When I was a little girl, my family moved into a farmhouse in rural Connecticut where, according to legend, a witch had lived 150 years earlier. The Old Witch of Millstone Road struck fear in the hearts of the neighborhood kids who attended the one-room schoolhouse next door. A century and a half later, my sisters and I used to play hide-and-seek in that rundown schoolhouse full of dusty desks and fading textbooks.
She wasn’t a real witch, of course, but our house was built on the original foundation of her colonial home, which gradually fell down around her and became uninhabitable, leaving only the basement with its uneven floors and sloping stone walls held together with mortar that crumbled when you touched it. I hated that basement—there was an unappeasable loneliness down there.
Years later, my family took a trip to Salem, Massachusetts, and I remember wandering around “Witch City,” surprised by its casual blend of chilling history and rampant commercialism. The spot where the accused witches were executed 300 years ago was located yards away from a Walgreens pharmacy. I imagined their screams, and then I bought a broomstick keychain. I ate too much candy and felt sick to my stomach, but there was a deeper unease I took home with me that day.
I’ve been wanting to write about this ever since.
A few years ago, I had a vivid dream about a young woman cleaning graffiti off her sister’s gravestone. She became Natalie Lockhart—a rookie detective in Burning Lake, New York, a place very much like Salem, full of ordinary people doing ordinary things, where good people profit from a story of staggering injustice.
Trace of Evil follows Natalie as she investigates the murder of a popular high school teacher that has eerie ties to the death of her sister, Willow, who was killed twenty years ago. As Natalie begins fitting the pieces together, she unearths an even darker story involving an obsession with black magic deep in the woods of this idyllic suburban community… but even she cannot predict the far-reaching consequences—for the victim, for the town of Burning Lake, and for herself.