He sighed. “At least neither of us was drinking this time.” And then he started unpacking, putting his clothes back into his bureau.
Her heart sank as she watched him put his things away, leaving the two top drawers for her. He paused, took a ring off his pinkie, and handed it to Callie.
“What’s this?”
“I’d say it’s my mother’s seal of approval,” he said.
Callie had no idea what he was talking about. She recognized the emerald and diamond ring as the one that Emily had always worn on her right hand.
“She changed her will right after we went to Matera. This ring was always supposed to go to the girl I’m going to marry. She left it to you.”
Callie stood looking at him. “Are you asking me to marry you?”
Paul managed to smile. “I am.”
The blade itself incites to deeds of violence.
—HOMER, The Odyssey
“Leah Kormos isn’t related to Sarah Good. She’s related to Elizabeth Howe.”
Mickey’s news didn’t come as a complete shock. For quite a while now, and certainly ever since he’d talked to her sister, Rafferty had become certain that Leah was no longer the primary suspect. But if Leah wasn’t related to Sarah Good, if she wasn’t the fifth petal, then who the hell was?
He’d already erased Rose’s name from under Good’s. He’d made Mickey recheck the others against their ancestors, not with Sarah Good this time, but confirming the corresponding names and ancestors now written on each petal. They’d checked out; the positions were right. Now he erased Rose’s name from Elizabeth Howe’s petal, inking in Leah’s instead. Finally, he removed Leah’s penciled-in name from under Sarah Good’s, but the eraser smudged the paper so badly it would have been impossible to add another name, even if he had one. He found an old bottle of Wite-Out in the desk drawer and painted the petal until it became as white as Susan Symms’s albino skin, which made it stand out even more. Four of the petals now had correct links from ancestors to women in modern times. All that was missing was the name of the descendant of the fifth petal, Sarah Good’s, which was now more mysterious than ever.
One thing was beginning to become obvious. There hadn’t been just one petal missing from the blessing that night on the hill. There had been two people who were absent that night: Leah Kormos and someone else.
“No luck?” Towner said, looking over his shoulder at the blank white petal.
“I’m at a loss,” he said, shrugging. “I know each of the girls was related to one of the executed, and that Callie said Rose was related to more than one of them. But Rose wasn’t related to Sarah Good, Mickey has already established that.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” Towner said. “I seem to remember hearing that Rebecca Nurse had a sister who was also accused. So I just checked it out online. Actually, she had two sisters who were accused of witchcraft, and one of them was executed. Not on July nineteenth, though.”
“Rose never told Callie it was on July nineteenth, just that she was related to more than one of the executed. I guess that means Callie and Olivia were also related to more than one.”
“That still doesn’t tell you who the fifth petal was.”
“There was someone else on the hill that night. Someone who was related to Sarah Good. Was there another Goddess we don’t know about?”
Towner was silent for a long moment. “Why does it have to be a woman? Didn’t the blessing simply require a descendant?”
“True enough,” Rafferty said. It wasn’t as if the thought hadn’t occurred to him, but that he was hoping it wasn’t a possibility. If it were a man, there were so many as yet unrevealed suspects that Rafferty might have to check half the population of Salem before he found the one he was looking for.
He’d already told Callie that he didn’t think it was Leah who had killed the Goddesses. “Leah got pregnant, Callie. That was the rule she broke.”
He started looking for another suspect. And the place he started was the love letters.
If Rafferty had been moved by the youthful romanticism of the letters when he’d first discovered them, reading them now had the opposite effect. They were very personal, and he found himself embarrassed, so much so that he got up and closed his office door. Each letter contained a description of the sender’s fantasy and how the Goddesses had fulfilled it in a way he had never dreamed possible. These weren’t love letters per se. They were thank-you notes. That any man had put such personal details down on paper amazed him. That one man had actually signed his letter with his full name was even more astonishing. If the young women weren’t witches, they were certainly bewitching.
Rafferty looked up the number and phoned the man who’d signed his letter.
“I spoke to you people about this years ago,” the man said.
“We people, as you so politely refer to us, have been replaced by newer people. Which means drop your attitude because you’re going to have to talk to us again.”
“Okay,” the man agreed, put in his place. “But not at my house. I’ll come to you.” He lowered his voice. “I don’t want my wife to know.”
The man, Donald Booth, was in his midfifties, a successful lawyer and married for the second time. Once he started talking about the Goddesses, he became energized, much less reticent than Rafferty had expected.
“It was only one night, but it was the most memorable of my life. It wasn’t just the number of them. There was something magical about those girls.”
Rafferty didn’t react.
“As far as the trouble they caused around town,” he went on, “it wasn’t the sex. It was the obsession.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“The night I was with them, guys showed up at the door twice; each time they were begging to see the girls again, but the girls refused. The thing was, they would only consent to be with you the one time. Then you had to write them a note. Those were the rules. There were exceptions to the one-night thing, I heard, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to be one of them.”
“Do you know who the exceptions were?”
“I don’t.”
“What about the two stalkers who showed up while you were there?” Rafferty asked. “Did you know them?”
“I wouldn’t call them stalkers,” the lawyer said. “I’d describe them as…moonstruck. It’s difficult to be possessive of four women at the same time.”
“Four? Are you sure of the number? It wasn’t five?”
“You tend to remember the number when you’re being seduced by four women,” he said. “Even if you’re high as a kite.”
“High on what?”
“Pretty much anything we could find,” he said. “Grass, X, ludes, coke, scotch. Everything was around in those days. Anyway, you couldn’t possess those girls, even if you wanted to.”
“Not sure who’d want to take that on,” Rafferty said, meaning it.
The man laughed knowingly. “I think those guys just wanted another night with them.”