The Survivors: Point of Origin (book 2)

The Salem Witch Trials, pt. 1

It took two days to track down my contact at Christie's to arrange the sale of the diamond, and in that time, I started reading into the sordid history of Salem, Massachusetts.

It was more than a little odd, I realized, that I had never done this before. I knew little about Salem and the witch-hunt that sent my ancestors into exile. Perhaps I couldn't bring myself to hear the real story. Maybe I was afraid. Maybe I hadn't cared until now.

I was so shocked to learn the real story of witch hunts throughout history that I barely got past that before we arrived in Salem. I found that witch-hunts in Europe predated those in Salem by nearly 1,500 years. In 367 ad, the Roman Emperor, Valerian, declared witch hunts fair game. Later, in the 12th century, accusations, convictions, and executions happened frequently—and off the record—across Europe. But in 1231, Pope Gregory IX had ordered an inquisition into the practices of witchcraft, and by 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared that the practice of witchcraft was punishable by death, taking many of those off-the-record pursuits into the public—and legal—arenas. From that point on, it seemed like any kind of witch hunt was acceptable. A book called the Malleus Malificarum, known as the Hammer of Witches, was published in 1486, and it gave detailed instructions on how to locate, identify, and persecute witches. I read in more than one place that it has been estimated that millions of people were executed across Europe in witch hysteria.

But in Massachusetts, it all happened in 1692, and 19 people were convicted and hanged—not burned at the stake like so many believed—though countless more were accused and others died in other ways. Some documentaries I watched said 200, some 500, other sources claimed 150 were accused in all. Whatever number they cited, I didn't believe it anyway. There was, after all, no record of the 26 souls who I knew to be accused, imprisoned, and then exiled. There was no record of the 14 who survived. And in the public record, there was no record of the deaths of the 19 who were hanged. For all the records there seemed to be, there were numerous holes. Sources of doubt. Places where whole parts of the story—like the 26 accused children who were exiled and never tried, much less convicted—were missing.

The one question history had never had been able to answer was, Why Salem? Why 1692? I knew that the hysteria over witchcraft happened in Salem in 1692 because there had been some matter of witches in the village—the people I knew as our Survivor elders. I felt guilty that so many innocent people died when so many of my own guilty ancestors survived.

Mark, Parker, and I boarded a train to Boston a few mornings later. My two traveling companions had been growing increasingly affectionate, but Mark was still on edge after he lost Parker in the city. I had returned to our hotel suite after leaving Cole, and Mark came back without her an hour later. We spent the rest of the night tracking her, at first remotely from the hotel, and later that night, traversing the city on foot looking for her. At dawn, we found her standing outside the Ferragamo store at 52nd and 5th Avenue, staring at the window displays. She greeted us cheerfully, but never offered a word about where she'd been. Two trackers on a twelve-mile island, and we couldn't locate one warm-blooded, unprotected girl. It was odd.

From Boston, we went immediately to Salem. I headed straight for the Visitor Center in the middle of town.

"All the hype about you being this experienced global researcher, and your strategy includes starting at a visitor center?" Mark quipped.

"Never underestimate looking for answers in the most obvious places," I said.

Towns in New England looked so drastically different from other places I'd spent time in within the states. The streets and buildings were so much older, for one. And everything was so close together, tightly and conveniently packed within even a regular person's definition of walking distance. But they had a quality I couldn't quite place that set them apart from the towns and cities in the South, on the West Coast, and especially those in the Northwest.