The Lace Reader. Brunonia Barry

      It is called Ipswich lace, or bobbin lace, or bone lace. It is made on bolster pillows held on the laps of the women. The pillows are round or elliptical and most resemble the muffs that Victorian women later carried to keep their hands warm while riding in their carriages. Each woman makes her own pillow, and those pillows are as individual as the women themselves. In old Ipswich the pillows were pieced together from bits of fabric, then stuffed with beach grass.

      —THE LACE READER’S GUIDE

       Chapter 3

      THE SALEM NEWS HAS ALREADY picked up the story about Eva’s disappearance: “Elderly Woman Missing Ten Days” and “Lace Reader of Salem Vanishes.” Eva used to send me the Salem paper. It was around the time that May started making the headlines. For a while I actually read them. My mother’s clashes with the police over her tactics for saving abused women were becoming famous and made for good copy. Eventually I stopped reading the papers and would leave them on the porch in their wrappers until my landlord would get fed up and take them to Santa Monica for recycling or, if it was winter, roll them up tightly and burn them in her fireplace like logs.

      The paper speculates that Eva just wandered away. A woman interviewed from the Salem Council on Aging suggests tagging the elderly residents of Salem. It evokes an interesting image—cops with ear tags and tranquilizer guns rounding up old people. Realizing she’s gone too far with her suggestion, the woman goes on to say: “This kind of thing happens all the time. Salem is a small city. I’m sure she couldn’t have gotten far.”

      The woman clearly didn’t know my aunt.

      The ferry from Boston lets me off on Derby Street, a few blocks from the House of the Seven Gables, where Nathaniel Hawthorne’s cousin grew up. I am named after Hawthorne’s wife, Sophia Peabody, although the spelling is different; my name is spelled Sophya. I was brought up to believe that Ms. Peabody was a distant relative, but I found out from Eva that we weren’t related to the Peabodys at all, that May simply found Sophia interesting, and appropriated her as our own. (So now you see which side of the family the lying thing comes from.) By the time it would have bothered me, May and I were hardly speaking anyway. I had already moved in with Aunt Eva. I had changed my name to Towner and wouldn’t answer to anything else. So it didn’t matter all that much.

      I’m walking for a long time. The estrogen patch on my arm begins to itch. I have a rash from it, but I don’t know what to do about that, short of ripping the damned thing off. I figure the rash is probably from the heat. I’d forgotten how hot it can get in New England in the summer, and how humid. Ahead of me tourists swarm. Buses line the lot at the Gables, jamming the side streets. People move in groups, snapping photos, stuffing souvenirs into bags that are already far too full.

      Around every corner of Salem lurks a history lesson. Dead ahead as I walk is the Custom House with its gold roof. This is where Hawthorne worked his day job, an appointed position as clerk. Using the locals as subject matter, revealing their secrets, Hawthorne basically wrote his way out of this town, escaping west to Concord before the townspeople remembered their talent with the old tar and feathers. Still, now they celebrate Hawthorne as their own. The same way they celebrate the witches, who never existed at all in the days of the witch trials but who thrive here in great numbers now.

      A kid steps in front of me, asking directions to the common. There are three kids actually, two girls and a boy. All in black. Goths, is my first thought, but no, definitely young witches. What gives it away finally is the BLESSED BE T-shirt worn by one of the girls.

      I point. “Follow the yellow brick road,” I say. Actually it’s a tour line painted on the street, and it’s red, not yellow, but they get the idea. A man in a huge Frankenstein head walks by, handing out flyers. I want to call for the continuity person, but this isn’t a movie set. A cruiser slows, the cop looks at the kids, then at me. The boy spots the witch logo on the side of the police car, gives the cop a big thumbs-up. Frankenstein hands each of us a Freaky Tours flyer and sneezes inside his big hollow head. “Universal tours without the budget” is what Beezer calls this place. I heard from my brother that Salem is trying to shed its image as Witch City. He told me last year that they were attempting to pass an ordinance to limit the number of haunted houses that can be erected within one city block. From the look of things, the ordinance didn’t pass.

      The second girl, the shorter of the two, grabs the side of her head, pulling it slowly until her neck cracks. Celtic-knot tattoo on the nape of her neck, hair way too dark for her pale skin. “Come on, let’s go,” she says to the guy, and grabs his arm, leading him away from me. “Thanks,” he says. Our eyes meet, and he flashes a quick smile. She steps between us then, turning him wide like a big ship she’s trying to keep on course. I follow them, walking in the same direction toward Eva’s house but leaving a safe distance so she won’t think I’m after him.

      It’s a long walk toward the common. I hear the music before I see the crowd—it’s nature music, New Age. We could be back in Woodstock except for the preponderance of black clothing. I’m wondering what holiday it is, what Pagan celebration. I count the days and realize that it’s some kind of summer-solstice thing, though it’s about a week too late. Living in L.A. has made me forget the seasons. Here the arrival of summer is something for everyone to celebrate, Pagan or not.

      Salem Common, with its huge oaks and maples and the Gothic cast-iron fence, triggers a lost school memory. There used to be tunnels under the common, sometime after the witches but before the Revolution. The shipping merchants probably used the tunnels to hide trade bounty from their English tax collectors; that was the theory anyway. After the war for independence finally started, the tunnels were used by the privateers, who were the same thing as pirates, really, but with the government’s permission. Not England’s permission—it was the British ships they were stealing—but permission of the new government. I’m told they also hid ammunition there, and saltpeter. Beezer and I used to search for the tunnels when we were little, but Eva told us that they’re all filled in now.

      I turn the corner by the Hawthorne Hotel and see the low blue flame from the old glassed-in popcorn machine, which is still on the corner across from the hotel, as it has been every year since my mother was a little girl. There’s also a makeshift stand selling wands and crystals, but that’s new. Across the street stands the imposing statue of Roger Conant, who, after failing to realize his original goal in Cape Ann, ended up founding the city that would become Salem. I’m reminded of the cliché Eva used to repeat at least ten times a week: There are no accidents. And the one that inevitably followed. Everything happens for a reason.

      The cops are everywhere: on bicycles, talking to people, asking for fire permits. “You can’t do that here,” I hear one of them say. “If you want to have a bonfire, you have to go up to Gallows Hill, or to the beach.”

      I cross the street. I open the gate to Eva’s house, catching a whiff of flowers, peonies, coming from her gardens. There are hundreds of them now, tree peonies on small bushes that die back every winter. Eva has done well with her gardens. She used to leave a key for me in a peony blossom when she knew I was coming. Or she would place it in one of the daylilies if it was later in the season and the peonies were no longer blooming. I’d forgotten that. But there are too many flowers now. I could never find a key here, and of course she hasn’t left a key this time, because she wasn’t expecting me.

      The brick house is much larger than I remember. More imposing and older. Huge chimneys list to windward. Off the back, away from the crowds of Salem Common, is the coach house, which is connected to the main house by the winter porch. The coach house is more damaged than the main house—probably from the weather or