Salem's Cipher

by Jess Lourey

  “Yeah. Turns out they frown on you doing drugs on the job.”

  Salem shook her head. “But you don’t do drugs.”

  Bel continued as if she hadn’t heard her. “Rachel turned me onto it. Said it would keep me on my game, alert.” She grimaced apologetically. “You know me, I always need to jump twice as high, run twice as fast. But in the Chicago PD, I was nameless, just one of hundreds trying for the same promotion. I only did it occasionally, only when I had to pull a double shift. Turns out one of those shifts included a random drug test.”

  Salem had thought the worst thing that could happen was hearing Bel say she hated Salem for lying to her about the phone. She’d been wrong. Seeing Bel’s shame—proud, perfect, strong Bel—was a million times worse. “Oh, Bellie.”

  Bel dropped her eyes. “I got the call about the scene at Mom’s apartment a few hours after I took the drug test. I figured the timing was perfect. Cosmic punishment.” Her glance rose. A pained grin creaked across her face. “Don’t cry! I was trying to make you feel better. Let you know you’re not the only bad guy in the room.”

  Salem wrapped Bel in her arms, pulling her so close that their heartbeats matched despite their height difference. At first Bel tried to pull back, but then she squeezed the breath out of Salem and kept hugging her past that point. She didn’t let go until both their tears stopped. When Salem finally released her, Bel used the cuff of her sleeve to wipe Salem’s eyes.

  “You’re on your own with those boogers,” she said, pointing at Salem’s nose.

  Salem laugh-hiccupped. “I’m so sorry.”

  Bel sighed. It sounded like a rusty bucket being pulled up a dry well. “We’re a fine pair, aren’t we? A liar and a druggie.”

  “I won’t ever lie to you again.”

  Bel’s smile was still sad, but it grew. “I know. Because I will kick your ass next time. And as terrible as the last few days have been, it got me away from Rachel. There’s hope for both of us.”

  Salem tried to draw a deep breath, but her chest hurt too much from the crying. “Do you think there’s hope for our moms?”

  Bel put a hand on each of Salem’s cheeks, her expression fierce. “You and I are in this together, until the end, until we figure out what happened to them, so no more secrets. Understood?”

  Salem nodded, using her own sleeve to swipe at her nose.

  Bel watched her for a second, planted a kiss on her forehead, and returned to her work on the chair. “We’ve got to forgive ourselves one of these days, Salem. It’s not my fault my dad didn’t stick around, or your fault Daniel killed himself.”

  Salem was floating in the limbo between lightness and emptiness, that unmoored clarity that comes with absolution.

  Bel glanced up from her work, an eyebrow raised. “I didn’t mean we needed to do all the forgiveness shit right now. First things first, we have to get out of this holding room. Can you stick your ear up to the door and tell me what you hear?”

  Salem blinked two or three times before walking to the door and pressing her head to it. “I hear a bunch of people talking, but I can’t make out what they’re saying.”

  Suddenly, a thunder of footsteps raced past outside the room. Bel shot forward and pressed her ear to the 1-inch crack between the door and the carpeting. She listened intently for two or three minutes. When the din passed, she stood, the chair bracket in hand. Sliding the thin metal between the strikeplate and the door latch, she began to wiggle it.

  “They’ve found a body,” she said as she worked. “Outside of the town, sliced up pretty bad, missing her fingers, eyes, and other stuff I couldn’t catch.”

  Salem felt this information with the force of hands on her neck. Sliced up. Missing fingers. The killer had followed them to Amherst. He was close. If he could trail them here, he could find them anywhere.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Bel said, “and you’re right. That’s why we have to get out of here. Now.” The door clicked open as she finished her sentence. She stood back, blinking in surprise. “I didn’t think it’d work. They really should make these holding room locks more impressive.”

  She peeked into the hall, waited a few seconds, and then yanked Salem out with her. “Walk alongside me,” she said. “Don’t look scared. Don’t look anything, in fact. Tell me a story.”

  “About what?”

  “It doesn’t matter!” They reached the end of the hallway, opened the door, and stepped into the police station’s main room. It housed twenty desks. They’d all been full when Stone and Clancy had brought them in. Now, there were only a handful of officers around. Bel chuckled softly.

  Salem stared at her, alarmed, before she realized Bel was holding up her end of the fake conversation. Salem matched her smile, and spoke, her light expression out of sync with her words. “Any chance we can get our stuff before we leave?”

  “None!” Bel said, as if providing the punch line for a joke. Salem grinned appropriately.

  “And the best part,” Bel said, leaning in to share a secret, “is that we need to walk past the front desk like nothing has happened. The remaining staff has no idea who we are or what we are being held for. All right?”

  Salem did her best imitation of a thoughtful expression. “Of course. And then what?”

  Bel laughed again, an artificial tinkling sound. Her eyes darted into every corner of the room. A middle-aged officer on a computer shot them a glance then returned to his work. No one else paid them any attention.

  “Then we hope Stone and Clancy aren’t outside, and we run like motherfuckers.”

  63

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  “How’d they find us?”

  Bel and Salem were speedwalking the three blocks from the Amherst Police Department to West Cemetery, both grateful that the graveyard was near since they no longer had even the penny between them. The night was full-on dark, though the Bank of America sign they passed informed them it was only 7:23 PM on Wednesday, November 2. It hadn’t been even seventy-two hours since Bel had received the call about the blood at Grace’s apartment. Not three full days, and their lives had been ripped out from under them, hurtling them all the way to the East Coast.

  “Who?” Salem’s hands were shoved in her jean pockets to keep her warmth close to her body. Amherst’s downtown was speckled with light pedestrian traffic, people leaving restaurants or walking to a movie, their fall parkas pulled tight around them against the 40-­degree air. The Colonial and Gothic buildings of Amherst lent it a similarly witchy feel as Salem.

  “Agents Stone and Johnson. Johnson was the Ed Harris lookalike that I spotted watching us in the MIA and again in the Hawthorne lobby, by the way.”

  “I don’t know.” Salem glanced over her shoulder. “If we find whatever is in the gravestone and save Grace or my mom, does it matter?”

  “It matters if the killer is using the same means to trail us.” Bel grew quiet. The low stone wall of the cemetery appeared a block ahead. “You think you can get inside the gravestone?”

  Salem was chewing the ragged edge of a fingernail. “I’m going to try my best.” She made an empty laughing sound. “It’d be easier if I had a crowbar.”

  Bel tipped her head to the left, toward a CVS Pharmacy. “What about a penknife?””

  Salem raised an eyebrow. “That’d be nice, but we don’t have any money.”

  Bel winked. “One of the best parts of being a cop is that you learn how to impersonate a criminal.” She jogged across the street and was gone from sight for four minutes before reappearing outside the CVS with the fingers of her left hand flashing a V for victory at her waist.

  She was out of breath when she returned to Salem’s side. “Got it!”

  Salem frowned.

  Bel patted her cheek. “I’m not going to turn into a regular crook, if that’s what you’re worried about. I learned my lesso
n back in Chicago. What I’m doing here is about survival.” She held out the knife. “You don’t mind an Emily Dickinson memorial penknife?”

  Salem couldn’t keep the smile from her face. “I wouldn’t have it any other way. We’ll send the CVS a check when all this is said and done?”

  Bel flashed a brilliant grin. It lit up the dusk. “You are perfectly perfect, Salem Wiley. When we are at the end of this, I promise you I’ll pay the CVS back for the stuff I took, and I’ll raise you one better. I’ll come clean with the Chicago PD and voluntarily check myself into rehab.”

  “Will it be enough to keep your job?”

  Bel shrugged and started toward the cemetery. “I don’t know, but it’ll be the right thing to do.”

  Salem slipped her hand into Bel’s, holding Bel’s smile close to her, letting it fill her with its healing warmth. The two of them were right again, and if they were together, they could survive anything.

  The metal gates to the cemetery were closed, so they rested their bottoms on the waist-high stone wall and slid their legs over the top. They jogged straight to the wrought iron–enclosed Dickinson plot on the far side of the graveyard. A healthy crescent of cheddar moon dangled in the sky, but the clouds scudding over it fractured the light. The wind was chill and moody, bullying the brittle fall leaves one second and cowering the next.

  “I don’t suppose you stole a flashlight?” Salem asked.

  She was answered by a click, followed by a tight circle of yellow light the size of a fifty-cent piece.

  Salem laughed. “Bel Odegaard, master criminal. Hold that beam on the face of the stone, okay?” Salem played her fingers over Lucretia Gunn’s name for the second time that day, tracing their curves and depth, pressing gently, pulling back to test for trip switches, searching for any construction anomaly that would indicate a secret drawer. Finding none, she expanded her exploration to the rest of the words on the inscription, and then even wider, to the lips and edges of the name panel.

  Still nothing.

  She knocked on the face, other hand over her heart, and felt the same hollowness that she had earlier with Mercy’s help. She was certain there was something back there, but she didn’t want to destroy the stone to get to it, even if she’d had the tools to do so. Flicking open the blade of the knife, she explored the same crevices and loops. She was rewarded with marble dust.

  She sat back on her heels, blowing a curl out of her face. It was almost three days since her last shower, and for the first time, she became aware of the smell of her own body, the sourness of sweat, her natural musk. She studied the rock.

  It waited patiently, gripping whatever secret it had housed for over 150 years.

  “Bel, where did your parents meet?” Salem was tracing the knife over an irregularity she’d just discovered leading from the ornamental line separating Samuel’s information from Lucretia’s. “High school, right?”

  “That’s the story.” Bel held the flashlight steady, checking over her shoulder periodically. The only noise in the graveyard was the dry whisper of leaves tumbling one over the other, scrambling to spy on the two trespassers. The distant hum of passing cars barely penetrated the stone and trees guarding the cemetery. “He was on the competing football team, homecoming of her senior year. They hooked up at some party in a field later that night. She never saw him again.”

  “Ah, young love.” Salem frowned and pressed the tip of the blade deeper into the stone. “And my parents met in college. Imagine how our lives could have been different. Let’s say your dad didn’t go to that party, or my mom didn’t register for that same art class my dad took.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  “What?” Salem asked, absentmindedly. There was definitely a crack running from the ornamental line to the G in “Gunn.” It was invisible to the eye, but the point of her knife was picking it up.

  “Your parents didn’t meet in college. They met in high school, just like mine.”

  Salem stood, hands on hips, so she could study the gravestone from a different angle. “Hunh?”

  Bel moved the flashlight beam to her face. “When I helped Grace move to Linden Hills, we found a box of old photos. There’s one of Grace, Vida, and Daniel, and it was taken at my grandparents’ house in Iowa. That house was sold the year I was born, and a chunk of the money put into an eighteen-year CD for me. I cashed it in to go to college.”

  Salem’s brow wrinkled. The wrought iron fence she’d threaded her arms through was providing too much interference. She’d need to sneak inside the fence. “I’m positive my mom said they met in a drawing class in college.”

  Bel returned the beam to the face of the gravestone. “It doesn’t matter, does it?”

  Salem didn’t know. There was a lot she didn’t know any more. “Help me over.”

  Bel held the flashlight with her teeth and created a hoist with her hands. Salem put her foot into it and hopped the fence. Bel crawled over without help.

  “Give me the light, okay?” Salem asked. “I want you to try and twist the top of this while I watch the face.”

  Bel raised her eyebrows but didn’t object. She pushed on one end of the top. Nothing moved. She tried the other end. Still nothing. Finally, she leaned over and put her shoulder into it. “Hulk mad!”

  The marble top made a shrieking, scraping noise before moving an inch.

  Bel’s face appeared behind the gravestone, eyes wide. “I didn’t think that would work.”

  “Keep pushing!” Salem knelt in front of the inscription. The crack from the line to the G had grown deeper. She jacked the tip of her knife into it. Bel earned another screaming inch from the marble. The crack widened.

  “Do you smell roses?” Bel asked, panting.

  “Push harder.” The crack was now 3 inches long and wide enough for Salem to stuff her finger in. She did so, with a murmured apology to the Dickinson family. She felt the trigger at the bottom of the crack, a cool shelf of metal the size of a fingerprint.

  She pushed.

  A perfect rectangle of panel shot out, the “Gun” of Lucretia’s name centered on its front.

  Behind the panel was a drawer.

  Inside the drawer was a metal container the size and shape of a pencil box. Resting on the container was a dried red rose so fragile that it crumbled when Salem’s finger brushed it.

  Her blood stampeded through her veins. She set what remained of the flower gently to the side and reached for the metal box, sliding her fingers around it. “Bel, do you really think my parents trained us for this?” She pulled out the box. It was as light as a bird.

  Bel stared at the box, her voice husky with amazement. “If they did, they did a kick-ass job.”

  Salem was just starting to lift the lid when two hands reached across the fence, grabbed her by the shoulders, and hauled her off her knees.

  64

  Amherst, Massachusetts

  “Ernest!” Bel leapt over the wrought iron fence of the Dickinson family plot, but he’d already released Salem. He appeared abashed more than anything, maybe for taking advantage of their concentration to sneak up on them.

  Mercy stood next to her brother, her face red and swollen from crying. “He ran away,” she said.

  “What?” Salem was trying to get her bearings. She brushed the grass and leaves off her knees, careful to hold the metal box steady.

  Mercy pointed at her brother. “He shouldn’t have let those men take you.”

  Bel scanned Salem to make sure she was all right. The juicy crescent moon broke free of its cloud cover and lit them from above, four lost souls in a Massachusetts graveyard. “It was a good idea to leave us,” Bel said, her focus still on Salem. “In fact, it was the best thing you two could have done. There was no point in all of us being arrested.”

  “We have to go,” Ernest said. He hadn’t stopped surveying the dark corners of
the cemetery. “This is the first place they’ll look for you.”

  “He didn’t just want to leave you here.” Mercy continued, glaring at him despite the trembling in her thin shoulders. “He wanted to leave you forever. But I wouldn’t let him. I knew you’d come back.”

  Ernest ducked his head, pulling his sister closer. “I’m sorry, but I gotta look out for Mercy. She’s my number-one priority, you know? But I’m here now, and it’s time to split.” He glanced uneasily toward the road. “There’s a sedan been driving by.”

  “We have to replace the gravestone,” Salem said. “Put it back together as much as we can.”

  Ernest made a frustrated noise. “There isn’t time!”

  “It’s someone’s grave,” Salem insisted.

  Bel hopped over the fence. “The sooner we do it, the sooner we can go. Trust me, you can’t change her mind when it’s made up.”

  Salem flashed Bel a grateful smile, her grin widening as Ernest stepped over the fence to help Bel straighten the headstone’s cap. Salem threaded her hand through the fence and pushed the drawer back in. The “Gun” no longer blended in with the rest of the face, and the crack she’d widened with her penknife was glaring.

  Bel glanced at it, hands on hips. “That’s the best we can do,” she said firmly, directing her words at Salem. “We have to go. Ernest, we’ll follow you.”

  The two of them climbed back over the fence, and then all four jogged toward the northeast end of the cemetery, Ernest talking as they traveled. “I need to get rid of this car before we travel any farther. If the FBI knew enough to find you at this cemetery, they know what we’re driving.”

  “But you just got it!” Salem objected.

  “No choice.”

  Salem cradled the box, breathless from running, but her words were clear. “Okay, but I need light, a computer, and WiFi. Now. We need to see what I pulled out of the gravestone.”

  65

  Iowa City, Iowa