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

  By the time George contacted Carol Merrit, she was desperate for anyone to believe her story, to squash these disgusting rumors about her daughters’ tragic deaths and her son’s alleged involvement.

  George wanted to help her.

  George entered the Demon Cabin on a bright spring morning. He said the place stank of vomit and animal feces. There was no way out except the one short doorway. Even with the cracks in the structure, the four stone walls completely obliterated any light.

  He said that, swinging his flashlight around, he expected at every moment to uncover any number of terrors. His imagination conjured many in just a few minutes of standing there in the rank-smelling dark. The bright spring day was part of another world, one from which he could easily lose his way. If evil existed, it no doubt existed there—it sought out and thrived in such places.

  But there was nothing left in the cabin from all those years ago, no new evidence to prove Robert Merrit’s innocence. And even if some evidence was left behind, George wasn’t a criminal investigator. He was out of his element.

  Yet, he stayed. He had promised Carol Merrit he would help her. He would stay until he proved Beverly Donneville was lying, even if he had to trick her.

  Now Mitch stands. “What if he told her about something with the name Allerton and then was planning to use it somehow to expose her as a fraud?”

  “And what if Beverly suspected?” asks Rita.

  They’re both standing over me now, and I think about them rescuing me in the woods the night we met.

  “What if,” asks Mitch, “George called me to tell me about Allerton because he was afraid something might happen to him?”

  “If Beverly realized George was setting her up again,” says Rita, “She might have had something to do with his death.”

  “We’re going. Now. To confront her.”

  I’m following their arguments, back and forth, and then my head is shaking. “No, I-I can’t go to Oregon. I have two kids who need me here.”

  “Your parents live close, right?” says Rita. “Can’t they stay with them for a few days?”

  “No.”

  She kneels in front of me and grasps both of my hands. I don’t recall ever touching her for any reason, and the act unnerves me. Maybe that’s her intention.

  “Thea. George is gone, but that woman can still hurt him. She is ruining his name, all the work he did to protect people from falling for her act.”

  “She’s a liar, but that doesn’t make her a murderer.”

  “You still don’t think, after all the things we saw over the years, that people aren’t capable of manipulating others for their own gain?” She drops my hands, backs away.

  “Manipulating, sure. You’re saying she k—.”

  Nausea turns my stomach, and I stop speaking. Drop my head in my hands.

  George kept grinning as Juliet tugged his beard to pull him closer, plant kisses all over his cheeks and ears and forehead. Between us, Lydia was still and quiet, no doubt wanting an explanation—as did her mother—for why her father was going to jail.

  “What do you mean you’re Thomas Cady? He disappeared in 1978.”

  “Yeah, the original Thomas Cady did. Most likely, he’s dead, although not in the Atlantic Ocean.”

  George explained that his father, Howard Drake, a judge in Cook County, had sentenced a career criminal named Rocky Wilcox in 1987 to a lifetime in prison for many crimes, among them racketeering, tax evasion, and murder.

  Wilcox, seeking revenge, attempted to gain influence on Judge Drake’s ten-year-old son George, writing to him from prison over the next seven years until he died of brain cancer, still incarcerated.

  He attempted to lure George into his control by offering him jobs, money, etc. But George never accepted any of it. He knew that every offer, each bigger than the last, only showed how much Wilcox hated his father. He knew that, as soon as Wilcox could gain influence, he would use it to destroy George to hurt his father. George never accepted any gift or proposal from Wilcox.

  Except one: a false identity, complete with paperwork.

  “I don’t even know what made me accept them. Social security card, birth certificate, everything. Wilcox said the papers were authentic, that they wouldn’t be traced. He was telling me I could use them to obtain credit cards, bank accounts, all these illegal things, but I never did.”

  Instead, George held on to the papers, hid them for his entire childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

  “I just kept thinking I would use them for something, someday. Something good. Something important.”

  The day finally came. He collaborated with Cathy Merrit to show Beverly Donneville an anonymous letter from a woman claiming to be a girlfriend of a man named Thomas Cady. She said her last contact with Cady had been a phone call in the middle of the night two weeks before he disappeared.

  Cady had told her that he was at a payphone in a town called Red Rock, but the girlfriend explained in her letter that Cady had not sounded like himself, reciting strange stories about layers of the Underworld, demons, and possession, telling her that he had a job to do, a quest that would take him east to the ocean.

  Carol Merrit told Beverly that she had received the letter years ago and had kept it, believing that this Thomas Cady had been the killer but never showing anyone for fear that the letter would be dismissed and her son again put under suspicion.

  “I thought Beverly would blame Thomas Cady,” said George. “She had a name, someone who couldn’t come after her for libel, someone she could accuse without recourse. Then I could come forward with the paperwork, discredit her.”

  But Beverly continued to blame Robert, saying that Thomas Cady was the spirit guide all along, that Robert Merrit killed his sisters.

  “I’ve never been so happy to admit to committing a crime. Now Carol is free, finally, from this woman’s accusations. Her son is free.”

  “But…what if Robert really did it?”

  He shrugged. “What if it was a random stranger? What if the father did it?”

  “What?”

  “He was the one who found them. He moved away, too, died a few years later.” Juliet squirmed, and he put her down. “We may never know. The point is, Beverly Donneville was lying, and I proved it.” He stood up and went back to his desk. Lydia still had her arms around my waist, and I pulled her into a hug.

  The police showed up at nine, as scheduled. George took with him the paperwork for the identity of Thomas Cady: his social security card, birth certificate, voting registration. He even had his American Legion membership card.

  “Didn’t you ever think about what really happened to him?” I asked George before he left with the police.

  “Cady? Sure. I knew he was dead, most likely because of Wilcox. I thought…I thought I might protect him, even though he was dead. Protect his name, I mean. Wilcox might have given those papers to some other kid, one who would have used Cady’s name to commit crimes. I felt like I was protecting him. And I thought, maybe I could do good with it someday. I thought Thomas Cady might like that.”

  “Thea,” says Mitch.

  “No,” I look up at them. “George had an accident. It was tragic and stupid, and there’s no reasonable explanation for it. If I go looking for an explanation where there isn’t one, that makes me no better than Beverly Donneville.”

  “She’s spreading lies again. This time about George. How can you do nothing?”

  “Because there is nothing I can do. My girls need me here.”

  “It’s okay, Thea.” Mitch lays a hand on Rita’s shoulder “We wanted to tell you our plans, and we have. We better get going.”

  I follow them into the foyer.

  “Is this about the contract?”

  They both turn.

  “You and George haven’t spoken since then. Why are you here?”

  “Because he called me. Yeah, we argued over a book contract. We argued a lot over the years. He was still my friend.”

 
; “And mine,” says Rita. “We want to know what really happened to him.”

  “Call if you change your mind.” Mitch hands me his business card: Mitch DeLuca Photography.

  Rita inhales as if she’s about to speak again, then stops, presses her lips together.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Calvin. Does he know about the video?”

  “I called,” I admit. “He didn’t pick up.”

  She nods. “Same here. Maybe it’s for the best.”

  JOURNAL OF THEA DRAKE | MAY 28

  Adeline’s Death and The Witch’s Throne

  Already suspected of practicing witchcraft, rumor had it that Adeline Tenatree could cause another person’s death by using only her mind; that is, by using the power of suggestion. She had only to wish a person dead, and that person would perish. In the years that she lived alone, from the time of her father’s death to her own death at forty-four (in 1930), it was rumored that she killed dozens of people.

  Though she contributed much good to the town, by the end of her days, she was killing animals and leaving bloodless chicken corpses on the porches of those who had in some way insulted her. She was walking through the town streets completely nude during the full moon. She was stealing from the Old North Church, walking in during the day and walking out casually with all she could carry: hymnals, crucifixes, communion cups. Her behavior grew so outrageous that the church barred her from crossing its threshold.

  But it was after the death of Lucy Doves, infant daughter of North Church’s minister, that the citizens of Portico turned on Adeline Tenatree. Minister Doves blamed Addie for his daughter’s death; she had one night simply died in her sleep. Lucy had been fine, rosy-cheeked and cooing when his wife sang her to sleep in her crib, but white and cold in the morning, her eyes still closed in sleep. She would never awaken. The previous morning Mrs. Doves had encountered Addie drawing symbols in the dirt of the church’s yard and demanded she leave.

  Minister Doves called a meeting of men in his parsonage where it was decided that Adeline Tenatree was too menacing to be left to her own devices any longer. The men rode to her house that night.

  In Minister Doves’ narrative of that night, he claims that the horses would ride only to the boundary of the Tenatree property and that the men had to dismount and creep with their torches across the wide lawn. He describes how they found her in bed, asleep, and dragged her from her mansion out into the April night.

  After her capture, when they searched her house, they found her own writing among the shelves of books. This, according to Minister Doves, is what damned her. Had she kept her ideas in her own head, she might have been able to hide amongst them, undetected, an eccentric woman.

  Besides her epic tome on witchcraft, Addie wrote seven volumes of ideas and plans for machines, chemical formulas, poisons and medicines, and mathematical theories. She also wrote wild, wicked stories about demons, witches, ghosts, and creatures of interplanetary travel who lived among the stars.

  She wrote about mind-control.

  The men built a pyre on her own lawn, and, at dawn, they burned her. They burned the books. And they burned her house.

  Addie’s burnt corpse was denied a burial next to her parents in the church cemetery, but placed in a pine box filled with wreaths of dried ash leaves and garlic for three days during which no one was allowed to speak her name. She was taken to the crossroads, within view of the cemetery gates, next to a sprawling Oregon White Oak older than any settler in that land. Ceremonies were conducted on the third night during which a series of totems were burned. Crosses were drawn in the ash, and after her burial, the ground was spread with salt.

  The following spring, the oak tree did not bud. Within a year, it was dead, a dry enormous husk. Men of the church cut the tree down. The stump was too large to be dug from the earth, and so they burnt it. But despite setting it to flame over and over, despite the prayers said at the spot or the oil poured over it, the stump of the oak would not burn completely. One side collapsed inward, creating a flat surface framed by a tall ragged back, resembling a burning chair. But it would not turn to ash. The flames died, leaving a blackened stump larger than a man and twisted into the shape of an enormous throne. This new form seemed more solid and eternal than the tree before.

  After that, they left it alone.

  It sat there out behind the church, far beyond the cemetery, across the creek. Stained-glass windows were installed on the back windows of the church so that no one could see it out there, waiting, the enormous black form in the field. The stories started soon after and escalated over the next few years.

  During the winter of 1934, a boy of nine named Jesse Root, dared by his young companions, climbed the tree stump and sat upon it.

  Three days later he died.

  Over the next eight decades, six more deaths would be attributed to the curse of the Witch's Throne. Six people, approximately one every ten years or so, have sat on the Throne and died exactly three days later.

  Sources

  -History of Oregon Western Counties

  -PorticoWitch.com (blog run by local resident Sosie Powell, bio on site but no contact info)

  -Interview with Mrs. Vera White, Portico Historical Museum

  Topics for Continued Research

  -witchcraft

  -curses

  -demons, possession, devil-worship

  -mind-control, projected death

  -pagan festivals

  CHAPTER EIGHT | OCTOBER 25

  “You said you’d tell me a ghost story,” says Juliet as we climb into her bed and cover up. “A special one.” She snuggles into the pillow and pulls the blanket to her chin. “Try to trick me.”

  It’s an old game, one that I started with Lydia to keep her from being afraid, to teach her that ghosts aren’t real, and I continue it with Juliet. For a brief year and a half, when Juliet was first becoming interested and Lydia was hanging on to the last stages of childhood, I had them both asking for the game every night.

  This is how it works: I tell a story that I claim is absolutely-one-hundred-percent-true, and they must decide how I’m lying. The stories are based on cases George researched, watered-down versions, of course, where I describe a seemingly paranormal event in the most convincing detail and try with my best effort to convince the girls the story is true.

  “All right, I’ve got a good one. Absolutely true.”

  She grins.

  “When I was eighteen years old, I saw a ghost.”

  Her eyebrows raise.

  “At a place called the Thompson Woods, when I was in college.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Shhh, listen. I was by myself. They have these hiking trails, and I decided to go for a run by myself.

  “I got lost, and then it got dark. I didn’t bring any water, and I was getting thirsty. I just kept running, trying to find my way back to the trail. Then I tripped over something and fell, twisting my ankle.”

  She gasps. Juliet does not have the stomach for any small injury. The slightest scratched knee sends her into quick-breathing panic.

  “I was fine, but my ankle hurt and I couldn’t run. Then I heard laughing.”

  “Somebody laughed at you falling?”

  “It was more like a giggle. A little girl. She ran from behind a tree, across the open space right in front of me, and disappeared behind another tree, like she was playing hide-and-seek.”

  Juliet looks skeptical. “That was the ghost? A little girl?”

  I nod.

  “Did you talk to her?”

  “No, I didn’t even think of that. My ankle was killing me, and I was too scared.”

  “Of a little girl?”

  “A ghost girl. When she got close, I saw her eyes. They were too bright, like they had lights behind them. I got scared. I looked away. I think I shouted, maybe. Anyway, when I looked again, she was gone.”

  “No way. That did not happen.”

  “I swear. One hundred percent
true.”

  She curls the corner of her mouth into a skeptical half-grin. She resembles George so much, my throat tightens.

  “One minute she was there, and the next, gone. No way a real little girl would have been in the woods after dark. No way could she have run away in the blink of an eye. She disappeared.”

  Juliet furrows her brow, thinking. “What happened with your ankle? How’d you get home?”

  “I was rescued.”

  “By the park rangers?”

  One of Juliet’s favorite stories is the one where her father got lost in Yellowstone and had to be rescued by park rangers. She reveres park rangers over any other officer of public service.

  “Nope, by your dad.”

  Her mouth dropped open in surprise.

  “And Mitch and Rita.”

  “Those people who were just here?”

  “That was the first time I met them.”

  “Did they see the ghost?”

  “No. No one ever saw her but me.”

  She lay back, considering. This is the part where she decides how I’m tricking her. I give her a long time. When I look over, her eyes are closed.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “No.”

  “So?”

  “Easy.” She opens one eye. “Hallucination caused by dehydration.”

  “Very scientific.”

  “You said you were out running. You didn’t drink enough water and dreamed it all.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s how Daddy would explain it.”

  “You’re right. He did.”

  I tell her about the clinic, and her eyes pop open when I mention Calvin. “Uncle Calvin was there, too?”

  “Yep, that’s how we all met.”

  I skip the part about my parents, how over Thanksgiving break they had tried and failed to persuade me to move back home, “for a little while, until I felt ready to go back.”

  And how just this morning, my mother, still convinced of my helplessness, tried and failed to do it again.