She didn’t laugh, but she couldn’t help but smile. “Hey, a good book is a good book.”
“I read for knowledge as well as entertainment.” He grinned. “I’ll have you know my knowledge of so-called women’s fiction makes me very popular with women when I go out at night. And I, unlike those macho types who look down their noses at my choice in reading material, know what women are looking for in the bedroom.”
“Good for you,” Rowenna said cheerfully, and then her smile faded as she remembered the corpse she had found and the fact that Mary Johnstone was still missing. “I feel guilty for having fun, you know?” she asked him.
“Yeah, I know,” Daniel said, his voice husky. He shook his head in frustration. “I really wish I could help.”
“Well, let’s see what we can find,” Rowenna said. “Dare I hope there’s a section on the Harvest Man?”
“Are you kidding?” he asked. “I have a section for everything.”
“You’re beyond anal,” she accused him.
“You bet,” he told her with a grin. “To your left, behind the desk, in the glass enclosed case. I’ll even trust you with one of our real treasures. It was written by a man named Ethan Forrester in 1730.”
“Okay, let’s go by era, then,” she said as he reverently handed her the book. She took it with the same respect.
“No coffee or anything else to eat or drink while we’re in here,” he told her gravely.
“I wouldn’t think of it,” she assured him.
They read in silence for a while. Daniel finished with one book, frowned and picked up another.
Rowenna immersed herself in Ethan Forrester’s The Way of the Devil.
Forrester had probably been considered a forward thinker for his day. Of course, he had had the advantage of hindsight. He could look back on the witchcraft hysteria as a man who had been a child at the time of the executions and had seen what happened firsthand, though through a child’s eyes.
He wrote about the hardships in Salem at the time the hysteria began, the severe cold of the winter, and the complete and utter boredom the children of the time experienced. The society was rigid, with scarcely room to breathe. Girls were expected to do their chores and pray.
Forrester’s book was rambling, but it made for intriguing reading. He spoke of people in a way that made them very real, noting that Giles Corey—a man who was pressed to death under heavy stones when he refused to enter a plea of guilty or innocent—had testified against his own wife, who had been executed. He wrote about John Proctor, who gave his servant girl, Mercy Warren, a good thrashing, which made her lose all sense of hysteria—until the other girls got hold of her and she once again cried “Witch!” against her neighbors.
Then, he wrote about the aftermath, how the shameful didn’t end so much with a bang as with a whimper. Massachusetts had been a British colony at the time, and the powers that be had looked to the mother country for guidance. In those days, correspondence moved slowly, with questions and their subsequent answers having to cross the Atlantic by boat. And just because the governor’s wife had been accused, he hadn’t been able to stop the whole frenzy with a single word. But the executions had ended at last, though some of the convicted had continued to wither away in jail, until the trials slowly became an uncomfortable topic of conversation. Eventually, as the world moved into another century, many began to regret their mistakes.
But there had been so much to fear in those days. The cold, hostile natives—even hostile neighbors.
And it was onto this stage that the Harvest Man had made his entrance.
Perhaps he had been there all along, unnoticed at first because the collective concentration of the people had been on the persecution of the witches, those who had supposedly signed the devil’s own book. Yet even in the height of the witch frenzy, a young girl had gone missing. Her friends thought she had found a way to leave the area before she could be accused. Her enemies were certain that she had run from justice.
She was never found. Perhaps she really had gone on to live elsewhere, changing her name and leaving behind no record of her existence.
But as the 1700s began, so did the periodic disappearances. And then bones—human bones—were found in a cornfield.
Rowenna, staring at the text, gasped.
“What?” Daniel said.
“In the seventeen hundreds, they found bones in a cornfield!” she exclaimed, looking over at him. “Why have I never heard this? I need to read more.”