“And I’m trying to find her.”
“For what? So you can arrest her and make yourself a hero? The supercop who solved the case that couldn’t be solved?”
“I don’t think she did it,” he said, keeping his eyes on hers, “but I think she might know who did.”
She looked at him as if trying to assess his sincerity. “How are you going to find her, if I couldn’t?”
“I found you, didn’t I?”
A customer sitting at the far end of the counter held up his coffee cup, and she grabbed the pot to refill it.
She replaced the pot on the burner and turned to Rafferty, who hadn’t looked away. “Five minutes,” she said, motioning to a corner booth. He took his cup and moved to the booth. She took a seat opposite.
He asked about Leah’s history, about her involvement with the Goddesses.
“I didn’t know them,” Becky said. “I know she had friends in Salem.”
“What about magic?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you know if Leah practiced witchcraft?”
“Oh, please,” Becky said, with a snort.
“Were you related to any of the Salem witches, the ones who were executed in 1692?”
“If we were, I never heard anything about it.”
“Your sister never told you anything like that?”
“No.”
“You really can’t tell me anything about her location?” Rafferty finally asked.
“No,” Becky said, her eyes filling with tears.
Rafferty could feel her sorrow.
“You still miss her.”
“Of course I do.” She wiped her eyes. “She’s my only sister.”
“And you really don’t know where she is?” Rafferty waited for her answer.
“I haven’t seen her since she got pregnant, and my father kicked her out.”
This was news to Rafferty. “Leah was pregnant?”
“Oh, don’t pretend you guys didn’t know. I was standing right next to my father when he told the police the whole story.”
I’ve been all through this with the cops.
Why was none of this in the files he’d read?
Rafferty drove directly to Rice Street in Salem. He stood on the top step of Tom Dayle’s house, ringing the bell for almost five minutes before Tom finally opened the door. He was wearing a robe and slippers, but he didn’t look as if he’d been sleeping.
“Do you want to take me down into your basement and show me box number nine, or do you want me to get a warrant?”
The ex-detective slowly opened the door.
Tom had a hard time walking down the cellar stairs. He clutched the railing so hard he was white knuckled, his other hand holding on to the wall as he descended.
Box number 9 was not sealed as the others had been but sat opened on the workbench. Rafferty shouldered past Tom Dayle and reached inside the box, spotting a sheet of paper with big letters scrawled across the top:
THE GODDESS RULES
1. Never take a man against his will.
2. All the Goddesses must be present when we take a man.
3. Practice safe sex.
4. Never take anyone back to Rose’s house again.
5. Don’t get pregnant.
Rafferty picked up a photo of the wall mural next, featuring all four girls: Leah, Olivia, Susan, and Cheryl. The artist had captured their beauty and their youth. It was, as Callie had described, a stunning painting, but, as he looked at it, Rafferty immediately figured out what had made Rose so angry. Though the portrait was exquisite, it was the setting that stood out. The artist had dressed the Goddesses skimpily and depicted them lounging on the brass bed Callie had described. They looked like they belonged in a bordello. Rafferty couldn’t take his eyes off the photo. In the middle of the bed, dressed in a lacy nightgown that left nothing to the imagination, was the most beautiful of the girls they called Goddesses: Leah Kormos.
It took a moment for Rafferty to pull himself away from the photo. Then he spotted the letters. All made out to the Goddesses, and evidently once tied with the pink ribbon that was still knotted and sitting next to them in the box.
From first glance, he could tell these were the love letters Callie had told him about. That the Goddesses had kept them, had collected them. The smudged lipstick kisses all over the envelopes seemed to illustrate just how young they had been. Something about this touched Rafferty in a way he couldn’t quite explain. The number of letters seemed far fewer than the ribbon would have held. To make sure, he slipped the ribbon back over the pile. There was a gap of at least an inch.
“Where are the rest of them?”
“You don’t want to know the answer to that.”
But he already knew. He’d begun to suspect as soon as he’d talked to Leah’s sister. The report of Leah’s pregnancy had never been in any of the police records that Rafferty had seen. Nor was it in the database the police had created to track the ongoing investigation. Callie had told him the police were at the house all the time, but there had been only three records of them ever being called. That meant that the rest of the police visits had been purely social calls. The missing letters belonged to them.
“How many officers were involved?” Rafferty asked.
“A lot,” Tom answered. “From both towns.”
“You?”
“No,” he said. “Never me.”
“All this covering up because they found out she was pregnant?”
“That baby could have belonged to any of them.”
Rafferty shook his head in disgust.
“The force couldn’t take the scandal. Even if there hadn’t been a child.”
Rafferty counted the letters that hadn’t been destroyed. There were thirty remaining, every one of the writers a suspect, or at least a person of interest. To say nothing of the cops themselves—even if their letters were destroyed. If he poked this hornet’s nest, a lot of people were going to get stung.
“What about the costumes they were wearing?”
“They were the first things to go,” Dayle said, looking toward the furnace.
“I said some things I shouldn’t have said. And so did my father. Let’s leave it at that,” Paul said.
They’d been staying at the boathouse since they returned from Italy, and their luggage was still not unpacked. It gave Callie hope each time she looked at it: As soon as they fulfilled their obligations, they would return to Matera. That packed luggage made her feel optimistic.
She hadn’t attended the reading of Emily’s will. Paul assured her there would be no surprises; his parents had put the houses and grounds into a trust long ago. The surviving spouse would take control, and one day it all would be passed down to Paul. The only things that would be at issue at the reading were his mother’s personal items.
But things hadn’t gone well or as expected. Paul and his father had had a terrible argument.
“Why do you insist on fighting with him?” she asked, when she heard the story.