Bones of a Witch Read online

  “After you,” I said. “It is your car after all.” He pulled the hammer back on his gun, allowing the multiple clicks of the revolving chambers to decline the offer for him. “No?” I shrugged. “Suit yourself.” I started into the limo, paused and then backed out again. “You know, on second thought,” I pointed at the barrel of his gun and brushed it aside with a wave. “Shoot yourself.”

  He probably dropped a duce in his pants when the gun inexplicably went off, blowing a .38 millimeter hole into the limo’s rear quarter panel. But hey, at least he didn’t actually shoot himself. He could have, and I think he knew it. I gave him a look to let him know that next time I won’t be so generous.

  I climbed into the limo and the door shut behind me. Putnam came around to the other side and got in behind the wheel. I remember laughing out loud thinking of all the fun I was going to have fucking with his head the rest of the night. But then the door suddenly opened again. A hand reached inside. It came at me so quickly I hadn’t time to react. Then everything went black on me.

  Dominic Spinelli:

  You can’t imagine Tony’s reaction when he saw Lilith jump down onto the tracks and hop up onto the other platform at Jefferson station. Of course we were all surprised. None of us saw it coming. We had Officer Burke on the platform; four of my buds from traffic on the southbound, a marksman up on the roof, Tony in the engineer’s booth and Carlos and me staked out at the turnstile. Nine cops all covering one woman, and Putnam gets her to give us the slip. When the northbound rolled out of the station, Tony started chasing the damn thing on foot. Should have seen him, man, running and hollering at the train to wait up, and shouting for Lilith to come back. It was classic—sad, but classic.

  Carlos and I ran after him as far as we could. For Carlos it was to the end of the platform; for me a bit further: about a hundred yards. I think Tony would have kept going all the way to Willow Junction, but thankfully (for me, not him) he stopped to answer my phone call.

  “Tony,” I said, “stop running.” I was seriously out of breath and hoping he’d not make me repeat myself. “We can drive to Willow.”

  “No, meet me there,” he said, amazingly not so out of breath. Even on foot I think he might have beaten us. “I can’t let him take her, Dominic. I can’t lose her.”

  If only for sympathy I would have continued running after Tony. Illogical, I know, but he means that much to me. Yet I’m here to tell you that camaraderie trumps the sympathetic impulse in ways that logic can appreciate. Never so true, I observed, than when Carlos pulled the car alongside the fence running parallel to the tracks and told me to hop in. I did, and we drove on to pick up Tony, who reluctantly agreed to ride with us.

  We arrived at Willow Junction with sirens wailing and lights flashing. Of course we were too late. The train was gone, and so was Lilith—the problem now was where.

  “Should have had him hold up just short of the station,” I said, I thought to myself.

  Tony looked at me funny. “What do you mean?”

  “I looked up at him. “What?”

  “I said, what do you mean, hold up?”

  “The train, we should have had the engineer of the southbound radio the northbound and tell him to hold up for us.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ooh, if looks could kill.

  I shrank back sheepishly and swallowed hard. “Sure, it seems obvious now, but it’s not like I thought of it before and didn’t say anything.”

  He looked at Carlos, who simply shrugged his ignorance away. “Is this what you’re teaching the kid, Carlos?”

  “Me? I’m not teaching him nuthin`. But hey, better he thinks of it now than not at all.”

  “What?”

  “Sure.”

  “How the hell is that better?”

  “So we’ll know next time.”

  “No, no next time, Carlos. There is never going to be a next time, because if we ever—”

  “Stop.” I held my hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry I said anything. You know everything happened so fast. You jumped from the train and took off down the tracks, and we started after you and—”

  “Fuckit,” said Tony. “It’s fucked. You fucked up, Spinelli. F`get it. It’s done. Look, let’s just focus on what we need to do now. Do either of you have any ideas?”

  I hate when he asks us that, because usually if he doesn’t have any ideas, then we sure don’t either. So we stood on the platform scratching our heads and feeling like complete buffoons for letting Putnam get the better of us; Tony, especially. I could see it in his eyes: the pain, the hurt; and if he weren’t so damn pissed at me, the embarrassment, too. He paced the yellow line along the edge of the platform, back and forth, mumbling to himself and occasionally looking down the tracks as if the train might return at any moment with Lilith on board. Carlos and I waited, as we’ve done so many times before for Tony to find his zone and work it out the best he could. But soon the wheels in his head began turning, and it wasn’t long before he stopped and said, “Besides staying onboard the train for the turn-a-round back to Boston, where else could she have gone?”

  “East,” I said, “to Ipswich.”

  “West,” said Carlos, “to Lowell.”

  “Yes, but what’s there for Putnam and Lilith? What’s in Boston, Ipswich or Lowell?”

  We both shook our heads. “Nothing?”

  “That’s right.” He turned his gaze to the exit. “There’s nothing there for them. The train station was just a ruse. But out there,” he pointed to the street, “out there we have Salem.”

  “Yes.” I clapped my hands and rubbed them together briskly. “Of course. Putnam is a witch hunter. If he wanted to kill Lilith he could have killed her on the train. But if he wanted to put her on trial he would want to take her to—”

  “Salem,” Carlos finished.

  “Exactly,” said Tony. “Dominic, do you get the GPS internet on your i-pod?”

  That made me laugh, though I assure you Tony saw nothing funny about it. “Well, Tony, first of all the i-pod doesn’t come with GPS. You’re thinking of the i-phone. Secondly, mine is not an i-anything; it’s a Merc-Vector 280.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference? Only about eight hundred dollars; that and the fact that mine is built with the world’s first perpetual capacitor regeneration modular based on Merc-Vector’s mercury filled dual resonance flux compression magneto.”

  Tony looked at Carlos and gave him a who gives-a-shit sort of shrug, to which Carlos promptly returned. “So what are you saying, it doesn’t have the internet GPS thing?”

  “Hell yes, it has GPS. How’s fifteen split-load megabytes a second at 128 MHz sound to you?”

  “Sounds like hen squabble. But if it gets us to Salem and lets you do some research on the Salem witch-hunts along the way, then I’m happy. After all that’s happened, I think it’s time we got a better understanding on just what we’re up against.”

  “Then let’s do it.”

  “Carlos, is the cruiser gassed up?”

  “Topped it off this morning.”

  “Okay, what are we waiting for? Let’s go to Salem.”

  We hopped in the car and headed out of town: Carlos driving, Tony riding shotgun and me with my feet kicked up in the back, browsing the web for everything I could find using the keywords: Salem, witchcraft and pizza. Of course we had to eat on the way; otherwise we never would have heard the end of it from Carlos.

  Lilith Adams:

  I awoke, I don’t know, sometime later, still in the back of the limo, only now my hands were bound behind my back. Night had settled in, just barely. I could see a slither of violet off in the western sky. The car was in motion, and though I was not alone I assumed that Putnam was driving, because the man sitting across from me on the leathered bench seat was not the dubious witch hunter, but the man from the train, the gentleman I assumed was as harmless as the newspaper he had retreated to when last our eyes met. He waited for me to shake the weariness
from my head before speaking, but when he did, I recognized his voice right away. His was the voice I heard over the phone on the platform at Jefferson station. The voice of the devil, I supposed, if such a creature existed.

  “Ms. Adams, you’re awake,” he said. “Splendid. I was afraid we would have to carry you in when we got where we’re going.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “No. I think I’ve seen enough already. If you don’t mind, I’ll just….” I tried to pull free from the ropes that bound my hands, but found I couldn’t. So I tried a little magic, but for some strange reason my witchcraft would no longer work. I looked to the old man. He smiled crookedly. Clearly, he had anticipated my moves and squelched my ability to react imaginatively.

  “Something wrong?” he said, and a dull laugh rolled up from his belly and then faded pathetically on his lips.

  I looked into his eyes, trying but unable to penetrate his thoughts. I sensed the evil lurking within him, but something wicked kept his secrets untold. “Who are you?” I asked.

  He elbowed his armrest and braced himself fully upright in his seat. “Name’s Hilton: Emanuel J., pastor of Our Lady of Grace Church.” Then, as if to validate his claim, he held up the eight-inch golden crucifix from around his neck. “At your service, ma'am.”

  I shook my head with certainty. “No, you’re no pastor. You’re a witch.”

  “Me? Oh-ho, that’s rich. Look who’s calling the kettle black. May I remind you that you’re the one who claimed the bones of a witch as your kin? You even told Deputy Mayor Goodman about the gate key. Who else might know about that, but for another witch?”

  “What would you know about a gate key?”

  He curled his lip and strained to smile. “Plenty.” He pulled the gate key medallion from his inside coat pocket and held it before me. “See?”

  I felt my anger boiling to the surface, but I tried hard to keep him from enjoying it. “That’s mine,” I said, “you thieving bastard. How the hell did you get it?”

  “Isn’t that just like a witch? Sooner or later your greed betrays you all. Tell the truth. Isn’t that why you told Goodman that Ursula Bishop was a distant relative of yours, so that you could get your hands on the gate key?”

  “No.”

  “Tell me about the key. What powers does it hold for you?”

  “None, you idiot. It’s just a medallion. Who gave it to you? Goodman? Is he an Ingersoll’s Witness, too?”

  “Would you kill him if he were?”

  “Maybe, but I’m definitely going to kill you.”

  That made him laugh. “Try as you might,” he said. “Let me see you.”

  I struggled to whip up something caustic and painful for the old wolf, certain that I could stop his heart or boil his brain or at least give him a bad case of indigestion. But nothing in my bag of tricks would work on him. I finally ask, “What have you done to me?”

  He reached behind his back and pulled out a stun gun and squeezed the trigger as he held it up, causing a riot of sparks to flicker in nervous fits between two wishbone electrodes. “We needed something to incapacitate you while we tied you up,” he said. “I trust you don’t find it too uncomfortable now, do you?”

  “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

  “Oh, you mean your powers, yes.” He pointed the gun at a small gem dangling from a gold chain around my neck. “Of course, we had to take certain precautions there, as well, you understand. So, I took the liberty to bestow upon you a witch’s stone—my gift to you. I believe you’ll find that your powers are completely ineffective as long as you’re wearing it.”

  “You must be mad if you think you can get away with this. There’s not a witch’s stone on earth that can stop me from kicking your ass the minute we step out of this car.”

  “No, Ms. Adams, your days of ass-kicking are over now. The men of Ingersoll’s Witness will see to that.”

  “Oh, but you’re wrong. Just so long as I still have my legs I can kick the shit out of your sorry old ass.” I rocked back in my seat and stretched my legs across the limo to give old Hilty a good swift kick in the groin. But he countered my attack with a righteous zap from his stun gun, knocking me flat on the limo floor and leaving me in a semi-unconscious state for the duration of the ride.

  Tony Marcella:

  Dominic had done a fair job of web surfing to find out what he could about the witch hunts of 1692. He filled us in on the highlights as we ate pizza in the car on the road to Salem.

  “In a nutshell,” he started, though with Dominic nothing is ever in a nutshell, “John Putnam, whose name came up earlier in connection with our suspect, James T. Putnam, was an influential elder in Salem village. In 1689 he hired Samuel Parris for the job of village minister. Parris—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Carlos. “Samuel Parris?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Why?”

  “Could be a coincidence,” I said.

  “What’s a coincidence?”

  “Our pastor fellow last night said his name was Emanuel Hilton.”

  “So?”

  “So…Emanuel/Samuel, Hilton/Parris?”

  “Parris Hilton?”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah, that is funny. Anyway, this Parris fellow accepted the job and later that year moved to Salem with his wife, Elizabeth, his daughter Betty, a niece Abigail and a slave woman named Tituba.”

  “You’re shitting.”

  “No, that’s what it says, Tituba.”

  I shook my head. “Not that. You said Abigail.”

  “Yes, that’s right. It was Abigail and her cousin Betty, along with Tituba and Putnam’s girl, Ann who first made accusations of witchcraft against some of the village women. And they got good at it, too. It says here that most of the accused were put on trial, found guilty and hanged up on Gallows Hill.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?”

  “Abigail and Ann: that’s the names of the girls from my apartment building.”

  “No,” said Carlos, and Dominic echoed the sentiments. “This is getting creepier by the minute.”

  Dominic said, “Tony, let me ask you. You’ve been living in that apartment for over a year now. Have you ever seen those two girls around there before?”

  “No.”

  “You notice anyone new moving in lately?”

  “You know, come to think of it, I haven’t.”

  “I don’t like the sound of this,” Carlos mumbled. “Too many coincidences.”

  I turned in my seat to face Dominic. “Where did you say they hanged those women?”

  “Gallows Hill.”

  “Can you get us directions there?”

  He held his Merc-Vector 280 up for me to see. “Already got the satellite image locked in. Just give me another sec to program it into the GPS.”

  “Carlos,” I said, “pick up some steam. Run the siren and lights if you have to. I don’t think we have a moment to waste.”

  Lilith Adams:

  The limo pulled up next to a barn behind a softball field in a residential part of town. I had been unable to see out the windows from the floor of the limo, but I knew right away we were in Salem. I had been there a hundred times in the course of my long life, and though I’ve never been on that street or in that particular neighborhood before, I recognized the subtle nuances of the roads and buildings. But more than that I recognized the smell—not that it’s bad or anything. It isn’t. But all cities and towns have their own unique smells, their historic essence captured in the hills and valleys, sequestered by the trees and released in subtle bouquets like spirits, inconspicuous, but to the uninhibited.

  Hilton and Putnam escorted me from the limo to the barn, where a gallery of spectators awaited in silent congregation. Off to my right in a step-stair balcony I counted twelve jurors, men and women in traditional Puritan garb seated like
eggs in a Styrofoam box, eagerly anticipating my arrival. A sun-like glow warmed the entire barn, illuminated exclusively with candles and lanterns hanging from beams, support posts and makeshift candelabras. A murmured hush swept through the ranks as the two men ushered me forward and presented me to the magistrate.

  “Your Honor,” said Hilton, standing stiff before the bench. “I present the accused: Lilith Adams of New Castle village in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.”

  The magistrate, a serious-looking old coot in a powdered wig, his face long and withered with hooded eyes like dull pearls mired in sunken sockets; leaned over the bench, the top of which stood a full six feet up off the floor. “Ladies and gentleman of the court,” he cawed. I thought he needed to clear his throat of some clinging phlegm, but he let it ride. “The jurors for our sovereign village of Salem, in the county of Essex, do on this twelfth day of October in the year of our Lord 2008, present that Lilith Adams of New Castle hath on days and times exercised certain detestable acts of witchcraft and sorcery, wickedly and feloniously afflicting torment of unspeakable nature and other most grievous sundry atrocities against our citizenry. Additionally, Miss Adams stands accused of bidding the devil’s work with willful and wanton disregard for the sanctity of God’s holy virtues and the casting of spells upon innocent bodies for the purpose of harvesting their souls while recruiting signatures in the devil’s book.” He peered down upon me as if contemplating squashing a bug. “How say you plea, Miss Adams?”

  I looked up at him in dismay. “Are you kidding? Are you out of your friggin` mind?”