Salem's Cipher Page 9

  “Truth.” Bel held open the door. “After you.”

  They stepped inside. The cling of moth balls and mustiness scrambled up Salem’s nose. She took a quick survey of the small space before pointing toward the ceiling. “This beam is the only part of the original building that remains, according to my research. It was the central support in the meeting house that became the First Church.” She indicated the other material inside the building, including ancient-looking pews and warped walls. “A lot of this was added later, when the church was moved.”

  “So that makes that beam … ”

  “The heart of the first church,” Salem said, finishing her sentence for her. “We need to check it for hidden drawers or messages.”

  Bel shook her head in disbelief. “What have we gotten into? Mom and Vida disappear and leave some weird code behind, which may or may not have meant to send us to Massachusetts to feel up a four-hundred-year-old chunk of wood. The guys on my beat would love this.”

  “More feeling up, less talking,” Salem said.

  “You do the feeling, I’ll do the lookout.” Bel grabbed a stool and handed it to Salem. “That should get you tall enough. I wouldn’t have any idea what to look for. It’s your dad who was the mystical carpenter. All my father offered was a one-time sperm donation, remember?”

  Bel hadn’t meant the words as anything but fact, Salem was sure of it. Still, they stung. “And my dad killed himself, remember?”

  Bel stared at her cross-eyed. The tension of the last twenty-four hours was finally crackling, pushing them to the edge of one of their rare fights. They’d had three in their lives, by Salem’s count. The first happened when Salem was eight and Bel eleven, and Bel was convinced that Salem had purposely wrecked her Furby because she was jealous of Bel’s new friendship with a neighborhood girl. Salem had insisted that it was an accident. They didn’t speak for a whole month, then one day ran into each other on the playground (Salem suspected their mothers had something to do with that) and picked their friendship up where it had left off. The second fight occurred seven years later, when Salem told Bel she’d decided not to go to college because she’d found an online coding job she could do from home. Bel had gone ballistic, yelling at her until she wore her down.

  The third clash happened more recently, just three weeks ago, when Bel brought Rachel, her new girlfriend, to Minnesota for a visit. Rachel, a petite Korean five years younger than Bel, worked the make-up counter at the Macy’s in downtown Chicago. She wouldn’t leave the house without her hair curled and her eyeliner and lipstick perfect, she texted or checked Facebook the entire visit, and she made velvet jabs at Bel’s low-maintenance look, calling the criticism “professional courtesy” before breaking into an insincere laugh.

  When Bel asked Salem what she thought of Rachel, Salem had made the mistake of answering honestly.

  Bel had left for Chicago the next day without saying goodbye.

  Her middle-of-the-night phone call was the first time they’d talked since that incident.

  This was not the time for a fourth dustup. Salem would absorb whatever was needed to keep the peace. She pushed her curls back from her face and looked Bel in the eye. “Sorry for snapping at you. Will you peek behind the pews while I look up here?” She stared at the beam. “Just in case.”

  “What am I looking for?” Bel still sounded crabby.

  “Anything that seems out of place.” Salem bit her tongue. Bel was wired to need the last word, and it wouldn’t cost Salem anything to give it to her.

  “Like us?” But Bel did as she was told, pacing toward the front of the old church.

  Salem rubbed the back of her neck before perching the stool under one of the two ends of the beam. If she stood on the three-legged chair, she was able to feel all sides of the seemingly solid chunk of wood. The truth was, she didn’t know exactly what to look for, either. If the beam contained a secret compartment, it would require some sort of trigger, but the thing looked like an unbroken chestnut girder, as dense as rock.

  Still, she began to search, inch by square inch.

  22

  Nine Years Old

  “Can you find the secret compartments, honey?” Daniel indicates the simple desk he’s been working on.

  “You’re silly,” she says. There’s nothing magical about the plain, boring old desk he’s been working on. Besides, she wants to play with the Rubik’s Snake her dad bought her from a garage sale up the street. Designed by Erno Rubik, inventor of Rubik’s Cube, the snake is currently shaped in a V made up of twenty-four multicolored plastic prisms that rotate four different ways. “Why would I look for anything hidden in there?”

  Daniel gently takes the snake from her. He twists the four prisms on one end of the V, and voila! It’s now a snake with a club foot. Salem claps her hands and squeals.

  Her dad’s face breaks into a grin, a great big crinkly smile that looks like home and hearth and everything right in the world. “You see?” he says. “It feels good to discover hidden things. That’s why you should search this desk.”

  She twists the other leg of the V and creates a club. She is falling into the puzzle, leaving this moment, her focus on the snake. She spots how, thirty-four moves out, she could transform the snake into a uniform ball. Daniel ruffles her hair, pulling her attention back.

  “How about you give your old man a moment of your time?”

  She doesn’t want to. The puzzle is calling to her. But he takes his wallet out of his worn jeans pocket, reaches in and tugs out a credit card, and slides it under the rim between the top and back of the unsanded desk.

  A secret drawer pops open. It’s on the leg of the desk, completely unexpected. Salem drops the snake and peers into the drawer. “A diamond!”

  He laughs, a deep, rumbling belly laugh, as she holds the giant Richie Rich gem in the air. “I bought that at the garage sale too,” he says. “You can keep it.”

  She can’t look away from the plastic jewel. “Will you show me where the other secret drawers are?”

  “I’ll do better than that,” he says. “I’ll let you discover them yourself, and you can keep whatever you find inside.”

  She’d located two more drawers within ten minutes by knocking along the wood until she detected a hollowness, and then sliding her fingernail in nearby cracks to release the spring. The first drawer held a plastic ruby, the second a Lucite emerald the size of an apricot.

  Daniel’s pride is written so plainly on his face that Salem blushes.

  “It wasn’t that hard, Dad.”

  He pulls her into an embrace so powerful she can’t breathe. She doesn’t complain, though, or consider dropping the jewels she clutches in her hands.

  “You’ve got a gift, honey,” he murmurs into her hair. “You make me proud.”

  23

  Salem, Massachusetts

  It occurred to Salem, not for the first time, what an odd niche her dad had found with his carpentry. There couldn’t have been many craftspeople creating pieces as he did. She had no idea who his clientele were. They never came into the house. One day, a white van would pull up—always a white van—and the latest piece of furniture would vanish. That night, like clockwork, Daniel would take her and Vida out for crab legs, and he’d pay cash. Looking back, it had seemed normal because it was all she knew, but she wondered now if she should have paid more attention to who her dad worked for.

  She’d been too busy playing, and then learning, at his feet. There’d been so many pieces of furniture that she couldn’t pick a favorite. One time, she’d helped Daniel construct a flat-top highboy decorated with cornices. A shallow drawer was hidden behind a broad piece of molding, and it could only be accessed by opening the visible drawer underneath it and sticking her hand inside to release a wooden spring. Many, many more pieces of furniture followed. The best hiding places were always the simplest, he made a point of te
lling her, and that’s why his secretary with the artless push-drawers hidden in its legs was Daniel Wiley’s most popular piece of furniture.

  She swallowed past the pain that accompanied memories of her father. After all, she should be grateful that he’d taught her what he had. She knocked on the First Church beam, and she stuck her fingernails in crevices, and she pressed. She found a rhythm, and the world fell away. Whatever her mom had sent her here to find, she would discover. Whatever puzzle needed cracking, she would solve it. Whatever—

  “Salem?”

  The tenor of Bel’s voice carried a warning, but Salem didn’t need it. She’d felt it the same time as Bel, a tingle in the back of her neck, a sensation so strong it was almost a smell, almost like …

  Frankincense.

  Bel jogged toward the front of the church, patting the gun at her hip.

  Salem’s eyes shot into every corner of the building. She felt exposed atop the stool. She began to crawl off but was frozen by a voice, deep and angry.

  “Stop!”

  24

  Salem, Massachusetts

  “Stop,” Jason commanded the woman. According to the man who’d been walking his bulldog outside the church, her name was Samantha.

  She turned, startled. He’d caught her walking toward the bathroom. “Yes?”

  “My mother was very specific about the pulpit, which she wanted me to see. It was a shining memory from her wedding. Yet, it doesn’t look like the original I saw in the pictures. Is it?”

  “The original? I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “Come, I’ll show you.”

  The gray-haired office worker’s smile took on a strained appearance. “Of course.”

  When she walked through the door into the sanctuary, she gasped.

  The enormous, gorgeous building had been constructed in 1836, and little had changed in this section of it in the nearly 200 convening years. The ceiling was still covered in quatrefoil molding, replicating the design on the exterior tower. The lancet windows still held the watercolor glory of the stained glass, nearly as old as the stones of the church, depicting biblical scenes. The dark wood of the row pews, and even the worn red velvet of the cushions of the box pews that lined the west and east sides of the church, was intact. The glorious organ in the balcony, which turned the entire upper back of the church into a brass wall, was untouched.

  It was the pulpit, the magnificent ten-foot lectern at the head of the church, that Jason had destroyed. Every delicate panel of wood adorning its front and sides had been molested, splintered, ripped open.

  The church worker spoke through shaking fingers. “What have you done?”

  Jason stared intently at her. The destruction meant nothing to him. He needed the docket. It hadn’t been anywhere in the pulpit, and he had to figure out where he’d gone wrong. “Is this the First Church of Salem?”

  “Of course it is.” She was backing toward the door.

  “The only one?”

  She began weeping, sniffling, still fumbling backward, her eyes wide with shock. “No. There were four. Didn’t you know?”

  Jason’s mother’s face slid over Samantha’s. He knew this sniveling woman wasn’t Vera, but still, he heard her speak his mother’s words, telling him how stupid he was, not good for anything, a mistake who just made more mistakes.

  He should have researched the church more carefully. He’d been too excited, too close to success. He should have known there would be more than one.

  You ugly shit. Put a bag over your head when you go out. It’s good they come at you from behind so they don’t have to look at your face. Don’t tell them I’m your mom. And if you get lost, don’t bother getting found.

  He hit the side of his head to drown out her voice. Vera couldn’t hurt him. Making sure of that was his first order of business once the Hermitage Foundation had given him the necessary skills and money. He checked on her every week, two at the most, just as he had done on his layover on the way to Massachusetts. It took no more than twenty minutes to change the litter under her chair and pour fresh water in the bottle and tube he’d strung from the ceiling. Only a minute to switch out the IV bag that supplied her nutrients.

  She’d given up on begging him to untie her years ago, even before the flesh had grown over the IV needle, consuming it, making it part of her.

  Now, she didn’t even open her eyes when he visited.

  He spoke to the gray-haired church lady, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Tell me what you mean when you say there were four.”

  “Four first churches, three buildings. The original First Church met in 1629.” She was talking so fast, snot running from her nose and into her mouth. “About a hundred years ago, that building was moved behind Plummer Hall up a ways on Essex. It’s a tourist stop, a tiny old thing, no longer in use.”

  Her back was flat against the door, but she seemed to have forgotten how to work a door knob. “Then came the East and North churches, and another First Church. This building was the North Church, built in 1836, but when it reunited with the First Church congregation in 1923, they both moved here because—”

  She choked on the slimy yogurt of her own words, the blood draining from her face. It was only when he spotted the whites around her pupils that Jason realized her terror had ramped up a notch. A second later, he understood why—his bones weren’t set. This happened to him in times of great stress, more frequently the older he grew. Only once had he witnessed his face when it was loose, reflecting back at him from a plate glass window.

  It was a demon’s mask.

  He quickly rearranged his bones to support a bland expression, but it was too late. She was melting toward the ground, unable or unwilling to turn her back on him, her mouth opening and closing like a landed carp.

  He leapt forward, grabbing her. Her throat was sliced before his feet touched the ground, his hands quicker than gravity. He wished he hadn’t made such a mess of the pulpit, but there was no turning back time. He stuffed her in one of the box pews and cleared away the worst of the pulpit’s wood splinters. He only needed to buy an hour or two.

  Now that he knew his mistake, he could address it. He needed to go to the original First Church, the one that was now behind Plummer Hall, a tiny old thing, no longer in use.

  25

  Salem, Massachusetts

  “Stop! You’re not supposed to be up there.” The man’s face was flushed with anger. He stood in the doorway of the old one-room church, his hand on the unlatched door. His blazer marked him as a Peabody Essex Museum employee, and his named badge tagged him as a “Guy.” “We need to preserve this building. You can’t get all up in everything.”

  Salem hopped off the stool. She gulped three deep breaths to calm herself.

  “I’m so sorry!” Bel tossed Salem a glance as she made her way toward the worker. I’ve got this, it said. Get back to work. “Someone told us Nathaniel Hawthorne had carved his initials into this post, and we wanted a photo.”

  Guy, who appeared to be in his mid twenties and was built like a linebacker, shoved his hands deep in his pockets. “That’d be pretty cool if it was true, but it isn’t. Hawthorne lived here during a totally different time.”

  Bel tipped her head. “But you do have some Hawthorne artifacts here. Right?”

  “Sure, in Plummer Hall,” he said, shoving his ear over his shoulder. “You must have walked through it to get back here.”

  They had. They’d walked through the entire building, out the back door, down the stairs, and up to this itsy bitsy, single-room church that had, if Salem’s research was accurate, been a meeting house, and then the First Church of Salem, and then a storage shed before it was found, restored, and relocated behind the Plummer House about 100 years ago. It was a pointy little red thing, shaped like a Monopoly house, with windows on each side and a blistered old door with a metal loop for a kno
b.

  “Can you point me toward the Hawthorne artifacts?”

  Guy appeared doubtful. While Salem thought it would’ve helped if Bel had been more specific about what sort of Nathaniel Hawthorne “artifacts” she was interested in, she was impressed that her friend had not only recalled Hawthorne’s name from their taxi ride, but also pulled it out of her ass when they needed it the most.

  “That’s okay,” Bel said, strolling past Guy when he didn’t answer. “I’m sure they can help me inside.”

  Guy either didn’t want to let Bel slip through his hands, didn’t want to be known as the king of bad customer service, or both, because after a laughable second hooking his glance between Bel and Salem, he decided to follow Bel.

  “Go get ’em, tiger,” Salem said under her breath, referring to Bel. She loved everything about her best friend, but right now she particularly loved her quick thinking. She leapt back onto the stool, alone in the whitewashed space.

  As she was knocking, exploring, and pressing, she thought, not for the first time, how grateful she was for the Internet. No way would she have known there were four First Churches without it. She would have just ended up at 316 Essex Street, where the current First Church stood, and then what?

  She liked thinking this. The small victory made standing on a stool, pounding on an old chunk of wood embedded in a ceiling, and injecting her fingers with some of the oldest splinters in America feel less like a snipe hunt. It also made her feel not so exposed this far from Minnesota. That train of thought helped until she reached nearly all the way to the other end of the beam, her knuckles scuffed, her fingernail beds porcupine-pierced with wood. She had less than a foot of the beam left to explore, and she’d discovered nothing, not even an old piece of chewing gum stuck up in there.