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

  On the way back to my cold bedroom, I stop at Lydia’s closed door. A strip of light shines from beneath, but I don’t hear any sound, not even the TV. I go to my room, change into pajama pants and George’s torn and faded SIU sweatshirt, and with all the lights on, bury myself under the blankets. I need sleep. Tomorrow, I do it all again. Day 152.

  Eyes closed, I imagine George at the crossroads by the Old North Church cemetery, lit by the full moon and stars in a blue-black sky, the stark white one-room church in the distance behind him, and before him, the enormous twisted remains of a century-oak cut down in its prime, covered in mud and moss, petrified by time and weather. It looms over him. He leans back, staggers beneath its presence.

  And then what? The specter of a nineteenth-century witch appears with murderous intent? Beverly Donneville arrives in her flowing robes and overwhelms his brain with her psychic powers? Or, like the police believe, he stumbled and fell in a tragic accident for no good reason at all?

  Maybe Beverly Donneville will go away. Not everyone in the world can believe her, right? George had his own followers, other skeptics. They exist, too. They won’t disappear just because he’s gone. They can’t.

  I jump when the phone rings. I dive for it, expecting Calvin’s face on the screen, a photo I took of him last time I saw him, on George’s last birthday.

  But no.

  I freeze.

  The screen is lit with the photo of my dead husband. His laughing eyes, scruffy beard, curly brown hair. His name is at the top: GEORGE.

  My stomach clenches. All day, all these memories: Martha Sassaman and her ghosts, the group working together, Calvin staring into my eyes, George on our first date, his psychic reading, the Demon Cabin, Beverly Donneville waving her arms in the air, Mitch and Rita arguing, rescuing me. It’s all too much memory, too much past.

  The screen goes black and he disappears.

  I jump up from the bed.

  George is calling me. His phone isn’t with his belongings upstairs. He still has it. He’s still alive. He needs me.

  My hands are shaking as I pick up the phone. I am shaking so violently, it takes me three attempts to return the call.

  The phone rings and rings. No answer. No voicemail message.

  Holding the metal box, George met Ted Sassaman in the upstairs hallway. It had taken Ted less than fifteen minutes to arrive at the house. I was still trembling, but I held my notebook in pretense of activity, as if I were of vital importance to the proceedings.

  “A pressure plate,” said George, presenting the metal contraption to Ted. “Hidden under a rug, it sends out a signal whenever someone steps on it. It can be hooked up to anything, a speaker, smoke machine, whatever.”

  Ted took the device from George and shook it. “I’ll kill him. I’ll see him go bankrupt. I’ll—”

  “Now wait a minute, Teddy.” Martha was in her robe and slippers, her hair wrapped in a gauzy scarf.

  “I swear to God when I’m done with him…”

  “Your brother didn’t do this.”

  “Who else, Mom? Who else would do something like this?”

  “Me, all right? I made all that stuff up.”

  I felt an elbow in the rib and jumped. I hadn’t noticed George sidle up next to me. He winked and, with a grin, mimed a writing action. I held my pen ready to take notes.

  “I guess I went a little overboard.” Mrs. Sassaman patted at the scarf on her head. “I see that now, especially what it’s done to you. I didn’t see before how much it upset you, Teddy.”

  Ted shook his head. His arms fell to his sides, and the wire from the pressure plate contraption slid to the floor. “So...Dad’s voice? You never heard it?”

  “I hear your dad’s voice all the time. But when you heard it…that was me.”

  “The shadow in the hall?” asked Mitch. “We didn’t find any pressure plates there.”

  “Oh, that’s an old trick I used to play as a girl. You put a mirror and a piece of cloth in the venting. When the furnace kicks on, the cloth blows over the mirror and when the light hits it, it makes these strange, tall, wavering shadows. Used to terrify my little brother.”

  Ted stared at his mother as if she’d suddenly begun to levitate in front of the group.

  “What about the lights turning on and off?” I ask.

  She laughed out loud. “That’s what the pressure plate switch is for, honey. A couple wires covered in cardboard and tape under the rug.”

  “Mom, how did you…how’d you figure all that out?”

  “What do you mean?” Mrs. Sassaman’s fists went to her hips; her mouth pressed into a hard line. "Do you know who designed the feeder we used in the barn for forty years? Who built it from scraps? Me! And then your father filed the patent for it and got all the credit.”

  "You’re angry at Dad? That's what this is about?"

  “No! I did hear your father’s voice,” she said. “That part is true.” Mrs. Sassaman turned to the group. “And then I had the idea…I wanted my sons to hear their dad’s voice, too. To believe he was watching over them. I thought it would be a comfort to them. So I set it up.”

  “Mom—”

  “Please, Teddy,” She held up a hand. “Let me explain. When it worked, when you believed… I wanted to keep going. I forgot how much I loved building things. Do you know I won the county science fair in 1948? For my demonstration on electrical efficiency of a Faraday cage? Did I ever tell you that?”

  “Uh…no, you didn’t.”

  “I didn’t blame your father. I asked him to file that patent. I had three kids, animals to care for, a house to run. I had no time to research the process, to fill out paperwork. The thought of navigating the condescension of one man after another during the filing process exhausted me. I'm not mad at your father. I'm mad at myself. I wish I'd tried harder. When I think of what I could have learned, what I could have built... I'm angry that I couldn't do it all."

  Awkwardly writing while standing, I scribbled the details of Mrs. Sassaman’s story. Next to me, George slid his arm around my waist. He tapped the open page of my notebook, at the top, the first line I’d written hours earlier: George says Mrs. Sassaman is making it up. He says it was her all along.

  I pace my bedroom. George is dead. He has been dead for 151 days. His phone is missing. But the one person who cannot have his phone is him. He cannot be calling me because he’s dead. And ghosts don’t exist.

  Do I really believe that?

  I do.

  George Drake proved to me again and again that paranormal events were stories created by the human imagination. I watched him reveal the pressure plate, perform the psychic’s bit, trick Beverly Donneville into exposing her own lies. Psychics don’t communicate with spirits. Houses aren’t haunted. Ghosts don’t exist.

  I force myself to sit on the edge of the bed. Deep inhale, slow exhale.

  Again.

  What is the trick to this story? If ghosts aren’t real, what is the explanation?

  Someone has George’s phone.

  Someone who is trying to scare me.

  Someone like Beverly Donneville.

  My hands tremble only slightly as I call Mitch’s number.

  JOURNAL OF THEA DRAKE | MAY 29

  You did it. You snuck on to the property and filmed yourself on the Throne. I wish you would tell me how you gained access. I know it’s not through Fisher. He still hasn’t responded to my emails or requests for access.

  I’m hoping you didn’t do anything illegal.

  I talked to Mrs. White today at the museum about Jesse Root. I wrote a summary here of every known detail about what happened to him. Read it carefully. I know you want to provide the rational explanation for every death blamed on the Throne, but have you carefully considered each case? Each one has just enough ambiguity to give those who want to believe in the curse sufficient reason to do so. You’re not going to change anyone’s mind with conjecture. We need facts. And so far, I haven’t found one.

 
I don’t know. See what you can come up with.

  1934 – Jesse Root

  Jesse Root was eight years old in the winter of 1934 when he was playing with a group of children on the frozen creek that cuts between the Old North Church and the fields at the crossroads where the remains of Adeline Tenatree was buried.

  The stump of the dead oak tree that marked her grave had been burned but not destroyed. It rose “like a monstrous black demon’s throne” from the frozen ground, according to Mr. Charles Benjamin, the reporter who wrote about the accident in the Portico Times. The kids must have found the spot irresistible for their games and fantasies.

  According to Benjamin, who interviewed the kids and their parents in the days after, the kids were all daring each other to skate across the frozen creek. Once they all completed this dare, the next challenge was to touch the black tree from which Adeline Tenatree had been burned. At some point, they began to talk of its resemblance to a chair, a throne, and one of the kids, no one recalls who, called it The Witch’s Throne. From there, they naturally dared each other to sit on it, but only one boy did so: Jesse Root.

  Many of the kids went to the frozen creek every day, free to play over winter break. Three days went by after Jesse sat on the Witch’s Throne, and the story spread through the whole town. Jesse was something of a celebrity, enjoying his popularity, so when his friends dared him again to sit on the Throne, he readily started sliding across the ice to get to it.

  Only this time, the ice cracked as Jesse crossed. He fell in. Each child swore that none of them could help. “We couldn’t move,” said Jesse’s eleven-year-old brother Sam, “like some force was holding us back, keeping us from helping him.”

  Two of the boys managed to break their paralysis and ran to town for help, but within two minutes of falling into the freezing water, Jesse Root slipped beneath a sheet of ice and drowned. One of the boys came back with his father, Allen Richardson, who was able to pull Jesse from the creek, but he was already gone.

  “White with blue lips,” said Mr. Richardson. “I could tell it was too late.”

  The Roots were not farmers or millworkers. Bob Root owned a newspaper stand that he set up on the road to the mill that sold cigarettes, newspapers and magazines, and other assortments that men bought on their way in or out of the mill. In the morning, he sold coffee. At lunch, ham sandwiches. After work, the rumor was he sold “medicines” or shots of moonshine in glass bottles. The men brought their bottles back, and Ol’ Root would fill them up.

  Bob Root was proud of his son. He told Mr. Benjamin that his boy didn’t hold with any nonsense about witches or goblins, didn’t believe in that fairy tale nonsense. His boy was practical. What happened to him was a tragedy, but it was also a coincidence that had nothing to do with that rich, crazy woman. “My boy didn’t do anything wrong,” he told the newspaper. “And he sure as hell didn’t do anything evil.”

  Sources:

  -interview with Vera White, Portico Historical Museum.

  -Charles Benjamin, “Boy Drowns in Hardtack Creek,” Portico Times, December 29, 1934.

  CHAPTER NINE | OCTOBER 26-27

  By 11 p.m. the following night, I’m sleep-sitting in a cracked vinyl chair by the rental car agencies at Portland International Airport.

  I’m mentally and physically drained from the exertions of the past twenty-four hours. The packing, the traveling, the lying. I kept explanations to my family on why I suddenly needed to fly across the country purposely vague and bureaucratic. I claimed the police had summoned me for a final interview, a required bit of paperwork, a few small but necessary details regarding George’s accident that I needed to take care of in person.

  The girls reacted as expected to my sudden plans: Juliet with overexuberance, bouncing on her toes, asking me to bring her a present. Lydia with hostility, scowling at my explanations. Ben pulled up soon after, and Lydia threw herself into his truck without saying goodbye.

  Juliet clung to me before she boarded the school bus. “Are those people going, too? From last night?”

  “They are, actually. We’re all going together.”

  “Good, I’m glad you’re not going by yourself.”

  I packed quickly, and shortly before Mitch and Rita picked me up, my parents pulled up to the house. I watched my mother walk around to the kitchen door carrying her damn slow cooker under her arm.

  “Oh, Thea!” she exclaimed when she burst into the kitchen. “I would have thought you’d already left.”

  She had listened the previous evening to my shady explanations for returning to Portico with a few sighs and dubious mmmhmms, but readily agreed to watch the girls.

  “Thought I’d get dinner started,” she said, placing the slow cooker on the counter, “maybe even tidy up a little. Dad can work on the yard.”

  “You don’t have to do any of that.”

  “Well, the girls have to eat!”

  “I mean the cleaning and the yard work.”

  “Oh,” she swatted her hand at me as she plugged in the slow cooker. “It’s no problem. Give us a few days and we’ll have this place whipped into shape.”

  “I’ll be back Monday afternoon,” I reminded her, “before school’s out. It’s only for the weekend.”

  “Of course,” she busied herself around the kitchen, opening cabinets, selecting cans and jars from the supply she’d delivered the day before, “we’ll have a ball with the girls. Dad’ll put the tent up. We can have a campout.”

  “Lydia will probably spend most of her time with Ben.”

  “Oh, I know all about the boyfriend,” said my mother with a raised eyebrow. She pointed a ketchup bottle at me. “Don’t think I haven’t been keeping an eye on that.”

  I jerk awake as Mitch returns with the keys. Rita hands me a large coffee.

  We find the rental car and spend the next six hours driving south on I-5. I’m exhausted but unable to sleep. I hunch in the back seat, my head against the cold window. Twice I offer to take a turn driving, but Mitch declines.

  “Hang tight back there. Prepare yourself. We have major confrontations ahead of us.”

  A high wave of panic crashes over my thoughts. Confrontations? Not my forte, especially not with the woman who was George’s biggest rival. Why the hell am I on this trip?

  The phone.

  I must find out who has George’s phone. I haven’t mentioned the call to Mitch or Rita yet. I keep that detail to myself, most likely because Rita will take that information from me and run with it. She’ll take over. And I’ll let her.

  The same with my mother. Before I left, I managed to ask her if she’d seen George’s phone.

  “No, it wasn’t in the bag with the rest of his things,” she said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. His clothing was in the bag. His boots and shirt they found in his car. But not his phone.”

  “You didn’t think that was strange?”

  “I didn’t think about it at all. I thought about you and Lydia and Juliet. Getting you home, taking care of you. What would it matter where George’s phone was? What does it matter now?”

  I didn’t tell her. If she knew about the phone call, my mother too would have taken over, called the police. And I would have let her. My father would have patted me on the back, praised my coming to them as bravery.

  My eyelids fall heavy and snap open at every bump. The scenery is the same anonymous interstate landscape, the bright lights of fast food restaurants and twenty-four-hour gas stations. If not for the hills and forests, we might have been driving I-55 back in Illinois. Finally, at Medford, Mitch exits the interstate and we drive the last hour on a two-lane highway. I close my eyes and drift into uneasy sleep.

  I feel our arrival rather than witness it. Mitch slows the car more often, turns, speeds up, slows again. When the car stops completely, I open my eyes. We’re at Portico’s single stoplight on Main and Tiller. Early morning sun peeks through the buildings.

  We have ar
rived during the All Hallows’ Eve Festival, and Main Street is decorated in fall colors: russet, mahogany, gold. Pumpkins and dried corn husks frame every doorway.

  To my right is the post office, a squat, square mid-century blonde-brick building with Portico, Oregon in thick block letters on the window. The U.S. flag, high on its pole, snaps in the wind.

  To my left is the second-oldest building in town besides the Old North Church. A two-story nineteenth century bar, seemingly open at all hours, so familiar to residents that it has no official name and is referred to only as The Corner. Last spring, on nights we didn’t eat at the inn; we ate at the Corner.

  It’s a little after 7 a.m., and the smell of coffee and hot fat fryers drifts from the building strong enough to permeate the windows of our rented Hyundai. Through the lighted windows, I see a waitress balancing two plates on one arm while carrying a coffee pot to a front table.

  “I’m starving,” says Mitch.

  Rita’s knee is bouncing. She tilts a foot-tall gas station coffee to her lips. “Just get there.”

  The light turns green. Main Street ends and we pass empty lots strewn with paper wrappers, beer cans, a bleached and decaying easy chair. Black graffiti covers several rundown houses and buildings: pentagrams and crosses, moons in various phases, other runes I don’t recognize.

  Outside the town, the landscape becomes more natural, but not any friendlier. Gone are all signs of civilization except the road, and the green takes over. Tall pines stand sentinel between the thick pillars of the redwoods. I press my nose to the window but still cannot see their tops.

  We wind deeper into the woods, and the arms of oaks reach over the road. They look ancient, imposing, all-knowing. I understand, entering this domain, why fantasy books assign magical properties to trees, why fairy tales take place in forests, why the old witch lives in the darkest part of the woods. These trees hold ancient mysteries I can never understand. They have witnessed scenes I could never imagine.

  As we drive the trees become denser, blocking the sun, the green more intense.