Salem's Cipher Page 5

  There is no question in her mind that she can’t enter the water. She pushes the afro of soft curls out of her eyes and repeats herself. “No.”

  Vida takes an angry drag off of her Virginia Slims 120. She cut quite the figure with her thick black hair tied up in a Pucci scarf, oversized glasses, skin a tawny brown that a Midwesterner couldn’t obtain with all the baby oil and summer sun in the world. She still has her accent, too, a faintly exotic lilt from spending the first ten years of her life in Iran.

  “We didn’t drive all this way to sit in the cabin,” she says.

  The “honey” has vanished, both the word and the tenor.

  Salem rubs nervously at the webbing between her thumb and pointer finger, trying not to cry. “Daddy wouldn’t make me.”

  “Daddy isn’t here, is he?”

  10

  Minneapolis Institute of Art

  Salem suddenly became aware that Dr. Keller, the Mia staff member, and Bel were all watching her. Dr. Keller’s brow furrowed, his body language saying that he didn’t want to leave but was forced to. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” Salem said. “Thanks for your help.”

  He seemed poised to add something but unsure how to word it. Finally, duty winning out, he turned and hurried through the exhibit doorway.

  Salem and Bel returned their attention to the painting.

  A small group had gathered behind them to admire the Gentileschi, murmuring about the grand drama of it, the beauty, the violence. Bel leaned closer to Salem. “You move to one side, I’ll go to the other. Check for notes Vida may have hidden on it as best as you can, okay?”

  Both women stepped back a few feet, and as surreptitiously as possible they eyeballed the back rim of the frame in the three inches between the wood and the wall.

  Nothing jumped out.

  They returned to front of the painting. Tension made Salem’s hands clammy.

  “You think there’s a secret panel in the frame and that’s what Vida sent us to find?” Bel asked.

  Salem crossed her arms, analyzing the gilt of the simple beveled mount. Before his death, her father had taught her everything a person could know about concealing drawers and compartments in wood. Looking back, it seemed a weird specialty for a carpenter, but her puzzling mind had loved it. She knew that if a craftsperson had hidden something in the Gentileschi frame, it would be nearly impossible to locate it without physically touching the wood.

  “If there is, we’re screwed. I imagine they don’t look lightly on patrons groping the art.”

  “So now what?”

  “I don’t know.” Salem uncrossed her arms in frustration and felt something odd in her pocket. She reached in, tugged out the ancient spectacles.

  Bel spotted what she was doing. Her face reflected an array of emotions, from amusement to desperation. “You’re going to put them on?”

  “I guess,” Salem said, sliding them onto her face. “They were in the box with the note that directed us here. Nothing to lose, right?”

  Bel wrinkled her nose. “You look like a super-fan in line for the latest Harry Potter movie.”

  The glasses pinched Salem’s nose, and the scratches on the lens were so profound as to render them nearly blinders. Yet, her mother had left them in the balsa box for a reason. Salem blinked myopically. “I’m hoping they’re like those 3D glasses that came in our Count Chocula. Remember?”

  “I remember they were supposed to let us read a secret code on the cereal box.” Bel’s brow was creased. “Mine never worked.”

  “Mine either, actually.” With great effort, Salem restrained herself from glancing around to see what stares the glasses were drawing. Instead, she walked forward and peered at the lower edge of the Gentileschi, her nose almost touching it. The painting was darker than it appeared in photographs and flat, the oil paint hardly built up at all. She began systematically scanning every square inch of the canvas from left to right.

  Bel stood next to her. “I will kick the ass of anyone who makes fun of you,” she hissed.

  Salem’s lips twitched. She and Bel were still friends, but she worried that that had grown to mean something different, less potent, with Bel in Chicago. For all of today’s trauma, it was nice to have Bel back as her bodyguard.

  After her first complete pass, Salem risked a peek behind her. People were staring. She certainly was doing a passable impression of the world’s biggest dork, swaying from side to side, nose-to-canvas, wearing a rusty pair of Coke-bottle, Ben Franklin glasses. It wouldn’t be long until security guards were called. She returned her focus to the painting and sped up her pace.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bel’s clenched hands.

  Left to right. Right to left. Left to right. Right to left.

  It was difficult to make out anything through the scratched lens.

  Still, she continued, moving as if mounted on the track of a giant typewriter, methodically scouring the canvas’s surface. She reached the first ribbon of Holofernes’s blood on the bed, so vivid that it blazed copper even through the brutalized glasses.

  She stopped—she’d spotted something. “Bel!”

  “What?” Bel swiveled.

  Salem peered closer. “Nothing.” She released her breath. “I thought I saw some sort of symbol. It was just a paint smudge.”

  She returned to her rhythmic searching. A loud muttering erupted near the entrance, followed by silence, then more talking. A nearby walkie-talkie squawked. Salem kept surveying the painting, moving even faster if such a thing was possible.

  She was operating so quickly, her heartbeat so loud, that she almost missed it.

  She returned to the fringe of the blanket beneath Holofernes’s bleeding head, her pulse quickening. Had she imagined something again?

  She peered closer, tipping her head. Her breath caught.

  She hadn’t imagined it.

  Words.

  She yanked the glasses off of her face.

  The words disappeared.

  She slid them back on, and the words reappeared.

  “Oh my god.”

  Clancy Johnson studied the artwork at the far end of the Target Gallery. According to the placard, he was looking at Hildegard of Bingen’s manuscript illustration of the universe, created circa 1140–50. It reminded him of a Persian rug with a fiery vagina drawn on it.

  It wasn’t really to his taste.

  He’d chosen the position because it allowed him to watch the women without appearing to do so. They’d been staring at the gruesome beheading painting as if it, rather than the hoo-ha-on-a-rug, held the secrets of creation. Then the dark-haired woman, Salem Wiley, had stuck on those weird little glasses. He didn’t know how he was going to explain those.

  He was unsurprised when the security guards showed up. The only question was how long until they kicked the girls out. The two stood out like sore thumbs, their agitation and fear emanating off of them like the stink clouds that followed cartoon skunks. Pepé Le Pew. Now that was some art Clancy could get behind.

  He ran his hand over his thinning hair. He couldn’t blame the girls for their state, given what they’d been through in the last eight hours. Even their driving from Grace Odegaard’s apartment to the Art Institute had been erratic. He pressed the ear bud more firmly into place. It was a small bit of luck that the SIGINT materials he’d packed were identical to the audio guide headphones handed out with the exhibit.

  Except his magnified sound.

  He smiled as he picked up Salem Wiley’s voice.

  11

  Eight Years Old

  “You know why people hide things, don’t you, Salem?”

  Daniel Wiley is hand-sanding a walnut monk’s bench. The sun pokes through the shop window’s dusty glass, and sawdust the color of heartsblood gambols in the beam. Salem trails her finger throu
gh the specks, upsetting their fairy dance. She’s on summer break between second and third grade. The weather’s been moody, starting out cooler than usual but winding toward the end of the hottest July on record.

  She’s helped her dad pick out the wood for this bench. Held tools while he measured, cut, drilled, and dremeled. Watched in awe as he carved the lion’s heads that would decorate each end of the two armrests. His woodshop is her favorite place on earth to be, most days.

  “So other people don’t find them?” she guesses.

  He blows the last of the sawdust off his creation and reaches for the varnish. She wants him to open it more than anything in the whole, whole world. He’s always made her leave at this point in a project. She imagines the varnish must smell like butterscotch.

  “That’s right.” He is smiling, encouraging. He wears the cut-off jean shorts and the faded, paper-thin Led Zeppelin Icarus t-shirt he always wears at this stage in the project, this time of year. “And why don’t they want other people to find them?”

  Salem pushes a sticky curl from her face. The Powderhorn Park wading pool closes at five o’clock. It’s clear water that stops at her knees. She tells herself it’s not scary, it’s just a big bathtub, and cooling off an entire third of herself will feel like heaven. Maybe Bellie can ride the bus over and they can skip to the park together, joking about how they’re too old for the baby pool but secretly loving it, and then walk home and drink grape Kool-Aid with ice cubes and watch the afternoon showing of Bel’s favorite TV show, Days of Our Lives. Bel has promised Salem she’ll understand it when she turns the ripe age of nine and that until then, it’s her job to watch and learn.

  “Because they don’t have enough to share?”

  He studies her. “You know what, I think you’re old enough to watch the final step.”

  Her mouth forms a perfect O. “You’re going to let me watch the varnish?”

  He sets down the can, chuckling. “If you like, but I have something that comes right before the varnish that I think you’ll like even better. It’s the final test of the furniture.”

  He reaches into the mouth of a carved lion’s head and tugs its wooden tongue. Without releasing the tongue, he turns the head 45 degrees and slides the top of the armrest toward the center. Underneath lies a narrow hidden drawer. He repeats the action with the other lion’s head.

  Salem is speechless.

  “I added the compartments while you were sleeping. I do that with every piece of furniture I make.”

  He flips the varnish lid and stirs the viscous liquid underneath. She wrinkles her nose against the acrid odor. It doesn’t smell like butterscotch at all.

  “Remember the question I asked you earlier?” He uses the inside lip of the can to scrape the excess varnish off the stir stick. “There’s only one reason a person ever hides something.”

  She blinks, waiting.

  He clicks the lid back into place. It makes a hollow snap, like a metal bone breaking.

  “Fear. That’s the only reason.”

  Salem looks at the hidden drawers her father just revealed to her. She is no longer thinking of grape Kool-Aid.

  12

  Minneapolis Institute of Art

  Fear. If her dad had been right, that’s what had motivated her mother to hide her instructions in a cipher, which led Salem to this message hidden in Judith Slaying Holofernes.

  But what level of fear would send her mom to these lengths?

  “Amazing!” Bel barked.

  Salem snapped her mouth shut, puzzled. Then, she caught the shadow of the security guard closing in on them. She yanked off the glasses and stuffed them in her pocket.

  “It really is!” Salem nodded energetically. If they hadn’t been drawing attention before, they certainly were now. “A real work of art, this Gentileschi. Ladies are doing it for themselves.”

  Bel grabbed her arm and steered her toward the door, marching right through the guards. They didn’t speak again until they reached the bathroom.

  Bel spun her around. “What did you see?” she demanded.

  Salem pointed at the glasses in her pocket, her voice disbelieving. “The spectacles must be some kind of moiré device. They showed up a pattern in the blanket’s fringe.”

  “Moray device? Like the eel?” Bel stepped away to peek under the stalls. Finding them all empty, she pulled Salem away from the door.

  “Close—moiré. I know it from math, but the principle works on cloth, or canvas, I suppose.”

  Bel waited, eyes trained over Salem’s shoulder, toward the entrance. At 5'11", she was over half a foot taller than Salem and nearly the same weight. She carried hers lightly, on the balls of her feet, ready to pounce on anyone who entered.

  Salem massaged her nose where the glasses had left a mark. “It’s when you have one lined pattern, and then you slightly rotate a second lined pattern on top of it. If you have something that mimics the initial lined pattern, like etched glass”—she tugged the glasses out of her pocket and held them up—“it essentially renders the first pattern invisible. Only the lines of the second pattern can be seen. They can be shapes or words.”

  “And in this case … ”

  “Words!” Salem said triumphantly.

  Bel was used to how Salem’s brain worked. “And they said … ?”

  “I could only read a little bit at a time, but I think I got it all before the security guard came over.” Salem spoke the words into her phone loud enough for Bel to hear. “We need a translation of Il cuore della prima chiesa nel nuovo mondo.”

  “Is that Italian?” Bel asked. “What’s it mean?”

  Siri’s robotic voice answered: “The heart of the first church in the new world.”

  13

  Minneapolis Institute of Art

  Bel and Salem passed the same clueless expression back and forth in a poor imitation of Laurel and Hardy. Bel broke the spell. “I don’t know what the hell that means, but I’m confident you’ll figure it out. And the sooner you do, the sooner we rescue our moms.” She hauled her own smartphone out of her back pocket. “Tell me what to look up.”

  Three women entered the bathroom, forcing Salem and Bel to move closer to the sinks. They huddled as far in a corner as they could, Salem talking them both through what they already knew. “The message in Gentileschi said ‘first church of the New World.’ Vida’s note said to go home. So, let’s Google First Churches in Minnesota. It’s in the New World, technically, and home to both of us, right?”

  Bel saluted, and they hunched over their phones, typing furiously.

  “There’s about a million first churches in Minnesota,” Bel groaned. “First Seventh-Day Adventist, First Congregational, First Covenant … ”

  Salem bit her lip. “Let’s take out the Minnesota and try it in quotes.”

  “Try what in quotes?”

  “‘First Church.’ That’ll screen out competing names.”

  Bel updated her search and scrolled through her phone, reading out loud, under her breath. “First Church in Cambridge, First Church in Wethersfield, First Church in Boston, First Church in Texas—wait!”

  They spotted it at the same time: “First Church in Salem, Unitarian.”

  Bel’s face scrunched up. “‘Go home.’ Have you ever been to Salem, Salem?”

  Salem shook her head. “Not unless I was a baby and no one told me.” She clicked the link and opened the “About Us” page on the First Church website. “The church was founded in 1629, one of the first in the nation.” She pointed toward Bel’s phone. “Verify when Gentileschi painted Judith Slaying Holofernes while I read the rest of the history.”

  A woman who had left the closest stall to wash her hands turned off the water and reached for a paper towel. “1614 to 1618. Somewhere in there.”

  “Excuse me?” Bel asked, hackles raised.

  Th
e woman turned from the paper towel dispenser. It was the same coral-lipped staff member who’d let them into the Women in Art Exhibit. “Judith Slaying Holofernes. Artemisia Gentileschi worked on it from 1614 to 1618, give or take.”

  “Are you an art history student?” Bel asked.

  She pointed at faint crow’s feet accenting the corners of her eyes. “Ten years ago I was. I’m hoping to be a curator here someday. Or, more likely, at another art institute. They don’t like to hire from their own pool in most places. They prefer a ‘diversity of ideas.’” She held out her hand. “I’m Sheila. And word is you two almost got yourselves kicked out of the exhibit. If I’d known you were such weirdos, I never would have allowed you in to find Dr. Keller.” Her smile belied her words.

  Bel shook Sheila’s hand. Salem followed. The woman’s confident grip, combined with her open expression, made up Salem’s mind for her. “Speaking of weird, can I ask you something?”

  Sheila glanced at her phone. “Sure. I’m on break for another five minutes.”

  “Have you ever heard of a secret message, or a code, maybe, hidden in a painting?”

  Sheila’s soft laughter made Salem think of chimes. “Ah, I didn’t peg you two for conspiracists, but it all makes sense now. Were you looking for a message in the Gentileschi?”

  “We’re just curious,” Bel said.

  Sheila’s eyes narrowed. If she knew Bel was lying, she had the good manners not to call her on it. “I’ve never heard of anything in a Gentileschi, but there are some famous examples. Da Vinci, of course, painted an LV in Mona Lisa’s right eye. Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Madonna with Saint Giovannino depicts a pretty clear UFO flying in the background over Mary’s shoulder, and that was painted in the fifteenth century. Michelangelo liked to dig up and dissect corpses, and the ceiling panels on the Sistine Chapel are supposed to be silly with hidden representations of brains and organs, though I don’t see them myself.”