Page 76 of You'll Be Sorry

Raquel wasn’t having any luck with Rita Louise Locke. She tried out Rita Louise Light.

“Let’s take it from the top,” Theo suggested. “Our poor skeleton, ostensibly the author of the ledger and this diary, was a midwife.”

Adams and Raquel nodded.

“So she’s documenting the births and deaths she attends in her professional ledger—major life events where she lives.”

More nods.

“Are these major life events also included in her diary? Because it sounds like the personal entries have more detail?”

Raquel glanced up. “Shit. That makes sense. Give me the dates again?”

She started flipping pages as Adams rattled off the entries in question. Theo followed along over her shoulder. She could definitely find one paragraph per day. And thankfully, the diary entries were longer, looser in construction compared to the cramped spacing of the ledger. But the faded script still made them challenging to decipher.

“Okay…” she murmured at last. “I think I have a match for the first birth in question. And there is more information here. Savage, Joseph and Sarah, I’m guessing. Sarah expressed much…something…and terror? Pain in head. Not…rouse. Umm, it’s going to take more effort to figure these out, but yes, according to both the midwife’s personal diary and professional register, a baby was born that day. Though again, no current genealogical databases include this information.”

“Why was the ledger thrown in the well with her and not the diary?” Theo asked.

Raquel glanced up in surprise. She hadn’t even thought about that. And she honestly had no idea.

“The ledger appears to be a professional record,” Adams tried out. “Meaning its presence was well known? Versus a private diary…”

“I’ll buy that logic. Okay, so they—the villagers, a particular evil person?—sealed the ledger in the crockery, along with…” Theo couldn’t seem to mention the baby bones out loud. “Then threw the crockery and the midwife into the well. To cover something up, personally? Or was it a societal statement?”

“You mean public punishment?” Adams frowned. “Drowning was a common ‘trial by ordeal’ for witchcraft. If the accused floated, she was obviously a witch and then retrieved to be burned at the stake. Or, she drowned, proving her innocence. Yeah, poor accused.”

“As a midwife, she wouldn’t be the first female in a position of power to be targeted.” Raquel glanced up. “But the ledger and the…remains…being tossed in the well as evidence of her guilt…I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Maybe we need to search more boarded-up wells,” Theo murmured. He pursed his lips. “Five babies in five months, that’s what the midwife’s records are saying. All of whom died within twenty-four hours of birth. I know infant mortality rates were high, but that sounds…intense.”

“The kind of thing that might raise the ire of an entire village,” Adams agreed. “Hence, the female caretaker had to be in cahoots with the devil. Okay, so maybe that explains the young woman’s fate. But why eliminate records of the births? Seems like there’d be even more reason to document them.”

Raquel gave up on her computer altogether. “The magnitude of what was done to this poor woman. Shoving her alive into a dark pit—because while we keep saying a well, it must’ve been mostly dry by then. You wouldn’t contaminate drinking water with a corpse, letalone we know she climbed out of it enough to try to escape. It feels to me like that kind of horrific act was more than just a punishment—it was a way to be totally done with her. Out of sight, out of mind. And including the ledger, ensuring those five births would vanish with her…”

“Like they wanted those infants erased as well?” Adams filled in softly.

“Why would you ever want that?” Theo asked.

“No mother would,” Raquel stated.

The men peered at her with troubled expressions.

“Maybe the entire village cast her into the well as a witch, but I’m telling you now, no woman would want all traces of her baby gone,” Raquel insisted.

“Unless,” Theo murmured.

“Unless what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe the issue is, we don’t know enough about the infants. Or what happened leading up to the births.”

“Jesus,” Adams murmured.

None of them had anything to say after that.

Detective Adams took his leave. Theo walked him out, dog in tow. Raquel conducted several more historical record searches with various iterations of Ruth/Rita Locke/Light before giving up. She got plenty of hits, given the sheer repetition of names back in the day, but none felt right.

She returned to the crumbling notebook, carefully working her way through each page, immersing herself back into the rhythm and feel of colonial English, until she could make educated guesses at blurred or missing words. So many perfectly mundane entries. Date, weather, location, perhaps a seasonal task such as candle-making, yarn spinning, et cetera. Interspersed with brief accounts of attendedbirths and deaths. Even these paragraphs were minimalistic in tone. The who, when, what, where of major life events, with occasional punctuation points of tragedy.