He’d seen her standing slightly downhill by the entrance to the cemetery.
At first she had been nothing but a deeper shadow in the darkness. But then the shape of her shadow had resolved itself into a woman, and not a woman in regular summer tourist clothing. A long skirt had hugged her legs and moved in the breeze.
He’d quietly left the tour group and walked slowly in her direction. But by the time he reached the cemetery gate she had turned and was headed down to Derby Street.
He followed her, and when she reached the corner she turned back and saw him―and saw that he could see her.
He recognized her face. It was the face in the portrait Jane had drawn that afternoon. The face that Mina Lyle had seen in the window the night that Devin had heard the sobbing.
“Wait, please,” he called softly.
Her face seemed to whiten; for a minute, he could see her clearly in the combination of moonlight and illumination from the well-lit main street.
Then she turned and fled around the corner. He raced after her, but there was a crowd of people walking along Derby Street in search of restaurants and bars, or heading home after a long day of exploring the city.
He moved through the crowd, searching, studying every group he passed. He even walked into the brewery and a few restaurants, looking for her, but after a good forty-five minutes of fruitless effort he gave up and slowly walked back to the cemetery.
A fine mist had crept in. The kind that made the cemetery ethereal and sad. He waited, watched and considered jumping the fence, but he knew there would be no point.
She was gone.
Of course, she could disappear at will. She hadn’t even needed to turn that corner.
He could never catch her unless she allowed him to.
He could only speak to her if she wanted to speak to him.
The tour group had moved on. He wasn’t worried. He had a pretty good idea of the route they would follow, so he would catch up to them eventually.
He walked down by the site of the old jail, by the Anglican church, then on to a few of the other stops on most of the tours. They wouldn’t have wandered too far; the tours didn’t tend to go more than a few blocks in either direction off Essex Street.
He caught up with the tour in front of the Gardner-Pingree House. As he joined the crowd, he realized that Devin was still speaking.
“The house was built in 1804 by Samuel McIntire but was sold in 1814 to Captain Joseph White. Joseph White was the victim of a brutal murder—and his killer’s trial was presided over by Daniel Webster himself. Parker Brothers, a Salem company, bought the American rights to a British game called Cluedo and marketed it as Clue. This house served as a real-life basis for the game. Captain White was bludgeoned in the bedroom with a candlestick, as well as stabbed with a knife. Nearby houses and people involved in the arrest and trial were added to the pieces and characters. In addition, many people believe that both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne used the trial in their works—including Poe’s classic tale of a guilty conscience, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ since one of the men hired to carry out the murder hanged himself in his jail cell.”
Brent Corbin stepped up to join her. “The trials and other grisly events in the history of Salem have been explored in numerous books, many of which I carry in my shop if you’re interested, so let’s move on and I’ll tell you the last story of the evening.”
Devin looked around as the group began to follow Brent, and Rocky knew the minute she’d spotted him. She walked over to where he stood, almost directly across the street from Crow Haven Corner, the city’s oldest witch shop.
She didn’t speak, but she did look at him questioningly.
“Good thing we came on the tour,” he told her. “Or, I should say, good thing you did.”
“Every time he tried to speak, he started coughing, poor guy,” Devin said. “So...where did you run off to?”
He didn’t get a chance to answer, because just then a woman ran up to her, trying to stuff a bill into her hands.
“Thanks! You were great. We learned so much.”
“Oh, uh, no...um, please, give this to Brent.”
But the woman was already gone, racing to rejoin the rest of the group. Devin winced and looked at him. For a moment, with her wry smile, the light in her eyes and the scent of her so powerful, he was tempted simply to touch her...to draw her into his arms.
Luckily she spoke, and the spell was broken.
“Looks like I got a twenty. Buy you a drink, Agent Rockwell?”
“Sure,” he told her.
They walked across the street to a restaurant that was still open for a few hours. Luckily it wasn’t very full, and they were given a curved table near the window to the street and no one seated near them. There were menus already lying on the table, and they both ordered shepherd’s pie, as if they’d realized simultaneously that they were starving.
When the waitress had left them, Devin turned to him and demanded, “Where the hell did you go?”
“I saw her,” he said.