20

Stonehenge

She dashed toward the stone, her blood thick in her veins. A sliver of sun had broken through the clouds and glinted off the rock face. The stone was covered in lichen, like the others, but the sun had also caught metal.

“What is it?” Charlie called, rushing to her side.

She pointed.

He squinted. “Yeah, it’s Stone 52. That’s a nail.”

“What?”

“Sure. Someone pounded it there, no one knows when. Lookit this.” He led her around to the south side of the stone. I WREN was carved into it. “Archeologists believe Christopher Wren carved this in here.”

“The seventeenth-century architect?”

“Among other pastimes. He may have been a freemason. Someone pounded a hole above the name.” He pointed toward it, overhead. “But don’t bother looking inside because that’s been examined more than a whore’s orifice.”

Salem recoiled.

He ran his fingers through his thick hair, chagrined. “Excuse my French. I spend too much time with men, I think. Truly sorry. It won’t happen again. But if it might be helpful, there’s more graffiti over here. Let me show you.”

They had stepped outside the circle to examine the outer edges of Stone 52. He brought her back inside to examine more markings. Now that he was pointing it out, she could see the graffiti everywhere. A dagger carved in one rock. Victorian names and dates in another. In some places, merely the suggestion of a name. She suddenly had so much visual information that the lichen and natural pebbling on the stone was starting to take on a pattern.

“How can we possibly find anything here?”

Charlie nodded sympathetically. “It might be helpful to consider what the original builders were after, if the code was hidden way back then. They were a pre-agricultural society. Feeding themselves would have taken up most of their day, if not their life. What force would’ve compelled them to forego survival to create this monolith?”

Salem found herself nodding.

He continued. “And how did they call others here? The Neoliths were only beginning to create pottery, for Pete’s sake. They had no method of communication, yet forensic study of the bones buried here prove that some came from as far away as Egypt, returning home and then visiting Stonehenge again, multiple times. What gathered them? Who organized them to build once they arrived?”

“Human instinct?” Salem said, almost to herself.

“What’s that?”

The blue-eyed raven cawed, pulling her gaze upward. “Maybe an ancient human instinct now bred out of us drew them here, the same drive that causes salmon to swim upstream and birds to fly south in the winter.”

A strain of music yanked her attention toward the guard. Except he was no longer standing there. No one was in earshot. Salem must have imagined it.

Charlie’s expression was doubtful, but it lit into a smile. “Maybe. In any case, this the most interesting code-breaking mission I’ve ever been on.” He held his hands out and twirled like a dancer. The wind outside the henge had ruffled his hair, and he hadn’t bothered to straighten it after entering the interior. “Cracking the meaning of Stonehenge! Who would have thought?”

Salem had no urge to join his excitement. Poor Mercy was terrified somewhere. Time was short. She yanked her camera out of her pocket. She would take photos now and study them later. If she discovered something, if Gaea’s image-reading program sniffed out something Salem’s eyes had missed, they could return to the rocks.

Charlie returned to the Altar Stone while Salem snapped photos. “This rock’s nickname came from Inigo Jones, who was sent here by James I to suss out what Stonehenge actually was.”

“Another seventeenth-century architect,” Salem murmured.

He pointed in the direction of the Heel Stone without moving his eyes. “Some researchers believe the Heel Stone was named that after the Anglo-Saxon word for conceal: helan.”

Salem squinted toward the Heel Stone, wondering again how he knew so much about Stonehenge. “You think there’s a code in there?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie looked at her, measuring her. “My dad was a stonemason. He taught me everything I know about this place.”

She hadn’t been expecting that. It brought a smile to her face. “Mine was a carpenter.”

“I know.”

Her face must have reflected her annoyance at him knowing that detail about her when she knew nothing about him because he stood, hands palm forward. “It’s not my fault you’re famous among us computer nerds.”

She noticed his dimples for the first time. “Is your dad still alive?”

He shook his head.

“Mine neither.” In that moment, she made up her mind; he had shared something personal with her and she would return the favor. She said it all in one breath before she lost the courage. “When I saw that replica Stonehenge in Ireland, it wasn’t just that it had an extra rock, one that isn’t standing here now. It wasn’t even that the extra rock had the word ‘mercy’ carved on it.”

Charlie’s eyebrows shot up.

“It’s what that extra rock made me see.” She dropped the B&C to the ground and opened her purse, rifling around until she found what she looked for. She yanked the plastic clamshell out and held it toward him, snapping open the top.

“It made me see that Stonehenge is arranged just like a packet of birth control pills. Well, the ones that come in the clamshell, anyhow. Do you see it? The circle of pills on the outside are the birth control. The ones on the inside are placebos, for your … period.”

She didn’t dare look at him. She let her hair fall over her eyes. “Once I saw that Stonehenge is shaped like a packet of birth control pills, it made me think there must be a feminine explanation for this site, that it’s related to a woman’s cycle, somehow.”

There. She’d said it all, every stupid word.

Had he heard?

His silence became too much. She pulled up her eyes.

His face was shifting.