The Witch of Tin Mountain(84)

“Not with what you pulled in the back of that truck,” Sheriff Murphy says.

I scan the crowd for any friendly faces, and finally see Abby toward the back. She meets my gaze and gives me a sad smile. She looks pretty today. She’s wearing a different black dress that does wonders for her figure. A wave of sadness washes over me. If I end up dyin’ today, I’ll be glad we had what we had. I never thought I’d fall in love or feel any kind of wanting after what my daddy did. But I’d felt it with Abby.

Ebba and Caro aren’t there, and I hope that means they’re keeping vigil with Granny. All I’ve done is worry about home since I got arrested.

Bellflower knocks a gavel against the pulpit. “Good people of Tin Mountain, we have gathered to bear witness against the enemy in our midst. Miss Gracelynn Doherty has been accused of arson, murder, and witchcraft. Let it be known that as a god-fearing people, it is our duty to cast out transgressors. We must purge the canker of evil before it festers and grows.”

Somebody cries out. It’s Aunt Val, standing off to the side of the altar. She grips her stomach like she’s in pain and howls. More theatrics.

Bellflower points at Val and shakes his finger. “See how the witch tortures this woman. How she suffers in the grip of wickedness?”

A murmur goes up from the crowd. Before long, other people are twisting in their pews and crying out. Some start speaking in tongues. It takes everything in me not to roll my eyes. These people have gone insane. Every last one of them.

Bellflower hammers the gavel on the pulpit like he’s driving nails into my coffin. “Do we have anyone who would bear witness?” he intones.

“I will.” A woman stands off to my left. It’s Nadine Clark, the woman whose baby died of colic after being healed by Bellflower. A baby I’d delivered two months ago, healthy and perfect.

She comes forward. Bellflower holds out a book—most assuredly not a Bible—and Nadine puts her hand on it. He murmurs something and she nods, then takes a seat next to the pulpit, crossing her legs at the ankle. She seems calm and sure of herself, and it frightens me more than Val and the folks who went into hysterics moments before. Calmness is credibility.

“Mrs. Clark, can you tell me how you know the accused?” Bellflower asks.

“She delivered my baby and checked in on us after his birth.”

“And was there anything unusual about her behavior when she attended you?”

“No . . . not then. She was nothin’ but kind and helpful.”

I wrinkle my brows. Not then. What the hell is she getting at?

“I see. But in the days after?”

Nadine’s lip trembles. “It was around the first of May when things took a turn. Danny started runnin’ a temperature and got sicker as the days went on. And . . . and I started seein’ things.”

At this, a hushed murmur comes from the crowd.

The first of May was when Bellflower showed up. Walpurgis Night.

“What did you see, Mrs. Clark? Can you describe it to us?”

Nadine crosses and uncrosses her ankles and fiddles with the clasp on her handbag. “Well, I suppose it sounds crazy, but I started seeing shadows around Danny’s crib. A cold draft would blow through the room, even though no windows were open. I’d hear whispers in the night, and felt a dark presence, like somebody was at the end of our bed, watching me and my husband.”

The hair stands up on my arms.

“Go on,” Bellflower urges. His eyes glint in the red-stained light coming through the window depicting Christ’s Passion.

“Danny just kept gettin’ sicker, no matter how hard I prayed. His fever would come and go, and he coughed constantly, all through the night. Wouldn’t nurse, neither.”

Nadine’s lip trembles again and a tear breaks loose from her eye and plops onto her lap. Even though she’s helping convict me, I can’t help but feel sorry for a mother who’s lost her only child.

Bellflower hands her a handkerchief and she dabs at her eyes. “And then one morning, just before dawn, when I went in to check on him, he was floatin’, pastor. Above his crib.”

“Come again?” Bellflower cranes his neck, confusion etched across his sharp features.

“He was floating. Levitating, like. Just a few inches off the mattress. That’s when I knew the things I’d been seein’ and hearing were real and that Danny’s sickness weren’t only of the flesh, but an oppression. That’s when I brought him to you.”

There’s more murmuring from the crowd. Bellflower comes out from behind the pulpit and starts up his characteristic pacing. He raises a hand to hush the noise. “And the boy got better, after I’d laid hands and prayed over him, yes?”

Nadine nods. “Yes. For a couple days. He was himself again. It was a miracle.” She breaks into tears again, her mouth forming a pained rictus. “And then I found him one morning. All cold and still. I tried to wake him. Held him, rocked him. But he was already gone.”

I clench my fists behind my back. It sounds like some sort of ague—a common fever that could have likely been cured if Nadine had come to me or Doc Gallagher instead of believing in Bellflower’s nonsense. So much senseless death. So much suffering.

Anger surges through me, steaming like hot pavement after a cold rain. I stand, my knees shaking. They won’t give me a chance to speak my mind, so I’m gonna take it myself.