He’d brought her three containers: one normal spray can to keep in the house—particularly by her bed at night—one small enough to go on a key chain and one disguised as a lipstick tube. Same basic principle as a gun, he explained. Point and shoot, but aim for the eyes.
“Don’t forget, this doesn’t bring down an opponent, it just blinds him and gives you time—up to half an hour or forty-five minutes—to get away.”
“I got it,” she told him. “Point, spray, aim for the eyes.”
“Exactly.”
“Pink,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Pink. The other two are black, but the one for my key ring is pink.”
“You don’t like pink?”
“I just didn’t see it as a color you would choose, Mr. Man in Black,” she said, smiling.
Devin found herself near him during his pepper-spray demo, and she couldn’t help noticing all kinds of ridiculous little things. The soft feel of his corduroy jacket, the crisp look of the shirt he wore beneath, his clean-shaven cheeks and, of course, his eyes. He smelled clean—soap and shampoo and some kind of masculine shaving cream or cologne. There was something intriguingly intimate about the way they stood so close.
“Actually, I don’t use lipstick, either,” he told her, humor in his eyes.
“They’ll have to come up with lip balm pepper spray,” she said.
“I’m sure they already have.”
His fingers brushed hers as he warned her to spray in the right direction—nothing worse than blinding yourself when you were already under attack.
“Got it,” she assured him. Their faces were inches apart. She thought he was going to lean forward just another inch and...
But his eyes were on the house, and he backed away.
Nothing like having a chaperone at her age, Devin thought—and a dead one, at that.
But she didn’t speak and neither did he. Instead, they got in the car and she dug her copy of Perley’s map out of her shoulder bag.
“Okay, in 1692 Peter Street was Prison Lane. And Essex Street led to Bridge Street and on to Boston Street—and the only way in or out of town was over the bridge the street was named for. We know from many sources that the condemned were taken by cart to the execution site. Most historians think it’s unlikely that Magistrate Corwin would have chosen a site too far outside the town limit. Which leads us right here.”
“There’s a drugstore on the corner,” Rocky said.
“And houses all around, yes, but all of that development, even the houses, is from the past hundred years or so. I’ve read some blogs by people who were doing the same research. There’s still a patch of woods here, though, on a rocky little rise behind someone’s backyard. I wonder why...”
“Why it hasn’t been developed?” Rocky asked. He cast her a glance and a grin. “Imagine a house built on a killing field like that. I see horror movie written all over it.”
She gave him a warning stare. “I haven’t had a chance to look up the county records yet, but Perley had a letter written by a Dr. Holyoke in 1791. Holyoke talked to a man who had lived to be a hundred and whose mother had often spoken about the hangings. She said she could see Gallows Hill from her house and had hated the days of the executions. She’d stood at her window with her baby in her arms and prayed that they wouldn’t come for her. What I need to do is see if I can find genealogical records to figure out who the woman was and a deed of ownership to tell me what house she lived in. Obviously it won’t be easy or someone would have done it by now, but if I can track down that information, I bet we’ll have proof that her house was right around here somewhere.”
A few minutes later he parked along the street and they got out of the car. After a bit of walking around they spotted the little hill with its patch of trees.
The terrain had probably changed a bit, of course. Three-hundred-plus years of snow and rain led to erosion and reshaping.
But she could still see it.
She could narrow her eyes and see the hill rising higher than it did now, could imagine that the pond still existed, and she could even visualize the well-known story of Benjamin Nurse, his mother’s youngest son, though a man of twenty-six, rowing his boat silently in the night to find his mother’s body where it had been discarded and take it away for burial.
The air stirred, but it was a warm breeze. The world around Devin seemed to grow distant, and she saw the lonely hill higher and scattered with rocks, along with a few strong trees. Someone whispered about the heat in July, and soon she heard the sound of horses, footsteps and a cart being trundled down the rocky path.
She wanted to cry out that they were wrong. That fear led only to hatred and prejudice, and that one day they would regret what they had done.
There were half a dozen women in the cart, and it was surrounded by others who had come on foot to watch the hangings, as well as those who were required by law to witness the executions.
Some were there only because they were afraid to stay away, as if refusing to watch as the ungodly were removed from the world might brand them as ungodly themselves.
She watched as the rope was thrown over the tree branch. She heard it rasp over the limb.