Cursed be the Wicked (10 page)

I sigh heavy and try to think who in the hell would have my number that lives in town.
No one, that’s who.

I remember the phone calls I got in my room at the B&B the other night and a chill runs up the back of my neck.

I’m letting this town get to me a little too much, I decide. Salem has a way of messing with one’s head. Especially my head.

I’m sick of it.

“What’s up?” Finn asks and I jerk to see her taking her hair out of its ponytail at the kitchen doorway.

I slip my phone back into my jacket pocket.

“I have to go,” I tell her. I’m done pretending I can have any type of normalcy in this town.

Finn doesn’t say anything at first. She simply smiles and nods as I pull my keys out of my pocket and start to take off.

Just as I’m at the door, though, she stops me.

“Mr. Stone?”

I stop with one hand extended out toward the handle and twist around to see her. She doesn’t shoot off the snarky remark that I anticipate. Instead, her eyes are dark and huge, and full of a vulnerability I wasn’t expecting. It makes me want to wrap my arms around her and stand there, holding her, safe and sound, until it goes away.

“I can only think of a handful of people who would tell Ray to fuck off like you did today.”

I hear it in her voice, a difficulty in saying thank you. I get that. It makes sense considering her deep seeded issues with apologies.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

I grin down at her and jut my chin out some. “Tell Geneva I appreciated the interview yesterday and the food today.”

She grabs hold of the doorknob and shrugs.

“Sure thing.”

“And Finn?”

Her eyes meet mine. “Yeah?”

“Thank
you
,” I tell her, “For today.”

Any lingering vulnerability in her eyes disappears when I voice my appreciation, but it’s too late, I’ve already learned a little something about her.

“I’ll waive today’s fee since you kind of helped me out this afternoon, but starting tomorrow, I run an even seventy-five a day.”

I take an inadvertent step forward.

“Excuse me?”

“For the tour,” she explains.

“I don’t recall accepting your offer as tour guide,” I tease and she almost seems uncomfortable with our sudden closeness, but easily covers it up.

“Compliance is assumed when you decide to tag along for the ride, Mr. Stone.”

I’d like to lean in and take her face into my hands. I’d like to press her against the wall of her grandmother’s foyer and kiss the smart ass right out of her. But I think better of it.

“Touché,” I tell her before finally forcing myself to take a step back and say goodnight. Leaving Geneva’s doesn’t stop me from thinking about Finn on the ride back to the B&B.

I don’t remember the last time I had so much fun with a woman outside the bedroom. I’ve never enjoyed Essex Street but I did today. That’s saying a lot in my book. And it wasn’t even Essex Street, so much as it was Finn. Just being around her is intriguing.
She’s
intriguing.

I think about her inspecting my head and decide that was the sexiest medical attention I’ve ever had.

I have a stray thought of wishing I’d told her that, yes, Coop
is
my real name. I fantasize about her saying it while I’m kissing her neck, exploring the rest of what’s underneath her skirt, nibbling on her earlobes.

I spent so much time stressing over this job and ticking off reasons for not wanting to be here. I never once thought there might be someone that I’d meet that would make this trip bearable.

I wonder if I’d have caved and made a move on Finn, after all, had I not gotten that damn phone call in the middle of dinner.

I think about the look she gave me at the door, and how easy it would have been to follow through when out of nowhere, something jumps out into the middle of the street.

“Shit!”

I slam on the brakes and come to a full stop just as a man’s hand hits the hood of the car. When he looks through the windshield to curse me out, he freezes.

He’s a tall guy, built like a lumberjack. His hair is beginning to gray and it looks like he hasn’t pulled a comb through it in weeks.

His eyes widen as he studies me. His mouth falls open. He looks like he’s seen a ghost.

Like
I’m
the ghost.

He loses his footing and stumbles, so I throw the car into park and get out to see if he’s okay. He’s already running off as I call after him.

“Hey! Are you all right?”

He waves me off, tripping a few times as he goes. I don’t chase him down, it’s not his fault I almost hit him.
Completely anyway
.

As I watch him fade into the darkness of the town’s shadows, I lean against the car and gather my wits. Between my mother’s death, the crazy dreams, visits to my aunt’s house only to find I’ve inherited a house I don’t even want, meeting Finn and her friendly neighborhood stalkers, I’m losing focus on the article I’m supposed to be writing.

And I nearly killed a man.

I need to regroup.

Chapter 7

Gallows Hill

My parents’ voices drift through the darkened bedroom as I pull the covers up and over my head. I’m hoping to drown out the sound of their fighting again but it never helps. They always fight, and I always hear them. This time is different though. As their voices travel through the house, they’re drawn out and hard to understand.

“Can’t let you hurt him,” one of them says, then the other responds. “Don’t be hateful, he’s just a boy.”

“He’s more than that though, isn’t he?”

The door flies open as Dad chases Mom inside. My mother’s hand reaches out to grab for me and her face changes. She morphs into my father. Even as I recognize him, the face changes again. This time I can’t see it before it dissipates into a rolling puff of smoke. It growls from every corner of my room. Shadows deepen, surrounding me. They envelope me until I feel like I’m nearly drowning in them.

I try to yell for help but all I see is my mother. She stands in the hallway but she can’t reach me and just when I think the weight of the blackness alone will crush me, a small light appears in front of my eyes.

“Oblivisci,” the light tells me with a whisper. As a small, frail hand reaches for mine, the darkness is gone, and I’m awake.

Air rushes in and out of me at an incredible speed. I feel as though something’s been sitting on my chest. I take a few minutes to steady my breathing and remind myself it was all in my head. Literally.

I sit on the edge of the bed for a few minutes. I need to collect my thoughts, and the rest of me. My breathing slows but I find that my hands are shaking once again. I ball them into fists to regain some control but they still shake. I’m anything but in control here.

I stand and think. I pace the room.

At the window, I pause, and stare out toward Salem. I’ve spent so many years bottling this place away on a shelf somewhere in the corner of my mind. Now that I’m here, face to face with the past, it’s all rushing back, that’s all this is.

“You need something to eat, Coop,” I tell myself, but it’s still too early for even the home cooked breakfast that the B&B serves. To waste some time, I decide to see how
others
have perceived my mother over the years. I pull my laptop from its leather case and hit the power button.

I type “Crazy Maggie Shaw” into the Google search bar and wait before I hit the enter key. I’ve spent years resisting the urge to Google my mother, years resisting the urge to find the smallest piece of information. I’m not sure I’m ready to reopen this chapter of my life and read how other people judged it. But I do.

ENTER
.

I click on the first “The Official Maggie Shaw” website I find. It takes no time to load. There’s a picture of Salem’s famous Witch House and my mom’s face in the header of the page. The background is black, the font is orange and they have eerie organ music playing as a default setting. I turn it off and scroll through the sections.

“The Life of Maggie Shaw” tells visitors a brief history of my mother. It glazes over her childhood, mentioning she grew up here, but fails to say anything about her parents, friends or social activities. I’m a tad disappointed that I don’t find anything about her that I didn’t already know. Or at the very least, something that might tell me she was once normal.

I wonder, while I scroll some more, why she never told me about my grandparents. Was my grandmother like her? Was she considered a bona fide witch? Did she kill her husband too?

It’s just as I’m asking myself these questions when I find another article titled “The Achilles Heel of Maggie Shaw”.

I stop and think for a minute. I never really thought of my mother as having any weaknesses. She always seemed like she was the one calling the shots, with me anyway.

The author of the post doesn’t list their name but they seem to have a very strong opinion of my father. According to this, Mom was considered to have had a lot of potential in some healing circles within Salem and was even expected to become very prominent within her coven before leaving.

That was a long time ago, though,
they write.

Her reclusiveness and loss of touch with reality can easily be attributed to Ben Shaw’s years of stifling poor Maggie’s abilities and his constant abuse during their marriage.

I stare at the words I just read.

I’m at a loss here.

The phrases used to refer to my father are not computing and I wonder how many people have seen this website and read these words about him. How many people see him as an abusive asshole?

Was
he an abusive asshole?

I mean, really? Dad? Mom was the one that lost her temper practically every day. She’s the one that screamed crazy, made up words and threw cooking utensils out into the yard for absolutely no reason.
She
locked me in my bedroom on more than one occasion, not him, and told me not to come out until it was, safe.

That last word surprises me.
Safe.
I wonder why I chose it. It certainly doesn’t make sense but now that I think back, I’m sure that was the word she used. She’d said it enough times but I wonder why I’m only now recalling that fact.

I glare at the computer screen and start to question if there’s any truth to the description of my father. And if there is, how did I miss it? And why hadn’t Mom ever told anyone?

I find a small reference to me at the bottom of the post. My name is highlighted as a link and underneath, it says, “only son”. There’s a sour feeling in the pit of my stomach now. I don’t want to click the link. If I do, I might find a similar article about me, and how I had been a suspect in the murder case. It might even name me as another contributor to my mother’s insanity.

Curiosity wins though, and I click on my name. Instead of finding a derogatory write up, I’m taken to a page with nothing but an “unknown error” message. As I stare at the blank page, I think, that pretty much sums up what she thought of me.

Nothing.

I close the laptop. I’ve had enough history for the day.

Doubt creeps up inside of me as I sit there, letting everything sink in—about decisions I’ve made, about my father. Mostly about Mom. But what could this blogger know? They weren’t there, I was.

My stomach grumbles and I’m reminded that I’m still hungry, so I head out to find a place to eat, grateful for the distraction. I need to get over what I’ve just read and have to stop myself from writing a comment on this ridiculous blog about how they’re tarnishing the memory of a man who was probably the only reason Mom didn’t lose her mind sooner.

I quietly make my way downstairs, opting out of the group breakfast again. I’m not in the mood for crowds. As I exit the B&B, the cold air hits me like an unexpected wave on the beach. The jolt of the change in temperature from inside out alerts me that I’ve forgotten my jacket.

Dammit.

Instead of rushing back inside for it, I stand there and take a deep breath of the cold, October, Massachusetts air into my lungs. While I’m letting it out, I take in the colors of the trees that line the property. The golds and maroons and fiery oranges always add a warm vibrancy to the Northeast that directly contradicts the cold weather this time of year. As a kid, I remember I used to rake the leaves as they fell, then run and jump into the middle of the piles I would leave behind. I smile at the memory but it’s gone as I recall the raised voices I could hear just inside the house as I bagged the leaves. Dad always left shortly after fights with Mom. Sometimes he’d come back the same day, sometimes not.

I push the memory down and take a moment to wonder where I can go this time of day that would be the most productive. I’m very aware that my choices are limited here, considering the early morning, but I figure that maybe I could make another attempt at visiting my mother’s old house.

“Looks like you’re trying awful hard to think, Mr. Stone.”

“Holy.”

Finn laughs at the fact she just scared the living shit out of me. For the second time.

“I’m fine, Finn, how’re you today?” I ask. “And what are you doing here?”

She shrugs, twisting her mouth up just enough to remind me of how difficult it is to concentrate on why I’m here when she’s around.

“Just thought we’d get an early start, is all.”

I’m confused for a few seconds but then I remember.

Right.

Our agreement.

I should tell her I can’t make it today.

I should get a good starting point on my story.

I should, but I won’t.

“But if you don’t want to,” Finn starts, letting her last word linger.

I shake my head.

“No. I Want to.”

She smiles for me.

I like Finn’s smile.

I’m not stupid; I know on some other level, I’m avoiding my mother’s house, but since the cost of that avoidance is to spend more time with the one woman who keeps things refreshing around here, I’m okay with that.

I tell her I need to get my jacket first and she taunts me.

“It’s only fifty-five degrees out, Mr. Stone.”

I grin because she’s got a point. Although I’m not blind to the fact that living in Florida has thinned my blood out over the years, but I’m still getting that jacket.

When I make it back downstairs, she’s leaning against the hood of the car, watching birds hover over the trees in the distance. I notice her outfit for the first time today.

The shorts she’s wearing are a direct contradiction to her hiking boots in my opinion, but I’m getting used to her odd choices in clothing. It’s the shirt that worries me. The baby blue tank top has barely enough material to be counted as swim wear and I’m certain I won’t be able to keep my eyes from wandering to the woman’s cleavage today. She does have a sweater on. I think it’s just a formality though.

I’m not complaining. She’s perfectly Finn. I wouldn’t ask her to change a single thing at this point.

When she catches me staring at her I overcompensate, jerking my eyes away from her as I head for the car.

“Let’s go,” I call out as I barrel toward the driver’s side door. She picks a bag up off of the hood and hikes it over her shoulder, smiling.

As we drive away from the Camilla Rose, I don’t ask Finn how she got there today or where we’re going. I’m simply glad I’m not all tied up in knots anymore, so I just drive and try to make some small talk.

“What’s in the bag?” I ask her.

“Camera.”

“Oh yeah? Are we taking photos today?”

She shrugs. “Maybe.”

That’s all she says for another ten to fifteen minutes. I don’t make any more attempts to chitchat. I’m tired anyway. And chitchat is overrated.

“You can park anywhere downtown, we can get to where we’re going on foot from there,” she says as we enter Salem.

Walk
. I immediately begin to do a quick rundown of all the places I think she might take me as I find a city parking lot that isn’t full yet.

Once I find a spot, I turn the car off and catch a glimpse of Finn as I open the door. She pulls her hair back and ties it into a knot behind her, showing off more skin along her neckline.

She’s sexy as hell. I don’t think I’ll last the whole trip without wanting to touch some part of her if she’s going to keep exposing the majority of her body to me.

“I bet you think you wanna see Gallows Hill,” she says once we’re outside. I think to myself, what a typical tourist place to start. It doesn’t seem like Finn, but I go along with it.

“Why wouldn’t I?” I laugh and it must come off more sarcastic than I intended because Finn gets defensive with me when I say it.

“Look, if you don’t wanna see it—”

“No it’s fine, Finn I was just having a moment. No coffee yet.” I smile, trying to make up for my attitude and she rolls her eyes.

“Well if that’s the problem, let’s get you some.”

She takes me to a street vendor she seems to know and it’s got to be the best damn coffee I’ve had in ages. Maybe even longer. As an added bonus, there’s food. Good breakfast type comfort food. I make a note of where he’s selling and tell myself to be sure and come back sometime during this trip.

Finn waits patiently while I guzzle down the coffee and swallow my food whole. When I toss the wrappers into the trash, she asks if I’m ready and I give her a resounding, “Yep.”

I’m already walking toward where I know Gallows Hill is located when I realize Finn is no longer beside me.

I look back at her. She’s got her head tilted and is staring at me with what appears to be confusion. It takes me a minute but then I realize, I’m not supposed to know where Gallows Hill is located.

Shit.

“Where are you going?” Finn asks me.

“I,” I hook a thumb over my shoulder bag. “Thought I saw a map this morning at the B&B. Gallows Hill is this way, right?”

I swallow a little. Finn’s expression changes and I high five myself for the quick thinking, but then she waves for me to follow her. Now I’m second-guessing if
she
knows where Gallows Hill is, because I
do
know, and she’s not taking me there.

“Can’t believe everything you read, Mr. Stone,” she says, like she can hear what’s going on inside my mind.

Her choice of words unexpectedly resonates with me over the blog post I was trolling earlier. I don’t want to let any of that ruin my time with Finn, though, so I try to remain focused on what’s happening here and now. Like the fact that we are most definitely headed in the wrong direction of Gallows Hill.

I’m so busy looking back towards where I know the hill is located that I run smack into Finn when she stops suddenly. She lets out a squeak, tripping over her own feet and I grab her by the waist before she does a face plant into the dirt. When she stands back upright, she twists in my arms so she’s facing me now. Despite the temperature, I’m warmer with her pressed against me like this.