Heather Graham Krewe of Hunters Series, Volume 4

by Heather Graham

  The cart was drawn up beneath the hanging tree and the condemned women were made to stand. A noose was slipped over each woman’s head, and together they began to pray, finally fading into silence. All but one. Someone in the crowd demanded that Rebecca Nurse be allowed to finish her prayer.

  And next to Devin, the specter of Margaret spoke. “It was all a mockery. A mockery of all that is just and good. Rebecca...how could any fault her? She lived a life of piety. The others...poor, often begging, or perhaps of different beliefs.” She turned to look at Devin. “You must understand. When even such a woman as Rebecca can be brought to the gallows, people are terrified. When one member of a family is taken, more follow. If you give testimony on behalf of one you love, you risk the hangman’s noose yourself. A four-year-old child resides in prison and did give testimony against her mother. And yet how do these confessions come to be heard? The weak are tortured, oppressed by fear and the demands of their oppressors and the examinations. They are so afraid they will say anything. When Governor Phipps demanded corroboration, goodwoman Rebecca Nurse was stripped before the crowd to find her witch’s teat, and she suffered humiliation beyond bearing. The prison itself is rank with disease and sickness, and food is scarce, and several died there with no hope. And so―”

  There was a gasp and a cry from the crowd as the horse was whipped and the cart was dragged from beneath the women. They struggled, kicking and jerking as they slowly strangled to death. Devin had to look away, and she turned to the specter at her side.

  Would she have died in this same way had she lived to be accused?

  As if she read Devin’s mind, Margaret turned to her with a soft smile. “They saw suffering, and they were terrified of the woods and the Indians, and so they saw the devil’s work in anything bad that happened around them. Fear made them believe in the devil, and I think they did indeed become demented. The sins of hatred and greed within their elders—one group wanting Salem to stay is it was, and another desiring separate villages—festered in their hearts. The children cried out against those they heard their parents ridicule, until it went wild and no one was safe anymore.”

  Margaret’s expression was sorrowful, her face marked by the pain and guilt of everything that had happened here so long ago.

  Devin could hear the ropes still swinging from the tree.

  Then a storm rushed in and the sky turned dark. But it wasn’t dark from the black clouds of a common storm; it was covered in a wash of red, like blood sweeping across the sky and covering the world. Or was it only in her mind that the world was changing? The red began to deepen to black. The darkness overwhelmed her, until there was no past or present, only a blackness deeper than any night.

  * * *

  Rocky caught her just as she began to fall.

  He’d seen the apparition, but the ghost had ignored him and walked straight to Devin. Together they had walked forward toward a rise with a little stand of trees, but as he followed, he knew from Devin’s eyes that she was seeing something more than the small deserted hill.

  He didn’t know how much time passed, but certainly no more than a few seconds. He had eyes only for Devin, who seemed hypnotized by something only she could see.

  Only his well-honed reflexes allowed him to catch her before she hit the ground.

  She blinked and looked up at him. “Is it over?” she asked.

  “Is what over?” he asked. And then he knew. She had indeed witnessed something he’d been unable to see, and he was suddenly certain that it had been a scene from the past. An execution. “It’s over,” he told her gently.

  She didn’t struggle to get out of his arms but let him help her to stand, and she didn’t object when he kept an arm around her for support. She looked around at their surroundings, looked to the trees, the rocky slope and the small crevice at the base of the hill.

  “That’s where they threw them,” she said, pointing. “They threw them into that crevice and covered them with dirt, burying them in unhallowed ground.” Once again, she seemed to be looking at something only she could see.

  “Let’s go,” he said, worried. He felt as if he was losing her. He understood seeing the dead, listening to the dead, learning from the dead. But something more was going on here. This place did not seem to be good for her. “Devin?” he asked.

  She straightened, clearly able to stand on her own, and he dropped his arm as she looked at him. “She’s here somewhere.”

  “Who? Our apparition?”

  “Yes—and no. I’m certain Margaret is our ghost, and I believe her killer buried her somewhere around here. She seemed so sad. But I don’t think she blamed her killer, because she didn’t even talk about her own death. All her concern was for the condemned. She said if Rebecca Nurse, who was pretty much considered a saint in the community, could be condemned and executed, anyone could be. Everyone, especially the families of the condemned, was in danger of being accused and tortured into confessing. I was sure her family murdered her to avoid being accused themselves, but maybe it was a mercy killing to save her from hanging. I don’t know―yet. But she’s here. I know it. And we have to find her.”

  “We can’t just start digging. For all we know this is private property,” he said.

  “I don’t know where to start, anyway.” She looked at him, disheartened.

  Despite her words, he knew this mission to help Margaret meant something to her. After all, she’d found one dead woman. Why not another?

  And yet, what good was it going to do—digging up a long-dead woman?

  “Even if we did find bones, they might not be hers,” he pointed out.

  “I know. People believe that Benjamin Nurse wasn’t the only one to recover the body of a loved one by night,” Devin said. “But I don’t think she’s buried with the others. I don’t know exactly where she is, I just feel I need to find her.”

  “It’s too bad she didn’t show you where to look,” he said dryly.

  “Are you mocking me?” Devin asked him, frowning.

  “No,” he assured her. “I meant what I said. It’s too bad that Margaret isn’t just a little bit more straightforward.” He smiled. She was so...possessed by her determination to find the dead woman’s body. “We can use portable ground penetrating radar. If there are bones here, we’ll find them.” He hesitated. “I just have to get Jack’s approval, so I need to figure out what to say.”

  She threw her arms around him. “Thank you!” She held her breath for a moment, looking at him as if she was searching for words to explain her feelings. Finally she said, “She deserves to be found, and her story should be known. And she should receive a real burial—a Christian burial.”

  Her body was pressed to his, and he couldn’t stop himself from holding her in return as they stood there on that windswept rise. Once again he felt the heated urge to hold her, to kiss her at last, to...

  Yep. A house with a resident ghost and a public hill. His timing sucked.

  Then Devin pulled away, and he realized that in her mind, they stood upon sacred ground.

  “I’ll call Jack,” he told her.

  “What are you going to say?” she asked.

  “I’m working on it.”

  In the end he told Jack that he’d been looking deeper into local history and stumbled across Perley’s theories, and he had a hunch the man was right and they might find something if they did some digging. Whether it would relate to the witch trials or to their current killer, he didn’t know, but he felt strongly they needed to find out.

  Jack thought he was crazy, but—since the feds would cover the expense—said they were welcome to dig, and he would take care of any paperwork.

  Rocky asked Jack to keep things to himself so the dig site didn’t become a media circus, then made a call to Angela. She promised to locate the necessary equipment and the Krewe, and be there i
n two hours.

  “Happy?” he asked Devin when he got off the phone.

  “Relieved,” she said. “I don’t think any of this can actually make me happy.”

  They headed off to grab lunch at a small local café while they waited for the others. Once their food had been served, he started talking. “Let’s try to figure this out. Why would someone now—say, a descendant of Margaret Nottingham or one of the condemned—kill other innocent women to avenge her death? Wouldn’t they go after law enforcement or judges?”

  She smiled. “Yes, well, some think the condemned already had their revenge.” She quoted, “‘I am no more a witch than you are a wizard. If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink.’”

  “Sarah Good to Nicholas Noyes, her last words before her execution,” Rocky said. “Of course, it was twenty-five years later, but Noyes did die of a hemorrhage—choking on his own blood.”

  Devin shook her head. “Margaret isn’t after revenge. She’s showing us what can happen if hatred and fear lead to persecution so we can stop it from happening again. Maybe our killer is driven by prejudice and fear, or maybe he has some sick, twisted reason for wanting to drive others to feel that way.”

  “Maybe. But we still need to figure out how the pentagrams fit in. If they were created by—and perhaps bought by—the same person...”

  “You really think a schoolteacher—”

  “I think she might have sold them to a store that sold them to the killer.”

  “Thirteen years ago, she was still teaching.”

  He nodded. “Yes, she was—right here in the area.”

  Devin sat back, frustrated. “You do realize that Boston is only twenty miles away.”

  “This is local,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because something about it is personal. What happened in the past, what’s happening now...there’s a personal dimension to both of them.”

  His phone rang just as he and Devin were finishing their lunch. It was Sam, telling him the rest of them were five minutes from the site. They all met up by the hill, and he helped Sam drag the equipment out of their SUV, then explained how to use everything. Then they paired up―Sam and Jenna, Jane and Angela, and he and Devin―and began the search.

  “Shall we try over there?” he asked Devin, pointing toward the crevice.

  “No,” she said softly. “If we find someone there...well, we might prove that this is Gallows Hill, but for now we’re looking for Margaret’s grave. For some reason I think it’s over that way, beyond the trees.”

  She led them to the area she had in mind, and they created a primitive grid and then worked in silence for about an hour.

  Suddenly Angela cried out, “Over here! We’ve got something.”

  Everyone ran over to look at the radar screen. He could see the shapes of bones—badly disarticulated but unmistakable―with something else in the center.

  Human bones.

  Devin had been right.

  He looked up and realized she wasn’t with them. He turned back and saw that she was standing in the center of a group of trees with a field of last year’s fallen leaves beneath them.

  “I’ll get shovels,” Sam said.

  Angela pointed at the screen. “It’s amazing. Rocky—there, that looks like the skull. And the bones...some are missing, I think, but those look like ribs.”

  “How sad,” Jane murmured.

  “Devin?” Rocky called, turning back toward her again.

  She hadn’t moved.

  She didn’t seem to hear him.

  He remembered her earlier entranced state and, worried, hurried over to her.

  She spoke at last, just before he reached her.

  “Slow down,” she told him.

  He did, moving carefully. “Devin,” he asked, “what is it?”

  She turned to him. Her blue eyes seemed enormous, her expression one of incredible sadness.

  “I’ve found someone else,” she said.

  And she had.

  The woman was laid out like the others, with arms and legs outstretched, her head forming the top of the star. Bracken and fallen leaves still hid most of her, and she hadn’t yet begun to decay, so they hadn’t detected the scent of death.

  She had been young, with dark hair. She was wearing jeans and a sweater, and she looked almost as if she’d lain down to make angels in the leaves.

  But the thread of blood around her neck gave the lie to that story.

  As did the pentagram lying on her chest, glinting through the leaves.

  CHAPTER 11

  Devin was certain that Jack Grail was looking at her with suspicion, even though Rocky had explained to Jack that they had been searching for a long-dead woman, not another recent victim.

  The day had become filled with crime scene technicians, the Boston M.E. and his crew and a multitude of police—state and local—along with representatives from the museum to assist in the investigation of the bones and, of course, the FBI team. Officers from a number of the small area towns kept crowd control running smoothly.

  Rocky and the rest of the Krewe had focused on the latest murder victim until Jack and his men had arrived to join them.

  Now, though Jack was being polite and hadn’t even suggested that he intended to take her down to the station for questioning, much less arrest her, he seemed to be asking the same questions over and over again.

  “Devin, I still don’t understand—why this sudden interest in quite literally digging up a woman who’s been all but lost to history? And what made you think someone would kill her and bury her here, where, if you’re right, they were hanging the condemned witches? And, you, Rocky! What the hell were you doing focusing a full FBI team on a woman who died hundreds of years ago just because Devin got caught up in some historical wild-goose chase, when we have our own murders to solve?”

  “Why the hell shouldn’t I?” Rocky demanded, his tone irritated. “It’s not like we’ve been getting anywhere with the current case, and the whole witchcraft-Wiccan connection seems to tie the present to the past, don’t you think? And the fact that we found another victim here on what may very well be the real Gallows Hill seems like a pretty strong indication I’m right.”

  “But you were looking for a victim murdered three hundred years ago!” Jack said. “It was pure luck that you—that Devin—stumbled on another body. Not to mention that there were no witches in 1692,” Jack said. “No real witches, anyway.”

  “No, but we wouldn’t have the Wiccan community we have here now if it hadn’t been for the witch trials,” Devin said. “There’s a connection here, we just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe revenge.”

  “You think someone is killing people over a three-hundred-year-old grudge?” Jack said incredulously. “Come on, you grew up here. What have the descendants of the victims done? They’ve demanded that their ancestors be pardoned—that’s what they’ve done. They haven’t gone running around killing other innocent people.”

  “Jack, I don’t know. I don’t have any answers—not yet. But I was researching, and―”

  “Stop researching,” Jack snapped.

  “Dammit, Jack!” Rocky told him. She could see that Rocky was becoming heated in her defense, and despite everything, it filled her with warmth.

  “Hey,” she said softly. “I know you guys are both the pros and I’m just a writer, but I can’t help thinking that if you can find the motive, it will help you find the killer.”

  “I hope so,” Jack said. “Because now we have a third body on our hands.”

  “Fourth body,” Rocky said.

  Jack looked at him.

  “Whoever is doing this killed Melissa Wilson,” Rocky said flatly.

  Jack stared at him, then nodded
slowly. “Four,” he agreed. “No ID on her, either. I hope to hell we don’t have another Jane Doe,” he said, shaking his head and walking away.

  Rocky looked at Devin. For a moment she thought even he was looking at her with suspicion. But then he said, “Don’t let him get to you. He’s just being a good cop.” He tried a smile. “Problem is, he’s a cop who doesn’t see ghosts.”

  “I was thinking earlier that we’d be the first ones hanged.”

  He offered her a wry grin. “I’m sure the Puritans would have seen our ability as witchcraft, so I guess you’re right.”

  “I did have a great-great-great-whatever-grandmother who was arrested as a witch. She survived until Governor Phipps’s wife was accused and he outlawed the use of spectral evidence.” She smiled. “Remember? They believed that witches could send themselves out as specters to harm others.”

  She heard excited murmurings coming from the people clustered around the old grave and walked over to see what they had discovered, only half-aware that Rocky was right behind her. She saw that they had abandoned their shovels and were using delicate brushes to uncover the bones themselves.

  Others might debate her identity, but Devin knew it was Margaret Nottingham in that grave.

  She had been buried deeply. Whoever had dug her grave hadn’t wanted her to be found, not by the residents of Salem and not by any roving animals that might have disturbed her rest.

  “It appears that she was buried on her back,” one of the anthropologists said, his tone excited, while another of the group began snapping pictures. “From the way the bones have been arranged—see the wrist there, and the phalanges, the fingers—her arms were crossed over her chest, as they would have been in a good Christian burial. And there’s something there on her chest. Maybe a cross?”

  Rocky reached into his back pocket for a plastic evidence bag. Without a word, he pushed through the group around the grave and jumped down into the spacious hole they had dug around the corpse. Before anyone had a chance to protest he used the evidence bag like a glove and reached for the object. Like the bones themselves, it was encrusted in dirt, but he studied it carefully before inverting the evidence bag around it.