Devil's Night (20 page)

“Were you being watchful last night?” Kat asked.

“No,” Betty said.

“Yes,” her husband replied.

Kat looked back and forth between them. “Which is it?”

Mrs. Freeman chose her words very carefully. “I might have looked outside once or twice last night. You know, just to keep an eye on the neighborhood.”

She cast her eyes downward, ashamed of her admission. Kat, on the other hand, was positively elated. Betty Freeman could be a world-class voyeur and she wouldn’t care. Just as long as she was able to glean some information out of it.

“And did you see anything strange last night?” Kat asked.

“At the museum or on the street in general?”

“Both.”

Dave Freeman sighed. “Get ready for an earful.”

His wife slapped his knee. Dave chuckled. The gesture made Kat suddenly, irrationally jealous. These two people were lucky to have each other, and despite their bickering, they knew it.

“Well,” Betty Freeman said, “it was pretty quiet all night. I did see a light on at the museum for most of the evening. I figured Mrs. Bishop was there burning the midnight oil. And then Mrs. Pulsifer stopped by. I saw her walk right into the museum.”

“When was this?”

“About eight o’clock,” Betty said.

This was in line with what Emma Pulsifer had told Kat right after the fire. She had checked in on Constance before departing for the fund-raiser at Maison D’Avignon.

“Other than that, did you see anything out of the ordinary?”

“Anyone suspicious,” Henry added. “Or did you hear anything.”

“As a matter of fact, I did,” Betty said. “We were watching TV and I heard something strange outside. Dave heard it, too.”

“I did,” her husband confirmed. “It sounded like clicking.”

“
Clicking?
Where on earth did you come up with that?” Mrs. Freeman turned to Kat. “It was a tapping noise. Not a clicking.”

Dave shrugged. “I heard what I heard.”

On the coffee table in front of them was a half-finished crossword puzzle. A retractable pen sat on top of it. Betty Freeman picked it up and started to push it open and closed.

“
That’s
clicking,” she told Dave. “The noise sounded like this.”

Using the tip of the pen, she tapped the coffee table in a quick, steady rhythm.

“Is that the same speed as the tapping you heard?” Kat asked.

“More or less, although it was lower pitched.”

“And what time was this?”

“About nine, I think.”

That was practically four hours before the fire broke out at the museum. No matter what caused the tapping—or clicking—sound, Kat was doubtful it had anything to do with the blaze.

“And there was nothing else after that?” she asked.

The Freemans answered that no, they witnessed nothing else out of the ordinary until the glow of the flames at the museum woke them up eight minutes before one. Kat thanked them for their time and told them to call her if they thought of anything else.

“We’re sorry we couldn’t tell you more,” Dave Freeman said. “Please, just catch this guy, it’s—”

“Scary right now,” his wife added. “The whole town is just—”

“Terrified.”

Kat assured them she would. Then she and Henry left the house, stepping outside into a bright autumn afternoon. The sky was a deep cerulean blue, and the trees in the Freemans’ yard were ablaze with color. The air was mostly warm, cut ever so slightly by a hint of chill. It was a perfect day—the kind that made Kat want to skip work and take a long stroll through the woods. But such a sojourn was out of the question, as her ringing cell phone rudely reminded her. Thinking it might be news about Nick, she answered it in record time.

“Chief Campbell here.”

“Chief? This is Trooper Randall Stroup.”

Kat let out an audible sigh. The call wasn’t about Nick. She supposed that, in his case, no news was good news. “How can I help you?”

“I’m here at the museum,” the deep-voiced state trooper said. “We just finished up the inventory of the historical society’s collection.”

“I’m right across the street. I can literally be there in a minute.”

“That’ll be great. It’ll be easier to explain in person.”

Kat was already halfway across the street, the museum growing closer with each step. “And why is that?”

“Because,” the trooper said, “I’m not sure you’re going to like what you hear.”

3
P
.
M
.

Randall Stroup was a big guy. Huge, in fact. He dwarfed even Henry, which, considering Henry was six five and more than two hundred pounds of solid muscle, was no small feat. Just being in his presence made Henry stand up straight and puff out his chest. He couldn’t help it. And Randall absolutely towered over Chief Campbell, looking capable of flattening her to the floor using only the palm of his hand.

“What do they feed you boys in the state police?” Kat asked him. “Do they put growth hormones in your food? Stock the vending machines only with protein shakes?”

Trooper Stroup, without even cracking a smile, stated the obvious. “We work out.”

“Yeah. I can see that.”

The three of them were in the meeting room at the rear of the museum, standing at a table covered with papers and photographs stacked in tidy piles. According to Stroup, the pages listed every item in the Perry Hollow Historical Society’s collection. The pictures were Polaroids of the entire collection, taken by Constance Bishop for insurance purposes.

“We went through all of it,” the trooper said. “Since so much was damaged in the fire, it took a while to figure out what was what. Anything we were unsure of, we called Emma Pulsifer and she verified it for us.”

Henry moved down the length of the table, scanning some of the photos that topped the piles. He was more than a little impressed. Granted, he didn’t have the eye of an appraiser, but some of the items in the museum looked to be extremely valuable. He regretted never stopping by to take a look around when he’d had the chance.

“Was there anything missing?” Kat asked.

“A couple of things, actually. The first is this.”

Randall Stroup handed her a Polaroid. Looking over her shoulder, Henry saw that it was a picture of an antique iron. Made of cast iron, its triangular shape was more pronounced than modern ones. The handle, also cast iron, rose from the base in an elegant curve and was accented with a rod of wood in the center.

“Apparently, it was part of an exhibit on household chores in the eighteenth century,” Randall said. “We searched the whole place and didn’t find anything like it. Nor is there any paperwork or mention of it being loaned out to another museum.”

Kat studied the photograph, her finger tracing the iron’s back edge. “Gentlemen, I think we’ve found our murder weapon.”

“An iron?” Henry said.

That elicited a nod from Kat. “The damage found on Constance Bishop’s skull was in a straight line. Like she had been hit with the edge of something heavy.”

She grabbed a nearby chair and asked Trooper Stroup to sit in it. Once he did, she mimed picking up an iron, fingers curled around the invisible handle.

“The culprit grabbed the iron from the exhibit. Just like this.” Kat stood behind the trooper, using him as her unwitting victim. Raising her hand, she said, “The iron was raised, flat side facing up.”

She brought her hand down, pretending to strike Randall in the head.

“One heavy blow was all it took to knock Constance to the ground. Thinking she was dead, he then started the fire. Then he took the iron with him, although I’m not sure why.”

“That’s easy,” Henry said. “He knew the fire would destroy any evidence left behind. But cast iron doesn’t burn.”

Kat tapped her temple. “Now you’re thinking like a cop.”

Henry wasn’t sure that was a good thing, although he knew it was bound to happen sooner or later. Lord knows he had spent enough time with them.

“But that’s not the most interesting thing missing from the museum,” Randall said. “There’s this.”

He whipped out another Polaroid, laying it on the table so they both could see it. The photo showed a cylinder made of heavy paper that had once been red but was now brown with age. A thin wire poked from one end of the cylinder and lettering ran along its side, too faded to read. Not that Henry needed it to know what the object was. It was pretty clear that they were looking at a stick of dynamite.

“Let me guess,” Kat said. “This is the part I’m not going to like.”

Trooper Stroup gave a single, swift nod. “Bingo.”

“What would a museum be doing with dynamite?” Henry asked.

Kat, the only Perry Hollow native in the room, provided the answer. “It was in their exhibit about the early days of the town. I remember seeing it in grade school. We had a whole lesson on the history of logging.”

“Call me crazy,” Henry said, “but I thought logging involved saws.”

“The dynamite was used after the trees were cut down. There’d be acres of nothing but tree stumps. Pulling them out of the ground took too much time and manpower. It was easier to just blow them up. It was called stump blasting.”

“Well,” Randall said, “that dynamite is now unaccounted for.”

He didn’t express what they were all thinking—that the dynamite could now be in the hands of an arsonist. The idea alone sent a shivery jolt of fear zipping around Henry’s body. Kat felt one, too. He knew it by the way her face suddenly paled. Not by much, of course. Just enough that he could tell she was now more scared than when they first walked into the museum.

“I assume there’s nothing else that’s missing,” she said. “Unless you want to tell me that the museum also had a few hand grenades lying around.”

“They had one.” Randall produced a snapshot of a World War II–era grenade sitting against a plain white backdrop. “We found it in a storage room upstairs, so that’s been accounted for.”

“Thank God for small favors,” Kat said.

“But,” the trooper continued, “we found something that
didn’t
belong in the museum.”

He retreated to a corner of the room, where a cardboard box sat on a folding chair. When he brought the box back to the table, Henry saw that it contained a single item—a hardcover book. The title was
Witchcraft in America
. The author was someone named Connor Hawthorne.

“Isn’t that the—”

“Guy we’re looking for?” Kat said. “Yes, it is. And he’s apparently not only a witch but a writer as well.”

“We found it on the second floor,” Randall said. “Under a bed in one of the rooms on display. Whoever it belonged to, they went out of their way to hide it.”

“It belonged to Constance,” Kat replied. “I guess she hid it after someone started snooping around her office.”

“But it’s just a book,” Henry said.

He took it out of the box and flipped it over. On the back was a photograph of an intense young man with shoulder-length blond hair and sharp features. It looked uncannily like the police sketch that had been passed out to the state troopers. Most of the front cover was taken up by an illustration of a woman about to be burned at the stake. The flames were up to her ankles, ready to consume the rest of her.

“I’ve seen that picture before,” Kat said. “Constance had a copy of it on her desk.”

A narrow ribbon of purple silk had been placed near the back of the book. Henry opened it to that spot, seeing several pages brightened with green highlighter. He set the book on the table and pressed it flat. Kat moved in quickly, practically squeezing herself between Henry and the table in order to scan the book. She nudged him with a sharp poke of her elbow, trying to force him to edge to the side. Instead, Henry put one of his arms around her shoulders, pulling her against him until they were both centered in front of the book. With his hand resting on Kat’s shoulder, they began to read.

*

Kat was so weary that she had trouble focusing on the page. She was fine when she was moving and talking. The adrenaline kept her going in that regard. But if she rested, even for a mere second, her exhaustion quickly bubbled to the surface, threatening to pull her under. Her mind got hazy and her eyes grew weak. Staring at the book, all she saw were blurry words running into each other until they formed unreadable streaks across the page.

She closed her eyes and slapped her cheeks. The light sting of the blows did the trick, and when she opened her eyes again, the first sentence on the page was crystal clear.

And chilling.

“Witches are everywhere,”
it read.
“They always have been and always will be. One could be living next door and you wouldn’t know it.”

Kat suspected Connor Hawthorne, a self-proclaimed witch himself, had meant the passage to be benign and reassuring.
You have nothing to fear,
he seemed to be saying.
We’re just like you.
Yet an ominous undercurrent lurked just beneath his words. There was something frightening about the prospect of having a witch for a neighbor. The fact that you might not even know it made it even more disturbing.

Yet Kat read on, half eager and half afraid to find out more.

While it’s true most witch trials during the late seventeenth century took place in Massachusetts, others occurred throughout the colonies at roughly the same time period. Many of these recorded incidents have been overshadowed by the infamous witch trials of Salem in 1692. Many more are lost to history. Then there are those that we know happened but have very little documentation about. The trial of Rebecca Bradford is one of them.

Kat inhaled sharply, enough for Henry to lift his heavy hand from her shoulder and say, “You okay?”

“I know that name. Constance had jotted it down at her desk.”

Only Kat had read it as a man’s first and last names. Turning the page of Connor Hawthorne’s book, she now understood that she had been badly mistaken.

The only mention of Rebecca Bradford I have found is located in the journal of William Daniel Paul, a judge who presided over several witch trials in the late seventeenth century. It was found in the attic of a home in Boston in 1964 and now resides in the archives of the Boston Public Library. In addition to offering great insight into the paranoia of the times, he goes into great detail about some of the cases he was involved in.