Salem Falls

by Jodie Picoult

  The fresh scent of Tide rose from the bowl of the machine. “Goodbye,” 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 heart-breaking. 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.

  Gillian unbuttoned her shirt. “My socks,” she begged in a whisper. “Can’t I leave them on?”

  The doctor nodded. She glanced at the bloodstain on the blouse and carefully placed it into a paper bag marked for forensic testing. Gillian’s underwear-a yellow bikini marked FRIDAY, although it wasn’t-went into a separate paper bag. Finally, she folded the piece of paper beneath Gilly’s feet and put it in an evidence bag.

  While Gilly stood like a horse on the auction block, the doctor walked in a slow circle around her. “I’m just looking for cuts and bruises,” she explained, bending down to get a closer look at a mark on Gillian’s thigh. “Where’d this come from?”

  “Shaving,” Gilly murmured.

  “And this?” the doctor pointed to a bruise on the bottom of her wrist.

  “I don’t know.”

  A camera was removed from a drawer; a photo was taken. Gilly thought of the carvings on the bottoms of her feet, the scars they could not see. Then the doctor asked Gilly to climb onto the examination table. She swallowed hard and clamped her thighs together as the doctor came closer. “Are you going to . . .”

  “Not yet.” After the doctor turned off the lights in the room, a bright purple bulb flared to life. “This is just a Wood’s lamp.” She held it an inch above Gilly’s arms and breasts as she moved it over the surface of her skin.

  It was pretty, the violet glow over her shoulders and belly and hips. With prompting, she relaxed the muscles in her legs so that they parted. The lamp swooped over and up. “Bingo.”

  On her inner thigh, a small paisley-shaped spot gleamed alien green beneath the lamp. “What is it?” Gilly said.

  The doctor looked up. “Dried semen, most likely.”

  Amos Duncan roared into the hospital, wild-eyed and terrified. He stalked right to the nurse’s station in the ER. “My daughter. Where’s my daughter?”

  Before the nurse could answer, Charlie Saxton slid an arm around his old friend’s shoulders. “Amos, it’s all right. She’s here, and she’s being taken care of.”

  At that, the big man blanched, his face contorting. “I need to see her,” he said, heading in the direction of the swinging ER doors.

  “Not now, Amos. God, think of what she’s been through. The last thing she needs is you barging in while the doctor is doing the physical exam.”

  “A physical exam? You mean someone else is in there poking and prodding her?”

  “DNA evidence. If you want me to catch the son of a bitch, I need to have something to work with.”

  Slowly, Amos turned. “You’re right,” he said hoarsely, although he didn’t like the idea at all. “You’re right.”

  He let Charlie lead him to a bank of chairs that faced the door Gilly would exit. Clasping his hands between his knees, he rocked back and forth. “I’m going to castrate him,” Amos said softly, his tone completely at odds with his expression.

  Then Gillian walked out beside a young female doctor carrying a stack of evidence bags. Amos looked at his daughter and felt his insides constrict. Anxiety rose inside him, until it fairly pushed him off his chair. “Daddy,” Gillian whispered.

  For a long moment they simply stared at each other, exchanging an entire conversation in silence. Gillian flew into his arms, burying her sobs against his shirt. “I’m here now,” Amos said soothingly. “I’m here, Gilly.”

  She lifted a tear-stained face. “D-Daddy, I-I-”

  Amos touched his fingers to her lips and smiled tenderly. “Don’t you say anything, sweetheart. Don’t say a word.”

  Ed Abrams and Tom O’Neill had driven their own hys
terical daughters home and had returned to the hospital to keep a support vigil for Amos Duncan. Now that Gillian had been treated, Charlie would begin an investigation. There was nothing left for them to do now but return to their families.

  They walked through the lobby of the ER. “God, it’s a shame,” Ed said gruffly.

  “Amos’ll make sure the motherfucker hangs. He’s got the resources to make it happen.”

  The men stepped into a night as warm and rich as silk. As if by unspoken agreement, they stopped at the curb. “You don’t think . . .” Tom began, then shook his head.

  “That he saw us?” Ed finished. “Jesus, Tom, I’ve been thinking that from the moment Charlie told us what had happened.”

  “It was dark, though. And we all were wearing black.”

  Ed shrugged. “Who knows what he focused on when we were beating him to a pulp? Maybe this . . . this was his way of getting back at us.”

  “It worked.” Tom rocked back on his heels. “Think we ought to tell Charlie?”

  “It’s not going to change anything now.” Ed let his gaze slide away. “I think . . . I think it’s best kept between us. That’s what Amos would say.”

  “If I knew that something I’d done had hurt my own daughter, I’d want to shoot myself,” Tom murmured. “This must be killing him.”

  Ed nodded. “That’s why he’ll kill Jack St. Bride instead.”

  Charlie knocked on the door of the hospital lounge before entering. Amos had requested a moment alone with his daughter, and he wasn’t about to refuse the man. They sat huddled in plastic seats, their fingers knit together tightly. “Gillian. How are you doing?”

  Her eyes, when they met Charlie’s, were absolutely blank. “Okay,” she whispered.

  Charlie sat down. “I need you to tell me everything,” he said gently. Glancing quickly at Amos, he added, “It can wait until tomorrow morning, if you feel that’s better.”

  “She wants to get it over with,” Amos answered.