Enigma

Chapter 7 Salem

CHAPTER 7

SALEM

What the hell?

Why the hell?

How the hell?

The questions kept going on a loop around her

mind as she made her way back to the residential block with Aditi and Melissa by her side. Aditi, who was equally as quiet as her, and Melissa, who was leaning on both of them and slurring her words. Both she and Aditi had been right in suspecting something was wrong with the drink. It had been drugged, and she’d find out with what later. For tonight, she was mentally exhausted.

This was unlike her.

She wasn’t rash or reckless. She was rational. She was resilient. She was resourceful. To anyone outside, it would seem that was what she’d been tonight, not wanting to kiss a guy playing the game so quickly assessing and targeting someone else. But she knew, deep down, it hadn’t been a reasonable choice. There hadn’t been any reason behind it at all, none except wiping that smirk off his face.

And she’d done that spectacularly.

She felt almost proud.

Even outside of that, it had been a surprising, pattern-breaking night. Not only had she gone out socializing and felt something like camaraderie for the first time in a long time, she had acted on a dare and smacked lips with the man who had been occupying her thoughts more than she wanted to admit, a man she didn’t know anything about—and what she did know wasn’t entirely reliable. A dangerous man with a dangerous air and even more dangerous mouth, one she’d wanted to taste deeper, better after seeing the way he had licked her lip balm off his lips. And that was exactly why she needed to resist these urges. He made her feel out of the norm and act out of the norm, and incited reactions in her body that were out of the norm.

The residential block came in view, two rows of three buildings, newer than the castle that spanned the entire academic area itself. The right row was the girls’ row and the left was the boys’ row, both done identically to match the castle, with brown stones, polished wood, and metal gates. It was dreary on the dark, cold days, but definitely an aesthetic that felt old. That was the point, probably.

As they neared the common entrance to the girls’ row, Salem felt her lungs burning with the effort of walking at an incline carrying half the weight of a drugged girl.

“Remind me to start working out more,” Aditi grunted, echoing her thoughts.

Guess both of them weren’t used to much heavy lifting, and it was a lot since both of them were on the smaller side, Aditi even shorter than Salem’s respectable five foot five inches.

For a few months a while ago, the university had tried to bring in some golf carts to the campus to assist students over long distances. But there wasn’t much give on the ground. It was either cobblestoned or soil, flat in some places and inclined in others, neither of which had been conducive for the golf-cart idea. A few months and a few tipped carts later, the idea was dismissed and young, mostly physically fit students had to fall back on the good old means of transportation—their feet.

Those golf carts would’ve been really handy right then.

As they approached the entrance, Melissa’s next door neighbor, who had been studying instead of partying, whom Aditi had had the foresight and contact details to call ahead of time so she could help, waited for them at the door. Aditi probably knew everyone on campus with her personality, while Salem didn’t even know who was on her floor.

“I’ll help her up to her room.” The friend came forward, her round face furrowed with concern. “How can anyone drug someone here?”

Salem scoffed. “You think rich people don’t commit crimes?”

She felt a sharp look at herself and bit her tongue, a habit she had formed after she’d started speaking again. For about five years, from thirteen to eighteen, she hadn’t said a word to anyone. At first it had been a rebellion, a reaction after a small traumatic incident, and it had felt nice not being told to control her tongue and her wayward ways. She’d thought she would get one over on them if they didn’t get her words. It had taken thirteen-year-old Salem exactly eight days to realize no one had even noticed. As long as she nodded and smiled and shook her head at the right times, her parents didn’t think of it, and her sister hadn’t either, lost in her own teenage drama and then leaving them behind. And Salem hadn’t had any friends, none who would physically see her at least, so she’d decided to just stop speaking and channeled her verbiage into writing to her only friend. A fake friend.

Twenty years and a life full of such odd memories.

Shaking them off, she went silent and helped transfer Melissa. It was just an elevator ride up from the entrance, and she didn’t really want to go inside, not yet.

The restlessness she’d been feeling came back tenfold.

“I’m wiped out,” Aditi groaned, rolling her shoulders. “Thank goodness I’ve got tomorrow off work.”

Salem looked at the girl, a girl she suspected had more to her than met the eye, and asked something she’d been wondering for a while. “Why do you work?” Then she realized how that sounded and added, “I don’t mean any offense. I’m just curious, because the university covers all the costs for full-ride students.”

Aditi leaned against the stone wall next to the door. “I’ve always worked, even if just an hour. It’s not about the money so much as keeping myself disciplined. Now, though, I love BBC. You wouldn’t believe the things I overhear! For a Nosy Nancy like me, it’s such a perfect place to be.” She ended on a chuckle.

It was a fresh perspective and Salem appreciated the other girl for it. But her mind got stuck on the overhearing information part. She looked around once, to make sure no one was lurking, and looked back at the girl. “Have you heard anything about the body they found at the beach?”

Aditi froze, her eyes darting around too. “Not here,” she said, opening the door to the entrance. “Meet me outside the library tomorrow at ten.”

Salem nodded and watched as Aditi entered.

Salem followed after a few minutes. It was already past midnight and the night was getting colder. There was no point lingering outside when she could be in her bed, warm and comfortable. With a sigh, she entered the massive common lobby area for all three buildings. There were three elevators and three staircases, each marked with the name of a building. She didn’t know what the logic of having a common entrance was, but she guessed it had something to do with encouraging mingling and networking.

She made her way to the staircase with “Cliffside” written over it in a dark, grungy font. The other two said “Woodside” and “Townside.” She assumed they meant the views the respective buildings faced, which was pretty convenient.

She began her ascent. Though her room was on the third floor, she always took the stairs, had since she was twelve and got accidentally trapped in the casket at her grandmother’s funeral, a little after her grandfather had passed. She had gone in looking for Junie and fallen in. It had been just a few minutes before the funeral home director had heard Junie’s barks and her screams and opened the lid, but it had felt like a lifetime. The whole incident had been a blip on everyone’s radar. The funeral home man didn’t say a word to anyone, knowing it could cause intense backlash for his business. And she never said a word to anyone because, well, she hadn’t really had anyone to tell. She had sat through the whole thing clutching Junie to her side and calming herself down.

Only two people in the world knew about her severe claustrophobia that had been a result of that innocent incident added to her fall into the pit as a child—and one of them was dead.

Salem had never been able to go into elevators, small rooms, places that made her feel boxed in since then. Was it a result of the trauma? Possibly. Did knowing that change her reality? No.

The staircase was simple, keeping in the theme of the main castle, just wide stone steps and a metal railing leading from one floor to the next. She finally came to a stop on her floor.

The landing opened up into multiple corridors, with a total of ten rooms on hers. She didn’t know how many were on other floors or the other buildings, but as she walked down her corridor to her door, unlocking it with her thumbprint in the scanner that lay next to an old-fashioned lock that suited the décor better, she was glad she had gotten the room she did. Though the residential block was occupied by students on the lowest rung of the social ladder, she doubted anyone higher up had the view they did, especially in her building.

Locking the door behind her, she made her way to the large window right opposite the entrance and looked out into the dark night. She could see the empty area beyond the campus that led to the cliff, a place she had walked a few times, cutting sharply to the sea beyond, and the small lighthouse off to the side.

The room itself was decent-sized, with a queen bed, a small closet, a desk and chair, a mini refrigerator, and a simple en suite bathroom. Every resident was free to customize their space as they wanted. For instance, there was room to mount a television on the wall opposite her bed.

Salem had a murder board instead.

She walked to it, her eyes scanning the images, clippings, handwritten notes, and strings connecting one thing to another, all there for her to see for the hundredth time. She had evaluated, analyzed, and tried to make sense of it for so long it felt like she could recreate it in her sleep.

There were photographs of ten bodies, some from the crime scenes, some taken after the postmortem, some from when they had been alive. There were dates and data, causes of death and patterns, everything found by the cops and investigators. How had she gotten access to them? The traditional way—by bribing the lowest-level data clerks in different offices, those who would neither care who wanted to quickly slip into the back room nor know which file she accessed.

Ten different deaths—eleven, counting the body on the beach—and nothing to connect them, nothing except each having been a student at Mortimer and an applicant for the prestigious Excellency Awards. All people from different backgrounds, different social standing, different cultures.

Her eyes took in everything as they did every morning when she woke up and every night before she went to sleep, lingering on one smiling photograph in particular.

Her sister.

Olivia. Her wide, beautiful smile that had once had people eating out of her hands. Olivia. Her shining, bright eyes so full of dreams to change the world for the better. Olivia. Her stunning, animated face so full of life it had shown everything she felt.

Salem had once hated her sister and everything she had been. But a part of her had loved her too, and the hatred, she came to know as she grew older, had stemmed from her own lack of self-worth. Olivia had been everything Salem could never be. Light, bright, wanted.

Her sister had never done anything for her, or even showed her any affection overtly, but somehow, she had always been around when Salem had needed it, and that had just made her hate even more at the time.

But Salem had never, not in her wildest dreams and her fascination with dead things, imagined Olivia as dead. Death and Olivia just didn’t match. So not only had her death come as a shock to her core, it just hadn’t made any sense, because if it had been an accident or a disease or even a robbery gone wrong or a stalker who got too close, Salem could have accepted that. It had been none of those things.

Olivia had died by suicide.

Talked to their mother normally one morning, and then been found on the rocks beneath the other side of the cliff, the one with the lighthouse, having jumped from there. There had been a thorough investigation, her father had made sure of it, but no foul play had been found. There was no one she had met before, no odd phone calls in the record, no one caught on the cameras. But there wasn’t a note either, and that was what bothered Salem.

Olivia had loved to write.

She had written short stories for children that never saw the light of the day, still sitting in the drafts on her laptop collecting dust at their home.

Once she left for Mortimer, she used to write long emails to Salem, telling her about her classes, her professors, her crushes and games, the people and the university and its history, though Salem never really replied back with the same length or enthusiasm. It was almost as if Olivia needed to journal everything and needed someone to read it, and who better than a younger sister who had given up speaking and had no friends? It wasn’t like Salem could have or would have shared her secrets. She was a vault.

Salem knew a lot of what she did about Mortimer thanks to those letters.

And the last one, the one sent a week before Olivia died, had been innocent enough, except for one line she had sneaked into the middle of a long paragraph about some local legend about the library, one line that had never made any sense to Salem.

They’re mak ing me do this.

A shiver wracked her body as it always did when she thought of those words and the implications they had.

Her sister’s death had broken her father, leading him down a path he never came back from. It had broken their family and its reputation, the losses unbearable for her mother. And it had broken something inside her too, though she would never admit it to anyone.

Salem got ready for bed, her purpose in coming to Mortimer at the forefront of her mind. She wanted to find out what had happened to her sister, find out the stories behind the rest of the deaths, find out if they were at all connected.

She wanted to find the truth.

“Every atom of your ?esh is as dear to me as my own:

in pain and sickness it would still be dear.”

—Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre