Marblehead, Massachusetts
Late June
1991
“
S
O WHERE’D YA WANNIT?” ASKED THE MAN, PLOPPING HIS TOOL CASE
onto the flagstones with a dull thump.
Connie smiled from where she stood in the front doorway. “Well, I don’t know, really. What’s usual?”
“Just the one?” he asked, lifting and then resettling his baseball cap on his head, affording Connie a fleet glimpse of shining scalp. “Front hall.”
“Sounds good,” she said, ushering him in. “You want some coffee or something?”
“I’d take a beah,” said the man.
Connie hesitated for a moment, but then shrugged.
Why not
, she thought.
It’s hot out, anyway
. “Just a sec,” she said to the man.
“Be stahtin’ outside,” he replied.
In the kitchen, Connie lifted open the antique wooden icebox and reached down into the slush inside. She was going through ice at an amazing
clip so far this summer. She paused, enjoying the cool breath of the melting ice on her moist face before closing the icebox again.
Ice’d last longer if you did that less often
, she told herself as she carried the beer out to the yard.
She found the man kneeling in the little vegetable patch near the front door, toolbox open. He had prised off a loose shingle and was uncoiling a length of wire.
“Ya had one heah before, turns out,” he told Connie as she placed the beer on the ground next to him. Arlo had appeared from under the tomato plants and was now sniffing at the soles of the man’s work boots. The dog quickly gathered all the information that he needed from this investigation and then returned to his spot in the shade, chin resting on his folded paws.
“Yeah?” she said, surprised. “What happened to it?”
“Got took out,” he said, working away with a small pair of pliers.
“Oh,” said Connie. She watched him work for a minute, thumbs hooked in her cutoff belt loops.
“Gonna be a while,” said the man without looking around.
“Oh! Sure,” said Connie, embarrassed. “Sorry.”
She made her way back into the house, being careful to leave the door unlocked, and then settled at the Chippendale desk in the sitting room to wait. Now that she thought about it, she hardly ever bothered to lock the door anymore. Granna’s house was so obscured by brush and overgrowth that she was even a little surprised the man had been able to find it. Connie smiled to herself. Wouldn’t Grace be astonished when Connie called her from the
house
.
Connie had been feeling confident since her lunch with Chilton. He was even more delighted with her possible primary source than she had anticipated.
“Of course, there are surviving examples of manuals for
finding
witches,” Chilton had said. “The
Malleus Maleficarum
from fifteenth-century Germany, even Cotton Mather’s 1692 treatise on the
Wonders of the Invisible World
.”
“Right,” Connie affirmed. “But so far my research indicates that there are no surviving colonial North American examples of any book or instructional
text for
practicing
witchcraft. We usually interpret this to mean that nobody was actually practicing it, right? So if Deliverance’s book is what I think it is, and if it has survived, it would be an amazing find. Its contents could change the way history looks at the development of medicine, of midwifery, of science….” Connie trailed off.
“To say nothing of changing our interpretation of the Salem panic. Those are quite a lot of ‘ifs,’ I’m afraid,” Chilton said. “But too tantalizing not to pursue.”
Two dishes of warm bread pudding appeared at their table, and as Chilton chewed he watched Connie thoughtfully. “Tell me, my girl,” he ventured. “You were planning to attend the Colonial Association conference this year, weren’t you?”
Connie nodded. “I think so. I’m not on any of the panels or anything, but I was going to go, just to hear the papers.” She dipped her fork into the soft pudding, prodding at a golden raisin with one of the tines.
“Always a good idea,” Chilton said. “Ground yourself in the current work in the field.” He paused, seeming to weigh something before continuing. “You know, I’m to give the keynote address this year,” he said lightly.
“Really?” she asked, surprised.
“Indeed. Just a general talk on the development of my research on the history of alchemical thought. Presenting some exciting new conclusions.” He paused, catching Connie’s eye when she looked up. “I may wish to introduce you there,” he finished, setting his fork aside with finality.
“But why?” she asked, puzzled.
Chilton chuckled. “We can discuss that in more detail later. Let us not get ahead of ourselves, my girl. Your only concern at this point is to find the book, and see if it is everything that you suspect. I trust you will keep me closely apprised of your progress.” As he spoke, Chilton had folded his hands into the temple shape that always indicated he was deep in thought.
As she left the Faculty Club that afternoon, Connie’s mind had been humming with excitement, veering between pleasure at Chilton’s approval and plans for the next stage of her research. She was so submerged in her
own thoughts that she collided with Thomas, her thesis student, as he approached her on the path by the undergraduate library.
“Ow!
Connie
,” Thomas whined, rubbing the toe that she had trod upon. She laughed.
“I’m sorry, Thomas!” she cried, grabbing at his skinny elbow to keep him from toppling over. “I’m fresh from a dissertation meeting with Chilton. I was just thinking a little too hard.”
They crossed Harvard Yard together, Thomas hopping at intervals to underscore to Connie the mortality of his injury as she chatted with him about his summer job reshelving books at the library.
“I can’t believe you haven’t called me,” Thomas said, sulking. “How am I going to get my grad school applications done without your help? I’m already starting to outline my personal statement, and it’s a total disaster.”
She sighed. “Oh, Thomas. You don’t want to go to grad school, do you? You could just graduate and get a nice job at a bank or something.”
Thomas scowled. “That’s what my mother said. Now you’re sounding like my mother.”
“Sorry. I guess I’m getting old. Anyway, I can’t call you. Granna’s house doesn’t have a phone.”
“It doesn’t have a
phone
?” Thomas repeated, incredulous.
“No electricity, either,” she affirmed. “What can I say? I’m being rustic this summer. And people will be lining up, I am sure, to buy a house with all those environmentally conscious, inconvenient, nonelectric appliances. You’ve probably never seen a nonelectric icebox, have you?”
“Why don’t you just get one installed?” Thomas suggested. “Rotary phones don’t take electricity.”
Connie stopped, looked at her student, and grinned.
“A
LL SET,” THE MAN CALLED THROUGH THE OPEN FRONT DOOR
. C
ONNIE
was still sifting through her notes on the desk, and the sound of his voice made her notice the darkness beginning to puddle in the corners of the sitting
room. She was always puzzled that people say that darkness falls. To her it seemed instead to rise, massing under trees and shrubs, pouring out from under furniture, only reaching the sky when the spaces near the ground were full. She rose, stretching and cracking her knuckles.
“This is great,” Connie said, passing her hand over the black rotary phone that now squatted on the tiny side table in the front entry.
“Most folks like a cordless now, ya know,” the man commented, lifting and settling his hat again.
“Yeah,” said Connie. “No plug.”
The man shrugged, betraying no apparent surprise that an inhabited house in a closely settled town at the end of the twentieth century could still be unelectrified.
“Bill’ll come in the mail,” he grunted, turning to make his way back down the flagstone path that led to the street.
“Thanks!” she called out after him.
“Need some lights out heah” was the vanishing response, and then Connie was alone.
T
HE TELEPHONE RANG FOUR TIMES BEFORE IT WAS PICKED UP WITH GREAT
commotion, and Grace’s voice said, “Hello?”
“Mom?” said Connie. She leaned in the doorway between the entry and the dining room, watching the shadows of evening collect in the bowls of the dead potted plants that hung motionless, like dried spiders, in the windows. She should really throw those away. Why hadn’t she gotten around to that yet?
“Connie, my darling! What a pleasure. I didn’t think I’d hear from you again so soon,” said Grace. For some reason, Connie imagined that Grace had been baking. She pictured her mother, hair still long, graying, standing with the telephone pressed to her cheek in the kitchen of her Santa Fe house. She imagined she saw Grace’s hands caked with flour, a splotch of it now spread across her telephone receiver.
“Fine. What are you making?” Connie asked, hazarding a guess.
“Samosas. But I can’t get the consistency right—the batter keeps pulling apart.”
“You should add more ghee.”
“I am, but that makes them so greasy!” Grace sighed, and Connie imagined her blowing aside a loose strand of hair. It would still be light outside in Santa Fe, and Connie pictured her mother’s kitchen sink, its windowsill crowded with fat, bristling cacti and hybrids of thyme. When she moved west, Grace’s plants had all taken on a prickly, dry quality.
Changing with the mandates of the earth,
Grace called it, whatever that was supposed to mean. Grace had complicated ideas about the relationship between weather and consciousness, for plants as well as for people. She liked to claim that electromagnetic fields caused by changing weather patterns could directly impact the auras of people, even changing their personalities or their abilities. Connie usually met this idea with patience, if not agreement. Grace had complicated ideas about most things, actually.
“I could do with a samosa right about now,” said Connie. Grace chuckled.
“So tell me, darling,” said her mother. “How is the house coming?”
“Slowly but surely,” Connie replied, twisting the stretchy telephone cord around one thumb. The digit flushed red, and Connie freed it. “I’ve…started making a few changes, I guess.”
“Putting in the telephone was an excellent idea,” her mother said, her voice traveling together with the sound of a wooden spoon stirring wet batter.
“Mom! How did you know?” Connie laughed.
“Where else would you be calling from at dinnertime? Mother used to have one, you know. Took it out sometime in the sixties. Too much hassle, she said. Used to worry me sick, that something might happen and she wouldn’t be able to reach anybody. There was no changing her mind, of course.”
“She must have been very particular,” said Connie.
“Oh, you have
no
idea,” said Grace, and for an instant Connie heard in her voice an echo of her mother’s teenage self. “How much longer before it’s ready to sell?”
“Ah.” Connie stalled. She had spent so much of her time on research that she had barely begun on the house. But if she was honest with herself, there was more to her reticence than that. Her eyes slid past the dead plant in its cracked porcelain China-export pot, traveling into the dim sitting room with its armchairs. The previous week she had scrubbed down their needlepoint upholstery with gentle wool detergent, and they now glowed a warm reddish brown, comfortable and clean. After dinner Connie planned to kindle a small fire and read there until she grew sleepy. She felt oddly protective of the little room, unwilling to disturb it. “Awhile yet.”
“
Connie
,” her mother began, voice once again that of a forty-seven-year-old woman.
“It was a real mess, Mom. It’s going to take longer than I thought,” Connie insisted.
Grace sighed. “Uh-huh. So tell me. If you haven’t been working on the house as we discussed, what have you been doing? How are those headaches you mentioned?” Connie heard the sound of a spoon being laid to the side and batter being rolled out on a chopping block. A bleep sounded as Grace’s chin dug into the keypad of her telephone.
“They’re fine,” Connie said, aware as she did so that while her daydreams had stayed vivid, she had not noticed the headaches afterward nearly as much. The shift had been gradual, almost imperceptible, but there it was.
“See? You didn’t need a doctor,” Grace interjected.
“Yeah,” Connie said, dismissive. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been doing dissertation research.” She attempted to imbue her voice with a mote of authority.
“Oh?” said Grace, losing interest.
“Remember that name I asked you about?” Connie said. “I did some background work on it, and I think it’s led me to a possible primary source for my dissertation.”
“A primary source? What sort of primary source?” asked Grace. Her voice carried a faint gloss of suspicion, but Connie pushed the thought away.
“It looks like Deliverance Dane might have actually owned some kind of instructional magic book! Isn’t that incredible?”
“Incredible,” Grace echoed, her voice flattening.
“It goes against everything historians have always said about the relationship between women and vernacular religion during the colonial period!” Connie exclaimed, voice rising.
“You were right,” her mother said over the whisper and squish of dough under her fingers. “I did need to add more ghee.”
“
Mom
,” said Connie.
“I’m listening,” said Grace.
“Now all I have to do is find the book. So far the probate records seem to be pretty much intact, so I have to follow the trail of the book as each owner dies. That assumes that each successive generation finds the book significant enough to mention in a will. But even if the book is probated together with several other books, I might still be able to trace its movement within the collection. Then, maybe, I’ll get lucky.”
“Oh, my darling, you don’t need some dusty old book to be lucky.” Grace sighed.
“Grace,” said Connie, sliding into a seated position in the doorway of the dining room. “This is an important find for me. It could be a real research coup. It could make my reputation. Why is it so hard for you to understand that this is important to me?”