J. G. Passarella - Wendy Ward 01

by Wither

  THUMP…THUMP…THUMP…

  The Moody Inn is to her right now. She can never avoid it in the dream. And, as her gaze falls on the iron ring handles, the doors burst open.

  He is laughing as he steps out.

  He inclines his head, clasping hands behind his back and smiles with a rotting charm. She fights the urge to run. “Good morning, Widow Cole,” he says, bowing neatly from the waist.

  “Good day, Magistrate Cooke,” she answers quickly. She attempts to continue past, but civility is never enough to escape him.

  He steps in front of her again. “Please, do call me Jonah,” he insists. “Surely you are not too busy to exchange greetings with a gentleman of the most honorable intentions?”

  “Please forgive me” she says, attempting unsuccessfully to sidestep him yet again. Honorable was the last word she would attach to his intentions.

  He rubs his jaw, displeased with her. “There are rumors… new accusations in this very town.”

  “It has been years since Salem. I had hoped Windale would be spared.”

  “Some say a witch caused the burning of Goodman Jones’s house.”

  THUMP. The samp mortar sets the dull, heavy rhythm for her heart.

  “They say it was witch fire that done it!” He pauses for effect. “You sold candles to Goody Jones, did you not, Rebecca?”

  “Only candles, nothing more,” she says, holding her basket of candles close.

  THUMP

  “I have heard it said that these… fits of yours, these fits of the mind have brought great ill to Goody Hale’s hens.”

  “Goodman Howell says that my fits are merely an… epilepsy. There is nothing of witchcraft in them.”

  “Goodman Howell is an excellent physician, but guileless in the matters of witches and witchcraft. I know better, Rebecca. Some say that the very moment the devil slips into your body to cause these fits, foul things happen. That your fits let the Old Boy do his work. Do you not smell the stench of brimstone?”

  “Sometimes… a foul odor, but there is nothing of the devil in my epilepsies.”

  “The stench of hell, I say. The devil come calling and you his willing servant. Do you not see apparitions of the damned?”

  “I know nothing of the devil. They are merely visions”

  “They are the devil at work and yourself a witch” Cooke says. “Nothing says the devil’s chosen shall always have the face of the hag. I could believe a woman as pretty as yourself might be a witch,” THUMP “What really caused the Jones’s fire, Rebecca, your candles or your fits? Are you ready to confess it?”

  THUMP. “I never…” Her breathing has become shallow, the laces of her bodice constricting her chest. She is suffocating. Almost wishes it for the foul odor that suddenly surrounds her.

  “As you know, it is quite within my influence as a magistrate to… shall we say, dispel certain of these accusations. There are interrogatories, certain tests and examinations.” She nods nervously, all words lost to her lips. Her mouth has begun to twitch slightly, her eyelids to flutter. “Perhaps you might visit me this evening, to ease these concerns?” A thick eyebrow arches expectantly.

  The pounding of the samp mortar comes from within her now, her heartbeat, quicker and deafening. His hand reaches out and touches her face with icy fingers. She pulls away and stumbles. The basket slips from her nerveless fingers and the candles scatter on the ground around her feet. Light flashes around Jonahs face. Black demons articulated from smoke seem to caper above his head, taunting her. Voices whisper urgent nonsense into her ears.

  Jonah’s hands reach out to her, but instead of helping her, he seems to be pushing her. Pushing her down. She falls with a gasp. Tear clenches her stomach. The seizure pulls her down into a helpless darkness and she is hardly aware as… people begin to gather around her, where she lies in the dirt, twitching and trembling. They look to one another, darting glances, looking for something fearful they expect to happen. Rebecca Cole is in a seizure. Is it not then that strange, foul deeds happen?

  Wither pushes through the crowd, toward the prone woman. Jonah Cooke, the troublesome magistrate, stands over the spectacle, a look of disgust on his face, not the slightest inclination to help. She does not doubt his unwanted attentions are somehow at the root of Rebecca’s fit.

  “Move! All of you!” Wither kneels at Rebecca Cole’s side and sneers up at them, finally settling on Jonah Cooke. “You would stand here and do nothing for her?”

  Cooke clears his throat. “I had planned to find Doctor Howell.”

  “A plan long in its execution, then” Wither says disdainfully. Her hands move swiftly over Rebecca’s body, seeking…. Finally, her hands settle around the thrashing woman’s face, grip it tightly. “She burns brightly, this one” Wither says softly. “Her mind burns, like to bum itself out.” Suddenly the convulsions stop.

  “The devil’s own work!” Cooke says, his voice thick with fear. “You took the spell away. The very same spell you must have placed yourself. You are a witch—”

  “Nonsense,” Wither says, but smiles at his discomfort.

  Rebeccas strained muscles relax and her face becomes peaceful.

  Her eyes flutter open and slowly focus. She stares jirst at the sky, then at the strange woman who cradles her head in her lap.

  The samp mortar is suddenly still.

  And Rebecca says with a touch of awe, “Widow—”

  Karen’s eyes snapped open. She saw distant lozenges of institutional light, and realized she was looking directly up at the fluorescent lighting of the lecture hall. A face was nearby, just outside her frame of vision. Speaking: “Professor? Can you hear me?” The voice was distorted, as if traveling through water.

  Wendy. Recognition came after a disorienting delay. Wendy was crouched down on the floor beside her, holding Karen’s hand. In a circle at a safe distance away stood more students, looking wary, as if what Karen had might be catching.

  Karen tried to rise. Wendy put a firm hand to her shoulder. “Maybe you should lie still for a second. We’ve called for campus security—they’re sending an ambulance.”

  Karen sat up anyway, her head throbbing. Through her hair she felt an angry knot at the base of her skull. She tasted the coppery tang of blood.

  “What happened?” she asked Wendy

  “I think you had a seizure. You made a noise, like a groan, and flipped out of your chair onto the floor.” She took a clean tissue from her purse and touched it gently to Karen’s lip: it came back bloody. “I think you might’ve bitten your tongue.”

  “How long was I unconscious?”

  “Maybe thirty seconds,” Wendy said, speaking quietly.

  “That’s all?” Karen said.

  “Seemed plenty long enough,” Wendy said, and Karen could see the girl was concerned.

  Karen looked into her student’s eyes and had the strangest feeling of déjà vu. The present as flashbulb afterimage on a dream…or a past memory?

  Art woke to antiseptic light and an out-of-kilter world. The right side of his face felt sore and lopsided, and when he lifted a hand instinctively to the bandages he saw intravenous lines trailing from the back of his hand.

  “My eye…,”he said, feeling a dread sinking in his chest.

  A voice told him: “Don’t worry—you still have them both.”

  Art turned in the direction of the man who’d spoken. He was standing in Art’s temporary blind spot, in the doorway of the private hospital suite.

  Sheriff Bill Nottingham was Art’s age and twice his size, big across the chest and shoulders, with the hangdog expression of a man with teenaged daughters. They’d gone to Harrison High School together, though of course they’d run in different crowds— Bill captaining the swim team while Art engineered the perfect bong.

  “What do you remember?” the sheriff asked, taking Art’s return to consciousness as an invitation to enter.

  “Being prepped for surgery,” Art said.

  “Before that,”
<
br />   There was a plastic cup of water on the bedside table, and Art sipped it. “You mean the accident…” He frowned, tried to bring it back into focus. “Isn’t much there. Just fragments … Hitting my head on the steering… And the paramedics…” He shook his head and instantly regretted it. He looked at the sheriff, now standing at the foot of his bed. Tried a smile. “Christ, Bill, I don’t think we’ve spoken since high school.”

  “This isn’t a reunion,” the sheriff said flatly. “I’ve got questions to ask. I’d like to get the answers to them now, but I’ll come back if you’re not ready”

  Art chilled at his tone. “My god, the little girl…. Is she dead?”

  The sheriff’s expression tightened, controlling any show of emotion beyond the professional. “Her neck is broken. She’ll never walk again.”

  Quadriplegic. Art felt the room swoon sickeningly around him. He clutched the cold steel bed rails to steady himself. Worse than dead…

  The sheriff watched Art’s reaction through clinically cool eyes. When Art began to speak again, they narrowed to slits.

  “I remember she…had some kind of fit. She attacked me—”

  The sheriff held up a hand. “I want to hear this. All of it. But I have to tell you before you say any more that you have the right to remain silent…” Art looked at him in surprise while he delivered his Miranda monologue.

  “I’m under arrest!? What do you—?”

  “Do you understand your rights as I’ve described them to you?” He glared at Art.

  Art’s mouth was dry so he only nodded.

  “When did your relationship with Abby MacNeil begin?” He gave the word relationship special emphasis.

  “But I’d just found her…in the woods….She was unconscious—”

  “When?”

  “A half hour before the accident. I never saw her before that.” He was confused, put on the defensive by the cop’s accusation tone. “The car wreck was an accident, Bill. I lost control when she attacked me. You see what she did to my eye.”

  The sheriff’s jaw tightened again. He crossed his arms and his jacket opened, revealing his service Clock and handcuffs. When he spoke again, it was in a deadly whisper. “You keep pissing in my face like this, we’re gonna have a serious problem. Now, I’ll give you one more chance to tell me how long you’ve been doing this to the little girl.”

  “Doing?!” Art felt tears of frustration well up in his one good eye. “I told you—I just found her a half hour before the accident.”

  “Bullshit!” The cop was trembling with restrained fury. “Listen to me, Leeson. All we’ve got you on now is reckless endangerment of a minor—it isn’t much, but it’s enough to hold you until we can make the more serious charges stick. And I will make them stick.”

  “Serious charges. But what am I suspected of?”

  “Kidnapping. Attempted rape.”

  The words hit Art like a slap. “My God, no.” They thought he was some kind of—child predator.

  “That’s right, Art,” the sheriff said. “While you’re lying there healing, you just think about what you’ve done to her.”

  Art was too numb to protest. He couldn’t shake the memory of the little girl asleep on the witches’ graves. He said weakly, “Does she remember anything?”

  “She won’t speak. She’s in post-traumatic shock. No one can help her now.” He’d spent all his rage, and was left now only with a weary sadness. He hesitated at the door to Art’s hospital room. “Only you. You can do one thing right by this little girl: accept responsibility for what you’ve done to her.”

  On his way down from the perp’s fifth-floor hospital room, Sheriff Bill Nottingham stopped off at the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit to check on the little girl. He found the child’s father at the nurses’ station, flirting with one of the RNs. Randy MacNeil, twenty-nine, had problems with Massachusetts open-container laws. Nottingham had personally administered field sobriety tests on two occasions to the younger man, the second resulting in a DUI conviction. It was to this prior confrontation that the sheriff attributed MacNeil’s discomfort now whenever they were alone together.

  The sheriff tipped his head in silent greeting to MacNeil, who looked stricken at the sight of the police officer approaching from the elevators.

  “How you holding up?” the sheriff asked, and put a hand on |MacNeil’s shoulder. The young father startled at the sheriff’s touch.

  “You know.” He gave an equally vague shrug, like a kid called on the carpet by his guidance counselor. He hadn’t shaved, and his redwhiskers were coming in patchy, like a rash.

  “You mind if I look in on her?”

  Randy MacNeil looked relieved. “Yeah sure, go ”head. I think she’s awake.“ He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of his daughter’s room.

  The sheriff nodded and continued past the nurses’ station, steeling himself for the sight of the little girl. A father himself, he dreaded these moments when the random ugliness of the world chose a child for its victim. He put a hand on the Plexiglas partition that separated Abby’s area from the rest of the ICU pod, and looked in.

  She was lying on her back on a special hospital bed designed to prevent bedsores in paralyzed patients. The heart monitor chirped quietly from its mechanical stand behind her. There’d been some concern at first that her spinal chord had been severed so high up that she would lose all autonomic function and require a respirator for the rest of her life to do her breathing for her. Thank god for small miracles, Sheriff Nottingham thought now, as he noticed that she’d been taken off the ventilator since his last visit.

  Randy MacNeil had been wrong about his daughter: she wasn’t awake. In fact the little girl was deep into REM sleep, her eyes scanning left-to-right rapidly behind her closed lids.

  She was dreaming…

  Sarah Hutchins slides the warming pan under the linen sheets of the single-posted jack bed. The embers in the copper pan warm the bed while the ale her husband drinks from his tankard warms his stomach. The ale, however, will produce a fatal heat from which he will not escape. He will take that secret to his grave.

  Her arms ache with each movement of the warming pan. The bruises along her arm and ribs have faded to yellow. Three days have passed since the last beating. Enough time to give her the courage to administer the poison Elizabeth has given her.

  Even though she has been waiting for the sound, it still startles her. The wooden tankard falling over, ale spilling out, spreading over the long table with a wet, gurgling rush. A moment later, his head strikes the table.

  She places the warming pan carefully on the floor. “Roland,” she calls, afraid to turn, afraid that he has found her out and is playing along to reveal her treachery. “Roland?”

  Sarah turns slowly, conscious that she was holding her breath. Now her fate is truly cast with Elizabeth and Rebecca. She whispers to herself, “There is no one else now.”

  Moonlight shines through the triangular-shaped windowpanes of leaded glass, lighting the floor of the keeping room in a pattern like arrowheads on her husbands back. The flames in the fireplace and lantern seem stirred to urgency, impatient for her to finish her task, as if they are emissaries of the devil come to oversee her sin. “The worst is over,” she says. “But all is not yet done.”

  He wears his looped jerkin, deer-hide breeches tied at the knee, and knitted wool stockings. He has been still and silent since his head fell to the table. Not snoring, as the poison has taken him to a deeper place than sleep, where the blackness of his mind matches the blackness of his heart.

  She wraps her hands under his arms, grips the cloth of his vest, and pulls him back from the bench. He is a big man, and she struggles with the weight. “Take your time,” she whispers, “You have all of the night to make it complete.”

  Her knees buckle under his weight, and she falls back, banging her head against the hard wood floor. She squirms out from beneath him. “Even in death you have the power to abuse me.”

  Sh
e looks at the window, expecting half the town to be staring back at her. Bent into a crouch, she pulls him across the floor, her fingernails biting into the cloth of his jerkin. “Did you think I would ever give a child to you? Each day you made such beautiful furniture, yet each night your hands had only ugliness for me. I would never give a child to your ugliness. Elizabeth saw to that outcome with her bitter potions, which I gladly drank.” It is only passing strange to her that his death has freed her tongue to speak the endless grievances against him. All the things she could never say to him while he yet lived.

  She struggles with his weight, down the narrow staircase to the basement, if she is not careful, she could fall and break a limb or split her head open. Carelessness now will produce the same result as if she had shared the deadly draught with her husband. She grunts with effort, realizing with each step that she leaves traces of dust and wood splinters on his clothing, signs that he has been dragged. She will have to clean his jerkin and breeches. “How many times has Elizabeth performed such dark chores?” she asks herself, sweat beading her brow.

  Her heart pounds. Sunrise is still hours away, yet the thought of daylights revelations fill her with sick fear. She has begun to appreciate the night, the concealing darkness. Here in the basement, the darkness is almost complete. She imagines Roland looking up at her, waiting for a careless moment to clutch her throat, to squeeze the life out of her as easily as waterfront a rag. One last beating.

  She runs upstairs for a candlestick. The fireplace hisses and spits its disapproval. Taking the long candlestick from the windowsill, she hurries to the betty lamp, pulls its wick out with the chain pick, and lights her candle from the hear fat flame. A chill races up her spine and a lump of dread makes its home in the pit of her stomach. What has she seen out of the comer of her eye? What movement?

  She looks over her shoulder, her mind filling with excuses never to he uttered. If she is caught now, she will not fight the accusations. The night knows all about her now. It knows the exact moment she stopped being the girl with the quick laughter and the moment when months of fear blossomed into a willingness to commit murder. Yes, the night knows Sarah Hutchins well.