“I know,” May said, turning and heading back toward the other end of the island. “But it will be easier for her to come out sometime. That’s all I care about.”
Rafferty worked all afternoon, swinging one of the sledgehammers, and the women took turns with the other. They worked without speaking, the way he’d seen them do when they spun flax or made lace. Debris was taken away in the wheelbarrows they used in the gardens. Rafferty couldn’t tell where they were putting the refuse, and he didn’t really care. Out of sight, out of mind. He hoped he was right.
By the time it was too dark to see, only a small portion of the far wall of the house’s foundation was left standing.
May set up an early dinner for them in the red schoolhouse: beef stew with vegetables from their gardens, and corn bread made from the heirloom Golden Bantam the women had grown over the summer. He noted the jars of zucchini lined up on the shelves in the back room; they’d been canning at May’s house and storing up for winter.
After dinner, May accompanied him back to the pier. He was walking like old Tom Dayle, all bent over. “When are you going to forgive her, Rafferty?”
The question took him by surprise. “What?”
She held his gaze. “She came back to you. Isn’t that enough?”
“It’s enough. It always has been. You’re reading it wrong. I don’t have to forgive her, because I never blamed her for anything that happened.”
“Okay,” she said. She looked at him for a long time. “I’ll rephrase the question. When are you going to forgive yourself?”
Strange rumors have begun to circulate, including accusations of disease, witchcraft, and even spectral evidence (wives have claimed husbands were receiving nocturnal visits from the Goddesses). “Is this the 1980s, or are we back in 1692?” Eva Whitney posited when asked for comment.
—The Salem Journal, NOVEMBER 15, 1989
The Salem Journal article, entitled “A Modern-Day Witch Hunt?,” appeared the same week Rose was released to the Arbor Street shelter. It produced the opposite of Callie’s desired effect; just as Rafferty had warned her, it made things worse. Now people were focusing their fears on Callie, too. And if she’d hoped the article would lead to information about Leah Kormos’s whereabouts, she’d been wrong. Rafferty hadn’t received a single call. The only mention of Leah had been one post on the newspaper’s website suggesting that Rose had probably killed Leah in some kind of Satanic ceremony.
The details of the Goddesses’ sex lives were luridly described, and Callie’s mother and the others came off badly. There was a sinister undertone, too, as if it had been inevitable that seduction as “competitive sport” would turn deadly.
Though the reporter didn’t come out and say the Goddesses were witches or Satanists—as some Salemites clearly believed—he revealed that at least one of Rose’s family of girls had visited that black magic shop, the one Rafferty had asked Ann about that had closed down.
The article detailed Rose’s unwavering belief that she herself was a banshee. “For those of you who have never heard the term,” the reporter elaborated, “the banshee is best known as the Irish herald of death.”
Along with archived photos of Rose and the Goddesses, The Salem Journal included a photo of Callie—a candid shot someone had taken as she entered the hospital. As a result, she was now recognized everywhere she went. Many people openly gawked and whispered, especially at the tearoom and the shelter. She hadn’t been back to the cemetery at all. When she and Paul bought a Christmas tree for the boathouse from a Cub Scout troop in downtown Beverly, the den mother stared at them during the entire transaction. As soon as she thought they were out of earshot, she said to one of the other parents, “That girl is either in deep denial or she’s one of them.”
“Jesus,” Paul said when they got back to the car. “That was incredibly rude.”
Callie shrugged it off. She wasn’t completely sorry she had given the interview. Someone had to speak up on Rose’s behalf. The reporter would have done the story anyway; he had tried to talk to the hospital staff, but they’d protected Rose’s privacy as the law required. The officer who had been posted outside her door, however, had no restrictions beyond the dictates of his own questionable ethics. He was quoted several times in the article, talking about Rose’s “trancelike state” and her sudden outbursts “like she was possessed or something.”
He had also talked at length about “the unearthly sound” of Callie’s singing bowl and how “the mystical treatment” had revived Rose. “She’s as weird as the old lady, if you ask me.”
Rafferty told Callie he had suspended the officer. But the damage was done.
The online gossip was the most incendiary. Protected by anonymity, the commenters on The Salem Journal page took the speculation to a new low:
The devil has once again been raised in Salem.
—GOODCHRISTIAN101
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
—LIKESTOSAIL
“That’s not even an accurate translation,” Paul said, looking over Callie’s shoulder at his laptop screen once they were back at his place. “I mean, that last comment.”
“Really?” Callie’s hands were shaking slightly. The sheer number of posters was frightening enough.
“King James was obsessed with witches. He even attended the first major witch trial in Scotland. As you know, people are terrified of anything they don’t understand. That Bible translation, while beautifully poetic, wasn’t the best. Many scholars believe that the original word wasn’t witch but poisoner. Poisoning was actually feared more than witches. Until that translation.”
“So a mistranslated biblical quote ignited the interest in witch hunting?”
“Yes. That and another bad translation from the original text to German. In the original, nouns didn’t have masculine or feminine modifiers, so the word witch was considered both. But when it was translated to German, the translator chose the feminine, and witches came to be seen as women. The King James Bible was a product of the Reformation and was based on Martin Luther’s version of the text. When the German was translated to English, the association with the feminine carried over. Which led to all sorts of atrocities against women, as you can imagine.”
“I don’t have to imagine.”
Paul nodded. “Sorry.” Then he said, “The 1486 bestseller called Malleus Maleficarum, which loosely translates to The Witch Hammer, added the methodology needed to root out these so-called witches. That book justified horrible persecutions in the Old World and then, much later, in the New. Fear, once again, ran rampant.”
“It’s still running rampant in Salem,” Callie said. “Look at these comments.”