Long after the train disappeared, Callie sat at the crossing, her breath heaving, both feet pressed on the brake pedal, wondering what the hell was wrong with her.
Twenty minutes later and still shaking, she crossed the town line into Gloucester and pulled into the parking lot at Hammond Castle. This had been her destination all along, she realized. She turned off the engine and rested her head against the steering wheel, trying to breathe herself back to calm.
“May I help you?” An older man slapped her driver’s-side window with his open palm, then motioned for her to roll it down.
“I just want to look around—”
“We’re closed for the season,” he said, pointing to a sign. “And this is private property.”
“Sorry,” she said, restarting the engine.
“Come back in the spring.”
She couldn’t shake her nervousness. She felt dizzy as well. She needed to eat something, she decided, so she drove to downtown Gloucester, pulled into a diner near the harbor, and ordered a full breakfast of eggs and bacon, toast, and orange juice.
By the time she finished, she felt better. The fog had cleared, and the sun was shining. Even so, she didn’t take the shore route again. She opted for Route 128 and headed over to the hospital to see Rose.
“Stay back,” Rose said. Her eyes darted wildly around the room. “She’s gotten loose. I don’t have her anymore.”
The nurses said Rose had spent the whole morning pacing the perimeter of her room. Circling once, twice, then reversing direction as if to undo the circles she had just created. Apparently, Rose had tried, just last night, to escape the confines of Salem Hospital to get back to her oak trees. They’d had to restrain her for several hours.
“Who don’t you have?” Callie asked.
“The Sidhe.”
Callie looked past Rose—the cabinet that held her belongings had been pried open, the lock broken. Rose’s clothing was ripped and shredded. And whole pages of her book were torn out and crumpled. Callie picked one up. Across the top was a sentence she’d seen before, written in caps: KILL THE BANSHEE.
“Who did this?” Callie asked.
“The banshee!” Rose said. “She’s gotten loose and I can’t stop her!”
“I don’t understand.”
“I had her inside of me. But she escaped. I saw her face. Right here in my room!”
“The banshee?”
“The goddess who turned!”
Rose was shaking. “The creature who killed your mother and the others. She got loose that night, and she killed them all. Then she jumped into me. I tried to hold her there, tried to stop her from killing again, but I couldn’t keep her there forever. When I saw the boy, saw the violence he was capable of, and what they could do together, I could feel her bloodlust rising. She wanted to inhabit him. If I hadn’t stopped him, everyone around him would have died,” Rose cried. “It was the lesser evil.”
Both the nurse and the aide were standing in the doorway staring at Rose.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying,” Callie said, reaching out, trying to calm Rose down.
“I’m going to call Dr. Finch back in,” the nurse said and hurried off.
Callie tried to calm Rose, but Rose squirmed away from her touch. “You don’t understand! The goddess is out there. She tried to kill me!”
An orderly appeared at the door. “I hear you need help in here.” The aide stood behind him.
“No,” Callie said. “Stay where you are.”
More than her words, she knew it was the sound of her voice and the look on her face that stopped him. Locking him in place with her stare, Callie grabbed her phone and called Zee’s number.
“The nurse just paged me. I’m on my way.”
She called Rafferty next and reported the vandalism. “Rose says the goddess tried to kill her! Or the banshee!” Callie said. “Someone was definitely here. They vandalized the room. Do you think it could have been Leah? Maybe she saw Rose on the news and came back to try to hurt her.”
“Did Rose say it was Leah?”
“No. But someone was in here, that’s for sure. There’s been a lot of damage.”
“Stay there. I’ll be right over. Don’t touch anything.”
The nurse started into the room.
“Stay where you are,” Callie warned. “The police are on their way.”
As his 1693 book, Wonders of the Invisible World, demonstrated, Cotton Mather felt little remorse for his part in the hysteria. To Mather, witches were a very real threat in the colony he called “the devil’s country.” He considered them to be “among the poor, and vile and ragged beggars upon Earth.”
—ROSE WHELAN, The Witches of Salem
“It’s not Leah Kormos’s father,” Mickey told Rafferty. “He wasn’t related to Sarah Good. You’re going to have to get me her mother’s name.”
“I’m working on it,” Rafferty said.
He’d called several New Hampshire numbers looking for the sister, since the neighbor said that was where she’d moved. Though Kormos was a common surname in the Greek community, there were fewer listings than he’d expected, and he called them all. He checked online real estate transactions for Vermont and Maine as well. Arrest records and tax filings told him nothing. He checked the other Department of Criminal Justice Information Services websites: missing persons, Victim Services, military records, even the firearms registry, but came up short on any family names. He was going on the idea that the sister was using her maiden name. He didn’t know her married name.
“Do you want me to start in on the other Goddesses?” Mickey asked. “This research takes a while.”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Rafferty said. Everything about this case was taking a while.
What hadn’t taken him long to discover was who’d vandalized Rose’s room. It wasn’t Leah Kormos. Though there had been an unconfirmed report of a female doctor visiting Rose earlier in the day, the vandalism had happened later. It was an orderly, not the one in Rose’s room when she arrived, but another man with a long record of offenses, his fingerprints all over the ruined property. He was a troublemaker, someone who’d heard the public opinion and decided to do a little damage, not unlike the growing number of people who were writing messages of hate online or gathering in front of the hospital to protest the police’s “inaction.” The man had an open bench warrant on charges completely unrelated, and was immediately taken into custody and held at the jail in Middleton.
Rafferty had gone to Pride’s Heart to give Callie the news. He sat across from her at the partners desk in Finn’s study and said, “There’s one more thing you need to know, Callie. It’s about Rose’s release.”