The Salem Witch Society (22 page)

“Not necessarily. The belief that a charlatan, preying upon desperate people, can reveal the secrets of the dead is utter foolishness.” Grey raised his index finger. “This, however, involves an actual dead body. That fact alone makes it of interest. And while I don’t believe in any aspect of witchcraft, I accept that our killer appears to. This Old Stitch character, by virtue of her reputation and her recent death, warrants at least a cursory review.”

They left the bridge and turned onto Main Street. A half mile farther and Grey rapped at the roof with his walking stick. The driver deposited them by the side of the road, and Grey made arrangements for the man to collect them in an hour. Lean looked around. The side of the street away from Back Cove was sparsely
populated with houses, while the area closer to the water was wooded.

“Our guide will be along shortly,” Grey said. “Tell me again about the police report.”

“The body was found by a customer on February fifth. The coroner ruled she’d been dead a few days. No external injuries, but traces of vomit in her mouth and blood in her nostrils.”

Grey nodded. “Nothing was taken. No signs of robbery.”

“The customer had been there before. She didn’t notice anything missing, but then there wasn’t much of value in the place to begin with.”

“And the constable reported signs of some séance?” Grey said.

“A deck of fortune-telling cards on the table, spread out, as if the woman was in the middle of a reading. It was thought she died from a sort of seizure.”

“Brought on by the shocking appearance of some otherworldly specter, no doubt.”

“Do you really not believe in spirits?” Lean asked. “The possibility of communicating with some eternal soul in the afterlife?”

Grey looked at him with one eyebrow pointing up to heaven. “The overwhelming majority of people in the world are unimaginative dullards who, in their three score and ten allotted years, manage to divine no purpose for their being other than to chase money, seize what moments of physical pleasure they can, and to create new, largely unimproved versions of themselves, whom they raise with the same mindless disregard they have applied to their own lives. Tell me, please, what use would such beings have for an afterlife? Whatever would they do with an eternity?” Grey motioned down the street. “Ah, here we are.”

Lean turned to see their guide approaching. The scrawny boy couldn’t have been more than thirteen, though he tried squinting and affecting a slight sneer in an effort to look serious. The boy tipped his cap and addressed Mr. Grey with a tone of respect before leading the men along the edge of the woods. At some inconspicuous landmark, the boy turned and led them
into the trees. Fifty paces in, he stopped and pointed.

“Path picks up again right ahead. Just keep on there and you can’t miss it.” The words shot out of the boy’s mouth. Lean could tell he was spooked to be so close to what must have been a cursed place in the lore of the local children. He handed over some coins, and the boy vanished into the brush, scurrying uphill, back toward his idea of civilization. Looking toward the dim, murky woods, Lean felt less than enthusiastic. He drew his revolver and rechecked that it was fully loaded.

“I assume the Deering police report noted that the woman is already dead,” Grey said.

“It’s not her that worries me. Who knows what else is slithering around in there?” Lean holstered his weapon again. “I don’t see anything resembling a path here.”

“Well, I guess we just push on, then. I’ll take the flank.” Grey moved off to the right as Lean pushed forward, shouldering aside low-hanging branches and plowing through the underbrush that had overtaken any old path. The land sloped down, and the ground became increasingly damp. He picked his way along several small stepping-stones across a miniature creek and sank a half inch deep with each step across the boglike ground, so that the water seeped in at the seams of his shoes.

The overhead foliage was sparse enough to let in patches of light. Lean saw an angular shape looming about twenty yards ahead, and he recognized it as a slanted roof. He let out three quick, sharp whistle bursts, then continued forward slowly, giving Grey time to find him.

“What was that supposed to be?”

“That was a legitimate bird call,” Lean said.

“Ah, the elusive Presbyterian warbler.”

Lean chuckled. “Fine, I’ll send up smoke signals next time.” He motioned with his head. “There—straight through.”

The two detectives pushed by the last bit of brush and emerged into a soggy clearing. A small structure, which could not honestly claim any title grander than hovel, squatted before them. At one time it had a window on the front side, but the
glass was broken out, and the primitive plank door had come off its hinges. The roof was made of loosely fitted wooden boards of various sizes, through which a rusty stovepipe protruded. Lean stood silent for a moment searching for the words he needed, then recited:

Lean glanced to his side to see Grey standing nearby, peering at him with an arched eyebrow. “Spenser,” announced the deputy. “You’re not the only bloke around here who’s ever opened a book.”

They stepped over the rotting door and entered the shack. At their approach, several small things scurried. Crooked beams of daylight sifted down through cracks and holes in the bare roof, displaying thin pillars of swirling dust. The smell of decaying plants outside the hovel had been replaced by a more putrid smell, smoke combined with the stale odor of human presence and waste. Lingering above it all, Lean thought he could detect the scent of death, though perhaps, knowing that the woman’s body had lain there undiscovered for some time, his mind simply expected the smell.

The shack seemed even smaller inside. A dingy, stained blanket had been strung up to cordon off a third of the room. It hung half off its line now, revealing a flimsy, tattered mattress on the floor, well stained with every shade of human usage. The larger portion of the room held a rickety bench, a small circular table, and a thick chair painted black and covered with etchings and strange designs. From an exposed beam above hung a series of strings on which dangled a variety of small animal bones. There was a second window on the south side of the shack that still held its grimy pane of glass. Set there, upon a wooden crate, were four potted plants, only one of which clung to life.

While Lean knocked about the small room, Grey went over to peer at the plants. He plucked something
from the last living one. After a few moments, he moved across the room to a shelf near the fireplace that held a variety of glass and earthenware jars. He began to examine the contents of each container and sniffed at a few of the selections, one of which turned his head. He dumped the offending brown powder onto the floor.

“Anything interesting?” Lean asked.

Grey pointed to the surviving potted plant. Lean examined the specimen, a woody, prickly, twining, herblike plant with numerous slender, smooth-textured branches. A few of the branches had sprouted a dozen pairs of leaflets, which looked to be dying before having reached their peak. Pinkish flowers that had faded to near white were on the branches’ swollen nodes or else had dropped off and withered in the pot. Many of the branches had been snipped.

“Looks bare, like it’s dead. But it’s really been trimmed down to nothing.”

“Exactly,” Grey said.

“So?”

“So where are the rest of the seeds? There’s not a single specimen in all these jars. They’re all gone except for this single bit, which, judging from the small size, may have sprouted after the plant was trimmed.” Grey held up a sprig whose tip bore a cluster of pods, which had opened and curled back to reveal small, oval-shaped seeds of a glossy scarlet.

Lean looked a bit closer and saw that the bright red only covered the bottom two-thirds of each of the quarter-inch-long seeds. The top third of each was black.

“So she trimmed them and sold them all to her customers.”

“Perhaps. Odd, though—every container here but one holding something. One jar emptied. And just this one plant that she valued highly enough to care for more than the others. Perhaps she wasn’t the only one who valued this plant.”

Lean shrugged. It was a long bit of speculation about some old plant seeds when what they were there to investigate was a question of murder. “There were no signs of violence. No struggle, if it’s a robbery and murder you’re getting at. There was just her body sprawled out there by the hearth.”

Lean went and stood before the
chimney, which was of a crude design: wood, plastered over with a heavy clay-based mud mixed with hay and twigs that had then been baked hard. He looked down between his feet. For all the other aesthetic and structural failings of the dismal little dwelling, the hearth actually showed some signs of skilled workmanship. A rough area of about four by six feet had been covered with large, irregular fieldstones. The mortar between the stones had gone black with age but was still set firmly in place to fashion a solid hearth of bluish gray rock.

“Peculiar,” said Grey after turning to examine the area. He knelt down and ran his finger along the edge of a small and shallow but perfectly round hole in the mortar joining two of the flat stones.

“There’s more,” noted Lean. “There and there. Five of them around in a circle.”

“A pentagram,” said Grey.

Lean’s mind flashed back to the image of Maggie Keene, her body splayed out to make five points.

Grey stepped back over to the shelf and returned with a thin candle, which he fitted into one of the holes. “I imagine this is where she put on her displays. Candles at her feet, but otherwise in darkness, with a fire behind her. Tossing in her magic powders. Sleights of hand while the flashes of color distracted the customers. Pulling who knows what from hidden pockets in her skirts.”

Lean knelt down on the hearth and craned his neck to look up the chimney. He stuck his hand up and ran it around, feeling for any secret hiding spots. The reward was nothing but a palmful of slick soot.

“A show like that would have been a sight more interesting than what she’s left behind—which is nothing.” Lean placed his hands on the hearth to steady himself as he rose. The fingers of his left hand poked into a seam of grime between two of the stones, and he quickly pulled out his handkerchief to wipe at the ooze. He was about to stuff the handkerchief back into his pocket when the thought hit him.

“There’s no mortar around this one stone. Just wet mud.”

Lean found a broad-bladed knife
in an old washbasin and used it to pry the stone up enough to get a fingerhold and lift it out of the way. On top of the soil lay the flattened remains of a small animal. It was not yet completely decomposed, and though worm-eaten, its skeletal wing frames, pointed beak, and some matted feathers revealed that it had been a bird. Lean flicked it aside with the tip of the knife. The dirt beneath proved to be more loosely packed than it should have been under the pressure of the hearth. He used the knife to dig away the soil, and within a minute the blade made contact, scraping on some still-hidden object. Abandoning the knife, Lean scooped away the dirt with his hands.

“Glass. Some type of jar.”

He locked a finger around the small handle and freed the wine jug from its grave. Lean brushed off the damp earth that clung to the outside and sloshed the two inches of dirty liquid at the bottom of the glass jug. There came a faint metallic rattling from inside the jar. After a series of tugs, the stopper came loose. Lean peered in at the yellowish brown liquid before the stench hit him.

“Ugh!” His wide eyes shot from the bottle to Grey and back again. “It’s piss!”

With the jar at arm’s length, Lean hurried outside, stooped closer to the ground to minimize splashing, and poured the contents onto a flat patch of earth. Several long, rusted nails and pins landed amid the foul froth pooling in the dirt.

“Well?” Grey stepped outside and nodded toward the puddle of fermented urine. “Aren’t you going to collect the evidence?”

Lean smiled, glanced at the bits of metal on the ground, then moved on into the small clearing that surrounded the shack. He glanced around at the murky setting once more. They were only a hundred feet or so from Back Cove. The mudflats were exposed at low tide, and a gentle southerly wind was wafting up the potent scent of tidal decay.

“This Stitch woman certainly had an eye for locales,” Lean said.

“I suppose you don’t attract much business if you’re a witch living in a well-kept home on the
West End. Customers have expectations, after all. With these types of services, they’re paying for what they want to believe in.”

“Still, the thought that she actually raised children here …” Lean returned his attention to the shack and kicked around the perimeter. His eyes wandered over the ground once more, making sure there was nothing else to see there in that dismal spot. He noticed a black seam running along the base of the wall, maybe a foot off the ground. He knelt for a closer inspection and saw that the wood was charred.

“The bottom wood’s still blackened from when it was burned down. She built it back up again after.”

Grey approached and studied the wood. He crumbled some of the charred fibers between his finger and thumb.

“I’m beginning to think that this has been a fool’s errand,” Lean said.

“Perhaps,” answered Grey in a distant voice, “or maybe the things that were seen here years ago, the things that matter, simply remain hidden from us.”

“I
t’s protection, a countercharm.” Helen’s voice was tinny coming through the telephone receiver. “Boiling a bewitched person’s urine in a pot with iron nails would not only break the spell but cause it to return and injure its creator. In fact, there was even an instance at Salem involving Dr. Roger Toothaker. Women with medical knowledge were definitely open to suspicion; he was the only male medical practitioner to be named. Toothaker was accused mostly because he told people that his daughter had killed a witch using such a technique that he’d shown her—baking an afflicted person’s urine in a clay pot overnight.”