31

Salem, Massachusetts

The 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 toḷḷing 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.”