The Witch's Throne (Thea Drake Mystery Book 1) (Thea Drake Mysteries) Read online

  And so, I found myself sitting next to him a few days after we met, drinking beer on the Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving break, watching the sunset over the lake and feeling completely at ease.

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Well, then. Let’s begin.” He clapped his hands together and rubbed them vigorously as if he were going to give me the Mr. Miyagi healing massage. But then he shook his arms out, stretched his neck, and pressed his fingertips to his forehead, closing his eyes.

  “I’m seeing...I’m seeing parents, mother and father, both in the same occupation...they’re both teachers.”

  I choked on my sip of beer. “That’s right.”

  “Small town...rural...small school.” He opened his eyes, smiles, nudges me with his elbow. “Top of your class.”

  “It was a small class,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Okay...now…” He spread his fingers in the air and assumed a faraway gaze over the pond. “I will see what spirits are following you.”

  “I have spirits following me?”

  He moved his hands in the air back and forth, as if we were at a concert and he should have a lit cigarette lighter in his hand. “I see three spirits at this moment, but you have many that come and go.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m seeing an elderly woman...she has short hair, once black but now gray, curly. Name…” He froze his hands in the air, tilted his head as if straining to hear. “She’s giving me her name but it’s hard to hear, she’s far beyond…gone for many years now…”

  I stared at him, my beer forgotten.

  “I see a…” he rubbed a hand over his front, his chest and stomach, in a circle, “black spot here. Name is…” He sighed, shook his head. “I’m getting an M...no, an E?”

  “Elizabeth,” I whispered, “my great-grandmother, but everyone called her Madge.” I stared out over the pond, trying to see what he was seeing. “She died of lung cancer.”

  “She says she’s so proud of you. She always knew you were special, even when you were a little baby. You would stare into her eyes as she held you, and she whispered secrets to you, every little thing she knew in the world, because she knew she wouldn’t be around your whole life. So she promised to stay near. Always.”

  He made this speech in a sing-songy voice, his hands still raised with fingers spread.

  “How are you doing this?” I whispered.

  “Wait...I’m hearing more. She wants to warn you.”

  I watched the pond. I saw a patch of ripples rise in the center, then disappear. “About what?”

  “She says...you shouldn’t drive home this weekend, too risky. Stay on campus.” His hands dropped, and so did the psychic pose, a feeling as if a scene in a play had ended and he had broken character. He reached out and threaded his fingers through mine. “She says you should stay here with me all weekend, drive home on Tuesday when classes are done.”

  “Wait. You’re making this up?”

  He nodded. “Yeah.” He took a long swig from his bottle and smacked his lips in satisfaction as if tasting a rare delicacy and not a domestic beer. “That was the whole point.”

  “But...how did you know all of that stuff?”

  “Easy. I overheard when your dad called. Your mom was on the extension, so I knew they weren’t divorced. And he said something about driving home this weekend. You know...” he shrugged, “two and two. And then the small-town stuff, well...come on. You’re obviously not big city. You’re small town girl, mile away.”

  “You listened in on my phone conversation?”

  “I was right there in the room. Sounded like they were ready to drive down and take you home with them.”

  I picked at the label on my beer, remembering. George had been in my room when my parents called. He’d come to check on me because of the strange way we’d met. I’d been out for a run at sunset, lost my way after dark, and had twisted my ankle. Mitch, Rita, and George found me. They helped me up and drove me to the campus clinic.

  “You’re not going to let them talk you into leaving school?” He opened a little access door on the cooler, opened another beer, and handed it to me.

  I took the bottle. “How did you know about my great-grandmother?”

  “Okay…so, I start with the easy stuff for the ‘wow’ factor. Gain your trust, your belief, then I just start guessing.”

  “That was guessing? How she died?”

  “Most people our age have great-grandparents we knew who are deceased. Sometimes grandparents too, but I started with ‘gone for many years now’ in case it was great-grandparents. And the most common cause of death is somewhere in front,” he did the rubbing of his chest and stomach again with his hand holding the beer, “heart disease, most cancers, even most injuries, all in the torso. It’s the biggest area of your body.”

  I shook my head. “How did you know what she looked like?”

  “I didn’t give a full description. You have black hair with some curl in it, so I guessed that she’d have a similar hair color. And most elderly women have gray hair worn short or pulled back. Anyway, once I hit on a guess, the mark,” he winks at me, “that’s you, usually confirms and adds information. You confirmed great-grandmother and lung cancer.”

  I take a long drink, thinking back over the conversation. “I did, didn’t I?”

  “From there, I can go into general platitudes about love and affirmation. I could tell by your tone and demeanor that you loved her very much. If the two of you had been estranged, I would have been able to tell and moved on to another subject.”

  I took a long swallow of beer. “So, I’m just as gullible as all those people who go to psychics.”

  “You’re human. Almost everyone wants to believe their dead relatives are still around, watching over them. Everyone wants to hear messages of love. It’s human nature. We want to believe.”

  “So...the warning?”

  “Ah, the warning...that’s what most people want most. To know they’re not alone. That they’re protected. Safe. Once we’re talking future events, I can make up anything if it sounds plausible, you know, based on the stuff I already know about you. I know you drive back home most weekends.” He took a drink. “Usually, that means there’s a boyfriend back home.”

  He was still holding my hand. He ran his thumb along my forefinger, down into my palm.

  “You tell me,” I said. “Use your psychic powers.”

  With the other hand, he pressed his fingers to his forehead, beer sloshing in the bottle. “I’m seeing...ah!” He dropped his hand, looked into my eyes, and smiled. “Big, exciting changes in your romantic life.”

  After George died, my parents came to Portico and brought me and the girls home. My mother stayed with us for two weeks. She talked with most visitors, including the police as they wrapped up the investigation. She made the funeral arrangements, notified family, brought in the mail, I think I even remember her spooning soup into my mouth at one point.

  She also unpacked our luggage and brought our things up to George’s office. I remember her telling me so.

  My messenger bag is here on the desk, flap open. Inside are my journals, the red Moleskine on top that I had been filling with research on Portico, the unsolved deaths, history on Adeline Tenatree and her family. I remember copying details of the town’s history—lumber mills and strange deaths and witchcraft—as if they were the most crucial details of our lives.

  I look inside the bag. No phone.

  When I close the flap, I see a flash of bright blue beneath. My stomach clenches.

  No. Deep breath.

  The blue plastic bag. The one filled with George’s belongings. The police officer had it…Officer Tims, that was his name.

  Officer Tims had stayed with me all through that horrid day, arriving at The Apple Inn early that morning, just after sunrise, telling me he was sorry ma’am, so sorry, but my husband was dead.

  He told me George had been found at the base of a tree by the crossroads at the Ol
d North Church on Martin Fisher’s property.

  He never used the words “Witch’s Throne.”

  As my parents flew across the country and my children, oblivious, watched television back at the inn, Officer Tims drove me to the hospital, stood next to me while the doctor explained the circumstances. The tragedy. The accident.

  George had suffered a closed head injury, a blow that had not pierced his skull but had nevertheless been severe enough to injure his brain, causing a fatal increase in intracranial pressure. The doctor believed that George had stumbled and fallen against one of the sharp, broken roots at the base of the tree.

  Not a supernatural death. A stupid, random accident.

  Officer Tims stayed with me the entire day, right up until he walked me out of the hospital and put me in a cab with my parents and my children.

  And then it was over. My life as I knew it.

  I don’t remember how the blue bag got home with us, but the officer must have loaded it into the cab with our luggage. Mom must have brought it up to the office.

  I can still smell the pipe tobacco. I want to get out of this room before I convince myself that George is still here, that I’ll turn around and see him.

  Holding my breath, I plunge my hands into the blue bag, digging through the items: the jeans George was found wearing, plus his clothes he left in the car: the t-shirt and waterproof boots with one of the laces snapped. No jacket, though it was pouring rain that night. No umbrella. No flashlight. No laptop or camera or any of his usual equipment.

  And no phone.

  JOURNAL OF THEA DRAKE | MAY 28

  Adeline Tenatree and Witchcraft

  In 1880, Alfred Tenatree married for money and doubled his personal fortune. His wife, Mary Porter, was thirty-four years his junior and the eldest daughter of a prominent Pacific Northwest lumber family. Upon their engagement, she initiated construction of their enormous family mansion on the edge of Portico (farthest from the rail yard). The house was completed in 1886, the same year their daughter Adeline was born.

  Unfortunately, Mrs. Tenatree died in childbirth.

  The only child of a wealthy man, Addie was indulged from birth. Perhaps because he struggled in poverty during his childhood, Alfred gave his daughter everything she desired, every book she named, every doll or toy or dress she requested. He gave her horses and servants and travel adventures and money, too, and from the time Addie refused a governess when she was nine, he gave her complete independence. Adeline Tenatree grew up with freedom rare for a girl. Had she grown up in the city, she might have been restricted by society, by the societal norms inflicted on all her peers, but she grew up in the Oregon wilderness where she had no peers. She grew up among men.

  Sketches of her in the Portico Museum show a thin-faced, birdlike young woman with a wide forehead, large, wide-set black eyes, nose a bit too long, and narrow chin. Her black hair she wore smoothed back in a low knot, the front parted in the center. Every Portico citizen and shop-owner dusts off and displays this portrait of Adeline Tenatree at the All Hallows’ Eve Festival.

  From girlhood, Addie had a fascination for women’s history, particularly the witchcraft trials of colonial Salem, Massachusetts. She owned volumes of history on the accused women, and she wrote three meandering narratives about Salem and the trials, a series of handwritten journals and essays describing the way the women were tricked and tortured into confessions, the deviant behavior of their accusers, including the women themselves, who turned on each other. She mixed these historical accounts with authentic witchcraft spells and ceremonies.

  Her manuscripts were never published, but she bound them together into a three-part tour de force: An Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft. The manuscripts are preserved by Mrs. Vera White at the Portico Historical Museum. At almost half a million words, Adeline must have written constantly on the subjects of witchcraft, the Salem trials, and history of the occult, for she completed all three volumes in merely eight years, when she was between the ages of fifteen and twenty-three.

  The manuscripts are strange documents filled with heartfelt dramatizations of the events, far-out theories about the reincarnation of the women in later years, and pages and pages of spells. Addie claimed to have transcribed these spells from sessions with a Ouija board: love potions, banishment spells, methods of mind control.

  Alfred Tenatree died of heart failure when his daughter Addie was twenty-seven. While Addie’s father lived, she was safe, protected, the precocious daughter of a rich and powerful man, but after his death, she became that which is most feared, that which makes others most uneasy: a rich and strong-minded woman—but unmarried.

  After her father died, Addie was left alone in that enormous house with her books and her strange ideas. Addie, did not change her behavior at all after her father’s death but continued to do exactly as she wished. She never married but had suitor after suitor, some of them living in the house for weeks or months, but they all eventually left. She threw parties. She held séances; practice of spiritualism was rampant in the late nineteenth century. She rode her appaloosa Cherry into town on Friday nights and drank with the men at the tavern until Saturday morning.

  Not only strong-minded but vastly intelligent and well-read, Addie used her intellect to the benefit of the town. She drew up plans for the East Bridge, plans that were eventually used according to the construction records. She invented a cheaper chemical treatment to lubricate the saws at her father’s mill. Expense books show that the savings were comparable to hundreds of thousands of today’s dollars. A letter from Addie's female friend to a cousin recounts how Addie once saved the life of a berry farmer’s horse when the animal developed a skin disorder. In the letter (also preserved at Portico Museum), the friend explains to her cousin how Addie treated the infected area with a foul-smelling poultice, whispering in the terrified animal’s ear for hours until it calmed.

  Adeline gave thousands of dollars to the town of Portico. She kept the mill running through uncertain economic times after her father’s death. She established the All Hallows’ Eve Festival, which has endured through the century and is still celebrated today.

  Unfortunately, it’s likely that she also killed several dozen people.

  CHAPTER SIX | OCTOBER 25

  The question of George’s missing phone and my need to locate it is not a conversation with my mother I can handle at this moment.

  But who else can I ask? The girls might have seen it, might have even been snooping in the office and taken it…no, they wouldn’t have gone in there. No one has been in George’s office since…not for months.

  My mother probably saw his phone and took it for reasons she thought were in my best interests. I will ask her.

  But not now.

  Instead, I decide to spare myself two confrontations with her in one morning and go downstairs to read.

  Try to, anyway. Drowsiness descends upon me within a few paragraphs. I tent the book open on my stomach and lie back on the couch, turning on the TV for the comfort of background noise. A celebrity chef explains how to create the perfect pie crust. The high and southern lilt of her voice bounces pleasantly.

  I close my eyes.

  I wish I had the energy to run. Running used to be the solution, the only way to stop the constant fears that lurked in my brain. I could focus on my quickening breath, pumping heart, aching muscles, until my thoughts were overpowered, unimportant blips under the rhythm and bodily effort of running.

  I’m too tired to run now. I tried once over the summer. Mom and Dad had taken the girls to the lake for the day. I changed into my running clothes, started down the lane. At the mailbox, I felt exhaustion overtake me. Not normal exhaustion. What’s-The-Point exhaustion. The feeling that nothing good will ever happen to me again, that I will never rest, that each day is another weight added, another layer dumped on the suffocating pile of one problem after the next.

  I turned back, abandoning my run. I had felt that kind of exhaustion before, and it sca
red me.

  The first time was as a teenager in the last year of high school, with college applications and final exams and the job my father got for me at Bob Ohler’s insurance office. I went to bed one Friday after school and stayed there until Tuesday morning when my mother threatened to take my car keys.

  I pushed through in fear of my mother’s disapproval only to have the exhaustion hit again my first semester at college. Harder. I started skipping my 8 a.m. class, then the 10:30, then all of them, every day for a week, sleeping until late afternoon, then walking to the library in my sweatpants and t-shirt, telling myself I would do the assignments, catch up, then stare at my notebook, chin in hand, trying to keep my eyes open.

  At night, I would go back to bed and lie awake, one fear chasing another. What is the point of being here? I have no interest in studying any subjects. But I can’t go home. I can’t face the shame my parents would lay on me.

  The night I met George, I went to the woods to run. To shut off my brain.

  It had been a spontaneous urge on an evening when the fear of lying sleepless in bed, alone with my thoughts for another night was too much to face. I would run instead. I would run until I couldn’t think, until I tired myself out.

  Right before I left, I remembered my roommate’s pills. Antidepressants she took with great flare, announcing as if she had just remembered, “Oh! My medication!” Implying the narrowly averted disaster of some unspeakable breakdown were she not timely medicated.

  I found them in the top drawer of her desk and counted the pills in the bottle: fifty-three. I swallowed a handful of them with the warm soda left on my nightstand, and then, wearing shorts and a t-shirt in November, I ran down three flights of stairs, through the streets, crossing the highway and into Thompson Woods.