Hideo shrugged and adjusted the volume of the stereo. “You’re no fun, Minerva.”
He drove away and she hurried to the door. “Sorry, my friend is chatty. Thanks for agreeing to see me.”
“No problem. Come in. Carolyn’s off in Boston getting examined for every illness known to mankind, so if you have questions about Betty Tremblay you’ll have to return another time,” he said. “She won’t be back until tomorrow.”
“Is she okay? Are her hands giving her trouble?”
“She’s fine. She loves to get her checkups every six months. Sheadores it when she goes into the hospital and the doctors hover around her. She says she plans to live to over a hundred.”
“My great-grandmother lived to a hundred and one.”
“Is that so?”
They walked into the room where they’d had tea the previous time. Noah plopped himself down on the high-backed chair that his grandmother had used. Behind him loomed the portrait of the gray-haired man.
“My great-grandfather was also long-lived,” Noah said. “Lived to be ninety-eight, which is probably why Carolyn wants to beat him at the longevity record.”
“That’s him behind you, right?”
Noah looked over his shoulder and nodded. “Mr. Wesley Noah Wingrave, after whom I’m named. Not that my grandmother thinks me worthy of the name, mind you. Carolyn painted that portrait.” He turned to look at her again. “Anyway, you said you wanted to talk about something?”
“Yes. I heard you’re Thomas Murphy’s friend. I was his resident director.”
“Thomas was my tutor,” Noah said. “He came over sometimes to help me with my papers. I’m not sure I’d call him a friend, though.”
“But you invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“My grandmother did. She felt sorry for the guy. His sister was mad at him because he owed her money, and he didn’t want to have dinner with her. His dad lives in Miami, and he wasn’t going to fly there. He spent most of the time talking with Carolyn, not with me. I was busy drinking myself into a stupor. Why are you asking about him? He dropped out.”
“Paperwork,” Minerva said. “He left a couple of boxes behind at the dorm and I need to get them back to him. His sister doesn’t know where he is, but she mentioned your name. Have you talked to him lately?”
“No. All we ever talked about was homework and class bullshit. I didn’t like him much and he didn’t like me, either. He chattedwith Carolyn about art. I couldn’t care less about painters and sculptors.”
She didn’t know what else to say and was grateful when Noah offered to take her to the library. He left after a few minutes, and she quickly pulled out Virginia’s drawings and set them on the table. Then she took out Thomas’s drawings and her copy ofA History of Witchcraft Lore.Thomas’s and Virginia’s drawings were almost identical. They had an eerie similarity to the apotropaic marks in the book.
Christina Everett taught AMS 513, which likely meant that she knew Thomas well and might even have been his adviser. The page with the bibliography might have been for a paper for a class she taught, or research for Thomas’s thesis. Minerva decided to email her and ask her if she knew anything about Thomas’s work, because she couldn’t let go of the idea that there was something to be found if she continued poking around. A dark thread wove everything together.
But for now, she needed to concentrate on her research, not get dragged away by flights of fancy. She grabbed Beatrice’s manuscript and began diligently scribbling her notes. Noah came by later carrying a tray with two plates and two glasses of milk. She slipped off her beaten-up headphones and paused her Discman, silencing Bowie in the middle of “Strangers When We Meet.”
“The staff has the day off since Carolyn’s not around, so you get a baloney sandwich,” Noah said. “It’s what I used to make when friends came over to the house when I was a kid.”
She laughed.
“What?” he asked.
“My friend asked if you were serving caviar.”
“I fill the pool with it every Sunday.”
This elicited another laugh from her. She stretched her arms and rubbed the back of her neck before grabbing the sandwich. She’d spent two hours bent over the table and her body felt stiff and uncomfortable.
“It’s hard to believe it happened, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry?” she replied.
“Salem,” he said, and pointed at her book on New England witches. She’d left it open to a page showing men in Puritan outfits undressing a woman and pointing at her back, presumably at a birthmark or wart that would be used as evidence against her. “Salem’s a carnival nowadays. Witch Town USA. All they do is sell memorabilia with cartoon witches sitting on brooms or cute black cats nestled between pumpkins. But back in the day, people took this stuff seriously.”
“There’s a theory that it was moldy bread.” He stared at her. She took a bite out of the sandwich. “Linnda Caporael theorized that there was an outbreak of ergotism. Basically, there’s a type of fungus that can grow on crops and cause hallucinations in people who consume it.”
