J. G. Passarella - Wendy Ward 01

by Wither

  Frankie whispered, “You’re telling me Alissa sells these magic mushrooms? Too cool! I know a couple frat houses I’d like to buzz over.”

  “Nothing hallucinogenic here, sorry,” Wendy said, grinning.

  “But you don’t really rub your body with these flying mushrooms, do you?” Frankie asked, wide-eyed.

  “Personally? No, I do not.”

  A sudden image of flying filled Wendy’s mind. She was looking down on log homes and the commons of colonial Windale, on the sheep that darted and ran from the distorted moon shadow she cast upon the ground. Their primal fear filled her with a sense of power.

  Frankie was shaking her. Wendy shuddered.

  “Are you okay?” Frankie asked, her easy manner replaced with concern now.

  “I’m… okay.”

  “Could have fooled me,” Frankie said. “You’re white as a ghost.”

  Wendy hid the trembling of her hands with quick passes of the duster. She forced a smile and a light tone as she said, “Maybe somebody walked on my grave.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  * * *

  On the last day of September, and with the provisional blessing of the Board of Graduate Studies in hand, Art embarked on his new career as a feminist.

  Not quite a card-carrying feminist, Art harbored no particular political agenda, and he was smart enough to recognize that he knew next to nothing about contemporary feminist debate or the intellectual tradition on which it was founded. What he did know, however, was the history of the textile industry in Essex County, which had employed a large number of lower-and working-class women throughout the nineteenth century. He knew statistics about salary inequalities; employee racial and ethnic demographics; attitudes of management toward its female workforce. (Much of this information lay unused in Art’s overstuffed filing cabinets, or had been relegated to footnote status in his dissertation.) If this specialized knowledge made him a feminist… well then, Art supposed he was a feminist. And, surprisingly, he was beginning to warm to the idea.

  What had started as a mercenary undertaking had soon sparked an excitement Art hadn’t felt since the early days of grad school. He spent a week poring through his old notes and files in preparation for today, when he’d begin his fieldwork. He bought 4oo-speed 35mm film for his camera, a fresh stack of the three-by-five note cards he preferred (wide ruled, a medium card stock), and—for spiritual guidance—a new Magic 8-BalL

  The first stop on his itinerary was Windale’s tiny one-room historical society, which shared office space and a single underpaid secretary with the Clerk of town records. Her name was Mrs. Florence Reader, age seventy-one, and she was as much living witness to the region’s history as its curator. As Art entered the small offices, Florence called out to him.

  She kept her focus on centering an ancient folio within a glass table-case. Florence recovered from her fright and beckoned Art to join her at the display case. “Oh, Arthur! Come see our latest acquisition! It’s a journal, dating back to the early eighteenth century. A local farmer’s wife.”

  “Have you read it?”

  She looked horrified. “My stars, no! It’s too fragile.” She closed the glass lid of the display case and locked it, suddenly suspicious Art might try to touch it.

  Art peered in at the folio, which wasn’t a bound volume but simply a collection of brittle pages held together between two loose covers, secured with leather cords. “She must’ve been a wealthy farmer’s wife, if she could afford paper in the early eighteenth century.”

  “Yes! I was just about to type up a note saying as much, for the display. This paper probably came from one of the few commercial paper mills. My guess is the Rittenhouse Mill in Germantown, Philadelphia.”

  Art straightened, surveying the historical society’s digs. It was almost wholly dedicated to a single chapter in the town’s long history: an October day almost exactly three hundred years ago, when, on a grassy spot now occupied by an old Howitzer-turned-war-memorial, three of Windale’s daughters were hung by the neck until dead. Despite the simple brutality of the act, it didn’t seem like much of a story, in Art’s opinion. Not even in the same league as Salem’s witch persecutions. Salem’s trials had been a bona fide hysteria, a series of lurid courtroom confrontations presided over by a colorful fire-and-brimstone preacher, Reverend Parris, that ended in the executions of many innocent women—for the most part condemned on the basis of “spectral” evidence. The mere fact that the accusers said they saw the “specters” of the accused women tormenting them was admitted into a damning form of evidence. Talk about “insubstantial” cases. By the time Windale’s blip on the historic radar occurred seven years later, the new Commonwealth of Massachusetts had outlawed spectral evidence in witch trials. Though Windale’s three witches were blamed for a long list of wordly and otherworldly woes (unexplained fires, stillborn children, sudden illnesses, inconvenient weather), what ultimately brought them to trial were a series of very real crimes, all with the same outcome: murder.

  And so, as far as Art was concerned, Windale’s witchy past was actually a criminal—not a hysterical—one.

  Of course, try explaining that to Mayor Dell’Olio or the town board of trustees, all of whom salivated over the potential tourist revenue generated by Windale’s past. (Isn’t it interesting—the cynic in Art thought—that Windale’s interest in its own history began right after its flagship industry collapsed?)

  Hence the original street signs (Chestnut, Oak, Maple) rechris-tened (Witch Hill, Familiar Way, Black Cat Crossing). Hence the new emblem on Sheriff Bill Nottingham’s patrol car—a witch in silhouette, complete with broomstick. Hence the annual King Frost Halloween Parade, with its witch float and brigade of sexy witch-majorettes …

  And hence the Witch Museum, the entrance to which Art could just see now, annexed off the historical society’s one-room headquarters. It was more of a wax museum really, and a pretty pathetic one at that. (Art had once visited a more impressive museum in Vermont dedicated to the history of maple syrup.) Oh, they had a few spooky dioramas, with a half dozen old department store manikins tricked out in colonial garb (no one seemed to mind that these Puritan women wore eye shadow and lipstick). And Florence had tried to lend a little class to the displays by hanging wall placards that outlined the scanty details of the event. But don’t fool yourself—Windale’s witch museum had no loftier ambitions than the average carny Chamber O“ Horrors.

  Florence caught Art’s disapproving look in the direction of the Witch Museum entrance, and said gently, “I always enjoy your visits, Arthur. It’s nice to talk to someone who is interested in real history.”

  “I hope you can help me, sweetheart. I’m trying to find a list of the thirty-eight women who died in the mill fire of 1899.”

  “You want names?” Florence said with a discouraging look.

  “That’s the idea.”

  She sighed at the task and led Art into a back room heavy with the smell of moldering newsprint, and together they searched the archives. Art noticed Florence’s hands trembling as she brought forth old newspaper clippings; the skin of her liver-spotted hands was nearly the same papery texture as the fragile clippings themselves. He thought he caught a whiff of something medicinal on her breath, and decided finally that it was scotch.

  “No names in the Boston papers,” Florence announced after several moments of close reading. “Just a record of the tragedy itself. ”Thirty-eight Souls Perish in Inferno“ My, but that’s rather biblical.”

  “I’m not having any luck with the local daily, either,” Art said. Then his eye snagged on something curious in the yellowing text. He read aloud,“

  “ ”Though arson is suspected by police officials, local opinion, particularly among the elder citizenry, attributes the blaze to a centennial curse laid upon the town’s founding fathers.“ ” Art looked up from the news clipping. “Know anything about a curse, Flos?”

  She flashed him a proud look. “I wouldn’t know, that’s long before my
time.”

  Art put an arm around her and gave her a squeeze. “Of course it is, sweetheart. I only meant, when you were a little girl, do you remember any of the old-timers talking about a town curse?”

  “In fact, I do remember some talk. Campfire stories. My Uncle Reginald would scare us with stories about Windale’s curse. I’m afraid I’m a little fuzzy on the details,” she said and made her own spooky-story face. “But there was talk of a restless evil in the woods…”

  She took the newspaper clippings from Art and began refiling them according to her own eccentric system. “Speaking of woods, if you really want to find the names of your thirty-eight mill workers, you might try visiting their graveyard out in Milton Woods.”

  “Graveyard?”

  “Yes. The mill owners donated a little parcel of land on the outskirts of town to the families of the dead. That’s how businesses settled out of court in those days. The women who died were all poor immigrants anyway and couldn’t afford grave plots in the Catholic cemetery.” Her eyes twinkled. “Not many people know about that graveyard!”

  Art gave her a kiss. Her cheek was downy, soft as tissue. “That’s why I came here first!” he said and slung his camera strap over his shoulder.

  Twenty-five minutes later he was hiking along old deer paths (or, perhaps, mountain bike trails) in the dense woods that encircled the Milton textile mills. He’d had to park on a gravel shoulder off Old Winthrop Road to gain access to the woods, because if he’d parked any closer to the condemned mills he would’ve quickly drawn the attention of the local police. The great rusting mills stood like shrines to a forgotten faith, and like all condemned places they drew a steady traffic of pilgrims looking for the illicit. Which for Windale meant fraternity pleebs, vandals, amateur photographers, and the more adventurous teen lovers. Trespassers braved not only the general spookiness of the place, but also tetanus, sprained ankles, and the wrath of the local police department. Nonetheless, the textile mills still held a nostalgic fascination, and Art wasn’t the first townie who sacrificed his virginity on the iron altar of these rusting cathedrals.

  Within moments of entering the woods, Art was lost, though he wouldn’t admit this to himself for another quarter of an hour. He wasn’t particularly concerned, since his instinctive directional sense had been honed during a childhood spent tramping through woodlands. He knew with innate confidence that these woods were bounded on one side by Old Winthrop Road to the south and Miller Creek to the east, that if he wandered too far to the north he’d emerge in the manicured backyards of the new single-family developments of Darley Springs, But he’d expected to find the graveyard Florence had told him about in closer proximity to the mills, and after three quarters of an hour now of persistent searching he’d seen no sign of it.

  That was when he stumbled upon an entirely different graveyard.

  He almost tripped over the little girl. He let out a startled yelp at the sight of her, lying still on a sunny patch of grass among tumbled gravestones. For a split second he was certain she was dead; something about the play of shade-dappled sunlight made her look broken. He took two panicked steps backward and fell, tripping on tree roots and landing hard on his tailbone. His teeth clacked together and he winced, tasting blood. His heart trip-hammered behind his ribs as he spun out the implications of what he’d found…a dead girl…a serial killer’s dumping grounds-Then she whimpered. Art felt his fear shift palpably within him, just as the little girl shifted in her sleep, and become something less focused: curiosity, surprise, confusion. He steadied himself against the tree that had tripped him and waited, the way you wait a few moments before trying again to start a flooded car. The girl was sucking on the two middle fingers of her right hand.

  Art climbed to his feet and moved a little closer. What in the world is this little girl doing alone in the woods? From the sight of crayons, storybooks, and stuffed animals nearby it seemed this was her secret place. He followed that thought up to the gray screen of trees beyond, and wondered in which direction her home lay. How far could a child this young travel? She couldn’t be older than seven or eight.

  He moved closer now, and examined the gravestones that had undoubtedly attracted the little girl to this place.

  SARAH HUTCHINS

  CONDEMNED WITCH

  HANGED THIS DAY 1699.

  Before he could even question why he was doing it, Art had snapped the lens cap off his camera and captured four shots of the gravestone. Near it lay two others, with similar epitaphs, differing only in name: rebecca cole, elizabeth wither,

  The Windale witches. It had never occurred to Art that they might actually have graves. Finding them here somehow diminished them in his mind, and Art couldn’t help feeling a twinge of disappointment. We want our historic figures to keep their mystery, to inhabit that hallowed place in our collective consciousness we keep for the vaguely unreal, like movie stars and saints. Finding these graves only reminded him now that they were real women, who had suffered real lives of savage brevity.

  Why had they murdered? The question of motive—the first question of any self-respecting homicide detective—had gone unasked for the forty years of Art’s life in Windale. He couldn’t remember, and had a nagging suspicion he’d never really known. Did anyone remember? Was motive such a twentieth-century concern that it had escaped the historic record? Young women in the colonies, particularly religiously fanatic ones, didn’t routinely murder their husbands and neighbors. What, then, had pushed these three to those types of crime? Art felt a tremor of excitement as that single, simple question began to branch and bifurcate into a more intricate pattern of inquiry, blooming in his mind’s eye like a fractal flower. Suddenly his dissertation seemed ugly by comparison.

  Click-click-click-click. Art spent the rest of the 35mm exposures capturing the gravestones from different angles. He had to step over the sleeping little girl and felt guilty doing it. But she seemed to be sleeping peacefully enough, and anyway it was just for a moment…

  He rewound the roll of film, slipped it into a canister, recapped the camera. Now to the little girl. Should he leave her? Wouldn’t she be even more frightened to be woken by a stranger?

  He crouched down beside her and touched her arm. Immediately, his decision was made: she was hot, burning with fever. He knew with primal certainty that what he felt was danger, another animal in distress. And now, closer to her, he could see the strange bruising beneath the skin of her face and neck.

  She whimpered a little as he slipped his hands beneath her. When he went to move her he saw that she seemed entangled in the weeds on which she lay. Almost as if the ground itself was sending runners to hold her down, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The sun suddenly disappeared behind a cloud and the day took on a chill. Art stood and staggered a step beneath her unexpected deadweight. It was going to be a real trial carrying her back through the woods. He set off, his feet crunching through the underbrush.

  Behind them, the trees rustled in agitation.

  Wendy sighed deeply as the class finally ended. She gathered her books and notebooks into a pile, wondering if she’d ever be able to make sense out of all those arrows shed drawn. Notes taken in class had a curious way of becoming as indecipherable as hieroglyphics in about a week’s time.

  “Don’t forget, people!” Professor Gorgas called out over the general hubbub. “Your list of lab assignments and due dates are down here. Pick them up before you go. I won’t listen to excuses later. You have plenty of time. And be sure to show your work!”

  “Shall we?” Wendy asked, indicating the stack of assignment sheets.

  “Ladies first,” Alex said, with a sweeping gesture.

  “This is real late in the late twentieth century, you know,” she said.

  “Then I won’t offer to carry your books or toss my coat on mud puddles.”

  Wendy laughed. “I don’t know, that mud puddle thing might come in handy.”

  She stuffed an assignment sheet in her notebook w
ithout looking at it, handed another to Alex, who made the mistake of looking at his paper before filing it. He frowned, “Who knew stargazing could be so much work?”

  Wendy stepped out the main doors of Locke Science Center. Professor Gorgas’s astronomy class was not shaping up as she’d expected. Wendy had selected astronomy as an elective, imagining nightly field trips to the Crown Observatory. Definitely not imagining long formulas that tried to cram as many Greek letters in them as an Athens telephone directory.

  “You parked in East Lot, again?” asked a familiar voice behind her. She turned and saw it was Alex.

  She nodded. “Why do you ask?”

  “It so happens I’m headed that way.” Alex winced and quickly put his sunglasses on. Wendy stood beside him, watching Alex grin, then replied. “I may be… but you’ve got to be fast!”

  She laughed and quick-stepped down the tree-lined walkway to East Lot, for the moment not caring who might see her acting goofy. When they reached the Gremlin, she was out of breath, more from laughing all the way than from the actual distance they’d covered.

  Wendy had the feeling he was about to say something. Something about her? “So, where exactly are you headed anyway?” she asked.

  “Run some laps,” he said.

  “SPEC’S the other way across campus,” Wendy said. SPEC was the new, sprawling Schwartz Physical Education Center. “You just wanted to spend a little quality time with me, right?” Oh, my God! I can’t believe I just said that. Maybe Alissa is right Maybe I am cracking under the pressure of non-Windalers.

  Alex just smiled. “That’s probably a better reason than the real one,” he said. “I’m going over to Marshall Held.”

  A better reason? Hmm…“ Marshall Field? That place is a dump. Why go way over there?”