The first time he’d met Rose was soon after he and Towner had started living together. He’d come home late one night to find her sleeping under an oak tree in Towner’s courtyard. “Well, you’ve certainly had a harrowing day, haven’t you?” Rose had said without preamble.
“Who the hell are you?” he’d asked. “And what are you doing in my yard?”
“It’s not your yard. It’s Eva Whitney’s yard, and she gave me this tree.”
He’d realized the woman before him was Rose, whom he’d only heard about until that moment. She was right. Eva Whitney, Towner’s grandmother, had been clear about that oak in her will. She’d left the huge brick house, the tearoom, and all her worldly possessions to Towner, but she had, in fact, left the oak tree to Rose. I hereby bequeath life rights to the oak tree to Rose Whelan, the will had specified. If I could, I would leave her every oak in Salem. May it help her learn their secrets.
After that initial meeting, they began to hit it off. She was always there, a fixture of the place, and she always said hello and asked about his day. Rafferty took to sharing bits of small talk and sometimes even philosophy with Rose when he’d come home from the late shift. He thought of her as his sage, his oracle. Not that she was always prescient. A lot of what she said and the fanciful stories she liked to tell were nonsensical ramblings. But every so often, something she said resonated with him in a profound way. He’d come to like their interchanges.
It was Towner who’d told him about the woman’s history. Rose hadn’t always been strange. Before the Goddess Murders, she’d been a well-respected scholar. Rose had been credited with establishing the true location of the 1692 witch trial hangings, for centuries erroneously believed to be part of Gallows Hill Park. She’d also come up with the recently accepted theory that there were no gallows used in the executions back in 1692, but rather a hardwood tree, one that had long since disappeared, along with the bodies of the executed.
But Rose had changed since the murders. Her fixation on death gave folks the creeps. She would tell people how and when they were going to die. It made everyone uncomfortable, to say the least. To make matters worse, some of her predictions had come true. As a result, most people avoided her, crossing the street when they saw her coming.
The one case people always talked about was a death Rafferty could have predicted himself: a drunk with yellow skin and rheumy eyes he’d known from the Program who’d been off the wagon more than he’d ever been on it. Anyone could have predicted what would happen to him, but in front of a sidewalk full of witnesses, Rose had pronounced his death imminent. The next morning, his body had been sprawled on Lafayette Street in front of Red Lulu Cocina. It had simply been the law of averages, but people had wanted to believe it was sinister. And they’d wanted to believe Rose was to blame.
Some nights, when Rafferty came home late, Rose might make a comment that kept him thinking for days. “No one comes out of the womb and sees death on everyone. It happens over time and by degree, until, one day, you’ve seen so much horror that it turns you. That’s when the banshee can jump in.”
There were a lot of strange things in Salem that Rafferty didn’t put any stock in, but he did believe in banshees, though he didn’t go around advertising that fact. He’d told Towner the story once. He’d heard a banshee wail and moan the night his mother died; he was certain of it. He’d seen her, too: an old crone behind his childhood home, keening. When he’d approached, she’d disappeared, just evaporated like a water spirit. Of course, it had been back in his drinking days. He and his brothers had shared a few pints that evening. They’d kidded him about “seeing that old woman” for years. But Rafferty had seen her, a boggy spirit sitting on an aluminum lawn chair in Queens, mourning the death throes of his mother.
But Rose’s flesh-and-blood banshee was something he didn’t believe in. He and Rose had debated the subject on several occasions. Eccentric as she was, or even crazy as most Salemites believed, Rose was a well-educated woman; her arguments were often backed by her extensive reading on almost any subject Rafferty could imagine, mythology being one of her favorites. You almost always learned something talking to Rose Whelan.
Yet sometimes Rose was too strange and creepy even for Rafferty. Sometimes she looked at him as if she could see straight into his soul, and what she saw there was lacking.
One night he’d come home after a particularly gruesome day dealing with a victim of domestic violence who’d landed at the shelter on Yellow Dog Island, and he’d hoped Rose might be asleep under her tree, as she often was when he worked late.
Tilting her head, she’d looked at him curiously. “Do you think, inside, every one of us is a killer?”
“What?”
“If you thought killing was the lesser of two evils, would you be capable of taking a life?”
“I don’t think about that kind of thing,” Rafferty had said.
“You should. In your job.”
Rafferty had hurried toward the steps.
“Have you ever killed?”
“No,” Rafferty had said and hurried inside.
He’d heard her whispered reply as he closed the door.
“Liar.”
If that wasn’t a straight shot at his soul, nothing was.
You know who you are. You have always been other.
—ROSE’S Book of Trees
The women sat in a circle, their eyes closed. The note echoed as it orbited the room, the sound softening everything it touched, removing rough edges, rounding corners, relaxing those who were seated.
Callie stood at the front of the room, drawing the wand around the singing bowl. From a distance, she appeared to be stirring some great stew or tending a witch’s cauldron, but the wand was actually being drawn along the outside rim of the bowl, not the inside. The tone it created was clear and true, circling and building in volume until it was so loud that Callie could feel the vibration in her bones. Placing the wand on the table, she listened to the sound waves the bowl continued to generate.
She had tried treating them separately, but the group energy was so strong when they meditated together that it had become obvious that this was their best healing modality. Today it was working for all but one of them, poor Margie, who was suffering from late-stage Parkinson’s. Callie walked over, placing a hand on Margie’s shoulder.
“Are you having trouble?”
“I can’t concentrate with all that racket,” Margie said.