Rafferty noted the similarities. But he found no real connection, other than the obvious one: the date of Sarah Good’s execution, July 19.
Though the records kept of the Goddess Murders were sketchy at best, he did know that the women had been on Proctor’s Ledge that Halloween intending to honor their ancestors: five of Salem’s accused who had been hanged together on July 19. Callie had confirmed that story. He knew that each of the Goddesses had been related to one of the five. If each represented one petal of the rose, then one of them had to be related to Sarah Good.
“God will give you blood to drink.” Sarah Good’s curse was evidently a catchphrase of Rose’s, something she’d been saying since she got out of the state hospital. Did she really hear it spoken that night, or was that, along with her insistence that a banshee had done the killing, another of Rose’s delusions?
It might be a dead end, but it was worth following. One of the Goddesses had to be related to Sarah Good. But which one?
He sat with all the reports, testimonies, and crime scene photos spread out in front of him, sifting through them piece by piece, trying to find anything he might have missed.
He erased the penciled-in names of the Goddesses from the sketch of the five-petaled rose, listing them, instead, to the right side of the image. Now he tried a different approach, inking the names of the five executed that he had penciled in before: Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Wildes, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, and Sarah Good. Those names he was sure of. He’d checked the spelling of each name online, then double-checked with Salem’s records, mentally noting which towns they were from—all of which had once been part of Salem—and their ages. With the exception of Sarah Good, who was thirty-nine, the women executed on July 19, 1692, were much older, ranging in age from fifty-seven to seventy-one. Some were homeless or nuisances to the community: indebted, outspoken, or otherwise troublesome. It made him think of Rose.
He inked in the Goddesses’ names under each of the corresponding ancestors he was certain of, crossing out the names from the list below as he went. Under Rebecca Nurse, he inked Callie, Olivia, and Rose. Assuming Callie’s recollections of the night, and who’d spoken which name, were correct, he continued, inking the name Susan Symms on Susannah Martin’s petal and Cheryl Cassella under Sarah Wildes. Callie had recalled Rose telling her that she was related to more than one of Salem’s executed, and since she had recited the name of Elizabeth Howe that night, he’d initially assumed she was Rose’s other relative. But Callie had told him that, after determining that Leah Kormos wasn’t coming to the ceremony, Rose had also reluctantly recited the name of Sarah Good. Callie had assumed that was the name meant to be spoken by the absent girl. Maybe, but not necessarily. Rafferty penciled Leah Kormos’s name under Good’s, placing a question mark after it. Then, looking at it again, and knowing Rose had also recited that name, he went back and penciled in Rose’s name as well, also followed by a question mark. Sarah Good could be Rose’s second ancestor, after all. With Elizabeth Howe’s name, he penciled in the names of both Rose and Leah, both followed by question marks. Finally, with his pencil, he crossed both Leah’s and Rose’s names off the list.
He held up the sketch and looked at it. The ink had a good psychological effect, as if he’d actually figured something out, though he didn’t really know any more than he’d known before. The drawing was still as confusing as this case had become.
Despite Callie’s recollection that the police were there “all the time,” he could find only three times on record when the police had been summoned. Twice when Rose and the girls had loud arguments, including the night of the murders, and once when an anonymous female caller complained about underage boys coming and going “at all hours.”
He contacted the archives, once again requesting the missing box of evidence, number 9. If there were more police reports, more records of officers being called to Rose’s house, that’s probably where they were.
He flipped through some of the pages of handwritten comments about the women. The town gossip was so profuse it bordered on obsession. They had made a lot of enemies, breaking up marriages, threatening the moral code of a city already infamous for its rigid Puritan standards. The speculation of Satanism was brought up several times in the witness statements, though, when questioned further, none of the witnesses had any basis for their claims or any evidence to back up the accusations.
The victims: Olivia Cahill, Susan Symms, and Cheryl Cassella. He had backgrounds on all of them, along with lists of living relatives. None had come from a stable family, and each had left home at an early age. Cheryl had come to Salem in 1987 at seventeen because her mother, a bitter divorcée, told her there was a real Salem witch on her father’s side of the family. She met Rose at the Center for Salem Witch Trials Research, where Rose helped her find her ancestor who was executed on July 19, 1692. She moved into Rose’s house on Daniels Street a few days later. Though Ann had claimed otherwise, rumor had it Cheryl had been briefly involved with one coven, studying the Craft, or at least learning a few spells.
Susan was an albino originally from Miami, teased and bullied all of her life, until her family moved to Marblehead, and she discovered her connection to the accused witches (again at the center). When her father was transferred, Susan stayed behind, moving into Rose’s house. According to witness statements, it was Susan who first became fixated on the idea that Salem’s accused really were witches—with supernatural powers—a belief that certainly alienated her from Rose. Hers was the body that the trophies were taken from the night of the killings; Rafferty looked at the photos of her missing skin and hair.