The Lace Reader

by Brunonia Barry

  Cal did not acquire his robed disciples until he came back home to New England.

  He had come home to reconcile with Emma, or so he claimed. When Eva took out the restraining order on him, Cal was livid. How dare she keep him from his home and family? He spent what money he could get his hands on hiring a team of attorneys to win his half of Yellow Dog Island. He wanted to build a church on what he considered was still his marital asset. But Eva and May were way ahead of him. The island had been put into trust long before, the first time Cal had raised a hand to Emma. It didn’t take a reader to know that the marriage would end badly.

  “How dare you!” Cal shouted at Eva from in front of her house one snowy night in mid-December. He picked up a rock and heaved it at a second-story window but lost his balance and slipped on the icy sidewalk. He broke his leg in two places.

  When asked to comment on the incident for the local papers, Eva shrugged and said, “I guess the Good Lord prefers my prayers to his.”

  It was the first time Cal had been known to speak in tongues. His rant lasted several hours, until the doctors prescribed a strong sedative. Cal reportedly slept for days. When he woke up, he filed his first formal accusation against Eva. Not for the slippery sidewalk in front of her house but for witchcraft.

  Rafferty went through all of Eva’s files. Cal had made several complaints against her: sorcery, witchcraft, kidnapping. That last one had been crossed out and over it were the handwritten words “making a girl disappear.” It read like something you’d pay to see in a Vegas magic show. Vanishing Act. Rafferty read through the complaint again, looking for something he’d missed the first time. The tie was there. Eva/Angela. Angela/Eva. For a crazy minute, Rafferty thought of dragging the shoreline out by Children’s Island, looking for a second body. But Eva’s death had clearly been accidental. There had been no sign of foul play. And he’d been looking. There was nothing Rafferty would rather do than arrest Cal for the murder of Eva Whitney. But there was nothing to support it. Except for the fact that Eva was found so far away. That was the one thing everyone kept pointing to. Eva hadn’t given up swimming; she had lied to Beezer about that. But for the last few years, she had always confined her swims to the harbor. Eva was a woman who knew her limits.

  God, he missed her. He wondered sometimes if he didn’t miss her more than her own family did. She was like family to him. Better than, actually. She was his friend. He still couldn’t believe she was gone.

  “‘Facts are the enemy of truth,’” Eva quoted Don Quixote.

  “If you were twenty years younger, I’d marry you,” Rafferty said to her the day she quoted that line.

  “If I were twenty years younger, I wouldn’t even look at you,” Eva said.

  He’d laughed all afternoon about that one.

  It was about that time she’d started talking about Towner. Or maybe his mind was playing tricks on him. But at some point in their friendship, Eva had started to talk about her and about the surgery Towner kept putting off, about her almost bleeding to death. She had tumors, Eva told him. Benign, yes, but still dangerous. Something a woman couldn’t afford to ignore.

  “There are many ways to kill yourself,” Eva said.

  Rafferty nodded in agreement. As a drunk he’d had firsthand experience with at least one of them.

  It was the second time that Angela had disappeared. The third if you counted the original, when she ran away from home. But it was only the second time that anyone had been looking for her. The first time Angela had disappeared from the Calvinist camp was before she got pregnant. Rafferty had been called by Cal to search Eva’s house.

  Rafferty had already known about Angela. Everyone in town was talking about her. She was one of the few pretty women in the Calvinist camp, which had few women at all, really. The Calvinists were a notoriously antifemale bunch. Not only did they fervently fear bewitchment, but beauty of any kind caused them to pray aloud for deliverance. And Angela was a beautiful girl. At least she had been when she’d first arrived.

  Angela was also a runaway. She had hitched a ride down Route 1, all the way from Maine, ending up in Salem just in time for one of the Pagan festivals. It was happy coincidence; she wasn’t a witch herself, but it was a fun place to be, so she stayed. She hung out in the common for several days, sleeping on a park bench and panhandling near the tour buses. Angela stayed after the Pagans disbursed, and Eva more than once took her a plate of food or let her sleep in her garden or in the gazebo if the weather got bad. Toward the end of the summer, Eva had started to come up with odd jobs for Angela: some windows to be washed, a children’s birthday party she needed a waitress for. Somewhere along the way, Angela happened upon one of the revival meetings down at Winter Island. Cal singled her out, which was not too difficult to understand. She was the only pretty face in a sea of despair and addiction. He accused her of witchcraft on the spot. He prayed for her demons to depart. By the end of his exorcism, Cal had convinced Angela and his congregation that her particular demons were much stronger than most and that it would take his personal dedication and unusual methodology to remove them.

  No one except Angela ever knew what his unusual methodology entailed. But with the exception of the true-believer Calvinists, no one in Salem thought for a minute that it was Angela’s immortal soul Cal was interested in saving.

  It didn’t take much to convince Angela of her sinful nature. Maybe it was convenience. The weather was getting cold, and she needed a better place to spread her sleeping bag than either the park bench or Eva’s gardens. Or maybe it was something inside her. She was running away from some kind of abuse, Rafferty was certain of it. It was never difficult to convince the victim that it was somehow her fault, that there was something evil in her nature that brought out the worst in the abuser. Cal was an expert at that kind of convincing. He’d certainly convinced Emma Boynton of it for years, and probably their daughter as well. Dressed in Armani with his Bible in hand, Cal became persuasive enough to make Angela believe that he was the only one who could save her.

  When Cal accused Angela of witchcraft that night, she fell to her knees and confessed to it on the spot.

  After Angela admitted practicing witchcraft, the Calvinists paraded her all over town. Even in old Salem, the confession of a witch called for public celebration. In the 1600s it was only the ones who insisted on their innocence who were hanged.

  While the Calvinists celebrated her salvation, the witches were getting pissed off. She’d annoyed them before, by panhandling in front of their shops or dressing in black and posing for pictures with the tourists. She never said she was a witch, but she certainly acted the part. Angela was an opportunist. The witches put up with it. They were an entrepreneurial bunch, so her business acumen was not lost on them. They even gave her some charms, a pack of incense, or a free meal once in a while. Ann let her pick herbs from her window-box garden. Usually they had a peaceful coexistence with Angela—some of them even felt sorry for her—but she wasn’t one of them. Wicca was a religion as much as any other, and it had its own course of study and ritual before you could call yourself a member. While Angela had been hanging around the shops, she had never even expressed an interest in the religion itself.

  Like most people, Angela had an image of witchcraft that was a Hollywood one or, worse, one that came from the hysteria itself. The truth was, there were no witches in old Salem, but they thrived here in great numbers now. It was the ultimate irony, and one that didn’t escape a single one of the witches—the fact that they owed their success today to one of the most terrifying religious persecutions in history. It was an uneasy legacy. So when Angela publicly confessed to witchcraft, a nervous shiver ran through the community.

  “What do you want me to do about it?” Rafferty had asked when Ann and some of the other witches complained to him.

  “I don’t know…. Something,” Ann said.

  “First Amendment rights,” Rafferty said. “Angela can go around claiming she’s the Second Coming if
she wants to.”

  “I’m afraid that role has already been taken,” Ann said.

  “And we haven’t been able to stop Reverend Cal even with God on our side, have we?” Rafferty was referring to the council of churches who’d been trying to find a way to run Cal out of town for the last two years. “The Calvinists are making it their goal to rid Salem of the witches,” Rafferty said.

  “I don’t get it,” Ann said. “What kind of weak, lily-livered god are they worshipping if they’re so afraid of a few witches?”

  “They’ll step over the line one of these days, and we’ll nail them,” Rafferty said.

  “That makes me warm with security,” Ann said.

  But Cal was getting too smart to step over the line. He went right up to it, but he was careful not to cross.

  The Calvinists paraded Angela all over town, proclaiming that the witch had been saved. They took her over to Pioneer Village and put her into the stockades. Cal sent photos to the Salem News and the Boston Globe. He printed brochures listing group rates for exorcisms. The Calvinists distributed them on street corners.

  When the Calvinists began to identify other witches in the community, the council of churches called an emergency meeting.

  “It’s 1692 all over again,” Ann said.

  “God, save me from your followers,” said Dr. Ward.

  A month later someone set one of the witches’ houses on fire. Everyone assumed it was one of the Calvinists, though no one could prove it. The insurance company attributed the fire to a dirty chimney flue and paid the claim.

  Over the winter the Calvinists moved down the coast to a campground somewhere in Florida. When they returned, they had added a new trailer full of women to the entourage. They were a scary-looking bunch. Drunks. Drug addicts. Meth and crack whores. All confessed witches. All supposedly saved.

  According to Angela’s report, the first time she went to Eva for help and then somehow ended up on Yellow Dog Island, it had been those reformed witches, and not Cal, who had beaten her so badly.

  “Stoned,” Eva corrected the report. “They didn’t beat her, they stoned her.”

  “Did she tell you that?” Rafferty tried to keep the horror from his voice.

  “No,” Eva said. “I saw it in the lace.”

  “So Cal didn’t do it,” Rafferty said. He couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his voice.

  “Make no mistake,” Eva said. “This is Cal Boynton’s work, all right.”

  “You think he told them to do it?”

  “I think he inspired them to do it. And that’s much worse…. At least in the old days, he used to do the deed himself. In the old days, you could tell who the bad guys were.”

  Rafferty stood and looked at her. He could see her pain. Almost as if, for this one moment, he were a reader himself. Eva was letting him see her.

  “Cal ruined your family.”

  “He did,” she said.

  “Your daughter, Emma,” Rafferty said. “And others.”

  “None of us was left unscathed.” Eva looked at him.

  He stared at her. Something about her tone quieted him. He didn’t dare speak.

  “Do you believe in redemption, Detective Rafferty?”

  He couldn’t answer. The truth was, he didn’t know what he believed. Not anymore.

  “You’ll need to decide that,” Eva said. “And quickly.”

  Cal swore he wasn’t around when the beating occurred. Later Angela herself would swear to the same thing. The women had hurt her, she said, because they had found some of the trinkets she’d gotten from the witches. And a piece of lace. It was a piece that Eva had given to Angela months earlier. It was the kind of lace the island girls made. The kind of lace Eva used to do her readings.

  When Angela didn’t come back to the camp, Cal had gone to the police. Some of his disciples had followed her to Eva’s house.

  “Don’t you mean chased her?” Rafferty asked him. He was already getting phone calls about the Calvinists. He’d been on his way over there before Cal showed up at the station. There was a mob gathering in the park, and in front of Eva’s house.

  “I want you to search the house,” Cal said.

  “I have no intention of searching the house.” Rafferty stood on Eva’s top step with Cal right behind him. “If Eva says Angela’s not there, then she’s not.”

  “She’s lying.”

  “I have nothing to hide,” Eva said. “Feel free to search the house if you like, Detective Rafferty. Mr. Boynton can come, too, as long as he is in your company.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, that’s a legal invitation,” Cal said, stepping over the threshold.

  Rafferty started to protest as Eva moved back to let Cal pass.

  Eva held the door for Rafferty. “I know what I’m doing, Detective,” she said. Her eyes shifted for just an instant to the lace on the window. “Come in.”

  Rafferty walked inside.

  They searched the house. Cal had learned every inch of this house in the days he’d been married to Emma. Even Eva seemed surprised by how familiar he was with the floor plan. He led the search, taking them room to room, sometimes checking a place more than once. Cal was very agitated. He searched the cellar twice and was headed to the widow’s walk for the third time when Rafferty finally called off the search.

  “Enough,” Rafferty said. “She isn’t here.”

  “No,” Eva said. “I regret that she isn’t.”

  “She came into this house,” Cal said.

  “Yes…. She did.”

  “We have witnesses that say she never left.”

  “Your witnesses need to have their eyes examined,” Eva said.

  The word of witchcraft spread quickly. Eva had made Angela disappear. The Calvinists were convinced that Eva had magic powers. Even the witches seemed impressed.

  “Angela went into the house, but she never came out,” Ann told Rafferty. “I know that for a fact. I don’t know how Eva did it, but she did.”

  The next morning Cal and a group of his followers showed up at the police station to file a formal complaint accusing Eva of witchcraft. It was a decent attempt, hand-lettered in old script with s’s and f’s interchanged, an academic Middle English. It was the first formal complaint of witchcraft filed in Salem since the 1600s.

  The Calvinists sent a copy of the complaint to the Salem News, which, not knowing how to treat it, printed it in their editorial section.

  It had taken Dr. Ward to point out the obvious plagiarism. “See for yourself,” the minister said. “It’s pure Cotton Mather, down to the ‘plan to countermine the devil in New England.’ If you don’t believe me, you can look it up. The whole account of the witch trials is on display at the Peabody Essex.”

  “What year is this? What century?” Ann Chase wanted to know.

  “I don’t understand why we’re even taking his report,” the police chief said to Rafferty. “Witchcraft isn’t even a crime. In this town it’s a profit center.”

  “I’m just building a case,” Rafferty said. “For future reference.”

  “Not against Eva?” The chief seemed shocked.

  “Please,” Rafferty said.

  It was almost three weeks before anyone found out where Angela was.

  She radioed Rafferty from Yellow Dog Island. “You have to come out here and get me.” Angela’s voice was urgent. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

  The chief stood over Rafferty’s shoulder as the message came in.

  “I didn’t know she was out there,” Rafferty said. He could tell the chief didn’t believe him.

  The two men looked at each other.

  “What do you want me to do?” Rafferty asked.

  “Go out and get her,” the chief said.

  Rafferty took the police boat out to the island. May was waiting on the dock with Angela. Her backpack leaned against the ramp.

  “You could have told me she was here,” Rafferty said to May.

  “Not my policy,” Ma
y said.

  “So Eva helped you,” Rafferty said.

  “Eva told Angela her options. She came here on her own.”

  “And now I want to go back on my own.” Angela’s tone was sarcastic.

  “Good,” Rafferty said. “Because if you tell me you’re going back to Cal Boynton, I’m leaving you here.”

  “She will,” May said.

  “Reverend Cal never hurt me.” She turned to May. “I told you what happened. The women threw stones at me.”

  “They stoned you?” Rafferty was amazed by Eva’s accurate reading.

  “Reverend Cal never touched me,” Angela said.

  “Well, he must have touched you at least once,” May said.

  Angela turned red.

  “She’s pregnant,” May said.

  “Is that true?” Rafferty looked at her. She wasn’t showing. Not yet.

  Angela started to cry. “This is why I’m leaving,” she said. “I told you that in confidence. You’re not supposed to tell.”

  “I don’t keep confidences that might endanger you.”

  “I told you, he wasn’t the one who hurt me.”

  “I’m not talking about physical abuse. I’m talking about sexual abuse.”

  Angela looked horrified. “He didn’t abuse me.”

  “Right.”

  Angela went on with her explanation. Cal had never been anything but good to her. Angela went on and on. Talking about the accusation of witchcraft, the devil’s marks. And how Cal Boynton had saved her from the fires of hell. She said she was lucky to be chosen. Lucky to be saved.

  Rafferty watched May give up on Angela.

  “She came too early,” May said to him later. She had seen it before. “They never make it if they come here before they’re ready.”