Chain of Souls (Salem VI) (9 page)

"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?"

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, and 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?"

There was a pause while D'Angelo seemed to think it over. "Well, you're not an academic and those documents haven't even been properly catalogued yet. Usually the only people allowed into our Rare Book and Manuscript Collection are working on academic projects, but in this case I certainly believe we should make an exception. I think that article would be a wonderful idea."

Having made an appointment for early the next morning, John got off the phone with D'Angelo, and then made three more quick phone calls, first for a case of cold beer to be delivered from a nearby deli and then for pizza and takeout Chinese. Everything arrived around eight and everyone took a break and ate and drank a few beers. Afterward they continued to plan out the first edition of the new paper, worked on the masthead design, the typefaces, and other issues.

At about nine o'clock, John told the staff it was time to go home. They would meet tomorrow and continue the process. People wandered out to their cars, while he and Amy stayed behind to lock up and turn off the lights.

"Want some company?" Amy asked. "Or would you rather be alone?"

"Please come over," John said, rubbing his eyes and realizing how absolutely drained he was. That thought brought another reflection, that he was perhaps the most unromantic man on the face of the earth. How many other men, given the chance to sleep in the same bed with a woman who looked like Amy, would have done anything but hold her for most of the nights they had been together? "I have nothing left, but I'd sure like to know you're there beside me."

She came up and rested her hands on his chest. "Life is going to get better, and then we're going to live like normal people."