And above them, their kill.
Hattie Breckenridge hung by a thick rope from a high branch. Helen could make out the noose around her neck. She wore a white dress that was dirty, stained. Her shoes were caked with mud. Her eyes were closed, her face placid. There was a woman right below her—a woman with light hair. She was smiling and holding something in her hands, something that seemed to glint in the light.
“What’s that woman got?” Helen asked, leaning in.
“I’m not sure,” Mary Ann said, squinting down. Helen saw a magnifying glass on the desk and reached for it. She studied the photograph through it and could see what it was: a necklace. Helen peered closer, and though it was hard to make out, she was sure it was the same necklace with a strange design Hattie had been wearing in the portrait: a circle, triangle, and square all tucked inside each other.
“Who’s this woman?” Helen asked, pointing to the woman holding Hattie’s necklace like a trophy, a sickening smile on her face that seemed to say,The witch is dead.
“I believe that’s Candace Bishkoff. Her daughter, Lucy, had been killed in the fire. The story goes that she’s the one who led the townspeople to Hattie’s that afternoon.”
“Bishkoff? Are any of her relatives still around?”
“Why sure. There are plenty of them. They own the pig farm and smokehouse—Uncle Fred’s Smokehouse—you know it?”
She nodded. “I’ve driven by.”
Mary Ann carefully replaced the photo in its folder and rubbed her hands together excitedly. “Well! Enough of that! Let’s get started with that research! What exactly are you looking for?”
“I’m trying to trace Hattie’s family tree, to find any living descendants she may have.”
I’m trying to save one of them.
Helen continued. “I know she had a daughter, Jane…”
“No one knows what happened to Jane,” Mary Ann said sadly, shaking her head. “She disappeared soon after the hanging and was never heard from again.”
“Actually, I’m fairly certain she went up to Lewisburg and eventually married a man named Silas Whitcomb. They had two children, Ann and Mark. Jane was killed in a fire at the Donovan and Sons Mill when the children were young. Her daughter, Ann, later married a Samuel Gray—they lived over in Elsbury. Samuel and Ann had a son, Jason, and a daughter, Gloria. Samuel and Ann were killed…a murder-suicide, and the children went off to live with relatives.”
“My goodness,” Mary Ann said. “You certainly have learned a lot! You should come volunteer here. We could always use someone with good research skills!”
“I’d love to. Maybe once the house is finished and I have more free time—right now, I’m looking for any other family. And I’d like to know what happened to Jason and Gloria—who they went to live with, where they are now.”
Mary Ann was amazingly adept at using both the computer and microfiche reader. In fact, she was a much faster typist than Helen—her fingers flew across the keyboard.
Together, they looked through genealogy websites, public records, census data, and old newspapers. Helen’s eyes got bleary and she felt a little queasy from flipping through page after page of birth and death records in state newspapers on the microfiche reader. She read articles about the mill fire that killed Jane, about Ann’s murder.
The first thing they discovered was that after Jane’s death, Silas Whitcomb remarried and had four more children, giving Ann and Mark half siblings, each of whom then married and had children.
Through Mary Ann’s skillful navigation of public records, they learned that Mark Whitcomb moved to Keene, New Hampshire, and married a woman named Sara Sharpe in 1965. They had three daughters: Rebecca, Stacy, and Marie. Mary Ann pulled up copies of birth certificates for all three.
“Riley can help me with this tomorrow,” Helen said after they’d been working for nearly two hours. “I don’t want you to have to be here all day.”
“Oh, I don’t mind at all,” Mary Ann said. “I’m actually enjoying the detective work. I had no idea that Hattie Breckenridge had left such a legacy. It’s fascinating that there are living relatives out there somewhere, isn’t it?”
“Absolutely,” Helen said.
“You know,” Mary Ann confessed, “I always thought it was unfair—the way people treated Hattie, the way the whole town talks about her still. I don’t think it’s right, to vilify a person like that.”
Helen smiled at her. “That’s part of what’s pulling me to do this research. I want to know her side of the story.”
Helen took a break and ran across to the general store to get them sandwiches, cups of coffee, and a box of raspberry Danish.
“I brought us provisions,” she announced when she got back.
“I’ve got some information on Samuel Gray here,” Mary Ann said, eyes on the computer screen. “He was one of eight siblings, and his mother, Eliza Gray, lived until 2002. She was in Duxbury, so the kids could have gone to her.”
Helen reached into her bag for her notebook to start writing down the list of names they came up with, but her notebook wasn’t there.
