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I looked up to find the guard from last night standing in front of me. I hadn’t gotten a great look at his face, but he was so tall and wide he was hard to misidentify.

“Why is it every time I look up I find you?”

He dropped into a chair across the table from me, reaching out to pick up a book from the stack.

“Malleus Maleficarum: Hammer of Witches,” he read the title out loud, then flicked his blue eyes up to meet mine. “Do I even want to know?”

“Are you stalking me now?” I leaned my forearms on the table.

He set the book down.

“My job is to look after the graveyard, and you have permission to be there, which makes you my business.”

“Not graveyard. It’s a cemetery.”

He blinked. “Is there a difference?”

I nodded. “Graveyards are attached to churches, cemeteries aren’t.”

“Whatever, you’re still interfering with my op, so your business, even if it is weird spooky stuff, is my business.”

“I don’t even know your name.”

He studied me for a long moment, square jaw giving nothing away. “Jonah,” he finally said.

“Jonah.” The name was less outwardly macho than I had been expecting. Butch or Rosco would have suited him better, but then again, maybe there was more to him than his stony appearance.

“Well, Jonah, I don’t like people in my business.”

He took a long moment to respond, his lips pulled in a thin line. “Fine. I don’t need to know about you, but I want to know what you find.”

I took a sip of my coffee, now watery with melted ice, and weighed my options.

I didn’t want more people involved in this than were required. Then again, he was involved whether I wanted him to be or not.

And if he was going to keep people like Mercer away from the unnamed grave, maybe it was better to keep him close.

“Fine, you’ve heard of the Salem Witch Trials, I assume?”

He nodded. “Sure, mass hysteria led to a whole lot of accusations and executions. What does 1600s Massachusetts have to do with an 1800s cemetery in New York?”

I gave him a long-winded explanation of the relevant history, and he listened to every word. “What happened there wasn’t an isolated thing. It was part of a bigger mindset and bigger movement that spread far beyond Salem.”

He clicked his tongue.

“So you found a gravestone that’s been defaced, and rather than assuming it was idiot teenagers, you think it was witches?”

I actually laughed at that and shook my head. “I don’t think witches defaced the gravestone; I think the gravestone may have been defaced because people thought the person buried there was a witch. Maybe before their death, maybe after.”

He sat up taller at that and I thought I saw a flash of interest in his usually hard eyes. “There has to be a simpler explanation than that.”

I shrugged. “Maybe, but chipping a name off a gravestone isn’t like spray painting a wall or something. It took whoever did it a lot of time, the motivation had to be big. So, what was it?”

Chapter Five

Jonah

Briar’s deep burgundy hair danced around her shoulders as she talked animatedly about Puritans and Pilgrims. Topics I remember studying with interest in high school. From her, they held extra appeal.