“And we owe it to her, her parents and you to bring her killer to justice,” he told them.
Juliet was dark haired with red-rimmed brown eyes, and she fought to hold back her tears. “She was—she was the best.”
“This whole trip was her idea. She wanted to explore her roots,” Gail said. She was a redhead with freckles that were nearly lost against the red blotches crying had left on her skin.
“Her roots?” Rocky asked.
Juliet nodded. “Her family moved to the Midwest sometime in the 1900s. But she could trace her dad’s family all the way back here. She said she had a great-great-whatever who’d lived here during the witch trials.”
“One of the condemned?” Rocky asked.
“No, no, just someone who lived here. But Barbara always wanted to come here. We’d planned this trip for years,” Juliet said.
“It was her dream trip,” Gail told him. And then she began to sob again, and Juliet put her arms around her and they sobbed together.
Rocky waited. When their crying eased again he asked, “When did you last see her?”
“Last night—on Essex Street,” Gail said. “We were at the bar on the corner...almost directly across from the hotel.” She winced. “This was a bad time for her. Her fiancé was killed overseas a few months ago. He was in the service. But being here, taking a trip she’d dreamed of...she finally seemed to be having a good time again. She was talking about how she wanted to go and see where her family had lived.”
“Somewhere in Danvers,” Juliet added.
“And then what? Did you all go back to the hotel together?”
He looked at the two of them as they both went pale, stared at each other and burst into tears again.
“We did. But then she went back to the bar for her phone,” Juliet said.
“She thought she’d left it on the table,” Gail explained.
“And that’s the last time you saw her? Didn’t you worry when she didn’t come back to the room?” he asked.
“She was next door—she had her own room,” Juliet said. “This place is historic and cool, but the rooms are small, and the bathroom... She thought that we should have two bathrooms between us.”
“When she wasn’t there this morning, we just thought she’d gone out early,” Juliet said.
“She wanted to explore the archives,” Gail said. “Do some research into her family.”
“And she was afraid we’d be bored. We were going to spend the morning on our own today, shop, do what we wanted, then meet up for dinner,” Juliet said.
“And then we saw her picture on TV!” Gail said with a sob.
“What time was it?” Rocky asked them.
“Not that long ago...I guess about four this afternoon,” Juliet said.
“I mean last night. What time did you leave the bar?”
“Oh. Late,” Gail said. “We had such a great day, so we were just relaxing over a beer, you know, and―”
“What time did you leave the bar?” Rocky persisted gently.
Juliet turned to Gail. “What do you think? Maybe near midnight?”
“That sounds right. We’d been on a ghost tour,” Gail explained.
“We had such a great guide,” Juliet said, tears welling in her eyes again.
“Barbara loved him,” Gail agreed.
“Do you remember his name?” Rocky asked.
“Oh yes, Brent. His name was Brent,” Gail said. “Brent Corbin.”
*
“I know that we work in mysterious ways,” Angela said, sitting across the table from Devin in the suite the agents had taken, “but it’s going to be difficult to solve a three-hundred-year-old murder.”
Jane and Angela were at their computers; Devin had a book open in front of her, having gotten them to stop at one of her favorite shops to pick up a few books, this one on the symbology and use of the pentagram through history.
“Very difficult. And we’re not doing so well on finding the current killer, either,” Jane said.
“And maybe the two cases have nothing to do with each other,” Devin murmured dejectedly. “I don’t know. I heard Margaret Nottingham—the woman whose grave we found today, I’m certain of it―the night I found the victim near my house. And then I kept dreaming about Gallows Hill—if that even is Gallows Hill. Maybe I was just being influenced by the things I’d heard all my life, stories I’d read and stored in the back of my memory, or...”