House of Six

Chapter 3

The next morning John pulled into the parking lot at the Peabody Essex Institute at eight o’clock sharp, climbed out of the car and dragged his exhausted body toward Plummer Hall. More than anything he would have loved to have stayed in bed because he felt as if he’d barely slept. He’d finally managed to fall back to sleep again the night before, but only after lying awake exhausted and unable to calm down after the dream that had awakened him. The Phillips Library usually opened at nine, but Joe D’Angelo had a busy day, and so he had asked John to come before the regular operating hours. True to his word, D’Angelo was standing outside the front doors as John arrived.

“Thank you for doing this,” John said.

“Not a problem,” said D’Angelo, shivering slightly as he turned, opened the door, and ushered John inside. He was tall and thin with bony shoulder bones that stuck up like two knobs beneath his threadbare cardigan sweater. His mostly bald scalp was unusually pink, from the cold John thought, and D’Angelo’s glasses were fogged up from having come out of the warm library into the morning chill.

“I hope you weren’t waiting for me for long,” John said, glancing at his watch to make sure he wasn’t late.

D’Angelo shook his head. “It wasn’t being outside. It’s being inside with the overheated library, and then going into the freezing rare books section and then back into the over- heated library. I’m either too hot or freezing all day long. It’s no wonder I have a perpetual cold.”

D’Angelo walked him through the main reading room, then opened a door that said “Private” and led the way down a flight of steps to another door marked “Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. Restricted Access.” He opened the door’s electronic lock with a magnetic card that hung around his neck. John followed the archivist into a small room where there were coat hangers for extraneous clothing and cubby- holes for personal effects. There were also five or six navy blue cardigan sweaters hanging together at one end of the coat rack with “Property of Phillips Library” stenciled in white letters along the back. On the far wall was another door that read:

NO FLASH PHOTOGRAPHY

WEAR GLOVES AT ALL TIMES

NO FOOD OR DRINK ALLOWED

John had been here once before and knew the drill. He took off his overcoat, hung it up, donned one of the cardigan sweaters, and then went over to the transparent plastic box that hung from the wall and took a pair of white cloth gloves. While John put on the gloves, D’Angelo reached into the pocket of his cardigan, pulled out his own pair of gloves, and put them on. Then he opened the next door and led the way into the rare books room. Right away, John felt the temperature and humidity change. The room was cooler than the rest of the library. When he looked at the instruments on the wall, he saw that the temperature in the room was sixty- five degrees, and the humidity was 45 percent.

“You want to see the same material you were looking at the last time?” D’Angelo asked.

John nodded, and the archivist disappeared into the stacks and came out a minute later with three boxes that he placed on one of the research tables. John opened the first box and felt his pulse quicken as he saw the stacks of letters and other writings all carefully organized and separated. D’Angelo cleared his throat before John did anything else, and when John looked up the archivist reviewed with him the proper methods for separating and overseeing the ancient pages to avoid any possibility of damage.

John sat down at the table and began to carefully remove the documents from the first box and look through them. There were letters from various early residents of Salem, personal journals from people whose names meant nothing. He saw pages of farm reports, recording the corn, wheat, and sorghum one of the Putnam farms had produced, how many oxen, cows, pigs and sheep they owned. He saw the document written by Nathaniel Hawthorne and skipped past it because he’d already read it.

John went through the first box and the second without finding anything that gave him pause. He was on the con- tents of the third box, close to the bottom, his eyes starting to glaze over when he found a packet of three letters bound together with a navy-blue ribbon. He gently slipped the rib- bon off the letters, unfolded them, and began to look them over.

At once he saw that the letter was addressed, “Dear Elizabeth.” He felt his pulse kick because it was the first thing, he’d seen that related to the curious notation in Paradise Lost.

He struggled to read the old-fashioned writing and he thought it said, “Thee hast been well pre- pared for thy role and responsibilities. Be thee obedient to thy

Expert and diligent in thy duties and remember fondly those who hath trained thee for thy Greatness in the New World. We hope this letter finds thee well in that far place and that the Astarte brought thee safely to the shores of your new home in reasonable comfort and without undue travail.” The Astarte! It must have been a ship, John realized. But then what did Ashtoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner mean? How did a person equate to a ship? If Astarte was the name of the ship that had brought Elizabeth Turner to North America, why was that important enough to call for a margin note in his great-great-grandfather’s book?

He looked through the other papers, which had been sinched together by the same ribbon, but were addressed to different people, within the same family, but shed no further light on his questions. The only other piece of paper in the packet was curious because it consisted of two renderings, the first of a house with lines drawn through it, and the second on the bottom half of the page showed a world map with lines radiating outward from what looked like the southwest corner of England.

Something about the drawings caught his eye, and he stared at them for a time trying to understand their meaning. Whatever their purpose, they were meticulous. The drawing of the house, which resembled the wealthier homes in Salem, was a house with six gables, each of the gables being the beginning of one of the lines. The house was oriented specifically to lines of the compass, with north, south, east, and west shown separate from the lines that radiated from the gables. Below it, the larger map was carefully executed, and its purpose seemed to be to extend the lines from the gables out- ward around the world.

John looked at where the lines intersected with land and noted that one of those points seemed to cut through the northern coast of North America, close to where the colony of Massachusetts was found. Another line went through Northern Europe and Russia. The lines were confusing because they didn’t seem to have any real meaning that John could figure out. Also, because the house from which the lines originated was irregular in its design, the lines did not radiate evenly. They weren’t anything like the spokes of a wheel but shot off at odd angles. Thus, another line went through Southern China and crossed what John guessed would be North Korea. Another went through Central Africa, another bisected South America and Mexico.

Why had someone gone to such trouble and put such effort into a paper drawing? John wondered. Were these supposed to be trade routes? He didn’t think that made any sense, but then what was the purpose? He was sure that Puritans hadn’t believed in wasting time on non- essential tasks, and yet a lot of artistry and time had been spent to make the drawings. Another question was, if they were so important, why hadn’t the artist made it larger and put it on canvas instead of paper? Then, other questions occurred to him. To whom had this been sent? There was no other writing on the page, no sign of the recipient.

He looked at the folds in the paper then laid out the other letters that had been in the bundle. Wondering if the map had was folded along with one of the other letters, he took the pages one by one and laid them atop the map. The creases on only one of the letters exactly matched the map’s folds, as if the same careful hand had folded them at the same time. It was the letter written to someone known only as Elizabeth.

John felt a surge of fresh energy as he looked at the letter and the map. The references to greatness and obedience to a master, to a ship named Astarte, and now the lines that radiated off the gables of the house, one of which intersected the Americas at what looked like the location of modern-day Salem. All of it was vague, but he knew he was onto something here, something strange. He didn’t have any idea what it meant yet or where it might lead, but he knew in his gut he had to start pulling this thread to see where it led, and he had to do it as fast as he could. He couldn’t articulate why, but he believed that wherever this went, it was going to take him to Sarah.

He knew it was against library policy, but he snuck his cell phone out of his pocket and used it to take pictures of both documents. Then he returned the documents to the box and rang the buzzer that would summon Joe D’Angelo to come let him out and return their boxes to their proper places.