Salem's Cipher (18 page)

Wednesday
November 2

51

Amherst, Massachusetts

S
alem's eyes were dust-storm dry. It had been forty-eight-plus hours since she'd had a full night's sleep, longer since she'd showered. Sleep deprivation at this level felt like walking next to her body, floating over it, making a sandwich out of her brain and then eating it. Her muscles were tight and sore, aching from long rides in small areas.

They didn't have the energy needed for small talk. The adrenaline marking the last two and a half days had drained out, leaving an aftertaste of ozone and lye. When Ernest parked the car three blocks from the Emily Dickinson Museum, the sun was four hours from rising and the air felt heavy, like it'd be night forever. The somber cloak seemed like a natural fit for Amherst, a town straight out of the Colonial period for all its paved roads and electric lights.

Ernest yanked a baseball cap and dark sunglasses out of his backpack, the only piece of luggage he carried. “I'm going to get two burner phones and another car. I'll be back at sunrise.”

“Is that a disguise?” Bel asked listlessly, pointing at the cap. She didn't ask where he'd acquire the car or phones. Her body language suggested she'd reached a grudging acceptance of him.

Ernest shrugged. “As much of a disguise as I can pull off. It's hard to blend in when you're this tall. You two toss your phones”—he pointed at the Dunkin Donuts' dumpster—“and you should try sleeping. You look … crusty.” He tucked his jacket tighter around Mercy, even though he'd be freezing without it, and stepped out of the car, unwinding himself from the confined interior like a jack-in-the-box finally freed. He jogged down the street, not glancing back.

“I'll take care of the phones.” Salem laid her hand across the front seat. Bel placed her cell in it without a word. Salem stepped out of the car, inhaling air as crisp and juicy as a fresh-sliced apple. The ground was spongy with a pre-frost. Despite being an urban area, a wall of scrub and trees lined the road across from the doughnut shop. Salem considered running rather than walking to the dumpster, but by the time she made up her mind to do so, she was already there, inhaling the grease and sugar and sour of the alley.

She glanced back at the Buick. Bel and Mercy were inside, their scalps pressed against the passenger windows, probably asleep. Bel's phone was warm in her hand. She yanked out the battery and SIM card and tossed the phone.

As a safety precaution, she charged another block up and flung Bel's battery and SIM into the receptacle outside of Kelly's Restaurant, a mom-and-pop joint at the end of a strip mall. Her breath came out in white plumes.

Next up, her phone.

She tugged it out of her pocket, holding it for a moment. A sleek black rectangle, it was both phone and computer, and now, possibly a lifeline to her mother. She fired it up and checked for new messages. There were none. But there
could
be. A message
could
arrive that would save Grace or Vida. Something that would make it okay that she'd lied to Bel about the original text.

She had to keep her phone.

Salem powered it down and inserted it into the inside pocket of her parka, the one where she kept spare tampons and a black-and-white tube of Chapstick.

She glanced around. No one was up yet. The city-country of Amherst didn't even have cars moving at pre-dawn. She felt silly with exhaustion, wired and loopy, like she could have run all the way back to the car and kept on running until she hit Mexico, and then leaned over to touch the border just like the relays they used to complete in phy ed, and then flip around and charge up to Amherst before Bel and Mercy woke up. That sounded like a plan, but when she returned to the side of the Buick, she realized she couldn't move another step if her soul depended on it.

She fell into the car and a bottomless sleep.

She realized something just before she plummeted. She and Bel would not talk about the fact that one of their mothers was dead. They would just keep moving forward, racing toward the end, pretending it wasn't true.

52

Amherst, Massachusetts

“R
ise and shine.” Ernest peered inside the driver's door. He held three coffees and a hot chocolate in a carrier. Salem had never smelled anything so good.

“Our new ride is behind the museum, about a ten-minute walk from here. We can ditch this car. Make sure you take everything you own out of it.”

Mercy sat up like a little soldier, handed Ernest his jacket, grabbed her Dora the Explorer knapsack and the hot chocolate, and stood next to the car, her eyes sleepy, blond hair soft-looking and messy. She must have done this early-morning-car-switch maneuver a lot.

Bel was slower to rise.

“There's an ATM on the way,” Ernest said once they were all outside the car. “You can withdraw cash on your credit cards, and then don't touch them again. You got rid of your phones?”

Salem sipped the coffee. It burnt her lip. She nodded, wiping at the pain. It amazed her how easy it was to lie, to not feel anything, not even guilt. The day had warmed considerably since her pre-dawn jog. The fuzzy peach glow had made good on its promise, delivering a golden globe hanging two hours above the horizon. The sun had burned off all the fog and taken with it their visible breath.

They set off toward the museum. Salem wondered what time it was, reached automatically for her phone, and then stopped, her pulse lurching. “You got us phones?”

“Yeah,” Ernest said, his face lighting up. He pulled two black flip phones out of his pocket and stopped to hand one to Salem and one to Bel. “They're precharged and aren't traceable, unless you start making regular calls to someone you know, and someone the FBI knows you know. They can watch the accounts on that end.”

Bel handed her coffee to Salem so she could power up the phone she'd just been given. “You've been on the run a while?”

“My whole life, seems like.” He was matter of fact. “Hey, Mercy, I want you to stay in the park outside when we go into the museum. You can hide in the bushes.”

Salem's head jerked toward Ernest. “What?”

Ernest scratched his hair just above the ear. “I don't want her recorded on any cameras or near any danger.”

“No way,” Bel said. “We're not leaving a child alone in a strange town in November.”

“It's okay.” Mercy took a long draw off her hot chocolate. “That's how we do it.”

“Not anymore.” They reached the side of the bank, and its outdoor ATM. Bel slapped her hand over the camera, withdrew the maximum from her credit card account, and kept the camera covered while Salem did the same. They tossed their empty coffee cups and credit cards in the trash bin outside the bank.

A woman inside the lobby of the Emily Dickinson Museum was unlocking the front door just as they walked up.

Salem rubbed the back of her neck, beginning her counting exercises to soothe her unease.

If the museum didn't house Samuel and Lucretia Dickinson's gun, they'd reached a dead end.

Whichever of their moms was alive, she wouldn't be for much longer.

53

Amherst, Massachusetts

A
gent Stone didn't approve of his diet, that much was clear to Clancy. Stone also managed to look completely put together despite spending the same twenty-four hours as Clancy had in this tin-can car. Clancy pegged Stone for a food stamp kid, the way he kept himself so tidy, his suits impeccable. Poor kids grew up, but they never grew past the need to show the world that they weren't dirty. He also figured his maneuver in the Hawthorne Hotel lobby had put to rest any chance of them becoming friends.

Still, Clancy held the open box of doughnuts out to Stone. “You want any?”

Stone didn't acknowledge him. Somewhere between the Hawthorne and here, Stone had gone from reserved to monolithic. It was either the ream-out Clancy had given him for showing up at the hotel without
checking with him first, or Stone had figured out who was pulling
Clancy's strings, though Clancy had racked his brain every way but Wednesday and couldn't figure out how that would be. He'd been neat.

All of his covert ops, like texting the daughter from her mom's phone, Clancy did in the bathroom, door locked. The phone had come to him via the clean-up crew in Minneapolis with instructions to use it to make sure the daughters were on the right track. Seems they'd gotten farther in cracking the hidden codes than tens of agents before them, stretched out over two hundred years. The Hermitage saw it as good business to have them continue.

The Hermitage's assassin hadn't gotten the message, though, and that's surely who had almost taken out Salem Wiley in the Hawthorne Hotel lobby. Or maybe the communication had broken down on Clancy's end. He was following the last instructions he'd been given. That's all he could do.

“They've got someone following them,” Clancy said.

Stone, his eyes trained on the group of four walking toward the Emily Dickinson Museum, put down his granola bar. If Clancy had to bet, he'd lay money it tasted like sweet-n-salty dog shit.

“You see him now?”

“Naw.” Clancy dropped his glance, biting into a powdered circle of flour and sugar. He was rewarded with a bright squirt of lemon curd. “Saw the same car downtown as I did back at the truck stop, but I don't see anyone here now. Just a feeling in my gut.”

Clancy was pleased that Stone refrained from glancing at his stomach. “You watch too many movies,” Stone said.

But Stone sat rigid, as he had since the moment the daughters came into view. He might have a different mission than Clancy, but he had the same instinct warning him that something big and hairy was about to go down.

54

Twenty-One Years Old

“I
t's okay, Salem. I understand.”

Salem feels terrible. Isabel is graduating from the University of Chicago with her BS in Criminal Justice. She wants Salem to attend the ceremony. The thought of leaving the state makes Salem's heart buck. “I'm sorry, Bellie. I wish I were—”

Bel interrupts her. “I love you just the way you are. I'll have Mom videotape it, and we'll have a private viewing at your place, okay? You can meet my new girlfriend too! She said she wants to come to Minneapolis and check out my friends.”

Salem smiles into the phone, but she feels the crack in their friendship like it's a tear in her own physical body. She knew things would change when Bel left for college, but they had Skype, and the phone, and Bel came home for every holiday and the summers.

Not this summer, though.

She'd just been accepted into summer skills training, the next step to being hired by the Chicago Police Department. Working for Chicago PD was her dream job, the one she'd been training for her entire life.

“That sounds good, Bel. I can't wait to meet her.”

But she feels it in her gut.

The two of them are growing apart, their friendship crumbling under the impossible weight of adulthood.

55

Amherst, Massachusetts

A
crazy thought entered Salem's brain: maybe this whole scavenger hunt adventure she and Bel were on was one of her mom and Gracie's elaborate schemes to teach them something or reunite them.

A moment of elation followed by a mental picture of the thick blood pooling in Gracie's hallway. Salem shuddered.

She, Bel, Ernest, and Mercy stood outside of Emily Dickinson's earliest home. It was a Federal-style mansion. They marched up the museum's cement steps, past the white columns, and through the green door. Salem knew from her research that Emily Dickinson had been born in this house, the Homestead, in 1830. She and her family left for a number of years and returned in 1855. Dickinson lived here until her death in 1886. Amherst College bought the house in 1965, and in 2003 the museum opened its doors.

According to the museum's online furnishing plan, the Homestead and its sister building, the Evergreens, contained a wealth of historically accurate items, many of them owned by the Dickinson family, from Emily's childhood piano to a ruby decanter and matching glasses. Salem had found no mention of pistols or rifles in the collection, but they had agreed beforehand that it was better to search the rooms themselves than be marked as the nervous, sleep-ragged foursome who asked to see Samuel Dickinson's guns.

“Four tickets, please,” Bel said. “Three adults, one child.”

“Excellent!” The woman was dressed in period gear, a bishop-sleeved, blue-and-white checked daydress that reached the floor. She paused to smile at two new people entering immediately behind Salem. “We'll have enough people for a tour in no time.”

“We don't need a tour, thanks.” Bel flashed her brightest smile. “We have to get back on the road. We want to show ourselves around, if you don't mind.”

“Of course. I'm afraid I still have to charge you the forty-two dollars, though.”

“No problem.” Bel pulled out three twenties. She grabbed the tickets and her change, and they walked up the purple, twisting stairs, Bel whispering instructions. “Two of us to a room. Me and Ernest are a team. Salem, you take Mercy. You find any guns, you locate the other team and we look them over together.”

Salem nodded. Bel and Ernest stepped into the room at the top of the stairs. Salem and Mercy continued to the end of the hall and opened the door, stepping inside.

“I think this was her bedroom.” Salem took in the tiny writing table perched in front of the window, the sleigh bed surrounded by a matching washbasin cupboard and dresser. She thought of Dickinson's passion for knowledge, and her reclusiveness. It was rumored that at her sickest, Dickinson wouldn't let her doctor take her pulse, would merely walk past an open doorway and require him to diagnose her from afar.

She and Dickinson would have gotten along just fine.

“I like it here,” Mercy said. “I want to live here.”

Salem pushed a lock of the girl's hair from her eyes and smiled. “It's nice, isn't it? Clean. No surprises. And,” she said, visually sweeping the room, “no old-fashioned rifles.”

Such was the case in every room they were allowed to enter in the Homestead as well as the Evergreens next door. As a last-ditch effort, they scanned the brochures near the front counter, scouring for any mention of a gun belonging to Dickinson's grandparents.

“We have to ask someone,” Bel said. “It's the only way.”

By now, there was a line at the desk. When it was her and Bel's turn, Bel slapped her smile back on. “Excuse me. Can I ask you a strange question?”

The woman nodded. “Believe me, I've heard them all.”

“Are there any guns on the property? Antique ones that belonged to the Dickinson family, specifically Samuel and Lucretia, Emily's grandparents?”

“Hmm,” the woman said. “That's a new one. I don't remember seeing any, but let me pull up our records.” She slid her glasses from the top of her head to her nose and turned her attention to her computer. She stroked the keys and studied the screen intently.

Salem found herself standing on the balls of her feet, leaning forward, as if she could step inside the computer and pull out the information they needed.
Follow the trail
, the text from her mom's phone had read, but what if the trail died here? Salem felt like someone was sitting on her chest.

“I'm sorry,” the woman finally said, perching her glasses back on the top of her head. “No guns. A lot of the original Dickinson possessions were sold over the years, before the museum was formed, I'm afraid.”

“Any idea how we could track down where it all went?” Bel asked.

The woman made a
tsking
sound. “I wish. But if you want to leave your name and number, I could talk to our curator. She's on vacation now but will be back next week.”

Bel nodded. To an outsider, it would look like she was considering her options. To Salem, it was clear she was trying to keep from punching a hole in the wall. Salem flipped open her phone and stepped to Bel's side. “Here's our number,” she said, reading it from the inside of the phone. “Please do call if you hear anything.”

She and Bel walked outside, Ernest and Mercy trailing behind them. The sun hit their face with a cruel brightness.

“We don't have a week,” Bel said. She seemed to have shrunk. “Whichever of our mothers is alive doesn't have a week.”

“I know.” Salem's chin trembled. She could hear her mom's life ticking away, or Gracie's. “The note led us nowhere.”

Mercy was glancing across the lawn in front of the Homestead. “It had more dots.”

“What, sweetie?” Salem asked.

“The note had more dots.” She said this with the absolute certainty only a child can pull off. “You got excited, but there were more after that.”

Salem, Bel, and Ernest stared at each other. Salem reached into her pocket, and with wobbly hands, she yanked out the note and smoothed it on the column in front of her. She spotted what Mercy was referring to in the poem's last stanza:

God pre
ạ
ches,—a noted cler

yman,—
And the se
ṛ
mon is never long ;
So instead of getting to he
ạṿẹ
n at last,
I'm going all along!

G-r-a-v-e.

“Grave.” Salem's voice shook with excitement. “We have to go to Samuel and Lucretia's grave!”

She charged back into the Homestead and barged ahead of the others in line. “I'm so sorry, but we just have one more question. Can you tell me where Samuel and Lucretia Dickinson's graves are?”

The woman wore a puzzled smile. “Why, Samuel Fowler and Lucretia Gunn Dickinson are buried here in town, in a single grave. They were reinterred in the family plot in the Amherst West Cemetery over a century ago.” She pointed northwest. “It's a ten-minute walk, as the crow flies.”

Salem had almost stopped listening after the woman said Lucretia's maiden name. Lucretia
Gunn
.

Gun Samuel Lucretia grave
.

The “gun” in the code hadn't been referring to a weapon! There must be something hidden behind the first three letters of Lucretia's maiden name on her gravestone.

Salem squealed. “Thank you!”

She ran outside, Ernest, Mercy, and Bel's faces staring desperately at her like baby flowers to the sun. “The cemetery isn't even half a mile away. Let's go!”