by Todd Ritter
“That’s clicking,” she told Dave. “The noise sounded like this.”
Using the tip of the pen, she tapped the coffee table in a quick, steady rhythm.
“Is that the same speed as the tapping you heard?” Kat asked.
“More or less, although it was lower pitched.”
“And what time was this?”
“About nine, I think.”
That was practically four hours before the fire broke out at the museum. No matter what caused the tapping—or clicking—sound, Kat was doubtful it had anything to do with the blaze.
“And there was nothing else after that?” she asked.
The Freemans answered that no, they witnessed nothing else out of the ordinary until the glow of the flames at the museum woke them up eight minutes before one. Kat thanked them for their time and told them to call her if they thought of anything else.
“We’re sorry we couldn’t tell you more,” Dave Freeman said. “Please, just catch this guy, it’s—”
“Scary right now,” his wife added. “The whole town is just—”
“Terrified.”
Kat assured them she would. Then she and Henry left the house, stepping outside into a bright autumn afternoon. The sky was a deep cerulean blue, and the trees in the Freemans’ yard were ablaze with color. The air was mostly warm, cut ever so slightly by a hint of chill. It was a perfect day—the kind that made Kat want to skip work and take a long stroll through the woods. But such a sojourn was out of the question, as her ringing cell phone rudely reminded her. Thinking it might be news about Nick, she answered it in record time.
“Chief Campbell here.”
“Chief? This is Trooper Randall Stroup.”
Kat let out an audible sigh. The call wasn’t about Nick. She supposed that, in his case, no news was good news. “How can I help you?”
“I’m here at the museum,” the deep-voiced state trooper said. “We just finished up the inventory of the historical society’s collection.”
“I’m right across the street. I can literally be there in a minute.”
“That’ll be great. It’ll be easier to explain in person.”
Kat was already halfway across the street, the museum growing closer with each step. “And why is that?”
“Because,” the trooper said, “I’m not sure you’re going to like what you hear.”
3 P.M.
Randall Stroup was a big guy. Huge, in fact. He dwarfed even Henry, which, considering Henry was six five and more than two hundred pounds of solid muscle, was no small feat. Just being in his presence made Henry stand up straight and puff out his chest. He couldn’t help it. And Randall absolutely towered over Chief Campbell, looking capable of flattening her to the floor using only the palm of his hand.
“What do they feed you boys in the state police?” Kat asked him. “Do they put growth hormones in your food? Stock the vending machines only with protein shakes?”
Trooper Stroup, without even cracking a smile, stated the obvious. “We work out.”
“Yeah. I can see that.”
The three of them were in the meeting room at the rear of the museum, standing at a table covered with papers and photographs stacked in tidy piles. According to Stroup, the pages listed every item in the Perry Hollow Historical Society’s collection. The pictures were Polaroids of the entire collection, taken by Constance Bishop for insurance purposes.
“We went through all of it,” the trooper said. “Since so much was damaged in the fire, it took a while to figure out what was what. Anything we were unsure of, we called Emma Pulsifer and she verified it for us.”
Henry moved down the length of the table, scanning some of the photos that topped the piles. He was more than a little impressed. Granted, he didn’t have the eye of an appraiser, but some of the items in the museum looked to be extremely valuable. He regretted never stopping by to take a look around when he’d had the chance.
“Was there anything missing?” Kat asked.
“A couple of things, actually. The first is this.”
Randall Stroup handed her a Polaroid. Looking over her shoulder, Henry saw that it was a picture of an antique iron. Made of cast iron, its triangular shape was more pronounced than modern ones. The handle, also cast iron, rose from the base in an elegant curve and was accented with a rod of wood in the center.
“Apparently, it was part of an exhibit on household chores in the eighteenth century,” Randall said. “We searched the whole place and didn’t find anything like it. Nor is there any paperwork or mention of it being loaned out to another museum.”
Kat studied the photograph, her finger tracing the iron’s back edge. “Gentlemen, I think we’ve found our murder weapon.”
“An iron?” Henry said.
That elicited a nod from Kat. “The damage found on Constance Bishop’s skull was in a straight line. Like she had been hit with the edge of something heavy.”
She grabbed a nearby chair and asked Trooper Stroup to sit in it. Once he did, she mimed picking up an iron, fingers curled around the invisible handle.
“The culprit grabbed the iron from the exhibit. Just like this.” Kat stood behind the trooper, using him as her unwitting victim. Raising her hand, she said, “The iron was raised, flat side facing up.”
She brought her hand down, pretending to strike Randall in the head.
“One heavy blow was all it took to knock Constance to the ground. Thinking she was dead, he then started the fire. Then he took the iron with him, although I’m not sure why.”
“That’s easy,” Henry said. “He knew the fire would destroy any evidence left behind. But cast iron doesn’t burn.”
Kat tapped her temple. “Now you’re thinking like a cop.”
Henry wasn’t sure that was a good thing, although he knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. Lord knows he had spent enough time with them.
“But that’s not the most interesting thing missing from the museum,” Randall said. “There’s this.”
He whipped out another Polaroid, laying it on the table so they both could see it. The photo showed a cylinder made of heavy paper that had once been red but was now brown with age. A thin wire poked from one end of the cylinder and lettering ran along its side, too faded to read. Not that Henry needed it to know what the object was. It was pretty clear that they were looking at a stick of dynamite.
“Let me guess,” Kat said. “This is the part I’m not going to like.”
Trooper Stroup gave a single, swift nod. “Bingo.”
“What would a museum be doing with dynamite?” Henry asked.
Kat, the only Perry Hollow native in the room, provided the answer. “It was in their exhibit about the early days of the town. I remember seeing it in grade school. We had a whole lesson on the history of logging.”
“Call me crazy,” Henry said, “but I thought logging involved saws.”
“The dynamite was used after the trees were cut down. There’d be acres of nothing but tree stumps. Pulling them out of the ground took too much time and manpower. It was easier to just blow them up. It was called stump blasting.”
“Well,” Randall said, “that dynamite is now unaccounted for.”
He didn’t express what they were all thinking—that the dynamite could now be in the hands of an arsonist. The idea alone sent a shivery jolt of fear zipping around Henry’s body. Kat felt one, too. He knew it by the way her face suddenly paled. Not by much, of course. Just enough that he could tell she was now more scared than when they first walked into the museum.
“I assume there’s nothing else that’s missing,” she said. “Unless you want to tell me that the museum also had a few hand grenades lying around.”
“They had one.” Randall produced a snapshot of a World War II–era grenade sitting against a plain white backdrop. “We found it in a storage room upstairs, so that’s been accounted for.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Kat said.
“But,” the tr
ooper continued, “we found something that didn’t belong in the museum.”
He retreated to a corner of the room, where a cardboard box sat on a folding chair. When he brought the box back to the table, Henry saw that it contained a single item—a hardcover book. The title was Witchcraft in America. The author was someone named Connor Hawthorne.
“Isn’t that the—”
“Guy we’re looking for?” Kat said. “Yes, it is. And he’s apparently not only a witch but a writer as well.”
“We found it on the second floor,” Randall said. “Under a bed in one of the rooms on display. Whoever it belonged to, they went out of their way to hide it.”
“It belonged to Constance,” Kat replied. “I guess she hid it after someone started snooping around her office.”
“But it’s just a book,” Henry said.
He took it out of the box and flipped it over. On the back was a photograph of an intense young man with shoulder-length blond hair and sharp features. It looked uncannily like the police sketch that had been passed out to the state troopers. Most of the front cover was taken up by an illustration of a woman about to be burned at the stake. The flames were up to her ankles, ready to consume the rest of her.
“I’ve seen that picture before,” Kat said. “Constance had a copy of it on her desk.”
A narrow ribbon of purple silk had been placed near the back of the book. Henry opened it to that spot, seeing several pages brightened with green highlighter. He set the book on the table and pressed it flat. Kat moved in quickly, practically squeezing herself between Henry and the table in order to scan the book. She nudged him with a sharp poke of her elbow, trying to force him to edge to the side. Instead, Henry put one of his arms around her shoulders, pulling her against him until they were both centered in front of the book. With his hand resting on Kat’s shoulder, they began to read.
*
Kat was so weary that she had trouble focusing on the page. She was fine when she was moving and talking. The adrenaline kept her going in that regard. But if she rested, even for a mere second, her exhaustion quickly bubbled to the surface, threatening to pull her under. Her mind got hazy and her eyes grew weak. Staring at the book, all she saw were blurry words running into each other until they formed unreadable streaks across the page.
She closed her eyes and slapped her cheeks. The light sting of the blows did the trick, and when she opened her eyes again, the first sentence on the page was crystal clear.
And chilling.
“Witches are everywhere,” it read. “They always have been and always will be. One could be living next door and you wouldn’t know it.”
Kat suspected Connor Hawthorne, a self-proclaimed witch himself, had meant the passage to be benign and reassuring. You have nothing to fear, he seemed to be saying. We’re just like you. Yet an ominous undercurrent lurked just beneath his words. There was something frightening about the prospect of having a witch for a neighbor. The fact that you might not even know it made it even more disturbing.
Yet Kat read on, half eager and half afraid to find out more.
While it’s true most witch trials during the late seventeenth century took place in Massachusetts, others occurred throughout the colonies at roughly the same time period. Many of these recorded incidents have been overshadowed by the infamous witch trials of Salem in 1692. Many more are lost to history. Then there are those that we know happened but have very little documentation about. The trial of Rebecca Bradford is one of them.
Kat inhaled sharply, enough for Henry to lift his heavy hand from her shoulder and say, “You okay?”
“I know that name. Constance had jotted it down at her desk.”
Only Kat had read it as a man’s first and last names. Turning the page of Connor Hawthorne’s book, she now understood that she had been badly mistaken.
The only mention of Rebecca Bradford I have found is located in the journal of William Daniel Paul, a judge who presided over several witch trials in the late seventeenth century. It was found in the attic of a home in Boston in 1964 and now resides in the archives of the Boston Public Library. In addition to offering great insight into the paranoia of the times, he goes into great detail about some of the cases he was involved in.
In a passage dated June 29, 1692, William Paul mentions being summoned to the Pennsylvania colony to oversee the case of a young mother accused of witchcraft in an unnamed village. That woman was named Rebecca Bradford.
Her situation was similar to many women accused of witchcraft during that time period. Her husband had succumbed to pneumonia the previous winter, leaving her the single parent of a young son. She lived in a cramped cabin with her husband’s four sisters, all of them struggling to make ends meet by farming the land and treating the sick with herbs from their humble garden. The allegations of witchcraft began after she had healed a child who was on her deathbed. The child’s condition improved so dramatically that many, including her parents, suspected some unnatural forces had been at play.
I can’t say with any certainty that Rebecca Bradford was a witch. The judge doesn’t go into very much detail about her alleged crime or her actions. But he does make mention of an amulet Rebecca wore that had been filled with a mixture of horehound, an herb often used to protect against evil forces, and calendula, which was rumored to help bring about a favorable verdict if carried with you into court. The appropriate use of herbs in her amulet leads me to believe that Rebecca was indeed a witch.
Despite this damning evidence, which would have resulted in a guilty verdict in a place like Salem, William Daniel Paul dismissed Rebecca’s case immediately. He admitted in his journal that he personally believed Rebecca to be guilty of practicing witchcraft. But since Pennsylvania had been founded on the promise of religious freedom, he did not feel it was his right to try Rebecca Bradford for her beliefs. She walked away a free woman.
He makes one more mention of the case in an entry dated a few months later. Without mentioning Rebecca by name, he describes receiving news about a case he had presided over in June. He says a young woman accused of witchcraft and her next of kin had died in a fire. The only survivor was the woman’s son, who was sent to live with a relative in Philadelphia. The judge, who had convicted quite a few witches in his day, expresses no sadness or remorse about the woman’s death—the rest of the entry details, in quite elaborate fashion, everything he had consumed for dinner that evening.
That was the end of the highlighted passage. Kat read on for a sentence or two but saw that the author had moved on to the sad story of another woman killed by ignorance and man’s inhumanity to man. The only other item of interest was a notation made in the margin, presumably by Constance Bishop’s hand.
“Perry Hollow?”
“What would make Constance think that such a thing happened here?”
“Well, it did mention Pennsylvania,” Henry said.
“I know, but this could have occurred anywhere.”
She backed away from the table and slipped past Henry, who lifted his hand from the open book. It sprang free, the pages fluttering of their own accord. The sudden movement dislodged a piece of paper that had been stuck in the middle of the book. A corner of it now poked out from the pages.
Using his thumb and forefinger, Henry slowly slid the paper out of the book. “It’s an envelope.”
He shoved the book aside and laid the envelope on the table. Flicking it open, he peered inside before sliding it toward Kat so she, too, could have a peek. Inside were a few folded pieces of paper so old they had to be parchment. Time had darkened them to a sickly yellow that reminded Kat of dried mustard.
Henry had already started to burrow two fingers into the envelope, but Kat grabbed his hand. “Gloves,” she said. “This is still evidence.”
Randall Stroup, who had stood by patiently as they read, was one step ahead of her, holding out a pair of rubber gloves. Kat put them on before carefully reaching into the envelope. When she pinched a corner of the par
chment, it instantly crumbled into tiny flecks that slipped around inside of the envelope.
“Shit.”
Grimacing, she tried again, this time using only the pad of an index finger to try and coax the documents free. It seemed to work, so she continued the gentle slide until the parchment was a brittle rectangle sitting on the table’s surface.
“Now the hard part,” Kat said. “We need to open them up.”
She waited until Henry, too, snapped on a pair of rubber gloves. Then she had him press lightly on the bottom of the pages while she attempted to unfold the top half. Kat held her breath as she slowly lifted the pages. Although they made a discouraging crackling sound at the crease—not unlike a candy wrapper being ripped open—she continued. Along the sides, more chips of paper broke free and dusted the tabletop.
It occurred to Kat that she should stop and let an expert open the pages. Someone with a steadier hand. Someone trained to delicately pry the secrets from ancient documents such as this one. But then she glimpsed the handwritten date at the top of the first page.
“10 November, 1692.”
She finished cracking the pages open, much faster than she should have and leaving the tabletop littered with dark yellow flecks that resembled gold dust. Kat blew them away before laying the documents flat on the table.
There were three pages in total, each one bearing identical creases where they had been folded. Kat leaned in close to the first page, squinting for good measure. Directly below the date was an introduction: “Dearest brother.”
“It’s a letter,” she said.
Henry was beside her again, so near that Kat could feel the warmth of his breath when he spoke. “What does it say?”
“I have no idea.”
Again, Kat could barely read it. This time, though, it was because the handwriting had faded so much it was barely visible. Large brown spots, from either water or mildew, dotted the pages, blocking out whole sentences. What she could make out was a cramped script that packed both the front and back of each page. There were twice as many lines as a normal letter, scrawled so close together they practically formed a solid block of text. Words that Kat recognized seemed foreign and unfamiliar. The letter f where an s should have been. Random capitalizations. Some common words had too many letters. Others had too few. It might as well have been written in another language.
