27 Birdie #2
“My pleasure. See you around, Birdie. And welcome to the team!” He walks away, disappearing back through the pair of glass double doors.
The doors whirr shut, mechanically locking behind him.
He waves at me through the glass, his bottom half obscured by the remains of the old church wall as he heads back to the elevator.
Once he steps inside the elevator, I turn on my heel and head deeper into the archive in search of Howe.
Weaving through the archive stacks, I let my fingers brush along the spines of the books as I pass.
I love the feel and smell of old leather.
Wandering along the rows of shelves, I let myself get momentarily lost in a maze of history and knowledge.
“Birdie?” Howe calls from the sub-basement. “That you?”
“Yeah!” I duck down the end of the aisle and spy a metal spiral staircase set in the corner.
“Come on down!”
Clutching tighter to my travel coffee mug, I make my way over to the stairs and weave my way down. The bright, almost clinical lights of the main archive floor change to something older and warmer as I descend.
Winthrop University has a library space just like this.
The top three floors have all been modernized—white walls, boxy furniture, boring hotel art.
I prefer the humanities wing. The floor is stacked with old shelves.
Most of the books still have their original library checkout cards tucked in them, typed by typewriter.
The lighting is moodier, and the couches and chairs are all these old, faded things from the 1960s. It’s the perfect little study hole.
Reaching the bottom step, I glance around with a grimace.
Okay, no. This place is just a hole.
The room is less than half the size of the upstairs floorplan.
Rich was right, this isn’t a functioning space.
It’s a storage room. No, it’s a cellar. A dungeon where treasured books and papers go to rot.
There’s a strong smell of mildew in the air.
There are a few shelves here by the stairs, stacked haphazardly with a mix of books and journals.
But most of the rest of the space is taken up by teetering towers of old file boxes.
I step off the bottom stair, peering around. Only a few fluorescent tubes light the space, leaving shadowy dark corners. The tube right above my head flickers faintly.
“Ezra?” The fine hairs on the back of my neck rise as I take another step deeper into the room. “Professor Howe? Are you down here?” Stepping over to the left, I peek between two of the shelves and—
“Behind you.”
I shriek, all but flinging my coffee at him as I spin around.
“Whoa—” Howe raises both hands, backing up a step.
“I come in peace, I swear.” His boyish face is bright and disarming as he laughs.
He’s dressed casually in a pair of slouchy jeans and a T-shirt.
His round, wire-framed glasses and that flop of blonde hair still give major Milo Thatch vibes. “Didn’t mean to scare you.”
I press my free hand to my chest, trying to keep my racing heart from bursting through my skin. “It’s fine. I’ve just been a bit jumpy recently.”
He glances around with a grimace. “Yeah, this place is a little creepy. At some point, I hope to raise enough money to make it as flashy as the archive upstairs. Did Rich show you the old church foundations? Pretty cool, huh?”
“Yeah. He said it dates back to the 1630s?”
“Yes—1634, if we want to be exact. And this here is part of the original cellar of the church.” He gestures around at the old stonework. “Somewhere upstairs we’ve got the record of the first baptism. Poor kid’s name was a mouthful: Search-the-Scriptures Elias Pratt.”
“Oh, gosh.”
He chuckles. “Yeah, Puritan names got a little wackadoodle.”
“What do you think his friends called him? Search?”
“Hmm. Maybe Scrippy?”
We both laugh and I relax a little, glancing around. “Well, so what all’s down here?”
“A little bit of everything. Lucky for us, Burr Islanders have always been prolific hoarders. They keep everything—property deeds of sale, birth and death records, council meeting minutes. Perhaps unlucky for us because it means we have to sort through it all.”
I fight my frown as I breathe in the stench of this mildewy cellar. “Is that what you want me doing this summer? Sifting through all these boxes and cataloging what I find?”
He waves a hand dismissively. “Heck no. I wouldn’t waste your talents on a simple digitizing project. I’ll have a few of my undergrads handle it for their internship credit.”
“Then what do you need from me? How can I help?”
He sighs, tucking his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Birdie, what I need most right now is a good procurer.”
I halt my coffee mug halfway to my lips. “Can I ask what that is?”
He flashes me that boyish grin again. “A procurer is one who procures things.”
I mirror his smile. “An answer that tells me nothing.”
“What do you know about the project I’m running up at Beale Pointe?”
“Homewood?”
“Yeah.”
I shrug. “A little.”
His lips purse. “Oh, I doubt that. I looked you up last night, you know. Saw your impressive list of accomplishments. So early into your program too. That’s what Regina called you in her email, begging me to take you on. Impressive, she said. So? Impress me.”
I take a deep breath, holding his gaze. “All right . . . I know you’ve been looking for Homewood’s location for ages.
I also know you only found it by luck with that storm in the spring.
And I know you think it’s the site of the island’s first colonial settlement, founded by a group of women tried and killed as witches.
Mathilde Blake, Charity Ames, Sybil Hastings, Alice Dent, Be-Good Prescott .
. . the islanders call them the First Five.
If you can prove how they died, I know you’ll have discovered the site of the earliest known witch killings in America.
Such a discovery would be quite the gold star to add to your professional resumé. ”
He beams at me. “You clearly did your homework.”
“I like to be prepared.”
“Well, the women were technically never tried by anything but the court of public opinion. They were hunted down by an angry mob, tracked to this very church, in fact. They hid inside this cellar, right where we’re standing now.”
Goosebumps shiver down my arms as I glance around at the old, mildewy stonework. “They trapped them down here?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“What happened?” I don’t even realize that I’ve dropped my voice to a whisper.
His expression turns solemn. “They set the church on fire, Birdie. Burned it down with the women inside.”
The ominous feeling I got as I came down the stairs now makes way more sense. This is hallowed ground, but not in the way the Church implies. Five innocent women met their end right where I stand. “What does all this have to do with Homewood? What are you really looking for up there?”
He smiles, a glint of mischief in his eyes. “Come with me.”