“Yes. He thinks I’m a fool.” Ginny carefully picked up her cup of tea and took a sip. “But I saw him again, Betty. While we were in Boston. Standing outside Edgar’s house.”
“The man in the blue overcoat?”
“The same.”
“Perhaps you would be able to describe him to the police. He might be a criminal who targets young women like us.”
“He’s not a criminal. Don’t you see, Betty? There’s evil out there. I can feel it, like I can almost feel the cold beyond that glass pane,” she said in a low voice.
I looked at the landscape outside. Trees and the soft whiteness of fresh snow, and beyond the trees the dormitories, the two ponds, the library, and the classrooms that constituted Stoneridge. Apicture-perfect college that deserved to appear on postcards. What evil could reside here? Yet as the snow fell, and even with the kitchen warm and cozy, I had to suppress a shiver.
“Anyway, I didn’t see his face this time, either. I knew it was him, though. It’s always him. The dead rat, the dead flies and the moths, the lights in the trees, they’re simply symptoms. He is the disease.”
“Did you tell Edgar about this?”
“Not quite. But he thinks I’m a madwoman nevertheless. My father telephoned Edgar while I was there. Someone wrote to him saying my nerves are frayed, that I need help. They spent a good half hour discussing my ‘mental stability,’ or lack thereof. I couldn’t help it. I broke down in tears and Edgar held me in his arms, but he doesn’t believe me.”
She quickly set her cup down and clutched my hands, anguish ravaging her beautiful face. “Betty, whatever happens, you must believe me. Promise me, please. Even if the rest of the world yells that I have gone mad, please believe me.”
“I will,” I said.
My words soothed her, and she picked up her cup again. A few minutes later we saw Santiago trudging through the snow in the direction of Briar’s Commons. He wrapped his ragged winter coat around his shoulders and pulled a cap down over his dark hair.
It was the first of December. On December 19, Virginia would go missing. We had less than three weeks left together, though of course I could not know that. Or perhaps I did know. After all, a terrible, restless darkness had been inching toward her every day. I had sensed it, I had almost tasted it, yet I had dismissed it as nonsense.
In the end, I had not believed her, despite my steadfast promises. In the end, I left her to face that terrible, hungry darkness on her own.
1998: 7
Minerva carefully took outThomas’s books and notebooks from the boxes, spreading them around her. She found two books on legends of New England and what appeared to be a bibliography that further expanded on that subject, likely for use in a course taught by Christina Everett, since her name appeared on several documents, including a syllabus and some of his time sheets. She noticed thatBell, Book, and Candle: Witchcraft in the New Worldwas among the titles in the bibliography and had been circled with a red pen, the words “crucial to find” written next to the title. Other books with similar themes also made an appearance:A History of Witchcraft Lore, The Witchcraft Delusion of 1692, The Witch-Cult in Western Massachusetts,and many more. These titles matched ones Ginny had been reading in 1934, before her disappearance, and which Betty had noted in her manuscript and her journal.
She drifted into the library and sat on one of the couches. As she dialed a number, she contemplated the stuffed birds and the shadow boxes with butterflies decorating the walls of LedgeHouse. She thought of Nana Alba when she sat by the window and talked to a parrot that was dead, her mind gone dim. Old age could wreck the human brain, but perhaps insidious thoughts could ruin it in one’s youth, chipping away at one’s sanity.
“Hello?” a woman’s voice said.
“Hi, is this Emily Murphy? I’m Minerva, one of the resident directors at Stoneridge College.”
“Stoneridge. Right. Someone already called about my brother’s stuff and my car is in the shop right now so I really can’t say when I can drive there to pick up the things he left behind.”
“That’s fine. No rush.” Minerva paused and fiddled with the spiral binding of a notebook. “Actually, I wanted to ask you about Thomas. Has he been in touch with you? The last email we had from him was in January.”
“Yeah, that’s when he emailed me.”
“He hasn’t talked to you since then?” she asked, sitting back on the couch. She placed the notebook aside.
“No.”
“It doesn’t worry you? It’s been months.”
The woman sighed. There was a brief silence. “He did this before. He dropped out after the first year, he said it was too much. He moved in with a girl I’d never heard about and three months later he was back in Massachusetts. He dropped out like that, in a heartbeat. I thought he’d figured out his life this time around, but I suppose I was wrong. He’s a smart guy, but he’s high-strung. He doesn’t take pressure well.”
Minerva twisted the phone cord between her fingers.
“Look, we weren’t the best of friends, especially after he took that time off to figure out what he wanted to do with his life and basically mooched off me for months. He’s my brother, but it’s a small apartment and he’s a little difficult, you know?”
Minerva recalled the constant quarrels between Thomas and Conrad Carter and pictured a similar situation.
“He didn’t even come home for Thanksgiving. It’s an hour away and he preferred to have dinner with that buddy of his.”
