Free Winds of Salem by Melissa de La Cruz Page A

blackberry vinegar too tart or too sweet? Did Maggie even like scallops?
    “As a matter of fact, I’m a pescatarian. I don’t eat red meat,” Maggie reassured her. “It’s perfect. Really! These are so moist and yummy.”
    Ingrid laughed, sipping her wine. “So is it an ideological or health choice to be a pescatarian?”
    “Ideological to a degree but also a texture thing. The texture of meat makes me think of the poor animal. I worry about lobsters, but I just love the way they taste. Have you ever read David Foster Wallace’s essay?”
    “ ‘Consider the Lobster’?” asked Ingrid.
    Maggie nodded, batting her eyelashes. Matt winked encouragingly at Ingrid. She had scored points. “It does make you think. So sad about the author’s suicide. Dad says he was agenius but he hated all of his footnotes.” She laughed. She was indeed a precocious child, thought Ingrid. “So Dad says you’re doing some research on Salem? The witch hunts and trials?”
    Ingrid was a little taken aback and looked to Matt for reassurance. She wasn’t sure how much the young girl knew about her background.
    “Maggie’s always been fascinated by the macabre, haven’t you, kid? I thought I’d tell her a little about your work… as an archivist and history scholar.” Matt coughed.
    “I’ve been digging into it a little—trying to see if I can figure out what was the spark—what started it…”
    “It was the girls, wasn’t it?” asked Maggie. “Girls my age.”
    Ingrid nodded. “You’re familiar with the story?”
    “A little. I know it started with girls having weird fits.”
    “Yes, Betty and Abigail. It was in the parsonage, the house of Reverend Samuel Parris, Betty’s father and Abigail’s uncle, where they started having those strange convulsions. When they wouldn’t stop, rumors began circulating that the girls were bewitched. Things took a bad turn when one of their neighbors, Mary Sibley, decided to take matters into her own hands, asking Parris’s Caribbean Indian slaves, Tituba and her husband, John Indian, to bake a witch’s cake.”
    “What’s that?” asked Maggie, her eyes full of wonder. She had pushed her plate aside to lean forward toward Ingrid.
    Ingrid looked to Matt. She smiled uncomfortably. “I don’t know if I should… It’s not particularly appetizing.”
    “Go ahead, she can take it.”
    A witch’s cake, Ingrid explained, was to be used for countermagic. It was to be baked with some of Betty’s and Abby’s urine, then fed to Parris’s dog. If the dog became seized with fits, it would prove that dark magic was at play. Or the animal might also run to the witch responsible for the girls’ fits, thereby pointing out the culprit.
    “So what happened?” asked Maggie, breathless. “Did the dog lose it?”
    Ingrid shook her head. “Mr. Parris found the cake as it was cooling, before it was actually fed to the dog. He beat Tituba to a pulp once he found out what it was and chastised poor Mary Sibley in church before all the parishioners, stating that with Mary’s actions, ‘the devil hath been raised among us.’ ”
    “Sheesh!” commented Maggie, and Matt laughed at the expression.
    “Parris’s position in the village was tenuous, and he wasn’t a well-liked man. I think he might have been afraid that his girls would soon be accused of being witches themselves. If that happened, he could lose his job, his home, everything. So he did what he could to shift the focus off his girls, off himself. But with his words to his parishioners, in a sense, the devil had been raised. At that point, other girls in the village began having fits, too. Hysteria spread like a contagion. But now Parris needed a culprit, someone to take the blame. He badgered Betty and Abby to tell him who exactly had bewitched them.”
    “And did they say?”
    Ingrid looked down at her hands. She had lived through the history she was retelling, she knew how it ended. “Sadly, yes. Many people were imprisoned