Salem's Cipher (11 page)

28

Nine Years Old

E
normous, enchanted puffs of snow are falling outside the living room window. The soft crystals dance dreamily toward the ground, a sylphic balance of size and lightness. It's the first snowfall of the year, and Salem and Bel are dying to bundle up, run outside, and build a fort, or a snowman, or play no-touch-me with the falling flakes.

“You're not paying attention,” the instructor says. Vida, Grace, and Daniel have pushed aside the living room furniture so that Sensei Pederson can teach them judo in the center of the living room.

“No,” Bel says. “I'm not.”

Twelve years old and standing up to a stranger. Salem almost yells, she wants to be like Bel so bad. It's not just Bel's courage, or the way she picks up the judo like she was born to it while Salem flails around like a grounded bird. It's not even how TV-show-pretty Bel is.

Well, maybe that
is
it.

Salem sighs. She'll never be Bel, but at least she gets to be her best friend.

She couldn't wait to giggle with Bel about this later. Who in their right mind brings a private judo instructor to their house on a snowy Saturday night? Vida had said it'd be fun, that she and Grace had thought of it on a whim. They were always thinking of stuff like that—agility courses, first-aid training, dragging Bel and Salem to community ed knot tying courses or immersion Spanish workshops at the local high school after hours. This is the first time they'd brought it into the house, though.

“How's this?” Daniel offers, glancing at Bel, who stands hands-on-hips like a tiny soldier. “You two give Sensei Pederson your attention for the next hour—I mean your whole focus—and then I'll take you both sledding.”

Salem is sure her dad is the only one of the three adults who remembers what it's like to have fun. She glances at Bel, trying not to smile. Bel has taught her that you never take the first deal presented, but dang, that's a sweet offer on the table.

Bel tosses her golden ponytail over her shoulder. “Ice cream on the way back?”

“Isabel Odegaard!” Grace admonishes.

But Daniel laughs. “You betcha.”

Salem grins. She can't believe it. Bel got them ice cream. In the winter!

She promises herself that some day, she'll be as bold as Bel.

Some day.

29

Salem, Massachusetts

T
he room they'd entered smelled like canned soup. It held an encompassing blackness that crawled over Salem's skin with the weight of dead fingers. To their left, up high, a stage lamp flicked on, bathing a hunched gargoyle in a sick yellow light. The grotesque creature was maybe six feet tall, perched on a second level of the main room. Below it, in the dead center floor of the room, a massive red circle lit up.

Salem Village 1692
was written in the center of the circle. Names were scribbled in outgoing concentric circles. Salem recognized Tituba and a few other names—people who'd met ghastly fates during the Witch Trials.

The gargoyle's lamp switched off, and the room was again bathed in darkness as thick as grave dirt. When Salem's eyes had a moment to adjust, she saw an exit sign at the far end of the room. Seconds later, a stage light to the right fired up. It outlined a peasant man on the gallows, a noose around his neck.

“In 1692, Salem was a peaceful village.”

Salem blinked.
The presentation.

The church sanctuary had been gutted to make way for this gigantic display room. Salem could just make out chairs arranged around the red circle, crammed with tourists. This is what people had been waiting in line for. If she squinted, she could spot the remaining dioramas rimming the upper edges of the hall. They would be lit up one at a time to tell the story of the Salem Witch Trials. It was kitsch at its finest.

Outside the door immediately behind them, they heard a scuffle.

Salem's skin prickled. “It's him,” she whispered. She didn't know who
he
was. She knew he was following them, and that there would be nothing worse on this earth than him catching them. The terror of being chased by this predator was so primordial, so unbearably awful that Salem understood why an animal would leap off a cliff rather than let itself be caught.

Bel pointed across the hall at the dimly-lit exit sign. Salem nodded. They wove around the chairs, trying not to draw too much attention.

But they weren't moving fast enough.

The doors behind them opened. Salem stifled a yelp.

The flooding light caused angry whispers to erupt from the viewing crowd.

“Not again!”

“Hey, we paid way too much for this already. Shut off the lights!”

The crewcut worker from the front desk held open the doors. The man who had been pursuing them stood behind, silhouetted. Glancing back at him filled Salem's gut with ice. She pushed Bel forward. “Hurry!”

They stumbled through the exit door. A smaller museum lay on the other side. It featured various depictions of witches behind glass, from the Wicked Witch of the West in all her green glory to a simple midwife surrounded by herbs, and finally, a couple who reminded Salem of Renaissance Festival regulars, flowers woven in their hair, holding carved walking sticks.

Salem and Bel ran past all of the shtick.

“You know that hotel across the street?” Bel was out of breath.

They found themselves inside the gift shop.

“No.”

A store employee stepped forward, speaking into her headset, palms facing Salem and Bel.

“The Hawthorne Hotel.” Bel glared at the worker. The worker stepped aside, squawking angrily at whoever was on the other end of the headset. “We drove past it to get to the church. We have to slip inside and secure a hiding spot as soon as we can. How much cash do you have?”

30

Salem, Massachusetts

J
ason stood just inside the entryway of The Old Spot, blood pumping pleasantly. He recognized what he hadn't seen in the photos he'd been provided: Isabel Odegaard was beautiful, breathtaking, stunning, even from a distance. She was more athletic than curvy, her strawberry-blond hair perfect against the cream of her skin.

He felt an electric arousal, one he rarely experienced on the job. He pulled his jacket tighter around him and glanced at his watch. The women had dashed into the Hawthorne Hotel six minutes earlier. He'd wait ten more minutes for them to check into their room before going to the front desk to retrieve their room number. No desk person would hand it to him, but odds were that they would have the last check-in open on their computer screen. It was industry standard. He'd simply ask the desk person a question that would require them to turn around, and he'd peek over the desk for the room number.

He'd done it innumerable times.

He glanced behind him. The pub's overhead TVs were dominated by political ads flashing various unflattering photos of Senator Gina Hayes.
Do you trust her with the troops? She's been lying since her college days—just ask her old roommate. Who will really run the country, her or her father's cronies?
The propaganda was ugly in a way that sat nicely with Jason, at least until the news showed a day-old clip of Senator Gina Hayes at an Ohio rally. She had an audience of tens of thousands. Their cheers were deafening.

Jason was unaware he was grinding his teeth.

Two men at the table next to him were tossing back draught beer and staring at the TV.

“No
way
,” one of them complained.

“I know,” his friend agreed. “A woman president? Not on my watch. Uhn-uhn. They're too emotional. I don't need a menopausal lady with access to the big red button, you know?”

The first speaker opened his mouth to agree when he spotted Jason watching them. His eyes widened. He held up his hands in apology. “Sorry. We're just talking big, you know? We're both momma's boys.”

Jason's chest tightened. Had he given himself away somehow? Then he realized, gratefully, that on the walk here, he'd let down his hair and, masking it as a sneeze, rearranged his face as a woman's to match the photo on the driver's license he carried. He wore gender-neutral jeans and t-shirt under his black blazer. The men had mistaken him for a female, the same disguise he'd used to sneak into Grace Odegaard's women's-only building.

He tightened his vocal chords to raise the octave of his voice. “Are you kidding me? A female president would be
terrible
. Every woman I know agrees.”

The men laughed, relieved.

Jason matched their laughter.

And he went over the Alcatraz plan for the millionth time.

His mission was bloated with urgency. The Crucible was already too powerful. He left the bar and jogged across the street, not willing to wait the ten minutes to dispatch Isabel Odegaard and Salem Wiley. He had bigger fish to fry.

31

Salem, Massachusetts

T
he Hawthorne Hotel was a plush brick cube straight out of the early 1900s. Room 325's wallpaper was beige on beige baroque flocking, buttressed by ornate crown molding along the ceiling and somber carpeting. It was clean and cramped with barely enough room to contain two double beds, a nightstand, desk, and TV-concealing armoire. To navigate past one another, either Salem or Bel had to hop on the bed. At least, Salem assumed they would have to. They'd made for the desk as soon as they'd entered the room.

Salem gently withdrew the paper from her pocket, the single sheet she'd retrieved from the central beam of the original First Church of Salem.

With trembling hands, she flattened it.

The paper was so ancient it felt like calfskin.

She and Bel leaned close to it. It emitted the pleasant mildew of old books.

A looping scrawl of crowded, half-cursive words with a sea of white space between them covered the paper. At the top was a title, and below that, a poem.

My Life had stood—a Loaded G̣ụṇ

Ṣome keep the Sạbbath going to church;
I keep it staying at hoṃe,
With a bobolink for a chorister,
And an orchard for a dome.

Some keep the Sabbath in Sụrplicẹ;
I just wear my wings,
And instead of to
ḷḷ
ing the bell for chụr

h,
Ouṛ
little sẹxṭon sịngs.

God preạches,—a noted cler

̣yman,—
And the seṛmon is never long;
So instead of getting to heạṿẹn, at last,
I'm going all along!

The poem was attributed to Emily Dickinson at the bottom, with the Greek letter “sigma” below that.

Bel and Salem stared at it in silence for several seconds. Their entire race from the Witch Museum to the lobby to room 325 had been a child's bed-to-door ghost run, their feet barely touching the ground. And now they were looking at an Emily Dickinson poem scrawled out on an old piece of paper pulled out of an even older chunk of wood, heartbeats thundering to catch up.

“Hunh,” Bel finally said.

“Yeah,” Salem agreed.

“You know,” Bel said, cocking her head, “I don't think that title goes with that poem.”

Salem reread it. English, particularly poetry, had not been her favorite subject. Too much room for interpretation. She drew out her phone and Googled it.

“You're right.” She clicked off her phone. “They're two different poems.”

Bel smiled. “Who ever thought that English minor would pay off?”

Salem nodded absently. “This doesn't seem like a code at all.” She held the paper up to the light. “And I don't see any messages behind it. If it is some sort of cipher, it's an amateur one. Far less complex than the cipher
in the Gentileschi, and that was essentially only a hidden message.”

Bel walked to the window and pushed aside the heavy tapestry drapes so she could peek out. “We're not facing the Witch Museum, but I don't see any sign of that creep. We paid cash, used false names. I think we're safe. We have time to figure this out.”

Salem was studying the paper, face screwed up as tight as a knot.

Bel let the curtain drop. “I see you're in deep-thought mode. I'm going to let you do what you do best and solve that thing so we can locate Vida and my mom. Meanwhile, I'm taking a shower and calling room service. Burgers and fries okay with you?”

Salem nodded, but she wasn't hungry.

Bel called down to the hotel restaurant and placed an order before disappearing into the smallest, whitest bathroom Salem had ever seen.

With Bel out of her sight, Salem realized she was coming down from an adrenaline high and, even worse, flirting with a panic attack. It slithered at the edges of her breath, threatening to pounce, to lay its hairy weight over her mouth, nose, and chest, picking out her sanity and flinging bits of it beyond her reach. She scrabbled for the plastic Ativan bottle and popped two of the seven she had left. It was probably conditioning, but she felt better immediately.

Deciding to begin with the basics, she first searched “My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun.” There were no obvious clues in the actual poem. Next, she Googled the Sabbath poem.

Same.

Behind the bathroom door, the whoosh of the shower came on. “Wow!” Bel squealed. “Cold water.”

Their quarters were so tight that Salem heard when Bel squirted out shampoo. She broadened her focus, pulling up Dickinson's Wikipedia page, figuring a wide net would catch more clues. Emily Elizabeth Dickinson lived from 1830 to 1886, was born in Amherst, and thanks to her father, received rigorous schooling, a rare privilege for girls of that time. She was a well-behaved, content girl until Sophia, her second cousin and a close friend, died.

Her parents sent her to Boston in 1844 to recover from her overwhelming melancholy, and when she returned to Amherst, a religious revival was taking place. Dickinson jumped on board for a time, but it didn't stick. More people close to her died, she became reclusive, and she wrote poetry, most of which wasn't published until after her death of heart failure. In fact, during her lifetime, she was known more for her gardening skills, for wearing white, and for being so isolated that she rarely left her house and often talked to guests from the other side of a door.

None of this helped Salem. She pushed back her curls and yanked her focus back to the moment, Googling “Emily Dickinson ciphers.” She didn't land any logical hits. Same with a variety of synonyms in place of “ciphers.”

Still nothing when she Googled “Emily Dickinson Artemisia Gentileschi,” “Emily Dickinson First Church,” and, as a last ditch, “Emily Dickinson hides secret in block of wood.”

She wanted to scream her frustration. Instead, she opened Google Images and began scrolling through photos of Dickinson. She'd been a striking woman with dark eyes, a full mouth, and fierce hair. She'd also apparently not been big on pictures because Salem kept seeing the same photograph over and over.

The shower twisted off with a loud protest. Salem heard Bel push the metal curtain rings down the rod and even heard her toweling off. She shoved the distractions aside.

As she was looking at the pictures of Emily Dickinson artifacts plus the millionth copy of the same Dickinson headshot, she wondered what the woman would have thought of the Hawthorne Hotel. By the sounds of it, the water pressure hadn't improved much since her time. Salem's mind was wandering. She was tired, emotionally and physically. She was scrolling almost too fast to see anything when her finger dropped on the scroll pad.

Her eyes bulged.

She leaned toward her computer screen. She
couldn't
be seeing what she thought she was seeing.

“Bel?”

Bel rushed out, her towel tied around her waist. Salem, long-used to how comfortable her friend was naked, didn't even give her a second glance. “What'd you find?”

Salem swiveled the computer so Bel could see. “Look.”

Bel bent forward. The screen reflected like a slumber-party flashlight against her face. “What am I looking at?”

Salem pointed at the image she'd enlarged, wiping drips from Bel's hair off the keyboard. “That letter on the screen. It was handwritten by Dickinson.” The note she'd found in the beam was lying next to the computer. She held it up. “Check out this note. The handwriting is identical.”

Bel squinted, trying to catch up.

Salem explained, her voice belying her incredulity. “Dickinson's name at the end of the note? It's not an attribution. It's her
signature
.”

Bel's eyes went wide. “Emily Dickinson wrote the note you found in that old church beam?”

A knock landed on the thick wood of the door. Salem and Bel flinched. Bel shook it off and peered through the spy hole. “Room service,” she told Salem, and through the door, “give me a minute.” She tossed the towel and pulled on her jeans, a bra, and a t-shirt before strapping on her holster, hauling on a jacket, and opening the door.

The guy on the other side was tall and scarecrow-thin, in his late teens or early twenties. He wore a blue uniform constructed of a polyester so cheap that light reflected off the thread of it. The pants were two inches too short. Probably most pants were for him. He was at least 6'5". He held a tool box rather than a food service tray.

“Sorry to bother you. Your bathroom has some sort of leak that's affecting the room below. May I come in?”

Bel stepped out of the way. Salem moved her laptop to the bed to clear space on the desk. She set Emily Dickinson's note next to it. Having a false alarm on the room service food made her realize she was starving.

The hotel worker ducked his head under the doorjamb and stepped in.

Bel closed the door behind him.

He ate up the three steps it took to cross the room and set down the toolbox on the spot Salem had just cleared. He turned to them both, his expression dark. He crossed his hands in front of him. “You two have to leave. Now.”