“Let’s go,” he said, worried. He felt as if he was losing her. He understood seeing the dead, listening to the dead, learning from the dead. But something more was going on here. This place did not seem to be good for her. “Devin?” he asked.
She straightened, clearly able to stand on her own, and he dropped his arm as she looked at him. “She’s here somewhere.”
“Who? Our apparition?”
“Yes—and no. I’m certain Margaret is our ghost, and I believe her killer buried her somewhere around here. She seemed so sad. But I don’t think she blamed her killer, because she didn’t even talk about her own death. All her concern was for the condemned. She said if Rebecca Nurse, who was pretty much considered a saint in the community, could be condemned and executed, anyone could be. Everyone, especially the families of the condemned, was in danger of being accused and tortured into confessing. I was sure her family murdered her to avoid being accused themselves, but maybe it was a mercy killing to save her from hanging. I don’t know―yet. But she’s here. I know it. And we have to find her.”
“We can’t just start digging. For all we know this is private property,” he said.
“I don’t know where to start, anyway.” She looked at him, disheartened.
Despite her words, he knew this mission to help Margaret meant something to her. After all, she’d found one dead woman. Why not another?
And yet, what good was it going to do—digging up a long-dead woman?
“Even if we did find bones, they might not be hers,” he pointed out.
“I know. People believe that Benjamin Nurse wasn’t the only one to recover the body of a loved one by night,” Devin said. “But I don’t think she’s buried with the others. I don’t know exactly where she is, I just feel I need to find her.”
“It’s too bad she didn’t show you where to look,” he said dryly.
“Are you mocking me?” Devin asked him, frowning.
“No,” he assured her. “I meant what I said. It’s too bad that Margaret isn’t just a little bit more straightforward.” He smiled. She was so...possessed by her determination to find the dead woman’s body. “We can use portable ground penetrating radar. If there are bones here, we’ll find them.” He hesitated. “I just have to get Jack’s approval, so I need to figure out what to say.”
She threw her arms around him. “Thank you!” She held her breath for a moment, looking at him as if she was searching for words to explain her feelings. Finally she said, “She deserves to be found, and her story should be known. And she should receive a real burial—a Christian burial.”
Her body was pressed to his, and he couldn’t stop himself from holding her in return as they stood there on that windswept rise. Once again he felt the heated urge to hold her, to kiss her at last, to...
Yep. A house with a resident ghost and a public hill. His timing sucked.
Then Devin pulled away, and he realized that in her mind, they stood upon sacred ground.
“I’ll call Jack,” he told her.
“What are you going to say?” she asked.
“I’m working on it.”
In the end he told Jack that he’d been looking deeper into local history and stumbled across Perley’s theories, and he had a hunch the man was right and they might find something if they did some digging. Whether it would relate to the witch trials or to their current killer, he didn’t know, but he felt strongly they needed to find out.
Jack thought he was crazy, but—since the feds would cover the expense—said they were welcome to dig, and he would take care of any paperwork.
Rocky asked Jack to keep things to himself so the dig site didn’t become a media circus, then made a call to Angela. She promised to locate the necessary equipment and the Krewe, and be there in two hours.
“Happy?” he asked Devin when he got off the phone.
“Relieved,” she said. “I don’t think any of this can actually make me happy.”
They headed off to grab lunch at a small local café while they waited for the others. Once their food had been served, he started talking. “Let’s try to figure this out. Why would someone now—say, a descendant of Margaret Nottingham or one of the condemned—kill other innocent women to avenge her death? Wouldn’t they go after law enforcement or judges?”
She smiled. “Yes, well, some think the condemned already had their revenge.” She quoted, “‘I am no more a witch than you are a wizard. If you take my life away, God will give you blood to drink.’”
“Sarah Good to Nicholas Noyes, her last words before her execution,” Rocky said. “Of course, it was twenty-five years later, but Noyes did die of a hemorrhage—choking on his own blood.”
Devin shook her head. “Margaret isn’t after revenge. She’s showing us what can happen if hatred and fear lead to persecution so we can stop it from happening again. Maybe our killer is driven by prejudice and fear, or maybe he has some sick, twisted reason for wanting to drive others to feel that way.”
“Maybe. But we still need to figure out how the pentagrams fit in. If they were created by—and perhaps bought by—the same person...”