“I’m sure I would have had no trouble remembering those,” Jack answered dryly.
“But you yourself say it’s hard to believe.”
“Just being honest.”
“Honest.” Matt snorted, to let Jack know what he thought of that assessment. “You testified that you were very drunk. How can you be sure this recollection is accurate?”
“I just know it is, Mr. Houlihan.”
“Isn’t it possible that in your . . . drunken stupor . . . you raped Ms. Duncan and then blacked it out of your mind?”
“If I was drunk enough to suffer a blackout,” Jack countered, “surely I was too drunk to be physically capable of sexual intercourse.”
Matt turned, surprised by the gauntlet the defendant had thrown. “So your theory of why Gillian Duncan became hysterical, sobbing, claimed you raped her, went to the hospital to undergo an invasive physical exam and have a sexual assault kit done, reported the rape to the police, and now has come to tell a panel of strangers the intimate details of how you sexually assaulted her . . . is because she was scared of her father?”
“I don’t know. I’m just telling you what happened.”
“All right,” Matt said. “You’ve given us your explanation for why your skin was found beneath Ms. Duncan’s fingernails . . . because she was grabbing at you to get you to stay, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Ms. Duncan didn’t give you the scratch on your cheek-the injury was sustained in the woods, on a branch?”
“Yes.”
“Your blood was on her clothes because she was trying to clean up that scratch by dabbing it with her shirt?”
“Yes.”
Matt frowned. “Then what’s your explanation for why semen matching yours was found on her thigh?”
“Objection!” Jordan leaped up, furious. “Approach!”
The judge waved the attorneys closer. “The semen wasn’t a match,” Jordan said angrily. “The state’s expert even deemed the results inconclusive.”
Matt scowled. “She said this defendant was seven hundred forty thousand times more likely to have been the donor of the semen than anyone else. Those are still pretty damn good odds.”
“However,” the judge said, “it’s too prejudicial. The jury has the information about the semen; they can do with it what they will. I’m sorry, Mr. Houlihan, but I’m not going to allow you to pursue that line of questioning.” She turned to the jury as the lawyers returned to their corners. “You’ll disregard that last question,” Judge Justice instructed, although Matt’s words still hung in the air, as sharp and as precarious as a guillotine’s blade.
“Mr. St. Bride,” Matt said, “you find yourself in the woods with a quartet of teenage girls who are not only perhaps interested in having sex . . . but are naked . . . yet you don’t turn around and run as fast as humanly possible away from there?”
“I said I needed to get away, over and over.”
“Actually, you said you jumped over a fire hand in hand with one of them. And that you looked around closely enough to see there were things hanging from the trees.”
“I also said that Gillian Duncan was the one who came on to me,” Jack said, trying very hard to keep his voice from rising.
“Was anyone else around when she attacked you?”
“No.”
“Where were the other girls?”
“I don’t know.”
“How convenient. Was she still naked?”
Jack shook his head. “She had gotten dressed.”
“And then she proceeded to throw herself at you?”
“Yes.”
Matt crossed his arms. “This five-foot-four, one hundred ten-pound girl forcibly held you there?”
“I got away as quickly as I could. I said no, shoved her off me, and ran. Period.”
“So . . . this is the second time in a space of two years that a teenage girl has falsely accused you of sexual assault?”
“That’s correct.” Heat climbed the ladder of Jack’s neck.
Matt raised his brows. “Aren’t you asking the jury to believe you’re the unluckiest man on the face of this earth?”
Jack took a deep breath. “I’m asking the jury to believe me.”
“Believe you,” Matt repeated. “Believe you. Huh. Mr. St. Bride, you heard the expert who testified that soil from your boots matches the soil in the clearing of the woods?”
“Yes, I did.”
“And you heard the DNA expert who showed that your blood was on Ms. Duncan’s clothing and your skin was underneath her fingernails?”
“Yes.”
“You heard Ms. Duncan testify that you were with her that night?”
“Yes.”
“And you heard Ms. Abrams and Ms. O’Neill corroborate that?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You’ve seen numerous amounts of evidence that place you at the crime scene, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.”
Matt tilted his head, questioning. “Then how come when the police came to arrest you, the very first thing you did was lie about being there?”
Jack’s mouth opened and closed, no words rising to the surface. “I-I don’t know,” he finally managed to say. “It was an instinctive response.”
“Lying is an instinctive response for you?”
“That’s not what I meant-”
“But,” Matt argued, “it’s what you said. Did you or did you not already lie once about your whereabouts that night?”
“Yes, I did,” Jack murmured.
The prosecutor turned and pinned him with his gaze. “Then why should the jury believe you now?”
“He’s good,” Selena mused. “He’s really, really good.”
Jordan slammed the car door and stalked up the walk toward his house. “If you’re such a huge fan, then why don’t you go sleep with Matt Houlihan tonight?”
The defense had rested and court had been dismissed. Closing arguments would begin the next morning, which meant Jordan had approximately seventeen hours to conjure sheer brilliance. Burning against his heart was the little packet Starshine had given him for Jack’s defense. He was going to sleep with it under his goddamn pillow; at this point, he’d take any help he could get.
He knew and the prosecutor knew-and even the jury knew-that Jordan had not conducted a defense of his client-he’d simply tried to make Gillian out to be something other than the little princess she made herself out to be. But a witch could be raped. A drug user could be raped. And if Jordan had been sitting on that jury, he would not have been inclined to believe anything Jack St. Bride had to say.
At the door, he tried to jam his key into the lock and couldn’t manage to get it to fit. “Goddamn,” he said, wedging it in again. “Goddammit!”
A second attempt, and the key stuck fast. With a mighty wrench, Jordan managed to pull it free of the hole, then swore and hurled his entire key chain into the bushes off the porch. He stared after it, his whole body shaking.
“Jordan,” Selena said, touching his arm.
He burrowed into her embrace, pressed his face against her neck, and silently apologized to Jack St. Bride.
Addie volunteered to close up the diner. “Come upstairs,” Roy urged through the door of the ladies’ room, as she changed. “We’ll have iced tea, watch a little TV.”
Zipping up her uniform, Addie came out of the restroom. “Dad, I need to do this. I want to do this.” What she really wanted, actually, was to hit something until her bones broke. Scouring floors, scrubbing counters, wiping the grill-these were better uses of her time.
She pushed past her father into the kitchen. It always seemed like a ghost town after hours, bathed in shades of gray and haunted by the scents of the foods it had harbored. Addie picked up the wire brush that hung on the side of the stove and began to scrape down the grill with brusque, mechanical movements.
“I’ll help you, then,” her father said, rolling up his sleeves.
“Dad.” She
met his eyes. “Right now, I just want to be alone.”
“Ah, Addie.” Roy moved forward, hugging her tightly, until the wire brush dropped from her hand and her sob curled into his chest like a kitten’s mewing.
“I’m not going to be able to say good-bye,” Addie whispered. “Visiting hours aren’t until next Wednesday. And by then . . . by then, he could be in the prison in Concord.”
“Then you’ll go visit in Concord. I’ll drive you every day after work, if I have to.”
Addie offered him a weak smile. “On what, Dad? The lawn mower?” She squeezed his hand. “Maybe I will come up for iced tea, all right? Just give me a while to sort things out in my head.”
She felt her father’s eyes on her as she took a jug of bleach from a shelf and began to wash down the dishwashing table and stainless sinks. Her mother used to say that a little bleach could go a long way toward making the shabbiest circumstances shine.
Her mother had not been in love with Jack St. Bride.
Once Roy went upstairs, Addie attacked the kitchen. She rubbed down the sneeze guard of the cold table and wiped clean its cool innards. She scraped burned patches from the base of the oven. She scrubbed and washed until her knuckles bled within her rubber gloves, and she had to wrap her hands in a damp dishcloth, just to ease the pain.
She was working with such a frenzy, she never heard the front door of the diner open. “I hope you’re paying yourself well,” Charlie said.
Addie jumped a foot, slamming her head against the base of the warming table. “Oh!”
“Jeez, Addie, are you all right?” Charlie rushed forward to help her, but the moment he was within the range of being able to touch, they both froze. Addie backed off, her hand to her forehead.
“Fine. That was just stupid of me.” She hugged her arms to her chest. “Is this about Jack?”
Charlie shook his head. “Is there . . . could we sit down for a second?”
Nodding slowly, Addie followed him into the front room of the diner. They slid across from each other in a booth. The barrier of a table between them helped, and being away from the bleach fumes cleared her head. But Charlie showed no signs of speaking. “How is Meg?” Addie asked after a moment.
“All right. Thanks for asking.” Charlie tapped his fingertips on the table. “After all that’s been said in that courtroom, I don’t know what’s going to come of her, really.”
“Take it one day at a time.” Addie looked at the clock. Swallowed.
“Addie,” Charlie said, “I owe you an apology.”
Her eyes reluctantly met his. “Why?”
“I’ve been listening to the testimony. And I’ve been helping the prosecution for weeks. And it’s made me . . . it’s made it all come back clearer than ever. God, I’m doing a shitty job of this . . .” Charlie rubbed his hand over his face. “I thought I’d live in Miami, get a job on the force, and just forget Salem Falls. Then Chief Rudlow invited me back north, and I told myself enough time had passed to just wipe away the memory. After nearly a decade, I assumed that if I didn’t think about it, no one else would, either.” He hunched over the table, as if drawing strength from within. “But you’ve thought about, every day, haven’t you?”
Addie closed her eyes, then nodded.
“I knew what was coming that afternoon under the bleachers, when Amos called you over. I was drunk, sure, but I knew what I was doing. And for reasons I can’t even stand to think of, I went along with it . . . and then followed the others, when they acted like it hadn’t happened at all.” Charlie lowered his gaze. “Damn, Addie, how do you tell someone you’re sorry you ruined their life?”
It took Addie a long time to speak. “You didn’t ruin my life, Charlie. You raped me. There’s a difference: One, I couldn’t keep from happening . . . but the other, I could. I did.” She thought of Chloe, of Jack. “The more you get past pain, the more it goes from coal to diamond.”
Charlie’s eyes were red-rimmed, stricken. “I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, and I know I can’t ask you to forget. But I want you to know, for whatever it’s worth, that I don’t forgive myself . . . and I’ll never forget, either.”
“Thank you,” Addie whispered, “for that.”
She heard the door jingle closed behind him and she sat at the booth with her legs completely limp, waiting for her heart to stop beating triple-time. After all these years, who would have expected validation? After all these years, who would have expected that simply hearing the words made her feel like starting over?
She was jolted out of her reverie by the sound of the door opening again. Charlie must have forgotten something. But before she could turn around, Addie heard the voice of a young woman, the thud of a suitcase being dropped on the floor. “They said I’d find you here.”
And suddenly Addie was face to face with Catherine Marsh.
July 5, 2000
Carroll County Courthouse
The air in the courtroom was thick the next morning, so heavy with anticipation it beaded on the foreheads of the reporters and misted the lenses of the camera crews. Judge Justice strode to the bench with the air of a magistrate whose mind is already turned toward her next case. “I believe we’re starting the day with closing arguments,” she said. “Mr. McAfee, are you ready to begin?”
Jordan stood. “Actually, Your Honor, I need to reopen my case.”
A moment later, he and Houlihan were standing at the bench. “I have another witness,” Jordan explained. “An unexpected one, whose testimony is crucial to the defense.”
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me why you didn’t know about her before?” the judge asked. “Does the state know this witness and what they’re going to testify to?”
“No, I don’t,” Matt said, irritated. “The defense already rested. You didn’t see me dancing a parade of new witnesses in front of the court after the prosecution finished.”
“Judge,” Jordan explained, “it’s the victim from my client’s previous conviction. She’s recanting.”
“Which is totally irrelevant. It’s too late,” Matt insisted.
The judge stared at each lawyer in turn, then addressed the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, you may recall that yesterday the defense rested. However, the court is going to allow Mr. McAfee to reopen his case to call one final witness.”
Jordan smoothed down his tie and glanced toward the rear of the courtroom. “The defense calls Catherine Marsh.”
She was small and shaken, and Jordan had his doubts about whether she would even make it to the stand without assistance. But at the steps, Catherine rallied, repeating the words to swear herself in in a true, ringing voice.
“How old are you, Ms. Marsh?”
“I’m sixteen.”
Jordan glanced at his client. “Do you know Jack St. Bride?”
It was the first chance Catherine had to see her former teacher. She met Jack’s eyes, and a story hung between them, one torn into a spotty snowflake pattern by contrition. “Yes, I do,” she murmured.
“How?”
Catherine took a deep breath. “I’m the one he was convicted of sexually assaulting last year.”
A gasp rolled through the courtroom like a tide. “Why are you here today, Ms. Marsh?”
“Because.” Catherine looked at her knotted hands. “I let it happen the first time, and I’m not going to be responsible for letting it happen a second time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Jack St. Bride never sexually assaulted me. He never touched me inappropriately. He never did anything wrong at all. He was the best teacher I ever had and . . . and maybe I thought of him that way and wished he would be attracted to me . . . but it never happened.”
“Why did you let him get convicted, then?” Jordan asked.
A single tear rolled down Catherine’s cheek as she took a deep breath. “Coach believed in me and was kind to me. When I had a boyfriend and wanted to have sex for the first time, Coach took me to a clinic to get birth control pills
. He didn’t want to, but he did it, because it was so important to me. And when the same guy broke up with me, all I could think was that I wished he’d been more like Coach-more mature, more into me, more . . . Jack.” She looked at the jury. “I started to write about him. . . about us . . . in my diary. I made it up, the way I wanted it to be. And when my father found my birth control pills and read my diary-God, for a moment, I just wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe what my father believed . . . that I was someone Coach was attracted to, instead of just the other way around.
“By the time I tried to take back what I’d said, it was so big and so ugly, I couldn’t swallow it down. I was a little girl playing with dolls who turned out to have real feelings and real lives that could get ruined.” She looked into her lap. “My father and the prosecutor and the judge-they all thought I was protecting a man I loved.” Catherine turned, addressing the jury. “The last time I told the truth in court, nobody believed me. I need you all to believe me now.”
“Thank you, Ms. Marsh,” Jordan said. “Your witness.”
Matt leaned forward in his chair, elbows resting on knees, hands clasped. “All right,” he said slowly, getting to his feet. “Where were you on the night of April thirtieth?”
“In Goffeysboro,” Catherine said.
“You weren’t in the clearing behind the cemetery here in Salem Falls, were you?”
“No.”
“So you don’t know whether something happened to Gillian Duncan that night?”
“No.”
“In fact,” Matt accused, “all you know is that a year ago, you made a terrible mistake.”
“Yes.”
“And a year ago, you were so in love with this man you didn’t want him to get hurt, correct?”
“Yes,” Catherine murmured.
He softened quite suddenly, his face rounding into a friendly smile. “You wish things with Coach St. Bride had ended differently, don’t you, Ms. Marsh?”
“Like you can’t imagine.”
“Even now, you don’t want to see him get hurt, do you?”
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