Salem Falls

by Jodi Picoult

  "Yes. And a maypole, and often there's handfasting, too--"

  "Handfasting?"

  "A trial marriage. You grab your intended's hand and jump the flames, and you're tied to each other for a year--a test period, if you will. And of course, after handfasting, there's always the Great Rite." She laughed at Jordan's blank expression. "Making love, Mr. McAfee, right out there in the fields of the earth."

  "Well," Jordan said, coloring. "That sounds festive."

  Starshine winked. "Don't knock it till you've tried it."

  "Is Beltane celebrated on a certain date?"

  "The same time every year," Starshine said. "At the stroke of midnight on April thirtieth, as the calendar rolls onto May first."

  *

  It spoke volumes that the first person McAfee had put on the stand did absolutely no harm to Matt's case. It didn't matter to him if Gillian Duncan was a Pagan, a Buddhist, or a tribal shaman. Despite the hocus pocus and the candles and the safe space, nothing could take away from the fact that Gillian Duncan had been raped that night.

  "Ms. Starshine," Matt said. "Do you have any way of knowing, other than by what she told you, that Gillian Duncan is a witch?"

  "I'm not in her coven, if that's what you mean."

  "Were you in the clearing behind the cemetery on Beltane?"

  "No. I was celebrating elsewhere."

  "In fact, you didn't see Gillian that night, did you?"

  "No."

  "And you didn't see Mr. St. Bride that night, either?"

  "I've never met the man," Starshine said.

  "So you have no way of knowing whether the defendant and Ms. Duncan were together on the night of April thirtieth?"

  "No."

  Matt started to walk back to his seat but then turned. "That safe-space spell you did when you got up here ... is that something other witches would know?"

  "In some form or another, a protection spell is fairly common, yes."

  "What does it protect you from?"

  "Negative energy," Starshine said.

  "But if the defendant were to step up there right now and grab you--"

  "Objection!" Jordan cried.

  "--if he were to throw you onto the ground and pin you--"

  "Sustained!"

  "--could a protection spell keep a witch from being raped?"

  "Mr. Houlihan!" The judge rapped the flat of her hand against the bench. "You will stop now!"

  "Withdrawn," Matt said. "Nothing further."

  Dr. Roman Chu was dressed like a skateboarder, with his hair on end and a black T-shirt that read SHREDDER. If Jordan hadn't known him personally, he would have assumed Roman was a kid plucked off the street and paid to play a part. But then the toxicologist was sworn in and began to speak, listing his credentials and his certification by three separate boards, as well as so many forensic testimonies under his belt that the prosecutor stipulated to his expertise. "My job involves demonstrating evidence of drug intake by means of isolating, identifying, and quantifying toxic substances in biological materials," Chu explained. "Basically, I'm a very expensive bloodhound."

  "Can a forensic toxicologist tell if a drug is taken in a therapeutic dosage, or as an accidental or intentional overdose?" Jordan asked.

  "Yes. We use modern analytical procedures like chromatography and spectometry to measure drugs, and then we identify the relationships between these drug levels and the clinical response to understand the pharmacological effect." He smiled at the jury. "We also go to graduate school and learn to use words that are never less than six syllables."

  He had them laughing, which was one of the reasons that Jordan loved to use Roman as an expert. "Dr. Chu, did you analyze a sample from Gillian Duncan?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "What were your results?"

  "The blood sample I tested showed signs of the substance atropine." At the prosecutor's table, Matt went very still. The jury leaned forward, riveted by the proof that Gillian had lied.

  "Atropine?" Jordan asked. "What's that?"

  "A drug used medicinally to relax the muscles of the intestine, to increase heart rate, to reduce secretions during anesthesia, and occasionally for treatment of asthma."

  "How long does the drug take to kick in?" Jordan asked.

  "It's a very rapid onset, with peak plasma concentration within an hour, and the effects last between two and six hours."

  "For you to find atropine in a blood sample, how long ago would the person have to ingest it?"

  "Within twenty-four hours of the specimen being drawn," the toxicologist said.

  "Was the level of atropine found in Ms. Duncan's blood consistent with a normal dosage?"

  "The usual therapeutic dose is zero point one to one point two milligrams. Her test showed a blood level of twenty-three nanograms per milliliter at about four hours after she drank it. With a drug half-life of three to four hours, that would correspond to a blood level of forty-six nanograms in the first hour. Working backward with the parameters of Ms. Duncan's weight, body fat, and approximate time of ingestion, that indicates a dose of ten milligrams of atropine ... roughly ten to one hundred times the norm."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Ms. Duncan had overdosed," Chu said.

  "Would that have impaired her functioning?"

  "Oh, yeah. At a dose of just two milligrams, a person would have a rapid heart rate, palpitations, dryness of the mouth, dilated pupils, blurred vision. Up the dose to five milligrams and the person would also be feeling restless, having trouble speaking and swallowing, headaches, hot skin, reduced intestinal peristalsis. If you take ten milligrams of atropine, like Ms. Duncan, you'd feel all that, plus have a rapid, weak pulse; blurred vision; flushed skin; restlessness and excitement; trouble walking and talking; hallucinations; delirium and coma."

  "Are the effects lasting?"

  "Nope. It's a short trip," Chu said, grinning.

  "But hallucinations are likely?"

  "Yeah. In fact, recently in Holland four brands of Ecstasy were found to contain atropine, for that reason exactly."

  "Other people, then, have used atropine as a recreational hallucinogenic drug?"

  Chu nodded. "That's what I hear. In fact, those hallucinations are what usually tip a doctor off to the possibility of atropine poisoning ... because atropine doesn't show up on a routine ER tox screen, and blows your short-term memory, which makes it very difficult to get an accurate sense of if or when the drug was taken."

  "Would you know if the things you hallucinated were real memories or not?"

  Cho shrugged. "You wouldn't be able to tell. Like all hallucinogens, from LSD to peyote, it creates altered perceptions."

  "Could someone in the throes of a hallucinogenic drug imagine a physical attack?"

  "Objection," Matt called out. "This isn't the witness's area of expertise."

  "I'm going to allow it," the judge said.

  Chu grinned. "Think of all those guys who scratched their skin off after tripping on angel dust, convinced they had bugs crawling all over. If you're using a psychedelic drug, what you believe to be true becomes true."

  "One final question," Jordan said. "Is atropine derived from any particular substance?"

  "It comes from the liquid extract of a plant, which has a long and varied history of being used as a poison, an anesthetic, and to induce a trancelike state. Remember that sleeping draft Juliet drinks in the Shakespeare play? Same stuff."

  "What's the name of this plant, Dr. Chu?"

  "Oh," he said. "That would be Atropa belladonna."

  Matt called for a fifteen-minute recess and left the courtroom fuming. He stalked upstairs, to the small conference room he'd secured to sequester the victim, on the chance that he needed to recall her after the defense finished its witness list. When he burst through the door, Gillian was bent over a table, doing a crossword puzzle.

  "Don't you ever lie to me again."

  She dropped her pencil. "W-what?"

  He braced an arm
on either side of her puzzle. "You heard me," Matt said angrily. "You 'had nothing to drink that night.' "

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "The atropine, Gillian. It was found in your blood."

  She looked positively stunned. "But ... but the test at the ER--"

  "Wasn't conclusive," Matt finished. "A more refined test was done on your blood by the defense's toxicologist. And right now, that jury knows you lied about taking drugs--and is wondering what else you might have been lying about."

  Tears welled in her eyes. "I didn't lie about being raped. I didn't. It was just that everyone already thinks I'm some kind of a slut, because this happened to me. I didn't want them thinking I was a drug addict, too. It was only that once. I swear." Raising a ravaged face to Matt, she asked, "Is he going to get off now? Because I was so stupid?"

  Matt felt the fight draining out of him, but he wasn't going to give her false hope. "I don't know, Gillian."

  "He won't be acquitted."

  At the sound of a third voice, both Matt and Gillian turned. Amos Duncan stood in the doorway, stiff and uncomfortable. "Mr. Houlihan wouldn't let that happen." Gillian's father walked closer, until he stood with his hand on his daughter's shoulder. "This may be a setback, but it's not a devastation. Isn't that right, Mr. Houlihan?"

  Matt thought of the twelve jurors and what they'd just heard. "You're preaching to the choir," he said, and stormed out of the room.

  "Isn't it true, Doctor, that hallucinogens produce a wide range of effects?" Matt asked.

  Chu laughed. "That's what I hear, but I may have to plead the fifth if you want me to get more specific."

  "It's possible that one person might have a great trip on a drug and another person could ... as you said ... scratch his skin off?"

  "Yes. It depends on dosage, potency, personality of the user, and the environment in which the drug is taken."

  "So if you take this drug, you're not even guaranteed to have hallucinations?"

  "Not necessarily."

  "Did you see Gillian Duncan in the early hours of May first?"

  "No," Chu said. "I've never met her."

  "Then you don't know what her personality is like."

  "No."

  "You don't know the environment she was in at the time."

  "No."

  "You don't even know the potency of this particular drug, do you?"

  "No."

  "Did you see her after she was brought to the ER to be examined because of a sexual assault?"

  "No."

  "So you don't know if she was having hallucinations, do you?"

  "No."

  Matt advanced on the witness. "You said that the drug stays in the bloodstream only a few hours, is that correct?"

  Chu nodded. "Yes."

  "And when was the sample you examined drawn?"

  "At approximately two A.M.," the toxicologist said.

  "Ms. Duncan arrived at the woods with her friends at approximately eleven P.M. that night. Do you have any way of knowing whether Ms. Duncan took the drug before she went to the woods that night?"

  "No ... but based on the levels in her blood at one-thirty A.M., if that was the case, she'd be dead now."

  "Still, given that two-to six-hour time frame, the drug could have been taken after the rape, isn't that right?"

  "I guess so."

  "And that would affect your calculation of the dosage amount, right?"

  "Yes."

  Matt nodded. "You don't know who provided the atropine that evening, do you?"

  "No."

  "Isn't it possible that Mr. St. Bride arrived in the woods and suggested they take it?"

  "It's possible."

  Matt crossed to the jury box. "Can you smell atropine, if it's placed in a drink?"

  "Usually not."

  "Can you taste it?" he asked.

  "No."

  "So if Mr. St. Bride handed Ms. Duncan an open soda can with this drug already mixed into the beverage, she might drink it and not even know she was ingesting an illegal substance?"

  "I suppose."

  Matt nodded thoughtfully. "Dr. Chu, have you ever heard of Rohypnol?"

  "Yes."

  "Can you explain what it is, for those of us who don't know?"

  "It's called the date-rape drug," Chu explained. "In recent years, there have been cases where men slip the substance into a woman's drink, render her unconscious, and then proceed to sexually assault her."

  "Why is Rohypnol so frighteningly effective?"

  "Because it's odorless, tasteless. The victim usually doesn't even realize she's ingested it, until it's too late. And it doesn't show up on a routine hospital tox screen."

  "Aren't every single one of those properties something that could be said about atropine?"

  "As a matter of fact," Chu said. "Yes."

  Fighting the Haldol she'd been prescribed was a losing battle. The moment her eyes closed, Meg was back there: The woods were swimming, as if they'd all been dunked underwater, and bright pink flashes of light kept spinning at her like creatures from a video game. Meg's head felt light as a balloon, and every time she opened her mouth, the stupidest sounds came out ... not words or her voice at all.

  "Come, come," Gilly was saying, waving them over to congratulate the happy couple. Whitney staggered over, but Chelsea was too busy plucking the stars from thin air. "Meggie, you, too," Gilly ordered, and Meg's own traitor legs carried her there.

  Matt Houlihan had blown a cannon right through the best argument Jack's lawyer had offered so far. Addie couldn't get past that, and as a result, her hand was shaking so badly by the time the coffee poured out of the little vending machine in the basement of the courthouse that she spilled it all over her skirt and the floor. "Oh," she cried, bending down to clean up the mess before she realized she didn't even have a napkin.

  "I've got it."

  A pair of spit-polished black boots stepped into her field of vision. Then Wes Courtemanche knelt and began to mop up the spill with his own handkerchief.

  Addie's cheeks burned. She had no reason to be embarrassed, but there it was, all the same. "Thank you," she said stiffly, taking the handkerchief from his hand to finish.

  "Addie," he said, and touched the back of her wrist.

  It took her a few seconds to get the courage to look up. "I'm sorry," Wes murmured. "I didn't know it would all come to this. And ... well, I never meant to drag you into it."

  "You didn't, Wes. I did that all by myself." Flustered, she fisted the handkerchief into a ball. "I'll wash this and get it back to you."

  "No." He plucked it from her hand. "Time was, I would have died twice over to hear you offer just that, but the truth is, Addie, you were never meant to do my wash."

  Addie took in his earnest eyes, his strong body, his steadfast loyalty. "Wes, you're going to find a woman one day who can't wait to mix her whites with yours." Biting her lip, she added, "I'm sorry it wasn't me."

  Wes shook his head, then slipped her a smile edged in regret. "Not as sorry as I am," he said, and gently helped her to her feet.

  Jack stood at the window of the small conference room. "You ever hear of a guy named Boris Yetzemeloff?" he asked Jordan.

  "No."

  "Guy who raped eighteen women in the forties, in Mexico. He was convicted, sentenced to a life term. Twenty years into it, he had a heart attack and was pronounced dead for twenty minutes before paramedics resuscitated him." Jack turned to face his attorney. "They let him go after that. Said he'd served his life sentence."

  Jordan pinched the bridge of his nose. "The only decent piece of trivia I know is that it's against the law to cross the state boundaries of Iowa with a duck on your head."

  Jack didn't crack a smile. "Good to know."

  "So what are you trying to tell me, Jack?" Jordan asked. "That you've got yourself tried and hung already, before you even get on the stand?"

  "Can you honestly tell me that my testimony is going to make a difference?" Ja
ck answered softly. "It's not even a testimony, for God's sake. It's a big gaping blank."

  "I explained to you what Dr. Chu said. If you drank any of the tea that night, your memory of the evening might never come back."

  Annoyed, Jack kicked a chair out of the way. "I want it all here," he said, holding out his hands. "Right at my fingertips. I want to remember what happened, Jordan, if only so that when I'm rotting away in prison I can pull it out every now and then and remind myself that I was innocent."

  "You've got a gut feeling, Jack," Jordan sighed. "That's going to have to be enough."

  The men fell silent, tangled in their own thoughts. Overhead, a fluorescent bulb hummed like an insect. Then Jack sat down across from his lawyer. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "Do you believe I'm innocent?"

  Jordan let his eyes slide away from Jack. "It has no bearing on my role as your attorney, you know, if I--"

  "I asked you a question. Not as attorney and client. As one man to another." Jack stared directly at Jordan. "Please."

  Jordan knew what Jack needed; knew that it was his responsibility as an attorney to keep his key witness calm, no matter how slender a testimony he had to offer. "Of course I believe you," he said. "So does Selena. And Addie." Jordan forced a smile. "See, you have all kinds of disciples."

  Just none of them, he thought, on the jury.

  Dr. Flora Dubonnet had the face of a sparrow, the body of a stork, and the voice of Minnie Mouse on helium. It was all Jordan could do to keep from wincing every time she answered one of his questions, and he kept sending murderous looks toward Selena, who'd found this pediatric forensic shrink on the Internet ... clearly not over the phone.

  "Did you review some documents in this case?" Jordan asked.

  The answer was a high-pitched squeal.

  Jordan watched the jury cringe. Fingernails on a chalkboard, that's what it was.

  "Doctor," Judge Justice said, "I'm very sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to speak up." She hesitated, then added, "Very sorry."

  "I said yes," Dr. Dubonnet repeated.

  "What did you review?" Jordan asked.

  "The psychiatric records of Gillian Duncan, from the year she was nine years old."

  "In your expert opinion, what do they reveal?"

  She turned to the gallery and chirped, "The girl showed tendencies of being a pathological liar."

  Somehow, in that voice, it didn't pack quite the same punch. "Can you give some specific examples that led you to this diagnosis?"

  "Yes. Collateral sources contradicted her accounts on a number of occasions, and sometimes her statements were completely implausible. For example, she flatly denied shoplifting although she was found holding the items in her hand. She was mutilating herself, cutting up her arms, and refuting this even when the evidence was presented to a doctor. On another occasion, she ostracized a neighborhood girl by spreading rumors, then denied it, although numerous fingers were pointed at her as the originator."