Salem Falls

by Jodie Picoult

  “No.”

  “Where were you?”

  Jack picked at his thumbnail. “Drinking,” he admitted.

  “Of course,” Jordan muttered, amazed that this case could get any worse. “With whom?”

  “Roy Peabody. I was at the Rooster’s Spit until they closed up.”

  “How much did you drink?”

  Jack glanced away. “More than I should have.”

  “Fabulous,” Jordan sighed.

  “Then I went out for a walk.”

  “A midnight walk. Did anyone see you?”

  Jack hesitated, for only an instant. “No.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Just . . . around. Behind town.”

  “But not near the woods behind the cemetery. Not anywhere near Gillian Duncan.”

  “I told you, I never saw her that night, let alone touched her.”

  “That’s funny, Jack. Because I’m looking at that scratch on your cheek, the one that Gillian Duncan said she gave you in her victim’s statement.”

  “It was a branch,” Jack said through clenched teeth.

  “Ah. From the forest you weren’t in?” Jordan’s gaze skimmed over Jack’s bruised face. “Did she beat you up, too?”

  “No. It was a bunch of guys in ski masks.”

  “Ski masks,” Jordan repeated, not buying a word of it. “Why were people in ski masks beating you up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jordan sighed. “What else can you remember about that night?”

  Jack hesitated. “I remember leaving Addie’s . . . and then finding her again at the diner.”

  “How much time elapsed in between?”

  “Four hours.”

  “And what were you doing during those four hours?”

  At Jack’s silence, Jordan rolled his eyes. “You don’t want to plead. You say you weren’t in the woods that night, but you can’t provide an alibi. You tell me, then-what have we got?”

  “A liar,” Jack said succinctly. “I don’t know why she’s doing it, or what she’s got against me. But I didn’t do this, I swear it. I didn’t rape Gillian Duncan.”

  “Fine,” Jordan said, although he didn’t believe him in the least. “We’ll go to trial.”

  “No,” Charlie said.

  On the other end of the phone, Matt paused in the notes he was writing to himself on a yellow pad. “What do you mean, no?”

  “I mean I can’t, Matt. I don’t have the time for this.”

  Matt set down his pen. “Maybe you’ve forgotten the way this works, Charlie. We have a case; I tell you what I need; you get it. And if that means putting down your doughnut and getting your ass out of your swivel chair to interview Addie Peabody, then do it.”

  “I’ve got to drive the rape kit down to the lab in Concord. Then I’ve got three teenage girls to interview. And somewhere in there I have to figure out who the hell stole the VCR from the high school audiovisual lab. Did I mention that I happen to be the only detective on staff here at the SFPD?”

  “I’m sorry your town budget doesn’t include the salary for a sidekick. But be that as it may, you’re the only one who can take Addie’s statement.”

  “You can do it,” Charlie suggested. “Besides, you aren’t the one whose face she remembers every time she thinks back to the moment her boyfriend was arrested. She’ll probably be more forthcoming with you.”

  Matt knew Addie Peabody would talk to him. Hell, everyone talked to him. Even after they said they didn’t want to, he’d ask a question, and they’d start spilling their guts. The issue here was what would happen if she told Matt one thing and then said another thing on the stand. “She’s not a sure thing, Charlie. If she changes her story between now and the trial, I can’t call myself as a witness to impeach her.”

  “She won’t lie.”

  “You don’t know that,” Matt said. “So what if she was shocked at the arrest? Who wouldn’t be? By now, she may have decided that she’ll stay on St. Bride’s ship until it sinks. Or that she can play Mata Hari with the prosecution and somehow secure his acquittal. She’s exactly the kind of witness who’ll keep me up nights before the trial.”

  “Look, I know Addie. I’ve known her my whole life.” Charlie sounded as if the words were being tugged out of him, all angles and cramps. “She’s the kind of person who takes a shitty situation and deals with it, instead of pretending it never happened. If it makes you feel better, take Wes Courtemanche along during the interview; he can take the stand for you if it comes to impeaching Addie. Now, are you finished? Or do I have to let your physical evidence sit in the fridge during another lecture?”

  “I hope you hit traffic,” Matt growled, and slammed down the receiver.

  She’d been all thumbs since the moment she set foot in the diner that morning-breaking three glasses, letting a platter of pancakes tumble over the front of her apron, spilling coffee on a customer’s paper. “Addie,” her father said, putting his hand on her shoulder, and that was enough to nearly make her topple the entire tray of table six’s food. “I think maybe you ought to call in Darla.”

  Ignoring him, she swung into the kitchen, Roy following. “Thank the holy Lord,” Delilah said. “I hope you’re here to wash.” She nodded toward the stack of filthy china piled high.

  Addie tucked an order into Delilah’s rotating file. “Sorry. Too swamped.”

  The cook lifted the slip of paper and frowned. “Well, honey, I’ll make you your frittata, but I’m gonna have to serve it up on a dirty plate.”

  “Frankly, Delilah, I don’t care if you bring it out in one of your shoes.”

  Addie held tight to the last thread of her self-control. She had gone to work in the hopes that staying busy would keep her from dwelling on what had happened. After all, it had helped after Chloe. But it seemed that everywhere she went in the diner, all she could concentrate on was the fact that Jack wasn’t there, too.

  “Addie,” her father said, “you’re a mess. No one’s going to think any less of you if you go up and lie down for a little while.”

  “Some of us might even think a little more of you if you found us a new dishwasher,” Delilah muttered.

  It was the last straw. Tears sprang to Addie’s eyes as she ripped off her apron and flung it onto the kitchen floor. “Do you think I don’t know that I haven’t slept in three nights? Or that we don’t have enough kitchen staff? A man that I . . . that I thought I could love was arrested right in front of me for rape. And I can’t tell you if he did it or not. That’s what I’m thinking about, not whether the goddamned dishes get washed or if I’ve dropped an order all over the floor. I am trying to make everyone happy. For God’s sake, what do all you people want from me?!”

  The voice that answered was unexpected, quiet, and cool. “Well,” said Matt Houlihan, standing behind her with Wes. “For starters, how about a little talk?”

  Houlihan seemed like a perfectly nice man, even if he was aiming to lock Jack away for twenty years. When he smiled, there was a gap between his front teeth, and to Addie’s surprise, his eyes seemed to reflect an understanding she never would have expected to find. “This must be very difficult for you, Ms. Peabody,” Matt said. In the corner of Roy’s living room, Wes snorted, then covered it with a cough.

  “Do I have to talk to you?”

  “No, of course not. But I’d like to talk to you, so that you’ll know what I’m going to be asking you in court, instead of just subpoenaing you cold turkey.” He smiled sympathetically. “I understand you were intimately involved with Mr. St. Bride.”

  Addie nodded, certain that she wouldn’t be able to force a single word of explanation out of her narrow throat.

  “Can you tell me about him?”

  She picked up her father’s television remote control in her hands and thought of Jack watching Jeopardy! “He’s very smart,” Addie said softly. “A trivia buff.”

  “How long have you been involved with him?”

  “I hired him t
wo months ago, in March. He started working as a dishwasher.”

  “Did you know at the time that he had a criminal record?”

  Addie’s cheeks burned. “I thought . . . he was down on his luck.”

  She could feel Wes’s eyes on her, and studiously ignored them. “Did St. Bride ever say anything to you about Gillian Duncan?” Matt asked.

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see them together?”

  “Only when she and her friends came to the diner and Jack had to clean their table.” As she spoke, her mind fishtailed back, trying to remember if she’d ever seen Jack smiling at the girls, flirting, staying a moment too long after clearing their plates. What had she missed? What had she wanted to miss?

  “Did he ever read pornography?”

  Addie’s head snapped up. “What?”

  “Pornography,” the county attorney repeated. “Playboy magazines, maybe a video . . . Internet sites of nude children?”

  “No!”

  “Was your own relationship with him sexually deviant?”

  “Excuse me?”

  That wide, gap-toothed smile again. “Ms. Peabody, I realize these questions are rude and personal. But I’m sure you see why it’s information we need to have.”

  “No,” she said.

  “No, you don’t see . . . ?”

  “No,” Addie interrupted, “he was not sexually deviant.” In the background, there was a snap as Wes broke the arm off a little clay figurine of a fisherman that sat on her father’s bookshelves. He hastily balanced it and turned away, muttering an apology.

  “Was St. Bride ever violent toward you?”

  Addie raised her chin. “He was the gentlest man I’ve ever met.”

  “Did he drink?”

  Her lips formed a thin line. She knew what the prosecutor was getting at; and God help her, even if Jack was guilty, she didn’t want to contribute to his downfall any more than she already had.

  “Ms. Peabody?”

  Then again, a girl was out there. A girl who had been raped.

  “He was drinking that night,” Addie admitted. “With my father.”

  “I see,” Matt said. “Were you together that night?”

  “He left my house about nine-thirty P.M. My father was with him until eleven-thirty P.M. I didn’t see him again until one-thirty in the morning.”

  “Did he tell you where he’d been?”

  Addie closed her eyes. “No. And I . . . I never asked.”

  The dimpled ball sailed over the wide, green sea of the driving range, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a sand trap. Without missing a beat, Jordan bent down and took another one out of the bucket to balance on the tee. He lifted his club, readying for the swing . . . and jerked at Selena’s voice.

  “Whose face are you seeing on that little thing? Houlihan’s . . . or St. Bride’s?”

  Jordan swung and carried through, shading his eyes against the sun to see the ball fall way off the mark. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to interrupt a golfer?”

  Selena set down the peel of the orange she was dissecting and popped the first section into her mouth. “You’re not a golfer, Jordan; you’re a dilettante.”

  Ignoring her, Jordan hit three more balls. “Got a question for you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “If you were charged with murder, who would you get to defend you?”

  Selena frowned, considering for a moment. “I think I’d try for Mark D’Amato. Or Ralph Concannon, if Mark wasn’t available.”

  Jordan glanced at her over his shoulder. “Mark’s good,” he conceded.

  She burst out laughing. “God, Jordan, you’ve got to work on your poker face. Go on, ask me why I didn’t pick you.”

  He set down his club. “Well . . . why not?”

  “Because you’re the only person I’d ever get angry enough with to actually kill, so you wouldn’t be around to defend me. Happy now?”

  “I’m not sure,” Jordan frowned. “Let me think on it.”

  Selena glanced at the half bucket of balls. “You get enough stress out of your system to tell me about your meeting this morning?”

  “That might take six buckets.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Why do I feel that this one’s gonna be a huge pain in the ass?”

  “Because St. Bride is dragging you out of a cushy retirement. An open-and-shut acquittal would still make you grumpy. Is he gonna plead?”

  “Nope. Our marching orders are to go to trial.”

  “No kidding?”

  “You heard me.”

  She shrugged. “Okay. Do we have a game plan?”

  “We’ve got nothing from our esteemed client, who’s conveniently amnesiac. Which means you get to prove the girl is a liar.”

  Selena was so quiet that Jordan went through six more shots before he realized she hadn’t responded. “I know,” he commiserated. “It’ll be next to impossible. Everything I’ve seen in her statement checks out so far.”

  “No, that’s not what I was thinking.” She looked up. “Who’s Dr. Horowitz?”

  “You’ve got me. Someone from ER?”

  “He . . . or she . . . is the doctor mentioned in the victim’s statement. My guess is a psychiatrist Gillian Duncan met with in the past.”

  For the first time that day, Jordan’s ball landed within spitting distance of the flag. He turned slowly from the green and stared at Selena, who raised her brows and handed him the last slice of the orange. As he took it, their fingers brushed. “Good guess,” he said.

  It was all Jack could do to look at the pile of clothes folded neatly on the chair beside him and not start scratching.

  In the three days he’d been in solitary confinement, he’d been fastidious about showering. At first, he’d dried off with his T-shirt. Then, as it began to mildew, he let himself air dry, bare-chested. But to be brought to the superintendent’s office, the guard made him put on his shirt again. It stuck to his skin and smelled like the bottom of a sewage tank.

  Jack looked longingly at the clothes. “Attractive, aren’t they?” the superintendent said. “They’re yours for the taking.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Mr. St. Bride, you’ve made your point.”

  Jack smiled. “Tell me that when you’re standing in my shoes.”

  “The clothing is for your own safety.”

  “No, it’s for yours. You want me to put on that jumpsuit so that every other man in here knows I follow your rules. But the minute I do, you’ve got control of me.”

  The superintendent’s eyes gleamed; Jack knew he was treading on very thin ice. “We don’t use our solitary cells as penthouse suites. You can’t stay there forever.”

  “Then let me wear my clothes into a regular cell.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  Jack let his gaze slide to the fresh clothing on the seat beside him. “Neither can I,” he answered softly.

  The guard behind him stepped forward at a nod from the superintendent. “Put Mr. St. Bride back in solitary for six days. And this time, turn off the water line to his shower.”

  Jack felt himself being hauled to his feet. He smoothed the front of his shirt as if it were the tunic of a king.

  “Mr. St. Bride,” the superintendent said. “You’re not going to win.”

  Jack paused, but did not turn around. “On the other hand, I have nothing to lose.”

  Francesca Martine had the body of a Playboy centerfold and the brain of a nuclear physicist, something that didn’t usually sit well with the men who got up the nerve to ask her out. Then again, she had learned her lesson: Instead of telling dates that she was a DNA scientist, she simply said that she worked in a lab, leaving them to assume she spent her days getting lunch for the real scientists, and cleaning out the cages of mice and rats.

  She set a sample beneath a microscope. “So, Frankie,” Matt said, grinning. “That come from one of your boyfriends?”

  “Oh, yeah. I have so little to do here I’ve taken
to swabbing myself to see what’s swimming around, just in case the fact that I haven’t had a relationship in six months isn’t enough to tip me off.” She squinted into the lens. “How’s that cute kid of yours?”

  “Molly . . . God. I can’t even describe how incredible she is. So I guess you’ll have to have one yourself.”

  “How come perfectly normal people become matchmakers the minute they get married themselves?”

  “It’s Darwinian, I think. Trying to keep the species going.” Restless, Matt got to his feet. “Besides, you brainy types need to be reminded that it’s nice to replicate DNA in something other than a thermocycler.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” Frankie said dryly. “Did you specifically come here to talk about my pathetic love life, or is there something else?”

  “That rape kit Charlie Saxton brought in-”

  “I haven’t gotten to it yet, Matt. I was in court yesterday, and this morning I-”

  “I’m not rushing you.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, not any more than I usually do, anyway. I just wanted to let you know what I’m looking for.”

  “Let me guess,” Frankie said deadpan. “Semen?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to know about the blood on the shirt, too. And the soil from the boots.” He swung away from the counter. “So, you’ll get me my results in two weeks?”

  “Three,” Frankie murmured, peering into a microscope.

  “Gosh, yeah-ten days would be great.” Matt backed away before she could complain. “Thanks.”

  Frankie turned to the scope again. Sperm frozen in time, tailless and immobile. “That’s what they all say,” she sighed.

  Addie didn’t know where she got the courage necessary to knock on the heavy door of the Carroll County Jail. If they don’t come, I’ll just turn away, Addie thought. I’ll go home and try some other day, when I feel more the thing.

  A guard opened the door. “Can I help you?”

  “I . . . I . . .”

  A kindly smile spread across the man’s face. “First visit? Come on in.”

  He led Addie into a vestibule, where a small line of people snaked like a tapeworm from a glass-enclosed booth. “Wait here,” the guard said. “They’ll tell you what to do.”

  Addie nodded, more to herself than to the guard, who had already moved away. Visiting hours were Wednesday nights, from 6 to 9. She’d called the switchboard for that information, which had been easy enough. Getting in her car and driving there had been slightly more challenging. Downright impossible would be the moment she saw Jack again and struggled for something to say.