Sydney smiled, and I felt a squeeze in my chest. She was so beautiful—even more so when her face lit up.
“Bill and I heard a crash in the dining room area. We found a cat in there but never did find anything broken.”
Sydney’s eyes widened as she whispered, “A ghost.”
Ignoring her comment, I kept talking. “When I was shining my flashlight around, I saw something on a wood beam, but I didn’t have time to really look at it. After we searched the house and found everything was okay, I went back into the dining room to find this black cat that had been in the house and following us around.”
“How did the cat get in there?”
“No idea. Maybe some kids let it in, thinking it was funny. Anyway, it was sitting on the fireplace mantel, looking up at the spot where I had shined my light.”
Sydney rubbed her hands together. “Oh, this is getting good! Maybe a ghost cat.”
“A ghost cat?”
She nodded and smiled.
“Okay… anyway. It gets better. Look at what was carved into the wood.”
I handed her my phone, and she stared at the symbol.
“Mike, this is the symbol that’s on the coin.”
I nodded. “I know. I didn’t want to say anything until I attempted to find something out about it.”
“Did you find anything?”
“No. I did, however, find an old blog that a woman here in Salem used to have. It talked about a secret society. I remembered that was what Quinn had said in the letter you found.”
Her eyes lit up. “Yes! Do you think the symbol is part of the secret society?”
With a half shrug, I replied, “I’m not sure. I even scanned the picture into the computer and tried to do a reverse image search, but I came up with nothing. Well, not nothing, I guess. It led me to that woman’s blog.”
“What was her name?”
“She never says her name. Her blog posts were sort of crazy and off the wall. She talked a lot about the witch trials and how it was all a conspiracy theory.”
“Conspiracy theory?”
“Yes, she hinted that the women’s deaths had nothing to do with them being accused of being witches. More like they knew things they weren’t supposed to know.”
Sydney frowned. “What kind of things?”
“Here, let me pull up her blog and show you.”
Sydney handed me back the laptop, and I couldn’t ignore the way my body felt when our hands touched. By the way she drew in a quick breath, I knew she’d felt it, too.
I typed in the web address I remembered from last night and waited for it to load. But all that popped up was a message that said the server couldn’t be found.