“Which people?” Towner asked, pouring him a second cup of the secret stash of coffee she kept in the tearoom just for him.
“Mainly Helen Barnes,” he admitted. “She’s already gotten a large number of signatures on a petition.”
Helen had persuaded some of her neighbors from the McIntire District to sign, as well as a few folks down in Washington Square. But it was the signatures from people in the less affluent neighborhoods that bothered Rafferty most, the ones from the Point and Boston Street. Many had recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where black magic and witchcraft were something older people still feared. The fact that Helen’s petition had accused Rose of being a witch wasn’t helping. “This thing with Billy Barnes has reminded people too much of the past, and it’s unfortunate for Rose.”
“Do you think they’ll go ahead with it?”
“Too early to say. I wouldn’t. Not until we see all the other evidence. But a judge will make the final decision, not me.”
Towner kept glancing at the legal pad on which Rafferty had sketched the five-petaled rose. Each petal held the name of one of the women executed in July 1692. Sharing that same petal was the name of the descendant who had come to honor them that terrible night in 1989. Olivia, Callie, and Rose shared a petal with Rebecca Nurse, Susan with Susannah Martin, Cheryl with Sarah Wildes. The other two were not yet filled in.
Towner pointed. “Wouldn’t that one be Rose?” She pointed to Elizabeth Howe’s petal. “Didn’t Callie say Rose spoke a name that night?”
“Rose spoke three names that night: Elizabeth Howe, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Good. One of them presumably belonged to Leah, who didn’t show up.”
He penciled in Leah’s name, not on a petal but just above the sketch.
Rafferty looked at his watch, then stood and took his dishes to the sink.
“Have you told Callie about the petition?” Towner asked, following him.
“Not yet. Though she’ll probably read about it in this morning’s gossip rag just like everyone else in town.”
“That could be disturbing.”
He considered. “She’s tougher than you think.” Now Rafferty looked at his wife. “Actually, Callie reminds me a little of you.”
“Really? In what way?”
“She was traumatized. She only has pieces of a child’s memory, very vivid ones, but there are gaps. The history is different, of course. But, I think, like you, she’s a survivor.”
“Let’s hope she’s better at survival than I was.”
Rafferty shuddered to remember what Towner had been through. An abuse victim as a child, she had experienced a trauma lengthier than Callie’s, and it had taken her a long time to recover. But, in her recovery, she’d found her life’s purpose, to help those who’d suffered similarly. Rafferty was filled with admiration for his wife’s bravery. Her struggles and her determination to overcome them had turned her into a strong and confident woman.
Rafferty kissed Towner and headed for the door. “Let’s see what happens with Rose before we worry about the exhumation. There are a number of steps that have to be taken before any judge would order it. And even if Rose does come out of her trance, she isn’t getting out of the psych ward anytime soon. I’m hoping this whole petition thing will have blown over by then.”
Callie pulled over when she saw the street vendor outside the gate of Greenlawn Cemetery. White chrysanthemums. The perfect flower. She used them in her meditation classes to stimulate the heart chakra.
She bought four of them, placing one on each of the graves: for Susan, Cheryl, and Olivia. She’d bring the last to Rose. The markers were simple. Just unpolished granite with each of the women’s names carved into the stone. The nuns at the group home had told her that Catholic Charities had paid for the gravestones but wouldn’t bury the Goddesses in the Catholic cemetery, choosing the town one instead. They’d said it was because the Goddesses weren’t Catholic—another lie, since Olivia had been. Callie didn’t know about the others. All she knew was that, at Rose’s insistence, each of the Goddesses had learned the Catholic Lord’s Prayer, the one without “the kingdom, the power, and the glory” at the end.
Given what she’d learned recently, she suspected there was more to the story than she had been told, probably something to do with the “hubris”—that’s what the nuns called it—of the women thinking they were qualified to perform the blessing at the site of the execution. “Only a priest can consecrate the ground of the Salem witches,” one of the older nuns at the children’s home in Northampton had declared, “although I don’t think any priest would agree to do it.”
Callie looked at the chrysanthemum she’d saved for Rose, her eyes tearing up. She recalled Halloween nights when the same old-school nun had locked the doors to the home against “evil spirits.” The children hadn’t been allowed to trick-or-treat. The doors weren’t unlocked until the following morning, All Saints’ Day, when “God opened the gates of Heaven, and all the souls came down to rid the earth of darkness from the night before.”
This morning, standing at her mother’s grave, Callie felt the kind of aching loss she’d had little time to feel as a child. She let the tears fall until they stopped. Callie said her own kind of prayer, not to any almighty power but to the women whose graves she was visiting. “Please help me bring Rose back,” she said. “I need her as much as she needs me.”
She’d tried music therapy with Rose, just basic stuff played on her cell phone. It had no effect. Today, she’d talked herself into a corner after she arrived at the hospital, telling Rose stories about grad school and even her apartment in Amherst. She was quickly running out of material.
By the time she remembered to put the last white chrysanthemum in water, she’d waited too long; one of the petals had dropped and drifted to the bottom of the glass. A single petal. That had meaning, didn’t it? What was it? If you dropped a single chrysanthemum petal into a glass of wine, it would yield a long and happy life. A life of ease. Someone had told her that, maybe it was Rose herself. Callie took a long look at Rose’s blank expression. Her life had been anything but one of ease. Callie said a silent prayer that this would change for the better.
She walked to the window. With the trees bare, she could see the ocean. Just a hint of horizon that stretched taut, then disappeared behind a far hill.