“Hi, Auntie.” Zee smiled and walked over. Ann was not Zee’s real aunt, but she’d been Maureen’s best friend. Zee had called her Auntie for as long as she could remember.
They hugged each other.
“So great to see you,” Ann said, looking at her. “It’s been a while.”
Zee thought back. It had been over a year. When she came home to visit, she always stopped by the shop to see Ann, but the last time she’d been here, Ann’s shop had been closed, and there was a sign on it saying that Ann had flown south for the winter along with the other snowbirds.
“How was Florida?” Zee asked.
“Warmer than here,” Ann answered, laughing. Then, more seriously, she asked, “How’s Finch doing?”
“Not great.”
“I heard he broke up with Melville.”
“Word travels fast,” Zee said. Salem was more small city than small town, but people still had a way of knowing one another’s business. “Does Mickey know?” Zee asked.
“He’s the one who told me.”
On some level Mickey would be glad. It was no secret that Mickey blamed Melville for his sister’s death. Though Ann had loved Maureen, she held no such grudges. Everyone who knew Zee’s mother well also knew how sick she was. Mickey had always been in denial about her illness, and finding someone to blame was easier for him than looking at the whole truth.
Zee believed that her Uncle Mickey had always been in love with Ann Chase. For Ann’s part, she seemed uninterested and barely tolerated his constant flirting. Every once in a while, she would get annoyed, especially when his rival but bogus witch shop advertised something that she found personally offensive, like the time his aura machine broke and he made coupons sending a bus full of tourists from Cleveland over to Ann’s shop advertising that Ann Chase, one of Salem’s most famous witches, would tell their fortunes by reading the bumps on their heads for half her normal price.
“Group rates!” he said when she yelled at him. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about-I sent you forty- five brand-new customers.”
Mostly, though, Ann and Mickey got along well. To their credit, most of the witch and horror shops in Salem got along. The only exception had been a recent issue about a psychic street fair that came to Salem every October. Almost everyone agreed it was a good thing, but some of the witches, particularly those who paid rent all year long down on Essex Street, where the fair was held, resented the itinerant psychics who came in to make a quick buck during the peak tourist season, then left town. The witches said they were afraid some of the traveling psychics might bilk tourists out of too much money or give them bad advice, thereby sullying the reputation of the year-round fortune-telling community.
For this reason the town had recently begun to require all practicing psychics to be licensed if they wanted to tell fortunes in Salem. Though Zee had wondered exactly how one goes about licensing a psychic (Salem, in the end, had adopted San Francisco’s policies, which included a fee of twenty-five to fifty dollars and a record of permanent address along with a valid Social Security number), she nevertheless thought it was a good idea. She remembered a horrible incident that she and her mother had had with a psychic named Arcana not long before Maureen committed suicide.
AS SHE WAS WRITING “THE ONCE,” Maureen had become convinced that she was not only the writer of one of the great love stories in history but that she was its heroine as well. She began to believe she was the reincarnation of its main character, Zylphia Browne. So absorbed was she in the story that she’d started searching for someone who could confirm her belief.
First Maureen went to her friend Ann, asking for a past-life reading. But Ann, whose New Age belief systems had only recently led her to Wicca and not yet to reincarnation, said she didn’t do such things. The only things Ann read in those days were the bumps on your head and a few astrological charts, and even those were a recent addition to her repertoire of New Age razzle-dazzle.
“Why do you want a reading?” Ann asked. She had of late begun to worry about Maureen, whose behavior had been growing more and more erratic in recent months, causing her to neglect both her home and her child in favor of this fairy tale she couldn’t finish. Though it was based on a true story, like many true stories it was left uncompleted, and Maureen had taken it upon herself to supply the happily-ever-after ending the story needed. But she’d been agonizing over the tale for several years, and it had become Ann’s opinion that not only was Maureen never going to finish the story but that in all probability the story might just finish Maureen.
“I think I was Zylphia,” she told Ann one day when they were at the shop. Zee had been busy flipping through the pages of the book entitled 100 Easy Spells for the Young Witch.
“Excuse me?” Ann said.
“I think I was the main character in my story,” Maureen said. “In another life, I mean.”
At this point Zee looked up. Her eyes met Ann’s.
“What makes you think that?” Ann asked as calmly as she could.
“Don’t patronize me,” Maureen said.
“I’m not.”
“And don’t be careful with me either. I hate it when people are careful with me.”
“I’m not being careful with you. I just asked you where you got this rather unusual idea,” Ann said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Maureen said. “I live in her house, I have the same bad marriage.”
“Not exactly the same, I hope.” The husband in the story had beaten and tortured his wife and essentially held her prisoner.
“You know what I mean,” Maureen said.
Zee was pretending to be absorbed in her book. But they both knew she was listening, so they lowered their voices, which only made the girl listen more intently.
“It isn’t just that I live in her house, it’s everything else,” Maureen said. “I dream about her all the time. I know the torture her husband put her through. I even know how she killed him, or how the housekeeper did.”
Maureen had spent the better part of last summer trying to figure out how Arlis Browne died. It was murder, no doubt, but historic records were sketchy about who had poisoned him. Maureen had determined (for the sake of her story) that it was the Haitian housekeeper and not Zylphia who had administered the poison. Though she was determined to stick to the facts in her storytelling, she needed a sympathetic heroine, she said.
“Strychnine,” Maureen said.
“They didn’t have strychnine in the early 1800s,” Ann said. “It wasn’t even introduced until the 1840s.”
“Yes, but they had the nux vomica plant, which is where strychnine comes from.” Maureen smiled at her discovery. “It grows in India or Southeast Asia, and it is quite possible that it could have come in on one of the Salem ships.”
Zee had put down her book and was now clearly listening to the conversation.
“You can buy the stuff at a garage sale,” Maureen said. “Do you know they used it as late as the sixties in small amounts as a medicine? This incredibly toxic substance, and they were feeding it to us.”
Ann wanted to say that they were still using it, that you could walk into the homeopathic section of any health food store and find nux vomica, which was still widely used, though the amounts were minute. But she decided against telling Maureen.
“Let’s change the subject,” she said, indicating Zee’s interest. Not only did Ann not want to talk about such subjects in front of a twelve-year-old, but she hesitated to talk with Maureen about such things at all. The previous year Maureen had taken Ann’s advanced herbal class for the sole purpose of learning how to poison someone, which hadn’t helped either the class or Ann’s reputation in Salem. Ann was studying to be a Wiccan high priestess and wanted to make sure her respectability was sacrosanct. In those days witches were not yet commonplace in Salem. Ann had been one of the first. Though Ann knew a lot about many substances and their effects, both good and ill, she didn’t think it wise to share any information that could potentially hurt anyone.
Ann tried to avoid talking to Maureen about her story. She didn’t like the idea of Maureen fictionalizing the tale, filling in its historic blanks. Some stories should remain unfinished, Ann told her friend. But Maureen didn’t listen. She was too obsessed by the plight of the young wife and by trying so hard to prove her happily-ever-after. The only real evidence of any ending to the story was the husband’s poisoned body and the worn oarlocks or thole pins in the abandoned boat. How the young lovers had escaped Great Misery Island, if they had indeed escaped at
