Salem Falls

by Jodi Picoult

  "Yes."

  "I see two charges listed for April twenty-fifth--one for $47.75 at the Wiccan Read and one for $10.70 at CVS. Nothing from the Gap. Are you sure you're looking at the right month's billing statement?"

  Selena was furiously scribbling on the corner of Jordan's newspaper. "Oh, God, I feel like such a loser. This is my MasterCard," she said, and giggled. "Like, duh."

  "Is there anything else I can help you with?"

  "Not today. Sorry about that," Selena added, and hung up. CVS--not an extraordinary place to spend ten bucks. A nail polish, Kit Kat bar, and pack of gum probably cost that much. Or even, perhaps, a pack of condoms.

  The Wiccan Read was a bigger mystery. "Wiccan," Selena said aloud, meandering into Thomas's room, where the big Webster's dictionary was kept for homework assistance. She scanned the W's, but found nothing. Wicked was the closest, and although that might have described Gillian Duncan, it wasn't what Selena was looking for.

  But she'd heard the word before; Selena would have bet on it. She logged onto the computer again, this time as herself, and settled into a search engine.

  Wiccan, she typed.

  After a moment, the first five hits of 153,995 came up.

  Pagan and Wiccan Sites. The Wiccan and Faerie Grimoire of Francesca Celestia. How to Contact a Local Coven. Bright Blessings--the Awesomest Teen Wiccan Home Page.

  And one that caught Selena's eye: Why are we afraid of witches?

  Now Selena remembered where she'd heard the word. "Why, Miss Gillian," she murmured, clicking on the site to find a graphic of a cauldron, fathomless and bubbling black. "What have you gotten yourself into?"

  Thomas had his hand up Chelsea Abram's shirt and was thinking of British monarchs. James I, Charles I, the Cromwells ... Charles II, James II, William and Mary. It was the most boring thing he could call to mind, thanks to a class in European history--God knew if he thought of the softness of Chelsea's skin or the scent that rose from it, he was going to come right then and there and have to suffer the humiliation of explaining the wet spot on the front of his pants.

  She knew how to kiss. Boy, did she know. Her tongue curled into his mouth, dancing and retreating until he could not believe that an hour before, he'd never tasted this ambrosia. Who would have guessed that Thomas would get to second base with a girl two years older than he was? Who would have guessed that this girl would have even agreed to go out on a date?

  They were underneath the bleachers at the football field, a long-established makeout place for Salem Falls High. Because Thomas didn't even have a learner's permit, Chelsea had picked him up in her parents' car. They'd gone to a movie, and out for coffee after that--Thomas paying, as if that might make them both forget that she was older than he was. Now, they were stretched beneath a stadium bench, mapping each other's bodies with the slow and wondrous discovery that comes only the first time you touch someone. "Thomas," she breathed, "like this." Reaching up between her breasts, she unclasped her bra.

  Oh, Jesus. Anne and George I and II and hell, all the Georges and William IV and Victoria ...

  Suddenly Chelsea drew back. Could a girl get shy when she was only half dressed? "Do you ... do you want to stop?" Thomas choked out, although he thought he might fling himself off the nearest cliff if she said yes.

  "Do you?"

  He couldn't see her eyes in the dark. Was she nervous ...or did she think he was? "Chels," he said with absolute candor, "I'd like to keep doing this for my next three lifetimes."

  Her smile caught the light of the moon. "Only three?" she whispered, and her breasts spilled, soft as snow, into his hands.

  Oh my God, Thomas thought. Chelsea tugged his shirt off and pressed against him, a line of fire licking their bodies where skin met skin. She bit his ear. "Who are George and Elizabeth?"

  "Good friends," Thomas gasped, as she rolled him onto his back. A medallion that hung between her breasts swayed over his face. He reached for it.

  "Leave it," Chelsea said.

  But it swung and clicked against his teeth, just when he was hoping to connect with something softer, pinker. Thomas held it up and squinted. "Pretty," he said. "A Jewish star?"

  "Those have six points. This has five," Chelsea said. And then, "Do you really want to talk about it?"

  "No, I want to take it off."

  "I can't."

  "I'll hold it in my pocket. I swear I won't lose it." He kissed the side of her neck and began to work the clasp.

  "Thomas, stop. I promised to wear it all the time."

  "Promised who? Some ex?"

  She didn't say anything, and Thomas stared at the little silver charm on her chest. He'd never seen one before--but maybe it was some funky religious symbol, a Hindu equivalent of the cross or something. Not that Chelsea looked particularly Indian.

  Chelsea was watching him intently. "Do you like me, Thomas?"

  He could barely breathe ... was this leading where he thought it was? He didn't think all the regents in the British Empire from the beginning of time would help him control his overloaded hormones if he actually started to have sex with Chelsea.

  Nodding furiously, he swallowed hard.

  "If I shared something with you, something I've never shared with anyone before, would you swear not to tell anybody?"

  Holy cow. She was a virgin, too. Thomas felt all the blood in his body pool in his groin. "Sure," he croaked.

  Chelsea lifted her hand and trailed it from her throat, over her breast, to the funny little necklace. "I'm a Pagan," she whispered, and kissed him.

  The word echoed, fuzzy, in his mind. "A Pagan?" Thomas repeated. "Like those guys at Stonehenge?"

  "Those are Druids. A Pagan believes in God ... and the Goddess. And the pentagram ... this star ... shows the five elements we celebrate. Spirit, Air, Water, Fire, and Earth." She stared soberly at Thomas, waiting for him to pass judgment. "Weird, huh?"

  "No," he said quickly, although he wasn't sure he believed himself. "So ... you're just, like, really into nature?"

  Chelsea nodded. "Yeah, but that's not how a lot of people see it. When Gillian and Meg and Whit and I formed a coven, we knew we had to keep it to ourselves. We figured if people heard about it, they'd take it totally the wrong way." Suddenly, she grinned. "My God, Thomas, do you know how good it feels to tell someone this?" She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. "Nine out of ten guys would be looking for my broomstick now, or expecting me to cast a love spell."

  Suddenly Thomas went still inside. "You mean you're--"

  "A Pagan, a witch, whatever you want to call it," Chelsea said. "All four of us are."

  His hands stopped roaming over Chelsea's back, and he suddenly realized that even if she ripped off her pants right now and climbed on him, he would be too distracted to do anything. For Christ's sake, there was a beautiful, half-naked girl next to him, and all he could think about was his father's case.

  The crime scene was different in the still of the night. Owls called to each other from dark places in the sky, a symphony of crickets tuned their bows, and small creatures tangoed in the pine needles at Jordan's feet. He didn't really know why he'd come here. For inspiration, maybe? Certainly, he had a leg to stand on now for his defense ... but it was shaky. The discrepancy in time and distance here didn't effectively exclude Jack as a rapist--it only suggested that Gillian Duncan was covering something up.

  If Jordan were a betting man, he'd lay odds that Jack and Gillian had had sex and after the fact, she'd been mortified and had spun this story to explain away what had happened. But why wouldn't the other girls have heard the sounds of their passion? Why wouldn't Jack have told him, if that was the way it had gone down?

  He said he hadn't touched Gillian. And there was also the strange fact that the other girls who had been there would have seen something--a look, a smile, a touch exchanged between Gillian and Jack that flirted with the possibility of sexual attraction. Yet not a single one of them had mentioned it. Were they protecting their f
riend? Or was it simply that--as Jack said--he'd never had sex with her?

  Either Jack was a liar who had committed a brutal rape--a very fast and quiet one--or Gillian was a liar ... and nothing had happened at all.

  In the tree above Jordan's head, the great yellow eyes of an owl stared at him sagely. "Whooo."

  "Wish I knew." Jordan tilted his head to the sky. His eye caught a small flash of silver on a branch, a star that had fallen and gotten lodged in the crook of the tree. Curious, Jordan got to his feet and dusted off the seat of his jeans. He was just tall enough to reach the object when he stood on his tiptoes.

  Damn. It was stuck.

  Gritting his teeth, Jordan twisted his fingers more firmly around a loop and tugged.

  He landed sprawled on the ground again, a thin strip of silver ribbon in his lap. "What the--"

  Ribbons, and little sachets. Weird shit.

  Ribbons.

  Jordan ran as quickly as he could down that fifty-yard path to his car and then drove straight to the Carroll County Jail.

  "Think!" Jordan ordered.

  Jack paced the confines of the small room. "I told you," he said. "I remember the ribbons. They were wrapped around a tree. And the ends were loose. Fluttering, like."

  It sounded completely unbelievable. In fact, Jordan still would have scoffed at Jack's recollection if he didn't happen to have a piece of silver ribbon in his pocket. "Like streamers at a high school dance?"

  "Like a pole," Jack clarified. "A maypole."

  The only maypole Jordan had ever seen was a re-creation done by a touchy-feely granola-and-Birkenstock nursery school Thomas had gone to for exactly three weeks before his father had yanked him out. People in today's world didn't weave maypoles.

  "The things hanging on the dogwood ... were they ornaments of some kind?"

  "Not Christmas tree balls, if that's what you mean. More like those little things that women stick in their lingerie drawers."

  "And Gillian Duncan was naked," Jordan said.

  Jack nodded. "Two other girls had their shirts off, too, but got dressed when I came."

  Jordan bowed his head, utterly lost. "Was it some kind of orgy?"

  "With each other? They weren't ... doing anything like that when I came."

  "What were they doing?"

  Jack thought for a moment. "Dancing. Around the fire. Like Native American warriors."

  "Ah, yes. Clearly, they were celebrating the kill of a buffalo."

  "A celebration," Jack said slowly. "That's what Gillian called it, too."

  It was after two in the morning when Jordan eased his way into the house, taking care not to wake anyone up. His mind was humming so strongly that it took him a moment to realize the lights were still on. When he stepped into the foyer, Thomas and Selena were waiting.

  "You won't believe this," Jordan began, grinning from the inside out.

  "Dad," Thomas interrupted, stealing his thunder. "She's a witch."

  III Now Jack did laugh and Jill did cry, but her tears did soon abate;

  Then Jill did say that they should play

  At see-saw across the gate.

  We are what we always were in Salem,

  but now the little crazy children are jangling

  the keys of the kingdom, and common

  vengeance writes the law!

  --THE CRUCIBLE

  June 2000

  Salem Falls,

  New Hampshire

  Addie paid ten dollars for a copy of Jack's first conviction, but didn't know what she was going to do with it. Keep it in the fire-safe box where Chloe's birth and death certificates were? Burn it, in some kind of ritual? Bury it in the yard, with all her other dreams?

  A night of tossing and turning had convinced her that Jack had spun lies as easily as a silkworm crafted threads, and the result was something just as beautiful to behold. She couldn't blame him for telling her that he hadn't had a relationship with Catherine Marsh, or that he hadn't raped Gillian Duncan, or even that he loved Addie. A lie took two parties--the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it.

  The clerk of the Grafton County Superior Court handed Addie a receipt. "Here you go," he said. "State of New Hampshire v. Jack St. Bride."

  Addie thanked the man and looked at the court records. "Jack St. Bride?" a voice said to her left.

  The tall man wore a police uniform. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a nose that was too big for his face, and many laugh lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. "Yes," Addie answered.

  "You know him?"

  Her fist gripped the paper so tightly it bunched in her hand. "I thought I did."

  Addie noticed there was something about Jack's name that brought a sad shadow to the man's eyes, just like it did to hers. "I know," he said finally. "So did I."

  It was the first time Addie could recall sitting in a diner as a patron rather than as an owner. Jay Kavanaugh ordered an entire breakfast, but Addie wasn't hungry. She had to fight the overwhelming urge to stand up and get her own coffee from the burner.

  "Doesn't surprise me," Jay said, after hearing that Jack had again been charged with rape. "Sexual perps tend to be repeaters. What does surprise me is that I fell for it the first time around." Shaking his head, he added, "I'm a cop, so I have this incredible sixth sense--like I can tell it's bullshit, pardon my French, from half a mile away. And I swear to God, I believed hook, line, and sinker that Jack was just some struggling prep school teacher--you know, an ordinary guy. Then it comes out that his family is rich as the Rockefellers and that in his spare time he wasn't doing lesson plans but seducing students."

  "The Rockefellers?" Addie said. "Jack's broke."

  Jay glanced up. "That's just something else he told you." He shrugged. "It's good to hear he's a career con artist. Makes me feel less like a moron."

  He continued talking as the waitress set down his plate. "Jack was Mr. Spontaneous all the time--Go climb a mountain? Sure! Cover some teacher's class that period? No problem!--But every time I suggested we go out for a beer or to play a game of racquetball after his soccer practices, he turned me down. Couldn't go until late at night, he said. Told me he had a standing engagement at seven--and never, not once, did he back down from that. I figured it was some faculty meeting or something. 'Course, later on, the girl said that was when they met. Every night, seven P.M., in the locker room."

  It was both liberating and depressing to find this man, another casualty of Jack's. Yet no matter how grievously wronged Jay Kavanaugh felt, he had not let Jack slip beneath his defenses, into his heart, into his body. He had not heard Jack say I love you. He had not listened, wide-eyed, and believed it.

  "Hey," Jay said. "You're a million miles away."

  "No, just thinking."

  "About Jack?"

  Addie shook her head. "About how much I don't like men."

  "Don't judge us all by Jack. Most of us are a lot stupider than he is and don't have nearly the finesse to carry off that kind of ruse." Jay smiled gently. "Hindsight's always twenty-twenty. And it doesn't hurt as much, after a while. I've had ten months to think on this. But I still remember sitting at my desk after I had to arrest him--my best friend!--and wondering how the hell this had slipped by me."

  Addie watched him spear the yolk of an egg. It ran across the plate, a yellow pool dammed by a wall of hash browns. "How is the girl now?"

  "She left Westonbrook. I hear that she's being home-schooled and that she doesn't keep in touch with friends who are still in Loyal." He paused, then added quietly, "I think she just wants to forget this ever happened."

  That was when Addie remembered Catherine Marsh had believed she loved Jack, too. "She won't be able to," Addie whispered.

  In her hotel room, Addie packed up her suitcase again, with Rosie O'Donnell keeping her company on the TV. She folded her shirts and stacked them on top of her jeans. She tucked her boots into plastic bags so that they did not get anything else dirty.

  "I swear, John," Rosie
was saying, "I'm going to win. I've been practicing." Addie looked up as the comedienne's face filled the screen. "Kelsey Grammer and Joy Behar," she said, "do you know your potent potables?"

  "What's a potable?" her bandleader asked.

  "A drink," Rosie said. "If you were destined to be the celebrity Jeopardy! champion, you'd know that, as well as the largest lake in Africa and the fact that the queen in the Netherlands is second cousins to the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. I'm making that last one up, John, but see, only a celebrity Jeopardy! champion like myself would even realize this."

  Laughter from the audience. Addie felt her heart contract as she heard Jack's voice in her head. They water down the questions for the celebrity tournament, he'd told her. Because otherwise, none of those stars would get a single one right.

  Jack would have. Most of us are a lot stupider than he is, Jay had said. "Seven P.M. tonight, here on ABC," Rosie announced. "I'm telling you, John, this could be a whole new career for me."

  Addie remembered Jack telling her about prison, how his knowledge of trivia had saved him from being abused. She remembered unsuccessfully trying to distract him with her body during the show. All that trivia in his head, she used to think. How can there be room for me?

  Suddenly, she began to tear through the papers on the table welcoming her as a guest to this hotel. There was a small guide to the Dartmouth-Sunapee region of New Hampshire, and a flyer from an outlet store, and a placard from a pizza place that would deliver until three in the morning. From underneath the mess of blankets and sheets on the bed, she unearthed the complimentary local newspaper. Scanning the pages, she finally found what she was looking for--the little grid of local television programming.

  In Loyal, Jeopardy! was syndicated and aired on ABC. At 7 P.M.

  Addie did not know nearly as much as Jack did about geography or presidents or even potent potables. She did not know if a discrepancy like this would have ever stood up in a court of law. But she did know that for one half hour a day, nothing would come between Jack and a television trivia show.

  Not even Catherine Marsh.

  The occult bookstore smelled like an apothecary, and rows of glass jars with small scripted labels held things that Selena really didn't want to consider. Books were jammed into the narrow shelves, with titles like Anastasia's Grimoire and Transfiguration for Beginners and The Solitary Witch's Guide. A cat with a bell around its neck stalked the countertop, and an opiate cloud of incense hung in the air.