After a few moments of awkward silence, Verlaine tried to lighten the mood. “Hey, at least we weren’t here for the ice storm in July. Or the time everyone at a screening of How To Marry a Millionaire started bleeding from the eyes and they blamed CinemaScope.”

“I have a feeling—before this fall is through, we’ll wish that’s all we had to deal with,” Nadia said, which in Verlaine’s opinion wasn’t helping the mood one bit. But Nadia remained focused. “What I can’t get over are how many reports there are about witches, witchcraft, et cetera. All the reports are about rumors—‘town lore,’ that kind of thing—but it seems like witchcraft has been a pretty open secret here for a long time.”

Verlaine pointed out, “Some of that is just New England for you. I mean, you have the Salem witch trials—women who fled Massachusetts because they were scared by the witch trials—that kind of thing.”

“Right, of course,” Nadia said, “but this goes way past that. So there have to be other witches in town, besides me and—and Elizabeth.”

As Nadia spoke, she glanced over at Mateo, but he didn’t argue. His arms were folded, and the expression on his face was strange—almost sad. He noticed both of them watching him and sighed. “I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that the curse is real. And looking through these records—do you see how often all the weirdness in town gets blamed on one of the Cabots? Not just Millicent. Any of us—almost all of us. Sometimes it was true, because of the curse. Sometimes it wasn’t true, because of the witchcraft. It’s like I have to rewrite everything I know about my family. About myself.”

“It has to be rough,” Nadia said softly. “I’m sorry.” They gave each other a look then, one of those looks that seemed to raise the room’s temperature by a few degrees and make Verlaine feel like she ought to find an excuse to leave.

Instead, she slid over the volume that read 1815–1820. “I only found one report about witchcraft, actually. This one.”

“This is almost two hundred years old?” Nadia began turning the pages, but very gingerly.

“A reproduction. The really old issues are too fragile now; they made copies of a lot of it back in the nineteen-fifties. But it’s all verbatim.”

They all gathered together, shoulder to shoulder, as Nadia found the correct issue. It took awhile to locate the story they wanted—newspapers were different then, with tiny type and vague headlines and no sections dividing the news by topic. But within a couple of minutes they had it:

“‘The sailors met their mischance while diving off the lighthouse for so-called “buried treasure,” perhaps believing it brought by privateers returning from the Caribbean,’” Verlaine read aloud. “‘But such treasure is well known to be only the possessions of one Goodwife Hale, an early settler of Captive’s Sound. Rumormongers and gossips claimed she had fled the Salem witch trials, and to be sure, she was a peculiar character, known for home medicines and squirreling away odds and ends not valuable to any rational mind. Yet she was a poor woman who never owned the gold or jewels that the sailors boasted they might find. Compatriots in the tavern who overheard the doomed men’s braggadocio about treasure tried to tell them better, but they paid no heed—and have paid the price.’”