CHAPTER TEN
MASSACHUSETTS, PRESENT DAY
Nobody cared about the dead after the living they’d belonged to were gone.
When I had been a kid, I’d think about it sometimes while lying in bed. That, once Luke and I were also gone from this world, nobody would care about our parents anymore, as if they’d never existed. Even if he and I were lucky enough to have kids of our own, those children would never know their grandparents, and it was hard to truly care about people you’d never even met. It was hard to ever call them truly yours when your memories of them were made up of nothing but stories.
It was something that had drawn me to Salem. Because while people might not have cared much about the ordinary dead, they undoubtedly cared about those with profound history, and Salem was certainly full of that.
Hell, people from all over the world flocked to this city to remember and pay their respects to those who had been wrongfully persecuted and killed hundreds of years ago. Maybe they, too, felt misunderstood for simply being who they were. Maybe they, too, had faced extreme punishment for something they’d had no choice but to be a part of.
I knew that was certainly the case for me.
So many people cared for Bridget Bishop, Reverend George Burroughs, Martha and Giles Corey, and Elizabeth Howe—among many others—and rightfully so. They should be remembered. They should be exonerated and respected in ways they never had been in the final moments of their lives.
But nobody cared about Annabel Lee Croft Black. Nobody but me.
Born in 1663 and dead in 1734, Annabel was the oldest soul in my cemetery—the graveyard guardian, some might call her. Her small, flat little marker was tucked just on the other side of the stone fence separating my cottage from the graves. Why she’d been buried there instead of beside her beloved husband, Thaddeus Black—buried somewhere in one of Salem’s other cemeteries—I wasn’t sure I’d ever know, but I suspected it had something to do with Thaddeus’s family disapproving of his marital bonds to an accused witch.
Once a week, while on my rounds, I made sure to leave a flower on her grave, knowing nobody else would. Nobody cared about a seventy-one-year-old felon who’d escaped the hanging rope. She hadn’t made the history books like the rest of them. Her story had begun in a town outside of Salem, one no longer written on the map, and she’d gotten lucky and died in her bed, I’d learned after doing some research. Nobody ever looked at her grave, nobody knew it was there, and maybe that had been done on purpose—whether by Thaddeus or someone else—hidden by bigger, more impressive monuments and headstones. Hidden from the accusations, judgment, and torment.
But not from me.
Today, a Sunday like any other, I walked past Luke’s bike and hopped the low fence—a shortcut to Annabel’s grave I’d discovered on accident while trying to trim a low-hanging branch a few years ago.
“Hey, Anna,” I greeted as I normally did while approaching the little worn headstone tucked away between a couple of bushes. “Found a nice lily last night on my way back to the house and thought you might—”
My words were cut short by the sight of a rose, lying precisely beneath the dash Annabel had filled with supposed witchcraft, love, and scandal. Its full bloom and deep, healthy color reminded me at once of the flowers Nana had instructed Luke and me to drop unceremoniously onto our parents’ caskets on the day we buried them.
It had been a short while since I’d felt the viselike grip around my lungs, squeezing from me every breath of air I needed to survive. But there it was again—the panic. As strong as the day I’d found that cigarette on Luke’s bike. The escalation of my heartbeat. The saliva flooding my mouth. The sticky sweat coating my palms.
“What the f-fuck?” I uttered in a high-pitched, squealed whisper as I turned on my heel, whipping my head this way and that to survey the land around me.
The landscaping went a little wild back here. The trees were fuller; the bushes grew wider. The shadows were darker, stretching long over the cleared but rarely walked path. It would be easy enough for someone to conceal themselves within the brush, cloaked in darkness and shrouded in mystery. Watching. Laughing. Taunting. Planning .
My lungs pumped harder, working overtime. My jaw began to tremble, my teeth chattering like I'd suddenly been submerged into the dead of winter. I thought about the cigarette butt left beneath the helmet, and now this.
Someone's watching. Someone knows. They know who I am .
The lily fell from my hand to the ground, glistening with the remnants of the morning's rain. And I ran, jumping the fence with the agility of an Olympic hurdle jumper and hurrying through the rarely used back door of my house.
With the dead bolt locked, I pressed my back to the door's surface, squeezed my eyes shut, and pushed the breath from my panicked lungs.
“Breathe, breathe,” I coached myself, my voice hushed against the ticking of the clock I'd taken from my childhood home.
In through your nose, out through your mouth …
In … out … in … out … in—
A floorboard creaked from deeper within the house, and my eyes flew open at the same time my lungs stopped working altogether. Then another creak, the sound of a light footstep.
Someone’s in the house.
A swarm of dreadful, unwanted memories encircled my brain, and adrenaline blanketed over the panic. I knelt, concealed by the kitchen island, and quietly untied my heavy steel-toed boots. I slipped them off and stood slowly to ensure I was still alone in the kitchen, then grabbed a long chef's knife from the rack, still drying from breakfast.
I listened for the floorboards' telltale whispers, another needed clue of the intruder’s whereabouts, as I tiptoed through the kitchen and into the living room, pressing my back to the wall and gripping the knife in a steady palm.
It was a small cottage, containing only a kitchen, living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. There weren't many places for a trespasser to hide—or me for that matter—and I spotted them easily from where I stood.
A woman with black hair, tied into two sloppily coiled buns on top of her head, like a haphazard attempt at Minnie Mouse ears. She wore a long black coat, black pants, and heavy lug-soled black boots. Her back was to me as she stood at the mouth of the short hallway, leading to the bedrooms and bathroom, and I snagged the opportunity to make my quick approach.
I walked swiftly, rapidly, and grabbed her by the shoulder, whipping her around to pin her against the living room wall and pressing my forearm across the top of her chest while holding the knife up high with the other.
“The fuck are you doing in my house?” I hissed before recollection settled in and her green eyes came into focus.
She was the woman from Salem Skin. The one who I'd saved from being raped across the street.
What the fuck is she doing here?
Her bold gaze held mine with a bravery I admired despite the frantic thrumming of her pulse, fluttering beneath my arm at the base of her throat. The only tell that she was, in fact, terrified.
Good .
“I'm sorry,” she said with a held breath, fighting to maintain the calm in her tone. “Your door was open.”
“And that gave you the right to trespass?”
She tried to shrug against my hold as she replied, “I tried knocking.”
I furrowed my brow at her cockiness, even with the blade of a knife pointed directly at her throat. One swift thrust, and she'd be dead. She should be scared. If she knew what I was capable of, she would be. But she didn’t, and I assumed that was why she maintained eye contact and a firm set of her jaw.
My nostrils flared, the adrenaline and irritation singeing against my veins. “You should've knocked harder.”
“And you shouldn't leave your front door wide open. There’re some crazy fuckin’ people out there, buddy. Just be glad I’m not one of them.”
“An oversight.” I tipped my head at the fair challenge while internally berating myself for being so careless. I knew better.
“A stupid one.” Her eyes dodged toward the knife, holding steady just above her head. “Are you still planning to stab me, or can you let me go now?”
“Why the hell are you here?” I asked, still maintaining my stance. Still putting pieces together. “Have you been following me?”
Her triple-pierced nose wrinkled as her single-pierced upper lip curled. “ Following you? What the hell?”
“The rose!” I exclaimed, seeing its soft, perfect petals through my mind's eye. “Did you leave the fucking rose?!”
The woman blinked, startled by my tone, then shook her head. “Dude, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. I came by because it's my day off, and I wanted to thank you for saving my fucking life the other night—that's all. Okay? I'm sorry. If you let me go, I'll—”
I lowered the knife and released her from my hold, taking a step back and gesturing toward the open door. “Leave.”
She seemed taken aback as she lifted her hands to dust off her chest, as if wiping my touch away. “Um … okay … I just—”
“ Go ,” I stated more firmly, jabbing the knife toward the cloudy, dreary world outside.
“Jesus.” She blew out a breath and walked carefully toward the door, keeping her eyes on me all the way. “Um … thank you … for stopping that guy,” she said as she moved. “You didn't have to, so … thanks.”
I swallowed, hating that I could feel my resolve shifting, even as I struggled to hold on tightly. Hating that I felt such a desire to be so awful . “Great. You did what you came to do. Now, please, please leave.”
“Oh, so he does have manners. That's good to know.” She smiled, the piercings through her bottom lip twinkling in the glow of a table lamp beside the door. Then, she turned and lifted her hand in a lackluster wave, wiggling her fingers. “See you around, Spider.”
Spider?
I narrowed my eyes at her back, then dropped my gaze to the webs tattooed on the backs of my hands. I couldn’t tell if the nickname was meant to be endearing or an insult, but it didn’t seem to matter. That nagging desperation for contact and companionship was back in an instant, flooding my chest and warming my frozen, forgotten heart.
“She’s kinda cute in a creepy way,” I could hear Luke saying, and I twisted my mouth, willing him to shut up as I hurried to stand in the open doorway, watching as she coolly made her way down the path. Strolling along as if the sun were shining and the birds were singing, completely oblivious to the ominous black clouds hanging overhead.
A black four-door sedan was parked not far from the cottage, one that hadn’t been there before, when I left through the front door to lay the lily on Annabel’s grave.
She couldn’t have left the rose.
Unless she had parked somewhere else … but …
No, that doesn’t make sense. She’d have had to walk too far. It wasn’t her.
“Hey,” I called after her, and when she stopped to look over her shoulder, I added, “You’re welcome.”
She flashed me that smile again. “Glad you were there to stop him.”
I pressed my lips together as I nodded curtly. “So am I.”
She continued to watch me as she walked backward, nearing the bottom of the hill and the gate. She would get into the car and drive away, and why did that make me feel so horribly … sad ? I didn’t know her, nor did she know me—but why the hell was there a small, nearly insignificant part of my brain telling me to change that? She had entered my fucking house without permission! She had snooped through only God knew what before I caught her! A sane man wouldn’t want to know her. No, no, a sane man would call the fucking cops, maybe even insist on getting a restraining order. Yet there I was, wishing Luke were around to get her name and number because even as an almost-thirty-nine-year-old man with more than a little experience under my belt, I was no better at this shit than I had been at seventeen.
She turned out of the gate and headed to the driver’s side of the car.
Then, after opening the door, before climbing inside, she looked in my direction and called, “I’ll knock louder next time!”
I watched as she got in and drove away at the slow but required fifteen miles per hour, and one side of my mouth twitched until it lifted into a reluctant smile.
I hoped there would be a next time.
And I hoped for that so much that I nearly forgot about the rose on Annabel’s grave.