Free Chain of Souls (Salem VI) by Jack Heath, John Thompson

things? What if there had been something else buried in that box of old documents, the importance of which might only be evident to someone who knew the workings of the Coven. Someone like Rich. John knew he might be grasping at straws, but what if there had been something in those boxes of documents and letters that could shed light on Elizabeth Turner, on the reason Captain John Bancroft Andrews might have written "Asthoreth/Astarte = Elizabeth Turner" in the margins of
Paradise Lost?
    Thinking again about those margin notes gave him a fresh flicker of hope, but as quickly as his spirits started to rise, they fell back to earth. "Even if we find something about Elizabeth Turner, what are the chances it has anything at all to do with Sarah?" He put his face in his hands. "The truth is it probably has a zero chance of helping us find Sarah, and I'm only doing it because I can't stand to sit around doing nothing."
    Amy came over, took his by the shoulders, and gave him a gentle shake. "How will you know until you find it?"

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    THEY FINISHED SEARCHING THE HOUSE WITHOUT any further discoveries, and by then it was already early afternoon. John had put a call in to Joe D'Angelo but hadn't yet gotten a call back from the archivist, so he was left with nothing to do but pace and worry about Sarah.
    He tried to sit down and make a checklist of places he thought they might have taken her, but after twenty minutes he ripped it up, knowing he was doing nothing but throwing darts in the dark. The truth was he had no idea where she was and no idea where to start looking.
    He kept pacing the house, but every time he walked past the liquor cabinet it called out to him. He knew if he stayed in the house, he'd start drinking, and in terms of helping Sarah, that would be the worst possible thing he could do. Amy had already gone to the
Salem News
to help the other members of the paper's staff who had been working since early that morning to finalize their plans for renting furniture and computers and were hammering out the logistics of moving their offices on Friday so that they would be able to put out their first edition of
The Salem Observer
on Monday.
    Left with nothing else to take the edge off his anxiety, he locked up the house and hurried over to the paper. He told no one about Sarah, apologized for his absence, and spent the rest of the afternoon pretending to concentrate as the people around him worked feverishly to finalize plans. At a staff meeting at the end of the day, the group decided that for the first week they would deliver the paper at no cost to all the
Salem News
subscribers. Once the subscriber base saw that the new paper was in many respects similar to the old one, everyone thought they would be likely to subscribe to
The Salem Observer.
John voted for the suggestion in agreement with the others, trying to feign an enthusiasm he didn't feel.
    John was grateful at the way Amy and the other staffers seized the initiative because his mind was so much on Sarah that he could barely think about anything else. In spite of all the hard work and activity in the offices, he could see the fear in the eyes of everyone on the paper's staff. He knew all of them were frightened for their jobs and their economic well-being, and he struggled to appear focused and upbeat, knowing they looked to him to provide the new paper's leadership. In spite of his best efforts to give them what they needed, he wanted to scream that he didn't really care about money or jobs or anything else when his daughter's life was on the line. It was everything he could do to bite his tongue and hold his raging anxiety inside.
    At one point when the others were all busy, Jack Daniels sidled into John's office. "Everything okay?" he asked. "I wondered when you weren't around this morning."
    "Yeah, yeah, I just had an appointment."
    "Not getting cold feet on the new paper, are you?"
    "Absolutely not."
    "You'd tell us if you weren't a hundred percent,