Salem Falls

by Jodie Picoult

  “I think the girl’s lying. And I don’t know where you were that night, but it wasn’t with her.”

  He watched Jack’s eyes darken with surprise. “I would have gotten you off no matter what,” Jordan said brazenly. “But now I actually want to.” He felt drunk, dizzy. As if something bound tight inside him had broken free, making him able to move mountains, to bring down giants.

  Stunned, Jack turned away. “I don’t believe this.”

  Jordan laughed. “Jack,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”

  1989

  New York City

  The girl had to be drunk, that was the first rule.

  If she wasn’t on the verge of passing out, she usually freaked and spoiled it right in the middle of the fun. Every now and then one had gotten her bearings and gone all skittish, but it hadn’t taken much more than another beer to convince her to stay. After all, this was why she’d come in the first place.

  The idea had come indirectly from Coach, when some of the guys were getting pissed about the minutes of playing time they were getting on the field. Factions began to fight; players cut each other down the second Coach’s back was turned. A soccer team, he said, has no room for a superstar. He was trying to make the players understand that how well they played together was a direct reflection of how well they interacted off the field. Visit the Empire State Building together, he’d suggested. Go bowling. Split a pizza in Little Italy. But the Columbia University varsity soccer team had found something else to share.

  There were always a number of girls hanging around their team bashes, soccer groupies who cared less about the sport than they did about being seen with and by winners. By unspoken agreement, the high scorer got to pick one from the crowd. He’d ply her with alcohol, even though she’d usually arrived ready, willing, and able. And after they screwed, he’d ask her if she wanted to meet one of his friends.

  Once a girl had passed out cold and all eleven players had gotten to fuck her.

  Jack pushed through the press of bodies in his apartment, trying to reach the Holy Grail of the keg. He was not a particular fan of this tradition, never having been one who liked sharing what he considered his. But as the lead scorer all season, he was first . . . so it was easy to pretend he was the only, too.

  He filled up two plastic cups and wove back toward the girl he’d been talking to. She had green eyes and tits that looked like they’d fill up his hands. He couldn’t remember her name. “Here you go,” he said, offering his most charming smile.

  “Thanks.” She took the cup, and then stumbled against him as someone pushed her from behind. “Sorry. It’s just so crowded in here.”

  She did this thing with her eyes, making them go all slanty and looking up from underneath her lashes, all of which was getting Jack as hard as a railroad spike. “You want to go somewhere quieter?”

  “Okay.”

  He tugged her by the hand toward his bedroom. Chad, his roommate, was standing near the threshold. “Save me some,” he said.

  Jack closed the door. The girl walked around his room, touching the trophies on his shelves, his team jacket, the battered soccer ball his dad had given him as a kid. He set his hands on her shoulders. “See anything you like?”

  She turned in his arms. “Yeah,” she said, and kissed him.

  They needed to turn down the music. Jack pulled a pillow over his head, wishing he could drown out the sound. The bass alone was killing him.

  Beside him, the girl lay sprawled on her stomach. He must have dozed off too, after. Wouldn’t have minded just crawling under the covers right now, either, except for the fact that his teammates were out there waiting.

  Rap rap rap.

  “Jack!” Chad’s voice came muffled through the door. “Jack, c’mere!”

  Naked, Jack stumbled off the bed and cracked the door open. “I’m almost done.”

  “It’s not that. Your mother’s here.”

  “My mother?”

  Granted, his parents lived on the Upper West Side, just a stone’s throw away. But they rarely saw each other, in spite of their proximity. The elder St. Brides did not move in the same circles as a college senior. Plus, it was nearly midnight, on a Saturday. Jack glanced over his roommate’s shoulder and saw the impeccably dressed Annalise sticking out like a hothouse flower in a tangle of weeds. He hiked on his jeans and pulled a shirt over his head. As he started out of his bedroom, he looked back to see Chad unbuttoning his fly, and easing down beside the girl.

  Something stabbed at Jack’s conscience. Cynthia. Her name was Cynthia, and she’d told him a story about how her father-a farmer-would cut fields of hay in a spiral and make all the rabbits run out of the center. “Chad,” he said quietly, and his roommate looked up.

  “What?”

  Maybe she doesn’t want to. Maybe she ought to be asked, at the very least, instead of waking up with some guy on top of her. “Jack?” Cynthia said, her voice slurred, and she reached out to tug Chad down.

  It’s not my problem, Jack thought, shrugging. It’s someone else’s, now.

  Pushing it out of his mind, he shoved through the thick snarl of people. It had gotten more crowded, if possible, these past twenty minutes. “Mom. Are you all right?”

  Annalise St. Bride looked at him. She tried to speak, then covered her mouth with her hands.

  “Mom, I can explain-”

  His mother glanced up, tears in her eyes. “Jack,” she said, “your father’s dead.”

  The funeral was attended by a multitude of men in the finance industry, society women, and Mayor Ed Koch. Jack moved around his childhood home in his charcoal gray interview suit, shaking hands and accepting condolences. Everyone wanted to talk to him, to offer sympathy, to let him know that his dad had been a great man.

  It had been a heart attack, his mother said. She was still shaky, and Jack assumed it was because she hadn’t been at her husband’s side when it had happened. Out on one of her crusades, she had come home to a message saying that Joseph St. Bride had been taken to Columbia-Presbyterian.

  Slinking away from the well-wishers, Jack escaped to his old bedroom. It was much like his apartment, filled with paraphernalia from soccer. Jack sat on the narrow bed and fingered a blue ribbon that hung from one of the bedposts. For league play. He’d been ten.

  His father had been the one to teach him. Every Sunday, in Central Park, they’d kick a ball around. Closing his eyes, he pictured the little boy he had been, and the young man who was his dad, weaving around each other’s defense. With a start, he realized that right now, he looked exactly like his father had back then.

  Footsteps approached down the hallway-his mother, probably, telling him to put on a good face and suffer in public along with her. But the sound stopped short of his bedroom door, and then Jack could hear two of his father’s colleagues talking.

  “He was so young,” one said.

  “Yeah.” The second man laughed. “But what a way to die!”

  A muffled chuckle. “Well, you know. You come . . . and go.”

  Jack’s head rose slowly. He walked out of the bedroom, pushing past the two surprised men. In the living room, he located his mother. “Can I speak to you?”

  “Just a second, sweetheart,” Annalise said.

  “No. Now.”

  Jack didn’t hear what excuse she made, but she followed him to his father’s library, a rich russet room with wall-to-wall bookshelves. “What is so important that it can’t wait until after your father’s funeral?” Annalise demanded.

  “How did he die?”

  “I told you. He had a heart attack. The doctors said it came on suddenly.”

  Jack took a step forward. “Mom,” he said quietly. “How did he die?”

  She looked at him for a long minute. “Your father had a heart attack. On top of a prostitute.”

  “He what?”

  “I would rather assume that the people here do not know. I may be fooling myself, but in the unlikely event that they hav
en’t yet heard, I’d like to keep this information private.”

  “Dad wouldn’t do that.” Jack shook his head, rooted in denial. “He loved you.”

  Annalise touched his cheek. “Not enough.”

  As a kid in New York City, Jack had been repeatedly warned by his mother to stay out of this part of the town, because you were likely to leave it knifed, mugged, or in a body bag. The taxi pulled up in front of an apartment building that might have been dumped into a run-down section of any city. Annalise paid the cab driver and swept up the pitted sidewalk as if she were entering a castle.

  He did not understand his mother. Jack couldn’t even forgive his father yet, much less visit the prostitute he’d been fucking when he died. He wondered with a mild curiosity how his mother planned to get past the first hurdle: a locked front door. But she only rang the buzzer beneath the apartment number she’d been given and said clearly into the speaker, “I’m here about Joseph.” Immediately, the door buzzed open.

  The woman was waiting for them when they climbed to the third floor-thin, worn, with red hair that came out of a bottle. Her hands twisted in front of her, as if she were pulling invisible taffy. The moment she saw Jack, her mouth rounded into a silent O. “You . . . you look like him.”

  Jack turned away, pretending to study the peeling paint on the hallway walls.

  His mother stepped forward. “Hello,” she said, holding out her hand. Even after years of working with underprivileged women, Jack couldn’t understand how she was managing to make this look easy. “I’m Annalise St. Bride.”

  The woman blinked rapidly. “You’re A,” she said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Remembering herself, the woman blushed and stepped back. “Please come in.”

  The entire apartment could have fit inside the living room of the penthouse in which Jack had grown up. They stood uncomfortably in the living room-a nook, really, with a battered floral couch and a television. Is this where they did it? Jack wondered, his throat burning to shout that he hated this woman, hated her place, hated that she had stolen his father away. With someone like his mother at home, this was what his father had run to?

  “I thought about calling you,” the woman confessed. “But I couldn’t get up the nerve. He left something here . . . Joseph.”

  She reached into a drawer and pulled out his father’s gold Rolex. Annalise took it and smoothed the engraved words on the back: To J, forever. Love, A.

  Jack read over her shoulder. He snorted. “Forever.”

  “It’s kind of you to return this to me,” Annalise said, lifting her chin.

  “More like she was going to steal it until you showed up,” Jack muttered.

  “Jack,” his mother warned sharply. “Miss . . .”

  “Rose. Just Rose.”

  “Rose, then. I came here to thank you.”

  “You . . . you wanted to thank me?”

  “The paramedics said you wouldn’t leave his side. If I . . . couldn’t be with him when this happened, then I’m glad someone else was.” Annalise nodded, as if assuring herself that she’d said the right thing. “Did he come . . . often?”

  “Once a week. But I wouldn’t take his money. I’d slip it back in his wallet when he slept.”

  That was the last straw for Jack. He stepped in front of his mother, the veins in his neck and forehead pulsing. “You cheap fucking whore! Do you think she wants to hear this? Do you think you could possibly make it any worse?”

  “Jack, that’s enough,” his mother said firmly. “I haven’t laid a hand on you since you were ten, but God help me, I will. Whatever your father did was not this woman’s fault. And if she made him happy, when I obviously didn’t, then the last thing you should be doing is yelling at her.”

  Tears ran down his mother’s face, and Jack was certain if he stayed there another second, his heart was going to simply explode. He gently touched his mother’s cheek, felt her sorrow slip over his fingertips. “Ma,” he whispered brokenly. “Let’s just go.”

  “You made him happy.”

  They turned at the sound of Rose’s voice, quiet as a memory. “He talked about you all the time. He said he didn’t deserve someone as fine as you.”

  Annalise closed her eyes. “Thank you for that,” she said softly.

  When she blinked and looked at Rose, hard, Jack’s jaw dropped. He had seen this expression before on his mother’s face-the specter of a crusade. “Mom-don’t.”

  But Annalise grasped Rose’s hand. “You don’t have to live like this.”

  “Not much call for my skills in the professional world.”

  “There are things you could do. Places you can start over.”

  “I’m not going to a shelter,” Rose answered firmly.

  “Then come home with me.” Annalise bridged the shocked silence with words. “I need a housekeeper,” she explained, although Jack knew for a fact she currently had one. “I’ll pay a fair wage and offer room and board.”

  “I can’t . . . I can’t live with you. Joseph-”

  “-is smiling,” Annalise finished.

  There was a poetic justice, Jack supposed, in this prostitute coming to literally clean up a mess she’d made. And this generosity of spirit was certainly nothing new for Annalise, who had a heart so wide that people tripped into it and landed square on her good faith before they realized they had been falling. Maybe it was even a selfish act of his mother’s, because between herself and Rose, they couldn’t help but keep Joseph’s presence strong.

  Then again, maybe his mother just wanted to kill Rose in her sleep.

  Annalise strapped his father’s watch onto her wrist, although it was too large. “Rose,” she said warmly. “Meet my son.”

  “I am going to have to remember her every day for the rest of my life,” Annalise said that evening, before Jack left to go back to school. “So I might as well get to like her.”

  “There’s nothing to like,” Jack said.

  “That’s not what your father thought. And I certainly approved of his first choice.”

  “She’s not your responsibility. Mother Teresa wouldn’t even have done this.”

  “Mother Teresa didn’t have a cheating husband.” Annalise’s lips twitched. “When it’s all over, Jack, you’re remembered for what you did, not what you said you were going to do. Your father found that out too late.”

  Jack kissed his mother’s cheek. “I want to grow up to be just like you.” They were silent, both reading the subtext of what he had not said.

  “You will,” Annalise answered. “I’m counting on it.”

  The cab dropped him off at his apartment shortly after eight o’clock. Even from the street, Jack could see the silhouettes in the windows, could hear the heavy drumbeat of the music. It was as if he’d never left, as if this party had been going on all weekend, in spite of the fact that his own personal world had stopped spinning.

  He let himself in with the key and found Chad sitting on the couch with a few of the other guys on the team. A girl he didn’t recognize was draped across Chad’s lap like a knitted throw. “Hey,” he said, immediately pushing her aside, getting to his feet, and approaching Jack. “Sorry about your dad, man.”

  Jack shrugged. “Thanks. I’m just going to go hang out in my room.”

  Chad pressed a cold beer into his hand. “Maybe you just need to take your mind off things,” he suggested pointedly.

  Jack handed back the bottle. “I’m not in the mood, Chad.”

  “You sure?”

  He started to nod, then looked at the girl, who smiled at him. “Maybe you’re right.”

  A knowing grin spread across Chad’s mouth. But he turned toward the others with a somber face. “Jack’s father just passed away.”

  On cue, Mandy sighed. “You poor thing.”

  “He could use someone to talk to,” Chad hinted.

  Jack felt himself go into his room, felt this girl sit down beside him and hold his hand, felt his arms go around
her-all without making any of it happen. It was as if his body knew how to go through the motions and his mind didn’t have to be there at all. When the tears came-hot, huge sobs that wracked his big frame-Mandy held him tight and stroked his hair. “I’m sorry,” he said thickly. “I’m really sorry.”

  In that instant, Jack thought of Rose. He thought of the girl he’d slept with the night his father had died, and he wondered where she was and what she would remember about that experience, long after all of the team had forgotten. He imagined his mother’s shelters overflowing, stuffed with women who no longer understood how to help themselves.

  If he died with his next breath, what would he leave behind?

  Jack lightly tugged Mandy to her feet. “Come,” he said softly. He steered her into the living room, where the others looked up in surprise.

  At the front door, Jack raised her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “You need to go home and pretend that you never came here tonight.”

  Chad began to curse, loudly and fluently. Jack forced himself to concentrate on the sound of this girl’s retreating footsteps. They were light as snow, nearly as silent, but they crashed and swelled within him like an opera.

  “Jesus!” Chad yelled the minute Jack turned around. “How the hell could you do that?”

  How couldn’t I, Jack thought.

  June 2000

  Salem Falls,

  New Hampshire

  The blood on the victim’s shirt was definitely the suspect’s.

  Matt felt a smile fight its way out from inside. “I knew it,” he murmured. He’d met Frankie, at her request, at a 1950s-style restaurant. They sat at an outside table beneath a big green umbrella while waitresses with change counters on their belts roller-skated by to take the orders of other patrons.

  She looked up at Matt. “I know you’re dying to ask . . . so yeah, there was semen on the swab from the thigh.”

  “Yes!” Matt smacked his fist onto the table, delighted. Rape cases without DNA evidence were the hardest kinds to win.

  “Let me finish.” Frankie cocked her head. “What do you remember about DNA?”

  “It couldn’t nail O. J.”