“They weren’t Satanists, were they?”
“Of course not. They called all witches Satanists back then. Though I don’t think they were witches, either, not exactly. As I said before, they weren’t solitaries, and they weren’t studying with any of the covens in town.”
“Where did they learn things, then?”
“If the rumors are true, maybe at the Left Hand Path. That store had a big selection of books on every kind of spell imaginable. The best around. We all bought books there. I thought it was a shame when they closed, but that’s just me. It was a great resource. As I said before, magic was getting popular here back in the eighties. Everybody had a bit of leftover hippie in them, especially in this city. We all believed in magical powers: We conducted séances, read tarot, believed in astrology. My Wiccan friends and I worshiped the Goddess. But those women…they believed they were the Goddess.”
“Wasn’t that a nickname someone gave them?”
“I always heard it was one they gave themselves.”
“From what I’ve read, they were pushing a lot of boundaries.”
“That’s an understatement. Sex is power, and they knew it. Men followed them around like puppies. The girls seduced them, and some would say they took advantage of them. Sometimes separately, often all together. It was a game.”
“Do you know about the ‘rules’?”
“What rules?”
“Callie said they had a set of rules. Evidently for seduction.”
“If there were rules”—Ann shrugged—“I never heard about them. I heard a lot of other fascinating things; they were very open about what they were doing. You could ask the ‘victims’ if they knew about rules.”
“The victims?”
“That’s what the locals called the men: victims. That’s not in the files? Every once in a while, the girls would ‘take’ a man, someone having trouble at home. He’d be gone for days, ignoring his work, his family. Eventually he would drag himself home to his wife, sick and exhausted. I know the Goddesses swore it gave them energy. Maybe that was a rule?”
“Do you know the names of any of these so-called victims?”
“I don’t,” Ann said. “And even if I did, I’m not sure I’d tell you.” She looked at him for a long time. “I believe in discretion.”
An awkward moment passed.
Rafferty regrouped. “The sexual revolution was long over in ’eighty-nine, and yet some of the accounts I’ve read, the condemnation of these girls, it reads as an overreaction, as if it happened in the 1600s.”
“It’s the same overreaction it was back in the 1600s…fear.”
“Fear of infidelity? Of the devil?”
“Yes, both maybe. And something else. A number of cases of heterosexual HIV were diagnosed on the North Shore right about that time. The sexual revolution might have brought sex out of the proverbial closet, but AIDS made it lethal. Someone started a rumor that the Goddesses were spreading it.”
Rafferty ran his hand through his hair. “Were they?”
“I doubt it, but it was easy for people to believe, and that’s all that mattered. They needed someone to blame. It certainly didn’t help with their reputation around town.” Ann looked at him curiously. “I thought this case was closed.”
“Cold, not closed.”
“Are you pursuing something new? Since this thing with Rose?”
He didn’t answer.
“The trouble with those girls started the minute they decided they’d inherited special powers from their ancestors, the women who were all hanged on the same day.”
“Why?”
“Think about it. It’s a short step from believing the accused had supernatural powers to justifying their hangings and the atrocities they suffered while awaiting execution. Those condemned women were not witches in any sense of the word. They certainly never ‘signed the devil’s book.’ Which—for the record—has nothing to do whatsoever with any witch I’ve ever known. The Salem accused were Puritans.”
“And subject to Puritan laws.”
“Exactly. Thank God those laws changed, but, in some ways, not much else has. The accused were usually women, sometimes elderly. There’s speculation that some were mentally ill. Or homeless.”
“Like Sarah Good.”
“Yes.”
“And Rose.”
“And once you start demonizing groups of people, when you make them the other, you can justify doing just about anything you want to them, can’t you? Look at history if you don’t believe me.”
Rafferty got the call as he was driving back to the station.
“There’s been a breakin at that condemned house on Daniels Street,” Jay-Jay said, explaining who’d called it in. “Do you want me to send a car, or are you still down in that neck of the woods?”
“I’m here,” Rafferty said, U-turning as he spoke.
“You need backup?”
“Nope. I got it.”
Rafferty didn’t climb the decrepit porch to get in; instead he jimmied the front door. Callie looked more surprised to see him there than he was to see her. “I figure we’ve got about ten minutes until our friend across the street calls 911 again and Jay-Jay sends the backup I told him I didn’t need,” he said. “You still want to look around?”
Callie looked a lot like a teenager standing in front of him, staring at her shoes.
“Am I under arrest?” she asked.
“Not yet,” he said. He turned on the flashlight he was carrying, which was about a hundred times more powerful than hers. There was nothing in the front room except a few old McDonald’s bags. The kitchen was empty: both sink and stove removed, copper pipes ripped out of the wall, probably stolen. It looked as if someone had started to sweep but abandoned the project, leaving a pile of debris in the corner: It had a network of cobwebs running from it to the handle of a base cabinet and down to the floor.
In a back bedroom closet was a dead water rat.
“Oh God,” Callie said, stepping back quickly to get out of the closet. As she shifted, her foot pushed through a rotting floorboard, and she nearly fell.
Rafferty caught her by the arm. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Thanks,” she said, still shivering from the sight of the rat.
“Be careful,” he said. “A lot of these boards look rotten.” He shone his light up to a damp-looking patch of plaster in the corner. “Water damage.” He pointed the beam back at the floor in an effort to identify other rotting boards.
Rafferty shone the flashlight into a crack between floorboards, then stepped over the rotting one to retrieve an envelope that had fallen in. Shaking the dust from it, he turned it over. “To Dagda from Morrigan,” he said, reading aloud. “Are those names of Goddesses?”
Callie shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t remember hearing them before.”