Still, Towner knew a lot. Right now, she was on her way to a safe house with the woman, who had only escaped because May had held off her ex with her six-gauge until Rafferty arrived and took him into custody.
He wanted to call Towner but knew better. He couldn’t ask any questions, and she wouldn’t give him any answers. He only hoped the transfer had occurred without incident. They couldn’t hold the guy. Not for long. And even though he knew it wasn’t logical, that the man didn’t know where Towner had taken the woman, Rafferty still wouldn’t relax until his wife called in.
He had gone straight from Pride’s Heart to Yellow Dog, and then immediately into meetings, one right after the other. The first was the one he attended every morning before work: In all his years of sobriety, the single thing he’d learned for certain was to “keep coming back.” The second had been an awareness meeting over at the Methodist church to which he’d taken Jay-Jay, though, in Rafferty’s opinion, Jay-Jay was far from ready; he wasn’t close to hitting bottom yet. He’d been drunk on the job a few weeks back—that was why he’d ended up on the desk, a punishment Jay-Jay hated. Even so, he’d kept drinking, and most mornings he was so hungover, he didn’t want to talk, which was unusual for Jay-Jay, who generally talked too much. He was skinnier than usual, which meant he wasn’t eating right, and he was more disheveled, though that was harder to tell since Jay-Jay had never been particularly well groomed. He had all the classic signs. And he had the family history. Both his father and his brother were drunks.
So today Rafferty had told Jay-Jay his story, or at least part of it. How guilt had kept him from sobriety for a long time: guilt about what his drinking had done to his daughter and his first marriage. How he still struggled with it every day. “Guilt is the enemy of sobriety. One reason you don’t get better is because you don’t think you deserve to,” he’d told him.
Jay-Jay had listened but said nothing.
Rafferty’s cell rang, and he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw who it was.
“You okay?”
Towner said she was, thank God. “I’m just heading back now.”
They wouldn’t discuss it further.
Rafferty was so lost in his thoughts as he walked down his driveway that he almost bumped into Callie and Paul Whiting. “What’s wrong?” he asked, reading their faces. The look on Callie’s was fear.
“Nothing,” she said, walking past him and into the house.
“Something you did?” Rafferty asked Paul.
“Evidently, though I have no idea what.”
Paul looked guilty and even a little bit angry. Rafferty had always thought of Paul Whiting as a good kid. Still, Paul was male and appeared interested in Callie. Anything could have happened between them. Maybe it was just the day’s events that had triggered the suspicion. But there was something…
Callie’s words, or rather Rose’s words, spoken by Callie at the Thanksgiving dinner yesterday, had gnawed at him all day. “Do you think, inside, every one of us is a killer?” Had Rose said those words to Callie? Had she told Callie what she knew to be true about him? Rafferty doubted it. What troubled Rafferty was that he had been thinking about Rose’s words just before Callie uttered them. Callie hadn’t seemed to direct the words at him, and when he’d looked to her for some sign that she knew what she was saying, he hadn’t seen any. Still, it was odd. Could she read him the same way Towner sometimes could?
“What happened?” Rafferty asked.
“I took her to see Hammond Castle,” Paul said. “The grounds and Norman’s Woe. I had reason to believe she’d like to see it.”
That’s probably the last place she’d like to see, Rafferty thought. He’d read the files. He knew the Goddesses had attended a party at Hammond Castle just before the murders and that Callie had been with them. He’d asked her about the party, though he’d never said where it had been held, but she’d just looked at him blankly. “I don’t remember any party.”
Three of the tearoom waitresses walked up the steps, talking quietly among themselves. Rafferty and Paul exchanged a glance and moved out of the way to let them pass.
“I should probably go,” Paul said.
“Sounds like a good plan,” Rafferty agreed.
He watched Paul drive away. He fought the urge to find Callie now and question her, but he made a mental note to do it soon. Whatever she had seen or remembered had obviously been rough on her.
It had been a rough day all around. As Rafferty and Jay-Jay had exited the meeting, Helen Barnes from the McIntire District had blocked their way. She was out walking her springer spaniel. As upstanding and traditional as Helen appeared in public, Rafferty was aware of another side of her: Helen was the president of a secret sewing circle. He knew of at least two of these groups; the first was formed after the witch trials. For a number of years after the hysteria, women hadn’t been allowed to gather in groups in Salem. If they’d wanted to get together, they’d done so in secret, and, though no longer necessary, that tradition had continued until this day. Not that there was anything necessarily illicit about these groups. Towner said they funded several charitable organizations, Yellow Dog Island included. But the secrecy still made people nervous. They were so secretive that if Towner hadn’t told him about the circles, he never would have known they existed.
Despite Helen’s clandestine gatherings, from what the ADA had told him the other day, she had no qualms about urging the commonwealth to exhume the bodies of the Goddesses. “Rose Whelan is a damned Satanist,” Helen had declared this morning, refusing to let Rafferty and Jay-Jay pass. “She was one back then, and she’s one now. You don’t want to do anything about it, but there are plenty of people around here who will.”
“Watch what you say, Helen,” Rafferty said.
“The so-called Goddesses were all related to Salem witches,” Helen replied.
“There were no Salem witches,” he reminded her. “There were innocent people who became the victims of unfounded hysteria.” Rafferty hoped Helen would catch his subtext.
“Well, witches are everywhere now!” She gestured to the Witch House across the street, one of the town’s last remaining buildings with direct ties to the trials. As she spoke, two costumed neowitches walked past the historic house. “You can blame Rose Whelan for them all!” Helen said. Her dog picked that moment to squat.
“She’s not a witch, she’s a banshee,” Jay-Jay said, trying to help.
Rafferty shot him a look.
Helen started to move along. “Pick it up,” he said, pointing to the pile.
She glared at him.
“If you’d rather a fifty-dollar fine, I’ll be more than happy to give you one,” he said, patting the dog’s head. He watched as she searched her jacket pocket for a plastic bag and bent over to pick up the mess, frowning.
“We’re going to dig them up. Every last one of them,” she promised. “It’s going to happen, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.”