by Jodi Picoult
Matt couldn’t possibly feel any worse than Duncan wanted him to feel. Losing cases was always a disappointment . . . losing one that seemed to be open and shut was downright devastating.
“What can I say?” Matt answered humbly. “Amos, Gillian—I’m so sorry.” He began to gather his notes and papers, stuffing them haphazardly into his briefcase.
“I hope you carry this with you, Houlihan,” Duncan spat. “I hope you can’t sleep at night, knowing he’s out there.”
In counterpoint to her blustering father, Gillian’s voice was quiet and firm. “You said it was a sure thing.”
Matt glanced at her. He looked at Amos Duncan, too. Then he thought of McAfee’s closing, of the atropine in Gillian’s blood sample, of Catherine Marsh testifying that she’d been afraid of her father. “Nothing’s a sure thing,” he muttered, and he walked up the aisle of the courtroom, heading home.
The champagne bottle popped, shooting its cork into the ceiling of Jordan’s porch. Foam sprayed and ran down the sides, soaking Selena’s toes and the wooden slats beneath her feet. “To justice!” she cried, pouring some into Dixie cups.
“May she continue to be conveniently blind,” Jordan said, toasting.
Thomas grinned, lifting his own glass. “And deaf and dumb, when you need it.”
They drank, giddy with the sheer delight of winning. “I knew I wanted to get back into trying cases again,” Jordan said, and behind his back, Thomas and Selena rolled their eyes. “Of course, I couldn’t have done it without the two of you.”
“If you’re feeling so charitable, then you can explain to Chelsea why I’m not a complete jerk.”
“Ah, that’s easy,” Selena said. “Just tell her you take after your mother.”
“Thomas.” Jordan slung his arm around his son’s shoulders. “We’ll have her over to dinner, and I’ll show her my enchanting side.” He smothered a laugh. “No pun intended.”
Selena poured herself a second glass of champagne. “She could bring along something to drink . . . or something to slip into the drink.”
“Very funny,” Thomas muttered.
Jordan, on the other hand, grinned at her. “Maybe I’ll get some atropine myself, stir it into your hot water, and tell you that we tied the knot.”
“Maybe you wouldn’t have to drug me for that,” Selena said lightly, but her words fell flat.
There was a thick beat of silence. “Do you—” Jordan asked, staring hard at her.
Selena’s smile started slow, then unrolled like a banner. “Yeah. I do.”
When they fell onto the porch swing in a tangle of arms and legs and joy, Thomas discreetly slipped into the house. He walked down the hall into his father’s bedroom, sat on the bed, and unzipped the linings of each of the two pillows. It took some rummaging, but he managed to find them—the small herbal charms Chelsea had given him weeks before. Red cloth, filled with sweet-smelling flowers and a penny, then tied with blue ribbon in seven knots. “You can’t force someone to love someone else,” Chelsea had warned, when he asked her to make these. “All a spell can do is open a person’s eyes to what’s out there.”
Thomas had shrugged. “I think that’s all they need.”
As his father and Selena embraced outside, Thomas slipped the charms back into their pillows. And then, toasting himself, he drank down the rest of his champagne.
Charlie knocked on the door of his daughter’s bedroom. “Hi,” he said, sticking his head in the door. “Can I come in?”
“Since when do you ask?” Meg shot back. She didn’t look at him.
This angry girl, huddled on her bed, looked nothing like the child who’d once followed him around with a tinfoil badge pinned to her dress, so that she could be just like her father. Betrayal sat between them, a monster of enormous proportions. “I guess you heard that Jack St. Bride got acquitted.”
Meg nodded. “Gillian’s a mess about it.”
The detective sighed. “Understandable, I guess.” He took a deep breath. “We can still press charges, if you want.”
His daughter shook her head, her cheeks flaming. “No,” she murmured.
“Meggie?”
“I knew,” she blurted out. “I knew that Gillian was doing all this just to hurt Jack. At first I didn’t care, because of the things . . . the things I remembered. But now I know they weren’t real.” Meg’s round, sweet face was turned to his, waiting for him to make it all better, the way he used to do when she’d fallen down and scraped her knee. A Band-Aid, and a kiss. If only that was what it took once they grew up. “Gilly lied . . . and she told us to lie . . . and we did it, because we were all so afraid of what would happen if we didn’t. Maybe we were a little curious, too, to see if we could pull it off.”
“Pull what off?”
Meg picked at a cuticle. “Punishing him. Ruining his life. Making him leave Salem Falls. Gillian just wanted to get him back—not for what he did to her, but for what he wouldn’t do.”
She had known about Gillian lying? And hadn’t told him? “Why didn’t you come to me, Meg?”
“Would you really have listened, Daddy? People hear only what they want to hear.”
He was the last person qualified to lecture his daughter on falsehoods and moral responsibility. Addie Peabody’s name flashed through his mind like a stroke of lightning, and he touched his daughter’s hand. “Maybe we’ll go talk to someone,” Charlie said. “Someone who can sort things like this out, who does it for a living.”
“Like a psychiatrist?”
Charlie nodded. “If you want.”
Meg suddenly seemed very, very young. “You’d go with me?” she whispered.
Charlie held out his arms, and his daughter crawled right where she belonged. He rubbed her spine, buried his face in her hair. “Anywhere,” he vowed, “and back again.”
For a horrible moment, Addie thought she had lost him. She moved through the house, wondering if she’d imagined his acquittal, calling his name and getting no answer.
Finally, she discovered Jack sitting out on Chloe’s wooden playset. In her bare feet, she padded out across the lawn to settle on a swing beside him. “Want a push?” she asked.
Jack smiled softly. “No thanks. I’ll jump when I’m ready.”
He untangled his fist from the chain and laced his fingers with Addie’s. They sat in summertime silence, bordered by the songs of crickets, watching the hot wind jump like a monkey through the fingers of the trees. “How does it feel?” Addie asked quietly.
Jack brought his fist to his chest. “Like the whole world has settled right here.”
She smiled. “That’s because you’re home.”
“Addie,” he said, “the thing is, I’m not. I can’t stay here.”
“Of course you can.”
“I meant that I can’t stay in Salem Falls, Addie. Nobody wants me here.”
“I do,” she said, going very still.
“Yes.” Jack reached for her hand, and kissed it. “That’s why I’m going to leave. God, you saw what happened today, after we left the courthouse. The mother who pulled her kid away from me on the street. The guy at the diner who walked out as soon as he saw I was there. I can’t live like that . . . and neither can you. How are you going to run a local business when people start ostracizing you, too?”
Maybe it was the heat breaking as the night rolled into Salem Falls, maybe it was the memory of her daughter playing in this very spot, maybe it was just a soul that had suffered too much to give up without a healthy fight—but at that moment, Addie made a decision. She stood, planting her feet on either side of Jack, to keep him where she wanted him. “I already told you,” Addie said, her eyes blazing, “you don’t get to leave me behind.”
“But Addie, I’m a drifter. You have a place where you belong.”
“Yes. With you.” She kissed him, her faith a brand.
By the time Addie lifted her head, Jack was smiling. “What diner?” he murmured, and yanked her onto his lap.
They swung lazily as the sun set, licking a fire up the slate path and charging the stars in the night sky. Jack imagined taking Addie to Greece, to Portugal, to the Loire Valley. He envisioned her by the Trevi Fountain, in the Canadian Rockies, on the top of the Empire State Building. “We’ll visit my mother,” he said, the thought forming in his mind like a crystal. “I think she’d like to meet you.”
“She lives in New York?”
Jack nodded. It was as good as place as any, he thought, to find a happy ending.
Shortly after midnight, Amos Duncan awakened. He lay in bed, gathering his sixth sense around him like an extra blanket, certain that something wasn’t right.
Shrugging into his robe, he padded down the hall to Gillian’s bedroom. The door was wide open, the covers on her bed thrown back.
He found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the dark. A glass of milk sat in front of her, untouched. Her head rested heavily on the heel of her hand; her eyes were focused on something only she could see.
“Gilly,” he whispered, so he wouldn’t startle her.
She came out of her trance, blinking, surprised to find him there. “Oh,” she said, flustered. “I was . . . I just couldn’t sleep.”
Amos nodded, his hands in the pockets of his robe. “I know. I understand. But Gillian . . . maybe it’s better this way.” She turned her face to his, so like her mother’s in this half-light. “Maybe we should just get on with our lives. Try to put this past us. Make things the way they used to be.”
When Gillian glanced away, Amos touched her jaw. “You know I’m only looking out for you, Gilly,” he murmured, smiling tenderly. “Who loves you most?”
“You do,” Gillian whispered.
Amos held out his hand, and she placed hers in it. Then he pulled her into an embrace, an old, old dance. Gillian closed her eyes, years past tears. Her mind was already a million miles away by the time her father’s mouth settled over hers, sealing their deal once again.
Salem Falls
JODI PICOULT
A Readers Club Guide
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for discussion for Jodi Picoult’s Salem Falls. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
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A CONVERSATION WITH JODI PICOULT
Q: What was your initial inspiration for this book? Are you a fan of witch folklore and legend?
A: I wanted to write an update of The Crucible, because so many of the themes in Arthur Miller’s play are still so timely: the concept of a town excluding someone they don’t believe to be fit; the way lies spread so much faster than truth; the very idea that truth is a subjective quantity, at the mercy of many influences. When I was mulling this idea over for a book, I knew I’d have to come up with a modern-day witch hunt—and my thoughts went straight to a rape trial, since that’s usually a he-said/she-said scenario, with a jury deciding whose story is more believable. Other than a trip to Salem, Massachusetts, when I was little, I didn’t really know very much about witches—historical or modern. After doing a little research, though, I decided that after all those alleged witches had suffered in Salem, they deserved to be the ones pointing the finger this time around—and thus I created my coven of teenage girls.
Q: You seem to be well versed in modern witchcraft and the basic tenets of the religion. Do you have friends who are Wiccan, or was this solely the product of research?
A: Although there is a large population of Wiccans close to where I live, I didn’t personally know anyone who followed the religion. So—as I do with all things I don’t know but want to write about—I set out to do a little research. I found some Wiccans and interviewed them; I read extensively; I studied Books of Shadows (there was one very funny incident in my son’s first-grade class at Halloween, where I brought in a frothing dry-ice punch for a snack and happily volunteered to try my hand at casting a spell . . . but that’s a whole different story). I learned that the fastest-growing group of Wiccans are teenagers—if you think about it, it makes sense: many teens are attracted to the religion because they think it’s about spells that might net them popularity or love or power (it’s not), and as an added boon, being a witch is something to hide from your parents. To this end, I found some Wiccan websites and chat rooms, and posed as a teen interested in Wicca to see what I might be able to learn . . . and in Gillian’s case, learn incorrectly. Since the publication of Salem Falls in hardcover, I have received fan letters from practicing Wiccans, who praise me for treating their religion sensitively and accurately; and I’m very proud of this endorsement.
Q: You deal with rape very carefully in this novel, and from many different angles. Were there inherent challenges working with this issue, as it is often a touchy subject for readers and writers alike?
A: My biggest fear when I was writing Salem Falls was that I would somehow not convey equally the horror of being raped and that of being wrongly accused as a rapist. The last thing I wanted to do was trivialize the trauma of rape by suggesting that the majority of women fabricated their claims; likewise, I didn’t want to hold convicted rapists up as role models simply because a very small fraction of them are innocent. To this end, I created the character of Addie to balance the character of Jack—I wanted readers to be invested in both of their stories, and to understand that they were both violated by someone of the opposite sex. The truth is, for every Jack St. Bride, there is an Amos Duncan; for every Addie Peabody, there is a Gillian. When I wrote about Jack’s prior conviction, I wanted readers to understand that rape trials are such a crapshoot that a defense attorney might indeed recommend to his wrongfully accused client that he simply plea-bargain for a misdemeanor rather than risk a felony conviction by a jury. I also wanted to explore the way victims in a rape trial are often victimized even more—which is why thousands of rapes go unreported every year. There is no easy way to talk about rape, because every case is different. But for this very reason, I wanted my novel to address the challenges it poses both legally and emotionally—in the hopes that it would get readers talking.
Q: Was there a particular concept that you wanted readers to come away with after having read this novel?
A: Yes. That a lie can outpace the truth every time, even though the difference between them is paper-thin. And that you never really know anyone as well as you think you do.
Q: The experiences of parents—especially mothers—seem to dominate your novels. How has having children strengthened your ability as a writer and your understanding and compassion for the characters in your books?
A: Technically, being a mother has made me more skilled at writing on the fly—that is, being interrupted to be asked a question about a spelling test, or to exult over an art project, or to attend a teacher’s conference, and then pick right up where I left off. But most of all, being a mother allows me to be surprised on a daily basis. You’d think that, having spent every single moment of a child’s life with him or her, you’d know them inside out. And yet, every day, my kids amaze me or confound me or astound me. The flip side of this is that I have discovered parts of myself that I never knew existed before I had children: patience, ferocity, pride. This theme of constant rediscovery—especially when you naïvely believe you know it all—is something I explore in Salem Falls, as well as many of my other books.
Q: In many of your books, love works as a kind of saving grace—sometimes the only one. Do you think love conquers all?
A: Don’t laugh, but sometimes when I write about love I think of a flying squirrel. There’s got to be a moment when that baby squirrel looks from the end of one branch to the tree si
x feet away and thinks twice about making a leap. Falling in love is no different; it’s the moment that we close our eyes and throw away everything that seems reasonable and hope to God there’s someone or something waiting to catch us on the other side. Either we’re lucky . . . or we wind up bruised and battered on the ground. Jack and Addie are two characters who have crashed. In Salem Falls, the challenge was to create a relationship between people who have lost everything once by getting close to someone. How can you make someone who has been burned stick his hand back in a fire?
I guess I’m an optimist, because I believe that love has the same kind of selective amnesia that childbirth does (you completely forget how much it hurt the last time around until you’re in the delivery room again). So to me, it’s conceivable that people like Jack and Addie, who have every reason in the world to be hermits, might try for a connection just one more time. If love doesn’t conquer all, it certainly has the ability to heal us until we are willing to close our eyes and jump once again, for good.
Q: Are any of the characters in your novels autobiographical? Do you base any of them on people that you have personally known, or do you craft them completely from your imagination?
A: I never “write” people I know into a book, because my characters spring fully formed and to endow them with the personality of someone who already exists would cheat both parties. However, I often give characteristics or features or even dialogue from my friends and family to my fictional characters, when it fits. If you’re my friend or kid or husband, anything you say or do is fair game. For example, in Salem Falls, Wes tries to seduce Addie—“How do you like your eggs in the morning?”—and she gives a pretty funny answer: “Unfertilized.” That nugget came from a Sunday night dinner at our house. We were discussing the world’s worst pickup lines, and my friend Aidan offered that one—and well, it just seemed too hilarious not to use in a novel.
