“What year are you looking for?”
“Nineteen eighty-nine,” she said, hoping he would not make the connection.
If he did, he showed no sign. He directed her to the microfiche room. It was off to the side, hidden by a few stacks of books. It didn’t have any windows, just a set of jaundiced fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling. There were four wooden tables with a fiche reader on each. An aide sat off to one side in front of a wall of filing cabinets.
“She’s looking for the Journal. Nineteen eighty-nine,” the bow-tie man said.
“What month?” the aide asked Callie.
“Late October, early November.”
The aide directed Callie to one of the tables. “Do you need a demonstration?”
“No,” Callie said. “I’m all set.”
Before she started looking at the fiche, she read today’s Salem Journal, the one she had grabbed on her way in. The article about Rose was disturbing, as she’d known it would be. The town was angry and upset and reacting to the fact that the police had not arraigned Rose for the crime on Halloween, or even determined if a crime had been committed. It was very clear that this incident reminded too many people of the crime they believed Rose guilty of in the past.
It took Callie a while to locate what she was looking for on the microfiche, and when she finally found it, she immediately wished she hadn’t. A local paper usually concerned with street closings and firemen’s musters, The Salem Journal seemed to have reveled in being the go-to source for morbid rumors and innuendo, reporting that was far beneath, it seemed to Callie, the standards of a more reputable paper. Day after day, article after article was filled with the grisly details of what had happened that night. One even contained graphic photos of the lifeless bodies, throats slashed, being pulled from the crevasse: the victims bloodied and almost unrecognizable. Callie had never seen these photos. One more thing the nuns had kept from her, though this time she was grateful. As she looked at the images, she could feel her body going into shock, her hand throbbing and then numbing.
The articles were less sensational than the photos, but there was an undercurrent, a subtext to the reporting Callie couldn’t quite define. It was straight news—matter-of-fact, the way news should be but often wasn’t these days, but the things they chose to focus on were more morbid than she might have expected. Callie read them several times, but nothing stood out as wrong. They reported the events, the time, the place, the facts, a direct contrast to the photos. If the photographer had been shocked by the image he recorded, the writer was not. Journalistically, the story was absolutely correct, but the focus seemed odd.
After she finished the articles from the week following the murders, she went on to read the follow-ups from the next few months. As time passed, more and more editorial opinions emerged. Some speculated that the young women were part of a Satanic cult. Some said they were in a recreational sex club or ran an escort service. One article detailed theories on the manner in which their throats had been cut, suggesting a box cutter or straight razor as opposed to a knife. Callie had to go outside to get some air after she read that one. It had taken her a while to drum up the courage to go back and read more.
Everyone seemed to have a theory. One article featured a photo of the wound on Callie’s palm with the caption A MODERN-DAY MIRACLE? There were several photos of the victims, the girls they called the Goddesses: Olivia Cahill, Cheryl Cassella, and Susan Symms, her white albino skin even paler in death than it had been in life. It was reported that trophies of skin and hair had been taken from Susan’s body during the murders.
But there were also pictures taken before the murders, and these were the ones that really touched Callie. It had been so long ago, and Callie had been so young that all she had of them were traces of memory; she’d forgotten what they actually looked like. The first shots were of Susan and Cheryl. They’re younger than I am now, Callie realized. And so beautiful. When she got to the photo of her mother, she began to cry. Strangely, when she let herself think of the Goddesses, she always had the most trouble picturing her mother. Olivia had been distant, somehow, had kept herself apart. The image Callie conjured when she thought of Olivia was ethereal, a dark-eyed beauty with vague edges that never quite sharpened into focus. But the photo in front of her wasn’t distant or ethereal: the backlit image on the microfiche stared back all too humanly, and Callie knew her mother immediately. The wild dark hair. The gypsy eyes. Part dark angel, part something else. But it was her expression that Callie recognized. Defiant. Challenging. A survivor. “Mess with me,” it said. “I dare you.”
It was the face that Callie saw every morning in her mirror.
As she finished the final article and shut down the fiche reader, the memory of that night came back to her complete and with the precision of a pinpoint.
“This is really the place?” Cheryl asked as they pushed through the thick brambles of Proctor’s Ledge. Her voice didn’t sound like her own. It was thicker, her speech slower. “You’re sure?”
“Positive,” Rose declared, adjusting her tortoiseshell glasses and looking back at the younger women she was escorting.
“But the witches are going up to Gallows Hill,” Susan slurred, rubbing her hands as if she was cold.
“The witches are wrong.” Rose stopped and looked from Susan to Cheryl, then back to Olivia. “Despite its name, Gallows Hill is not where our ancestors lost their lives.” She did not take her eyes off them as she spoke; instead she stared as if seeing through them. “What’s wrong with all of you tonight? You know the history!”
They shifted uncomfortably.
“I thought you were going to stand me up again like you did in July,” Rose grumbled.
“We’re here just like we said we would be,” Olivia replied.
“Late, drunk, and wearing revealing Halloween costumes.” Rose shot a look at Susan’s low-cut costume, more Playboy bunny than Alice in Wonderland inspired, with rabbit ears that perfectly matched the color of her snow white hair. “This is how you honor our ancestors? I hope you took time out from your party schedule to pack your belongings.”
No one answered.
“I’m serious. I want you out of my house tomorrow.”
Rose herself was wearing black for the solemn occasion, her long brown braid tucked under a cap that looked vaguely Puritan. “This is a new low, even for you,” she said to Olivia, who was dressed as the Mad Hatter with dark skintight trousers, a top hat, and a black coat with tails. “And as usual, we’re waiting for Leah.”