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.
“Nadine, I’m real sorry about your loss. But I didn’t have nothin’ to do with Danny’s sickness or death. Or any of the other things you just talked about. Me and Granny have always been good to you. You know that.” I jerk my chin toward Bellflower. “This man’s got y’all fooled. If Satan’s in this so-called courtroom, he’s working through Bellflower. Or whatever his real name is.”
A roar goes up from the townsfolk, bouncing off the high ceiling of the church. Bellflower frowns at me and stalks back behind the pulpit, banging the gavel. “The accused will not speak unless called upon to do so.”
Sheriff Murphy grabs me by the arm and pulls me back down into my seat. “Girl, if you don’t behave and hush your mouth, I’ll put a gag on you and tie you to this chair.”
“So that’s the way it is, huh?” I hiss. “They can say whatever they want about me, but I can’t defend myself? You’re a fair-minded man, Sheriff. Always been a good man, by my reckoning. I delivered every one of your young ’uns and every one of ’em’s still alive. Can’t you see how wrong this is?”
Sheriff Murphy just looks away, shamefaced.
Bellflower dismisses Nadine and calls Al Northrup to the stand. He looks like he ain’t slept in a month of Sundays. Here we go.
“Mr. Northrup, my condolences on the loss of your son.” Bellflower is doing the fake sympathy thing again, his voice all syrupy sweet. My bile rises. “Can you tell us what happened on the night of the fire, to your best recollection?”
“I . . . um, I was there with Harlan and his girl. Abigail. We was just watchin’ the service when I noticed Miss Doherty. She come walking through the crowd. Somethin’ weren’t right about how she moved.”
“In what way?”
“She slithered, like . . . like a serpent on two legs.”
Oh, good Lord.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir, and when she got to the front, and was facin’ you, I saw her eyes go all white. Then the fire started.”
This makes me even more nervous. Everything else he’s said is hogwash, but this . . . this could have the ring of truth to it. My eyes must do something strange when that fiery surge washes over me. More than one person has said the same. It’s the truth in the middle of the lies that’ll prove to be my undoing.
“And after the fire started, you lost sight of Harlan?”
“Yes, sir. And that girl, she was just standing there, off to the side, watching as everything burned. She was smiling, almost like she was proud.”
“Thank you, Mr. Northrup. I won’t ask you any further questions. You’ve been through enough.”
One by one, Bellflower calls more witnesses. People I’ve tended while sick. Men and women Granny has known since they were babies. They tell their tall tales—each one wilder than the next. A man, made of shadow, walking backward through a cornfield. A cat with human eyes. Children bitten and scratched in their sleep by unseen entities. Blood coming up from wells and springhouses instead of water. A black wolf with glowing, red eyes.