Bones of a Witch (3 page)

The first thing he did was turn on the TV set.
He always does that to shut me out. I asked him politely to turn it
down, and what did he do? He turned it up louder. Then he had the
nerve to complain when I grabbed the remote and turned the set
off.

“What the hell is your problem?” he said, like
I’m the one with the problem.

“I’m just thinking it might be nice if you
started practicing some witchcraft,” I said. “That’s all.” But then
he took out a witch’s stone that he had custom made from some
street vendor downtown and he pushed it in my face.

“Look here. What do you think of
this?”

“That’s a witch’s stone,” I said. “It’s no
wonder I can’t do magic in the house.” To which he laughed and told
me he doesn’t get it. What’s to get? Is it me?

Anyway, he turned the TV back on to tune me out
again and I happen to notice this story on the news about this
woman they hanged in the township of New Castle back in 1692. It
turns out the old gal is a distant aunt of mine. Go figure,
huh?

Right away, I picked up the phone and called
City Hall. After getting the proverbial run-around for twenty
minutes, someone finally put me in touch with the Deputy Mayor,
whose nose is so far up the mayor’s ass that the man can’t breathe
unless His Honor passes wind and flubs his butt cheeks into the
breeze.

“Tomorrow,” I tell him. “I’ll be downtown first
thing in the morning to claim my aunt’s bones for a decent burial,
and I expect an apology from the city for getting her hanged and
then misplacing her for the last three hundred and eighteen
years.”

“Of course, you realize we’re going to need
proof,” the little weasel starts in, giving me some shit about
following procedures and protocol before releasing her remains.
It’s all I can do at this point to keep from going straight down
there and opening up a can of whoop ass on him.

“I’ll have your proof,” I told him. “You just
worry about having my aunt packed up nicely for a fitting
burial.”

I hung up feeling proud of myself, though I
must say that once the high tension subsided, an unusually strong
sense of loss and remorse struck me. Tony, who is often more
sensitive than I give him credit for, picked up on it right away.
He came to me and folded his arms around me like a warm blanket. I
think he thought I was going to cry. Right, like I’d ever let him
see me do that.

Harvey Goodman, Deputy Mayor of New Castle,
Massachusetts:

It was the middle of the workweek, as I
recall. I had just gotten to my office and settled in with a
newspaper when Jenny, my office girl, buzzed me to let me know that
a Ms. Lilith Adams was waiting out in the lobby to see
me.

“Does she have an appointment?” I
asked.

Outside my door, I heard a woman pronounce
loudly, “APPOINTMENT? I’ll show him a fuck’n`
appointment!”

Two seconds later my door blew open, which
seemed strange, as I’m sure I had locked it, a habit I had formed
early in my political career. You might be surprised to know that
when you work for the people, many of them believe they are
entitled some reasonable access to you. It’s a phenomenon I have
never understood.

When the door blew, I sprang to my feet, jolted
by the sudden intrusion, expecting to find some behemoth woman
toting a baseball bat and looking to avenge the injustice caused
when the city condemned her home day-care business due to varmint
infestation. Instead, what I found was this hot little pistol with
jet black hair, blue denim curves that could charm a snake, and
eyes of fire sizzling like coals on autumn ice. I didn’t know
whether to run, hide or flick my wallet at her and beg for
mercy.

“What is the meaning of this?” I said, sounding
as authoritative as one could with his balls fully retracted into
his body cavity. She marched up to my desk, sweeping the newspaper
onto the floor so that she could rest her hands upon it, palms
flat, her breasts leaning over my pencil cup with cleavage I dared
not look down, but could not ignore.

“Where is my aunt?” She said, though admittedly
I really didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Your aunt? Am I supposed to have
her?”

“You better. You dug her up yesterday. Don’t
tell me you lost her again.”

“Oh, yes, wait a minute, Lilith Adams. We
talked on the phone last night.”

“I talked. You better have
listened.”

“Please.” I pointed to the seat opposite my
desk. “Won’t you sit, Ms. Adams? I’m sure we can talk this out
rationally.”

“I’m not sitting down,” she said, though she
did stand up straight and fold her arms at her chest, relieving me
of a temptation I would surely have regretted, had my eyes gone
down that slippery slope. “And as far as I’m concerned….” She
reached down for my nameplate, picked it up, read it and slapped it
back down. “Harvey, there is nothing to talk out, rationally or
otherwise. You have the bones of my aunt and I’m here to claim
them.”

I went ahead and sat down in my chair, hoping
she would also take my cue and sit, but she seemed more than
content on her feet. “Ms. Adams,” I began, “as I mentioned on the
phone last night there are certain protocols and regulations to
matters of this sort, not the least of which have to do with right
of ownership. And then there’s the historical aspect of the case.
As you might imagine, the townspeople are going to feel a special
kinship for this woman. After all, she is one of the earliest
settlers to have—”

“Been hanged, Mister Goodman? Is that what you
were going to say?”

“No, not at all. What I was going to
sa—”

“Frankly, Harvey, I don’t give a
rat’s ass what you were going to say. And I take offence in your
assertions that the townspeople feel shit. Their ancestors hanged
my aunt and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to let them have the
smallest scrap of her bones to kin up to for historical sake. And
as for
ownership
….” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small
round medallion and slapped it down on the desk. It appeared to be
made of gold, and encrusted in tiny stones of jade and emeralds.
Embossed on the front was this face, an evil-looking creature with
ruby eyes and crescent horns. To look at it gave me the willies,
and I almost found myself making a sign of the cross to ward off
the spirits that I just knew came with the thing. “This,” she said,
“should prove my right of ownership.”

I dared to pick up the medallion. It felt
heavy, and I was reasonably sure from the vibes I got from it that
spirits of millennia had known the places it had been. I flipped it
over and read the inscription on the back.

In time ye pass this one of
eight

as thou doth hang in morn of
late

earth and ashes be thy
fate

till beckoned home to Bishop’s
Gate

I looked up at Ms. Adams. She seemed taller to
me now, and if I could have found the strength to stand and look
over the desk, I feared I might find her floating off the floor by
several inches or more.

“W…what is this?” I asked her.

“That,” she said, “is a key, and as the
inscription denotes, it’s one of eight.”

“A key to what?”

She scoffed as though I should know. “Why, to
Bishop’s Gate, of course. Didn’t you just read that?”

“Yes, but what does it mean?”

She sighed, and I swear I saw her float back
down to the floor. “Ursula Bishop is a distant aunt of mine and
Bridget Bishop’s sister.”

I shook my head. “And Bridget is….”

“Bridget Bishop was the first
woman tried in Salem Massachusetts for witchcraft. They hanged her,
Mister Goodman, along with eighteen others in the spring and summer
of 1692. And though Salem is mostly remembered for that
exceptionally dark period in its history, our own quaint town of
New Castle was just as culpable of similar atrocities. On July
17
^th
,
1692, eight days after they hanged Bridget Bishop in Salem, one of
your noble town magistrates learned that Ursula Bishop of New
Castle and Bridget Bishop of Salem were sisters. Naturally, the
rest of the townspeople saw that relation as a covenant with the
devil and so they put her on trial, too. A few false witnesses came
forward, claiming the stupidest things, like how their butter had
turned after she visited them, and how someone’s pig had miscarried
after she chased it out of her flower garden. The kicker came when
the preacher’s nine-year-old daughter claimed Ursula’s specter
pinched her bottom and tried to get her to put her mark in the
devil’s book. They hanged her from the livery stable’s sky winch
that day—Ursula, not the kid.”

I fell back in my chair, exhaling a breath that
I hadn’t even realized I was holding. “That’s awful, Ms. Adams. I
do feel your pain.”

She leaned over my pencils again, her hands
splayed flat upon my desktop. “Really, Harvey? Do you really feel
my pain?”

“I do, yes. But I’m not sure what I can do for
you. As I said, there are certain protocols for such
things.”

“Protocol?”

“Yes.”

“And why is that, Harv? How the hell do you
have protocols for such things? You dig up three-hundred-year-old
bones often, do you?”

I squirmed a bit in my seat. “Well, no, we
don’t often find bones like this; nonetheless, there is still the
matter of kinship. How do you propose to prove your relations to
this woman, Ursula Bishop?”

She picked up the medallion, waved it in my
face and slammed it back down on the desk. “This, Mister Goodman.
This gate key is one of eight that has been in the Bishop family
since landing at Plymouth Rock. You will notice it has a ring of
stones around the embossed image of Incubus: five emeralds and
three diamonds. My great, great grandmother, Victoria Bishop was
born third of eight girls into the family; as denoted by the three
diamonds. Bridget Bishop was first born and Ursula was second. If
you haven’t already found it, you will.”

Again I shook my head. “Found what?”

“The second gate key. Come on, Harv, get with
the program. Ursula had no children of her own to pass the key down
to. There is no doubt in my mind that if you look among the bones
you will find a gate key just like this one, only it will have six
emeralds and two diamonds. That is all the proof you need to my
kinship with Ursula Bishop. Now, I am prepared to go straight to
the press with my proof, and my story. Believe me. It won’t take a
Pulitzer Prize investigative reporter to confirm the shameless
details surrounding the lynching of my dear old aunt. When that
happens, your peaceful township here will look like a three-ring
media circus that will forever blemish the good name of New Castle.
Is that what you want?”

I must admit the woman had me over a barrel. I
hadn’t heard if a medallion had been found with the bones, but the
coroner’s office had only just gotten to the site that morning to
verify that the bones were in fact of early American ancestry, and
not from a more recent death. I stood up and offered Ms. Adams my
hand. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If we find a medallion such as
the one you have presented here, one with two diamonds and six
emeralds, and providing the bones are cleared for release by the
coroner, and NCPD has no objections, then, Ms. Adams, I will assign
primary custody of the remains to you. Fair enough?”

I watched her posture soften by degrees. She
unfolded her arms and shook my hand. “Thank you Mister Goodman,”
she said. “I knew you looked like a reasonable man.”

“All right, then. If you would get with Jenny
on your way out and let her know which funeral home you would like
your aunt’s remains sent to, she’ll be—”

“Funeral home?” She stiffened up again and
crowded her brows in an angry stir. “Why would I want them sent to
a funeral home?”

I looked at her somewhat baffled. “Well, of
course we can’t just let you have a complete set of human bones
to—”

“Harvey. I don’t think you understand.” She
anchored her hands on her hips and leaned forward, ascending on a
cushion of air till our eyes met even. I thought that was bizarre
enough, until I realized she had not mysteriously levitated off the
floor to meet my eyes; instead she had mysteriously reduced me in
size to meet hers. Where only a minute before I was a four-hundred
pound, six-foot-six man of imposing stature, I now weighed merely a
shadow of that, was thirty inches tall and standing on top of my
desk.

“You will have her bones bagged, boxed or
bundled in twine,” she sneered. “I don’t care how you do it, but
get her ready for me to pick her up in the morning. You
understand?”

I told her I did, in a squeaky helium sounding
voice that matched my new pint-sized body. She turned and headed
for the door, stopping at the threshold to offer me one more piece
of advice. “Oh, and Harvey, don’t forget the medallion.”

I smiled and waved, and the moment she left I
hit the buzzer on the phone with my foot, calling Jenny into the
office. I hopped down onto my chair and then to the floor. I
expected Jenny would probably scream when she saw me, maybe even
have the presence of mind to run and call security before the
witch-n-boots made it out of the building. But the strangest thing
happened then. Jenny came into the office and asked if I was all
right. I think I said something like, “Do I look all right to
you?”