The Lace Reader (38 page)

“Get the witch!” It’s louder now. I am reading them. It’s inside my head.

This can’t be happening. This must be a dream. Or a hallucination. I have to fight to stay here. Part of me is already going away, distancing myself from the inevitable. I am going under. For a minute I can stand back from it and just watch it happen. This is not real. It is too much out of time to be real. It is not real, and at the same time it is very real. Hyper-real. Every detail stands out and lingers as if in slow motion.

Kill her! Kill her!

In this place the scene has become simple and universal. What we are seeing is history repeating itself, one scene superimposed over the other. We are both here and back in old Salem at the same time, with the real Calvinists, the first ones. There is a feeling of impending doom here, and when I look at Angela, for just a moment, I see her in the drab brown Puritan dress, her hair tied back and covered. And we are back in history in the days when they came to get you because you were a woman alone in the world, or because you were different, because your hair was red, or because you had no children of your own and no husband to protect you. Or maybe even because you owned property that one of them wanted.

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Every part of me fights to pull myself out of this scene. To create the distance of the divide. It is not real. I am not real. But Angela is real. That is the one truth to the scene, the only thing I know for sure. And all my life I have remembered this. Standing here, out of time, with this woman, whom I realize now that I recognized from my own dreams the moment I saw her standing at the tearoom door, coming first to Eva and now to me for help. The voices are still inside my head, chanting.
Kill her!
I push them away, struggling to hear the voice of the 911 operator. “I have a car in your area,” she says. “Can you get to a secure location until we can reach you?”

“I think so,” I say. Mind racing, settling on the widow’s walk, figuring it’s the only place they can’t get to. If we get up to the widow’s walk and sit on the trapdoor, no one can push it open from below. I used to do that when I wanted to be alone. There’s only the narrow ladder leading up to it, and only room for one person to climb. One person can’t get enough leverage to push the trapdoor open.

“The widow’s walk,” I say to the operator, so she’ll know to tell them where to look. “We’ll be up on the widow’s walk.”

“Go!” she says, and we run.

They’re blocking traffic as they cross the street, still coming. There must be fifty of them. So many. Not just men but women, too. Angela’s eyes are desperately searching the crowd for Cal. She keeps saying he will save her. Over and over, this is what she says. But Cal is nowhere in this. He is still in jail. And while she waits for the rescue that I know will never come, the mob is beating down the gardens, trampling them as they surround the house.

I see their faces. They are at the windows.

Another shattering of glass. A change in the air, olfactory, a smell remembered from another time and place. The smell of summers and sun on the wood of the dock at the Willows or maybe at Trani where Jack is filling up the boat before we head out for a day of pull-356 Brunonia Barry

ing traps together. And me lying on the deck getting some sun on my back before we go, letting him do all the busywork. Still tired from last night, happy. Drifting and dreaming while he fills up the gas tank.

I loved this smell then, the smell of gasoline. It was such a pleasant smell to me that it now takes me a moment to break from its hypnotic spell and realize it’s in the room with us here, that someone has poured gasoline through the broken window and is soaking the floor with it.

A popping sound as someone throws one of the torches through the opening. A larger explosion, and the room fills with flames. And the chanting changes on the spot. They are good at improvisation, these Calvinists, able to change their chant to suit their circumstances. “Get the witch!” morphs into the older, more historically correct “Burn the witch!” And then to an even shorter chant, the one I heard in my head just moments ago: “Kill her! Kill her!”

I glance outside at the watching crowd that has suddenly gone quiet. Some look confused, no longer certain what they’re seeing. Is this theater? Is Salem getting so good at their special effects that they actually have the budget to burn down a real house? I watch as one man, the only one in the crowd who gets it, runs across the street to the corner by the Hawthorne Hotel and pulls the red fire-alarm box.

“The house is on fire!” Angela screams, starting up the stairs toward the widow’s walk. I grab her.

“No!” I yell. “Don’t go up!”

“Get out of the house!” the operator says. She’s still with us, I realize now, but it’s the wrong idea. If we step outside the house, they will kill us. From outside I can hear the sound of sirens, but distant, too long to wait for. The streets are completely crowded with spec-The Lace Reader 357

tators. Horns blaring. Some of them getting out of their cars now, trying to get a closer look.

“The cellar!” Angela says, starting toward the door “There’s a tunnel in the cellar!”

I follow her down into the blackness, closing the door behind us against the smoke. I know that this is the right move to make—there’s a bulkhead down there, behind the house, and I’m thinking maybe we can get out that way. They won’t see us back there, maybe, and we can somehow sneak past them. But there aren’t any tunnels left that I know of, not anymore. Beezer and I had looked for the tunnels when we were kids. We’d spent long hours searching—whole days, even. The tunnels were here a hundred years ago, weaving a web of deception under Salem Common, keeping the British tax collector at bay. Maybe they remained later, during the Underground Railroad, the last stop on the way to Canada and freedom. It would have made sense for May’s new Underground Railroad. But the tunnels had all been filled in. That’s what Eva had told us anyway, when she’d had enough of our searching or when she felt bad that we weren’t finding anything, or maybe when she just decided that we should play outside and get some fresh air for a change instead of hanging out in her basement all the time. Eva told us the same thing our teachers had told us, that the city of Salem had filled in all the tunnels at the end of the last century. They were sorry about it, too, when World War II came, and even sorrier during the Cold War, because the tunnels would have been a good place for an air-raid shelter, and the city wouldn’t have had to spend good money to build its own. Angela is groping along the back wall, clawing at it. “I know it’s down here somewhere,” she says. “That was how Eva got me out of here the last time.”

So that was it. It must be true. The tunnels must have been how Eva made Angela “disappear.” They were the reason Cal and his followers thought Eva was a witch. What was it Rafferty said? They 358 Brunonia

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saw Angela go into the house, they had the whole house surrounded, but Angela never came out again. When she finally showed up again, she was on the island with May’s girls. Until Rafferty brought her back. May was angry at Rafferty for helping Cal, but she didn’t get the point. The point was that Cal was scared of both Eva and May. He believed his own accusations about them. He didn’t know about the tunnels. What he believed was that, with the exception of his exwife, all the Whitney women had magical powers. They have the house surrounded now, the same way they did that night. I can see the sandal-clad feet outside the high basement windows. There is no way to get out the bulkhead exit now. They are standing on it. Holding it closed. We can see their figures, like shadow puppets lit from behind, their profiles projected across the basement walls by the headlights of the few cars that are still able to pass on the streets, the ones not stuck in traffic. Angela pushes on the wall again, giving it everything she’s got, almost knocking herself out before I stop her.

“What are you doing?”

“I know it’s here!” she says. “Behind this wall. There’s a whole room in there. Eva hid me there the last time. Until she could get me out.” She is hurting herself. She coughs. It is damp and smoky in here—damp and smoky, with the vague smell of mildew. . . . And I think of the Realtor looking at the wine cellar, inspecting the water on the floor. That’s where it had to be. The wine cellar. I had always wondered why Eva had a stocked wine cellar put in when she didn’t drink at all. The secret door is on the wine cellar’s wall. It has to be. The slats and cross-hatchings must be a way of disguising it. The liquid on the floor wasn’t spilled wine or a leaky pipe. It was the salt water that was making the flowers mildew. The tunnel was tidal.

“Where does the tunnel come out?” I say, just to double-check, to make sure I am right in my hunch. But I’m already pretty certain. The Lace Reader 359

I’m moving toward the wine racks. Even as I’m asking the question, I already know the answer.

“The boathouse,” she says.

I move my fingers slowly along the wall, feeling for the cracks, the world behind the world: spiny wooden racks, a lattice of wood and bottles, dust. I’m looking for what is different. What does it say in Eva’s journal? “Look for one of two things: something that enhances the pattern or something that breaks it.”

It’s getting too smoky to see. I feel along the spiny racks, reading them with my fingers, like Braille. And then my fingertips find a small slice across the grain of the wood. Small as the blade of a razor. I follow the tiny crack with my fingers as it moves three bottles up, cuts ninety degrees, goes four bottles across, then heads back down the wall. I have found it. It is real.

It’s a secret Alice in Wonderland door, smaller than me, the right size for a person the year it was built, maybe, but not anymore. I reach in between the bottles at the same height a handle should be, and I find a small lever. I push it down. It engages. I can hear the cylinders turning, but the door doesn’t open. It is locked. I feel around, looking for the thumb turn or a keyhole or something, one hand in my pocket already searching, trying to find something to pick it with. Then my fingers hit the smooth, round plate where the key should be but isn’t. My heart sinks. It’s a keyed dead bolt. It’s getting harder to breathe. I call out to Angela, but she cannot hear me over the building noise of the approaching fire. It smells of old wood and horsehair plaster as the fire burns through the walls of the tearoom above us. The heat seems to drive the mold spores into the air. I can smell the lavender from the flowers that Eva had drying on the racks next to me, the ones I forgot to throw away.

And then I remember the combination. From the house inspection. And from the Realtor’s telling me it was half the problem. 360 Brunonia

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Mildew in the basement, from the drying flowers. Hung upside down like a distress flag.

“Who in the world would dry flowers in a basement?” It annoyed me when she asked the question, as if she thought Eva were stupid or senile. But I had to admit that I’d wondered about it, too. Who in the world
would
dry flowers in a basement? The answer was, no one. No one who knew what they were doing anyway. Eva wouldn’t. And it becomes another thing that breaks the pattern, that stands out—the flowers, of course. Eva was nothing if not consistent. The key to the dead bolt was in the drying, moldy flowers.

I grab the bunches one by one, pulling them off the hooks, shaking them the same way Beezer shook the bells that last Christmas we were children. I shake each bunch slowly, deliberately, as if I’m expecting one of them to have a different tone. Above us a timber crashes through the floor, shaking the house to its foundations. Angela jumps back from it.

“What are you doing?” Angela is freaking out. “We need to get out of here now,” she says. She thinks I’m losing it, standing here shaking flowers while the house is falling down around us. She’s afraid that what she has heard about me is true. I’m beginning to think she’s right, because I’m not finding the key. She’s pulling at my arm now. Wanting to head back up and maybe go out the same way she came in. But it’s already too late for that. The whole floor above us is on fire. Angela pounds on the bulkhead, pushing her body against it, screaming at the onlookers, shouting at them. Either they don’t hear her or they choose not to hear. Then she collapses on the floor next to me in tears. “We’re going to die!” she wails. I pick up the last bunch of flowers, barely able to see it now with the smoke closing in. I shake it hard, and the key falls to the floor. I feel for it, my fingers closing around it, running my other arm along the door until it finds the dead bolt. Slowly, carefully, I put key to lock and turn it clockwise until I feel the click. The door springs open. The Lace Reader 361

“We’re in,” I say, grabbing Angela’s hand, pulling her, half standing, half crawling, until we’re inside, closing the door behind us against the inferno that is now the cellar.

Angela knows the room. She moves along the far wall until she locates a flashlight. The light is dim. At first I assume it’s because the batteries are bad, but it’s not the batteries, it’s the smoke. This place is more cave than secret room, its hollowed-out earthen walls reinforced with the wooden frames of old ships. Cobblestones line part of the floor, then stop abruptly where the builders ran out of them and couldn’t steal any more from the streets of Salem. There are treasures here as well: A piece of ivory—the carved handle of a knife, its blade rusted and disintegrated to a pile of red dust. The knife sits on top of a spice box, the kind I recognize from the houses of old Salem, its wood warped from water damage. There’s an ancient wooden bed in the corner, with sleep-tight ropes instead of a box spring. And there’s the chinoiserie, a lot of it, stolen probably when my grandfather’s forebears turned to privateering. Probably too recognizable or too hot to ever bring upstairs and display. Except for some of the chinoiserie, most of the stuff left in this room is broken. I notice that. Everything else was eventually taken upstairs and assimilated. The items left behind are not functional. Except for the bed. The bed was left here for the people who waited. There is a sense of waiting in this room. And a sense of fear. Both are palpable. We are fearful now, of course, but it’s more than our fear that resides here. This is the room where the slaves waited for their freedom. The last stop on their trip north. They waited here, never knowing if they would get out or if they would die trying. Trusting the abolitionists, who were the same blood and only a few generations removed from the people who owned the ships that brought them here to be sold into slavery in the first place. Trusting 362 Brunonia