The Fifth Petal Read online

  Unless the neighbors had a legitimate complaint, the police did little to discourage the fright tours or anything that made a dollar for the people who relied on Halloween to make a living. But this wasn’t public property, it was private, and the manager of Walgreens as well as the neighbors up the hill resented the invasion of tourists. Especially lately, as the site of 1989’s still-unsolved murders had become Salem’s most popular tour.

  He could see the candles from here. He recognized the voice of a local talent, someone they’d nicknamed Actor Bob, who’d made enough money with a voice-over commercial selling burials at sea to buy himself the old hearse and outfit it with cushy cutaway coffin seats lined with satin. Tonight, Actor Bob’s baritone was far less comforting than his oceanic funereal voice. Tonight his voice was raspy, haunted.

  “And now we come to Proctor’s Ledge. Though some will tell you otherwise, many believe this place, not Gallows Hill, is where Salem executed nineteen accused witches back in 1692. This is also the place where, back on Halloween in 1989, three beautiful young women were brutally murdered: Olivia Cahill, Cheryl Cassella, and Susan Symms, whose ghostly white hair and skin were cut from her body to be used for some kind of Satanic ritual.”

  The crowd murmured, shocked.

  Rafferty had heard Actor Bob lead the tour on several occasions. He always played to the crowd, changing and embellishing the story for effect, but this last part had been added recently—and embellished beyond belief.

  “Remember their names. And remember the nickname the townspeople gave them. These young women were so beautiful and so bewitching, everyone called them the Goddesses.”

  More murmurs from the crowd.

  “Neighbors on Boston Street and along the North River could hear their screams that night, but no one called for help until the next morning. It was as if a spell had been cast across the entire city of Salem, and no one could break it. For what the girls were doing that Halloween had been forbidden, way back in 1692. They were trying to consecrate the mass grave of their ancestors, five of the women who had been executed during that dark time—for signing the devil’s book.”

  Bob paused again.

  “The ritual the Goddesses were performing that Halloween night in 1989 had been against Puritan law in 1692. To consecrate the ground where one of the Salem witches was buried was once an offense punishable by death. Which, ironically, is exactly what happened to those beautiful young women in 1989. Someone, or something, decided to punish them.

  “Strangely, the bodies of all those executed in 1692 had disappeared shortly after the hangings, never to be found again. This is one of Salem’s greatest mysteries. But the bodies of the Goddesses were left for all to see. Their throats were slashed, their corpses pushed into the same mass grave where their ancestors had once been buried.”

  Another lie, Rafferty thought. The bodies of the Goddesses had never been put on display. Where did Bob come up with this nonsense?

  “There were only two survivors that night in 1989, a middle-aged woman and a young girl. The woman was found in Broad Street Cemetery, covered with the blood of the victims, ranting about the unearthly creature who, she claimed, had killed the girls. Most think the woman was the guilty one. A once-respected historian and scholar, she lost her mind that night and has never recovered. To this day, you can see her wandering the streets of Salem, predicting the death of everyone she meets. She has never been charged. No one could ever prove who the guilty party really was. Some think it was the crazy woman. Others believe the killer is a far more sinister creature, a screaming spirit of ancient powers who returns every Halloween to claim new victims.”

  On cue, a high-pitched scream pierced the air just behind Rafferty.

  The group gasped.

  Rafferty spun around in time to see Actor Bob’s accomplice run from the woods. “You’d better run,” Rafferty said under his breath. He pushed through the brambles, swearing as a branch snapped back, slapping him on the side of his face.

  “What about the little girl?” one of the tourists asked. “What happened to her?”

  “No one knows,” Bob replied, pausing once more for effect. “The little girl disappeared shortly after the murders. No one has seen or heard from her since.”

  At the sound of Rafferty’s uncontrolled groan, the now terrified tourists reeled around. Even Actor Bob held his breath until he spotted Rafferty coming through the brambles.

  “Are we just about done?” Rafferty asked. “Or is there more to this ridiculous story you’re trying to sell these poor people? Bob, you know you’re not allowed to do this here.”

  Rafferty hated that the still-unsolved case had become fodder for fright tours and tourist dollars, taking on mythical and paranormal proportions and embellished with exaggerated details that simply weren’t true. The murders had taken place years before he arrived in Salem, but, to Rafferty’s mind, the lack of closure was a stain on the police department that he now ran.

  Rafferty escorted the tourists back to the hearse, then led the car out of the parking lot and onto Boston Street, turning left at the intersection and continuing downtown to the far end of Essex Street, which was party central.

  As always, the pedestrian-only walkway was full of revelers: pirates, sexy witches, monsters, and zombies. Lots of zombies. The undead outnumbered the pirates and witches about ten to one. From the middle of the crowd, he could hear the amplified voices of the evangelists preaching fire and brimstone to the revelers, damning their souls to Hell unless they repented and stopped partying. They had added drums this year and cymbals that clanged each time a preacher mentioned Hell. The partiers were laughing and applauding. It didn’t seem like there would be any confrontations between the groups tonight.

  At a gathering on the corner, Rafferty saw a family wearing homemade costumes that featured bloody stumps where their limbs should have been. They were pulling a little red wagon full of body parts. He watched another man who stood on the sidelines dressed as an oven, complete with burners that turned off and on. A very convincing set of duct-taped Siamese twin dogs ran in front of his cruiser, nipping at each other’s faces, frustrated by their unnatural confinement. The usuals were present and accounted for, too, the Frankensteins and the mummies posing for photos at their regular posts by the Peabody Essex Museum, out-of-touch vampires still sporting sparkling glitter in homage to Twilight. They’ll be zombies next year, Rafferty thought. Vampires had been passé in Salem for quite a while now.

  He felt sorry for some of the store owners, the ones who paid rent for shops no one could get to through these crowds. It happened every year. Dozens of fortune-tellers set up their booths on Essex Street right in front of the year-round shops that were vying for the same customers. The competition between the resident and visiting psychics had been a big problem a few years back. As a result, Salem now licensed its psychics before allowing them to set up their temporary booths in October.

  “How the hell do you license a psychic?” Rafferty had asked when he’d heard about the plan. “I mean, do you have them do a reading and then just wait a few months to see if any of their predictions come true?”

  “We’ll follow San Francisco’s lead,” the town clerk had told him. “We’re going to use their psychic licensing standards.”

  “Of course we are.” Rafferty had laughed, relieved he didn’t have to figure out how to do something so ridiculous. It turned out that all they had to do was check criminal backgrounds before granting licenses. Anyone without a past could now read the future.

  From Essex Street, Rafferty drove over to Pickering Wharf. Traffic was bumper to bumper. Some partiers were heading out of the city before the fireworks at the end of the evening, but many were still trying to get in. He was happy to see that the group down by the harbor was fairly docile. He rolled down his window to speak to a patrolman who’d come up from Jamaica Plain.

  “Just stick around long enough for the traffic to die down, then either head home or over to the pa
rty at the Hawthorne. Best Halloween party in town.”

  “Will do, thanks.”

  The Hawthorne Hotel hosted the famous Witches Ball annually, a few nights before Halloween. Tonight would be their more traditional costume party, with prizes given for the best creations; a few years back, Rafferty and his wife, Towner, had been judges.

  He parked his car by Bunghole Liquors and walked over to the wharf.

  Ann Chase was locking up her Shop of Shadows early tonight.

  Six feet tall with thick red hair free-falling halfway down her back, and a “grey witch” by her own admission, Ann practiced neither white nor black magic but something in between. Tonight, she was wearing her traditional black witch’s robe. It moved with her stride like a flock of blackbirds, making her look even more magical than usual, if that was possible.

  People claimed Ann had a magnetic charge that defied normal boundaries. Depending on your own polarity, you generally found yourself standing either too close to or too far away from Ann Chase. Rafferty intentionally placed himself into the latter category—as much as he wished it weren’t true, their history meant he kept her at arm’s length whenever possible.

  Ann had once explained to him why it was her choice to practice grey magic instead of the more common “white magic” that most Salem witches were into. A black magic witch—the bad, menacing kind you saw on television or in The Wizard of Oz—was an unnuanced caricature no self-respecting Salem witch would embrace. Besides, any witch worth her salt knew that every “black” spell you performed came back to you threefold.

  “So why don’t you stick with the love potions and lottery ticket enhancers that most witches sell around here?” he’d asked.

  “The world is too messed up to be a bliss ninny, Rafferty. Sometimes you need to fight back. You of all people should know that.”

  Ann normally played the good witch, selling everything from herbal remedies to lace. But sometimes, when she got bored with the tourists, she liked to scare them. Especially on Halloween.

  “Had enough of the tourists, have you?” Rafferty laughed.

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “Mickey tells me you started a rumor that there’s some weird energy out there tonight.” His tone was dismissive. He looked at the wharf again. Nothing seemed amiss. People were now watching the fireworks exploding over the harbor, illuminating the docked replica of the Friendship. Looking at the great sailing ship, he imagined himself—for an instant—back in the early 1800s, when hundreds of the huge vessels still sailed from Salem, once the richest port in the New World.

  “You doubt me, do you?” Ann’s expression was one of amusement.

  “Wouldn’t dare.” He laughed again, in spite of himself.

  “It’s the blood moon,” she insisted, “and the eclipses.” She gestured to the sky. The clouds had lifted, and now the waxing quarter-moon shone with no remaining trace of red. The lunar eclipse a few weeks ago had occurred during the day and wasn’t visible from the East Coast, but that night, the full “blood moon” had been the color of rust.

  Rafferty knew the lore. His Irish American grandmother had called it a hunter’s moon, but the Pagans had coined this more ominous phrase. It was simply October’s full moon. “The blood moon rose a couple of weeks ago,” Rafferty said. “So I doubt that’s the culprit.”

  “It’s the tetrad, Rafferty.” Ann sighed as if explaining to a child. “Four lunar eclipses. This weird energy you don’t believe in isn’t going to end until September of next year.”

  As if to prove Ann right, a wind suddenly gusted around them, creating a screeching sound that would fit right in at the haunted houses on Derby Street. It stopped as quickly as it had started.

  “You doing parlor tricks again?” Rafferty asked.

  “Hey, I didn’t do that. That one came from the other side.”

  More Pagan lore. Halloween and its Pagan predecessor, Samhain, were the time of year when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was supposed to be at its thinnest. The things Rafferty had learned since moving here! He didn’t buy any of it, of course. “You think it’s some kind of warning?”

  “I think it’s more like a preamble.” She stared at him as she spoke. She was serious.

  Despite his skepticism, Rafferty shivered.

  The fireworks had ended, and the witches were gone. Rose Whelan settled her cart under the only oak left standing at the top of Gallows Hill, not far from the pavilion, with its caving roof and urine stench. The banshee music was in her ears tonight, and death was everywhere. Each fall, the leaves looked exhausted before they began to reveal the true colors that lay beneath their green masks. Every year, as they felt fall’s inescapable death pull, they turned the reds and oranges and yellows that drew tourists to New England. The maples, whose leaves were always the first to turn, were naked now, their webbed branches sweeping the dark sky like witches’ brooms. Only the oaks still held their scarlet flames.

  Rose was exhausted, too. She greeted the tree as she sat down under it. Then she spoke to the pigeons; she was simply going to join them for the one night, she explained. Soon, she was drifting off, moving in and out of consciousness, dreaming a recurring nightmare from her stay at the state hospital. In it, the witches’ hanging tree was chopped down, and then its massive trunk was floated along the North River toward open ocean, like a Viking ship carrying the souls of the dead to Valhalla. The dream woke her up, as it did every time she had it. Though she’d been dozing for only a short while, it took her a moment to get her bearings. It was the cooing of the pigeons that reminded her: Gallows Hill, a misleadingly named park that had nothing to do with what really happened here.

  “If it weren’t for me,” Rose told the birds, “historians would still claim Salem built a gallows to execute them. On this very spot.” She shook her head. “You wouldn’t be living here if they had. You wouldn’t build your nests where any such thing had happened, would you? Of course not.”

  The hanging spot, on Proctor’s Ledge, sat unmarked, abandoned, and overgrown next to the Walgreens parking lot just below. The hanging tree, on which the condemned had been executed, had vanished long ago, and even the crevasse that had served as their mass grave was barely visible now, but Rose could still feel it there, unsanctified and cursing the whole area with bad luck. The Great Salem Fire had started right across the street in 1914, destroying hundreds of houses and leaving half the population homeless. To this day, there was crime, violence, and a darkness the neighborhood couldn’t shake. The only way to stop it was to finish the blessing they had started that night on Proctor’s Ledge, the night her girls were murdered.

  Rose had been wrong that night, taking the girls up there. Not because the place didn’t need to be consecrated, but because the remains of the executed from 1692 were no longer there. Shortly after the hysteria ended, the bodies had begun to disappear from the crevasse into which they had been thrown. Two of the bodies had been taken by their families and buried properly, but the remains of the others executed that dark year had simply vanished. What in the world had happened to them?

  “Find the hanging tree, and you will solve the mystery,” the oak trees had told Rose over and over, and she had come to believe them. “Find the tree and finish the blessing. For it is not just the wrongly executed who need God’s mercy, but the tree itself for the part it was forced to play.”

  Rose had listened carefully when the trees began to speak. The oaks had saved her that horrible night in 1989, and she owed them a debt of gratitude. Finding the hanging tree had become Rose’s sole purpose in life.

  The birds appeared unimpressed, and Rose closed her eyes again, sighing. “There was a hanging tree,” she mumbled, her speech slowing as she grew sleepier. “That is true. Down there.” She pointed toward Proctor’s Ledge. Rose hadn’t been back to the spot since that night. This was as close as she dared get.

  “The hanging tree disappeared…everything disappeared. The tree, the remains of
the nineteen people they executed as witches, and even the young women I used to know.” Rose began to doze. “You’ll disappear one day, too,” she murmured to the birds, her voice slowing even more. “You don’t know that, but it’s true. Everything disappears. The banshee takes them all…” Her head dropped to her chest, and she became silent.

  “Hey, grandma, the witches all went home.”

  Rose’s eyes snapped open. There were three boys standing too close in front of her. The one who’d spoken couldn’t be more than fifteen. Low-riding baggy jeans and heavy boots made him look younger than the OG tattoo on his arm.

  “I’m not a witch.”

  He moved even closer, smirking, his blue eyes in stark contrast to the dark look he focused on Rose. “I know exactly who you are. And I know what you did.”

  “Keep your distance from me,” Rose warned.

  “Good idea,” he said, fanning his face. “You got a real stink there, grandma. When’s the last time you took a shower?”

  “Go home,” the second kid said, shoving her.

  “She doesn’t have a home, do you, grandma?” OG laughed.

  “Keep your hands off me,” Rose said, pressing her back against the tree, hearing her pulse in her ears. “I’m not afraid of you.”

  “You should be,” the second kid said, laughing.

  “You’re the one who should be afraid,” Rose countered.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?” the second kid taunted. “You planning to kill me the same way you killed the rest of them? By screaming?”

  “Screaming?” OG started to laugh. “She didn’t kill them by screaming. That’s just what she told the cops. She slashed their throats.”