Mercy's Chase

by Jess Lourey

  “It was big in the UK three years ago. Serial killer was chopping up girls in South London. Fancied himself a bit of a coding genius. Like your Zodiac Killer. Left a clue at every scene. Got seven girls before we caught him.”

  His words hollowed out a spot in Salem’s stomach. “How did you crack his code?”

  “I was just part of the team. And the truth is that Coogan got lazy. He repeated an earlier cipher pattern in his last note. The repetition allowed us to crack it.”

  “I’m glad you were able to stop him,” she murmured.

  A comfortable silence settled between them, unspooling itself.

  “Hey,” he finally said. His quiet tone drew her full attention. “We can talk about your mother.”

  She stiffened.

  “Or not. At your own pace. That was a bit of a bad job she laid on you back there, is all.”

  Salem’s vision narrowed. “She had reason to be upset.”

  Charlie looked like he wanted to say something, his brain warring with his mouth. He pinched his lips together and glanced out his window before looking back at the road. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  Salem stared out her own window. She desperately wanted to call Bel, to tell her that the Hermitage had only been a tentacle of the octopus they’d fought, to ask for her help in fighting the larger monster. But she couldn’t think of a way to tell her that her indiscretion had gotten Mercy kidnapped. She couldn’t bear the reprobation in her best friend’s voice.

  She shifted in her seat. “How far are we from Stonehenge?”

  “Another half an hour, maybe. I can’t drive any faster,” Charlie said, not unkindly. When she didn’t respond, he fiddled with the radio buttons. He landed on a station playing jangly folk tunes. He sped up to the bumper of the car in front of him and then slowed down when the westbound M4 motorway passing lane filled up.

  Charlie seemed to want to keep the conversation going. He nudged her. “Nina and Lucan slept together last night after we had drinks. Bet on it.”

  Salem didn’t have the stomach for a response. In a normal time, that news would have twisted her rib cage, but it was only hours earlier that Stone had rejected her in no uncertain terms. Even if he had wanted her, she didn’t have the mental space for him now. It took all her concentration to keep her brain from eating itself, caught in a loop imagining poor Mercy, afraid, begging for Salem, not understanding why no one came.

  “Sorry. Was there something between you and Stone?”

  Salem snapped into the conversation. “No. I don’t care about him, only Mercy. You heard my mom. It’s my fault that she was taken. If anything happens to her, I’m done.”

  Charlie drew a breath deep enough to lift his chest. “I know she’s your ma, but that doesn’t mean she’s right. In fact, on this front, she seems straight wrong.”

  Salem didn’t want to think about it because then she’d cry.

  Charlie must have sensed her distress on the subject. He pointed toward her computer screen, taking his eyes off the road for far too long. “Maybe it’s time to consider Stonehenge. Your mother seems to think there’s a mountain of a conspiracy there, and if your president is setting us on this merry chase, I’m inclined to agree. There’s got to be something to it that every archeologist has overlooked.”

  Or misunderstood. Salem angled her rotating screen so the sun didn’t flash off it. Because now that you mention it, when I was in Ireland, I saw Stonehenge in a new light, and I wonder if … But she didn’t want to tell him about her graveside hypothesis. Or did she? She had to trust someone.

  But maybe not just yet. She began a wide-net search on Stonehenge, skimming the information. “Nothing much here,” she said. “Stonehenge’s basic history that the stones we recognize now have been around for five thousand years, and that no one really knows what the structure was built for. Pretty much what you told me earlier.”

  He tapped the side of his nose. “I’m a bit of a history buff. But what’s that I hear in your voice?”

  His attentiveness warmed her and made up her mind. She would share her theory. “The day before we met, I went to Ireland.”

  “Sure. With Agent Curson. Dead end, the report said.”

  Salem realized she hadn’t seen Agent Curson since. “It was. At least as far as what we were called out for. There was no threat to the president that we could discern. The woman had uncovered a tiny replica of Stonehenge.”

  “What, made of stone?”

  “Yeah, but it had an extra stone in it.”

  The radio crackled, and Charlie changed the station. “There used to be quite a few more stones, you know, more than what we see now. The original had seventy-five, and postholes indicate there was more to it, maybe even a timber structure built atop. Have you heard of the Aubrey Holes?”

  Salem didn’t want to make him feel bad for pivoting the subject from her big reveal. He didn’t know she’d been about to share something with him that she hadn’t even told Bel. “No. What are those?”

  She clicked the phrase into her search bar as he spoke. Aubrey Holes.

  “Chalk pits surrounding Stonehenge. There’s fifty-six of them in all. John Aubrey discovered them in the 1600s, but they believe they predate the construction of Stonehenge as we know it, from around 3100 BC. Can’t tell if they contained wood posts or stone. Plus, there’s the Heel Stone, outside what we recognize as Stonehenge. It marks the midsummer sunrise. There’s the Slaughter Stone, the Altar Stone. Who can say if the stone you saw was even an extra? Maybe it was just an earlier construction.”

  “Maybe.” Salem verified everything he had just said. She’d commented earlier that he seemed to know a lot about Stonehenge, and it had bothered him. She kept that observation to herself this time. She searched for a sketch of Stonehenge in its prime to run against what she’d seen at Mrs. Molony’s.

  He indicated her screen again. “You know I love computers, but it’s not good to type while sitting in a moving vehicle. Unsettles the stomach. Besides, it’s lonely out here in the real world, and we need a plan going in. You’re the only one who’s solved one of these code trains. Tell me what we’re looking for at Stonehenge.”

  Salem clicked her screen shut. “I don’t know.”

  He waited.

  She sighed. “I know I have to save Mercy. That’s it.” She couldn’t hold the tears back.

  He made tsking noises. “Why, if you can crack the Beale train, then Stonehenge will be a piece of cake. Count on it!” He patted her shoulder awkwardly. “Hey, you’ll cheer right up when I tell you the best part.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I got us inside Stonehenge! They’ll clear it for our arrival. We have fifteen minutes to solve an apparent code that’s evaded centuries of attempts.” He chuckled. “Not a thing to worry about there.”

  It wouldn’t be enough time. Panic stroked Salem’s throat. She grasped on to an earlier thought to distract herself. “Do you know what happened to Agent Curson?”

  Charlie shrugged. “I assume he’s back at the Campus.” He gripped the steering wheel and pointed to the right. “Here we are. Look at those gorgeous rocks.”

  Salem followed the path of his finger.

  Her jaw dropped. She was looking at history’s most famous mystery.

  19

  Stonehenge

  If the sun had been able to crash through the clouds, it would have appeared directly overhead. Salem was unaware of its position, or its feeble heat, or the chilly breeze whispering at her neck, or even the handful of visitors talking in a clot, blocking the path leading away from the private parking lot they’d been ushered into.

  All she cared about was connecting to that beautiful stone structure again.

  A hill hid Stonehenge at the moment, but the initial glimpse had stolen her breath away. Photographs of the monoliths were a pale shadow of their majesty, even fro
m the road. It was epic, stunning, awesome.

  Stonehenge had awoken something true in her blood, almost a song, not quite a story.

  She tightened her parka’s belt, yanked the shoulder strap of the B&C on one arm and her purse on the other, and pushed through the crowd.

  “Salem! Wait up.”

  She didn’t turn. He could hurry up. She needed to examine the rocks. Her feet crunched on gravel. Her eyes ate the fields billowing to her right and left, chewed on the poppies that dotted them. She inhaled deeply, smelling cow and country, prairie and field. She’d felt this grounded, this comfortable in her skin, only once before, and that had been in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The bustle and aroma there had made her feel both anonymo//us and part of something bigger.

  The land around Stonehenge was different.

  Stonehenge made her feel powerful.

  She crested the hill separating the private lot from the beginning of the interpretive trail and beyond that, Stonehenge. Her shoulders relaxed when it was again in sight. The field of scarlet poppies ringing it was even more glorious at this height. They reminded Salem of the flowers surrounding Muirinn Molony’s house and decorating the sachet she’d been given. It hung off her jean’s belt loop. She patted it through her coat, speed walking toward the structure.

  “Quite the eyeful, yeah?” Charlie caught up with her, out of breath. He was hunched against the wind. He nodded toward the stones and the security guards who were opening the rope gate for them. “They’re expecting us.”

  The thrill of entering the ancient circle heightened Salem’s senses. “We have free rein?”

  “Almost.” He held out a hand to indicate Salem should enter the rope circle first. “The only rule is that we can’t touch the stones.”

  Salem scowled. If there was a code hidden in one of the rocks, as there had been inside of Emily Dickinson’s grandmother’s gravestone, she would need to lay hands on it.

  She’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

  Salem stood just outside of the stones, suddenly hesitant. Once she entered, she sensed she would not be the same. “Does it matter which stones we enter through?” she asked a guard.

  He shrugged and pointed at a well-traveled path separating the base of the nearest trilithon. It looked like a doorway through time.

  She nodded.

  She stepped through the megalithic arch.

  She held her breath and closed her eyes.

  Time and space interacted differently inside the stones, trailing against her skin like a broken cobweb. She knew when she was inside the circle because it was warmer. The temperature change was dramatic. Probably just the stones blocking the chilly wind.

  The caw of a bird startled her, and her eyes flew open. A blue-eyed raven had settled on the Altar Stone, a greenish-purple rock the size of a sedan that rested inside the circle of Stonehenge. Another movement caught the edge of her vision, but when she turned, she saw only the stones. It must have been a trick of the light.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?”

  Salem was almost surprised Charlie had been able to step through. It seemed too precious in here, too magical. But of course it was just her head playing tricks on her. Twenty-six tourists were allowed in here twice every day, once at dawn and once at dusk. They were called special access tours and were the reason there were paths in and out of the stones.

  “Yes,” she breathed.

  He held up his watch. “Clock’s ticking.”

  She turned to take it all in. There was no clear beginning spot.

  Her dad’s voice found her, suffused her with warmth. Start with what you know. Once you’d inventoried the familiar, you could find what didn’t belong.

  Well, rocks were familiar. Salem counted ninety-three of them making up this incarnation of Stonehenge, a mix of broken lumps and free-standing rocks.

  That told her nothing.

  Next, she evaluated shape. The original structure was a circle of stones around a horseshoe shape. Salem was currently standing inside what remained of the formation. Beyond the stones lay a circle of embankment, and even farther, burial mounds. The Heel Stone lay approximately 250 feet northeast, a lumpy, fifteen-foot-tall rock shaped like an eel poking its head out of the ground.

  Her research had verified what Charlie told her on the drive, which was that on the summer solstice, if she stood in the center of Stonehenge, she’d see the sun rise directly over the Heel Stone. The winter solstice sun set opposite that.

  Charlie strode to the Altar Stone behind her. He knelt beside it. “They don’t think anyone was sacrificed here. Just a fanciful name.”

  Salem turned and nodded. She had number and shape. Now she needed surfaces. All the stones were pockmarked, gray and green, three tons each and as large below the earth as above. The rocks were ancient and timeless, witness to five thousand years of humanity: feasts and festivals, rituals and rites. These stones would not give up their secret lightly. She felt that, and below that certainty the friction of discomfort itched at her brainstem.

  She recognized it: she needed to find a pattern. She needed to soothe herself. She stepped toward the nearest stone, her hand raised.

  “Stop that!” The guard stared at her fiercely. “You can’t touch the stones.”

  Salem dropped her hand but felt no shame. Normally, getting in trouble would drown her in embarrassment, but she was a different woman inside the stones. Or maybe her perspective had shifted now that she was responsible for Mercy getting kidnapped.

  “Nothing like the fear of finger oils destroying a five-thousand-year-old rock, eh?” Charlie said under his breath.

  Salem’s lip twitched. She wasn’t alone in here, and that felt good, but knowing how closely they were being watched made their impossible task even more difficult. She would have to crack this using only her mind. She didn’t know if the code train had been put in place by the Neolithic builders or if it had been placed here later, camouflaged for hundreds of years. It could be a disguised drawer, a cipher carved into the stone, something buried below the soil, or any of another thousand possibilities.

  She turned on her heel, studying the stones as if they were old-fashioned slides and she in the center of the projector. It only took half a turn before she spotted it.

  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.”