Defending the Dead (Relatively Dead Mysteries Book 3) by Sheila Connolly Page B

and stick to it, or you’ll never finish. She really should know more about the whole series of events, and about the history of the town, in order to put her own findings into context. Assuming she made any findings. It might turn out that she had no personal connection at all—maybe that flash while she was in Salem had come from somebody just passing through town—but that wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the line: she could go back again and see if she could sense any lingering emotional charge. At least she could prove something . She decided to devote a couple of days to filling in her historical blanks, and then go see what was what on the spot.
    Thank goodness for the Internet! While she didn’t assume that the quick summaries she found there were entirely accurate or unbiased, at least they provided a framework for further research. After a few hours of trolling websites, she had learned: the first inklings of anything amiss had come in January of 1692, and the whole thing had petered out (when some cooler heads prevailed) by April of 1693. Between those two dates, at least twenty-five people had died, nineteen by hanging, one pressed to death (the description of that was gruesome), and at least five had died in jail waiting for trial. But that twenty-five were out of a total of over a hundred and sixty who were accused. Fifty people had confessed, but mostly because they knew that would spare them from a death sentence. Salem had accounted for the nineteen hanging deaths, between June and September of 1692. She didn’t recognize any of the names on that short list, but that didn’t mean a lot since she knew little about her own seventeenth-century ancestors.
    A lot of accusations had been flung about in Andover as well as Salem, which didn’t make sense to Abby when she looked at a modern map, but when she turned to earlier maps she realized that Andover and Salem had butted up against each other back then. What was then Salem Village was now Danvers. The village had broken off from Salem, then a thriving port city, which was what had sparked a lot of conflict even before the witch trials, since Salem didn’t particularly want to lose some of its best agricultural land. The more she read, the more she came to dislike a lot of people in the former Salem Village—they seemed to have given an awful lot of time and energy to fighting each other as well as the town of Salem. Maybe there was something in the water? Or it could be that kindred spirits kind of gravitated together—in this case, people who relished a good fight and who could hold a grudge for years.
    There had been accusations of witchcraft in neighboring towns, but Abby decided to set those aside for now. Salem Village had been the epicenter, the focal point, the catalyst—where it had all started. Of all the victims hanged at Salem, nine of them had come from the village.
    Abby sat back in her chair and considered what she had just learned. Apparently she had been sadly ignorant before now. While most people would nod knowingly when someone said “Salem” and “witch” in the same sentence, their understanding of the events didn’t go much further than that. What had really happened? And more important, why had it happened—why there, why at that particular time? Abby dug back into her research.
    By late afternoon she had compiled a list of proposed causes for the frenzy. It made entertaining reading, but there was no consensus. Candidates included: hysteria (whatever the heck that meant), Lyme disease, Jimsonweed overdoses (Abby found a very amusing story about such a problem at Jamestown, but nothing for Massachusetts), encephalitis, fungus poisoning—including ergot—post-traumatic stress (based on what trauma?), religious awakening, and fear of Indian raids. Those were just the most popular theories.
    “Huh,” she said to herself. Okay, she assumed all the surviving legal and personal documents had been examined closely for