Page 107 of The Witch

I thought the secret was that Ethel gave her sister her baby. But that wasn’t the secret at all. The horrible truth hits me like a ton of bricks: Celia killed Ethel to take possession of her identity and gave my grandmother her baby. Then they shared the secret for over half a century.

“Of course, then you had to come stay with us.” Celia rolls her eyes with disgust. “All I could think about was how to get you out of Pemberton as soon as I could, and without you talking Letty into selling to that goody-goody Henry Ziegler. But then I remembered how Letty used to say you thought Pemberton was haunted, and that’s how I got the idea…”

I stare at her in astonishment. “What did you do?”

“Oh, it didn’t take much.” She smiles fondly. “Mick played a few recordings of a woman crying outside your room and pumped cold air through the vents in the middle of the night. We planted a few muddy footprints. Hung that noose off the tree in the backyard. Wrote on the wall. It was sort of fun, actually.”

I can’t believe my ears. I thought I was dealing with Caroline’s tortured spirit, but it was all just Mick and Celia’s handiwork. “What about the grandfather clock?”

“I got up every night and stopped it,” Mick replies. “Then I’d reset it in the morning.”

“It was even better when you got that charlatan Alistair Dixon to come to the house.” She chuckles to herself at the memory. “I read up on those electromagnetic field meters, and I bought magnets to put behind the oil painting and in the clock. I made sure we’d get a positive result in the living room, especially near that painting that always spooked you so much.”

My face burns. I was so convinced there was something supernatural about that painting, and I thought Dixon’s tools confirmed it. But I was tricked by a magnet.

I whip my head to the side to look at Mick, who is also just a dark shadow in the beam of my flashlight. “Why did you go along with this?”

Mick has always seemed like a good person, and he didn’t benefit at all from covering up Ethel’s murder. Why would he do something like this? I wait for his answer, but it doesn’t come. He just stands there, looking at Celia as if he hopes she’ll reply for him. When neither of them says anything, the answer hits me.

“You love her.” It makes complete sense. Ethel wrote in her letter that Celia and Mick were engaged. Celia might have changed her identity, but Mick’s feelings hadn’t changed. “That’s why you do everything she tells you too.”

Come to think of it, they always seemed to disappear from the house at the same time, although they never left together. And that white Buick I saw at the seedy motel… Oh my God, they must have been meeting there while I was staying at the house!

“Mick has been very loyal,” Celia says. “He has done everything that I have asked of him.”

“I would do anything for you, Celia,” Mick says softly.

“Well,” she says, “until recently, at least.”

Her words hang in the air between them for a moment.

“Celia…?” Mick’s voice floats out from behind the beam of his flashlight. “What are you⁠—”

Before he can get out the entire sentence, a loud crack splits the night. It’s only when Mick’s body crumples to the ground that I realize Celia is holding a gun, and she has fired it at him.

“Oh, Julia,” Celia sighs. “I wish you had just stayed locked in your bedroom like I told you to. This whole thing would have had a much happier ending.”

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1692

CAROLINE

How could you?” I sputter.

Now he is crying. I have never seen Archie cry before, and the sight of it fills me with disgust. “It just comes over me, Caroline. I am unable to stop it.”

I shake my head. “You never laid a finger on me.”

He gazes up at me with surprise in his swollen red eyes. “You are my wife. How would it look if my wife were found strangled? Especially after what happened to Temperance.”

Archie rarely speaks of his first wife’s untimely death, and I have believed it to be a sensitive topic. “What do you mean? Temperance died of a fever, didn’t she?”

He is silent.

And that is how I learn that Archie’s first wife was also murdered.

“Oh my Lord,” I whisper. “This cannot be…”