Healer Chapter 2

I opened the door and found a tall police officer standing on my stoop.

“Ms. Scarlet Hawthorne?” he asked.

I cringed as I always did at my mother’s idea of a joke. “Yes, that’s me. How can I help you?”

“I’m Nathan Whitworth. I’m investigating a claim that you have charging for services under false pretenses. There has been a report that you say that you heal the sick and take money for this service, but you don’t heal the person and instead make them come back for more “treatments”. What do you have to say about this?”

I stared at him a bit dumbfounded. “Come in. There has been a serious misunderstanding, not that I’m surprised.”

I showed Officer Whitworth into the bright drawing room and gestured for him to sit. I took my place in the second wing backed chair.

“Okay. Wait,” I stood up, went to the desk in the corner and found the form that I needed. “This is the disclosure form that all patients must read, understand, and sign before I do any treatment,” I said as I handed it to him and sat down again. “I’ll tell you what I tell all my patients. I do not claim to heal anyone and that page in front of you says that explicitly. All I claim to do is to relieve people of the symptoms caused by underlying disease; I do not remove the disease itself. For example, if you look at the form, there is a blank where we write in the disease that the person is suffering from as diagnosed by their doctor and you’ll see that it says that this is merely for reference when researching the associated symptoms. In the next blank we write any treatment the patient is receiving from their doctor and any side effects associated with that. And in the third blank we write what symptoms and side effects the patient wishes to have removed. Then there’s the customary paragraph of various disclaimers that my lawyer said should be included in the litigation ruled world we live in. Now, if you’d tell me who made such a claim about me, I can find my copy of this form for that person and we can talk about what they said I was supposed to do and what I actually did. There’s another form that patients fill out after their treatment has been completed that lets me know of their satisfaction, though that one is not required.”

Officer  Nathan Whitworth spent two minutes reading the form that I’d handed him. He looked at me, looked at the page, leaned back and seemed to think about what I’d told him. He scratched his chin as he leaned forward to look at me closer. “What you’ve told me seems to clear your name, so I guess I need to see the form of Ms. Jacqueline Cox so that I can look into this further.”

I groaned audibly and Officer Whitworth’s eyes widened at the sound. “Ms. Cox is not one of my patients. She’s a member of the Reverend Brown’s group of, for lack of a better word, cronies that has been trying to get my family thrown out of this town since before 1692.” I heard my voice rising so I took a deep breath. I hadn’t been able to vent my frustration on this subject for years and things were just getting worse. “Look, I’m sorry that you had to come all the way out here, but Ms. Cox has no experience with my abilities and so any claims she’s making about me are fake. I have a feeling that I could turn the tables and press charges on her for making such claims,” Officer Whitworth nodded, “but I’m not. I’d rather just forget about it.” I stood up. “If there’s nothing else, I’ll show you to the door.”

Officer Whitworth stood, too. “I’m sorry to have bothered you. I guess I should have called and asked if Ms. Cox was a client before coming out here and annoying you. I’ll go now.” We walked to the door. “It was nice to meet you, though,” he said a bit awkwardly.

“Yeah, it was nice to meet you, too, I guess. Maybe under different circumstances things would be better. Well, Goodbye.” I shut the door as he walked away, and leaned against it, thinking.

I went into my bedroom and pulled the large, ancient leather bound book from inside my bedside table. I went across the hall into the upstairs office where I did most of my studying and crafting. I pushed some scrap fabric and lacewings to the side of the table and set the book gently on it. The book is over four hundred years old and is essentially my bible. It is everything that my ancestors have compiled about our talent with hints and instructions for everything they could think of that a person in my position would need to know. There were also places where they vented their own frustrations with neighbors that felt that “our kind” didn’t belong in this town. My ancestor, Mary Pickworth, was here during the Witch Trials of 1692, and gave a very detailed account of the massacre. She was never charged, which, given our history, is astonishing in my opinion. I suspect that her relationship with the mother of Simon Bradstreet, one of the Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders, had something to do with it. Mary kept a list of the women and children she treated, I assume as insurance should she find herself charged with witchcraft, and Mrs. Bradstreet was listed as suffering from a very painful bowel ailment. I flipped the pages carefully, reading the thoughts of Elizabeth Brown (who woke up one morning in 1789 to find a Bible on her doorstep; it’s now on the table in the foyer for whomever might wish to read it), Victoria Grady (who was anonymously invited to a group bible study at the church in 1868, but arrived to find an exorcism being prepared for her), Charlotte Andrews, my grandmother, (who in December 1941 found a letter in her post box blaming her for the attack on Pearl Harbor) and the rest of the strong women in my family who stood up against the hatred facing them.

I live just outside of what had been Salem Village and is now known as Danvers, Massachusetts in the house that has been occupied constantly by my family for as long as we’ve lived in America. It started as a small one story farmhouse with just two rooms and expanded over the years to have the two drawing rooms in the front separated by the foyer with a dining room attached to the back of the bright drawing room and the kitchen tucked behind the stairs. A small spare bedroom can be found behind the dark drawing room and upstairs are 4 more bedrooms. There are two bathrooms, one upstairs, one down. It’s not a huge house, but a lot of children have been raised here and a lot of memories have been made. There had once been 150 acres of farmland around the house, but they’d long since been sold off, leaving just one acre that has long since overgrown.

I took out the new leather bound journal that I was using to create a more concise “bible”. Fahrenheit 451 was forgotten for the night. I had a stack of papers where I’d transcribed all of the information on various illnesses that my ancestors had dealt with. I had already sorted through it and put it all into sections based on the disease causing the symptoms as well as a miscellaneous section to house the many lists of symptoms and treatments without any specific causes. I opened the journal to where I’d left off in the cancer section and consulted my notes on the illness. I was trying to remove all the duplicates and find all the secret jewels hidden amongst the general chatter about life. I wrote in the journal for a few hours before turning off the light and heading to bed.