matron in Edwardian costume, the kind of photo you dress for at Ye Olde County Faire.
If life had not become so exceptionally peculiar over the past month, I would simply have blocked her. Instead, chewing on my lower lip, I sent her a private message: “Who are you and what do you want?”
Before I could even log out, I received a response: “Come and get me. Elm House, 420 Common Street, Belmont. Do not make me wait any longer. Do you have any idea how much I have suffered?”
I stared at this statement, flummoxed.
“I know you are online,” came a new message. “There is a little green light next to your name. Come at once. I shall be waiting near the front desk with my luggage.”
After an unsettled moment, I typed back, “What are you expecting of me?”
“That you will help me to do magic once again. As you promised.”
Thirty seconds later, laptop under my arm, I was dashing out the door to get to Tristan.
Diachronicle
DAY 290
In which adjustments are made
I SPRINTED INTO THE BASEMENT office ready to thrust my Facebook page at Tristan. But he and the assembled Maxes, all bleary-eyed yet full of pep, were cheering the results of the overnight test, which had apparently found no leaks. Frank Oda (radiant) and his wife, Rebecca (stoic), were also present, creating yet another mound of empty boxes and packing material as they uncrated the newly arrived circuit boards.
“Tristan, I found—!” I began, but he was moving so quickly as to resemble an animated character, without the least interest in anything I had to say. He seemed to be headed for the server room, so I darted past him, executed a 180, and blocked his path. “I found a woman who says she can do magic. That is, she found me,” I clarified, seeing his eyes go wide with wonder. “On Facebook. We haven’t met in person.”
Tristan frowned. “Oh God, not some social media thing, Stokes. Please tell me you didn’t put out a call for witches.”
“Of course not,” I snapped. “I signed a nondisclosure form, I know what that means. Give me some credit, Lyons. She sent me a message out of the blue, saying she was waiting for me so she could do magic.”
He blinked. “Strange.”
I reached for my messenger bag. “I’ve got it right—”
He held up a hand, shook his head. “Stokes. I forbid you to communicate with this person, whoever she is, over social media channels. It is totally insecure. You have got to go about this systematically—not by sitting around your apartment waiting to get friended by supernatural trolls.”
“Well, now that we’ve ruled out the use of the Internet and all other modern communications devices,” I said, “what systematic approach do you recommend for responding to the only lead we have?”
“Don’t do anything till we have a chance to hack into Facebook and get this person’s real identity for a background check. Leave your laptop with the Vladimirs.”
“And what do I systematically do in the meanwhile?”
“Go to Salem.”
“We’ve been over this. There never were any actual witches in Salem. Even the Puritans ended up admitting as much.”
“Back in the day, yes. That’s true,” Tristan said agreeably. “But now, because of its reputation as a witchy place, it is a magnet for people like that.”
“And you know this how?”
“I drove through it once. There was witch shit all over the place.”
“Good. Now I understand what you mean by systematic.”
“Try to see it through the eyes of my higher-ups,” he suggested. “Salem. Witches. Go. Get on it. See if you can find a witch, or a witch’s descendant, or a witch’s DNA or something, just so I can tell them it’s being worked on. I’ve got to work my contacts at Lawrence Livermore, they’re hoarding helium.”
“Of course,” I said, and wished for a brief, exhausted moment that he had asked me to translate Tartessian, or something simple like that.
Feeling like a dolt before I’d even departed, I borrowed Tristan’s Jeep and drove up Route 1 to Salem, about an hour away. In that vehicle, on that road, this was like being beaten with sacks of gravel.
Like many New England towns with something of historical note to recommend it, Salem was a bizarre combination of well-preserved, beautiful old buildings and ugly commercial developments. The commercial developments were winning, however. Ignoring the various signs for the Salem Witch Museum, the Salem Witch House, the Salem Witch Village, the Salem Witch Day Spa, and so on, I found a parking spot on a broad street, marveled at how cheap the parking was, and walked into the older part of town. I have no words to describe how unenthusiastic I felt about this assignment. Three and a quarter centuries after nineteen innocent people were hanged for no reason, a bunch of New Age types whose concept of witchcraft had zero in common with the seventeenth-century concept of witchcraft decided to set up shop right by the graves of the victims. What the fuck. I have no tolerance for sloppy logic like that.
Just so I could tell Tristan I’d done it, I walked into a couple of occult shops that I found along a pedestrian stretch of Essex Street, then fled before the incense overwhelmed me.
There’s another context-is-everything moment, because now I live for incense—if I really am to be stuck permanently in 1850s London, I might have to become an Anglican nun. God, I hope it doesn’t come to that.
In the end, though, the scholar in me won out, and I ended up visiting a few of the legitimate historical sites in the Salem area. The name of Mary Estey—one of the victims of the witch hysteria—kept jumping out at me. Rebecca East, Frank’s wife, had mentioned that she was a descendant of this family, the spelling having changed and the final syllable having been dropped from the surname at some point in the intervening three centuries. In typical WASP style, Rebecca underplayed its significance, pointing out that the families of that era had been enormous and that, if you did the math, every second or third white person you encountered on the streets of America was probably descended from someone who had lived in Salem. But I felt that the least I could do was pay my respects.
Then, suddenly feeling as though it was late in the day and that I must be missing important developments, I got back in the Jeep and fought my way back through late afternoon traffic to the office. I can’t say I mourned my failure overmuch, as it meant I’d get a free trip to New Orleans out of it, and that would rock be most excellent.
I DROVE BACK to the office late in the day to find Tristan collapsed on the couch from exhaustion. I began to make coffee in one of the high-tech machines we had pillaged from a departing tech start-up. While it gurgled and hissed, I idly and out of habit took my phone out and glanced at it. There was a banner notification from Facebook Messenger.
“I will wait in the lobby,” said a private message from the Hungarian woman, with a 9:04 a.m. time stamp on it.
“Oh God,” I said out loud. How could I have gone the whole day with hardly a thought of her?
A mechanical chime sounded as an instant message sprang up. “I waited the ENTIRE DAY. Where were you?” She had changed her profile picture again, this time to an artsy-looking purple blur.
I went to the couch and nudged Tristan. Deep asleep, he almost instantly awoke and leapt to his feet, shoving me sideways without registering my identity, glancing around for an assailant.
“It’s just me,” I said with irritation. “Calm down.”
“You startled me,” he said, as if I should have known better.
I gestured to my phone. “Take a look at