“There’s something else,” he said, squinting. He brought the flashlight in closer, making the envelope translucent and revealing a faded lipstick kiss.
“A love letter maybe?” she said, and it triggered a memory. “My mother and the others used to receive ‘love letters’ from their…‘friends.’ Sometimes I’d recite them.”
“Love letters?”
She nodded. “Rose gave me elocution lessons. She made me memorize, too, and I’d perform poems in front of my mother and the others. In the elocutionist’s pose.” She indicated one hand poised over the other, palm up against palm down at chest level. “At the end I had to curtsy.”
“Sounds adorable.”
“It was meant to help me gain poise in front of an audience. Not sure the poise thing worked, but it did help me learn to read.”
“And the love letters?”
“Rose worked nights at the center. Most people came in to do their research after work or on Saturdays. When she was out, my mother and the Goddesses had me recite passages from love letters. I’d struggle with words I didn’t recognize. They found it hilarious.”
Callie could feel herself blushing as she remembered the words she’d had to sound out, words she was all too familiar with now.
“I didn’t have to take the elocutionist’s stance when I was reading those letters, but they did insist on the curtsy at the end.”
She remembered the Goddesses giggling and whooping throughout the reading, but it was the curtsy that sent them over the edge. They would laugh until they couldn’t breathe, then they would be silent catching their breath, and one of them would start to giggle and they would be off again. Callie had counted these times as happy ones, with all the Goddesses together and herself as the center of their attention. Now, as she recalled more of the context, she had a different feeling.
She could see Rafferty’s quick look of disapproval before he covered it. “But you don’t recall any of them being called Morrigan?”
“I really don’t,” she said. “Is this a clue?”
“I don’t know,” Rafferty said. “It might be, Nancy Drew.”
A beam from headlights moved across the walls, lighting the room as the backup cruiser pulled up out front. Rafferty looked out the window to see the neighbor coming over to talk to the officers Jay-Jay had predictably dispatched.
“Let’s get out of here,” Rafferty said. “Before we both end up in jail.”
He ushered Callie out the back door, then left by the front himself, stopping to talk to the policemen and the neighbor before getting into his car, giving Callie time to get away unnoticed. Then he drove around the corner and pulled up next to her, opening the passenger door. “Where are you parked?”
She pointed up toward the common.
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”
Montserrat College of Art called the station the next morning with Leah’s last known address.
The three-decker where she’d lived in Beverly was long gone; he’d found a condo development in its place. He’d talked to one of the neighbors. “The kid was a runaway,” he said. “She was in school, I think, but then she came home. She didn’t stay long. She and the father never got along.”
The man couldn’t remember when Leah ran away, but it certainly hadn’t happened before the murders, Rafferty knew that much.
The father had died a long time ago, the man said. “Lung cancer. There was a younger sister, Becky. She moved away. Had a kid. Last I heard she was living in New Hampshire.”
The man didn’t know where, said he’d heard somewhere that the guy had run off, leaving her a single mother. He hadn’t found anything online, but Rafferty had recently found a copy of Leah’s birth certificate at the town hall in Beverly, though the original had been handwritten and was almost illegible, and he couldn’t quite make out the parents’ names. He’d managed to locate the father’s name from online real estate records, then had found his birth certificate; he was born in Beverly, his parents having come over from Greece just after the war. Rafferty found nothing on either the mother or the sister.
He dialed Mickey from his cell.
“Greece, huh? Then it’s probably not the father’s lineage we’re looking for. Plus it’s really hard to trace records back to Europe.”
“Give it a try.”
“Get me the mother’s records.”
“I’m working on it.”
On his way back to Salem, Rafferty stopped at the Beverly Police Station on the off chance that someone had been looking for Leah and had filed a report. He spoke to a detective he knew, another transplant, who had moved north from Connecticut. When Rafferty mentioned the name Leah Kormos, he thought he noticed one of the older cops shoot a quick look at his buddy.
It took a while for the detective to locate the records. “She was a runaway all right. Disappeared into thin air.”
“When did she disappear?”
“Let’s see,” he said, looking at the screen. “It says here that she was reported missing on November fifth, 1989.”
Witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.
—Malleus Maleficarum
They stood at the “four corners of the circle,” each woman holding a candle representing east, west, north, or south. As he sat on the bench watching them at the far end of Derby Wharf, the wind was off the ocean and the candles kept going out. Rafferty had seen this ceremony performed before. Ann named it “calling up the seas.” Once it was drawn, you couldn’t penetrate the circle, not without cutting an entrance of some kind, a metaphorical door to pass through.
“Circles don’t have corners,” he’d said when she’d tried to explain the process.
“Don’t be so literal,” she’d replied.
“What would happen if I just walked in?” Rafferty had asked. “If I just stepped inside to say hello?”
“At the very least you’d break the spell,” she said. “That’s the best-case scenario.”
“And the worst?”
“You’d be exposing those inside—and probably yourself—to some danger. Inside the circle, you are protected. By the gods and goddesses you’ve invoked to join you.”
“And outside?”
“Outside are the ones you didn’t invite. Fairies and impish creatures. And they can be a jealous lot. They love to crash a party.”
Rafferty had listened with the amused detachment of a nonbeliever. Even so, today he kept his distance and waited until the ceremony was over and the circle had been uncast before talking to Ann. He watched until she pointed with her wand, undoing the circle counterclockwise or, as he’d once heard her refer to it, “widdershins.”
“Three times in one week?” she said, spotting him waiting for her as she and the witches walked back toward shore. “People will start to talk.”
“Raising the sea again? The climate change people will be all over you,” he replied.
“Just the opposite, actually. It’s a spell called Time and Tides. It’s meant to turn back both. As a cure for climate change.”
“And is it working?”
“Time will tell,” she said.