"So perfect," Mom interrupted, her face lighting up. "You were plump and healthy, with curly hair and big eyes, and you looked up at me… and I knew you were the one. In that moment you became my child, and I would have killed anyone who tried to take you away from me. The lawyer said that your birth parents were too young to raise a baby and had asked him to find you a good home." She shook her head, remembering. "We didn't even think about it, didn't ask for more information. All I knew was, I had my baby, and frankly, I didn't care where you had come from or why."
I clenched my jaw, feeling my throat start aching. Had my birth parents given me to someone to keep me safe, knowing they were in danger somehow? Had the lawyer been telling the truth? Or had I just been found somewhere, after they were dead?
"You were everything we wanted," said Dad. "That night you slept between us in our bed, and the next day we went out and bought every kind of baby thing we'd ever heard of. It was like a thousand Christmases, all of our dreams coming true, in you."
"A week later," Mom said, sniffling, "we read about a fire in Meshomah Falls. How two bodies had been found in a barn that had burned to the ground. When the bodies were identified, they matched the names on your birth certificate."
"We wanted to know more, but we also didn't want to do anything to hurt the adoption," said my dad. He shook his head. "I'm ashamed to say, we just wanted to keep you, no matter what."
"But months later, after the adoption was final—it went through really fast and finally it was all legal and no one could take you away—then we tried to find out more." Mom continued.
"How?" I asked.
"We tried calling the lawyer, but he had taken a job in another state. We left messages, but he never returned any of our calls. It was kind of odd," Dad added. "It almost seemed like he was avoiding us. Finally we gave up on him.
"I went through the newspapers," Dad went on. "I talked to the reporter who had covered the fire story, and he put me in touch with the Meshomah police. And after that I did research in Ireland, when I was there on a business trip. That was when you were about two years old and your mom was expecting Mary K."
"What did you find out?" I asked in a small voice.
"Are you sure you want to know?"
I nodded, gripping my desk chair. "I do want to know," I said, my voice stronger. I knew what Alyce had told me and what I had found out at the library. I needed to know more. I needed to know it all.
"Maeve Riordan and Angus Bramson died in that barn fire," my dad said, looking down as if he were reading the words off his shoes. "It was arson—murder," he clarified. "The barn doors had been locked from the outside, and gasoline had been poured around the building."
I trembled, my eyes huge and fastened on my dad. I hadn't read anywhere that it had definitely been murder.
"They found symbols on some of the charred pieces of wood," said Mom. "They were identified as runes, but no one knew why they were written there or why Maeve and Angus had been killed. They had kept to themselves, had no debts, went to church on Sundays. The crime was never solved."
"What about in Ireland?"
Dad nodded and shifted his weight. "Like I said, I went there on business, and I didn't have a lot of time. I didn't even know what to look for. But I took a day trip to the town where the Meshomah police had said Maeve Riordan was from: Ballynigel. When I got there, there wasn't much of a town to see. A couple of shops on a main street and one or two ugly new apartment buildings. My guidebook had said it was a quaint old fishing village, but there was hardly any sign of it or what it had used to be."
"Did you find out what happened?"
"Not really," Dad said, holding his hands wide. "There was a newsstand there, a little shop. When I asked about it, the old lady kicked me out and slammed the door."
"Kicked you out?" I asked in amazement.
Dad gave a dry chuckle. "Yes. Finally, after walking around and finding nothing, I went to the next town—I think its name was Much Bencham—and had lunch in the pub. There were a couple of old guys sitting at the bar, and they struck up a conversation with me, asking where I was from. I started talking, but as soon as I mentioned Ballynigel they went quiet 'Why do ye want to know? they asked suspiciously. I said I was investigating a story for my hometown newspaper about small Irish towns. For the travel section."
I stared at my dad, unable to picture him blithely lying to strangers, going on this quest to find out my heritage. He'd known all of this, both of them had, almost all of my life. And they'd never breathed a word to me.
"To make a long story short," Dad went on, "it finally came out that until four years earlier, Ballynigel has been a small, prosperous town. But in 1982 it had suddenly been destroyed. Destroyed by evil, they said."
I could hardly breathe. This was similar to what Alyce had said. My mom was chewing her bottom lip nervously, not looking at me.
"They said that Ballynigel had been a town of witches, with most of the people there being descendants of witches for thousands of years. They called them the old clans. They said evil had risen up and destroyed the witches, and they didn't know why, but they knew you should never take a chance with a witch." Dad coughed and cleared his throat. "I laughed and said I didn't believe in witches. And they said, 'More fool you. They said that witches were real and there had been a powerful coven at Ballynigel until the night they had been destroyed, and the whole town with them. Then I had an idea, and I asked. Did anyone escape? They said a few humans. Humans, they called them, as if there was a difference. I said, What about witches? And they shook their heads and said if any witches had escaped, they would never be safe, no matter where they went. That they would be hunted down and killed, if not sooner, then later."
But two witches had escaped and had come to America. Where they were killed three years later.
Mom had quit sniffling and now watched my dad as if she hadn't heard this story for many years.
"I came home and told your mom about it and to tell you the truth, we were both pretty frightened. We thought about how your birth parents had been killed. Frankly, it scared us. We thought there was a psycho out there, hunting these people down, and if he knew about you, you wouldn't be safe. So we decided to go on with our business, and we never spoke of your past again."
I sat there, interlacing this story with the one Alyce had told me. For the first time I could almost understand why my parents had kept all this to themselves. They had been trying to protect me. Protect me from what had killed my birth parents.
"We wanted to change your first name," Mom said. "But you were legally Morgan. So we gave you a nickname."
"Molly," I said, light dawning. I had been Molly until fourth grade, when I decided I hated it and wanted to be called Morgan.
"Yes. And by then, when you wanted to be Morgan again, well, we felt safe," Mom said. "So much had changed. We'd never heard anything more about Meshomah Falls or Ballynigel or witches. We thought all of that was behind us."
"Then we found your Wicca books," said Dad. "And it brought everything back, all the memories, the awful stories, the fear. I thought someone had found you, had given you those books for a reason."
I shook my head. "I bought them myself."
"Maybe we've been unreasonable," Mom said slowly. "But you don't know what it's like to worry that your child might be taken from you or might be harmed. Maybe what you're doing is innocent and the people you're doing it with don't mean any harm."