“But you were looking for a victim murdered three hundred years ago!” Jack said. “It was pure luck that you—that Devin—stumbled on another body. Not to mention that there were no witches in 1692,” Jack said. “No real witches, anyway.”
“No, but we wouldn’t have the Wiccan community we have here now if it hadn’t been for the witch trials,” Devin said. “There’s a connection here, we just don’t know what it is yet. Maybe revenge.”
“You think someone is killing people over a three-hundred-year-old grudge?” Jack said incredulously. “Come on, you grew up here. What have the descendants of the victims done? They’ve demanded that their ancestors be pardoned—that’s what they’ve done. They haven’t gone running around killing other innocent people.”
“Jack, I don’t know. I don’t have any answers—not yet. But I was researching, and―”
“Stop researching,” Jack snapped.
“Dammit, Jack!” Rocky told him. She could see that Rocky was becoming heated in her defense, and despite everything, it filled her with warmth.
“Hey,” she said softly. “I know you guys are both the pros and I’m just a writer, but I can’t help thinking that if you can find the motive, it will help you find the killer.”
“I hope so,” Jack said. “Because now we have a third body on our hands.”
“Fourth body,” Rocky said.
Jack looked at him.
“Whoever is doing this killed Melissa Wilson,” Rocky said flatly.
Jack stared at him, then nodded slowly. “Four,” he agreed. “No ID on her, either. I hope to hell we don’t have another Jane Doe,” he said, shaking his head and walking away.
Rocky looked at Devin. For a moment she thought even he was looking at her with suspicion. But then he said, “Don’t let him get to you. He’s just being a good cop.” He tried a smile. “Problem is, he’s a cop who doesn’t see ghosts.”
“I was thinking earlier that we’d be the first ones hanged.”
He offered her a wry grin. “I’m sure the Puritans would have seen our ability as witchcraft, so I guess you’re right.”
“I did have a great-great-great-whatever-grandmother who was arrested as a witch. She survived until Governor Phipps’s wife was accused and he outlawed the use of spectral evidence.” She smiled. “Remember? They believed that witches could send themselves out as specters to harm others.”
She heard excited murmurings coming from the people clustered around the old grave and walked over to see what they had discovered, only half-aware that Rocky was right behind her. She saw that they had abandoned their shovels and were using delicate brushes to uncover the bones themselves.
Others might debate her identity, but Devin knew it was Margaret Nottingham in that grave.
She had been buried deeply. Whoever had dug her grave hadn’t wanted her to be found, not by the residents of Salem and not by any roving animals that might have disturbed her rest.
“It appears that she was buried on her back,” one of the anthropologists said, his tone excited, while another of the group began snapping pictures. “From the way the bones have been arranged—see the wrist there, and the phalanges, the fingers—her arms were crossed over her chest, as they would have been in a good Christian burial. And there’s something there on her chest. Maybe a cross?”
Rocky reached into his back pocket for a plastic evidence bag. Without a word, he pushed through the group around the grave and jumped down into the spacious hole they had dug around the corpse. Before anyone had a chance to protest he used the evidence bag like a glove and reached for the object. Like the bones themselves, it was encrusted in dirt, but he studied it carefully before inverting the evidence bag around it.
He hoisted himself up out of the hole, his expression unreadable.
“What is it?” Devin asked.
“A pentagram,” he said quietly.
*
The dead woman was Barbara Benton, from Ohio. She had come to Salem on vacation with several friends. She was twenty-seven years old, single and the manager of a chain clothing store.
The two friends she had come to town with—Juliet Manson and Gail Billet—had seen her picture on the news and had come forward to identify her.
Jack was calling her parents.
Rocky took the job of meeting with the two friends to find out what he could about Barbara’s activities once she’d arrived in Salem. Because he was afraid for her to be alone, he left Devin with Jane and Angela. She was going to go back to the hotel with them, so they could do further research into Margaret Nottingham and her family. Rocky had kept the medallion and sent it to the lab so it could be cleaned and compared with the others for style, chemical makeup and historical context. Jenna and Sam were waiting at the lab to reclaim it as soon as it was ready.
Rocky met Juliet and Gail at their hotel, a small historic building right in town. They were both nearly hysterical, and getting them to calm down enough to answer questions wasn’t easy. How could they answer questions? She was dead. Barbara was dead.