“Thanks,” she said, then added, “don’t let him have milk with them.”

ZEE WALKED DOWN DERBY STREET toward the wharf. This was a street of American firsts: first candy shop, first brick house. The street was named after America’s first millionaire, Elias Hasket Derby, a man known locally as “King Derby,” who had been made famous by the lucrative shipping trade that came into this port. Zee remembered her Uncle Mickey telling her something about the first elephant in America as well. It had come in on one of the Salem ships. For some reason she thought the elephant had a drinking problem and laughed to herself, dismissing the thought as a trick of memory. But then she remembered the story. Running low on water, the crew had fed porter to the elephant. By the time the ship arrived in Salem, the elephant had developed a strong taste for the stuff. That much of the story was true. Uncle Mickey’s embellished version included 1800s AA meetings and elephant detox.

She thought about Mickey and decided to stop by. There was no love lost between Mickey and Finch, not since Maureen had died and Melville had come into Finch’s life. But Zee hadn’t yet said hello to her uncle. She knew she should tell him what was going on, and she figured he might know someone who could install the rails and grab bars Finch needed. If anyone was connected in the city of Salem, it was Mickey Doherty.

Zee ducked into Ye Olde Pepper Companie to buy Finch some Gibralters. The Salem confection was the first commercial candy in America and might have been responsible for some of the success of the Salem ships, which stocked the candy as ballast on their outbound voyages. They were hard candies with a shelf life longer than the life span of any human, and it is said that the captains bribed the customs officials in the far ports with Gibralters to get more favorable trading rights. “The original strangers with candy,” is what Finch called the Salem ships.

Finch loved Gibralters, and he loved Black Jacks as well, so she bought both for him. She helped herself to one of the Black Jacks, smelling the sweet molasses as she opened the bag.

She walked past the Custom House with its gold roof, where Nathaniel Hawthorne had worked his day job before his writing made him famous. Then she crossed the street to Derby and Pickering wharves.

There were only a few wharves left in Salem now. In the shipping days, there had been almost a hundred, along with all the businesses that went along with the shipping trade: coopers, boatwrights, stables with wagons for transportation, and shipyards.

In those days there were many rivers that emptied into the sea here. New Derby Street, where it connected to Lafayette and Salem’s Route 114, would have been mostly underwater, with the North River running down the other side of town. It was possible back then to get around Salem almost completely by boat. Even the Point, where Jessina and many of the Dominican and Haitian population lived now, had once been bordered on three sides by water. The street noise from the wharves and the resulting trade eventually became loud enough to send the shipping millionaires uptown, either to the Common or to Chestnut Street, depending on their politics.

Now there were only a few of the old wharves left down here-Derby Wharf, where the Friendship was docked, and Pickering, where Mickey’s store and Ann Chase’s witch shop were.

These days Derby Street was an endless array of tourist traps. Costumed pirates and monsters handed out flyers for haunted houses and wax-museum tours. Though the main attraction was still the witches, any unrelated but marginally frightening side business was fair game. The real witches, who didn’t exist at all in Salem back in 1692, thrived here in great numbers now.

A number of shops and tours belonged to Uncle Mickey, whom the locals referred to as the “Pirate King.” Mickey had seen the tide turning in Salem way back in the seventies and was entrepreneurial enough to take great advantage of it. For the most part, the witches kept a lower profile, selling their wares for cash but practicing their religion quietly, as if they were never quite certain that their new elevated status would last in a city that sported images of witches riding broomsticks on the doors of their police cars while at the same time it launched a campaign to “Ditch the Witch” in favor of Salem’s less famous but in many’s opinion more significant maritime history.

But for now that campaign had not taken hold, nor had the ordinance that someone had proposed to limit the number of haunted houses per city block, a proposal that Mickey had vehemently opposed, owning so many of them himself.

Zee started her search for Mickey in one of his many haunted houses. Summer hires from Salem State College worked the counter as they munched on Wendy’s takeout. Their fake scars looked disturbingly real alongside their piercings and tattoos from the Purple Scorpion down the street. Screams echoed from behind the hanging curtain, followed by demonic laughter that Zee recognized as Mickey’s recorded voice. Cackling and trying to frighten one another, a group of tourists exited through the gift shop.

“Oh, my good God, what was that!” A woman in her sixties giggled nervously and tried to catch her breath.

A man with a crying child was less impressed. “That is extremely frightening,” the man said. The kid, who wouldn’t let go of his father’s hand, seemed equally frightened by the teenagers behind the counter. “You ought to have an age limit. Post a sign or something,” the father said. As he stepped down into the brighter lobby, the kid tripped, the father dangling him by the arm until he righted himself.

“Wimps,” the tattooed girl said under her breath.

“It says right on the door.” A kid sporting a Frankenstein half-head extension with bolts glued to his neck pointed to a sign: THE SCARIEST HAUNTED HOUSE IN SALEM. Frankenstein reached for one of the girl’s french fries, and she slapped his hand.

“Is Mickey here?” Zee asked. She didn’t know any of these kids. Mickey had a new crop every summer.

“He’s at the other store,” Frankenstein said.

“No he isn’t. He said he was going to the Friendship,” the girl said.

“One or the other,” Frankenstein said.

Zee thanked them and exited as a large group of tourists crowded through the door. They all wore red T-shirts saying DON’T MAKE ME CALL MY FLYING MONKEYS! Zee navigated her way through the crowd, crossing the street in front of their silver tour bus, heading for Pickering Wharf.

She could see the masts of the Friendship in the distance, but she figured she’d stop at Mickey’s shop first. Then she saw her Auntie Ann.

Ann Chase stood in the doorway of her store, the Shop of Shadows. Its name was a reference to the Book of Shadows, a well-known journal used by real witches to record spells, rituals, and philosophy, plus recipes for herbal potions and teas. Ann was in costume today, her black robes rustling in the early-evening breeze. “Hello, Hepzibah,” she called when she spotted Zee. “I heard you were home.”

“Hi, Auntie.” Zee smiled and walked over. Ann was not Zee’s real aunt, but she’d been Maureen’s best friend. Zee had called her Auntie for as long as she could remember.

They hugged each other.

“So great to see you,” Ann said, looking at her. “It’s been a while.”

Zee thought back. It had been over a year. When she came home to visit, she always stopped by the shop to see Ann, but the last time she’d been here, Ann’s shop had been closed, and there was a sign on it saying that Ann had flown south for the winter along with the other snowbirds.

“How was Florida?” Zee asked.

“Warmer than here,” Ann answered, laughing. Then, more seriously, she asked, “How’s Finch doing?”

“Not great.”

“I heard he broke up with Melville.”