The Evil Inside (Krewe of Hunters)

by Heather Graham

  “Oh,” he said, looking back at her. “Well, I can’t help you there.”

  “Oh, nothing to worry about,” she said and shrugged.

  Jenna realized that in her pursuit she had turned down the street toward Old Burying Point Cemetery. The cemetery contained the graves of a Mayflower Pilgrim, and John Hathorne, one of the witchcraft trial judges. Nathaniel Hawthorne had added the “w” to his family’s name, and written many of his works, because he’d been disturbed by his ancestor’s involvement in the trials. Jenna mused that it was an interesting place, and she was grateful for the historic preservation there and for the monument of benches and names that had been added just outside the gates for the tercentennial of the trial in 1992.

  It was a place steeped in history and the past. A place where the dead had been interred for hundreds of years. Though tourists walked among the gravestones and sought out those of the greatest interest, Jenna could still see the hazy images of a few of the departed wandering about. Most spirits did not remain to haunt burial grounds; their business was seldom at the place where their earthly remains had been interred. Perhaps those who came just did so out of respect to others. The cemetery wasn’t crowded, but she could see a man in a ship captain’s jacket, a few in more puritanical dress, and a beautiful young woman in a gown that belonged in the early eighteen hundreds.

  “Ah, the old burying ground,” Sam said.

  “I doubt if we’ll find any answers here,” Jenna said, turning away from graveyard itself to look at him, hoping she gave away nothing of what she saw.

  “You never know. The past can usually teach us a lot. I always find people amazing—and the trials extremely interesting, as far as the legal process of the time went,” Sam mused. “Those who admitted to witchcraft—dancing with the devil, whatever!—managed to save their lives. Those who denied it to the end, certain in their belief in God or just determined that they wouldn’t admit to such ridiculousness, were the ones who were hanged. Or, in the case of Giles Corey, pressed to death.”

  “I know. I’ve always wondered how people managed to stay fast to such a declaration. I wonder about myself. If I believed I could be forgiven and redeemed by stating a lie—and I knew that I’d wind up being hanged if I told the truth—I’m not sure I would have stayed the truth course. But our standards have changed. We know the world is filled with beliefs, and we have to be tolerant of them now. I’m convinced that God would forgive anyone such a lie to save themselves, since their accusers were obviously so sadly mistaken in the law, religion—and witchcraft!” Jenna said.

  She found herself sitting on one of the cantilevered benches, looking at the trees that seemed to whisper softly in the autumn air. She had chosen the bench that was inscribed to John Proctor.

  Sam smiled, setting a foot on the bench and leaning toward her on his knee. “How wonderfully logical, Miss Duffy.”

  “Are you mocking me again?”

  He shook his head, serious despite the charming curve of his rueful smile. “I often wonder myself how people could adhere to principle with such determination in the face of such horrible consequences. Take old John Proctor. He argued that, ‘the girls will make devils of us all!’ He gave his girl a good whack—hardly accepted these days, of course—and her fits stopped. She got back with the other girls, and her fits started up again, and John Proctor wound up being hanged because the girls accused him. We can never, ever forget the power of belief and the human mind!”

  Then he looked around wistfully at the various graves. “Well, you’re good at lying,” he said suddenly, catching Jenna off guard.

  Startled, she stared up at him.

  “Or, not so good…” he said.

  “I don’t know what—”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Who were you just chasing?” he demanded.

  “If I told you, you’d make fun of me,” she said defensively.

  “Try me—since I know you’re lying anyway, and I’d rather you tell a truth that I might mock.”

  “I don’t particularly enjoy being mocked,” she said.

  “My mind isn’t that closed—there’s a door in there that’s slightly ajar.”

  “All right—I went to the murder site. The barn.”

  “I know that.”

  “I sometimes have what they call retro-cognition or postcognition,” Jenna told him.

  “You see the past.”

  She nodded. “And you’re going to laugh.”

  “No, honestly, I’m not. I have to admit, I’m not sure that anyone really sees the past, but I believe that the mind is amazing, and perhaps such things as postcognition, as you say, exist because of something locked in the deep subconscious. You know an area, you’ve seen things, you’ve heard things…they come alive in the back of the mind,” he said.

  “Well, then, in the back of my mind, I saw the killer go after Peter Andres.”

  He stared at her a moment, then shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands. “Well, let’s hope you’re right. If we know who, we just have to find proof and motive to back it up. You know, evidence. So who was it?”

  “I don’t know who.”

  “But you saw them.”

  “Whoever killed Andres did so in costume.”

  “In costume?” he asked, staring at her blankly. “Like in a Halloween costume? It wasn’t the Halloween season when Peter Andres was killed.”

  “I know.”

  “So…what kind of a costume? I hear clown costumes are great—in horror movies, at least. There there’s always your traditional white plastic mask à la the Friday the 13th movies. Or a rubber Freddy Krueger—”

  She stood up. “You may be the attorney. Well, then, you have all kinds of legal research and studying to do, motions to file, arguments to plan. You know the law, Sam. I’m not so sure that you know people, or really understand much about the human soul. I think I’m better off on my own.” She turned to leave, saying over her shoulder, “I’ll call you when I have something tangible.”

  She walked away, thinking that he would call her back, that he would apologize.

  He didn’t.

  Sam watched Jenna go, feeling a growing sense of irritation—battled by a longing to rush after her.

  He steeled himself to hold still. Somehow, her crazy-good uncle had convinced him to take on the defense of a youth who had been caught with the blood of the slain all over him. Somehow, he had gotten himself into this. Jamie had always been happy to tell a tale about the gnomes, pixies, leprechauns and banshees, and how a battle of giants had created great stone steps in Ireland. His stories were fun—good drinking fare in a pub, sure to entertain.

  But, now, his niece, FBI special agent, was telling him she could see what had happened in the past. Except that she couldn’t actually see who had murdered the Smiths, Peter Andres or Earnest Covington. Nope, nope, just someone in costume.

  A brilliant red leaf drifted down on the stone slab seat where Jenna had been sitting. He read the writing engraved there: John Proctor, hanged, August 19, 1692. Arthur Miller, in The Crucible, had cast the man in his early thirties, a romantic fellow who had engaged in an affair with his chief accuser, Abigail Williams—who had, in truth, been eleven at the time. There had been no affair, and the girl who had cried out first against the family had been Ann Putnam, and she had accused Elizabeth, his wife.

  Sam’s lips tightened grimly. Growing up in Salem, it had been impossible to miss learning about the Witch Trials, backward and forward. And also the Hollywood versions of them.

  “‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,’ Exodus, 22:18,” he murmured aloud. Witches—those who had made pacts with the devil—did not exist. Wiccans didn’t even believe in the devil of the New England forefathers, no matter what those like the Smiths had thought.

  Jenna might well have been hanged as a witch—in the colonies. Burned if she had stumbled back to Scotland or the European continent.

  Sam got up and wandered in through the gat
e, and over to the Hathorne grave. He wondered if the remains of the man who had been instrumental in the persecution were even vaguely in the spot anymore—the earth shifted over the years. Embalming hadn’t existed here when Hathorne had died, and coffins were not made to try to stave off time. The thing of it all was that history was the greatest teacher. Nathaniel Hawthorne had been so disturbed by his family’s part in the hysteria that he’d found a way to try to right the wrongs of the past on paper, not just in works such as The Scarlet Letter or The House of the Seven Gables, but in his short stories, such as “Young Goodman Brown,” in which the protagonist was late getting into the woods because of his wife, Faith, who held him back before he entered the realm in which an old man, née the devil, informed him he had many friends in New England. Fear so overcame Goodman Brown that he “lost Faith.” It was far too easy to believe in the evil that might be around than it was to fight against it.

  The autumn breeze was rustling, and he looked around at the beauty of the leaves. He loved New England. It was home. And New Englanders, who usually accepted all their history with a grain of salt, were truly no different than people anywhere. Especially in the twenty-first century. The pace of living was frantic; the internet brought the escapades of the world closer and closer together. And people everywhere had a tendency to be influenced by the crowd around them.

  Well, back in the seventeenth century, sane men were led to believe in “spectral” evidence. A witch’s evil soul could leave her body and squeeze the bowels of the afflicted, pinch and scratch them. And while the modern world scoffed and laughed at such a possibility, people were still fascinated by out-of-body, near-death experiences.

  And Jenna Duffy could close her eyes and see the past….

  None of it mattered, he told himself. He was dealing with flesh and blood—literally. Malachi Smith had been found covered in the blood of his family.

  That was evidence—hard evidence. That was the stuff he had to deal with, no esoteric comparisons of human nature over the centuries.

  Sam himself had been the first to see Malachi that night. And hadn’t he at first refused to acknowledge that it was blood the boy was covered in? His first impression—his unconscious—couldn’t even be brought to think the boy a killer.

  He imagined the questions he would ask if he’d put himself on the stand. Nothing in his testimony—sworn under oath—could possibly testify to Malachi’s innocence. John Alden had found the bodies of Malachi’s family; he had seen the house and the pile of Malachi’s clothing.

  Everything pointed to Malachi. So the trick was to find someone else who hated the boy’s father, a case of reasonable doubt. Of course, it wasn’t going to be hard to find someone like that; everyone had hated Abraham Smith.

  Except, perhaps, for the old believers who had met in Beverly, at the Old Meeting House.

  Sam turned and started walking toward his car. He called his assistant, Evan Richardson, back at his offices in Boston, and asked him to do research on any legal actions against the church.

  It was time to head out to see the elders.

  Jenna walked back through the crowd of Halloween locals and visitors—always entertaining. In Salem, some were in business attire, some were in the more day-to-day Gothic attire chosen by many of the modern Wiccans and some were in costumes of all varieties. A giant Count Chocula was walking around with a Barbie doll. A fantastic and perfectly realistic vampire was strolling the streets with two little Toy Story 3 characters.

  It was fun to walk Salem’s streets. She loved the city, especially during Haunted Happenings.

  All she had to do now was forget that her uncle was probably giving himself an ulcer regarding Malachi Smith’s innocence, and that Sam Hall was a major-league ass.

  She tried to remind herself that she and her group were often greeted that way. People found it hard to believe that other people had talents they did not, though she wasn’t sure why. Jake Mallory, their computer expert, played a mean guitar, and she couldn’t play to save her life. She saw ghosts. Not everyone did.

  It was often difficult to believe in what couldn’t be seen. And, sometimes, it was too easy to believe in it. The “witches” of Salem had been prosecuted and condemned because of “spectral” evidence. The people of the time had believed that their friends could leave their bodies—even when they were jailed and in chains!—to pinch and torment others. Sometimes, belief could cause irreparable harm; sometimes, it was impossible to summon any at all.

  Which was better?

  Sam Hall was no worse than many other doubters they had come to know.

  Yes, he was.

  He should be getting to know her, if only a bit. There were times when they looked at each other that she was fascinated with him physically, when the light in his eyes made her think that he’d just reach out and touch her….

  Frankly, that she could just about fall into his arms and explore his…mind. In all honesty, she liked his mind. He was definitely walking around with a few extra chips on his shoulders, but the concept of a pro bono case had come easily to him.

  She might have been wrong to walk away in a huff. No, it had been a dignified retreat. Okay, at least a dignified huff.

  She paused, wondering where Sam might be headed at that moment. She didn’t want to bump into him just yet. Up until now, she’d been out to see the site where Peter Andres had been killed, and she was certain that her postcognition had given her a good first step. Whoever had killed Peter Andres had done so in costume, playing on the area’s past fear of the devil as a horned demon. That made her think that the murderer was local; of course, someone could have come here and played off the past, but since the murders had been so brutal without being ritualistic, she didn’t think that they were random or serial-killerish. The first two had been committed to make people believe that Malachi Smith was crazy and capable of murder; only the testimony of the grocery clerk had kept the boy from arrest.

  She found a little café just off Essex, sat down and ordered coffee.

  Once she’d been served, she put through a call to Jake Mallory. When he began to barrage her with questions, she promised that she would call Jackson, their team head, with a full report soon—even though the team wasn’t officially on this case.

  “Jake, I just need some information right now. Can you help me?” she asked.

  “I’m at my keyboard.”

  “A Mr. Earnest Covington of Salem was murdered last week. Some kids said that they saw Malachi running from the house. A grocer said that was impossible unless Malachi could astral-project, since he’d been in the store buying meat at the time. I need the names of the grocer and the kids.”

  “Sam doesn’t have that information on hand?”

  “Sam is… Sam isn’t into ghost investigations,” she said tightly.

  “Most people do mock what they don’t understand—especially when we’re all taught to be brave, that ghosts don’t exist and there’s nothing hiding under the bed,” Jake reminded her.

  “Will you just get me the information?” she asked.

  “Call you right back,” Jake said. “And be careful up there, young woman.”

  “Hey, I’m from Massachusetts,” she told him.

  “Hey, you’re from Ireland.”

  “Okay!” she said, and laughed. “But the Commonwealth became my home. I’m okay.”

  “You’d better give Jackson a call soon,” Jake warned her. “He tends to read the papers, you know, and he knows you’re up there with your uncle, and he knows you went because Jamie asked you to, so when he starts reading about everything that’s going on there right now—and Jamie’s name winds up in the papers since he’s the kid’s guardian—he’s not going to be happy that you haven’t yet spoken to him about the situation.”

  “I’ll call him now,” she promised. “But this isn’t official. It can’t be official.”

  “I know. So, if you want to be able to get in there and see what you can find out, remember to play n
ice and disappear when you need to.”

  “Yes, sir,” she promised. “I’ll call boss man right now, while you’re looking up the stories in the newspaper and wherever else you find your computer information for me.”

  When they hung up, Jenna realized that she’d been wandering down toward the museum. She applauded the Peabody Essex museum—the area was given a complete history there. Pirates had ranged the coast here, too; whalers had gone to sea. Pilgrims had fought off the Indians, and Massachusetts had given the country Thanksgiving Day. It wasn’t all witches!

  But, equally, what had happened here had helped change the future of a country. While there had been a time when superstition had reigned over the rich, the poor, the noble and the castoffs of society, the tragedy of the executions here in line with the “legal” system that convicted its victims might have been the beginning of the end for judgment without due process, heralding a true legal system in which a jury would decide on the facts, and not on hearsay or passionate words. Had there been malice involved? Surely, though many of the people had not been aware of it. It was far easier to see evil in someone if you believed that they had wronged you. But then, at the time of the Salem witchcraft trials, much worse had gone on elsewhere in the “civilized” Western worlds. Thousands had been burned in a day in Germany. The Native Americans hadn’t even known that such a creature as Satan existed, but the Pilgrims’ fear of Indian attack had certainly fueled their belief in that evil. It had been a hard world, and it was easy to blame cultural differences, death, starvation and other ill fortune on the devil.

  And, of course, those who consorted with him.

  She put through a call to Jackson Crow just as she had promised. Jackson listened gravely, assuring her that, at the moment, nothing big was going on; he was still in NYC and a few people were just settling into their new field offices in Arlington, Virginia, but could help her out in their limited background capacity. The Krewe of Hunters would always have her back.