25
Raquel performed her photography trick with the faded name scrawled inside the diary, adjusting various effects until the print darkened enough to read more of the letters.
Adams had gotten it right away. “That doesn’t make any sense. Even infant fatalities were recorded. There were plenty of sad couples where that wasn’t the exception but the norm.”
“Where do the ‘official’ genealogy records come from?” Theo wanted to know.
“So…” Theo was thoughtful. “This register obviously couldn’t be used, as it was sealed in crockery and tossed in a well. But the infants should’ve still been listed in family records—say, historic Bibles?”
“In theory,” Adams agreed.
Raquel wasn’t having any luck with Rita Louise Locke. She tried out Rita Louise Light.
“Let’s take it from the top,” Theo suggested. “Our poor skeleton, ostensibly the author of the ledger and this diary, was a midwife.”
Adams and Raquel nodded.
“So she’s documenting the births and deaths she attends in her professional ledger—major life events where she lives.”
More nods.
“Are these major life events also included in her diary? Because it sounds like the personal entries have more detail?”
Raquel glanced up. “Shit. That makes sense. Give me the dates again?”
She started flipping pages as Adams rattled off the entries in question.
Theo followed along over her shoulder. She could definitely find one paragraph per day.
And thankfully, the diary entries were longer, looser in construction compared to the cramped spacing of the ledger.
But the faded script still made them challenging to decipher.
“Okay…” she murmured at last. “I think I have a match for the first birth in question. And there is more information here. Savage, Joseph and Sarah, I’m guessing.
Sarah expressed much…something…and terror?
Pain in head. Not…rouse. Umm, it’s going to take more effort to figure these out, but yes, according to both the midwife’s personal diary and professional register, a baby was born that day.
Though again, no current genealogical databases include this information. ”
“Why was the ledger thrown in the well with her and not the diary?” Theo asked.
Raquel glanced up in surprise. She hadn’t even thought about that. And she honestly had no idea.
“The ledger appears to be a professional record,” Adams tried out. “Meaning its presence was well known? Versus a private diary…”
“I’ll buy that logic. Okay, so they—the villagers, a particular evil person?
—sealed the ledger in the crockery, along with…
” Theo couldn’t seem to mention the baby bones out loud.
“Then threw the crockery and the midwife into the well. To cover something up, personally? Or was it a societal statement?”
“You mean public punishment?” Adams frowned. “Drowning was a common ‘trial by ordeal’ for witchcraft. If the accused floated, she was obviously a witch and then retrieved to be burned at the stake. Or, she drowned, proving her innocence. Yeah, poor accused.”
“As a midwife, she wouldn’t be the first female in a position of power to be targeted.” Raquel glanced up. “But the ledger and the…remains…being tossed in the well as evidence of her guilt…I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“Maybe we need to search more boarded-up wells,” Theo murmured. He pursed his lips. “Five babies in five months, that’s what the midwife’s records are saying. All of whom died within twenty-four hours of birth. I know infant mortality rates were high, but that sounds…intense.”
“The kind of thing that might raise the ire of an entire village,” Adams agreed. “Hence, the female caretaker had to be in cahoots with the devil. Okay, so maybe that explains the young woman’s fate. But why eliminate records of the births? Seems like there’d be even more reason to document them.”
Raquel gave up on her computer altogether.
“The magnitude of what was done to this poor woman. Shoving her alive into a dark pit—because while we keep saying a well, it must’ve been mostly dry by then.
You wouldn’t contaminate drinking water with a corpse, let alone we know she climbed out of it enough to try to escape.
It feels to me like that kind of horrific act was more than just a punishment—it was a way to be totally done with her.
Out of sight, out of mind. And including the ledger, ensuring those five births would vanish with her… ”
“Like they wanted those infants erased as well?” Adams filled in softly.
“Why would you ever want that?” Theo asked.
“No mother would,” Raquel stated.
The men peered at her with troubled expressions.
“Maybe the entire village cast her into the well as a witch, but I’m telling you now, no woman would want all traces of her baby gone,” Raquel insisted.
“Unless,” Theo murmured.
“Unless what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the issue is, we don’t know enough about the infants. Or what happened leading up to the births.”
“Jesus,” Adams murmured.
None of them had anything to say after that.
Detective Adams took his leave. Theo walked him out, dog in tow. Raquel conducted several more historical record searches with various iterations of Ruth/Rita Locke/Light before giving up. She got plenty of hits, given the sheer repetition of names back in the day, but none felt right.
She returned to the crumbling notebook, carefully working her way through each page, immersing herself back into the rhythm and feel of colonial English, until she could make educated guesses at blurred or missing words.
So many perfectly mundane entries. Date, weather, location, perhaps a seasonal task such as candle-making, yarn spinning, et cetera.
Interspersed with brief accounts of attended births and deaths.
Even these paragraphs were minimalistic in tone.
The who, when, what, where of major life events, with occasional punctuation points of tragedy.
Raquel made it to the end, then returned to the beginning. Theo and Mr. Man cleared the cheese and cracker platter. Put together a light dinner. Plunked down a salad and glass of wine before her.
She frowned, squinted harder at the fraying diary pages in between bites of food. There was something here. A slight change in tone and pattern, but she’d be damned if she could get it. Maybe if she scanned each page, played around with the contrast. Something. Anything?
She’d just sat back with a sigh, rubbing at her temples, when Theo spoke up from the sofa.
“Raquel, honey.” There was a timber to his voice. “You need to see this.”
She found him with his feet up on the coffee table, dog splayed on the rug below.
Theo appeared to be watching something on his phone.
As she settled in beside him, he twisted the screen until she could make out a video from a local station, highlighting the “new” discovery at the “old” Dixon property, with words such as “horrifying,” “shocking,” and “disturbing” being tossed about with near reckless abandon.
Raquel was already rolling her eyes at the melodramatic coverage, when suddenly her own image appeared on the screen.
She recognized the clip immediately from earlier in the day—her and Detective Adams walking down Main Street.
But who? How? The wide-angle shot zoomed in closer and closer, until her face filled nearly the entire screen, capturing everything from the arch of her brows to the curve of her cheek to the small dark mole near the corner of her right eye.
She stared. Told herself it didn’t matter.
Shouldn’t matter. Not after all this time.
And this far away, right? Who paid attention to happenings in a remote little New Hampshire town?
Except, of course, there was nothing small about this story.
People everywhere were fascinated by crime.
Especially ones high on the horrifying, shocking, and disturbing scale.
She was acutely aware of Theo sitting quietly beside her, watching her intently.
“How bad?” he asked at last.
“I don’t…I don’t know.” At least she wasn’t denying this might be a problem. That was a concession of sorts, which he seemed to respect.
He took her hand, his thumb gently rubbing the inside of her wrist, where her pulse was beating frantically.
“How did you know? About the bones in the crockery, which really did look like a handful of debris. Not even Chief Grady recognized them for what they were. But you?”
The dog was sitting up now, his deep brown gaze ping-ponging between the two of them. A second later, he rested his pale head on the edge of the sofa, closest to Raquel’s knees. She reached down her free hand and patted him softly.
She knew what Theo was asking. She simply didn’t want to say the words.
“Forever and always,” he prodded softly.
“I am not the person I once was,” she managed at last.
He waited.
“I paid my dues,” she heard herself continue. “I…I served my time.”
A slight charge in the air. Theo, being Theo, always so attuned to subtext.
She stroked the dog’s ear, not making eye contact. Then: “Who I am now is real. This, us, we are real. Isn’t that enough?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
A brief flare of anger. “I wasn’t the monster. She was!”
Theo, still holding her hand.
Raquel blinked her eyes several times rapidly, while the dog pressed closer. She hated this sudden rush of emotion. The rage, the fear, but mostly the shame. Because sometimes even doing what you knew was right didn’t change it from being wrong.
And she was never as completely emotionally removed as she wanted to be. Let alone these days.
She might have been vibrating slightly. It was hard to tell. But Theo wrapped his arm around her shoulders, drawing her into the solid warmth of his body, resting her head upon his chest.
“Forever and always,” he repeated.
She closed her eyes. She listened to the strong, steady rhythm of his heartbeat and willed herself to believe, as much as she’d ever wanted to believe anything, that their life together was enough. That the woman she’d become was enough. That Theo’s love would definitely be enough.
But Raquel knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that faith was for fairy tales.
In the real world, you had to rely on yourself.
Even if that meant finally picking up an axe and getting the job done.