Chapter Seven #2
“Marta’s on the case!” Ellen announced as she sat back down at the kitchen table. “Monterey’s not large, they’ll find the dog, or it will find its way home. Now, tell me what else you’ve been up to.”
Harper made Ellen laugh when she told her about exploring the abandoned barracks with her students and getting caught red-handed by the MPs.
“Speaking of ruins and Delilah,” Ellen said. “Her ex, Benjamin Philips, has been pushing to develop a ‘seaside paradise’ on the former army base. I wonder if that’s one of his proposed developments.”
“Usually I’m all for restoring historic buildings, but these are too far gone and were pretty ugly to begin with—flat roofs and concrete blocks, totally 1960s-era utilitarian.”
Ellen then asked Harper about her classes, and Harper confided about the difficulty she’d been having getting her students to engage with history. This was a recurring topic for them; as a retired high school teacher, Ellen knew the struggle firsthand.
“Oh, I wanted to ask you,” Harper said. “Did Monterey ever have witch trials?”
“You mean like at Salem?”
“Something along those lines. When I was on the ghost tour, the guide told us that the Perles Mansion was built on ‘troubled ground’ that had been the site of the gallows where witches were hung. He claimed this was the source of the alleged haunting of the Perles Mansion.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Ellen said with a shake of her head. “Not in this area.”
“He probably made it up just to boost the drama of the evening,” said Harper. “Up to that point, we’d been looking at invisible footprints.”
“Invisible…?”
Harper nodded and they burst into laughter.
“Let me get us some crackers and cheese to go with this lovely wine,” Ellen said.
“You sit, I’ll get it.” Harper was familiar with Ellen’s cheerful kitchen, with its outdated pink linoleum counter, gleaming copper cookware on a shelf near the old-fashioned gas stove, bundles of drying herbs hanging from a rack, and two mason jars full of amber-colored sun tea on the windowsill.
She took a hunk of cheese out of the fridge and set a handful of flatbread crackers on a Spode plate in a basket weave pattern that Ellen had inherited from her mother.
Harper’s mind wandered back to her encounter with Sigrid, the self-proclaimed “kitchen witch” she had met at Delilah Mason’s gate.
What was now a proud declaration of self-expression and love of nature and ritual—calling oneself a “witch”—had, once upon a time, been cause to be tried, tortured, and executed.
There’s plenty of real drama in history, Harper thought as she set the plate on the table. No need to make it up.
“Did you know Monterey Jack cheese is originally from Monterey?” asked Ellen as she cut into the pale yellow hunk, this one studded with peppers.
“I never really thought about it, but that makes sense.”
“It originated here in the 1700s, with the Franciscan friars. Then a businessman named Jacks commercialized it, and I suppose the name stuck. This is a good one, from the Dillon Creamery, a local favorite.”
They both helped themselves and savored the mild nutty flavor emboldened by the chilies.
“Speaking of the Franciscans, I presume they would have been involved if there had been witchcraft accusations, but I can’t think of any,” Ellen said.
“The most interesting thing that’s happened around here was back in the ’90s, when some children found several skulls and femur bones scattered about. ”
Harper choked on her wine. “Excuse me?”
“At first the authorities thought it might be the work of a serial killer, but according to the forensic anthropologist the police called in, the bones were hundreds of years old. Turns out they were from a long-forgotten cemetery and had been unearthed over the years due to soil erosion. When they located the cemetery and examined the rest of the graves, they discovered a number of empty coffins.”
“The bones must have been washed away in a storm or something, like the ones the children found. Could it have been the result of a vampire scare? I was just reading up on those.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re right, that wouldn’t make sense,” Harper mused. “During typical vampire scares folks wanted to prevent the dead from rising by keeping the bodies in the coffins. Usually the skeletons are face down, or stabbed through the heart, or beheaded…But the bones were always in the coffins…”
Harper stopped herself when she spied the expression on Ellen’s face.
“Sorry. TMI. The point is that coffins discovered with the bodies missing were more likely to cause a vampire panic than be a response to one.”
“There were rumors about the Perles family, you know.”
“Of Perles Mansion fame?”
Ellen nodded. “Soren Perles was the only doctor for miles around, who at one point was highly respected. His sister, Isabel, was considered a wild child, and became famous for her raucous dinner parties attended by artists and writers and the like. And I suppose that for her time and station, she was a bit wild. But you know what they say about well-behaved women rarely making history.”
“I do indeed. So what were the rumors?”
“That the rest of the family might not have died of natural causes, if you catch my drift. And there are some odd parallels with Delilah and her brother, come to think about it,” Ellen mused, staring into the ruby red liquid in her glass, her cheeks rosy from the wine.
“People whispered that Soren and Isabel were involved in an incestuous affair.”
“Joel mentioned that on the tour. Was this rumor based on anything?”
“That’s hard to know, especially given the passage of time.
As I was saying, it doesn’t take much to start a rumor in a place like this.
After most of his family died, and Isabel became a spiritualist and then died the way she did…
” She shrugged. “Some suspect Soren Perles’s spirit still haunts the town. ”
“Why would he be haunting the town?”
“Who knows? I have to suppose that the motivations and workings of the great beyond are a bit different than ours.” Ellen tilted her head. “They say he was found hanging from the Witch Tree. Perhaps he’s still tormented.”
“Hauntings, missing body parts, incestuous siblings, and now someone buried alive,” Harper mused with a yawn. “Interesting little town you’ve got here.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
“As for now, I think I’d best get to bed. Another glass of this wine and I won’t be able to negotiate the stairs to my apartment. Next thing you know I’ll be the one in the cemetery.”
After making sure Ellen had taken her evening pills, Harper washed the wineglasses, put away the leftover cheese and crackers, and picked up the grocery list Ellen had prepared. She hugged the elderly woman, thanked her for the wine and conversation, and headed out.
Ellen was so earnest it was sometimes jarring, and she did not always “get” Harper’s snarky sense of humor. But she was smart and endearing and was Harper’s only local friend, really, other than Tariq.
It was kind of pathetic, now that she thought about it. At her birthday party the other day, the only attendees other than Ellen and Tariq were a few faculty acquaintances from Monterey College and a handful of Tariq’s many friends, whom she scarcely knew.
You’ve got to get yourself a life, Harp.
It was just that…life was a lot. As a younger woman, looking to the future, she had never factored in how very wearying life could be. How sick of everyone’s crap she would become, as Cate Blanchett had said. She felt like getting that emblazoned on her arm. Maybe she should get a tattoo…
Harper locked Ellen’s door behind her and paused on the front porch. Balancing on one foot as she pulled on her left boot, Harper had that feeling again: as though she were being watched. She peered into the darkness, searching for the dog. Or…someone.
The sidewalk appeared empty, as did the street.
All seemed normal: The evening air was lightly scented with woodsmoke and the brine off the bay. Neighbors’ windows glowed with the flickering blue of television screens. Crickets chirped. The sonorous notes of Ellen’s wind chimes reminded Harper of the ones at the Perles Mansion.
As she skirted the house and crossed the back lawn to the garage, Harper looked this way and that, checking behind her, but saw nothing beyond the stillness of the night-shrouded trees and the low fences separating Ellen’s lot from the neighbors’ bungalows.
Perhaps finding dead bodies, searching abandoned buildings, and talking about vampires had rattled her more than she realized. Or a surplus of wine was making her imagine things that go bump in the night.
Harper climbed the garage’s exterior wood stairs and, with relief, arrived at the second-story landing of her apartment. Unlocking her front door, she paused and turned to survey the garden from her perch.
A pair of eyes glowed in the light from the streetlamp.
Could it be the dog? More likely a raccoon, or an opossum, or some other harmless creature of the night.
Still, Harper felt compelled to call out to the darkness:
“Either talk to me, or leave me alone!”
After another moment, she ducked into her apartment and bolted the door.