The Tenth Circle

by Picoult, Jodi

  Daniel turned to the detective, who'd been doing a good job of trying to blend into the 1970s paneling. “Tell her about the photo.”

  “He already has,” Marita said. “And I'm going to have my hands full trying to keep that out of the courtroom as it is.”

  “It's a perfect example of how Trixie's being victimized . . .”

  "It doesn't tell us anything about the night of the assault . .

  . except that Trixie wasn't a choirgirl before it happened."

  “Will you all just shut up!” At the sound of Trixie's voice, all eyes

  turned. “I'm here, in case you hadn't noticed. So can you all stop talking about me like I'm not?”

  “By all means, Trixie, we'd love to hear what you have to say. Today.”

  Trixie swallowed. “I didn't mean to lie.”

  “You're admitting you did?” the district attorney replied.

  “There were so many . . . holes. I didn't think anyone would believe what happened if I couldn't remember the whole story.” She pulled her sleeves down farther over her wrists. Daniel had noticed her doing that in the past few days, and every time it made his heart pleat. “I remember going to Zephyr's, and all the people who were there. I didn't know most of them. A bunch of the girls were playing Rainbow”

  “Rainbow?” Daniel said.

  Trixie began to pick at the hem of her coat. “It's where everyone gets a different shade of lipstick, and the boys . . . you know, you go off with them .. .” She shook her head.

  “The one with the most colorful penis at the end of the night wins,” Marita said flatly. “Is that about right?” Daniel heard Laura's intake of breath as Trixie nodded. “That's it,” she whispered. “I didn't do it, though. I thought I could - I wanted to make Jason jealous - but I couldn't. Everyone went home after that, except for Jason and Moss and me and Zephyr, and that's when we started playing poker. Moss took the picture of me, and Jason got mad at him, and that's when it all goes blank. I know I was in the bathroom when he found me, but I can't remember how we got to the living room. I can't remember anything, really, until he was on top of me. I thought if I waited long enough, it would all come back. But it hasn't.”

  The district attorney and the detective exchanged a glance.

  “Are you saying,” Marita clarified, “that you woke up to find him having intercourse with you?”

  Trixie nodded.

  “Do you remember any other details?”

  “I had a really bad headache. I thought maybe he'd slammed my head on the floor or something.”

  Bartholemew walked toward the district attorney. He stood behind her shoulder, flipping over the contents of the file until he reached a certain page and pointed. “The ER doc noted a seemingly dissociated mental state. And during her initial interview at the PD, she was unresponsive.”

  “Mike,” the district attorney said, “give me a break.” “If it's true, it would turn this into gross sexual assault,” Bartholemew pressed. “And all of the inconsistencies in Trixie's story would actually work to the prosecution's advantage.”

  “We'd need proof. Date rape drugs stay in the bloodstream for only seventy-two hours, tops.”

  Bartholemew lifted a lab report out of the file folder. “Good thing you've got a sample, then, from six hours post.” Daniel was utterly lost. “What are you talking about?” The prosecutor turned. “Right now, this case is being tried as a juvenile sexually assaulting a juvenile. That changes, however, if the assault is committed either while Trixie was unconscious, or if she was given a substance that impaired her ability to appraise or control the sexual act. In that case, by law, Jason Underhill would have to be tried as an adult.”

  “Are you saying Trixie was drugged?” Daniel said. The district attorney fixed her gaze on Trixie. “Either that,” she replied, “or your daughter is trying to dig herself out of yet another hole.”

  * * *

  "Special K, Vitamin K, Kit Kat, Blind Squid, Cat Valium, Purple

  . . . it's got a dozen names on the street,“ Venice Prudhomme said, peeling off a pair of latex gloves and throwing them in the trash at Bartholemew's feet. ”Ketamine's a nonbarbiturate, rapid-acting anesthetic

  used on both animals and humans . . . it's also allegedly a sexual stimulant. Kids like it as a club drug because, molecularly, it's very similar to angel dust - PCP. It produces a dissociative state, making them feel like their minds are separate from their bodies. We're talking hallucinations . . . amnesia." Mike had begged Venice to run the test at the state lab, in spite of

  a two-month backlog of cases. He'd promised, in return, a pair of

  club-level Bruins tickets. Venice was a single mom with a hockey-crazy son, a woman who didn't get paid enough to spend $85

  per ticket; he knew she wouldn't be able to turn down the offer. Where he was going to actually get two club-level Bruins tickets on his own

  salary, though, remained to be seen.

  So far, Trixie had tested negative for GHB and Rohypnol, the two most common date rape drugs. At this point, Mike was close to conceding that Trixie had, again, duped them. He watched the computer screen, an incomprehensible run of numbers. “Who's dealing ketamine in Bethel, Maine?” he asked rhetorically.

  “It's fully legal when it's Ketaset and sold to vets as a liquid. In that form, it's easy to use as a date rape drug. It's odorless and tasteless. You slip it into a girl's drink, and she's knocked out in less than a minute. For the next few hours, she's numb and willing ... and best of all, she won't remember what happened.” As the computer spit out the last analysis, Venice scanned it. “You say your victim's been lying to you?”

  “Enough to make me wish I was working for the defense,” Mike replied.

  She pulled a highlighter from her towering nest of braids and drew a yellow line across a field of results - a positive flag for ketamine. “Keep your day job,” Venice replied. “Trixie Stone was telling the truth.”

  * * *

  There were not, as most people believed, a hundred different words for snow. Boil down the roots of the Yup'ik language, and you'd only have fifteen: - qanuk (snowflake), kanevvluk (fine snow), natquik (drifting snow), nevluk (clinging snow), qanikcaq (snow on the ground), muruaneq (soft, deep snow on the ground), qetrar (crust on top of snow), nutaryuk (fresh fallen snow), qanisqineq (snow floating on water), qengaruk (snowbank), utvak (snow block), navcaq (snow cornice), pirta (snowstorm), cellallir (blizzard), andpirrelvag (severely storming). When it came to snow, Daniel thought in Yup'ik. He'd look out the window and one of these words, or its derivatives, would pop into his mind ahead of the English. There were snows here in Maine, though, that didn't have equivalent terms in Alaska. Like a nor'easter. Or the kind of snow that landed like goose down, during mud season. Or the ice storm that made the needles on the pines look like they were fashioned out of crystal. Times like those, Daniel's mind would simply go blank. Like now: There had to be a term for the kind of storm that he knew was going to be the first real measurable snow of the season. The flakes were the size of a toddler's fist and falling so fast that it seemed there was a rip in the seam of the gunmetal sky. It had snowed in October and November, but not like this. This was the sort of storm that would cause school superintendents to cancel afternoon basketball games, and create long lines at the Goodyear store; this was the kind of storm that made out-of-town drivers pull over on the highway and forced housewives to buy an extra gallon of milk.

  It was the kind of snow that came so fast, it caught you unaware. You hadn't yet taken the shovels down from the attic where you'd put them last May; you didn't get a chance to cover the trembling rhododendrons with their ridiculous wooden tepees. It was the kind of snow, Daniel realized, where you didn't have time to put away the errant rake and the clippers you'd used to trim back the blackberry bushes, so you'd find yourself walking in circles, hoping you might trip over them before the blades rusted for good. But you never did. Instead, you were bound to lose the things you'd

  bee
n careless with, and your punishment was not seeing them again until the spring.

  * * *

  Trixie couldn't remember the last time she went out to play in the snow. When she was a kid, her father used to build a luge in the backyard that she'd slide down on a tube, but at some point it was no longer cool to look like a total spaz when she tipped over, and she'd traded her rubber-tread Sorels for fashionable stacked-heel boots.

  She couldn't find her snow boots - they were buried under too much stuff in the closet. Instead, she borrowed her mother's, still drying in the mudroom, now that her mom had canceled her afternoon lecture in the wake of the storm. Trixie wrapped a scarf around her neck and jammed a hat onto her head that said DRAMA QUEEN across the front in red script. She pulled on a pair of her father's ski mittens and headed outside.

  It was what her mother used to call snowman snow - the kind damp enough to stick together. Trixie packed it into a ball. She started to roll it across the lawn like a bandage, leaving behind a long brown tongue of matted grass.

  After a while, she surveyed the damage. The yard looked like a crazy quilt, white stripes bordering triangles and squares made of lawn. Taking another handful of snow, Trixie began to roll a second snowball, and a third. A few minutes later, she was standing in the middle of them, wondering how they'd gotten so big so fast. There was no way she would be able to lift one onto the other. How had she managed to build a snowman when she was little?

  Maybe she hadn't. Maybe someone else had always done it for her. Suddenly the door opened and her mother was standing there, screaming her name and trying to see through the flakes still coming down. She looked frantic, and it took Trixie a moment to understand: Her mother didn't know she'd come outside; her mother was still worried she'd kill herself.

  “Over here,” Trixie said.

  Not that death-by-blizzard was a bad idea. When Trixie was tiny, she used to dig a hideout in the mountain of snow left behind by the plow. She called it her igloo, even though her father had told her that Eskimos in America did not and never had lived in those. But then

  she read a newspaper article about a kid in Charlotte, Vermont, who had done the same exact thing and the roof had collapsed on his head and smothered him before his parents even knew he was missing, and she never did it again.

  Her mother walked outside and immediately sank ankle-deep in snow. She was wearing Trixie's boots, which she must have dug out of the closet wreckage after Trixie had commandeered her own Sorels. “You want help?” her mother asked. Trixie didn't. If she'd wanted help, she would have invited someone outside with her in the first place. But she couldn't for the life of her imagine how she was going to get that stupid belly on top of the snowman's base. “All right,” she conceded. Her mother got on one side of the ball and pushed, while Trixie tried to pull it from the front. Even together, they couldn't budge the weight. “Welcome to the Fourth Circle,” her mother said, laughing.

  Trixie fell onto her butt on the snow. Leave it to her mother to

  turn this into a classics lesson.

  “You've got your tightwads on one side and your greedy folks on the other,” her mother said. “They shove boulders at each other for all eternity.”

  “I was kind of hoping to finish this up before then.” Her mother turned. “Why, Trixie Stone. Was that a joke?” Since coming home from the hospital, there had been precious few of those in the household. When a television sitcom came on, the channel was immediately changed. When you felt a smile coming on, you squelched it. Feeling happy didn't seem particularly appropriate, not with everything that had gone on lately. It was as if,

  Trixie thought, they were all waiting for someone to wave a magic wand and say, It's okay, now. Carry on.

  What if she was the one who was supposed to wave that wand?

  Her mother began to sculpt a snow ramp. Trixie fell into place beside her, pushing the middle snowball higher and higher until it tipped onto the bigger base. She packed snow between the seams. Then she lifted the head and perched it at the very top. Her mother clapped... just as snowman listed and fell. His head rolled into one of the basement window gutters; his midsection cracked like an egg. Only the massive base sphere remained intact. Frustrated, Trixie slapped a snowball against the side of it. Her mother watched and then packed her own snowball. Within seconds they were both firing shots at the boulder until it cleaved down the center, until it succumbed to the assault and lay between them in fat iceberg chunks.

  By then, Trixie was lying on her back, panting. She had not felt .. . . well, this normal . . . in some time. It occurred to her that had things ended differently a week ago, she might not be doing any of this. She'd been so focused on what she had wanted to get away from in this world she forgot to consider what she might miss.

  When you die, you don't get to catch snowflakes on your tongue. You don't get to breathe winter in, deep in your lungs. You can't lie in bed and watch for the lights of the passing town plow. You can't suck on an icicle until your forehead hurts.

  Trixie stared up at the dizzy flakes. “I'm kind of glad.”

  “About what?”

  “That it didn't.. . you know ... work out.” She felt her mother's hand reach over to grab her own. Their mittens were both soaked.

  They'd go inside, stick their clothes inside the dryer. Ten minutes later, they'd be good as new.

  * * *

  Because of the storm, hockey practice had been canceled. Jason came home after school, as per the conditions of his bail, and holed himself up in his bedroom listening to the White Stripes on his iPod. He closed his eyes and executed mental passes to Moss, wrist shots and slapshots and pucks that hit the top shelf. One day, people would be talking about him, and not just because of this rape case. They'd say things like, Oh, Jason Underhill, we always knew he'd make it. They'd put up a replica jersey of his over the mirror behind the town bar, with his name facing out, and the Bruins games would take precedence over any other programming on the one TV mounted in the corner. Jason had a lot of work cut out ahead of him, but he could do it. A year or two postgrad, then some college hockey, and maybe he'd even be like Hugh Jessiman at Dartmouth and get signed in the first round of the NHL draft. Coach had told Jason that he'd never seen a forward with as much natural talent as Jason. He'd said that if you wanted something bad enough, all you had to learn was how to go out and take it.

  He was living out his fantasy for the hundredth time when the door to his room burst open. Jason's father strode in, fuming, and yanked the iPod's headphones out of Jason's ears. “What the hell?” Jason said, sitting up.

  “You want to tell me what you left out the first time? You want to tell me where you got the goddamned drugs?”

  “I don't do drugs,” Jason said. “Why would I do something that's going to screw up my game?”

  “Oh, I believe you,” his father said, sarcastic. “I believe you didn't take any of those drugs yourself.”

  The conversation was spinning back and forth in directions Jason couldn't follow. “Then why are you flipping out?”

  “Because Dutch Oosterhaus called me at work to discuss a little lab report he got today. The one they did on Trixie Stone's blood that proves someone knocked her out by slipping her a drug.” Heat climbed the ladder of Jason's spine.

  “You know what else Dutch told me? Now that drugs are in the picture, the prosecutor's got enough evidence to try you as an adult.”

  “I didn't . . .”

  A vein pulsed in his father's temple. “You threw it all away, Jason. You fucking threw it all away for a small-town whore.”

  “I didn't drug her. I didn't rape her. She must have fooled around with that blood sample, because ... because .,.” Jason's voice dropped off. “Jesus Christ... you don't believe me.”

  “No one does,” his father said, weary. He reached into his back pocket for a letter that had already been opened and passed it to Jason before leaving the room.

  Jason sank down onto his bed. The letter was emb
ossed with a return address for Bethel Academy; the name of the hockey coach had been scrawled above it in pen. He began to read: In lieu of recent circumstances . . . withdrawing its initial offer of a scholarship for a postgraduate year. . . sure you understand our position and its reflection on the academy.

  The letter dropped from his hands, fluttering to land on the carpet. The iPod, without its headphones, glowed a mute blue. Who would have imagined that the sound your life made as it disintegrated was total silence?

  Jason buried his face in his hands and, for the first time since all this had begun, started to cry.

  * * *

  Once the storm had stopped and the streets were cleared, the storekeepers in Bethel came out to shovel their walkways and talk about how lucky they were that this latest blizzard hadn't caused the town manager to cancel the annual Winterfest.

  It was always held the Friday before Christmas and was a direct ploy to boost the local economy. Main Street was blocked off by the spinning blue lights of police cars. Shops stayed open late, and hot cider was served for free in the inn. Christmas lights winked like fireflies in the bare branches of the trees. Some enterprising farmer carted in a sickly looking reindeer and set up portable fencing around it: a North Pole petting zoo. The bookstore owner, dressed as Santa, arrived at seven o'clock and stayed as long as it took to hear the holiday requests of all the children waiting in line.

  This year, in an effort to connect local sports heroes to the community, the square in front of the town offices had been sealed and flooded to create a makeshift ice rink. The Ice CaBabes, a local cornpetitive figure-skating team, had done an exhibition routine earlier that evening. Now the championship Bethel High School hockey team was slated to play pickup hockey with a local group of Boy Scouts.

  After everything that had happened, Jason hadn't planned to go

  - until Coach called up and said he had an obligation to the team. What Coach hadn't done, however, was specify in what condition Jason had to arrive. It was a fifteen-minute ride downtown, and he drank a fifth of his dad's Jack Daniel's on the way. Moss was already on the ice when Jason sat down on a bench and pulled out his skates. “You're late,” Moss said. Jason double-knotted the laces, grabbed his stick, and shoved hard past Moss. “You here to talk or play hockey?” He skated so fast down the center of the rink that he had to slalom around some of the