“That’s not weird,” Seth said. “That’s just reality. It sucks, but what are we supposed to do about it?”
Angel shrugged, and as Zack and his friends threaded their way toward their regular table, they went back to their lunch. “You want to go over to the old churchyard after school and see if we can find a grave for Forbearance Wynton?”
Angel cocked her head. “Why would there be one? If they burned her as a witch, they wouldn’t bury her in the churchyard, would they?”
Seth rolled his eyes. “So if we find her grave, we know they didn’t think she was a witch, right? At least we’ll know more than we do so far.”
“Okay,” Angel said. “Unless…”
“Unless what?”
Angel glanced at Zack and his friends, who seemed to have forgotten about her. Yet she still had that strange feeling that something was wrong, that something was going to happen. She let out the breath she didn’t even know she’d been holding in a long sigh. “Nothing, I guess. I’ll meet you after school.”
The bell ending lunch hour rang a few minutes later, and as she picked up her backpack, Angel glanced one last time at her cousin.
This time, their eyes met.
And she saw a dark, cruel glint, as if he knew something.
But what?
As his eyes remained fixed on her, and the strange feeling of apprehension gripped her once again, Angel turned away and hurried out of the cafeteria.
The day wore on, and by the time the last bell rang, Angel was beginning to wonder if she’d just been imagining things in the cafeteria. But when she came to the second floor landing and started toward her locker, she knew that she hadn’t.
Zack and his friends were clumped around Zack’s locker, and though he tried not to be as obvious as he’d been in the cafeteria, Chad Jackson kept glancing at her as she started down the hall toward her own locker.
And she was certain Zack was trying not to laugh.
As she drew closer to her locker, the strange feeling of apprehension grew stronger.
Had they done something to it?
She remembered last year, when someone sprayed paint through the vents of her locker back in Eastbury.
Her step slowed.
Maybe she shouldn’t even open it, she thought. The only thing inside was the heavy history book she didn’t want to lug around all afternoon, and since Mr. McDowell hadn’t given them homework tonight, she didn’t need to take it home.
She glanced back at Zack, Chad, and Jared.
Jared was gone.
But Zack and Chad had been watching her. And they’d done something — she could tell by their postures and expressions, with Chad trying too hard to look innocent.
Making up her mind, she turned away from her locker, hurried back down the stairs, and left the school by the front door. Seth was waiting for her. “I think they did something to my locker,” she said as they started down the steps and across the lawn. They walked toward the cemetery behind the Congregational church, and Angel told him how they had stood around, eyeing her as if hiding a secret, when she’d gone to her locker.
“What are you going to do?” Seth asked. “You have to open it sometime.”
“I know,” Angel said. “I just didn’t want to open it with them standing right there. I just didn’t—” Her words caught as a lump rose in her throat.
“How about we go back after we look in the cemetery?” Seth said. “They’ll be gone by then, and whatever they did, we’ll clean it up. Okay?”
Angel nodded, still struggling to control the sob in her throat. Why couldn’t they just leave her alone? What had she ever done to them?
And what had they done to her locker?
Ten minutes later they were standing at the gate to the old cemetery that was all but hidden behind the Congregational church. An enormous tree loomed in the exact center of it. Nearly bare of leaves now, its branches were silhouetted against the sky, its trunk was absolutely straight, and its canopy was almost perfectly round.
Angel stared at it for several long seconds. “How do they keep it looking like that?” she finally asked.
Seth grinned at her. “They don’t — it just grows that way. It’s supposed to be the tree the town was named for.”
“But trees don’t grow that way.”
“That one does,” Seth said. “Come on — the oldest part of the cemetery’s over there.”
He started toward a far corner of the graveyard, beyond which was a small stone chapel with an abandoned look that made Angel feel almost sorry for it. “What’s that?”
“It’s supposed to be the first church built when the town was founded. They’re always talking about making it into a museum but they never do.”
As they drew closer to the old chapel, the shiny granite headstones near the gate gave way to more weathered stones, and when they came to the area directly behind the ancient stone church — which couldn’t have seated more than a hundred people, even if they were packed inside — the headstones were so weathered that whatever inscriptions had been chiseled into them were barely legible.
“Let’s start here,” Seth said, stooping down to try to make out the name on a stone that was leaning at a precarious angle and was missing one corner.
Even the once jagged break had long ago been worn smooth by the centuries of harsh New England weather that had all but eroded it away.
Seth squinted at the inscription. “ ‘Jabez Conant,’ ” he read. “Wow! He died in 1672!”
Angel crouched down in front of the next headstone. “ ‘Abigail Conant,’ ” she read. “ ‘Wife of Jabez.’ ”
“When did she die?”
Angel reached out and brushed some moss away. “It looks like 1661. Or maybe 1667.”
They moved on down the row, reading all the inscriptions they could, then started up the next one. Most of the stones were too worn to be completely legible, though, and even most of those they could read were so faint they weren’t sure they were reading them right.
Halfway up the third row, they found an area neatly bordered by a rectangle of granite blocks that were about four inches wide and three feet long. In several of them, holes had been bored that showed signs of rust. “I bet there used to be a fence mounted in the stones,” Seth said. “But it’s so old the whole thing rusted away.” Within the rectangular plot bordered by the granite footings, which was about twenty feet long and almost as wide, there were at least two dozen headstones, one of which was much bigger than the others.
Even from the path in front of the plot, both Seth and Angel could read the name engraved on the largest stone: THE REVEREND PERCIVAL WYNTON PARSONS.
“The guy who wrote the book,” Seth breathed. “The one about the witches.”
Spread around the large headstone were many smaller ones; they found grave markers for the minister’s wife, his son, two of his grandsons, and his father, along with the stones marking the graves of the men’s wives, and at least a dozen infant children, some of whom had been buried without names.
Three of the women who had married into the Parsons family and were buried in its plot — by far the largest in the cemetery — had been named Wynton.
“I bet there’s a Wynton plot too,” Seth said when they’d deciphered the inscriptions of as many of the stones as they could.
Five minutes later they found it.
It was near the northern edge of the graveyard, and, like the Parsons plot, was surrounded by granite blocks with the same holes bored in them that might too have once supported a wrought-iron fence.
They searched the headstones, brushing away the moss that covered most of the inscriptions, and were almost ready to give up when they noticed one more stone.
It was set apart from the rest of the grave markers, and as Seth and Angel gazed at it, they both got the
