Devin had been to most of the local museums before in the course of her life, but she had never been in the room she found herself in now with Angela and Jane.
When she asked Angela why they’d been allowed to enter this inner sanctum of records and learning without so much as a question, Angela had just waved a hand in the air. “Adam Harrison can make one phone call and open doors you would never believe could be opened.”
“I would love to meet him somewhere along the line,” Devin said. “He sounds amazing.”
“Who knows? You might. You never know when Adam will show up,” Angela said, then went back to work.
The room they were in was climate controlled and filled with municipal records, ledgers, diaries, family Bibles and assorted other materials from the area’s earliest days.
A scholarly woman with a slightly stooped back and horn-rimmed glasses—exactly the kind of woman you would expect to find holding sway over such a valuable trove—helped them at first. But then an assistant—a beautiful young blonde—came in to help, as well.
A lot of information had been programmed into computer files, so they were able to get a good start without going to the primary sources. But still, going back generation after generation wasn’t easy.
Devin had been assigned to look up her own genealogy. Since both her parents had come from Salem, it was time-consuming and complicated. Then she got back to 1668 and discovered her parents had a mutual many-many-times-great set of grandparents.
“I am inbred,” she said.
Angela laughed. “Well, at least no one married a first cousin, right?”
“No, it’s about a fiftieth cousin or something like that.” But even as she spoke, she gasped. She’d just discovered something a lot more crucial than a distant relationship between her parents.
“What?” Angela asked.
“Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised,” Devin murmured.
“What? Spit it out.”
“I’m related to Margaret Nottingham!” Devin said. “Through my mom. Her however-many-greats-grandmother married Archer Myles, father of Margaret Myles Nottingham. Apparently the baby she had just before she died was a woman named Mary Elizabeth Nottingham who in turn married Andrew Barclay and had a daughter named Anne who married a Douglass—and the long line of Douglasses my mom comes from sprang from that marriage.”
“Ah,” Angela murmured. “That explains why Margaret comes to you.”
“She’s probably worried about you,” Jane said.
“She should be careful,” Angela said. “Twice, she’s led Devin to a body, and that could actually be putting her into danger.”
“I’m not sure she had a choice,” Jane argued. “She wanted those bodies found, and she wanted Devin to know how she herself had died.”
“Why didn’t she just tell me what she wanted me to know?” Devin asked.
“She seems to be very shy and not all that good at communicating. We’ve seen ghosts like that before,” Jane said.
“And,” Angela said, “she may not know what happened. There’s no reason to believe she was there when the women were killed. And since none of us has seen the murdered women, they were probably able to move on, so they weren’t able to tell her.”
“Maybe, or maybe they just haven’t found one of us yet,” Jane said, leafing through the old family Bible she was studying. “Hmm. Here’s a name I wasn’t expecting.”
“Oh? What is it?” Devin asked.
“Hastings,” Jane said, brushing back a lock of dark hair. “Theodore Hastings.”
“There must be hundreds of thousands of people named Hastings in the United States,” Devin said. “Well, a lot, at any rate.” She grimaced. “Math isn’t my forte.”
“Yes, it’s a common enough name,” Angela said, getting up to look over Jane’s shoulder. “But Theodore Hastings? At the very least, it’s an interesting coincidence. When is the entry from?”
“Theodore Hastings was born to John and Mildred Hastings in 1677 in Salem Village,” Jane said.
“Let’s trace him and see where that takes us,” Angela said.
Jane looked over at Devin. “I didn’t think your friend Theo was from Salem?”
“He isn’t—at least, not as far as I know. I sure as heck didn’t know him until he showed up a few years ago and started working for Beth,” Devin said. “Theo might not be any relation to those Hastings.”
“True—but then again, he might be related and not even know it. We’re talking about three hundred years and at least fifteen generations,” Angela said.
Jane leaned back, stretching. “With everyone we’re researching, this could take hours.”
“At least there are three of us,” Angela said.
They went back to work.
An hour later Angela sighed. “This could take days. Going back over three hundred years is beyond time-consuming.”