The Evil Inside

Page 15

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 gate, 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.