CHAPTER SEVEN.

(I).

It was just after nine p.m. when Fanshawe and Abbie entered the Squire"s Pub. The comfort he felt by being with her-the idealism of a first date notwithstanding-continued to ease the turmoil he"d been dwelling on all day. Additionally, he was pleased by how easy it was to slip his arm around her waist; he could tell she was glad he did that. Closer now, her subtle perfume and shampoo scents were driving him nuts, to an arousing degree, yet not once had he even re-framed the vision he"d stolen last night, when he"d peeped on her and seen her utterly naked.

Several tables full of loud professors took up the pub"s rear section; Fanshawe noticed the two joggers, too, who didn"t seem to be having quite the raucous time as their inebriated elders, which was understandable.

Most of the bar, however, was empty. Perfect, Fanshawe thought. Mr. Baxter stood in attendance, and at first Fanshawe was worried what the proprietor might think of him walking in with his arm around his daughter. The instant he spotted them, though, he seemed to perk up, as if somehow energized by their entrance. Fanshawe let his hand slide across the small of Abbie"s back when they parted for him to pull a barstool out for her.

"Well, hey there, you two," the older man greeted, a crackle in his voice. "How was dinner?"

"Excellent, Mr. Baxter," Fanshawe said, then sat down next to Abbie. "A perfect meal for a perfect evening." He wondered if he should take Abbie"s hand so quickly in front of her father, but before he could finish the consideration, she took his.

"Oh, yeah, Dad, it couldn"t have been better," she augmented, "and Stew says the curries are as good as the Thai places he goes to in Manhattan."

"Your daughter has great taste in cuisine, Mr. Baxter."

Baxter, thumbing his suspenders, failed to restrain an amused frown. "That she does, but not such good taste in what she chooses to let come out of her mouth. I"d like to put my boot to her behind for telling you all that gory baloney about Wraxall and his daughter."

"Listen to Dad," Abbie mocked, looking at Fanshawe. "You should"ve seen how excited he was when we found all those black-magic relics in the bas.e.m.e.nt. *The Salem of New Hampshire!" he said. *We"ll make a fortune from all these sucker tourists!""

"Mind your mouth, girl..."

"Well, it"s true, Dad. For someone who thinks witchcraft is just a bunch of *silly drivel," you sure jumped all over it."

"You did a little jumpin" yourself, missy," Baxter replied, wagging a finger. "So don"t ya go puttin" it all on me in front of Mr. Fanshawe."

Abbie laughed and drifted off her stool. She went behind the bar, to make drinks.

Fanshawe smiled through the vocal volley. "Well, it certainly looks like it"s working; you"ve got a pretty solid business here. But tell me, Mr. Baxter. It can"t all be baloney and drivel, can it?"

Baxter scoffed mildly. "Oh, I"m sure a little bit of that religious mob-law stuff went on," and then he threw a hard glance to Abbie, who was adding ice to a silver shaker, "but it wasn"t nothin" like the witch-killing free-for-all that my mouthy daughter here claims. It was just mostly folks gettin" a little carried away."

Abbie rolled her gray eyes. "What about the tens of thousands of people who died at the hands of the Inquisition, Dad? Just folks getting a little carried away?"

Fanshawe interjected, addressing Baxter. "But, seriously, did the legal authorities of this town really sentence heretics to death by barreling?"

Baxter stiffened up. "Aw, Abbie, ya didn"t tell Mr. Fanshawe all that morbid nonsense now, did ya!"

Fanshawe laughed. "Don"t blame Abbie, sir. I was the one who insisted she tell me."

Baxter made a gesture of frustrated resignation. "Oh, jeez. I suppose there"s a hint of truth to it, but there ain"t really no official record."

Now Abbie began to work the shaker, speaking over the clatter of ice. "The unofficial record, Jacob Wraxall"s diary, testifies that almost a hundred were executed in that fashion, including his daughter, Evanore."

"Abbie, why do you insist on fillin" Mr. Fanshawe"s head up with all that grisly poppyc.o.c.k?"

This was the first time tonight Fanshawe felt s.e.xually distracted by Abbie: the way her b.r.e.a.s.t.s tossed slightly as she shook the iced tumbler, and suddenly he seemed hotly intrigued by the graceful slope of her neck, the hollow of her throat, her gleaming bare shoulders and skin above her cleavage. Fanshawe could"ve winced when the friction of Abbie"s bra from the shaking seemed to provoke her nipples to hardness.

Jeez... Eventually, he dragged his way back to his focus. "But I am curious about what Wraxall"s diary revealed. You"ve actually read it?"

"Oh, sure," Abbie admitted. "I"d be happy to show it to you sometime."

Baxter flapped a hand of disregard. "You can look at it all you want, Mr. Fanshawe, but you"ll be hard-pressed to make out a word of it."

"It"s true that most of it"s not legible," Abbie added. "First of all it"s written in a very old style, and the majority of the lines are blurred-"

"Oh, water damage? Silverfish?" Fanshawe presumed.

"Nope. It was mostly because back then the inks of the day were high in iron oxide content-I actually researched this. Proteins in the vellum stock that they used for paper interacted with the iron molecules. It would look great for a hundred years or so, but longer than that the ink would blur and turn yellow. A lot of the books here are like that unfortunately."

"But you said that most of the diary"s illegible," Fanshawe pointed out. "Most means not all."

Now Baxter b.u.t.ted back in. "There"s a tad you can still make out, but you"re guaranteed a whopper of a headache from eyestrain."

Abbie began to pour the drinks, looking at the shot gla.s.ses as she spoke. "Overall, there was a lot of verification of some of the mysteries of the day. There was a spate of missing persons-mostly children and teenagers-but no one suspected that occult ritualism had anything to do with the disappearances. Instead they were blamed on small scattered tribes of Indians who wanted revenge against the Colonists for killing so many of them when the area was first settled."

"But?" Fanshawe goaded.

"Wraxall"s diary gave the real reason. It was him and Callister Rood, plus the coven members. Every so often they"d s.n.a.t.c.h a kid to sacrifice as an offering to the Devil. There were also entries about certain seasonal rituals they"d perform in the woods at night, on All Hallows Eve, for instance, and Candlemas, and the last day of April, called Beltane Eve. And the rest of the legible stuff is mostly what I told you about the other night"-she hesitated-"you know, about the incest and the sacrifice of Evanore"s newborns-"

Mr. Baxter groaned, a hand to his head.

"And he did go into some detail about some of his rituals and coven meetings," Abbie added.

Fanshawe now fell unreservedly prey to Abbie"s s.e.xual aura when she slid him his drink. d.a.m.n... Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s seemed to lift and then taunt him when she raised her own gla.s.s. "To Jacob and Evanore Wraxall," she proposed with a laugh.

Baxter"s face corrugated. "I ain"t drinkin" to them!"

"Just kidding! Um, to the Witch-Blood Shooter. Cheers."

The three of them clinked the tiny gla.s.ses.

Fanshawe felt the sweet concoction slam into his stomach. The liquor blended with the sight of Abbie coming back to sit with him made him feel light-headed.

She re-took his hand immediately, which appeared to buff off some of her father"s displeasure with all the "grisly poppyc.o.c.k" she"d revealed. I guess he doesn"t mind his daughter going out with a billionaire, Fanshawe thought cynically. "Oh, what was I going to ask next?" He slid his stool even closer to Abbie and was suddenly luxuriating in her scents and exotic warmth. He looked right at her, helpless. Oh, G.o.d, she"s so beautiful...

"Stew?" She was grinning. "What were you going to ask?"

He could"ve twisted his own ear. Idiot! You"re acting like an airhead! "Oh, yeah. You said Wraxall dug up his daughter"s bones-"

"Six-hundred-and-sixty-six days after she was executed," she reminded with an elucidating finger raised.

"What ya got to understand about my daughter, Mr. Fanshawe," Baxter stepped back in, "is she likes to over-dramatize things."

"Whatever," she sniped.

"I"m just curious," Fanshawe continued, "as to what Wraxall did with the bones, like...exactly."

Abbie"s c.o.c.ky smile challenged her father outright. "Dad, why don"t you tell Stew what Wraxall did with Evanore"s bones."

"I"ll do no such thing, girl!" Baxter railed. "It"s all a bunch of hokey codswallop anyways."

Fanshawe went with Abbie"s flow. "Come on, sir. I"d be interested in hearing your interpretation."

Baxter stewed in reluctance, then resigned to the task. "Aw, well, if ya really wanna know... What he done was he made witch-water out of "em."

Of course, the term witch-water rang a loud bell. The gla.s.s, he thought. The caption called it a "Witch-Water" looking-gla.s.s... But he pretended to be unfamiliar with the term. "Witch-water? What"s that?"

Baxter, not enthused to be coerced into the line of talk, poured himself a beer. "Wraxall, see, he boiled them bones of his daughter"s. In a big cauldron-"least that"s what it looks like in his dairy."

"Boiled the bones for what purpose?" Fanshawe asked.

"Well, after boilin" "em, he used the water. Called it witch-water."

"The water was supposed to have occult properties," Abbie augmented. "It"s said to be an invention of the Dark Ages. Witches, warlocks, and heretics used the water for all kinds of things: anointings, incantations, channeling with the dead-"

"-which proves it was all made up," Baxter insisted. "In that silly diary, Wraxall claimed that he performed these rituals in the attic. Said he had a pentagram on the dang floor, written in blood. He also said he had a bunch of big cauldrons up there, and a whole lotta witch-water stored up in bottles from bad folks he dug up over the years. But ya know what?" In his pause, he smiled in self-satisfaction. "It was all a bunch of bull hockey. When the authorities busted into the house in 1675, they searched the entire place, including the attic, and found nothin" of the sort. No cauldrons, no witch-water, no nothin"."

"It does seem that Wraxall exaggerated some things in the diary a little," Abbie accepted.

Baxter crossed his arms, eyes narrowed. "He didn"t exaggerate, missy, he lied. He made it all up "cos he was a nut. h.e.l.l, we been up in that attic a hundred times and looked high and low, and under the floor planks too. Pentagrams in blood? My tookus. There"s nothin" up there like what Wraxall claimed, not now, not then."

You"re right about that, came Fanshawe"s private thought, since I was up there myself. But, "How interesting," he said. "Eye of newt and toe of frog, sure, but I"ve never heard of witch-water. And..." Several cogs turned. He knew he had to be very careful making references to the looking-gla.s.s. They must not even know it"s missing... Of course it wasn"t missing.

It was stashed upstairs in Fanshawe"s room.

"Does anyone know what the water from the boiled bones has to do with looking-gla.s.ses?"

"It wasn"t clear in the diary," Abbie said, "since that section was so blurred out. But my guess is that Wraxall filled the inside of the looking-gla.s.s with the witch-water, and this would somehow produce an occult effect."

Fanshawe struggled to sort her words as her s.e.xual presence continued to blare. Suddenly a consideration broke through: Maybe that"s why the gla.s.s is so heavy. It"s FILLED with the water. "But I a.s.sume you don"t know what that effect was."

""Cos there ain"t no effect," Baxter insisted, then parted to serve several patrons who"d come up to the bar.

Abbie shrugged. "We can only a.s.sume, but my a.s.sumption is that when filled with the water, the gla.s.s might reveal something supernatural if you looked through it."

Fanshawe stilled, but Baxter barked from the bar"s other end, "Which proves even more that it"s just a bunch more silly drivel. I looked through them gla.s.ses myself, Mr. Fanshawe, and so did Abbie. And you know what we saw?" He shot a half-smirk, half-smile to his daughter. "Jack diddly, that"s what."

"I can"t deny that either," Abbie confessed.

But Fanshawe could, couldn"t he? Holy s.h.i.t... It took him a moment to recover and seem unimpacted by this information.

IF I saw what I THOUGHT I saw...

He"d seen the past. He"d seen Evanore Wraxall herself, in the window of the room he now occupied-a woman dead for over three hundred years.

Sounds supernatural to me...

Abbie jumped up, and said excitedly, "Let me go get it-"

Fanshawe threw off his contemplative daze. "Get what?"

"Why, the Witch-Water Looking-Gla.s.s, what else? We keep it in one of the display cases..."

"Oh, don"t bother," Fanshawe interjected. Change the subject! Quick! "It"s just kind of interesting, like a lot of this witchcraft stuff. But that"s the other thing I wanted to ask you-"

Abbie ceased her gesture to leave the bar and fetch the gla.s.s.

Fanshawe felt relieved. "The other night just as I was leaving the pub, you said I should remind you to tell me about-what was it? The gazing ball?"

Her already bright eyes brightened more. "Oh, yeah! It"s just off from the graveyard."

"Yeah, I found it but what is it?"

"I only mentioned it "cos it"s kind of mysterious, and-just our luck-that portion of Wraxall"s diary is illegible too. But it"s interesting because it was one of the things Wraxall bought on the trip he took to Europe in 1671."

Fanshawe nodded at the recollection of the excursion. "Yeah, I remember you saying that he was abroad when Evanore had been convicted and executed."

"Right. But the point is who he visited with during the trip-"

"Aw, Abbie, would ya please stop boring Mr. Fanshawe with all that witchcraft bunk!" Baxter pleaded while serving more customers.

"He visited a number of like-minded folks-"

"Occultists?" Fanshawe presumed. "Other guys who thought of themselves as warlocks?"

Abbie nodded. "And from these people, Wraxall not only learned to sharpen his own skills, but he bought things, things he couldn"t get in the new colonies."

Fanshawe studied her. "Do I want to know what things he bought?"

"No, he does not!" Baxter insisted.

"It was mostly books about necromancy," she continued without pause, "and other things that witches and warlocks used. Crystals said to possess certain powers, hex-charms, pendants and bracelets made from metals smelted to special specifications for the purposes of protection, and of course, ritual ingredients."

"Ingredients?" Fanshawe smiled and repeated his previous reference. "So he really did need eyes of newts and toes of frogs-"

"Nope, none of that. Try vials of elixirs, suspensions, and distillations used for soothsaying, alchemy, divination, stuff like that. The dried blood of virgin gypsies was big back then, oh, and in the diary Wraxall said he bought a lot of aborted fetuses."

Fanshawe gaped.