by Heath, Jack
He went upstairs to the home office that had once been the library of Captain John Bancroft Andrews and several of his other sea captain ancestors who had helped make the Andrews family such a success in early Salem. Through his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and also through discoveries made on his own sea voyages, Captain John Bancroft Andrews, like John today, had become deeply concerned about the Salem Coven and its murderous activities. However, unlike his modern day namesake, Captain Andrews had apparently never been able to tap the power of the spirits of the dead to actually fight and kill members of the Coven.
John thought about that as he paused in the doorway of his library, taking in the large bay window that overlooked the dark waters of Salem harbor, windows from which his ancestors had been able to look down on their own clipper ships. He had grown up thinking he had to be in some ways weaker, certainly less intrepid than his forbearers who had gone to sea generation after generation in wooden ships that seemed incredibly small and frail considering the distances they traveled and the savage seas they encountered. He wondered how those old sea captains would view him if they could see the way he had destroyed the leaders of the Coven, and he felt a small flutter of pride that he had acquitted himself in a manner that might give those tough old men something to smile about. At least he hoped that might be the case.
He shook off his reverie and focused on the old Hepple-white mahogany table that stood in the bay window. On top of the table rested a clutter of things from a wide mix of generations: his computer and keyboard; a sextant once used to navigate his family's ships; the leather bound ship's log of the Formosa, perhaps the most famous of his family's many clipper ships; his grandfather's binoculars; an oosik, which was the penile bone of a walrus and had been collected by some enterprising ancestor with a good sense of humor; a wooden model of the Singapore, another of his family's ships.
The rest of the room was just as cluttered. A folding Chinese screen stood in one corner; another table held John's own hockey and sailing trophies. The Federal period desk held a stack of unpaid bills, unfiled brokerage and bank statements, and a general confusion of personal documents. The bookshelves sagged with books he had bought and read as well as his aunt's and grandfather's books and numerous leather-bound volumes from the 1800s and even several boxes of old letters and other unbound scraps of writing.
For the next five hours he went through the room, starting to the right of the doorway and working his way around, inch by inch; checking each square of molding and each piece of furniture for hidden compartments; looking to see if ancient messages had been glued to the underside of tables; running his fingers around the edges of the Chinese screen as he felt for bumps or irregularities beneath the fabric.
At his desk he removed each drawer, looked inside and all around the sides and bottoms, felt the sides of the desk for any hint of a panel that might move, then lay on his back, slid underneath, and looked at the bottom. When he finished he did the same thing to the Hepplewhite table, but found it as empty of hidden messages as the desk.
He felt along the sides of the fireplace, pushing each slight protuberance in the carved mantel, listening hopefully for the muted click that might indicate that a hidden panel had opened. When he finally came to the bookshelves, he took each old book, opened it to look for notes written inside the cover, then went through the pages to see if a slip of paper had been carefully inserted somewhere.
He was halfway through when Amy came into the room. "Nothing downstairs, I'm afraid. I checked every piece of furniture and every single painting, but I came up empty handed. Anything up here?" she asked.
John shook his head. "Totally dry, so far."
"Can I help?"
John nodded at the old Andrews family Bible where it lay on the lowest shelf. "You might want to tackle that old beast. I was saving it for last."
The Bible was large, bound with embossed leather, and held together with a metal clasp. Inside, in addition to the Bible itself were blank pages in which births, deaths, and marriages of the Andrews clan had been recorded for over one hundred fifty years. As Amy carried the Bible over to the desk, unfastened the clasp, and laid it open, John went back to the other books.
Coming to a section of ancient leather-bound books that had been owned by Captain John Bancroft Andrews, he saw a line of old classics, like Robinson Crusoe, The Aeneid, The Odyssey, A Pilgrim's Progress, Don Quixote, Pamela, and Paradise Lost. Because the books were old and valuable, he took each one off the shelf with care and turned the pages slowly and gently.
The work was tedious and slow. He had gone through all of the books but one and as he started to page through Paradise Lost, he began to think there was nothing in the house worth finding, but then a small notation opposite line 422 of Book I caught his eye. It was unusual not so much because of what it said but because there had been no other marginal jotting in any of the other books. Feeling a flutter of excitement, he brought the book over by the window and squinted down at the faded writing.
"Amy, come over here," he said softly.
When she looked over his shoulder at the writing, he glanced at her. "What does that say?"
"I think it says 'Asthoreth/Astarte equals Elizabeth Turner.'"
"You ever heard of Asthoreth/Astarte?"
"Asthoreth and Astarte are sort of synonymous names for a Phoenician goddess who was kind of a sinful love goddess."
He turned all the way around and gaped at her. "How do you know that?"
"Too much college, I guess. Some of my totally unessential and useless knowledge."
"Why is this name in Paradise Lost?"
Amy picked up the book and read for a few moments. "Because apparently Asthoreth was one of the twelve most powerful angels who united with Satan to oppose God."
"So who is Elizabeth Turner?"
Amy went over to John's computer and started an Internet search. After a few minutes of typing, she turned away from the screen. "The best historic local hit is Elizabeth Turner, wife of Captain John Turner."
John snapped his fingers, recognizing the name. "He's the guy who built the first part of what is now known as the House of the Seven Gables."
John picked up Paradise Lost again and finished paging through the book. The notation mentioning Asthoreth/Astarte and Elizabeth Turner seemed to be the only writing he could find. He rubbed his eyes. "This is pretty damn vague. We don't know who wrote this or why they wrote it or when it was done. We don't know whether it means something important or nothing at all. How can we know whether this has anything to do with the Coven?
"Why can't Rebecca Nurse's spirit just appear and make it easier?"
Amy glanced up from the family Bible where she was still going through all the pages. She shrugged, having no answer to offer.
John nodded, amazed yet again at how much he missed Rebecca Nurse, then went back to work, going through the last few books on the shelf but not finding any other marginal notations. He looked up, feeling a mounting sense of desperation as he realized just how much he had been counting on finding some new set of clues that could tell him something, anything about where to start looking for his daughter.
"We have nothing," he said, hearing the hollowness in his voice.
Amy shut the family Bible with a resounding thump. John noticed she looked much less defeated than he felt. Her eyes glittered with energy and spirit, and he felt a flush of admiration for her resilience. Today there was no vestige of the fear he knew she'd felt the night before in the underground passage, the same fear that he had felt deep in his bones then and that still troubled him today. As if Amy held the spirit of Rebecca Nurse, he wanted to reach out and pull some of her fire into his own belly because he had never felt so pathetically weak.
"Remember where you went with Rich Harvey?"
He blinked as her question interrupted his thoughts. "I went a lot of places with Rich."
"I'm talking about the Peabody Essex Institute. If I'm remembering correctly, you went to
the Phillips Library there and met with somebody who let you see some of the old collections."
John rapped a knuckle on his forehead, as if trying to knock the dust off his brain. "I think his name was Joe D'Angelo. He's the head archivist." He felt his pulse quicken as he recalled the boxes of old journals and letters that had recently been discovered in the House of the Seven Gables and donated to the museum. Even though the journal and letters hadn't yet been properly catalogued, D'Angelo had let him go through them with Rich when they visited the library.
That was where he had found some papers written by Nathaniel Hawthorne titled The Truth about the Witch Trials of Salem, papers that apparently by careful design had been hidden away because Hawthorne feared the Coven's retaliation against his family. The same day John had read the Hawthorne document, Rich Harvey had claimed to be reading church documents written by pastors of nineteenth-century Salem congregations.
But what if Rich had lied about that, just as he had lied about so many other things? What if there had been something else buried in that box of old documents, the importance of which might only be evident to someone who knew the workings of the Coven. Someone like Rich. John knew he might be grasping at straws, but what if there had been something in those boxes of documents and letters that could shed light on Elizabeth Turner, on the reason Captain John Bancroft Andrews might have written "Asthoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner" in the margins of Paradise Lost?
Thinking again about those margin notes gave him a fresh flicker of hope, but as quickly as his spirits started to rise, they fell back to earth. "Even if we find something about Elizabeth Turner, what are the chances it has anything at all to do with Sarah?" He put his face in his hands. "The truth is it probably has a zero chance of helping us find Sarah, and I'm only doing it because I can't stand to sit around doing nothing."
Amy came over, took his by the shoulders, and gave him a gentle shake. "How will you know until you find it?"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THEY FINISHED SEARCHING THE HOUSE WITHOUT any further discoveries, and by then it was already early afternoon. John had put a call in to Joe D'Angelo but hadn't yet gotten a call back from the archivist, so he was left with nothing to do but pace and worry about Sarah.
He tried to sit down and make a checklist of places he thought they might have taken her, but after twenty minutes he ripped it up, knowing he was doing nothing but throwing darts in the dark. The truth was he had no idea where she was and no idea where to start looking.
He kept pacing the house, but every time he walked past the liquor cabinet it called out to him. He knew if he stayed in the house, he'd start drinking, and in terms of helping Sarah, that would be the worst possible thing he could do. Amy had already gone to the Salem News to help the other members of the paper's staff who had been working since early that morning to finalize their plans for renting furniture and computers and were hammering out the logistics of moving their offices on Friday so that they would be able to put out their first edition of The Salem Observer on Monday.
Left with nothing else to take the edge off his anxiety, he locked up the house and hurried over to the paper. He told no one about Sarah, apologized for his absence, and spent the rest of the afternoon pretending to concentrate as the people around him worked feverishly to finalize plans. At a staff meeting at the end of the day, the group decided that for the first week they would deliver the paper at no cost to all the Salem News subscribers. Once the subscriber base saw that the new paper was in many respects similar to the old one, everyone thought they would be likely to subscribe to The Salem Observer. John voted for the suggestion in agreement with the others, trying to feign an enthusiasm he didn't feel.
John was grateful at the way Amy and the other staffers seized the initiative because his mind was so much on Sarah that he could barely think about anything else. In spite of all the hard work and activity in the offices, he could see the fear in the eyes of everyone on the paper's staff. He knew all of them were frightened for their jobs and their economic well-being, and he struggled to appear focused and upbeat, knowing they looked to him to provide the new paper's leadership. In spite of his best efforts to give them what they needed, he wanted to scream that he didn't really care about money or jobs or anything else when his daughter's life was on the line. It was everything he could do to bite his tongue and hold his raging anxiety inside.
At one point when the others were all busy, Jack Daniels sidled into John's office. "Everything okay?" he asked. "I wondered when you weren't around this morning."
"Yeah, yeah, I just had an appointment."
"Not getting cold feet on the new paper, are you?"
"Absolutely not."
"You'd tell us if you weren't a hundred percent, right?"
"Yes, and I'm very much a hundred percent."
Jack nodded. "I'll tell the others. People are just a little bit nervous, you understand."
"Completely." John hesitated as Jack started to turn and walk out of the office. "Jack," he said, causing Jack to stop and turn back. "I just need to tell you that I've got a bit of a personal problem. I can't seem to get hold of my daughter, and I'm a bit concerned. I don't mean to burden you with my problems, but it's got me a little distracted, that's all."
Jack stepped back into the office. "Your daughter's missing?" he asked in a low voice.
John shrugged. "Maybe," he said, telling the version of the story he had concocted with Amy earlier that morning. "We're just not sure yet. It might be nothing, but she was supposed to have come over for dinner last night, and she never showed up."
"Have you contacted the police?"
"Not yet. I don't want to sound the alarm bells if it's not absolutely necessary." He checked his watch. "I need to call her office and see if anyone there has heard from her."
"Jeez, John, that's terrible. Let me know if there's anything any of us can do. And don't worry about getting things set up here; we've got everything well in hand. If you need some time for yourself, just take it, okay?"
John nodded. "Thanks, but Jack . . . just keep it to yourself, okay?"
"Sure thing."
As Jack walked away, a cold feeling settled into John's stomach and he found himself wondering if Jack Daniels was just what he seemed on the surface, a person concerned about a friend and fellow worker, or if he was another secret member of the Salem Coven. John shook his head, hating that he could harbor that kind of suspicion about someone who'd never acted like anything but a friend, but at the same time admitting to himself he had no choice but to distrust the motives of almost everyone around him.
He said nothing else to the other staffers about the fact that Sarah was missing. However, as the afternoon wore on he found himself studying each person, trying to detect anything unusual in their demeanor or in the way they looked at him or spoke to him. Even when he pretended to be reading something at his desk, he watched the others out of the corner of his eye, hoping to notice somebody staring at him when they thought he wasn't looking.
He wanted so badly for someone to give themselves away so that then he would have a person to pound on, a neck to wring, eyeballs to gouge until they gave him the information he wanted. He knew he was becoming a paranoid wreck, but he couldn't help it. He had to accept the probability that at least one member of his staff was also a member of the Coven. Even though he focused hard he saw nothing that made him suspicious.
A few minutes before seven o'clock, he closed the door of his office and called Sarah's television station and asked to speak with her boss, the producer. The person who answered took John's name and phone number and said that while the producer had gone home some time earlier, he would try and reach the producer on his cell phone and give him the message. John's phone rang three minutes later.
John told the producer he was Sarah's father and had been worried since she didn't show up for a dinner the previous night. The producer hesitated then told John that Sarah had also not shown up for her morning news show, an
d that he, too, was concerned. "It's not at all like her to have an unexplained absence," the man said. "She is extremely conscientious."
"Yes," John agreed, "in everything."
"Have you called the police to report her missing, Mr. Andrews?" the man asked.
"No," John replied. "Until now I kept hoping that might be premature. I kept thinking she might have had some personal reason for avoiding dinner, but she hasn't answered her cell phone or office phone all day."
"In our business it's extremely unusual for a news professional to miss a broadcast, especially when they don't call in first. If you want, we can call the police and file a missing person's report. That way, if it turns out Sarah's absence is something completely innocent, you won't be the one who gets blamed by your daughter for calling the cops."
"Yes, thank you very much, I'd really appreciate that."
John hung up, hoping he'd managed to deal with Sarah's abduction in a way that made it look normal. A second later he shook his head and let out a humorless laugh, wondering how far over the edge he'd gone when he could even think about an abduction as being "normal."
He glanced at his watch, wondered if he could still make a call to the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Institute before they closed, and he dialed the number. When someone answered, he asked for the second time to speak with Joe D'Angelo.
When D'Angelo came on the line John said, "I'm sorry to be a pest. I don't know if you remember me, but I came to the library a few weeks ago with Rich Harvey, and you were kind enough to let us look at the documents you'd just received from the House of the Seven Gables."
"Yes, I remember you," D'Angelo said. "I've just been tied up in meetings all day and didn't have a chance until now to return phone calls. What a tragedy about Rich, by the way. I was absolutely devastated to hear it. I saw him with some regularity. I never would have guessed he was suicidal."
"I agree," John said, and then after a suitable pause, he continued, "I know Rich was working on several ideas for scholarly articles using those new documents as his sources. I wanted to have the paper write an article honoring Rich's scholarship and his contributions to helping us better understand our own local history. I was wondering if you might allow me to come back in and look over those same documents again?"
