88

Montvale, Virginia

The three of them had picked up a rental car at the airport, purchased shovels, pickaxes, and a high-powered GPS at a Home Depot just outside of Richmond, and inputted Beale’s coordinates.

The GPS led them to Montvale, Virginia, then south to Porters Mountain Road. A sugar maple and pine forest hugged the sides of the winding highway. Mountains—or at least they looked like mountains to Midwest-raised Salem—circled the robin’s-egg blue of the sky. Although they had yet to pass a farm, the air carried the earthy smell of manure and spicy plants, like tomatoes or dandelions.

They’d been on Porters Mountain Road for three miles when the phone commanded them to drive straight into the center of the woods. Bel had parked the car on the shoulder, and they’d packed up their equipment and started hiking in and up, Bel carrying her share of the load even though her shoulder was clearly still bothering her.

The forest air smelled musky, like snake dens and decomposing leaves. The trees stayed dense, but the ground transformed from spongy to stone. In the distance, Salem heard water crackling along a rocky creek. It reminded her of the sound of bacon frying. Birds screeched overheard. Sweat began to inch between her shoulder blades despite the molasses-thick shade of the trees. When they reached a rocky outcropping shaped like three triangles, the GPS informed them that they’d
arrived. They went to work on the middle stone, trying to pry and budge it.

That’s why they had been taken completely off guard by the man.

“Hands up. All three of you.”

Bel, Salem, and Ernest dropped their tools and turned slowly.

“Tell me what you’re doing.” The elderly man’s sing-song accent was at odds with the shotgun he had trained on them and his gnarled face. He wore a flannel shirt and faded jeans tucked into work boots. A noon sun shone overhead, speckling the forest.

They didn’t have a weapon of their own. Bel couldn’t risk an unregistered gun in her bag, even if they’d had time to check it.

“Sir, put the gun down.” Bel’s voice was steady. “You can see we’re unarmed.”

“Please,” Salem begged, her hands in the air. To have come this far, to be so close to saving their mothers, only to be gunned down by this stranger was inconceivable.

“I can see you’re trespassers, and I’m within my legal rights to shoot you.” He tossed his chin at the pickaxes they’d dropped at their feet. “Treasure hunters?”

“Yes sir,” Ernest said.

“Bah.” The man spit to his left, but he didn’t lower the gun.

“Is this your land?” Salem asked.

He nodded. “And my father’s, and his dad before that. And I’ll be g’all damned if you get to come and go as you please on what is rightly mine. If I chase off one treasure hunter a week, I chase off ten.”

Salem licked her lips. “Has Beale’s vault been discovered?”

“Hell if I know. I’ll ask you kindly to pick up your equipment, walk back the way you came, and never return.”

Salem’s stomach dropped, but she followed his instructions, as did Ernest and Bel. They grabbed their tools, including the GPS, and started walking away.

“Sir,” Ernest said, stopping.

The man’s gun was still trained on them.

“Do you have a mother?”

“A’course,” he said. “And two legs and a dog. What’s that to do with anything?”

“We’re trying to save one of these women’s mothers.”

The man made a sound like air leaving a tire and cocked an eyebrow at Salem and Bel. “Which one?”

“Please.” Salem stepped forward. He’d let the tip of his gun fall, but he raised it back. “We don’t know. We just know that somebody kidnapped our mothers, but one of them may still be alive. If we can get to the vault, they might return her.”

He laughed, then paused. “You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a new one.” He dropped his gun again, scratching his chin. “I’m quite sure I don’t believe you, but a good story deserves a reward. I tell you what, though, I’ve been hunting these woods since I was knee high to a grasshopper. If there were a treasure in these rocks, I’d have found it.”

“Sir?” A hunch burned Salem’s throat.

“Yup.”

Miss Gram guards the truth. What if it was more than a tip to the anagram contained in the ciphers? What if it marked the actual vault? “Have you noticed any symbols around here, ever? You know, when you were hunting?”

“Like pentagrams or something?”

“Probably not,” Salem said. “Something smaller.”

“Nope,” he said, yanking a handkerchief out of his back pocket. He blew loudly and returned the cloth. “Just the electric company’s stamp over the yonder hill.”

Salem forgot to breathe. Miss Gram, rearranged, made Ma Rigs Ms, Mags Rims, and Mass Grim.

It also made Mrs. Sigma.

The original Greek letter sigma, used frequently in modern mathematics, was usually referred to as lunate sigma, or the female sigma, because of its crescent shape.

Mrs. Sigma guards the truth.

Emily Dickinson had included the symbol below her name in both messages she’d written. Writers were taught to represent sigma with more of a buckle in the middle, comparable to an English capital E, like the first letter in electric.

Exactly what you’d expect to see for an electric company’s stamp.

“Never would have found the stamp,” the man said, pointing at it. Once he’d made up his mind about the three of him, he’d been a genial host, introducing himself as Ronald. “Except a burrow of groundhogs set up here. I don’t mind ’em, but the wife didn’t like what they did to her garden. I tracked them back to their home and made to set up traps.

“You have to secure the trap to the ground or the animal runs away with it,” he explained to Ernest, as if the 6'7" city boy was the only one who could truly understand. “I stuck one in right here and it wouldn’t go. Not surprising, since much of this is rock. I moved the grass aside to be sure, and there was the electric company stamp. Funny, because there’s no electricity over here.”

He kept talking to Ernest while Salem and Bel dropped to their knees, ripping out grass and pushing aside dirt. Their work revealed the metal disk—bronze, the size of a dinner plate, a large Σ stamped in its center.

They both sat back on their heels. Salem’s skin tingled.

Ronald stepped over to them. “That’s it. There you go! Good work, girls.”

“You found it, Salem,” Bel said. “I can’t believe it. You found Beale’s vault.”

“We all found it,” Salem insisted. Was it possible to have an excitement-­induced heart attack?

“Maybe,” Bel replied. “But you’re going to be the one to open it.”

Ronald leaned his gun against a nearby tree. “How’s that? Open it?”

“We think this is the marker for the Beale vault, sir.” Bel stood awkwardly, her arm in its sling, and brushed off her knees. “If you’re familiar, the second cipher says the treasure is six feet under.”

Ronald took Bel’s place next to Salem, his gun forgotten. “Well, I’ll be. You know people been looking for this for lifetimes, right?”

Salem felt all the grooves on the stamp. In mathematics, sigma usually represented the sum of a series. She suspected Thomas J. Beale used it to represent the lunar, or feminine. Neither piece of information helped her. “Hand me the pickax.”

“You’re not going to destroy it, are you?” Bel asked.

“I want to dig around it.” Salem took the tool Ernest handed to her, using the blunt edge like a hand spade to clear the area immediately surrounding the bronze stamp. A wider metal circle emerged under that. “Help me!”

All four of them went at it, digging until their shoulders ached and sweat stung their eyes. They widened the circle, and then another circle around that. After an hour, they had discovered the top of the vault. The stamp was welded to a circle the size and shape of a manhole cover, which sealed what appeared to be a room-sized, rusted metal container buried in the ground, sloping out and down from the manhole. Salem guessed it was shaped like a giant whiskey jug if she could see it from the side.

“Now what?” Bel asked. They’d stopped, panting, the circle of earth they’d cleared forming a natural ledge they could all sit on to study the manhole cover. “A blow torch?”

“Let’s get these pickaxes between the lid and the base and see if we can pry it open,” Ronald offered. He tried first, but there was no crack to stick it in. Even after a few directed swings with the pickax, there was no purchase.

Bel scratched her head. “I think it needs your sweet touch, Salem.”

“I don’t know what to do,” she wailed. “I’ve felt every square inch of that cover, pressed and pulled on every bit of it.”

“What about pushing together?” Ronald asked. “You pushed down, but how about toward? Like squeezing?”

“What would you squeeze?”

“The edges of this E.” Ronald pointed toward the tips of the sigma symbol. “It’s itching to meet up with itself.” He leaned forward and demonstrated, his long fingers touching the points and pinching.

The vault underneath them shifted.

“Do it some more!”

He squeezed again. The earth rumbled some more, and the manhole cover popped up an inch with a pneumatic hiss. The air it released was bitter with age.

“Help me push this lid open,” he said. They all came around to his side and put their shoulders into it. The manhole slide to the side, still attached but no longer covering the opening. An absorbent darkness stared back at them.

Ronald whistled low. “I hope one of you brought a flashlight.”