by Jodi Picoult
Althea regarded him over the lip of the mug. “It wasn’t until you just said so.”
“I’m sorry.” Mark colored again. These white boys, with their face a whole palette.
Althea decided to take him off the hook. That way, she could always bait him again. “Tell me what we have today.”
“Motions hearing in State of New Hampshire v. Jack St. Bride.”
She took the proffered file. “The rape case?”
“Yes.” Mark took a deep breath. “If you look in there, you’ll see the research I’ve done, and some of my opinions.”
“Well, matter of fact, I do want to know if any of the counsel has been snooping around you, trying to size me up.”
Again, that blush. “Well, Your Honor, there’ve been a few questions . . .”
“Prosecution or defense?”
Mark looked at his polished shoes. “Both, ma’am.”
When Althea Justice smiled, which wasn’t all that often, it transformed her face, like a valley being touched by the sun. She knew of this case; hell, with the reporters swarming on the steps of the courthouse like bees at a hive, it would be impossible not to know of it.
She thought of Matt Houlihan and Jordan McAfee, the counsel that would be standing in front of her a few hours from now, at the mercy of a big bad black bitch. “Mark,” Althea said, grinning, “this may turn out to be a fine day after all.”
An hour after the motions hearing in the St. Bride case, Jordan lay on his back in the woods, watching the sun leap from branch to branch like an iridescent squirrel. He could feel the moisture from the ground sinking into his skin, right through the shoulders of his dress shirt. The dirt smelled like dying things, but Jordan conceded that maybe his current state of mind was coloring his senses. He had a case that completely sucked, a dead end of a defense, and a client who wasn’t willing to budge in any of the directions that would lead to a plea. Jack St. Bride hadn’t had sex with Gillian Duncan in this very spot, in spite of the fact that his skin was under her nails and his blood was on her shirt. Maybe if Jordan stayed here long enough, the aliens that had apparently come down to rape Gillian would return to zap him with a death laser, so some other hapless attorney could be appointed to Jack’s case.
“I had a feeling I’d find you here.”
Jordan sat up, squinting. “Oh, it’s you,” he said dully.
“You think Lancelot got that kind of reception?” Selena muttered, grunting as she tried to haul Jordan to his feet.
“You’re my white knight?”
“Well, I’m trying to be. You’re not exactly making it easy.”
She had wrapped herself around him to get him upright. Jordan could smell the soap she used—honey, and some kind of flower, mixed together and sitting cozy next to his own bar of Ivory. “What are you saving me from?”
“Yourself,” Selena said. “Despair. Root rot. Take your pick.” She regarded Jordan thoughtfully. “I heard you had a lousy hearing.”
“Lousy?” Jordan laughed. “I wouldn’t say it was lousy. Downright abysmal. This judge has a chip on her shoulder the size of the whole goddamned courthouse. She ruled against my motion to suppress Jack’s statement about not being with the girl that night. But she granted Houlihan’s motion to admit Jack’s prior conviction for sexual assault.”
“I heard you won one.”
“Yeah,” Jordan snorted. “The rubber-stamp motion for a speedy trial, which I put in weeks ago. The one I wanted before I knew I’d be dealing with a client who changes his tune more often than a fucking jukebox.” He sighed. “Oh, and did I happen to mention the DNA test came back?”
“And?”
“Jack’s blood’s all over the girl’s shirt. His skin was under her nails. There was semen on her thigh, and although the results weren’t quite as conclusive, it could be his, too.”
“Maybe it’s not his.”
“Yeah, and maybe I’m Johnnie Fucking Cochrane.”
Selena smirked. “Trust me, you don’t have quite the same tan. Besides, Johnnie wouldn’t lay down and let a prosecutor steamroll him.”
“Johnnie didn’t sign Jack St. Bride as a client.”
Selena braced herself against the trunk of the dogwood. “Can’t win ’em all, Jordan.”
“Thanks for reminding me, because you know, that thought hadn’t entered my consciousness for at least a half a second.”
Jordan skimmed his hands down the freckled bark of a tree. It reminded him of age spots, which reminded him that he was getting old, and what the hell did he have to show for it? And that reminded him that Jack St. Bride would turn fifty in prison, probably shouting with every breath that he hadn’t committed a crime.
He turned on his investigator.
“What have you been doing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Other than eating my groceries and sucking up the air conditioning I’m paying for . . . what have you dug up about this case?”
“Nothing. Addie Peabody is still out of town, and she’s our best hope to make Jack look good.”
“That’s if she’s still speaking to him,” Jordan pointed out. “Being arrested in front of your girlfriend has an uncanny way of ruining a relationship. What else have you got?”
Selena sighed. “Everywhere I turn, there’s someone telling me what a good kid Gillian Duncan is. Smart, sweet, Daddy’s little girl. Add that kind of credibility to the physical evidence . . . well, Jordan, there just isn’t a lot I can offer here.” She reached down between her feet and pulled up the towhead of a dried dandelion. “Here. Make a wish.”
“Just one?” Jordan said.
“Don’t want to overload the magic, do you?”
He closed his eyes. “I wish things were different.”
Selena held her breath until Jordan blew, scattering the seed pods over the wind. “What do you mean?”
“I wish I could trade this job for whatever’s behind door number one. I wish Jack St. Bride’s blood wasn’t on Gillian’s shirt. I wish you and I could . . .”
His voice trailed off, and Selena stared at him. “Could what?”
“Could find something to get our client acquitted.”
Selena dusted off her jeans. “Nothing’s gonna get done with us standing here. Let’s go.” But Jordan didn’t follow, and before she knew it, she was standing at the edge of the woods again. Frustrated, she tried to peer through the trees but couldn’t make him out. “You coming?” she called. “I’m gonna be halfway home before you get out of the forest.”
In the clearing, Jordan turned at the sound of Selena’s voice. I’m gonna be halfway home before you get out of the forest. “Where are you?” he called.
“Waiting for you!”
Jordan hurried down the narrow trail that led toward the cemetery. He counted each footfall . . . thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . . and finally broke out of the thicker vegetation to find an annoyed Selena tapping her sneaker. “Fifty-one,” Jordan announced.
“No, actually, I’m only thirty-eight. You’re just giving me gray hair.” Selena turned her back on him. “Can we just get going now?”
“No. Selena, where are we?”
She peered at Jordan. “You hit your head on a branch back there?”
“This is where Saxton found Gillian. Where she’d caught up to her friends after the rape. Right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“I could hear you. When you called my name, I could hear you.”
Selena’s mind picked up the ball Jordan had thrown. “But could you hear something other than a voice? Like two people wrestling?”
“I don’t know. Wait here.” He ran back into the woods, then started kicking at the leaves. “Can you hear that?”
Selena strained. Daytime sounds—birds, and trucks in the distance—were louder, but every now and then she got a slight sense of disturbance. “Kind of,” she called back. “Real faint, though.” Selena jogged to the clearing again. “I’m guessing it’s about fifty yar
ds,” she said. “You can hear a lot of things from fifty yards away.”
“Yes,” Jordan agreed, “and you also can’t get a lot done in the time it takes to walk it.” His hands went to the buttons of his trousers, and Selena took a step back. “Don’t flatter yourself; I’m testing something. Start walking slowly.”
Selena looked at him askance. “What are you gonna do?”
“Simulate a rape.”
She looked down at his pants, then his hand. “By yourself?”
“Simulate,” Jordan repeated. “Not stimulate.”
Selena started to walk. She crept forward far more slowly than a girl would, especially one in a hurry to get home before her parents found her missing. She stopped once to shake a rock out of her sneaker and a second time to stare at a toad with black button eyes, and then finally reached the edge of the woods. “I’m here.”
“Already?”
“If I went any slower, I would have grown moss.”
“Eighty-seven seconds,” Jordan said, approaching.
“Gillian said the rape took five minutes. Yet when she managed to catch up with her friends, they were only fifty yards away.”
“And if they’d been walking that slowly—”
“—then they would have heard a struggle,” Selena finished.
Jordan turned to her. “Assuming,” he said, “there was a struggle at all.”
June 2000
Salem Falls,
New Hampshire
Delilah threw up after the lunch crush ended and before the supper crowd arrived. She sat at the small card table in the kitchen, a Handi Wipes towelette wet down and plastered against her forehead. “She’s burning up, Roy,” said Darla.
“I’m fine. I just can’t stand cooking clam chowder is all.”
Roy folded his arms across his chest. “You’ve been making meatloaf.”
Delilah’s runny red eyes focused on Roy, and she managed a tiny smile. “Guess I’m sick, boss,” she said softly.
He squatted down so that he was at eye level. “Now I’m worried. The Dee I know would never in a million years admit to it.”
Delilah rested her heavy head on her hands. “Maybe in another million years, I’ll feel good enough to argue that point.”
“One of those summer viruses,” Darla said. Looking at Roy, she added, “I just hope she didn’t give it to everyone who ate here this morning.”
Roy eyed her big frame uneasily. “I could carry her up to my place . . .”
“No, her son’s coming to take her home. I called him twenty minutes ago.” Darla blinked at him. “So what are we gonna do?”
“Roy’s gonna take over as my replacement, aren’t you, Roy?” Delilah said. “On account of otherwise, this diner’s going to close . . . and that would kill Addie.”
“I can’t do that,” he whispered. “You know why.”
Delilah shrugged. “Sometimes we don’t have a choice about what life throws us. And right now, it’s throwing you a spatula.”
At that moment, Delilah’s son came into the kitchen. She let herself be lifted and supported by him, a lumberyard supervisor who was every inch as tall and forbidding as his mother. “You all try to get along without me,” she said, and left.
Roy glanced at the flat black face of the grill, the steam rising like a song. He wouldn’t be cooking, really. He’d just be finishing up what Delilah had started.
He inched toward the line where food was prepared. He could feel the ridges on the chopping block where knives had edged out their history the better part of the past twenty years. And he waited for his heart to stop, just like Margaret’s had.
Roy, you daydreaming again or are you gonna cook me up Adam and Eve on a raft?
Just like that, he could hear his wife’s voice again, teasing him about how long it could possibly take to fry two eggs and set them on a piece of toast. He could see her reaching up on tiptoe to put her ticket in the circular holder. He could feel the ache of the scar he’d gotten when she’d sneaked behind the line to kiss him and, lost in the moment, he’d pressed his hand flat on the open waffle iron.
“In the weeds,” he whispered, cook’s lingo for being overburdened.
“Here.” Darla held out a white chef’s coat so old it had moth holes in some places. “Addie told me she’d been saving this for you.”
Roy took it slowly, then shrugged it on. To his surprise, it fit. He’d imagined that he’d grown a size or two, thick around his middle with stubbornness. Darla watched him button up, and she smiled a little. “Don’t you look smart,” she said softly.
She cleared her throat suddenly, as if she was wary of giving in to her emotions in front of someone else. “What’s the special tonight?” she asked briskly.
Roy curled his hand around the base of a wooden spoon, the gesture first tentative, then coming smoother, as if he were an old-time big leaguer lifting a bat once again. “Anything,” he said with pride. “You tell them I’ll cook them whatever they want.”
Addie sat on a wicker chair across from Reverend Marsh and his daughter, and took a sip of her iced tea. “Thank you,” she said. “This is lovely.”
The reverend was a skinny stick of a man with an Adam’s apple that jutted out like a burl. His daughter’s hands were folded neatly in her lap; her eyes were fixed on a spot on the porch floor. Catherine Marsh no longer had long, silky dark tresses, an athletic body, and a winning smile. She was thinner, swimming in her oversize T-shirt and carpenter jeans, and her hair was cropped short. Addie stared at the girl as she traced a circle on the sweating side of her glass. Did Jack do this to you?
“I’m delighted you sought me out,” the reverend said. “Sometimes I think today’s papers are so frightened to explore religion they veer too far toward an atheist’s position.”
After getting Catherine Marsh’s name, Addie had looked her up in the local phone book. The Right Reverend Ellidor Marsh was listed in Goffeysboro, a tiny town thirty miles east of Loyal. Addie had called, knowing he would never invite her to his home to discuss the statutory rape of his daughter, and pretended to be a reporter on a nonsecular beat.
“I have something to confess,” she said now, setting her iced tea down.
The reverend smiled and tugged at his white collar. “I get a lot of that,” he joked. “But technically, I’ll have to send you down the road to Father Ivey.”
“I’m not a reporter,” Addie blurted out.
Catherine Marsh’s gaze lifted for the first time since she’d come, at her father’s beckoning, to join them. “I’m here because of Jack St. Bride,” Addie said.
What happened next was like an unexpected nor’easter: The Reverend Marsh’s complacent demeanor was swept away only to be replaced with a cold fury so intense that it was easy to imagine him hurling damnation from a pulpit. “Do not mention that man’s name in my presence.”
“Reverend Marsh—”
“Do you know what it’s like to realize that your daughter’s been ruined by a man twice as old as she is? By a man whose moral compass is so defunct he can’t see the wrong in seducing an innocent?”
“Daddy—”
“No!” Ellidor thundered. “I won’t hear any of it, Catherine. I won’t. And you, weak as any woman . . . weak as your own mother . . . believing that you loved him.”
“Reverend Marsh, I just wanted to know—”
“You want to know about Jack St. Bride? He’s a calculating, depraved pervert who baited my daughter like a Pied Piper and used her own innocence against her to get her into his bed. He’s a sinner of the worst kind—the sort of man who pulls angels out of heaven and drags them down for the fall. I hope he rots in Hell for what he did to my child.”
Catherine’s features twisted in agony, or memory. Ellidor stood abruptly and hauled his daughter up against his side. “Please leave,” he bit out, and he started inside.
Addie’s head whirled. As condemnations went, this was fairly clear—Marsh truly believed his daughter had been wro
nged. And who knew a child better than her parent? It meant that the charge of sexual assault against a minor a year ago in Loyal had not been a misunderstanding. A horrible offense had occurred, and Jack had been at the root of it.
He had lied to her about Catherine Marsh. And, most likely, about Gillian Duncan.
Still, something made her call out at the last minute. “Catherine!”
The girl turned, anchored by the reverend.
“Is that what happened?” Addie asked softly.
Catherine’s glance slid to her father. She nodded, then let herself be swallowed up by his anger and buoyed into the house.
And that, more than anything, made Addie give up hope of Jack’s innocence. After all, she had been like Catherine, years ago. She had survived a rape. And that was something no woman would ever consciously choose to claim as a memory—no, it was something that scarred you so deeply you couldn’t forget.
Sitting up is so hard, when her head is this heavy. Heavy as the moon, dropped to the ground. Heavy with thoughts . . . things she should not be doing, things she can’t quite remember now.
Someone comes to help her. A hand with hair on the back, sprinkled like pepper. Those hands, the pepper hands, reach for her, cup her breast as she tumbles down again. Her own hand, smooth and white, pushing at the ridge of his erection.
Blessed be.
Meg sat up in bed, wild-eyed, the covers falling away from her. The memories were like the ocean at the Cape, where they’d gone on vacation last summer. They kept running after her, and no matter what she did to try to keep them away, they managed to find her feet and suck her more firmly into the sand.
The hose sprayed wildly, soaking the girls who gathered barefoot around the Range Rover. Shrieks cut through the buzz of the summer air, falling flat into the puddles of soap on the driveway. Meg turned the nozzle away from Chelsea and Whitney and onto Gillian, who squealed and jumped out of the way.
“At this rate,” Charlie said, watching from the deck behind the Duncan house, “your car won’t be washed until October. I don’t think they’ve managed to hit a sponge on anything but each other yet.”