by Jodi Picoult
"Guardians of the watchtowers of the west," Chelsea continued, "the blood of the earth, I do summon, stir, and call you up. Let your mystery flow over us. Blessed be!"
"Blessed be!"
Finally, Meg spoke. "Guardians of the watchtowers of the north, night of cool magick, I do summon, stir, and call you up. Bury us deep in your soil; give us the power of earth and stone. Blessed be!"
"Blessed be!"
"Spirit," Gilly cried, "come play with us as we weave our ribbons; sing with us as we light the fire. Take us to a world without words. Make this night magick ... blessed be!"
"Blessed be!"
She knelt before the altar, her breasts swaying, and touched the incense burner, the water, the earth, and then sliced her hand through the flames of the bonfire. "I do cast out any and all impurities both of the spirit and the world. As I will it, so mote it be." Gillian cast the circle three times--with water and earth, with incense, and finally with energy. Then she smiled. "The circle is perfect."
Gillian brushed a branch of the dogwood tree, and a festival of delicate white petals rained over her shoulders. She raised her hands, her body slender and blued by the moon. "Mother Goddess, Queen of the night, Father God, King of the day, we celebrate your union. Accept these gifts." Digging into the L.L. Bean canvas bag, she pulled out a sachet filled with the herbs she'd bought at the Wiccan Read. There were twenty in there, all crafted by Whitney. "You do it," Gilly suggested, and she handed the sachet to her friend.
Whitney strung it on a branch, a poppy red ornament. She reached into the bag and handed out the rest of the sachets to the others, who began to trim the tree. Their gifts winked out from the thick profusion of blooms, a rainbow of offerings.
"Ouch!" Whit said, jumping. "I got nailed by a twig."
"See, there's a reason we wear clothes," Meg said.
Chelsea sank down on the ground. "Well, nudity aside, it seems to me that the God and Goddess have all the fun."
"What do you mean?"
"Beltane's all about sex, right? But I don't see Freddie Prinze Jr. hanging with our coven. No offense, Gill, but you don't have the right equipment."
Gillian turned. "But that little geek Thomas McAfee does?"
Chelsea's cheeks flamed. "He's not like that--"
"No? Then tell us what he is like. You've been hanging out with him so much I thought you might bring him along. You have to do that when you're training a puppy, right? Keep a close eye on them?"
"Gilly--" Meg said, trying to keep the peace.
"Let's conjure a man," Whitney suggested. "We're all just jealous. Right, Gill?"
But Gillian didn't answer. The other girls exchanged glances, unsure of what to do, what to say. "We'd never agree on what to call up," Whitney hastily continued. "You know, like I have a thing for redheaded guys, but Meg likes those squat, stubby bull types."
"Italian," Meg corrected. "And they're not stubby."
Finally, Gillian smiled. The others were careful not to show it, but inwardly, they all relaxed. This was the Gilly they knew, the Gilly they loved. "Maybe if we're really good little pagans, the God and Goddess will give us a gift, too."
She walked to the tree beside the dogwood, a pillar of a pine. God knew how, but Chelsea had managed to affix long streamers of ribbon from a branch nine feet off the ground. Gilly picked up a silver ribbon and smoothed it between her breasts, over her belly and thigh. She arched her back, and the other girls were transfixed--channeling a spirit was one thing, but here Gilly was shifting shape, turning into a siren as if she had done this a hundred times before. "Now," she said softly, "we celebrate."
Addie woke up, her cheek flush against Chloe's pillow. It was so easy to see her daughter's little face, her flyaway hair. She touched her hand to the worn cotton, pretending that it was Chloe's soft skin beneath her fingers.
It isn't.
She heard the words as clearly as if Jack had spoken them, a thought that dropped like a grenade, and was just as devastating. Even more upsetting was the intrusion of Jack into her mind when she was stubbornly trying to think about Chloe. She tried to force her memories to the surface but kept seeing more recent ones: Jack sliding his arms around her waist; Jack looking up at her as he chopped peppers in the kitchen, Jack's slow smile. The truth was that although she found it hard to believe and had no idea how it had happened, she could no more picture her life without Jack than she could without Chloe.
Frustrated, she threw back the covers of the bed and began to pace through the house. At the bottom of the stairs, she automatically touched the small picture of Chloe that hung there, the same way she did every time she came up and down, as if it were a mezuzah. And that was the moment she realized she'd lied.
Jack might never mean more to her than Chloe. But God, he meant just as much.
Addie sank down onto the bottom step and rested her forehead on her knees. The last person she'd loved had been taken away. This time around, her second chance, she should have been holding onto him tightly, with both hands.
"I love him," she murmured out loud, the words bright as a handful of new coins. "I love him. I love him."
Addie stood suddenly, giddy and dazed, like a cancer patient who'd just been told that the disease had disappeared. And in a way, it was not all that different--to find out a heart she'd believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed. She took a deep breath and felt it: every space in her soul that had been left empty when she lost Chloe was now swelling with the very thought of Jack.
She had to find him. She had to apologize. Addie slipped on her clogs and shrugged into a coat. She was halfway to the door when she hesitated. With the resignation of a man walking to the execution chamber, she started back up the stairs.
In Chloe's room, she stripped the bed. She carried the linens downstairs in a bundle, remembering what it had been like to hold her newborn just like this in her arms and walk her through her colic at night. She threw the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine, added soap, and turned the dial.
The fresh scent of Tide rose from the bowl of the machine. "Good-bye," Addie whispered.
Amos Duncan couldn't sleep.
He sat up in bed and turned on the light, finally giving in to his insomnia. He was being ridiculous, he knew. As a parent, he was overprotective; more than a few times he'd heard town matrons talking about the tragedy it was that he'd not married again, for Gilly's sake. But Amos had never found anyone who meant more to him than his daughter. Where was the tragedy in that?
It was 11 P.M.; the movie she'd gone to see would probably let out in half an hour. It made sense to have Gilly stay over at the Saxtons' because the movie theater and, well, just about everything else was on the other side of town. Plus, Charlie probably slept with a gun next to his bed. For all Amos knew, so did his wife. And not even Jack St. Bride would be stupid enough to tangle with the detective's family.
Gilly would be in good hands.
Which didn't explain why, at 11:30 P.M., Amos got dressed and drove to the Saxtons' house to take his daughter home.
Jack tried to wipe the back of his mouth with his hand, but it took him three tries before he could connect. That made him laugh--great guffaws that gave him the hiccups, so that he had to take another long swallow of whiskey to get rid of the spasms--and by the time he did, he couldn't remember what he had been laughing about. He canted back in his seat, only to realize his stool didn't have a back. The next thing he knew, he was staring at the pitted ceiling, flat on the floor. "Roy," he yelled, although the man was sitting ten inches away. "Roy, I think I may be getting a little drunk."
Marlon snorted. "Fucking Einstein," he muttered.
Jack staggered to his feet--something truly commendable, because he couldn't sense anything past his knees--and hauled himself up by yanking on the rungs of Roy's stool. He peered into the empty insides of his whiskey tumbler. "Jus' one more," he said, pushing it toward Marlon ... but Marlon was no longer beside the bar. Craning his
neck, he found the bartender standing beside Roy, who had passed out cold.
Jack would have been horrified ... if he'd been in a condition to feel anything at all. Roy was slumped over the bar, snoring. "Lemme help," Jack insisted, but the moment he stood up, the entire room became a tornado around him.
Marlon shook his head as Jack wilted back onto the stool. "You should have stopped after the fifth one."
Jack nodded, his head as heavy as a bowling ball. "Absholutely."
Rolling his eyes, Marlon heaved Roy into a fireman's carry. "Where're you taking him?" Jack yelled.
"Relax, buddy. Roy's slept off plenty of late nights in the back room here." He disappeared into an adjoining nook not much bigger than a closet. Jack could hear him banging around, dumping Roy's unconscious body on a cot.
"I gotta go home," Jack said, when Marlon reappeared. "But I don't have a home."
"Well, Roy here just took the only accommodations. Sorry, pal." Marlon scrutinized Jack, assessing just how bad off he was, and apparently decided he was just about as bad as they come. "Hand over your car keys."
"Don't have any."
The bartender nodded, satisfied. "Good thing. How much trouble can you get into walking?"
Jack staggered up from his stool. "Trouble," he said, "is my middle name."
Charlie opened the door in his bathrobe. "You may be the richest fucking guy in this town, Duncan, but that doesn't mean you own the civil servants. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow."
He started to close the door but was stopped by Amos. "For Christ's sake, Charlie. I just came to pick up my daughter. She isn't back yet, I take it?"
"What the hell are you talking about?"
It was the absolute calm in Charlie's voice that frightened Amos to the core. Charlie functioned under pressure by turning down his internal emotional thermometer.
"Meg invited her to a movie. Your wife ... she went with them."
"My wife is upstairs, asleep," Charlie said. "Meg told me she was staying over at your house."
"Charlie--"
But the detective had moved away from the door to grab his radio. Amos stepped inside the foyer, and Charlie met his sober gaze. "It's Saxton," he said, when dispatch picked up. "We've got a problem."
Wes was in his cruiser, wishing for a cup of coffee, when the APB came through. Two--possibly up to four--teenage girls missing. They could be anywhere at all. Christ, that was a recipe for all hell breaking loose, especially with a rapist in town.
He turned on his cruiser's silent blue lights and began to prowl slowly, ten miles an hour, through the back streets of Salem Falls. Dispatch would have called in the reserve officers, but as of right now there were only three cops on patrol in the town. If Wes found the girls before anyone else, he stood a very good chance of being awarded a promotion.
He had just turned the corner by the Rooster's Spit when he saw something moving jerkily along the edge of the road. Something rabid? Every now and then the department had to shoot a coon. But no, it was too big for that. A deer?
Wes angled the car so that the beam of blue light caught the moving creature in its crosshairs. "I'll be damned," he said softly, and parked his car.
Jack found it amazing that almost of their own accord, his feet managed to alternate one after the other, instead of just hopping left-left-left or right-right-right the whole time. Add to that the uncanny fact that the moon was the exact shape of a cat's slitted eye, and the world was a wondrous place. He shuffled down along the road that led into Salem Falls, stumbling and managing to catch himself before he pitched face first onto the ground.
It was a few moments before he realized there was a car following him. Its headlights looked like the eyes of a wolf, yellow and tilted up at the edges. The motor purred behind him, dogging his every step.
Jack tried to walk faster, glancing over his shoulder every now and then.
Had the men who had beaten him up come to finish it? If they killed him, who would care enough to notice?
Breathing hard, he turned just enough to see that a man sat behind the wheel. He was too far away and dizzy to make out the features, but it looked like a man who had dark hair ... or a man who was wearing a black knit stocking cap.
Christ, the car was speeding up. Jack could hear the rev of the motor beating in his brain, the knot of panic clotting the back of his throat. I'm going to be run over. Terrified, wild, he ran diagonally across the road to throw off the driver, stumbling once and slamming his hand against the hood of the car as he righted himself and scrambled down an alley between two buildings.
He emerged on a different block and was trying to control the violent shaking of his body when the town began to glow, as if some huge UFO were beaming down rays in preparation for landing. Jack's gaze lit on the neon edges of the storefronts and curbs. Awestruck--it was fucking beautiful, in his mind--he stood in the middle of the street, so mesmerized that he completely forgot about his brush with death.
Suddenly, there was a police car not three feet away from him, and he had to hold his hand up to the glare. "Hey," Wes Courtemanche called out. "You all right?"
It was that simple kindness that made Jack realize something was wrong. If Wes were the last guy on earth, he'd go out of his way to make sure Jack knew he was disliked. The whole town wanted him out; it would be easy for a cop to shoot someone and say it had been self-defense. Had Wes beaten him up earlier? Had it been his cruiser that had almost hit Jack? Without thinking beyond the fact that he wanted to be as far away from Wes as humanly possible, Jack started to run through the field behind the street, up paths that could not be followed by car.
Jack heard Wes swear, heard his boots hitting the pavement as he strained to catch up. He ducked into the woods behind the town cemetery, hoping to lose the policeman in the dark, and ended up hurting himself--he fell over an exposed root and scraped the palm of his hand, the cut over his eye reopened, and a branch snapped back and scratched his face, drawing blood. But even with these stumbling blocks, Jack, who'd been an athlete, easily outstripped Wes. He ran for five minutes, until he was certain he was safe, and then wandered through the woods, not sure of where he was or how he would get back to town.
When he paused to catch his breath and his bearings, he heard it: laughter. All the Greek myths he'd taught at Westonbrook came back in a flood, of Apollo chasing Daphne and Artemis running with her bow. And then, as if he'd dreamed her, he saw the Goddess herself--a flash of white skin silvering through the trees, her heels tripping on the air, her hair flying out like a banner behind her. Jack was momentarily confused: She was naked, like a nymph, but she seemed to be singing to him like a Siren.
Suddenly he realized that there were four of them, some in clothes and some without, and that the girl he'd been staring at was calling his name.
He heard the sound of sobbing first.
Charlie had caught plenty of that sound during his career on the force--what you hoped to be an animal with its leg trapped in a forked branch always wound up to be something far more human and heartbreaking. He forced himself to stop and listen more carefully, and then took off at a dead run toward the south.
Meg's orange anorak was a flag, and with energy he didn't know he possessed Charlie sprinted closer. Four girls were huddled together at the gate to the town cemetery. Their hair was straggling free of their combs and clips, and any one of them would be horrified to be seen in public looking the way they did, but Charlie counted them all in one piece and breathed an internal sigh of relief.
Meg, Whitney, and Chelsea were gathered around Gillian, who was crying. They hugged and soothed her, but she was inconsolable. In fact, Charlie had seen grief like that only once that he could remember--when he'd had to break the news to the survivor of a car crash that her two-year-old had not been as fortunate as she.
His daughter spotted him. "Daddy," she said, and threw herself into his arms.
"Shh. Meggie, honey, it's going to be all right." With his girl tucked close
, he approached Gillian. "What happened?" But none of the four spoke.
Charlie squatted down at Gillian's side. "Honey," he said, his careful eye noticing, now, the blood streaked over her shirt, the hastily mismatched buttons. "Are you all right?"
Her face came up, white and stained with tears, like a web of scars. Gillian's throat knotted visibly, her mouth twisted as she forced her voice free. "It ... was ... him."
Every muscle in Charlie's body tensed. "Who, honey?"
"He raped me," Gillian sobbed, the words shredded raw. "Jack St. Bride."
II When Jill came in, how she did grin to see Jack's paper plaster;
His mother, vexed, did whip her next
For laughing at Jack's disaster.
Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a
word about the other things, and I will come to you
in the black of some night and I will bring a
pointy reckoning that will shudder you.
--THE CRUCIBLE
May 1, 2000
Salem Falls,
New Hampshire
They made her stand on a piece of paper and brush off her clothing, so that bits of dirt and leaves from the forest floated down. Gillian stared at the pristine white sheet, transfixed by the way it grew dirtier and dirtier.
The doctor, thank God, was a woman. She had asked Gilly's age, height, weight, the date of her last period and Pap smear. She wanted to know if Gilly had ever had any surgeries or hospitalizations, if she'd been under psychiatric care, if she was on any medications, if she'd been sexually assaulted before. Then she asked where penetration had occurred, so she'd know where to collect evidence. Gillian had stared at her blankly. "Vaginally," the doctor explained. "Orally. Anally."
Gillian had no recollection of giving answers. She felt as if a steel shell had formed around the core of her, making it impossible to hear clearly or move swiftly. She pictured the shell growing thicker, until one day it cracked and inside there was nothing but dust. "Is my father here?" she whispered.
"Any minute. Okay?" The doctor smiled gently and put down the file she had been writing on. Gilly saw words scrawled across the top: Patient reports a sexual assault. It made her shiver.