“Why not?”
“Because it’s dangerous. Even if Perpetua was behind all of this, it would be reckless to accuse her of any wrongdoing.”
“How well do you know her?”
“I told you; she sells charms. She used to go with her daughter to the Molinas’ and the Desotos’ to visit the workers there.”
“Then who is hurting us? Tell me, who?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, and his serious, sad face felt like a slap, something in his distress stinging her. She wanted him to fix everything, to put things back together the way they were. To bring Tadeo back.
“You don’t care about me!” she exclaimed.
Valentín let out an exasperated grunt. “Alba, I care the world about you!”
“Liar!”
“Alba,” he said in turn, and clutched her hand with such vehemence that she almost gasped. Then he leaned down to kiss her.
She was too surprised to react at first, but then she parted her lips and kissed him back. She felt his hand on her cheek as she tipped her head to the correct angle. She understood then that he could not provide her with easy answers, but he was there nevertheless. She held him tight.
The horses grew restless, shifting, and they finally separated. Alba blushed. Valentín simply smiled.
She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and remembered how the Molina girls had teased her about Valentín. They’d never let her be if they suspected she had kissed him. And Alba’s motherwould be furious if she knew. She glanced toward the house in the distance and then back at Valentín.
He was a pleasant-looking man, and kind. She’d complained to Arturo, telling him Valentín had hard hands, farmer’s hands, but when he’d kissed her and pressed his palm against her cheek, she hadn’t cared that it was calloused and firmed by manual labor.
Nevertheless, Alba ought to tell him he shouldn’t be taking liberties with her. Instead, she ducked her head, attempting to maintain a decorous expression on her face.
“I should go. Thank you for helping me and for the handkerchief,” she said, and held it out to him.
He shook his head. “You may keep it. It’s only a cheap square of cloth, not fancy silk.”
“Thank you.”
“Be careful, Alba.”
In response, she kissed him quickly on the lips. They looked into each other’s eyes and perhaps he might have shared another kiss with her, but she urged her horse forward. It trotted down the path that led to the door of her house and she smiled.
1934: 4
Snow arrived early thatNovember, dusting the tops of the pines and frosting the windows. With the colder temperatures Ginny’s mood grew somber. While the rest of us were eager to skate on one of the ponds or build a snowman, Ginny kept to our room. Often, I found her looking out the window, in the direction of Briar’s Commons.
She seemed to be eternally ducking between the library and our dorm. A pile of books formed by her bed. These weren’t the tomes on art and design I’d grown to expect. I spottedThe Superstitions of Witchcraft, Old Paths and Legends of New England, The Wonders of the Invisible World, The History of Witchcraft and Demonology,and many other books, all dealing with matters of ghosts, witchcraft, and things that go bump in the night.
New England is rife with narratives of the uncanny. Almost every town in Massachusetts boasts a tale of devilry and witches. Some of the protagonists in these stories are innocents sent to the gallows and others are agents of evil. There’s a witch rock in Rochester and another in Peabody, and even though these may be merely boulders left behind when glaciers retreated in distant ice ages, they mark the land in unusual ways. More than one girl in our dorm liked to share legends of strange haunts, sending herroommates shrieking out the door. And, as evidenced by our own séance, sometimes the girls were willing to dip their toes into the world of the supernatural. Myrna Whitemyer, for example, had a fondness for tarot cards.
Which is to say that Ginny’s interest in matters of witchcraft was by itself not an odd trait, not when you considered her automatic writing or her spirit paintings, but I felt that this was fundamentally different from her other pursuits. There was no joy in this quest, simply a grim determination.
There were other changes in Ginny’s behavior as the days advanced. More than once while we were walking together, she looked over her shoulder or turned quickly around as if expecting to find someone behind us. She grew distracted and sometimes I’d have to call her name twice to get her attention. In the mornings she looked tired and dark circles formed under her eyes. She scribbled incessantly in her notebooks.
Two incidents stand out from that November, one before Thanksgiving and the other shortly after our return to the dorm from the holiday, which in those days took place on the last Thursday of the month.
Edgar had promised to pick Ginny up and take her to Boston for Thanksgiving dinner with his family. I, on the other hand, had plans to enjoy dinner with Mary Ann Mason and a few other girls at her home in Gloucester.
The evening before our departure, when I was packing my suitcase, Ginny ran into the room, practically breathless, her hair in disarray. Before I could even open my mouth, she pushed me aside and rushed to the window and looked outside.
“Ginny? What’s the matter?” I asked.
