Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3)

by Sheila Connolly

  “I can’t tell you that, Abby.” Sarah laid a hand over hers, and Abby felt a tingle of warmth. It felt nice. It was also different from what she felt when Ned did the same thing. Closer to what she felt when Ellie held her hand, like when they crossed a street. She’d have to think about that—later. Right now she was at Ground Zero and she had to focus.

  “Well, there’s one more thing I want to do today: find Gallows Hill, where they hanged the witches.”

  “Is that a good idea?” Sarah said anxiously. “I mean, it’s bound to be hard on you. If we can even find it. Isn’t there a park?”

  “Yes, and the park is probably in the wrong place—they kind of picked a convenient hill a long time after the fact, when there was no one around to remember. It wasn’t the site of one of their best events—I think they’d have been happier to forget all about it. Until the tourists showed up.”

  “So how are we supposed to locate it?” Sarah asked. “Follow the pain? Sorry, that was in poor taste.”

  “It’s okay, Sarah—humor helps. I found something online, written by a person who approached it logically and looked at all the primary sources, and then looked at the old roads and a topographic map. I think he made a pretty good case. I vote for checking that out.”

  “Okay, as long as it’s not miles away.”

  “It did lie just outside town limits—in 1692. Which means it’s a few blocks from where we’re sitting.”

  “Then onward! Should we have a safe word, if you get overwhelmed?”

  “Nice thought, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I mean, I don’t lose track of who I am, exactly—I’m just in a very real dream. I haven’t tried to touch anyone, and they haven’t touched me. It’s all visual and audible.”

  “And you said something about smell?”

  Abby smiled. “Well, yes, maybe. That I could do without—things were pretty rank in those days, not that they had much of a choice about it.” Abby stood up. “So, we need to go west until we cross Bridge Street, which leads to a bridge that isn’t there anymore, and then we take Bridge until it crosses Boston, at which point it becomes Proctor Street. It should be about a mile. Is that okay?”

  “I’m not ancient, Abby—I think I can manage that.”

  They set off at a moderate pace, heading more or less westward. The main intersection between Boston Street and Bridge Street looked like every other street corner in every other city—the biggest landmark was a Walgreen’s on one corner, with a large parking lot. Abby looked around and found Proctor Street, which sloped gently upward, as it would. “Hill” was probably a generous description of the low rise. The whole area was filled with modest houses probably built after 1900, much like the neighborhood she’d seen in Danvers.

  Abby looked up the hill, feeling depressed. There was nothing impressive about the landscape. Nothing except the name suggested a dramatic history on the site. So the poor doomed women had been hauled out of the jail, stuck in a cart, and dragged to the town line, up a tiny hill—her source had said it was all of thirty feet high, about the height of a three-story house—and hanged from a tree. And when they were dead, they were pulled down and dumped into a gully. Lovely. How long had they hung from that tree, visible from the town?

  “Now what?” Sarah asked.

  “We’re here.”

  “What, at Walgreen’s?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. I told you, I found a source online who looked at all the available information, and his explanation made a lot of sense. If you believe him, the hanging hill is right behind Walgreen’s. There used to be a pond where the building is now. The actual hangings took place behind the parking lot there. And the bridge crossed right where we’re standing.”

  “Talk about an anticlimax. How sad!”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Well, now that we’ve located this historic Walgreen’s, what do you want to do?” Sarah asked. “Sit cross-legged in the parking lot staring at the trees?”

  “That’s a recipe for disaster—we’d probably get arrested. Do you mind if we see if we can find a way into that stand of trees? I know they haven’t been there since 1692, but the rocks have.”

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” Sarah said cheerfully. “At least I dressed for it. You do know what poison ivy looks like, don’t you?”

  “Yes, that much I’ve figured out. Let’s go.” Abby set off toward the back end of the parking lot, wondering if she had really lost her mind. Behind the lot lay a scruffy patch of land with the underlying rock jutting through the skimpy soil in many places. Most of the trees were less than twenty feet tall, and spindly. Obviously the plot had been altered in the past three centuries. Why did she think she had any chance of picking up any residue of those poor women? But it was all she had.

  There was no fence at the back of the parking lot, so Abby plunged into the underbrush, keeping an eye out for poison ivy. She reached the crest of the hill quickly; it gave her a great view of the roof of the drugstore. Well, if she looked beyond, she could see the historic part of Salem, less than a mile away as the crow flies. Behind her the outcrop ended in somebody’s backyard, with a fence. She didn’t need to go any farther anyway. Sarah had reached the top and was standing a few feet away, scanning the horizon. She wasn’t even winded, which annoyed Abby: she really should get out more and do something. Maybe climbing up and down ladders and scraping walls was a form of exercise, but she wanted to stretch her legs and get some fresh air and sunshine. She was spending far too much time hunched over the laptop, oblivious to whatever was happening in the rest of the world, near and far. She sat down.

  Where she sat, give or take a few feet, was where nineteen people had been hanged in 1692. Nineteen ordinary citizens, going about their business until some smart-assed young girls had decided to turn their world upside down. And they’d gotten away with it. The convicted—men and women alike—had gone to their deaths under the mocking eyes of their friends and neighbors, knowing they had done nothing wrong. Wondering how everything had changed so quickly and completely.

  The next time Abby looked up, the Walgreen’s wasn’t there. It had been replaced by a silent crowd of men and women, and she was in the midst of them, facing toward Salem town. She turned quickly and looked up to see the bodies hanging like limp laundry from the old trees.

  20

  Abby fought back panic. She was still in the real world; she knew who she was, and where—she could feel rocks and leaves under her, and the sun falling on her shoulders. But at the same time she was standing with a group of people, staring at something awful. The swinging bodies were dead, no question, sagging limp from several different branches of tall old trees. She counted five, all women. Modern Abby wondered irreverently whether the officials of the town had waited for a day without rain, so that the execution would draw a bigger crowd. Or was there something special about the date? Obviously they hadn’t had to build anything for the purpose—those trees had been there for a while. What kind were they? Locust? Too bad she couldn’t ask Sarah, who would probably know.

  Who was she? Whose body had she borrowed to watch? Or had the owner of the body summoned her in?

  Abby felt calmer now, more in control of herself, although she had no control over her host—hostess, she amended, looking down at the shabby skirt and apron she was wearing. She glanced to her right and was startled to see Samuel Barton, who had his arm around her. Samuel tugged on her arm—Abby could feel it—and looked like he was ready to go, but she—or rather, her seventeenth-century surrogate—pulled her arm away and returned her gaze to the dangling bodies twisting in the breeze. The trees were in full leaf, and the wind was warm. Summer, then. After the first trials. Some of the earliest executions. What else should she notice? How long did she have?

  Abby tried to still her roiling emotions and just listen, although “listen” was not quite the right word. Try to hear the emotions? The woman she was seeing through was grieving, an almost physical pain. Other emotions began to eme
rge slowly, trickling in from all sides, then building in force. What were these people feeling? Fear came through the loudest. Fear of—what? The Devil? Or that they’d be next to see Abigail Williams’s finger pointed at them? Where was dear young Abigail—who probably more than anyone present deserved the title of Devil’s Tool? Almost as if she’d heard, a girl near the front turned and looked smugly at the silent crowd, her eyes locking briefly with Abby’s. The same girl she’d seen when she’d first seen Samuel: it had to be Abigail. When the girl was satisfied, she turned back to her peers in the front row, looking pleased with herself. Look what you did, you little bitch. You and your little buddies killed these women. I hope you paid for it.

  Abby tried to quell that anger: that was her own, not from the people around her, and it mattered to her that she find out what they were thinking, or feeling. Did they believe they’d done the right thing, by trying to purge their community of an evil influence? But in a way they had invited the Devil in, or left the door open, at least. Were they now horrified by how things had turned out, and fearful for what was yet to come. I know what’s coming, and it’s not pretty.

  And gradually she came back to her carrier’s emotions, a convoluted mix of pain and sorrow and fear, nestled like a huge ball in the pit of her stomach. Was she at risk? Or someone close to her? Was Samuel under suspicion for standing up for Elizabeth Proctor?

  Samuel’s hand on her arm again, insistent. “Hannah, we must go.”

  A horn blared in the parking lot below, and abruptly Abby returned to the present. Sarah was sitting a few feet away, her back against a mid-sized tree, watching her. “You okay?”

  “I think so,” Abby said cautiously. “Thank you for not interrupting.”

  “You didn’t look like you needed help. Except you’ve been crying.”

  Startled, Abby reached up and found her cheeks were wet. “I didn’t realize . . .”

  “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “Yes. But give me a few minutes to sort things out in my head, will you?”

  “You want to walk back to the car now?”

  “Sure. I’m fine—just confused. Do you know, Salem looked a lot different in 1692.”

  Sarah cocked her head. “Are you saying you saw it?”

  “Yes, from right here.”

  Sarah nodded without comment and began picking her way down the slope toward the parking lot, and Abby followed. She wasn’t sure what she should feel at that moment: awe that she’d seen a piece of the past, even if it was a particularly unpleasant one? She had no doubt that it had been real, not something she’d imagined. Sorrow for those who had suffered then? It was one thing to read about what had happened and infer people’s reactions (something the official record definitely did not include, unless an individual started spewing curses at the crowd); it was entirely different to be in the midst of it, and Abby was pretty sure that the person—Hannah?—she’d been inhabiting had had a personal connection to one or another of the hanged women. Why else would her grief have been so sharp?

  “Abby!” Sarah’s hand on her arm. “We should wait for the light to cross, you know.”

  Abby looked around her to find they were standing at the main intersection of Proctor and Bridge Street, and on her own she would have just kept walking, right into the traffic. “Oh, right. Thank you, Sarah. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad you asked me to come along, Abby. Okay, now we can cross.”

  They made it back to the parking garage, silent along the way. Sarah was peaceful company: she didn’t ask questions, and she didn’t babble just to make noise. Ned had inherited some of that too. Of course, taken too far it could be seen as lacking in empathy, unable to connect to other people. That idea made Abby smile: the problem in Sarah’s and Ned’s cases was probably too much empathy, and the difficulty of not knowing how to respond to it without terrifying other people.

  “You want to get a bite or something?” Sarah asked while they were still outside the garage.

  “No, there’s something I want to check online, so I need my laptop. I can offer you tea and cookies at home. I think you might be interested if what I suspect is true.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Once Sarah had maneuvered her car out of the center of Salem, Abby started to describe what she had seen, while the memory was sharp—slowly at first, and then more rapidly as the emotions had taken over. She had just about wrapped it up when they arrived in Lexington. Sarah pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine. But before getting out, she turned to Abby.

  “You know, this may sound strange, but in a way I’m jealous. You’ve seen something that very few other people have—actually, none that I know of, so I’m just guessing that there are others who share our gift. I know it must have been frightening and upsetting for you, but was it exciting? You can tell me to shut up if you want.” Sarah smiled anxiously.

  “No, Sarah, that’s all right. I’d have the same questions if I was in your shoes. It was kind of schizoid, I guess. I mean, I knew who I was and I never really lost sight of that, but I was seeing what someone else saw then. Someone with a real connection to the events, not just a snoopy bystander. So I was two people at once, in a way. Let’s go inside—I want to see if I can figure out who that other me was.”

  “Of course.” Sarah followed her up the front steps and into the house. “Hey, why don’t I make the tea and you can do your searching?”

  “That makes me sound like a terrible hostess, but I really would appreciate it, Sarah.”

  When Sarah disappeared into the kitchen, Abby sat down at the table and opened her laptop. She had to admit she had very confused feelings about what she was about to look for. What did she hope to find? Or what was she afraid she would find?

  Previously she had ended her search when she found Samuel in Salem. So who was Hannah?

  When Sarah returned, she found Abby sitting and staring into space. “Abby? The tea is ready.”

  Abby didn’t move at first, then turned slowly to face Sarah. “I know who Hannah was, and who her mother was, and who her aunts were.”

  “You need food, and sugar, and caffeine. I’ll bring in the tea, and since I couldn’t find any cookies I made some cinnamon toast. Then you can tell me about it.”

  Abby waited, still in a daze. Sarah returned with a tray full of tea things. She poured Abby a cup, added sugar and milk, and set it in front of her. “Drink this.” Abby obeyed, because it was easy. When Sarah slid a plate of buttered toast sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar, Abby dutifully picked up a piece and munched. It did help: after five minutes she was feeling almost human.

  “Well, you look better,” Sarah said. “You ready to explain?”

  “Yes. And thank you. I feel like I need a keeper as I keep stumbling through this, and I can’t think of a better person than you, Sarah.”

  “Not even Ned?” Sarah said.

  “No, because he’s a man. That’s not a criticism, just a fact. Haven’t you noticed that most of what happened in Salem was generated by and aimed at women? Sure, the magistrates were all men, and some of the accused were as well, but it was the women—well, mainly the girls—who started it all. By the way, Abigail Williams looked like a very nasty piece of work.”

  “You saw her?” Sarah asked, incredulous. “I cannot believe I am having this conversation. Okay, lay it out for me, and I’ll try to keep my comments to a bare minimum.”

  Abby nodded, and dove in. “I knew who Samuel was because I saw him in court last Saturday, where he gave his name. I know—saw isn’t quite right, but you know what I mean. Today Abigail Williams was there with her little friends, right up front. Anyway, I recognized Samuel when I saw him on Gallows Hill today. He was standing next to me, and he had his arm around me. He called me Hannah.”

  “One quick question: was the person who you were seeing through on Saturday the same as the one today?”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that.” Abby pause
d for a moment to recall what she’d seen. “The first one, in the courtroom—yes, I think so. The one at Gallows Hill was someone else. So that’s two female relatives there, plus Samuel.”

  “That’s what I was wondering. Go on, please.”

  Abby picked up the thread. “I realized I hadn’t really finished the research on Samuel the other day—I’d only been looking to make the connection to him, so I hadn’t looked at the rest of his family in any detail. Like his wife. Her name was Hannah Bridges. They got married in Salem in 1690, before all the craziness started.”

  “So you were seeing through his wife?”

  “Looks like it, the last time. But that’s not all. Hannah’s father was Edmund Bridges, but he was already dead by the time Hannah married Samuel. Hannah’s mother was Sarah. Her married name in 1692 was Cloyce, and she was one of the accused witches.”

  “Oh, wow,” Sarah whispered.

  “I’m not done yet. It turns out that Sarah’s maiden name was Towne. Two of the witches hanged at Salem were her older sisters, Rebecca and Mary. I think what I was seeing today was the day that Rebecca Towne was hanged, with her niece Hannah watching. And I think that the other person at the courthouse, before we went to Gallows Hill, was Hannah’s mother, Sarah, who was the accused at the hearing, along with Elizabeth Proctor. They were arrested together, and examined by John Hathorne—that’s Nathaniel’s ancestor—and Jonathan Corwin, the one who lived in the so-called Witch House. Abigail accused Sarah in court that day, and then Sarah was shipped off to prison in Boston the same night. So that’s not the same event when her son-in-law Samuel testified. Sarah’s my lineal ancestor, and I was seeing the hearing through her—and seeing Abigail.”

  “Oh, my,” Sarah said. “How awful for you.”

  “Yeah, I guess it was.” And Abby burst into tears.

  She’d been so good, so strong, keeping it all together in the face of incomprehensible visions. Sure, Abby, you just watched your umbledy-dumpth great-aunt get hanged as a witch in 1692, with her community watching—and some of them had enjoyed it. She was the rational one, the one in charge. It was like a historical diorama, right? Or a play. Except it wasn’t: they had been real people, and she was related to them. She wouldn’t be sitting where she was now, or be the person she was, without any and all of them. She had guessed right: the pain had lingered through the centuries, soaked into the ground, the stone. The pain had been very real. The Devil had walked among them, only not in the way they thought.