Where There's Smoke полностью

“Susanna Martin,” she said, and added immediately, “The witch of Amesbury.”

“All right, Miss Martin, is it true that Natalie Fletcher has been attending black masses at which blood sacrifices are made?”

She suddenly burst out laughing.

“What are you laughing at?” I asked.

“Well may I laugh at such folly,” she said. Her voice sounded different. Not only had her language changed abruptly, but so had her normal speaking voice.

“Do you know that Natalie has been attending black masses?”

“I don’t desire to spend my judgment on it,” she said. “If she be dealing with the black arts, you may know as well as I.”

“Her mother...”

“A curse on mothers!” she said. “Was not Sarah Atkin­son of Newbury a mother? And did she not, when I was sorely taken with the witchcraft, report to the magistrates that I had once in weather foul walked to her home from Amesbury and entered her kitchen with the soles of my feet dry? And when she said to me, ‘I’d be wet to my knees if I’d come so far,’ was I not right to reply, ‘I scorn to have a drabbled tail?’ A curse on all mothers, a curse on the goodwife who saw me melt into nothingness and then reappear in the form of pecking, pinching birds. And a curse on fathers, too, and on thee, and on thine own fa­ther! A curse on John Kembal, to whom I sent the van­ishing puppies, as black they were as the heart of Jesus, to leap at his throat and his belly, immune to his swing­ing ax! ‘In the name of Jesus Christ avoid!’ he shouted, and the puppies relented, but though I gave him puppies enough, I curse him still.”

“Miss Martin,” I said, “why is Natalie coming here to­morrow?”

“To hear me tell of Tituba the slave, half-black, half-Carib, and of the tricks and spells and voodoo magic she brought from the Barbados to Salem Village.”

“I don’t think she’ll be here,” I said. “She’s moved out of the apartment on Oberlin Crescent. The place is empty.”

“Thy head is empty,” she said.

“Her mother spoke to her last night. Natalie told her she was passing over into a new life. Do you have any idea what that might have meant?”

“It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.”

“Do you know where Natalie’s gone?”

“I would say if I knew. I do not know. Look!” she shouted, and pointed toward the ceiling. “There sits Goody Cory on the beam, suckling a yellow bird betwixt her fingers.”

I looked up. There was nothing on the ceiling.

“Don’t you hear the drumbeat?” she asked. “Why don’t you go? Why don’t you go?”

“Where? Where can I find Natalie?”

“There stands Alden,” she said. “A bold fellow with his hat on before the judges. He sells powder and shot to the Indians and French, and lies with Indian squaws and has Indian papooses.”

“Is Alden someone Natalie knows?”

“Ask John Indian,” she said.

I didn’t know whether John Indian was real or imag­ined, but I knew there was no point in asking Susan How­ell or Susanna Martin any further questions. I’d put her on guard back there when I’d asked how she knew Natalie was not in the Oberlin Crescent apartment; it was then that she’d gone into her Salem Village routine. True delusion or diversionary tactic, there was no getting her out of it now.

“Well,” I said, “thanks a lot. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

“When did I hurt thee?” she asked, and grinned.

I walked to the door.

“No further questions?” she asked.

“None,” I said.

“No more weight?” she said, and grinned again.

I went out of the apartment. She closed and locked the door behind me. I pressed my ear to the wood. If she was making a hurried telephone call, I could not hear her di­aling. I walked to the elevator and rang for it. I didn’t know much about the history of witchcraft in Salem but I did know that when Giles Cory, an accused witch, was being pressed to death in an open field next door to the jailhouse, rock upon rock being piled upon his chest in an effort to get him to confess to the crime of witchcraft, he had maintained silence almost to the end. And then he had said only, “More weight.”

It was beginning to look very good.

The killer had made only one mistake that I could see, the very mistake that had transformed him from a body snatcher into a murderer. He should not have slain Peter Greer, the mortuary attendant. Up to that moment, his crime had been strictly small-time stuff, punishable by a nickel stretch in jail or a thousand-dollar fine, or both. But his need for a corpse had been so overriding that he’d committed the biggest felony of them all, and that had been a blunder.