Bones of a Witch Read online

  “Sure, you’re saying you can fly.”

  That remark earned me a punch to the ribs. “Jesus, Tony. Sometimes I think you’ve been hanging around Rodriquez too long. The stupid is rubbing off on you. And what the hell is that in your pocket? I nearly broke my hand on it.”

  “What? This?” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my key chain, dangling from it a small rock carving of a dolphin. She took it and held it away from her as if I had brought a lump of dog shit into the house.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “What?”

  “This.” She pointed at the carving.

  “It’s a dolphin. Cute, huh? I bought it because it reminds me of Florida.”

  “Where did you get it?”

  “From a street vendor on the corner. He has a ton of these cool looking rocks that he carves into animal shapes and then sells them on key chains. Why, what’s wrong with it?”

  “This is dolomite.”

  “Yeah, I guess. The guy said it’s a rock.”

  “Yes, it’s the type of rock used for making a witch’s stone, something you need to know about if you’re going to be a witch, and something you definitely don’t want to be walking around with in your pocket.”

  I shook my head in ignorance. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a carbonate rock. It contains a mix of minerals known to inhibit a witch’s powers.”

  “What, like kryptonite?”

  “Mother of…. Tony, no wonder I can’t do magic in this house. See, that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about. You’re a witch now. I’m a witch. We both have got to start acting like witches together, or this simply isn’t going to work.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Here, give it to me.” I snatched the key chain from her and broke off the stone. Then I walked to the front door, opened it and pitched the stone out into the street. “There,” I said, kicking the door shut with my foot. “Happy?”

  She turned her back on me without answering, taking flight into the kitchen on an angry thread of steam. For Lilith, that was as good as a yes, and I was happy to get it. With that settled and behind us, I reclaimed my seat on the sofa and turned the television back on. The mid-day news was just starting. Barry Dell, anchor for WNCW news, led off the top of the broadcast with a story about an ongoing road-widening project down by the cemetery. I was still thinking about what Lilith said and not listening much to the story, when Lilith’s scream sent me jumping out of my boots.

  “Turn it up!” she cried. “Quickly, quickly, turn it up!”

  I did, and she came around the coffee table to take a seat on the sofa next to me. A live video feed from on the scene now accompanied Barry Dell’s narrative. It showed a backhoe sitting idle just outside the west wall of New Castle Cemetery where a road-widening project was taking place. A close-up shot moved in on a grave marker, long since knocked over and overgrown with earth and vegetation for more years than anyone could imagine. That the burial site lay just outside the original stone wall, erected in 1746, suggested it likely contained the remains of one of New Castle earliest settlers.

  Lilith and I both scooted to the edge of our seats, crowding the TV in hopes of seeing the writings on the marker as the TV camera zoomed in further on the granite slab. The site foreman brushed his gloved hand over the stone, sweeping aside the last of the dirt and grass obscuring the simple writing. As he read the engraving aloud, I heard Lilith whisper along.

  Ursula Bishop

  Hanged

  July 27 1692

  Through my peripheral, I saw Lilith turn her head to me. I turned mine and our eyes met. No longer were they the haunting, penetrating eyes of the great mind dweller that so easily harvested my most guarded secrets in my most fragile moments; nor were they the eyes of hypnotic persuasion that had bent my will into submission so many times in so many ways. Instead, now they were the eyes of a woman, vulnerable to the whims of fate and slaved to the echoes of history. I reached for her hand and she let me take it.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, her voice barely above a whisper.

  I pointed at the TV set. “Do you know anything about that grave marker?”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  “Who is it, then?”

  She blinked softly and my heart melted. “Ursula Bishop,” she said. “She’s a distant great aunt of mine.”

  Lilith Adams:

  I don’t know what’s gotten into Tony these days. Ever since he hooked that job on the police force, all he wants to do is talk shop: Spinelli this, Carlos that. Ooh, I’m a big bad detective now. I have a gun as big as my penis. Pah-leez, give me a break.

  I think things really started coming to a boil after that walk back from the Cyber Café. I was in a great mood, as usual, and naturally Tony was his usual stick in the mud self. We were almost home when this snot-nose kid came up to us, crying because her stupid balloons got stuck in a tree. Well, duh, kid, that’s what you get for letting your whiny-ass little sister hold them. What do you expect from a kid that plays with her own poop?

  Of course, I did not say that out loud. Tony would have had a shit. But I did suggest to him, nicely, that instead of climbing the tree to get them down for her, maybe he might want to consider using witchcraft. I mean, it’s better than him busting his ass falling out of the tree.

  “Screw your witchcraft.” he says, all excited-like for no reason. “You always want to fix things with magic, don’t you?”

  I eased up to him nicely and tried to coax the conversation down a notch so that the girls’ mother wouldn’t hear us. “Tony, I’m only thinking of your safety.”

  “Damn it, Lilith, I used to climb trees all the time when I was a kid. I was the grand tree-climbing champion of New Castle in 1947 and again in 48. I think I can handle a measly Massachusetts elm.”

  “Of course,” I said, but—”

  “No buts. I’m going.”

  He started up on the most flimsy of branches, which had already begun to splinter under his weight. I had no choice but to step in quickly to save him from himself. I checked first to make sure the girls’ mother wasn’t looking, and then I made a gesture with my fingers and the balloons dropped right into Tony’s hand, making him the hero. He gave two of the balloons to snot-nose and two to whiny-ass; then we went up into the apartment where the real sparks began to fly.

  The first thing he did was turn on the TV set. He always does that to shut me out. I asked him politely to turn it down, and what did he do? He turned it up louder. Then he had the nerve to complain when I grabbed the remote and turned the set off.

  “What the hell is your problem?” he said, like I’m the one with the problem.

  “I’m just thinking it might be nice if you started practicing some witchcraft,” I said. “That’s all.” But then he took out a witch’s stone that he had custom made from some street vendor downtown and he pushed it in my face.

  “Look here. What do you think of this?”

  “That’s a witch’s stone,” I said. “It’s no wonder I can’t do magic in the house.” To which he laughed and told me he doesn’t get it. What’s to get? Is it me?

  Anyway, he turned the TV back on to tune me out again and I happen to notice this story on the news about this woman they hanged in the township of New Castle back in 1692. It turns out the old gal is a distant aunt of mine. Go figure, huh?

  Right away, I picked up the phone and called City Hall. After getting the proverbial run-around for twenty minutes, someone finally put me in touch with the Deputy Mayor, whose nose is so far up the mayor’s ass that the man can’t breathe unless His Honor passes wind and flubs his butt cheeks into the breeze.

  “Tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’ll be downtown first thing in the morning to claim my aunt’s bones for a decent burial, and I expect an apology from the city for getting her hanged and then misplacing her for the last three hundred and eighteen years.”

  “Of course
, you realize we’re going to need proof,” the little weasel starts in, giving me some shit about following procedures and protocol before releasing her remains. It’s all I can do at this point to keep from going straight down there and opening up a can of whoop ass on him.

  “I’ll have your proof,” I told him. “You just worry about having my aunt packed up nicely for a fitting burial.”

  I hung up feeling proud of myself, though I must say that once the high tension subsided, an unusually strong sense of loss and remorse struck me. Tony, who is often more sensitive than I give him credit for, picked up on it right away. He came to me and folded his arms around me like a warm blanket. I think he thought I was going to cry. Right, like I’d ever let him see me do that.

  Harvey Goodman, Deputy Mayor of New Castle, Massachusetts:

  It was the middle of the workweek, as I recall. I had just gotten to my office and settled in with a newspaper when Jenny, my office girl, buzzed me to let me know that a Ms. Lilith Adams was waiting out in the lobby to see me.

  “Does she have an appointment?” I asked.

  Outside my door, I heard a woman pronounce loudly, “APPOINTMENT? I’ll show him a fuck’n` appointment!”

  Two seconds later my door blew open, which seemed strange, as I’m sure I had locked it, a habit I had formed early in my political career. You might be surprised to know that when you work for the people, many of them believe they are entitled some reasonable access to you. It’s a phenomenon I have never understood.

  When the door blew, I sprang to my feet, jolted by the sudden intrusion, expecting to find some behemoth woman toting a baseball bat and looking to avenge the injustice caused when the city condemned her home day-care business due to varmint infestation. Instead, what I found was this hot little pistol with jet black hair, blue denim curves that could charm a snake, and eyes of fire sizzling like coals on autumn ice. I didn’t know whether to run, hide or flick my wallet at her and beg for mercy.

  “What is the meaning of this?” I said, sounding as authoritative as one could with his balls fully retracted into his body cavity. She marched up to my desk, sweeping the newspaper onto the floor so that she could rest her hands upon it, palms flat, her breasts leaning over my pencil cup with cleavage I dared not look down, but could not ignore.

  “Where is my aunt?” She said, though admittedly I really didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Your aunt? Am I supposed to have her?”

  “You better. You dug her up yesterday. Don’t tell me you lost her again.”

  “Oh, yes, wait a minute, Lilith Adams. We talked on the phone last night.”

  “I talked. You better have listened.”

  “Please.” I pointed to the seat opposite my desk. “Won’t you sit, Ms. Adams? I’m sure we can talk this out rationally.”

  “I’m not sitting down,” she said, though she did stand up straight and fold her arms at her chest, relieving me of a temptation I would surely have regretted, had my eyes gone down that slippery slope. “And as far as I’m concerned….” She reached down for my nameplate, picked it up, read it and slapped it back down. “Harvey, there is nothing to talk out, rationally or otherwise. You have the bones of my aunt and I’m here to claim them.”

  I went ahead and sat down in my chair, hoping she would also take my cue and sit, but she seemed more than content on her feet. “Ms. Adams,” I began, “as I mentioned on the phone last night there are certain protocols and regulations to matters of this sort, not the least of which have to do with right of ownership. And then there’s the historical aspect of the case. As you might imagine, the townspeople are going to feel a special kinship for this woman. After all, she is one of the earliest settlers to have—”

  “Been hanged, Mister Goodman? Is that what you were going to say?”

  “No, not at all. What I was going to sa—”

  “Frankly, Harvey, I don’t give a rat’s ass what you were going to say. And I take offence in your assertions that the townspeople feel shit. Their ancestors hanged my aunt and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let them have the smallest scrap of her bones to kin up to for historical sake. And as for ownership….” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small round medallion and slapped it down on the desk. It appeared to be made of gold, and encrusted in tiny stones of jade and emeralds. Embossed on the front was this face, an evil-looking creature with ruby eyes and crescent horns. To look at it gave me the willies, and I almost found myself making a sign of the cross to ward off the spirits that I just knew came with the thing. “This,” she said, “should prove my right of ownership.”

  I dared to pick up the medallion. It felt heavy, and I was reasonably sure from the vibes I got from it that spirits of millennia had known the places it had been. I flipped it over and read the inscription on the back.

  In time ye pass this one of eight

  as thou doth hang in morn of late

  earth and ashes be thy fate

  till beckoned home to Bishop’s Gate

  I looked up at Ms. Adams. She seemed taller to me now, and if I could have found the strength to stand and look over the desk, I feared I might find her floating off the floor by several inches or more.

  “W…what is this?” I asked her.

  “That,” she said, “is a key, and as the inscription denotes, it’s one of eight.”

  “A key to what?”

  She scoffed as though I should know. “Why, to Bishop’s Gate, of course. Didn’t you just read that?”

  “Yes, but what does it mean?”

  She sighed, and I swear I saw her float back down to the floor. “Ursula Bishop is a distant aunt of mine and Bridget Bishop’s sister.”

  I shook my head. “And Bridget is….”

  “Bridget Bishop was the first woman tried in Salem Massachusetts for witchcraft. They hanged her, Mister Goodman, along with eighteen others in the spring and summer of 1692. And though Salem is mostly remembered for that exceptionally dark period in its history, our own quaint town of New Castle was just as culpable of similar atrocities. On July 17th, 1692, eight days after they hanged Bridget Bishop in Salem, one of your noble town magistrates learned that Ursula Bishop of New Castle and Bridget Bishop of Salem were sisters. Naturally, the rest of the townspeople saw that relation as a covenant with the devil and so they put her on trial, too. A few false witnesses came forward, claiming the stupidest things, like how their butter had turned after she visited them, and how someone’s pig had miscarried after she chased it out of her flower garden. The kicker came when the preacher’s nine-year-old daughter claimed Ursula’s specter pinched her bottom and tried to get her to put her mark in the devil’s book. They hanged her from the livery stable’s sky winch that day—Ursula, not the kid.”

  I fell back in my chair, exhaling a breath that I hadn’t even realized I was holding. “That’s awful, Ms. Adams. I do feel your pain.”

  She leaned over my pencils again, her hands splayed flat upon my desktop. “Really, Harvey? Do you really feel my pain?”

  “I do, yes. But I’m not sure what I can do for you. As I said, there are certain protocols for such things.”

  “Protocol?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why is that, Harv? How the hell do you have protocols for such things? You dig up three-hundred-year-old bones often, do you?”

  I squirmed a bit in my seat. “Well, no, we don’t often find bones like this; nonetheless, there is still the matter of kinship. How do you propose to prove your relations to this woman, Ursula Bishop?”

  She picked up the medallion, waved it in my face and slammed it back down on the desk. “This, Mister Goodman. This gate key is one of eight that has been in the Bishop family since landing at Plymouth Rock. You will notice it has a ring of stones around the embossed image of Incubus: five emeralds and three diamonds. My great, great grandmother, Victoria Bishop was born third of eight girls into the family; as denoted by the three diamonds. Bridget Bishop was first
born and Ursula was second. If you haven’t already found it, you will.”

  Again I shook my head. “Found what?”

  “The second gate key. Come on, Harv, get with the program. Ursula had no children of her own to pass the key down to. There is no doubt in my mind that if you look among the bones you will find a gate key just like this one, only it will have six emeralds and two diamonds. That is all the proof you need to my kinship with Ursula Bishop. Now, I am prepared to go straight to the press with my proof, and my story. Believe me. It won’t take a Pulitzer Prize investigative reporter to confirm the shameless details surrounding the lynching of my dear old aunt. When that happens, your peaceful township here will look like a three-ring media circus that will forever blemish the good name of New Castle. Is that what you want?”

  I must admit the woman had me over a barrel. I hadn’t heard if a medallion had been found with the bones, but the coroner’s office had only just gotten to the site that morning to verify that the bones were in fact of early American ancestry, and not from a more recent death. I stood up and offered Ms. Adams my hand. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If we find a medallion such as the one you have presented here, one with two diamonds and six emeralds, and providing the bones are cleared for release by the coroner, and NCPD has no objections, then, Ms. Adams, I will assign primary custody of the remains to you. Fair enough?”

  I watched her posture soften by degrees. She unfolded her arms and shook my hand. “Thank you Mister Goodman,” she said. “I knew you looked like a reasonable man.”

  “All right, then. If you would get with Jenny on your way out and let her know which funeral home you would like your aunt’s remains sent to, she’ll be—”

  “Funeral home?” She stiffened up again and crowded her brows in an angry stir. “Why would I want them sent to a funeral home?”