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put their remains into cloth sacks and buried them next to the smoldering house. Rebecca’s bones were kept separate and deposited into a sack that had only the day before carried oats for my master’s horses. The sack was placed in a wooden box lined with lead by the blacksmith. There was great fear among some of the men that without the lead, her evil spirit could escape her burying place and further torment the village. We buried her remains next to the lake. She lies there now, inside a lead-lined box instead of a proper casket.

It is my darkest fear, dear brother, that I have assisted in the execution of five innocent women. The only strength I can summon comes from knowing that Rebecca’s young son was spared the piteous view of his mother’s demise. The boy was shunted off to a distant relative in Philadelphia. Before his departure, the villagers informed him of his mother’s passing, filling him with tales of how there was a terrible fire that consumed his entire family. It was scandalous how good Christian folk could cast untruths with such ease and cunning. These lies, I fear, will come back to haunt them one day. As for myself, dearest, dearest brother, I left the wretched village within the week. My hope is to find Rebecca’s son and confess our sins to him. Once I do, perhaps I will be rid of the heaviness my actions have created in my heart. You shall receive word from me again soon, brother. Until that time, I beseech you, pray for my soul.

When she was finished reading the letter, Kat remained silent. What could she say in the face of such brutality? The fact that five innocent women—one a mother, no less—had been killed in such a cruel manner made her sick to her stomach. She felt even worse knowing it all had happened in her town. Yes, she was well aware that the events occurred before Perry Hollow ever really existed. But the land was the same. Folks in her town walked the same ground those ignorant villagers had walked. And that land, she now knew, was stained with blood.

“Well,” she finally said, “it looks like Constance found Rebecca Bradford.”

“We can’t be certain those bones in the museum belonged to the woman in that letter,” Henry said. “It could have been anywhere in Pennsylvania. You said so yourself.”

“The bones had been burned, Henry. Before last night. Years before.”

Three hundred years, in fact. That’s what Lucy Meade had told her just before she learned the bad news about Nick. Then there was the fact that Constance Bishop had been seen leaving her house with a metal detector. When she had first heard about it, Kat thought it strange that she would use such a device to search for bones. Now it all made sense, considering poor Rebecca Bradford’s lead-lined resting place.

“Those bones are what’s left of Rebecca,” Kat said. “And Constance found them.”

She assumed that Constance had also tried but failed to uncover the remains of the rest of the Bradford clan. They were still out there, waiting to be found. And Constance certainly wanted them to be. It was why, as she was dying, she had written that message on her hand. That once cryptic phrase that now made complete, dreadful sense.

THIS IS JUST THE FIRST.

Constance hadn’t meant murders. Or fires. She had meant skeletons, buried somewhere beneath Perry Hollow.

Kat left the conference room and charged down the hallway, propelled by a newfound sense of energy. Henry followed, remaining close behind her as she pushed through the museum’s back door. The small patch of yard behind the building looked different in the daylight. Far prettier than Kat had realized. A cluster of light blue asters sat beside the wooden fence at the rear of the property. The gate was still ajar, creaking gently back and forth among the blooms. Next to the fence, a sprawling sycamore rained yellow leaves onto a bench beneath it.

The only thing keeping the spot from looking picture-perfect were the two state troopers standing close to the museum. Their backs were turned to the yard as they studied a patch of the exterior wall next to the door. One of them was the female trooper who hadn’t hesitated to speak up in Kat’s kitchen an hour earlier. Seeing Kat, she spoke up again, calling out, “Chief, you might want to take a look at this.”

“What did you find?”

“Vandalism,” the trooper said. “We missed it during the night. Only noticed it this morning when the sun came up.”

The troopers parted, giving Kat an unobstructed view of the wall. The vandalism, rendered in black spray paint that scarred the whitewashed siding, consisted of a series of connected lines surrounded by a circle. The lines formed a rough five-pointed star, just like the ones children draw in their first bursts of artistic creativity. Each point touched the circle, as if straining to break free of its borders.

“Is it just me,” Henry said, “or is this day getting weirder as it goes along?”

Kat had no choice but to agree. There were fires and corpses and skeletons hidden beneath the floor. And now, just when she thought it couldn’t get any stranger, she found herself staring at a spray-painted pentagram on the wall of the place where all this trouble started.

Just below the pentagram was a small brass plaque embedded into the wall. The sign proclaimed that the museum had been designated a state historic landmark. Perry Hollow was so old that such plaques weren’t uncommon. Kat saw them here and there, yet rarely paid attention to them. The fact that a pentagram had been painted next to one finally got her attention.

“Do you remember seeing one of these at the bed-and-breakfast?” she asked Henry.

“I hope you’re asking about the plaque,” he said with a wry lift of his brow.

“I am.”

“I didn’t notice. Why?”

Kat hurried around the side of the museum, picking up speed as she crossed the wide lawn and leaving Henry far behind her. She burst into a jog once she hit the street, not slowing until she reached what was left of the Sleepy Hollow Inn.

That block was closed to both cars and pedestrians, thanks to the rubble that had spilled into the street when the hotel collapsed. Kat ducked beneath the police tape stretched from tree to tree around the scene and surveyed the damage.

Debris was everywhere—a jumbled pile of wood, bricks, and shattered glass. Shingles from the roof littered the street, and tufts of blackened insulation rolled like tumbleweed across the lawn. Kat moved cautiously, stepping around the rubble until she reached a small set of concrete steps. It was the hotel’s front stoop, one of the few things still standing. At the top, instead of a front door, was a view of the smoldering pit that had once been the Sleepy Hollow Inn.

Standing on the stoop, Kat leaned over the edge and scanned the debris. She saw charred pieces of paper, smashed plates, and still more shingles. Lying on the other side of the stoop was a portion of the fallen wall, its siding warped from the heat. It now resembled melted candle wax that had been cooled back to a solid form. But on that piece of wall, partially obscured by the half-melted siding, was a brass plaque similar to the one located at the museum.

“Why did you run off like that?” Henry, finally catching up to her, stopped on the other side of the police tape. “I’m supposed to be helping you, remember?”

“Sorry. I had to look for something.”

“Did you find it?”

“I did,” Kat said, eyes still fixed on the tiny plaque. “And I think I also figured out the reason behind the fires.”

4
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“He’s trying to get revenge.”

Lieutenant Tony Vasquez, still confined to a hospital bed, lifted himself as far as his broken bones would allow. “Who is?”

“Connor Hawthorne,” Kat said. “He’s trying to get revenge on Perry Hollow for something that happened hundreds of years ago.”

She paced in front of Tony’s bed as she recounted everything she had learned that afternoon. The antique iron. The missing stick of dynamite. The book and letter that told the strange, sad story of Rebecca Bradford and her sisters. Then there was the pentagram, which symbolized that something far more evil than mere arson was taking place.

“He knows that there was a massacre on the land where Perry Hollow now sits,” she said. “So he’s targeting the oldest buildings. The museum was on the state registry of historic places. So was the Sleepy Hollow Inn. This is his way of making the town pay for its sins.”

She thought of Rebecca’s last words as recorded in that crumbling letter.
“May the fires of Hell rise up to consume this place.”
It had taken more than three hundred years, but now her final wish was coming true.

“It’s a good theory,” Tony said, “but why would he kill Constance Bishop, as well?”

“Maybe she caught him in the act of setting the museum on fire,” Kat replied, thinking aloud. “Maybe he was just using her to dig up as much information as she could. Or maybe it’s just another piece of his vendetta. There’s no better way to get revenge on a town’s history than by killing its chief historian.”

“How many other places in town are registered historic landmarks?”

“I don’t know,” Kat said. “But I’ve got someone checking right now.”

That someone was Louella van Sickle, who had had the unfortunate luck to be leaving the hospital with James just as Kat and Henry were arriving. Kat ordered her to head to the library and look up all the other buildings in town that had earned landmark status. As for James, he was still at the hospital, sitting in the waiting area with Henry.

“Once you get that list, post a trooper at every door,” Tony said. “If you can, I’d shut them down entirely. Are you sure this Hawthorne guy is the man behind all this?”

Before that afternoon, Kat hadn’t been sure. But now, in her mind, Connor was the only suspect. Constance’s letter had certainly made it sound like Connor was the only other person who knew about Rebecca Bradford. There was a certain logic to the thought that one witch would try to avenge another. The pentagram they found only sealed the deal. Once he had spray-painted the museum wall, Connor might as well have stamped his forehead with the word
GUILTY.