Serpent's Kiss
Page 20

Ingrid laughed. "Now I really want to see it," she said teasingly, trying to reach for the door handle. He caught her wrist. The gesture wasn't hard or violent, but it was firm. He pulled her toward him, took her face in his hands, and kissed her. She melted at his touch, his breath rushing against hers. Something about his kisses made her feel more alive than she had ever felt. He smelled good, like freshly cut grass, an ocean breeze, like life itself.
"I thought you said no secrets," she reminded him, although she had plenty of her own.
"I'll show you, just not today. I promise." His voice was full of breath. "Come on, let's go upstairs." He was so damned cute, Ingrid couldn't help but smile. He took her by the hand and guided her to the master bedroom. At this point she couldn't utter a word, so she let herself be led into the room, which was so bright, the sunlight uncovering every corner. There was no hiding here. He threw himself on the bed. There was little furniture: a low-slung king-size bed on a white platform, an orange chair shaped like an S, a desk.
Matt was propped up on the pillows, observing her, his arm muscles bulging with his hands behind his neck. She noticed the tint of red in his brown hair, highlighted by the sun. She stood there, her arms dangling at her sides.
"You're too far away," he said. He seemed more self-assured than he had ever been with her. She envied him for that. Perhaps it was because he was in his element here, in this house built from love and pain. "You're driving me crazy, you know."
She smiled. She loved him. She did. It was undeniable. She was crazy about Matt. It was corny, but she liked this little game, and yet she wasn't sure whether she was ready to make a full-on confession. That scared her the most, more than the sex.
She steeled herself. "How can I help?" she asked, her voice suddenly husky.
"You could start by taking off your clothes." He gave her a huge teasing grin.
"Here?"
There was something very fun and exciting about all this. She felt like a kid. She had never done anything like this before, had never been undressed in front of anyone, other than, embarrassingly again, her mother and sister. She trusted Matt. She wanted to do it. She had bought and worn lingerie for the occasion, and the slinkiness under her dress made her feel sensual, but her hands were sweating again. She ran them along her h*ps and waist to get rid of the wetness.
"Hmm. That's nice," said Matt.
"Oh!" she said surprised, unaware she was being sexy. She reached for her side zipper and pulled it down.
Matt smiled encouragingly. "Come closer," he said. "My vision's blurry."
"No touching yet," she said.
"No," said Matt, shaking his head, looking very serious. "No touching."
She let her dress fall to her ankles and stepped out of it, moving closer to the bed. She was left wearing a short slip, with a garter belt to hold up her stockings. Freya had picked everything out, had bullied her into wearing nothing underneath the slip.
Matt gave a low wolf whistle. He seemed to really be enjoying himself, leaning back, watching her. Ingrid felt his gaze like a physical caress.
He rose from the bed, kneeling beside her and, hands trembling, began to gently undo the garters and peel off her stockings one by one. She let him. He pulled the pins out of her hair, letting it fall on her shoulders. Then she let him pull the straps of her slip off her shoulders so that the wisp of silk fell to the floor. She turned away, using her hair and her hands to cover herself.
She had to tell him. She didn't know how. The words were caught in her throat, as if she had swallowed gravel.
Matt stepped back. "Turn around," he said. "Let me see you."
She did as she was told, bracing herself. She had never been undressed in front of a man before. Had never let anyone get this close to her before - not just her body, but her heart ...
"Come here," he growled, as if he couldn't wait a second longer, and he pulled her down to the bed, his strong arms circling her waist. He kissed her stomach, sending flutters through her body.
She pulled his T-shirt over his head, laid down on the bed so that his body covered the length of hers. She could feel his excitement as he pressed against her. And still he was kissing her, all over. Now her heart was thundering in her chest and she wanted to feel him - all of him - against her. She slipped a hand underneath the waistband of his jeans and he groaned against her. With her other hand, she helped him pull his pants down and he kicked them off. He was so hot, his body molten, that Ingrid felt as if she would melt. There was nothing between them now and she gasped, her knees shaking violently, as he leaned closer ... closer ...
"Are you crying?" he asked, looking down at her. "Am I doing something wrong?"
Ingrid pushed herself up on her elbows, horrified. "No ... it's nothing. It's ..."
Matt was looking at her so strangely, and she was overcome by an overwhelming feeling of shame and embarrassment. Was she the one who was doing something wrong? After all, she had no idea what she was doing. She'd never been with a man.
"Wait a minute, you are crying!"
Her face was wet, and she was mortified by these sudden tears that wouldn't stop. She scrambled for her dress and ran out of the bedroom, grabbing her trench. Matt was right behind her, confused, his face and body red.
"Hey, come on, where are you going?" He reached for her shoulder.
She wanted to say something, to explain, but all that came out was a huge embarrassing sob. He had done nothing wrong. It was all her. She was a virgin. She couldn't tell him; it was much too shameful to admit. How could she continue to pretend to be anything but what she was? She just couldn't tell him. She buttoned up her coat over her slip, grabbed her dress and purse. She was ashamed for being such a wimp, for all of it, and she hated herself.
"Ingrid." He stood in front of her, na**d, his whole body flushed red, looking ever so hurt and vulnerable. "Please tell me what's wrong."
"I have to go," Ingrid managed to get out, then hiccupped. "I'm sorry."
"Okay," he said, and then she was gone.
Chapter thirty-four
Burning Down the House
Joanna was still in her study, engrossed in research on the North American witch-hunt era. Most books focused on Salem, mentioning other witch-hunts like cursory afterthoughts. During the Salem trials, the circle girls, Ann Putnam as leader, had achieved what had been tantamount to rock-star - or reality-star - status. Their hunger for fame grew exponentially as their accusations spread. Even today, their celebrity eclipsed other contemporaneous tragedies.
Joanna had gleaned, however, that before Salem, between the years 1645 and 1663 alone, eighty people had been accused of witchcraft in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and of those cases thirteen women and two men had been executed. And these were only the recorded cases. The problem was that records of witch trials in the more rural areas were often poorly kept, if kept at all, thereby vanishing altogether from the annals of history.
Joanna finally came upon a story that had taken place nearby, lo and behold, the same year as the date given for The Milkmaid - a coincidence? Or her intuition?
"In February of 1658, sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Howell of the Isle of Wight (now named Gardiners Island), daughter of Lion Gardiner, accused fifty-year-old Elizabeth Blanchard Garlick, a wet nurse and healer of Seatalcott in the east riding of Yorkshire on Long Island East Hampton of having bewitched her. These allegations came while Howell, who had recently given birth and likely was suffering an infection, lay in her sickbed, delirious with fever. There, she claimed to see the apparition of Goody Garlick in a corner of her room as well as a dark shape in the other (assumed to be Garlick's familiar, a black cat). 'Goody Garlick is a double-tongued woman. Because I spoke two or three words against her, now she is come to torment me,' cried the young Howell, who then accused Garlick of being a witch. Howell died shortly afterward, but her deathbed accusations were enough to launch a charge of suspicion of witchcraft against Elizabeth Blanchard Garlick, wife of Joshua. Other allegations from townspeople followed, most of them spurred on by one Goody Davis, who was reported to have had a cantankerous relationship with her ex-neighbor from the Isle of Wight. Depositions were gathered by the town's authorities."
Since 1645, more than a dozen cases of witchcraft had been tried in the New England courts, but this was a first for East Hampton, and the local court, having no experience in witchcraft trials, was at a loss. Because East Hampton, then Maidstone, fell under the jurisdiction of Connecticut, Elizabeth Garlick was sent to stand trial in the Court of Magistrates at Hartford on May 5, 1658. The jury found insufficient evidence to prove Garlick's guilt, and she was sent home with a letter from the courts admonishing her fellow townspeople and requesting that all "carry on neighborly and peaceably without just offense to Joshua Garlick and his wife and they should do like to you."
Still, Elizabeth Blanchard Garlick, whether a veritable witch or not, was not the witch Joanna was after. First off, she was older than the wraith she had seen; second, she had been propitiously acquitted. But this passage elucidated something else for Joanna.
East and South Hampton may well have fallen under the jurisdiction of Connecticut then, but North Hampton itself existed inside the disoriented pocket, on the seam, and most pertinently outside any greater jurisdiction. Whatever had happened in North Hampton would not be in any records, for there were none of the town itself. Even today, it wasn't on any map, or if it were, only as an accidental pinprick, a cartographer's faint memory or dream, a dot, a smudge. North Hampton would always be its own independent and invisible - rather than indivisible - little country.
Joanna's witch was from North Hampton or, more accurately, Fairstone, as it was called in the seventeenth century. She had lived here. She had been tried by the local magistrates and given a verdict by a jury made up of her own neighbors and accusers. She had been hanged from the oak that stood above the burial mound in the woods.
What Joanna had also gathered from the case of Goody Garlick was that around 1658, a fervor had begun to stir in the briny air of East Long Island, the first wave of a witch-hunt.
A sudden realization hit Joanna: something had happened in Fairstone, something important that the witch needed to communicate to her. Joanna would need to travel back in time to find out what it was. It wasn't her specialty, but she could perform it. Norman's brother Arthur was the time-traveler of the family. She also had to ensure that she arrived before the girl was dragged to the oak beneath whose long, gnarly branches a hole would have been dug.
The cell phone lying on her desk buzzed, making Joanna jump. She picked it up and read Harold's name on the screen. She didn't exactly feel like being interrupted, especially not during her epiphany, but it was her friend Harold, and she answered the call.
"Hello, my dear!" boomed his hearty voice.
"Harold! How are you? Good of you to call."
"What are you doing next week?" he asked. "My daughter, son-in-law, and Clay will be out of town; they are off to spend the day with his side of the family. I was wondering if you might be free?"
Joanna ran a finger down a paragraph on Long Island history while talking at the same time. "I am but why don't you come over to the house instead? Thursday is perfect since Freya's cooking. She's a marvelous cook. It'll be divine!"
Harold cleared his throat. "Thursday? Are you sure?"
"Of course," Joanna said, distracted. "Thursday."
"Well, that is very generous of you. I would love to join you. I'll bring some wine!"
"I'm in the midst of a project. Talk later?"
"Of course, my dear," said Harold.
Joanna hung up and continued to read.
Chapter thirty-five
Like a Wheel Within a Wheel
The diner on the county road outside North Hampton was a classic oblong, 1950s-style eatery with black-and-white-checkered floors, red vinyl booths, swivel stools along the counter, blinds on the windows, and cheesecake topped with preternaturally red strawberries inside a glass case. It was aptly, or unoriginally, called Diner, loudly conveyed by the gargantuan neon sign across the front.
It was replete with the usual crowd one found in such places, often themselves in disoriented pockets: the weekend or prom-night teens, the honeymoon or wordless couples, widows, families with screaming infants, truckers, die-hard preppies with shirt collars flipped up, women with bejeweled fingers and Liz Taylor hair (in the latter years), or anyone who had, no matter the time of day, a hankering for flapjacks drenched in hot maple syrup with eggs any which way.
Jean-Baptiste sat in a back booth in a perfectly tailored handmade suit with a red silk pocket square, his cashmere coat slung over the back of the banquette. He was wearing sunglasses even though it was pitch-dark outside. Freya spotted him right away - it was hard not to notice him - and slid into his booth.
"You're looking good, Freya," he said in a velvety baritone with a hint of southern lilt. He peered up at her from behind his dark, rimless Ray-Bans and gave her his understated wry smile. Just one corner of his lips that normally turned a tad downward peaked up ever so slightly, and the pronounced grooves at the sides of his mouth creased a little more deeply, indicating his pleasure at seeing her.
"I was just thinking the same about you, Jean." She stared silently at his handsome face, the faint grizzled mustache and goatee, the perfectly smooth bald head, his lovely amber-brown skin. Jean-Baptiste Mesomier brought to mind the word suave, as well as other sibilant ones - smooth, sexy, savvy, and so forth.
"Hungry?" he asked.
"Sure, I could go for the short stack special with the works. Just got off of a long shift," she explained.