Salem Falls

March 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

On the second worst day of Addie Peabody’s life, her refrigerator and dishwasher both died, like long-term lovers who could not conceive of existing without each other. This would have been a trial for anyone, but as she was the owner of the Do-Or-Diner, it blossomed into a catastrophe of enormous proportions. Addie stood with her hands pressed to the stainless steel door of the subzero walk-in, as if she might jump-start its heart by faith healing.

It was hard to decide what was more devastating: the health violations or the loss of potential income. Twenty pounds of dry ice, the most the medical supply store had to offer, wasn’t doing the job. Within hours, Addie would have to throw away the gallon buckets of gravy, stew, and chicken soup made that morning. “I think,” she said after a moment, “I’m going to build a snowman.”

“Now?” asked Delilah, the cook, her crossed arms as thick as a blacksmith’s. She frowned. “You know, Addie, I never believed it when folks around here called you crazy, but-”

“I’ll stick it in the fridge. Maybe it’ll save the food until the repairman gets here.”

“Snowmen melt,” Delilah said, but Addie could tell that she was turning the idea over in her mind.

“Then we’ll mop up and make more.”

“And I suppose you’re just gonna let the customers fend for themselves?”

“No,” Addie said. “I’m going to get them to help. Will you get Chloe’s boots?”

The diner was not crowded for 10 A.M. Of the six booths, two were occupied: one by a mother and her toddler, the other by a businessman brushing muffin crumbs off his laptop. A couple of elderly regulars, Stuart and Wallace, slouched at the counter drinking coffee while they argued over the local paper’s headlines.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Addie proclaimed. “I’m pleased to announce the start of the Do-or-Diner’s winter carnival. The first event is going to be a snow-sculpture contest, and if you’d all just come out back for a moment, we can get started-”

“It’s freezing out there!” cried Wallace.

“Well, of course it is. Otherwise we’d be having a summer carnival. Winner of the contest gets . . . a month of breakfast on the house.”

Stuart and Wallace shrugged, a good sign. The toddler bounced on the banquette like popcorn in a skillet. Only the businessman seemed unconvinced. As the others shuffled through the door, Addie approached his table. “Look,” the businessman said. “I don’t want to build a snowman, all right? All I came here for was some breakfast.”

“Well, we’re not serving now. We’re sculpting.” She gave him her brightest smile.

The man seemed nonplussed. He tossed a handful of change on the table, gathered his coat and computer, and stood up to leave. “You’re nuts.”

Addie watched him leave. “Yes,” she murmured. “That’s what they say.”

Outside, Stuart and Wallace were huffing through their scarves, crafting a respectable armadillo. Delilah had fashioned a snow chicken, a leg of lamb, pole beans. The toddler, stuffed into a snowsuit the color of a storm, lay on her back making angels.

Once Chloe had asked: Is Heaven above or below the place where snow comes from?

“You got the Devil’s own luck,” Delilah told Addie. “What if there was no snow?”

“Since when has there been no snow here in March? And besides, this isn’t luck. Luck is finding out the repairman could come a day early.”

As if Addie had conjured it, a man’s voice called out. “Anybody home?”

“We’re back here.” Addie was faintly disappointed to see a young cop, instead of an appliance repairman, rounding the corner. “Hi, Orren. You here for a cup of coffee?” “Uh, no, Addie. I’m here on official business.”

Her head swam. Could the accountant have reported them to the board of health so quickly? Did a law enforcement officer have the power to make her close her doors? But before she could voice her doubts, the policeman spoke again.

“It’s your father,” Orren explained, blushing. “He’s been arrested.”

Addie stormed into the police department with such force that the double doors slammed back on their hinges, letting in a gust of cold wind. “Jeez Louise,” said the dispatch sergeant. “Hope Courtemanche found himself a good hiding place.”

“Where is he?” Addie demanded.

“My best guess? Maybe in the men’s room, in a stall. Or squeezed into one of the empty lockers in the squad room.” The officer scratched his jaw. “Come to think of it, I once hid in the trunk of a cruiser when my wife was on the warpath.”

“I’m not talking about Officer Courtemanche,” Addie said through clenched teeth. “I meant my father.”

“Oh, Roy’s in the lockup.” He winced, remembering something. “But if you’re here to spring him, you’re gonna have to talk to Wes anyway, since it was his arrest.” He picked up the phone. “You can take a seat, Addie. I’ll let you know when Wes is free.”

Addie scowled. “I’m sure I’ll know. You always smell a skunk before you see it.”

“Why, Addie, is that any way to speak to the man who saved your father’s life?”

In his blue uniform, his badge glinting like a third eye, Wes Courtemanche was handsome enough to make women in Salem Falls dream about committing crimes. Addie, however, took one look at him and thought-not for the first time-that some men ought to come with an expiration date.

“Arresting a sixty-five-year-old man isn’t my idea of saving his life,” she huffed.

Wes took her elbow and led her gently down the hall, away from the dispatch sergeant’s eyes and ears. “Your father was driving under the influence again, Addie.”

Heat rose to her cheeks. Roy Peabody’s drinking wasn’t any secret in Salem Falls, but he’d gone one step too far last month, wrapping his car around the town’s statue of Giles Corey, the only man who’d been a casualty of the Puritan witch hunts. Roy’s license had been revoked. For his own safety, Addie had junked the car. And her own Mazda was safely parked at the diner. What vehicle could he have used?

As if he could read her mind, Wes said, “He was in the breakdown lane of Route 10, on his ride-on mower.”

“His ride-on mower,” Addie repeated. “Wes, that thing can’t go more than five miles an hour.”

“Fifteen, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, he doesn’t have a license. And you need one if you’re gonna operate any self-propelled vehicle on the street.”

“Maybe it was an emergency . . .”

“Guess it was, Addie. We confiscated a brand-new fifth of vodka from him, too.” Wes paused. “He was on his way home from the liquor store in North Haverhill.” He watched Addie knead her temples. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“I think you’ve done enough, Wes. I mean, gosh, you arrested a man joyriding on a lawn mower. Surely they’ll give you a Purple Heart or something for going to such extremes to ensure public safety.”

“Now, just a second. I was ensuring safety . . . Roy’s. What if a truck cut the curve too tight and ran him down? What if he fell asleep at the wheel?”

“Can I just take him home now?”

Wes regarded her thoughtfully. It made Addie feel like he was sorting through her mind, opening up certain ideas and shuffling aside others. She closed her eyes.

“Sure,” Wes said. “Follow me.”

He led her down a hallway to a room at the back of the police department. There was a wide desk manned by another officer, a high counter with ink pads for fingerprinting, and in the shadowy distance, a trio of tiny cells. Wes touched her forearm. “I’m not going to write him up, Addie.”

“You’re a real prince.”

He laughed and walked off. She heard the barred door slide open like a sword being pulled from its scabbard. “Guess who’s waiting for you out there, Roy?”

Her father’s voice now, pouring slow as honey: “My Margaret?”

“ ’Fraid not. Margaret’s been gone about five years now.”

They turned the corner, Wes bearing the brunt of her father’s weight. Roy Peabody was a charmer of a man, with hair as white and thick as the inner wing of a dove and blue eyes that always swam with a secret. “Addie!” he crowed, seeing her. “Happy birthday!”

He lunged for her, and Addie staggered. “Come on, Dad. We’ll get you home.”

Wes hooked his thumb on his belt. “You want a hand getting him out to your car?”

“No, thanks. We can manage.” At that moment, her father felt slighter and more insubstantial than Chloe. They walked awkwardly, like contestants in a three-legged race.

Wes held open the door. “Well, shoot, Addie. I’m sorry I had to call you down for this on your birthday.”

She did not break stride. “It’s not my birthday,” she said, and guided her father out.

At 6:30 that morning, Gillian Duncan had lit a match and waved a thermometer through it, spiking a temperature that made her father believe she truly was too sick to go to school. She spent the morning in her bedroom instead, listening to Alanis Morissette, braiding her long red hair, and painting her fingernails and toenails electric blue. In spite of the fact that she was seventeen years old and could fend for herself, her father had taken the day off from work to be with her. It raised her hackles and secretly pleased her all at once. As the owner of Duncan Pharmaceuticals, the biggest employer in Salem Falls, Amos Duncan was generally regarded as one of its richest and busiest citizens. But then, he had always had time to take care of her; he’d been doing it since Gilly was eight and her mother had died.

She was going crazy in her room and was about to do something really drastic, like pick up a textbook, when the doorbell rang. Listening closely, Gilly heard the voices of her friends downstairs. “Hi, Mr. D,” said Meg. “How’s Gillian?”

Before he could respond, Whitney interrupted. “We brought her jellybeans. My mom says they soak up a fever, and if they don’t, they taste so good you don’t care.”

“We brought her homework, too,” Chelsea added. Painfully tall, self-conscious, and shy, she was one of Gilly’s newest friends.

“Well, thank God you’re all here,” her father said. “I have a hard time recognizing Gilly unless she’s glued to the three of you. Just let me see if she’s awake.”

Gilly dove beneath the covers, trying desperately to look sick. Her father cracked open the door and peered inside. “You up for company, Gilly?”

Rubbing her eyes, Gillian sat up. “Maybe for a little while.”

He nodded, then called out to the girls. Meg led the charge up to Gillian’s room, a hail of Skechers pounding up the stairs. “I think my whole home could fit in this room,” Chelsea breathed, stepping inside.

“Oh, that’s right . . .” Whitney said. “This is the first time you’ve been to the manor.”

Gillian slanted a look at her father. It was a common joke in town that the reason the Duncan home sat to the east whereas all the other roads and developments sat to the west was because Amos had wanted a palace separate and apart for his kingdom.

“Yes,” Amos said, with a straight face. “We’re putting in a drawbridge this spring.”

Chelsea’s eyes widened. “For real?”

Whitney laughed. She liked Gillian’s dad; they all did. He knew how to make a teenager feel perfectly welcome.

“If you guys tire her out,” Amos said, “I’ll make you dig the moat.” He winked at Chelsea, then pulled the door closed behind him.

The girls wilted onto the carpet, lilies floating on a pond. “So?” Meg asked. “Did you watch Passions?”

Meg Saxton had been Gilly’s first best friend. Even as she’d grown up, she hadn’t lost her baby fat, and her brown hair flew away from her face in a riot of curls.

“I didn’t watch any soaps. I took a nap.”

“A nap? I thought you were faking.”

Gillian shrugged. “I’m not faking; I’m method-acting.”

“Well, FYI, the trig test sucked,” Whitney said. The only child of one of the town selectmen, Whitney O’Neill was nothing short of a knockout. She’d opened the bag of jellybeans to help herself. “Why can’t we write a spell to get A’s?”

Chelsea looked nervously at the large, lovely bedroom, then at Gillian. “Are you sure we can do magick here, with your father right downstairs?”

Of course they could-and would-do magick. They had been students of the Craft for nearly a year now; it was why they had gathered this afternoon. “I wouldn’t have invited you if I didn’t think it was okay,” Gillian said, withdrawing a black-and-white composition notebook from between the mattress and box spring. Written in bubble letters, with smiley-face O’s, was its title: Book of Shadows. She got out of bed and padded into the large adjoining bathroom. The others could hear her turning on the faucet, and then she returned with an eight-ounce glass of water. “Here,” she said, handing it to Whitney. “Drink.”

Whitney took a sip, then spat on the floor. “This is disgusting! It’s salt water!”

“So?” Gillian said. As she spoke, she walked around her friends, sprinkling more salt onto the carpet. “Would you rather waste time taking a bath? Or maybe you’ve got a better way to purify yourself?”

Grimacing, Whitney drank again, and then passed it to the others. “Let’s do something quick today,” Meg suggested. “My mom will kill me if I’m not home by four-thirty.” She scooted into position, across from Gillian on the floor, as Whitney and Chelsea made up the other corners of their square. Gillian reached for Whitney’s hand, and a cold draft snaked in through a crack in the window. As Whitney’s palm skimmed over Meg’s, the lamp on the nightstand dimmed. The pages of the notebook fluttered as Meg reached for Chelsea. And when Chelsea clasped Gillian’s hand, the air grew too thick to breathe.

“What color is your circle?” Gillian asked Chelsea.

“It’s blue.”

“And yours?”

Meg’s eyes drifted shut. “Pink.”

“Mine’s silver,” Whitney murmured.

“Pure gold,” Gillian said. All of their eyes were closed now, but they had learned over the course of the past year that you did not need them open to see. The girls sat, their minds winnowed to this point of power; as one snake of color after another surrounded them, plaited into a thick ring, and sealed them inside.

“Not again,” Delilah said with a sigh, as Addie hauled Roy Peabody into the kitchen.

“I don’t need this from you now.” Addie gritted her teeth as her father stumbled heavily on the arch of her foot.

“Is that Delilah?” Roy crowed, craning his neck. “Prettiest cook in New Hampshire.”

Addie managed to push her father into a narrow stairwell that led upstairs to his apartment. “Did Chloe give you any trouble?” she called back over her shoulder.

“No, honey,” Delilah sighed. “No trouble whatsoever.”

Through sheer will, Addie and Roy made it upstairs. “Why don’t you sit down, Daddy?” she said softly, guiding him to the frayed armchair that had stood in that spot all of Addie’s life.

She could smell the stew that Delilah had prepared for the lunch rush rising through the floor and the weave of the carpet-carrots, beef base, thyme. As a child, she had believed that breathing in the diner had rooted it in her system, making it as much as part of her as her blood or her bones. Her father had been like that, too, once. But it had been seven years since he’d voluntarily set foot behind the stove. She wondered if it caused him the same phantom pain that came from losing a vital limb-if he drank to dull the ache of it.

Addie crouched down beside his chair. “Daddy,” she whispered.

Roy blinked. “My girl.”

Tears sprang to her eyes. “I need you to do me a favor. The diner, it’s too busy for me to take care of. I need you-”

“Oh, Addie. Don’t.”

“Just the register. You won’t ever have to go into the kitchen.”

“You don’t need me to work the register. You just want to keep tabs on me.”

Addie flushed. “That’s not true.”

“It’s all right.” He covered her hand with his own and squeezed. “Every now and then it’s nice to know that someone cares where I am.”

Addie opened her mouth to say the things she should have said years ago to her father, all those months after her mother’s death when she was too busy keeping the diner afloat to notice that Roy was drowning, but the telephone interrupted her. Delilah was on the other end. “Get down here,” the cook said. “Your bad day? It just got worse.”

“Did you say something?” The cab driver’s eyes met Jack’s in the rearview mirror.

“No.”

“This look familiar yet?”

Jack had lied to the driver-what was one more lie in a long string of others?-confessing that he couldn’t remember the name of the town he was headed toward but that Route 10 ran right through its middle. He would recognize it, he said, as soon as Main Street came into view.

Now, forty minutes later, he glanced out the window. They were driving through a village, small but well-heeled, with a New England steepled white church and women in riding boots darting into stores to run their errands. It reminded him too much of the prep-school town of Loyal, and he shook his head. “Not this one,” he said.

What he needed was a place where he could disappear for a while-a place where he could figure out how to start all over again. Teaching-well, that was out of the question now. But it was also all he’d ever done. He’d worked at Westonbrook for four years . . . an awfully big hole to omit in a job interview for any related field. And even a McDonald’s manager could ask him if he’d ever been convicted of a crime.

Lulled by the motion of the taxi, he dozed off. He dreamed of an inmate he’d worked with on farm duty. Aldo’s girlfriend would commute to Haverhill and leave treasures in the cornfield for him: whiskey, pot, instant coffee. Once, she set herself up naked on a blanket, waiting for Aldo to come over on the tractor. “Drive slow,” Aldo would say, when they went out to harvest. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

“Salem Falls coming up,” the cab driver announced, waking him.

A hand-lettered blue placard announced the name of the town and proclaimed it home of Duncan Pharmaceuticals. The town was built outward from a central green, crowned by a memorial statue that flisted badly to the left, as if it had been rammed from the side. A bank, a general store, and a town office building were dotted along the green-all neatly painted, walks shoveled clear of snow. Standing incongruously at the corner was a junked railroad car. Jack did a double take, and as the cab turned to follow the one-way road around the green, he realized it was a diner.

In the window was a small sign.

“Stop,” Jack said. “This is the place.”

Harlan Pettigrew sat at the counter, nursing a bowl of stew. A napkin was tucked over his bow tie, to prevent staining. His eyes darted around the diner, lighting on the clock.

Addie pushed through the swinging doors. “Mr. Pettigrew,” she began.

The man blotted his mouth with his napkin and got to his feet. “It’s about time.”

“There’s something I need to tell you first. You see, we’ve been having a little trouble with some of our appliances.”

Pettigrew’s brows drew together. “I see.”

Suddenly the door opened. A man in a rumpled sports jacket walked in, looking cold and lost. His shoes were completely inappropriate for the season and left small puddles of melting snow on the linoleum floor. When he spotted her pink apron, he started toward her. “Excuse me-is the owner in?”

His voice made Addie think of coffee, deep and dark and rich, with a texture that slid between her senses. “That would be me.”

“Oh.” He seemed surprised by this. “Okay. Well. I, um, I’m here because-”

A wide smile spread over Addie’s face. “Because I called you!” She shook his hand, trying not to notice how the man froze in shock. “I was just telling Mr. Pettigrew, here, from the board of health, that the repairman was on his way to fix our refrigerator and dishwasher. They’re right through here.”

She began to tug the stranger into the kitchen, with Pettigrew in their wake. “Just a moment,” the inspector said, frowning. “You don’t look like an appliance repairman.”

Addie tensed. The man probably thought she was insane. Well, hell. So did the rest of Salem Falls.

The woman was insane. And God, she’d touched him. She’d reached right out and grabbed his hand, as if that were normal for him, as if it had been eight minutes rather than eight months since a woman’s skin had come in contact with his own.

If she was covering something up from the board of health, then the diner was probably violating a code. He started to back away, but then the woman bowed her head.

It was that, the giving in, that ruined him.

The part in her dark hair was crooked and pink as a newborn’s skin. Jack almost reached out one finger and touched it but stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. He knew better than anyone that you could not trust a woman who said she was telling the truth.

But what if you knew, from the start, that she was lying?

Jack cleared his throat. “I came as quickly as I could, ma’am,” he said, then glanced at Pettigrew. “I was paged from my aunt’s birthday party and didn’t stop home to get my uniform. Where are the broken appliances?”

The kitchen looked remarkably similar to the one at the jail. Jack nodded to a sequoia of a woman standing behind the grill and tried desperately to remember any technical trivia he could about dishwashers. He opened the two rolled doors, slid out the tray, and peered inside. “Could be the pump . . . or the water inlet valve.”

For the first time, he looked directly at the owner of the diner. She was small and delicate in build, no taller than his collarbone, but had muscles in her arms built, he imagined, by many a hard day’s labor. Her brown hair was yanked into a knot at the back of her head and held in place by a pencil, and her eyes were the unlikely color of peridot-a stone, Jack recalled, the ancient Hawaiians believed to be the tears shed by the volcano goddess. Those eyes, now, seemed absolutely stunned. “I didn’t bring my toolbox, but I can have this fixed by . . .” He pretended to do the math, trying to catch the woman’s eye. Tomorrow, she mouthed.

“Tomorrow,” Jack announced. “Now what’s the problem with the fridge?”

Pettigrew looked from the owner of the diner to Jack, and then back again. “There’s no point in checking out the rest of the kitchen when I have to return anyway,” he said. “I’ll come by next week to do my inspection.” With a curt nod, he let himself out.

The owner of the diner launched herself across the line, embracing the cook and whooping with delight. Radiant, she turned to Jack and extended her hand . . . but this time, he moved out of the way before she could touch him. “I’m Addie Peabody, and this is Delilah Piggett. We’re so grateful to you. You certainly sounded authentic.” Suddenly, she paused, an idea dawning. “You don’t actually know how to fix appliances, do you?”

“No. That was just some stuff I heard in the last place I worked.” He saw his opening and leaped. “I was on my way in to ask about the HELP WANTED sign.”

The cook beamed. “You’re hired.”

“Delilah, who died and left you king?” She smiled at Jack. “You’re hired.”

“Do you mind if I ask what the job is?”

“Yes. I mean, no, I don’t mind. We’re in the market for a dishwasher.”

A reluctant grin tugged at Jack’s mouth. “I heard.”

“Well, even if we fix the machine, we’ll still need someone to run it.”

“Is it full time?”

“Part time . . . afternoons. Minimum wage.”

Jack’s face fell. He had a Ph.D. in history, and was applying for a job that paid $5.15 per hour. Misinterpreting his reaction, Delilah said, “I’ve been asking Addie to hire a prep cook a while now. That would be a part-time morning job, wouldn’t it?”

Addie hesitated. “Have you ever worked in a kitchen before, Mr. . . .”

“St. Bride. Jack. And yeah, I have.” He didn’t say where the kitchen was, or that he’d been a guest of the state at the time.

“That beats the last guy you hired,” Delilah said. “Remember when we found him shooting up over the scrambled eggs?”

“It’s not like he mentioned his habit at the interview.” Addie turned to Jack. “How old are you?”

Ah, this was the moment-the one where she’d ask him why a man his age would settle for menial work like this. “Thirty-one.”

She nodded. “If you want the job, it’s yours.”

No application, no references, no questions about his past employment. And anonymity-no one would ever expect to find him washing dishes in a diner. For a man who had determined to put his past firmly behind him, this situation seemed too good to be true. “I’d like it very much,” Jack managed.

“Then grab an apron,” said his new boss.

Suddenly, he remembered that there was something he needed to do, if Salem Falls was going to become his new residence. “I need about an hour to run an errand,” he said.

“No problem. It’s the least I can do for the person who saved me.”

Funny, Jack thought. I was thinking the same thing.

Detective-Lieutenant Charlie Saxton fiddled with the radio in his squad car for a few moments, then switched it off. He listened to the squelch of slush under the Bronco’s tires and wondered, again, if he should have stayed with the Miami Police Department.

It was a hard thing to be a law enforcement officer in the town where you’d once grown up. You’d walk down the street, and instead of noticing the IGA, you’d remember the storeroom where a local teen had knifed his girlfriend. You’d pass the school playground and think of the drugs confiscated from the children of the town selectmen. Where everyone else saw the picture-perfect New England town of their youth, you saw the underbelly of its existence.

His radio crackled as he turned onto Main Street. “Saxton.”

“Lieutenant, there’s some guy here insisting he’ll talk only to you.”

Even with the bad reception, Wes sounded pissed. “He got a name?”

“If he does, he isn’t giving it up.”

Charlie sighed. For all he knew, this man had committed murder within town lines and wanted to confess. “Well, I’m driving into the parking lot. Have him take a seat.”

He swung the Bronco into a spot, then walked in to find his guest cooling his heels.

Literally. Charlie’s first thought, pure detective, was that the guy couldn’t be from around here-no one who lived in New Hampshire was stupid enough to wear a sports jacket and dress shoes in the freezing slush of early March. Still, he didn’t seem particularly distraught, like the recent victim of a crime, or nervous, like a perp. No, he just looked like a guy who’d had a lousy day. Charlie extended his hand. “Hi there. Detective-Lieutenant Saxton.”

The man didn’t identify himself. “Could I have a few minutes of your time?”

Charlie nodded, his curiosity piqued. He led the way to his office, and gestured to a chair. “What can I do for you, Mr. . . .”

“Jack St. Bride. I’m moving to Salem Falls.”

“Welcome.” Ah, it all was falling into place. This was probably some family man who wanted to make sure the locale was safe enough for his wife and kids and puppy. “Great place, great town. Is there something in particular I can help you with?”

For a long moment, St. Bride was silent. His hands flexed on his knees. “I’m here because of 651-B,” he said finally.

It took Charlie a moment to realize this well-dressed, soft-spoken man was talking about a legal statute that required certain criminals to report in to a local law enforcement agency for ten years or for life, depending on the charge for which they had been convicted. Charlie schooled his features until they were as blank as St. Bride’s, until it was clear that his former words of welcome had been rescinded. Then he pulled from his desk drawer the state police’s form to register a sexual offender.

March 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

“What are you doing?”

Jack spun at the sound of his new employer’s voice. He hid his fists behind his back. “Nothing.”

Addie’s lips tightened, and she stuffed her order pad into the waistband of her apron. “Look,” she said, “I don’t put up with anything shady on this job. Not drugs, not drinking, and if I catch you stealing, you’ll be out on your butt so quick you won’t know what kicked you.” She extended a hand, palm up. “Give it over.”

Jack glanced away from her and passed her the steel wool he’d been using.

“This is what you’re hiding? A Brillo pad?”

“Yeah.”

“For God’s sake . . . why?”

Jack slowly uncurled his fist. “My hands were dirty.” He stared again at the pads of his fingers, still black with ink from when Detective Saxton had taken a set of prints for the station’s records. The baby wipes at the booking room had been ineffective, and Jack could have asked to use the men’s room, but the feeling of having his fingers rolled one by one, again, was so unsettling that he wanted only to put the building far behind him. By the time he’d arrived at the diner, the ink had dried, and no amount of soap had managed to remove it.

He held his breath. There was no way she’d be able to tell, was there?

“Ink,” Addie announced. “It happens to me, too, when I read the newspaper. You’d think they could figure out a substance that stays on the page instead of your fingers.”

With relief, Jack followed her into the small pantry off the kitchen. She held out a bottle of industrial cleaner. “I got this from a customer, once, a farmer. It’s probably used to cure leather or something . . . but it also cleans just about every mess you can imagine.” Smiling, she held up her hands-chapped, red, cracked. “You keep using Brillo, you’ll wind up looking like me.”

Jack nodded and took the bottle from her. But what he really wanted to do was touch her hand, feel the tips of her fingers, see if they were the catastrophe she made them out to be or if they were simply as warm as they looked.

Roy sat up in bed with a start, cradling his head. God, it hurt. The room was spinning, but that was nothing compared to the noise that was nearly splitting his skull. Scowling, he stood. Damn Delilah Piggett, anyway. The cook thought she had a right to play alley cat with the pots and pans when people were trying to sleep just above her.

“Delilah!” he roared, stamping down the stairs that led into the kitchen.

But Delilah wasn’t there. Instead, a tall blond man who looked entirely too polished to be working as a dishwasher was standing at the big sink, rinsing out cookware. He finished another cast-iron pot and set it down-with a righteous, ear-splitting clank-onto a makeshift drying rack. “Delilah went to the bathroom,” the man said over his shoulder. “She should be back in a second.”

Delilah had left several burgers going on the grill. Fire hazard. He never would have done that in his days on the line. “Who the hell are you?” Roy barked.

“Jack St. Bride. I was just hired as a dishwasher.”

“For crying out loud, you don’t do it by hand. There’s a machine just over there.”

Jack smiled wryly. “Thanks, I know. It’s broken.” He stood uneasily before the old man, wondering who he was and why he’d appeared from a back staircase. The alcohol fumes coming off the guy could have pickled the cucumbers Delilah had sliced for garnish. Jack grabbed another dirty pot and set it into the soapy water. As he scrubbed, black smoke began to rise from the grill. He looked at his hands, at the pot, then at the older man. “The burgers are burning,” Jack said. “Do you mind flipping them?”

Roy was two feet away from the grill; the spatula lay within reach. But he sidled away from the cooking area, giving it a wide berth. “You do it.”

With a muttered curse, Jack turned off the water again, wiped his hands dry, and physically pushed Roy out of the way to flip the hamburgers. “Was that so hard?”

“I don’t cook,” the older man said succinctly.

“It’s a hamburger! I didn’t ask you to make beef Wellington!”

“I can make a hell of a beef Wellington, matter of fact, if I feel like it!”

The swinging doors that led to the dining room swelled forward like an eruption, then parted to reveal Addie. “What’s going on? I can hear you yelling all the way up front . . . Dad? What are you doing down here? And where’s Delilah?”

“Bathroom.” Jack turned to the sink, assuming his hired position. Let the old man explain what had happened.

But she didn’t even ask. She seemed delighted, in fact, to find her father in the kitchen. “How are you feeling?”

“Like a guy who can’t get any rest because someone’s downstairs banging around.”

Addie patted his hand. “I should have warned Jack that you were upstairs napping.”

Napping? Comatose, more like.

“Jack, if you’ve got a minute . . . there are some booths in the front that need clearing.”

Jack nodded and picked up a plastic bucket used for busing tables. His heart started to pound as he entered the front of the restaurant, and he wondered how long it would take until he no longer felt like his every move was being watched. But the diner was empty. Relieved, he cleared one table, then headed toward the counter. Jack put a coffee cup into the bin, then reached for a full plate, the food cold and untouched. French fries and a cheeseburger with extra pickles-someone had paid for a meal and hadn’t even taken a bite.

He was starving. He’d missed breakfast at the jail because he was being processed for release. Jack glanced around . . . Who would ever know? He grabbed a handful of fries and quickly stuffed them into his mouth.

“Don’t.”

He froze. Addie stood behind him, her face white. “Don’t eat her meal.”

Jack blinked. “Whose meal?”

But she turned away without a response and left him wondering.

At fifteen, Thomas McAfee knew he was going to be a late bloomer. Well, at least he sure as hell hoped so, because going through life five feet five inches tall, with arms like a chicken, wasn’t going to make for a pleasant adolescence.

Not that ninth grade was supposed to be pleasant. After taking medieval history last semester, Thomas figured high school was the modern equivalent of running the gauntlet. The hearty survived and went off to Colby-Sawyer and Dartmouth to play lacrosse. Everyone else slunk to the sidelines, destined to spend their lives as part of the audience.

But as Thomas stood on Main Street after school that day, freezing his ass off, he was thinking that Chelsea Abrams might like to root for the underdog.

Chelsea was more than just a junior. She was smart and pretty, with hair that caught the sunlight during the keyboarding class Thomas had with her. She didn’t hang with the cheerleaders, or the brains, or the heads. Instead, she was tight with three other girls-including Gillian Duncan, whose dad owned half the town. Okay, so they dressed a little weird, with a lot of black and scarves-a cross between the art freak Goths who hung out in the smoking pit and gypsy wannabes-but Thomas knew, better than most, that the package was far less important than what was on the inside.

Suddenly Chelsea turned the corner with her friends, even Gillian Duncan, who had been too sick to go to school but had made an amazing enough recovery now, to be out and about. Chelsea’s breath fogged in the cold air, each huff taking the shape of a heart. Thomas squared his shoulders and came up from behind, falling into step beside her.

He could smell cinnamon in her hair, and it made him dizzy.

“Did you know the alphabet’s all wrong?” he said casually, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

“Sorry?” Chelsea said.

“The letters are mixed up. U and I should be together.”

The other girls snickered, and Gillian Duncan’s voice fell like a hammer. “What’s it like at the moron end of the bell curve?” She looped her arm through Chelsea’s. “Let’s get out of here.”

Thomas felt heat rising above his collar and willed it to go away. Chelsea was tugged forward by her friends, leaving him standing alone. Did she turn back to look at him . . . or was she only adjusting the strap of her knapsack? As they crossed, Thomas could hear Chelsea’s friends laughing. But she wasn’t.

Surely that was something.

Charlie Saxton ate a peanut butter sandwich every day for lunch, although he hated peanut butter. He did it because for some reason, his wife Barbara thought he liked it, and she went to the trouble of packing him a lunch each morning. Around Valentine’s Day, she’d bought those little sugary hearts with messages on them, and for a month now she’d been sticking one into the soft white bread: HOT STUFF! CRAZY 4 U! With a fingernail, Charlie edged out the candy of the day and read its message aloud. “Kiss and tell.”

“Not me, boss. My lips are sealed.” The station’s receptionist hustled into his office and handed him a manila folder. “You know, I think it’s sweet when a guy over forty can still blush. This just came in on the fax.”

She closed the door behind her as Charlie slid the pages from the folder, scanning the court records of Jack St. Bride. They showed his arrest for a charge of felonious sexual assault against a minor . . . but a final disposition for simple sexual assault, a misdemeanor.

Charlie dialed the Grafton County attorney’s office, asking for the name of the prosecutor listed on the fax. “Sorry, she’s out for two weeks on vacation. Can someone else help you?” the secretary said.

Charlie hesitated, making a judgment call. The list of registered sexual offenders was public record. That meant anyone could walk into the station and find out who was on it and where that person lived. As of this morning, his list stretched to all of one person. In spite of what secrets he knew as a detective, Salem Falls had the reputation of being a sleepy New England town where nothing happened, which was the way the residents liked it. As soon as word got out to the male populace that a guy who’d been charged with rape had moved in near their wives and daughters, there would be hell to pay.

He could start a snowball rolling or he could give St. Bride the benefit of the doubt and just keep an eye on the guy himself for a couple of weeks.

“Maybe you could ask her to call me when she gets back,” Charlie said.

Gillian had been the first to try Wicca, after finding a Web site for teen witches on the Internet. It wasn’t Satan worship, like adults thought. And it wasn’t all love spells, like kids thought, either. It was simply the belief that the world had an energy all its own. Put that way, it wasn’t so mysterious. Who hadn’t walked through the woods and felt the air humming? Or stepped onto the snow and felt the ground reach up for one’s body heat?

She was glad to have Meg and Whitney and Chelsea as part of her coven-but they didn’t practice in quite the same way Gillian did. For them, it was a lark. For Gilly, it was a saving grace. And there was one spell she didn’t share with the others, one spell she tried every single day, in the hope that one of these afternoons it would work.

Now, while her father believed she was doing homework, she knelt on the floor with a candle-red, for courage. From her pocket, she withdrew a tattered photograph of her mother. Gilly visualized the last time she’d been held by her, until the feeling was so strong that she could feel the prints of her mother’s fingers on her upper arms.

“I call upon the Mother Goddess and the Father God,” Gilly whispered, rubbing patchouli oil over the candle, middle to ends. “I call upon the forces of the Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I call upon the Sun, Moon, and Stars to bring me my mother.”

She slid the picture of her mother beneath the candleholder and then set the candle inside it. She imagined her mother’s laugh, bright and full, which had always reminded Gilly of the sea. Then she sprinkled herbs in a circle around the candle: sage, for immortality, and cinnamon, for love. The room began to swim with scent. In the blue heat of the flame, she could see herself as a child. “Mama,” Gilly whispered, “come back.”

That moment, just like always, the candle flickered out.

Darla Hudnut twitched into the diner like a summertime mare. “Where you keeping him, Addie?” she called, unbuttoning her coat.

Darla was the backup waitress, someone Addie asked to work when she knew she wouldn’t be able to. This time, though, Addie couldn’t remember calling her. “How come you’re here?”

“You asked me last week, remember?” Darla said. She adjusted her uniform, stretched tight over her bust. “You said you were going out. But first I want to know all about the guy you hired.”

“Good lord, are there billboards on the street?”

“Oh, come on, Addie. Town like this . . . someone with a hangnail’s bound to get noticed. A tall, blond, handsome mystery that comes in out of thin air . . . you don’t think that might stir up some interest?”

Addie began to wipe the Naugahyde seats of a booth. “What are people saying?”

Darla shrugged. “So far I’ve heard that he’s your ex-husband, Amos Duncan’s brother, and the guy from the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Prize Patrol.”

At that, Addie laughed out loud. “If he’s Amos Duncan’s brother, he hasn’t mentioned anything. As for my ex-husband, well, that’s interesting, since I was never married. And I can assure you that I’m not a million dollars richer, either. He’s just a guy who’s down on his luck, Darla.”

“Then he’s not your date for tonight, either?”

Addie sighed. “I don’t have a date tonight, period.”

“That’s news to me.” Addie jumped as Wes Courtemanche breezed through the door. He was no longer wearing his police uniform but a spiffy coat and tie. “I clearly recall you saying I could take you out to dinner on Wednesday. Darla, is it Wednesday?”

“Think so, Wes.”

“There you go.” He winked. “Why don’t you change, Addie?”

She stood rooted to the spot. “You’ve got to be kidding. You couldn’t possibly believe that I might want to go out with a man who arrested my father.”

“That’s business, Addie. This is . . .” He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a curl of sound. “Pleasure.”

Addie moved to another table and began to scrub it. “I’m busy.”

“You’ve got Darla here to do that. And from what I hear, some new kid, too.”

“That’s exactly why I have to stay. To supervise.”

Wes covered her hand where it lay on the table, stilling her motion. “Darla, you’d take care of the new guy, wouldn’t you?”

Darla lowered her lashes. “Well . . . I could probably teach him a thing or two.”

“No doubt,” Addie said under her breath.

“Well, then. Come on. You wouldn’t want me to think you’ve got some objection to going out with me, would you?”

Addie met his eye. “Wes,” she said, “I have an objection to going out with you.”

He laughed. “God help me, Addie, but that piss-and-vinegar thing you’ve got going is some turn-on.”

Addie closed her eyes. It wasn’t fair to have to deal with Wes Courtemanche on a day like this one. Even Job was eventually cut a break. She also knew that if she refused to go, Wes would just sit in the diner and get on her nerves all night. The easiest way to get rid of him was to simply go out, then plead sick in the middle of the appetizer course.

“You win,” Addie conceded. “Let me just go tell Delilah where I’m off to.”

Before she could reach the kitchen, however, Jack emerged, holding her parka. Seeing the others, he blanched and ducked his head. “Delilah said I should bring this in,” he mumbled. “She said a night off won’t kill you.”

“Oh . . . thanks. Well, I’m glad you came out. I want you to meet Darla.”

Darla held out her hand, which Jack did not take. “Charmed,” she said.

“And this is Wes,” Addie said shortly, shrugging into her coat. “All right. Let’s get this over with. Darla, you’ll tell Delilah to have Chloe in bed by eight?”

No one seemed to be listening. Darla was turning up the TV volume from behind the counter, and Wes squinted at Jack, who trying to sink between the cracks of the linoleum. “Have we met?” Wes asked.

Jack ducked his head, refusing to meet the man’s eye. “No,” he said, clearing a table. “I don’t think so.”

It wasn’t that Wes Courtemanche was such an awful guy-he just wasn’t the right one for Addie, and nothing she said or did seemed to convince him otherwise. After about twenty minutes, a date with Wes took on the feeling of slamming oneself repeatedly into a brick wall. They walked side by side through town, holding Styrofoam cups of hot chocolate. Addie glanced across the green, where the lighted windows of the diner resembled holiday candelabra. “Wes,” she said for the sixth time, “I really have to go-now.”

“Three questions. Just three tiny questions so I can get to know you better.”

She sighed. “All right. And then I’m going.”

“Give me a minute. I’ve got to make sure they’re good ones.” They had just turned the corner of the green when Wes spoke again. “Why do you stay on at the diner?”

The question surprised Addie; she’d been expecting something far more facetious. She stopped walking, steam from her cup wreathing her face like a mystery. “I guess,” she said slowly, “because I have nowhere else to go.”

“How would you know, since you’ve been doing it all your life?”

Addie cast him a sidelong glance. “Is this number two?”

“No. It’s number one, part b.”

“It’s hard to explain, unless you’ve been in the business. You get attached to creating a place where people can come in and feel like they fit. Look at Stuart and Wallace . . . or the student who reads Nietzsche in the back booth every morning. Or even you, and the other police officers who stop in for coffee. If I left, where would they all go?” She shrugged. “In some ways, that diner’s the only home my daughter’s ever known.”

“But Addie-”

She cleared her throat before he could finish speaking. “Number two?”

“If you could be anything in the world, what would you be?”

“A mother,” she said after a moment. “I’d be a mother.”

Wes slid his free arm around her waist and grinned, his teeth as white as the claw of moon above them. “You must be reading my mind, honey, since that brings me right to my third question.” He pressed his lips over her ear, his words vibrating against her skin. “How do you like your eggs in the morning?”

He’s too close. Addie’s breath knotted at the back of her throat and every inch of her skin broke out in a cold sweat. “Unfertilized!” she answered, managing to jam her elbow into his side. Then she ran for the buttery windows of the diner like a sailor from a capsized ship who spies a lighthouse, lashes his hope to it, and swims toward salvation.

Jack and Delilah stood side by side chopping onions, taking advantage of a slow after-dinner crowd to get a head start on tomorrow’s soup. The scent of onions pricked the back of his nose and drew false tears, but anything was preferable to finding himself backed into corners by Darla. Delilah raised the tip of her knife and pointed to a spot a foot away from Jack. “She died right there,” Delilah said. “Came in, gave Roy hell, and collapsed on the floor.”

“But it wasn’t her fault Roy had put the wrong side order on the plate.”

Delilah looked at him sidelong. “Doesn’t matter. Roy was busy as all get-out and didn’t want to take any fuss from Margaret, so he just said, ‘You want your peas? Here’re your goddamn peas.’ And he threw the pot of them at her.”

Delilah scraped her onions into a bucket. “He didn’t hit her or anything. It was just a temper he was in. But I guess it was too much for Margaret.” She handed Jack another onion to chop. “Doctor said her heart was like a bomb ticking in her chest and that it would have given out even if she hadn’t been fighting with Roy. I say a heart stopped that day, sure, but I’m thinking it was his. Everyone knows he blames himself for what happened.”

Jack thought of what it would be like to go through life knowing that the last conversation you had with your wife involved throwing a cast-iron pot at her. “All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down,” he agreed.

“Mighty profound from a dishwasher.” Delilah tilted her head. “Where’d you come from, anyway?”

Jack’s hand slipped and the knife sliced across the tip of his finger. Blood welled at the seam, and he lifted his hand before he could contaminate the food.

Delilah fussed over him, handing him a clean rag to stop the bleeding and insisting he hold the wound under running water. “It’s nothing,” Jack said. He brought his fingertip to his mouth, sucking. “Must’ve been hard on Addie.”

“Huh? Oh, you mean her mom dying. Actually, it gave her something to throw herself into, after Chloe.” Delilah looked up. “You do know about Chloe?”

Jack had heard Addie speaking to Chloe in the tender, idiomatic language of a mother. “Her daughter, right? I haven’t met her yet, but I figured she was around here somewhere.”

“Chloe was Addie’s little girl. She died when she was ten. Just about ruined Addie-she spent two years holed up in her house, nothing but her own upset for company. Until her mom passed and it was up to her to take care of Roy and the diner.”

Jack pressed the cloth against his cut so hard he could feel his pulse. He thought about the plate he’d stolen fries from today, heaped with food no one had touched. He thought of all the times he’d heard Addie talking to a girl who didn’t exist. “But-”

Delilah held up a hand. “I know. Most people around here think Addie’s gone off the deep end.”

“You don’t?”

The cook chewed on her lower lip for a moment, staring at Jack’s bandaged hand. “I think,” she said finally, “that all of us have got our ghosts.”

Before shutting off the grill and leaving with Darla, Delilah had made Jack a burger. He was sitting on the stool next to Chloe’s now, watching Addie close up. She moved from table to table like a bumblebee, refilling the sugar containers and the ketchup bottles, keeping time to the tune of a commercial on the overhead TV.

She’d come back from her dinner engagement silent and disturbed-so much so that at first Jack was certain she knew about him. But as he watched her attack her job with a near frenzy, he realized that she was only being penitent, as if she had to work twice as hard to make up for taking a few hours off.

Jack lifted the burger to his mouth and took a bite. Addie was now hard at work on the salt shakers, mixing the contents with rice so that the salt grains wouldn’t stick. On the television, the Jeopardy! theme music swelled through the speakers. Without intending to, Jack found himself sitting higher in his seat. Alex Trebek walked onto the stage in his natty suit and greeted the three contestants, then pointed to the board, where the computerized jingle heralded the first round’s categories.

A method of working this metal was not mastered until 1500 B.C.

“What is iron?” Jack said.

A contestant on the television rang in. “What is iron?” the woman repeated.

“That’s correct!” Alex Trebek answered.

Addie looked up at Jack, then at the TV, and smiled. “Jeopardy! fan?”

Jack shrugged. “I guess.”

In the 1950s, this Modesto, CA, company became the first winery with its own bottle-making plant.

“What is E. & J. Gallo?”

Addie set down the salt container she’d been holding. “You’re more than just a fan,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “You’re really good.”

Nine of the twelve chapters in this book of the Bible set in Babylon revolve around dreams and visions.

“What is Isaiah?” Addie guessed.

Jack shook his head. “What is Daniel?”

In the original Hebrew of his Lamentations, each verse in three chapters begins with a new letter, from aleph on.

“Who is Jeremiah?”

“You know a lot about the Bible,” Addie said. “Are you a priest or something?”

He had to laugh out loud at that. “No.”

“Some kind of professor?”

Jack blotted his mouth with a napkin. “I’m a dishwasher.”

“What were you yesterday, then?”

A prisoner, thought Jack, but he looked into his lap and said, “Just another guy doing something he didn’t really like doing.”

She smiled, content to let it go. “Lucky for me.” Addie took the mop that Jack had brought from the kitchen and she began to swish it over the linoleum.

“I’ll do it.”

“You go ahead and eat,” Addie said. “I don’t mind.”

It was these small kindnesses that would break him. Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he’d promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again. But here was Addie, taking him on faith, doing his work to boot-even though, according to Delilah, fate had screwed her over, too.

He wanted to tell her he understood, but after almost a year of near silence, words did not come easily for him. So very slowly, he took a handful of French fries and set them on Chloe’s untouched plate. After a moment, he added his pickle. When he finished, he found Addie staring at him, her hands balanced on top of the mop, her body poised for flight.

She believed he was mocking her; it was right there in the deepest part of her eyes, bruised and tender. Her fingers wrung the wooden handle.

“I . . . I owed her, from this afternoon,” he said.

“Who?” The word was less than a whisper.

Jack’s eyes never left hers. “Chloe.”

Addie didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up the mop and began to swab with a vengeance. She cleaned until the floor gleamed, until the lights of the ceiling bounced off the thin residue of Pine-Sol, until it hurt Jack to watch her acting fearless and indifferent because she reminded him so much of himself.

By the time Addie pulled the door shut and locked it behind her, it was snowing outside. Fist-size flakes, the kind that hooked together in midair like trick skydivers. Inwardly, she groaned. It meant getting up early tomorrow to shovel the walkways.

Jack stood a distance away, the lapels of his sports jacket pulled up to shield his neck from the cold. Addie was a firm believer that someone’s past deserved to stay in the past-she herself was surely a poster child for keeping secrets. She didn’t know what kind of man walked around in a New Hampshire winter without a coat; she’d never met someone who was bright enough to know the answers to every Jeopardy! question but willing to work for minimum wage in a menial job. If Jack wanted to lie low, she could offer him that.

And she wouldn’t think about his unprecedented reaction to Chloe.

“Well,” she said, “See you tomorrow morning.”

Jack didn’t seem to hear. His back was turned, his arms stretched out in front of him. Addie realized, with some shock, that he was catching snowflakes on his tongue.

When was the last time she’d thought of snow as anything but a hindrance?

She opened the door of her car, turned the ignition and carefully pulled the car away. In retrospect, she did not know what made her look back into the rearview mirror. If not for the yellow eye of the streetlight in front of the diner, she might never have seen him sitting on the bare curb with his head bowed.

With a curse, she took a hard left, curving around the green to the front of the diner again.“Do you need a ride?”

“No. Thanks, though.”

Addie’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You haven’t got a place to stay, have you?” Before he could protest, she got out of the car. “It so happens I know of a room for rent. The bad news is you’re going to have a roommate whose disposition isn’t always very sunny. The good news is if you get hungry in the middle of the night, there’s a hell of a kitchen you can raid.” As Addie spoke, she unlocked the door of the diner again and stepped over the threshold. She found Jack holding back, haloed by the falling snow. “Look. My father could use the company. You’d actually be doing me a favor.”

Jack didn’t move a muscle. “Why?”

“Why? Well, because when he spends too much time alone he gets . . . upset.”

“No. Why are you doing this for me?”

Addie met his suspicion head-on. She was doing this because she knew what it was like to hit rock bottom and to need someone to give you a leg up. She was doing this because she understood how a world jammed with phones and e-mail and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone. But she also knew if she said either of these things, Jack’s pride would have him halfway down the street before she could take another breath.

So Addie didn’t answer. Instead, she started across the checkerboard floor of the diner.

Tonight, one of the Jeopardy! categories had been Greek mythology. This hero was given permission to bring his love Eurydice back from the underworld but lost her by turning back too quickly to see if she was following.

Addie wouldn’t be like Orpheus. She kept walking with her eyes fixed ahead until she heard the faint jingle of bells on the door, proof that Jack had come in from the cold.

September 1999

North Haverhill,

New Hampshire

A ldo LeGrande had a four-by-four inch tattoo of a skull on his forehead, which was enough to make Jack take the bunk farthest away from him. He didn’t react when Jack set his things down, just continued to write in a purple composition notebook whose cover had been hand-decorated with scribbled swastikas and cobras.

Jack began to set belongings in a small tub that sat at the foot of the bed. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Aldo said. “Mountain uses that to piss in in the middle of the night.”

Jack let the warning slide off his back. He had spent a month at Grafton County. Every new inmate started out in maximum security and was then allowed to petition for a move to medium security after two weeks of good behavior. Two weeks after that, the inmate could move to minimum security. Each time Jack had moved pods, he’d had to face some kind of test from the inmates already living there. In maximum, he’d been spat at. In medium, he’d been jabbed in the kidneys and gut in corners too dark for the security cameras to see.

“Mountain will get over it,” Jack said tightly. He stacked his books from the prison library last and then shoved the plastic container under the lower bunk.

“Like to read?” Aldo asked.

“Yes.”

“How come?”

Jack glanced over his shoulder. “I’m a teacher.”

Aldo grinned. “Yeah, well, I work for the state paving roads, but you don’t see me painting a dotted yellow line down the middle of the floor.”

“It’s a little different,” Jack said. “I like knowing things.”

“Can’t learn the world from a book, Teach.”

But Jack knew the world did not make sense, anyway. He’d had four weeks to ruminate on that very topic. Why would someone like himself even bother listening to someone like Aldo LeGrande?

“You keep your ass tight and prissy like that,” Aldo said, “and you’re gonna be candy for the other boys.”

Jack tried not to feel his heart race at the other man’s words. It was what every man thought about when he conjured an image of jail. Would it be irony or biblical justice to be convicted of sexual assault and then find himself the victim of a prison rape?

“What’re you in for?” Aldo asked, picking his teeth with his pen.

“What are you in for?”

“Rape,” Aldo said.

Jack did not want to admit to Aldo that he had been charged with the same offense. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, either. “Well, I didn’t do what they say.”

At that, Aldo tipped back his head and laughed. “None of us has, Teach,” he said. “Not a single one.”

The minimum-security pod resembled a daisy: small groups of bunks sticking out like petals from the central common room. Unlike the floors downstairs, there were no cells, just one universal locked door and a guard’s booth in the middle. The bathrooms were separate from the sleeping area, and inmates had the freedom to go there as they pleased.

Jack deliberately went to the bathroom a half hour before lights out, when everyone else was still watching TV. He glanced into the common room in passing. A big black man sat closest to the television, the remote control in his fist. He was the highest in the pecking order, the one who got to choose all the programming. Other inmates sat according to their association with him, closest buddies sitting just behind him, and so on, until you got to the row of stragglers far back, who simply did their best to stay out of his way.

By the time Jack returned to his bunk, Aldo was gone. He quickly stripped down to his shorts and T-shirt and crawled into bed, facing into the wall. As he drifted off, he dreamed of autumn, with its crisp apple air and sword-edged blue sky. He pictured his team running drills through the muddy soil, cleats kicking up small tufts of earth so that by the end of the day’s practice, the girls had completely changed the lay of the land. He saw their ponytails streaming out behind them, ribbons on the wind.

He woke up suddenly, sweating, as he always did when he thought of what had happened. But before he could even push the memory away, he was stunned to feel a hand at his throat, pinning him against the thin mattress. At first all Jack could see were the yellowed eggs of the man’s eyes. Then he spoke, his teeth gleaming in the darkness. “You’re breathing my fucking air.”

The man was the one he’d seen earlier holding the television remote, the one Aldo had referred to as Mountain. Muscles rippled beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, and at eye level with Jack in the upper bunk, he was easily six and a half feet tall. Jack reached for the hand pinning his windpipe. “There’s plenty of air,” he rasped.

“There was plenty before you came, asshole. Now I have to share it with you.”

“I’m sorry,” Jack choked. “I’ll stop.”

Almost immediately, the big man’s hold eased. Without another word Mountain hefted himself into his own bed. Jack lay awake, trying not to breathe, trying not to recall how Mountain’s thick fingers had let go of his throat and begun to caress it gently instead.

The cows surprised Jack. Chained individually to their milking stanchions, he had first thought this was some kind of cruel joke: prison animals being locked up. But a few days of the routine of the farm and he realized that they never got turned loose-not out of cruelty but because that was where they were comfortable. Jack would watch their languid, drowsy expressions and wonder if it would be like this for him, too-after so many months of being incarcerated, did you simply stop fighting it?

The twin brothers who ran the farm had assigned him feed duty, which involved mixing grains from two different silos in an automatic overhead chute and then carrying the wheelbarrow load to the small troughs in front of the cows. Jack had done it early this morning before the milking; now, at just past 4:30, he was scheduled to do it again. He maneuvered the wheelbarrow to the far end of the huge barn. It was shrouded in cobwebs and poorly lit, and this morning Jack had had the scare of a lifetime when a bat dove out of the rafters and skittered onion-skin wings along his shoulder.

The automatic mixing mechanism was powered by a toggle switch on one of the heavy upright wooden beams. Jack flipped it, then waited for the grain to fill the top of the chute. The noise made by the machine vibrating to life was deafening, sound pounding around like a hailstorm.

The first punch, square in the kidney, drove him to his knees. Jack scrambled for purchase on the cement floor, twisting to see who had attacked him from behind.

“Get up,” Mountain said. “I ain’t done.”

It cost three dollars to go to the jail’s nurse. Mostly, this was because she was one of the few females on site and inmates would rather malinger and watch her breasts shifting beneath her white uniform than sit in a six-foot-by-six-foot cell, or thresh grain. Inmates who paid the fee were granted twenty minutes on one of the two padded tables and a free sample of Tylenol.

Jack was brought there by a security guard, who assured him that this visit was on the house. One of the twins who ran the farm had found Jack buried up to his neck in a heap of feed, blood spreading over his blue denim shirt in the shape of a valentine heart. Jack hadn’t been asked any questions, nor had he volunteered information.

The nurse gathered her materials on a metal tray. “Want to tell me what happened?”

Jack could barely speak past the blinding pain that came every time he moved his head. “Nosebleed,” he choked out.

“First nosebleed I’ve ever seen that involved broken nasal cartilage. How about that contusion on your spine, and your ribs? Or should I guess . . . you were kicked by a cow?”

“Sounds good,” Jack said.

Shaking her head, she packed his nostrils with cotton and sent him back to the pod. There, in the common room, men sat playing board games. Jack made his way to an unoccupied table and began to play solitaire.

Suddenly, two tables away, Aldo lunged across a Scrabble board and grabbed another inmate by the lapels. “You callin’ me a liar?”

The man looked him in the eye. “Yeah, LeGrande. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

Jack averted his gaze and turned over the queen of spades. Put it there, on the column with the five of diamonds . . .

“I’m telling you, it’s a word,” Aldo insisted.

Hearing the commotion, the correctional officer on duty appeared. “What’s the matter, Aldo? Someone not want to share his toys with you?”

Aldo jammed his finger at the game board. “Isn’t this a word?”

The guard leaned closer. “O-C-H-E-R. I’ve never heard it.”

“It’s a word,” Jack said quietly.

Aldo turned with a smug grin. “You tell ’em, Teach. I read it in one of your books.”

“Ocher,” Jack said. “It’s a color. Kind of orange.”

“Twenty-seven points,” Aldo added.

His opponent narrowed his eyes at Jack. “Why the hell should I listen to you?”

“Because he studies all kinds of stuff,” Aldo said. “He knows the answers to all kinds of questions.”

Jack wished Aldo would just shut up. “Not the ones that matter,” he muttered.

Jack scraped the shovel along the concrete, holding his breath against the pungent stink of manure as he tossed another load into the wheelbarrow. The cows twisted their muscular necks to blink at him with great brown eyes, their udders already swollen with milk again and distending their legs like a bellows.

One of the cows lowed at him, batting eyelashes as long as his pinky. Gently, he moved his shovel to one hand and traced the marbled black-and-white pattern of her hips and side. The heat and softness of it made his throat close.

Without warning, his shovel was knocked away and he found himself sprawled facedown. He felt the scratch of hay against his temple, the fetid puddle of manure beneath his cheek, and the cold bare air on his backside as his jeans were wrenched down. The deep voice of Mountain Felcher curled at the nape of his neck. “How much you know, Einstein? You know that I was gonna do this to you?”

Jack felt the meat of Mountain’s fingers close over his neck. He heard every tooth of a zipper coming undone.

“Aw, Christ, Mountain,” came a voice, “couldn’t you pick someone else?”

Mountain ground himself against Jack. “Shut up, LeGrande. This ain’t your business.”

“Sure it is. St. Bride’s got a bet going with a bunch of us. He says he can get every answer right on Jeopardy! before the brains who are playing do. There’s a can of coffee in it for each of us if he screws up.”

Jack took small, shallow breaths through his mouth. He had made no bet with Aldo or anyone else in the pod. But he’d spend his life’s savings on coffee, if that was what it took to get this monster off his back.

“We get to place our commissary order tomorrow-if he’s stuck in the infirmary tonight, thanks to you, we won’t get our coffee for another week.”

Jack’s arms were released. He scrambled upright to find Mountain buttoning his jeans and looking at him speculatively. “I seen that show. Ain’t no one smart enough to get them questions all right.” He crossed his arms. “I don’t want coffee if you lose.”

“Fine. I’ll buy you a chocolate bar instead.”

Mountain’s hands were on his shoulders in an instant, drawing him to his feet. “You get those answers right tonight, then tomorrow I’ll leave you be. But you play again next night, and the next. And the minute you fuck up, you’re mine.” He touched Jack’s jaw, the pads of his fingers soft. “You lose that game, and you come to me like you want it.”

Jack froze. He watched Mountain leave the barn, then his legs gave out beneath him. Pants still down around his knees, he sat in the straw, trying to draw in air.

“You okay?”

Until he’d spoken, Jack had completely forgotten that Aldo was standing there. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and nodded. “Thank you.”

“The only thing Mountain likes more than a piece of ass is new entertainment.” A bright flush worked its way up Jack’s neck and face as he righted his clothes. “It’s no big deal,” Aldo said, shrugging. “We’ve all been there.”

Jack felt himself begin to shake uncontrollably, a delayed reaction from what had nearly happened. In jail, you gave up everything-your possessions, your job, your home. The thought that any man might take even more from an inmate-something as irreplaceable as dignity-made Jack so angry his blood ran faster.

He could not let Mountain Felcher win.

Jack won. And like Scheherezade, he gained a reprieve for several nights. His days took on a frenetic quality: he’d work eight hours, then grab as many books as he could from the prison library and carry them to his bunk. He read before dinner, during dinner, after dinner . . . until the familiar strains of the television game show filled the common room. He went to sleep thinking of the ingredients in a Tom Collins; he woke imagining the history of the Sino-Russian War. But soon, he wasn’t doing it alone. Prisoners who at first were angry that they hadn’t gotten the coffee they’d expected had come to root for Jack, having realized that self-esteem packed just as much of a high as caffeine. Eager to help, they took books out from the library, too, and fashioned questions for him. They’d quiz Jack as he brushed his teeth, bused his cafeteria tray, made his bunk.

After a week, all of Grafton County Correctional Facility knew about Jack’s bet with Mountain Felcher. The guards wagered with each other, a pool for the day that Jack would eventually stumble. The maximum- and medium-security pods followed his wins through the jail grapevine. And at 7 P.M., every TV in the prison would be tuned to Jeopardy!

One night, as had become the custom, Jack sat to Mountain Felcher’s left, his eyes riveted on the television screen overhead. The leading contestant was a woman named Isabelle with wild curly hair. “Quotable Quotes for six hundred,” she said.

The historian Cornelius Tacitus said these beings are “on the side of the stronger.” The other inmates stared at Jack, waiting. Even the correctional officer on duty had given up on his crossword puzzle, and he stood nearby with his arms crossed. Jack felt the response bubbling up from his throat, easily, carelessly. “The angels.”

In the next breath, he realized he’d given the wrong answer. “I meant-”

“The gods,” said the contestant.

A bell rang and $600 showed up in Isabelle’s account. The common room grew so quiet that Jack could hear his pulse. He’d grown so sure of his skill that he hadn’t even stopped to think before he spoke. “The gods,” Jack repeated, licking his dry lips. “I meant the gods.”

Mountain turned to him, eyes flat and black as obsidian. “You lose,” he said.

Out of sympathy, the others left Jack alone. When he threw up in the bathroom, when he stalked in silence to the cafeteria, they pretended not to see. They thought he was terrified past the point of speech, and it was something they could understand-by now, everyone knew that the forfeit of the bet was Jack’s free will. It was one thing to be raped; it was another thing entirely to offer yourself as a sacrifice.

But Jack wasn’t frightened. He was so angry that he could not utter a word, in case his fury spilled out. And he wanted to keep it inside him, glowing like a coal, hoping to burn Mountain Felcher and scar him as deeply as Jack himself was sure to be scarred.

The night that Jack lost the bet, Aldo’s voice drifted to him as he lay on his bunk. “You just do it, and then you put it behind you and never let yourself think about it,” Aldo said quietly. “Kind of like jail.”

Jack stood in the shadows of the barn, watching Mountain’s arms bunch and tighten as he lifted another bale of hay onto the stack he was making in an alcove. “Cat got your tongue?” Mountain asked, his back still to Jack. “Oh, no. That’s right. I got your tongue. And the whole rest of you, too.”

Mountain stripped off his work gloves. Sweat gleamed on his forehead and traced a line down the middle of his T-shirt. “I had my doubts about you paying your debt.” He sat on a bale of hay. “Go on, drop those pants.”

“No.”

Mountain’s eyes narrowed. “You’re supposed to show up wanting it.”

“I showed up,” Jack said, keeping his voice even. “That’s all you get.”

Mountain jumped him and set him in a headlock. “For someone who thinks he’s so smart, you don’t know when to shut your mouth.”

It took all the courage in the world, but Jack did the one thing he knew Mountain wouldn’t expect: He went still in the man’s hold, unresisting, accepting. “I am smart, you asshole,” Jack said softly. “I’m smart enough to know that you’re not going to break me, not even if you screw me three times a day for the next seven months. Because I’m not going to be thinking what a tough guy you are. I’m going to be thinking you’re pathetic.”

Mountain’s grip eased, a loose noose around Jack’s neck. “You don’t know nothing about me!” In punishment and proof, he ground his hips against Jack from behind. Denim scraped against denim, but there was no ridge of arousal. “You don’t know nothing!”

Jack blocked out the feel of Mountain’s body behind his, of what might happen if he pushed too hard and sent the man over the edge. “Looks like you can’t fuck me,” he said, then swallowed hard. “Why don’t you just fuck yourself instead?”

With a roar that set three sparrows in the rafters to flight, Mountain wrenched away. He had never tried to force someone who had given in yet refused to give up. And that one small distinction made Jack every bit as mighty as the bigger man.

“St. Bride.”

Jack turned, his arms folded across his chest-partly to make him look relaxed and partly because he needed to keep himself from falling apart.

“I don’t need you when there’s a hundred others I can have,” Mountain blustered. “I’m letting you go.”

But Jack didn’t move. “I’m leaving,” he said slowly. “There’s a difference.”

The black man’s head inclined just the slightest bit, and Jack nodded in response. They walked out of the barn into the blinding sunlight, the foot of space between them as inviolable as a stone wall.

Mountain Felcher’s sentence for burglary ended three months later. That night, in the common room, there was a buzz of interest. Now that Mountain was gone, the program lineup was up for grabs. “There’s hockey on, you moron,” an inmate cried out.

“Yeah, and your mother’s the goalie.”

The footsteps of the guard on duty echoed as he hurried down the hall toward the raised voices. Jack closed the book he was reading and walked to the table where the two men threw insults like javelins. He reached down and plucked the remote from one’s hand, settled himself in the seat just beneath the TV, and turned on Jeopardy!

This Hindi word for prince is derived from Rex, latin for King.

From the back of the room, an inmate called out: “What is Raja?”

The two countries with the highest percentage of Shiite Muslims.

“What are Iran and Saudi Arabia!” Aldo said, taking the chair beside Jack.

The man who had wanted to watch hockey sank down behind them. “What are Iran and Iraq,” he corrected. “What are you, stupid?”

The guard returned to his booth. And Jack, who held the remote control on his thigh like a scepter, knew every answer by heart.

Late March 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Every day for the past three weeks, Jack had awakened in Roy Peabody’s guest room and looked out the window to see Stuart Hollings-a diner regular-walking his Holstein around the town green for a morning constitutional. The old man came without fail at 5:30 A.M., a collar fitted around the placid animal, who plodded along like a faithful puppy.

This morning, when Jack’s alarm clock went off, he looked out to see a lone car down Main Street, and puddles of mud that lay like lakes. Scanning the green, he realized Stuart and his animal were nowhere to be seen.

Shrugging, he grabbed a fresh T-shirt and boxers-the result of a Wal-Mart shopping spree he’d gone on with his first paycheck-and stepped into the hall.

Coming out of the bathroom, Roy startled when he saw Jack. “Aw, Christ,” he said, doing a double take. “I dreamed you died.”

“That must have been awful.”

Roy walked off. “Not as awful as it felt just now when I realized it wasn’t true.”

Jack grinned as he went into the bathroom. When he’d moved in it was immediately clear that it had been some time since Roy had had a roommate . . . unlike Jack, who had eight months of practice living among other men. Consequently, Roy did what he could to keep Jack from thinking this was truly his home. He made Jack buy his own groceries-even ketchup and salt-and mark them with his initials before putting them into the refrigerator or the cupboard. He hid the television remote control, so that Jack couldn’t just sit on the couch and flip through the channels. All this might have begun to wear on Jack, if not for the fact that every morning when he came into the kitchen to find Roy eating his cereal, the old man had also carefully set a place for Jack.

Before joining Roy for breakfast, Jack glanced out the window.

“What are you looking for?”

“Nothing.” Jack pulled out his chair and emptied some muesli into his bowl, then set up the box like a barrier. A cereal fort, that was what he’d called it as a kid. Over the cardboard wall he saw Roy take a second helping of Count Chocula. “That stuff’ll kill you.”

“Oh, good. I figured it was going to be cirrhosis.”

Jack shoveled a spoonful of cereal into his mouth. He wondered if Stuart had gone on vacation. “So,” he said. “How did I die?”

“In my dream, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

The old man leaned closer. “Scabies.”

“Scabies?”

“Uh-huh. They’re bugs-mites-that get right under your skin. Burrow up inside your bloodstream and lay their eggs.”

“Thanks,” Jack said dryly. “I know what they are. But I don’t think they kill you.”

“Oh, sure, wise guy. When’s the last time you saw someone who had them?”

Jack shook his head, amused. “I have to admit . . . never.”

“I did-in the navy. A sailor. Looked like someone had drawn all over him with pencil, lines running up between his fingers and toes and armpits and privates, like he was being mapped from the inside out. Itched himself raw, and the scratches got infected, and one morning we buried him at sea.”

Jack wanted to explain how following that logic, the man had died of a blood infection rather than scabies. Instead, he looked Roy right in the eye. “You know how you get scabies,” he said casually. “From sharing clothing and bed sheets with an infected person. Which means if I had really died of scabies, like in your dream, you wouldn’t be that far behind me.”

Roy was silent for a moment. Then he stood and cleared his place. “You know, I’ve been thinking. There isn’t much point in both of us buying milk when we can’t each get through a half-gallon in a week. Might as well do it so you buy the milk one week and the next week it’s my turn.”

“Seems economically sound.”

“Exactly.” Roy rinsed his bowl. “You still wash your own sheets, though.”

Jack stifled a grin. “Well, of course. You never know what you’re going to catch from someone else’s laundry.”

Roy eyed him, trying to decide whether Jack was being sincere. Then he shuffled toward the living room. “I knew I liked you for a reason,” he said.

Roy, who categorically refused to work in the kitchen, manned the cash register under the watchful eye of his daughter. Addie let him out of sight only briefly, and even then with warnings: “It should only take you ten minutes to run to the bank, Dad, and I’m going to be counting.” Mostly he sat and did crossword puzzles, trying to pretend he wasn’t looking when Darla, the relief waitress, bent down to tie her shoe and her skirt rode up.

It was nearly 11 A.M.; a time that was slow for the waitresses but frenetic for the kitchen staff. Roy could hear the oil in the deep fryer heating up infinitesimally, degree by degree. He would sometimes remember how he was once so good he could cut inch-long segments from a carrot with a cleaver, blindfolded, and end the last slice a half inch from the hand that held it in place.

A coin rang onto the Formica beside the cash register. “Penny for your thoughts,” Addie said, stuffing the rest of her tip into her pockets.

“They’re worth a quarter.”

“Hustler.” Addie rubbed the small of her back. “I know what you were thinking, anyway.”

“Oh, you do?” It amazed him, sometimes, how Addie could do the most ordinary thing-blink her eyes or fold her legs beneath a chair-and suddenly Roy would swear that his wife had come back. He looked at his daughter’s tired eyes, at her chapped hands, and wondered how Margaret’s losing her life had led Addie to throw away her own.

“You’re thinking of how easy it is for you to slide back into this routine.”

Roy laughed. “What routine? Sitting on my butt all day?”

“Sitting in the diner on your butt all day.”

It was impossible to tell Addie what he really thought: that this diner meant nothing to him, not since Margaret’s death. But Addie had gotten it into her head that keeping the Do-Or-Diner open would give him a purpose he wouldn’t find at the bottom of a bottle of vodka. What Addie didn’t understand was that what you had could never make up for what you’d lost.

He and Margaret had closed the diner for a week each summer to take Addie on a family vacation. They had driven by car, to towns with names that drew them: Cape Porpoise, Maine; Egypt, Massachusetts; Paw Paw, Michigan; Defiance, Ohio. Roy would point out a flock of Canada geese, a looming purple mountain, a sunlit field of wheat-and then he’d glance in the back to find his daughter asleep on the backseat, the whole world passing her by. “There’s an elephant in the lane next to us!” he’d call out. “The moon is falling out of the sky!” Anything to make Addie take stock of her surroundings.

“The moon is falling out of the sky,” Roy murmured now.

“What?”

“I said, yes, there are advantages to being here.”

A customer came in, ringing the bell over the door. “Hey,” Addie called out, her smile set firmly in place like a child’s Halloween mask. As she went to seat the woman, Jack poked his head through the double doors.

“Roy,” he whispered. “Did Stuart come in today?”

“Stuart, the old guy?” Roy said, although he himself couldn’t have been much younger than Stuart. “Nah.”

“I, uh, I’m worried about him.”

“How come?”

“He hasn’t missed breakfast a single day since I’ve been working here. And I didn’t see him out with the cow this morning, either.”

Addie walked up to the two men. “What’s the matter?”

“Stuart,” Roy explained. “He’s gone missing.”

She frowned. “He wasn’t in today-you’re right. Did you try calling his house?”

Jack shook his head. “I don’t know his last name.”

“Hollings.” Addie dialed a number, her expression growing tighter with each ring. “He lives by himself, in that old farmhouse behind the pharmaceutical plant.”

“Maybe he just went away for a while.”

“Not Stuart. The last trip he went on was to Concord, in 1982. I’ll go check on him. Dad, don’t let Chloe sneak any snacks before lunchtime, no matter how much she says she’s starving.” She reached around her waist to untie her apron, her breasts thrusting forward in the process. Jack didn’t want to notice, but he did, and he grew so flustered that it took him a moment to recognize her intentions. “Here,” she said, tossing the apron and order pad at him. “You’ve just been promoted.”

Stuart’s farmhouse sat at the crest of a hill, snowy pastures draped around it like the settling skirts of a debutante. Addie parked in a hurry and got out of her car. His cow was lowing angrily from the barn-something that made the hair stand up on the back of her neck, since nothing meant more to the old man than caring for that cow.

“Stuart?” Addie let herself into the barn, empty save for the swollen cow. She raced up the path to the house, calling his name. The front door was unlocked. “Stuart, it’s Addie. From the diner. Are you here?”

She moved through the puzzle of the unfamiliar house until she reached the kitchen. “Stuart?” Addie said, and then she screamed.

He was lying on his side in a pool of blood, his eyes open but half of his face curiously wooden. “Oh, God. Can you speak to me, Stuart?”

Addie had to lean close and focus hard to understand the mangled word that crawled from Stuart’s slack mouth. “Sauce?” she repeated, and then she realized that the spreading red had come from a broken jar and smelled of tomatoes.

The phone was an old 1950s wall-mounted rotary. It took forever to dial 911 and get an ambulance dispatched. She returned to the pantry and got to her knees right in the puddle of spaghetti sauce. She stroked the fine silver hairs that glimmered over Stuart’s scalp. To how many deaths would she have to bear witness?

Roy untied the strings of the waitress apron and handed it back to his daughter. “How come you were waiting tables? Didn’t I ask Jack to do it?”

“He was a mess. Practically broke out in hives every time he had to go over to a customer. He’s shy, you know, not nearly as charming as me, so I decided to put him out of his misery.” He nodded toward the swinging doors. “You gonna tell him about Stuart?”

Addie was already heading toward the kitchen. Delilah and Jack both looked up as she entered. “He’s okay,” Addie said without preamble. “Wallace is with him now.”

“Thank the good Lord.” Delilah rapped the spoon twice on the edge of the pot and set it down. “Heart attack?”

“Stroke, I think. The doctors talked alphabet soup. CVA, TIA, whatever that means.”

“Cerebrovascular accident preceded by a transient ischemic attack,” Jack translated. “Basically, it means Stuart had a whole lot of little strokes leading up to a big one.”

Both Addie and Delilah stared at him. “You some kind of doctor?” Delilah asked.

“No.” Embarrassed, Jack busied his hands with a rack of dry glassware. “I’ve just heard of it.”

Addie crossed the kitchen until she was a few feet away from where Jack stood. “I told Stuart that you were the one who was worried about him. You did a kind thing, Jack.” She reached out and touched Jack’s hand with her own.

He froze in the motion of unloading another tray of dishes. “Please . . . don’t.” He pulled away, breaking eye contact. “The cow,” Jack said, leaping into the silence, desperate to keep Addie from speaking. “Who’s taking care of the cow?”

She cursed under her breath. “That’s right. I need to find someone who knows how to milk by hand.”

“Don’t look at me,” the cook said. “All I know about cows is that one day I’m going to be able to braise, stew, and fry them.”

“Oh, come on, Delilah. You know everyone in Salem Falls. Isn’t there someone in this town who-”

“Yes,” Jack said, looking nearly as surprised as Addie to hear his voice. “Me.”

Starshine, the proprietress of the Wiccan Read, fixed a smile on her face as the tiny silver bells strung over the door signaled the arrival of a customer. A quartet of girls entered the occult bookstore, their laughter twining around them. The one with the greatest aura of energy about her was Gillian Duncan, the daughter of the most prosperous businessman in the county. Starshine wondered if he knew his daughter wore a small golden pentagram tucked beneath her shirt, a symbol of the pagan religion she embraced.

“Ladies,” she said in greeting, “is there anything in particular I can help you with?”

“We’re just looking,” Gillian said.

Starshine nodded and gave them their space. She watched them move from shelves crowded with grimoires-spell books-to the small vials of herbs-wax myrtle, mandrake root, boneset, joe-pye weed.

“Gilly,” Whitney said, “should we get something to help Stuart Hollings?”

“Yeah. For a healing spell.” Chelsea smiled at Starshine. “It looks like we do need your help, after all.”

Meg hurried over, clutching a six-pack of candles. “Look! Last time we were here, the red candles were back-ordered!” she said breathlessly, then realized that her friends were choosing among the herbs. “What’s up?”

“For the guy who had a stroke,” Chelsea said. “We ought to do something.”

Starshine began to empty a small quantity of something that looked like tea leaves into a tiny Ziploc bag. “Yerba santa,” she suggested. “And some willow. A nice piece of quartz couldn’t hurt, either.”

She handed one of the girls the bag and went in search of quartz, only to realize that she had lost sight of Gillian Duncan. Frowning, she excused herself for a moment. Once, a teenage witch had shoplifted an entire vial of hound’s-tongue.

She found Gillian behind the silk curtain that divided the store from the private area, where stock was kept. The girl sat cross-legged on the floor, a heavy black book cracked open on her lap. “Interesting stuff,” Gillian said, looking up. “How much for the book?”

Starshine grabbed the volume and shoved it back into the shelf. “It’s not for sale.”

Gillian got up, dusting off her jeans. “I thought there were rules about those kinds of spells.”

“There are. An it harm none, do what ye will. Witches don’t curse or make others suffer.” When Gillian’s expression didn’t change, Starshine sighed. “These books are back here for a reason. You aren’t supposed to read them.”

Gillian raised one brow, so confident that it was impossible to believe she was only seventeen. “Why not?” she said. “You do.”

“I know,” Jack soothed. “I’m going to make it better.” Milking by hand was not something they’d done at Grafton, but the twins who ran the barn had given him a lesson once. Now, as he curled his fingers around the teat and rippled them downward, a sweet stream of milk shot into the pail.

“Look how much better she feels,” Addie murmured. If there was such a thing as an expression of relief on a cow’s face, this one wore it now. Addie could remember nursing Chloe; how sometimes she’d be delayed for a feeding and would come to her baby, full and wet, certain she would die if not for the touch of Chloe’s bow mouth.

It surprised her to see Jack’s obvious enjoyment in something as simple as being close to the heated hide of the cow or skimming his hand up the smooth, pink udder. She realized that Jack, who could not bear to be touched, craved physical contact.

“You grew up on a farm,” she said.

“Who told you that?”

“You did. Look at how easy this comes to you.”

Jack shook his head. “I grew up in New York City. This is an acquired skill.”

Addie sat down in the hay. “What did you do in New York?”

“What any kid does. Went to school. Played sports.”

“Your parents still live there?”

Jack hesitated only a second. “Nope.”

“You know,” Addie said facetiously, “that’s what I like about you. You’re so naturally talkative.”

He smiled at her, and for a moment, she could not catch her breath. “What I like about you is how you so fiercely guard someone else’s privacy.”

She blushed. “It’s not like that. I just . . . well . . .”

“You want to know where I came from before I walked into your diner.” He let go of the teat and stood up, maneuvering the stool to the cow’s other side, so that Addie could no longer see him while he spoke. “You already know a lot, actually.”

“That you grew up in New York City and could give Alex Trebek a run for his money?”

“Your dad could tell you some things.”

“Like?”

“Like I don’t squeeze the toothpaste tube in the middle.”

“Well, that’s good to know. I wasn’t able to sleep at night because-”

Suddenly his head rose over the bulk of the cow. “Addie,” Jack said, “shut up and get over here. You’re about to have your first milking lesson.”

The cow bellowed, and Addie shied back. “She likes you.”

“Her brain is the size of a clam. Trust me, she couldn’t care less.” He nodded toward the udder again, and Addie reached down but could not draw forth any milk.

“Watch.” Jack knelt in the hay and took two udders in his hands. He began to pump rhythmically, milk raining into the bucket. Addie marked the synchronic motion and then lay her hand over Jack’s. She could feel the flex of the tendons and the muscles tightening as he froze; she looked back to find Jack’s face twisted in either agony or rapture at the simple fact of a human touch. He opened his eyes and locked his gaze on hers.

The cow’s tail slapped him hard across the face, damp and reeking. Addie and Jack jumped apart.

“I think I’ve got it now.” When she tried this time, a small squirt of milk came from the teat. She continued to focus her attention on the cow, embarrassed now that she had seen Jack with his guard down.

“Addie,” Jack said softly, “let’s trade.”

They were inches apart, close enough to breathe each other’s fear. “Trade what?”

“The truth. You give me one honest answer,” he said, “and I’ll give you one back.”

Addie nodded slowly, sealing the bargain. “Who goes first?”

“You can.”

“All right . . . what did you do?”

“I was a teacher. At a private school for girls. Coached soccer there, too.” He rubbed the flat of his hand along the cow’s bony ridge of spine, the protrusions of her hipbone. “I loved it. I loved every minute of it.”

“Then how come you-”

“Now it’s my turn.” Jack moved the pail from beneath the cow. The milk steamed, fragrant and fresh, its heat rising between them. “What happened to Chloe?”

Addie’s eyes swam. Jack’s fingers grasped her upper arms. “Addie-” He broke off, following her stare. To his hands. Which were touching her. Of their own free will.

Immediately, he let go.

“That waitress has an ass like a-”

“Thomas.” Jordan McAfee cut his son’s observation off, even as he peeked around the edge of his mug to see for himself. Then he grinned. “You’re right. She does.”

Darla turned, in the middle of making rounds with the coffee. “Refill?”

Jordan held out his cup. He bit back a smile as his son’s eyes fixed directly on the waitress’s cleavage.

“You know,” Jordan mused, when Darla had left them for another customer, “you’re making me feel old.”

“Aw, come on, Dad. You were fifteen . . . what? A few centennials ago?”

“Do you think of anything besides sex?”

“Of course.” Thomas looked affronted. “Every now and then, I worry about people in Third World countries. And then I figure if they all started having sex, their lives would be considerably brighter.”

Jordan laughed. As a single father, he knew he had a very different sort of relationship with his son than most other parents had. And maybe it was his own fault. A few years ago, when they’d been living in Bainbridge, Jordan had run a little wild, had brought home his share of women whose names he could not recall the next day.

He set down his coffee cup. “Tell me the paragon’s name again?”

“Chelsea. Chelsea Abrams.”

Thomas’s whole face softened, and for a moment Jordan was actually jealous of his own son. When was the last time he’d been swallowed whole by love?

“She’s got the most incredible pair of-”

Jordan cleared his throat.

“-eyes. Big and brown. Like Selena’s.”

Just the name made Jordan’s shoulders tense. Selena Damascus had been his private investigator when he’d been a defense attorney in Bainbridge. She did have beautiful eyes-a brown you could drown in. Once, Jordan nearly had. But he had not seen or heard from Selena in the fourteen months since he’d moved to Salem Falls and cut back dramatically on his caseload.

“So,” Jordan said, rerouting the topic. “Chelsea’s beautiful.”

“She’s smart, too. She takes AP everything.”

“Sounds promising. And what does she think about you?”

Thomas grimaced. “That’s too big an assumption. She probably doesn’t think about me at all.”

“Ah, but that’s something you can overcome.”

Thomas looked at his thin arms, his concave chest. “With my incredible physique?”

“With your perseverance. Believe me, there are plenty of times I’ve tried to forget about you, but you keep crawling back into my head.”

“Thanks a bunch.”

“Think nothing of it. You going to ask her to the Spring Fling?”

“Nah. I have to bone up on my perseverance first, so that when she laughs in my face I don’t collapse in a heap.” Thomas pushed his French fries through an ocean of ketchup, drawing Chelsea’s initials. “Selena used to be great with girl advice.”

“That’s because she’s a girl,” Jordan pointed out. “What’s going on, Thomas? Why do you keep bringing her up?”

“I just wish we still knew her is all.”

Jordan stared out the window at two dogs that were chasing each other, tails scrawling trails in the snow. “It would be nice,” he agreed softly. “But I lost my best investigator a year ago.”

At first, when Addie was watching Jack, she told herself it was because he was a new employee-she needed to make sure he didn’t put the salt back on the storage shelf where the sugar was supposed to be; she had to be certain that he loaded the dishwasher in a way that would maximize cleaning and minimize breakage. Then she admitted that she was watching Jack simply because she wanted to. There was something mesmerizing about seeing him run a mop over the checkerboard floor, his mind a million miles away. Or listening to Delilah with rapt attention, as if learning how to make bouillabaisse was one of his life’s goals. He was handsome, certainly, but plenty of handsome men had come through her diner before. What was so attractive about Jack was his exoticism-the fact that he looked completely wrong there, like an orchid blooming in the desert, yet acted as if there was no place else he’d rather be. To Addie-who felt as much a part of the diner as its bricks and mortar, and equally as unable to separate from it-Jack was the most fascinating creature she’d ever seen.

She was figuring out a tab one afternoon when Jack looked up from wiping down the counter, glanced out the front window, and suddenly sprinted into the kitchen. Curious, she followed, to find him handing Delilah an order.

Addie pulled it from the cook’s hand. “There’s no one at table seven,” she said.

“There will be. Didn’t you see him? The kid with the long hair and the philosophy book-he’s on his way in.”

Addie knew immediately to whom Jack was referring. The student was a fairly new regular but a consistent one. He came in at 2:20 every day but Sunday, slid into the booth in the back of the diner, and pulled a dog-eared paperback of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil from his battered knapsack. Every day for the past three weeks, without any deviation, he’d ordered a BLT, hold the tomato, with extra mayonnaise. Two pickles. A side of cheese fries, and black coffee.

Delilah pushed the sandwich toward Jack, who picked it up and hurried into the front of the diner. The student was just sliding into his customary booth when Jack, smiling triumphantly, set his usual order down in front of him.

The kid paused in the act of removing his book from his knapsack. “What the fuck is this?” he asked.

Jack nodded toward the window. “I saw you coming. And you’ve ordered this almost every day for the past three weeks.”

“So?” the student said. “Maybe today was the day I wanted a fucking burger.” He shoved the plate across the booth, so that it toppled off the edge onto the banquette. “Fuck you and your mind games,” he said, and he stormed out of the diner.

From her vantage point by the swinging doors, Addie watched Jack begin to clean up the food. He angrily wiped mayonnaise from the plastic seat and stacked the pieces of the ruined sandwich back on the plate. When he turned around, he found Addie standing beside the table. “I can take that for you,” she said.

But Jack shook his head tightly. “Sorry I lost you a customer.”

“It wasn’t intentional, I’m sure.” Addie smiled a little. “Besides, he was a lousy tipper.”

There was something in the tense curve of Jack’s shoulders and the flat blank of his eyes that told her he had been slapped down before when he’d only been trying to go out of his way for someone. “Some people don’t know what to do with an act of kindness,” Addie said.

Jack looked directly at her. “Do you?”

What kindness would you show me? she thought, and shocked herself. Jack was an employee. He was as different from her as night was from day. But then she thought of how, that morning, he’d taken over the grill for Delilah and had made pancakes in the shape of snowmen, then slipped them onto Chloe’s plate at the counter. She thought of how they would move around the empty diner in tandem after closing, clearing and sorting and shutting down for the night, a dance that seemed so smooth they might have been doing it forever.

Suddenly she wanted to make Jack feel what she had felt lately: that this once, there was someone on her side, someone who understood. “Stuart’s been coming here for years, and every morning I pretend I have no idea what he’s going to ask for, although it’s always the same-ham and cheese omelette, hash browns, and coffee. Jack, I know you were only trying to help,” Addie said, “but on the whole, customers don’t like having assumptions made about them.”

Jack stuffed the dirty wipe into the waist of his apron and took the plate back from her. “Who does?” he said, and walked into the kitchen, leaving Addie to wonder if his response had been a wall to make her keep her distance or a clue to help her understand.

In Meg Saxton’s opinion, phys ed was an inhumane form of humiliation. It was not that she was hugely fat, like the people Richard Simmons visited because they couldn’t even get out of bed. Her mother said she was still growing. Her father said there was just enough of her to love. Meg bet neither of them had had to suffer through shopping at the Gap with their friends, pretending there was nothing that interested her on the sale rack so that they wouldn’t see her picking from the size fourteens.

The two girls the phys-ed teacher had picked came front and center, with a confidence that said they were used to standing there. Suzanne Abernathy was a field hockey captain; Hailey McCourt had led the soccer team to a district championship last year. They stared down the group of girls, sorting the athletes from the losers in their minds.

“Sarah.”

“Brianna.”

“Leah.”

“Izzie.”

Gilly was picked-she was no athlete, but she was quick and smart. The choices narrowed, leaving only a small huddling puddle of girls who had little coordination. Meg shivered each time a name was called, as if each time one of them walked away, a piece of protective armor had been removed.

Finally, only two girls remained: Meg, and Tessie, the Down syndrome kid who’d been mainstreamed this year. Hailey turned to Suzanne. “What do you want? The retard or the tub of lard?”

Laughter rained down on Meg. Beside her, Tessie clapped her hands with delight.

“Tessie, you’re with Suzanne,” the phys-ed teacher announced.

As the ball was set into play, Meg stared at Hailey, thinking of boils and leprosy and third-degree burns, horrible things that would take away her honey hair, her Cover Girl complexion, and leave her in the same boat as the rest of the misfit world. Then the ball came directly toward her. “Saxton!” Hailey yelled out. “To me!”

Meg lifted her foot-how hard could it be to kick a soccer ball?-and let loose with such force she slid and landed on her butt in the mud.

The snickers of the class didn’t take away from this slow-motion moment, the ball spinning skyward like a missile. Meg was a little stunned at how far it went, even if it was soaring in the complete opposite direction from Hailey. The ball continued so far out of bounds that it landed on the baseball field.

Hailey walked past Meg, deliberately splattering her with even more mud. “If you can’t shoot straight, hippo, pass the ball!”

“Hailey!” the teacher said sharply. And then sighed. “Meg, go get it.”

Meg jogged off, painfully aware of Hailey whispering about the way she looked while she was trying to run. One day she’d be reincarnated as an anorexic. Or a supermodel. Or maybe both at the same time. Head down, Meg concentrated on the fire in the pit of her lungs and her belly, instead of the tears pricking the backs of her eyes.

“Here you go.”

A man handed her the out-of-bounds ball. He was tall, and the sun caught his hair like it did Gilly’s. He had a kind smile, and she would have thought he was incredibly handsome if he wasn’t as old as her father. “Don’t kick it with your toe,” he said.

“What?”

“Raise your knee, push your toes down, and hit it with your shoelaces. Swipe under the ball.” He grinned at Meg. “You’ve got more power in one leg than that blond girl has in her whole body.”

Meg let her eyes slide away. “Whatever,” she muttered. She slogged onto the field, letting the action fly around her. She was facing her own goal when the ball slammed her in the back of the knees. “Knee up, toe down, on the shoelace!” Meg heard his voice again, and without thinking about it, she did exactly what he said.

The ball flew low and strong, driving straight toward the opposite goal. Maybe it was the surprise that Meg Saxton had actually hit it; maybe it was-as that man had said-that she had power she didn’t even realize-but for whatever reason, the ball streaked past the defense and snugged in the net.

For a moment, everything stood still, and Meg felt herself suddenly cloaked in the thick satisfaction of doing something perfectly right. “Killer shot!” one girl said, and another patted her on the back. Gillian ran up to her side. “Unbelievable. Did you cast a spell?”

“No,” Meg admitted, a little amazed this had happened without witchcraft.

But Gillian’s attention was on the field, where the man was walking off, hands in his pockets. “Who’s your coach?” she asked.

Meg shrugged. “Some guy. I don’t know.”

“He’s cute.”

“He’s old!”

Gillian laughed. “Next time,” she said, “ask his name.”

The basement of the diner held the lion’s share of the food that couldn’t fit in the narrow kitchen: a stacked ladder of hamburger rolls and breads, huge tins of sweet corn, tubs of ketchup large enough to fill half a bathtub. Jack had been sent down there by Delilah for a fifty-pound bag of potatoes. Hefting the bag onto his shoulder, he yanked it out of its spot on the shelf and found himself looking right at Roy.

The old man was in back of the metal shelving, his fist closed around a bottle of cooking sherry. “Oh, shit,” he sighed.

“Addie’s going to kill you.”

“Only if she finds out about it.” Roy offered his most charming smile. “I’ll let you watch whatever you want on TV for a week if you pretend you never saw me.”

Jack considered this for a moment and nodded. Then he balanced the potatoes on his shoulder, trudged up the narrow stairs, and dumped the sack at Delilah’s feet. “Start peeling,” she ordered.

“Have you seen my father?” Addie demanded, hurrying into the kitchen. “We’ve got a line a mile long at the cash register.”

Delilah shrugged. “He’s not here or I’d have tripped over him. Jack, you see Roy in the basement?”

Jack shook his head but he didn’t meet Addie’s eye. Then, with impeccably lousy timing, Roy sauntered through the basement door. His face was glowing, and even from across the room Jack could smell the cheap alcohol on his breath.

Addie’s face went bright red. Tension filled the confines of the kitchen, and Jack tried to ignore the fact that someone was going to say something any moment that he or she would regret. Words, he knew, could scar.

So he squeezed the base of the potato he was peeling, then watched it fly in an arc over his shoulder toward the grill. Then, taking a deep breath, he grabbed for it, deliberately pressing his palm to the burning plate of metal.

“Goddamn!” he cried, geniune pain pricking behind his eyes and making him weak in the knees. Delilah pulled him away from the stove as Addie hurried to his side. With the brisk expertise of someone who’d done this before, she led him toward the hand-washing sink and ran the cold water. “It’s going to blister. How badly does it hurt?”

It hurt, but not the way she thought. It hurt to have her fingers stroking the back of his hand, to feel her concern flowing over him like a river. Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

Addie fussed over the red streaks branded into his skin, a scarlet letter that in his imagination took the shape of an A. “Really,” she scolded, now that the danger had passed, “you’re no better than Chloe.”

Jack shook his head. He pressed Addie’s fingers to his chest, so that his heart beat in the palm of her hand.

Thomas glanced up to find the very girl he was daydreaming about standing less than two feet away from him. “Uh, hi,” he managed. Brilliant.

“Would you mind if I sat down?” Chelsea asked, her gaze lighting on the other lunch tables. “Pretty crowded today.”

“Mi table es su table.”

“What?”

“It’s Spanish. Well, kind of. I don’t know how to say table . . .” Shut up, Thomas, before you hurt yourself.

“Thanks.” Chelsea set down her lunch, then waved. And suddenly Thomas realized that the princess came with an entourage. Gillian Duncan and two others sat down, and the minute they arrived, it was as if Thomas himself didn’t exist.

Still, it was better to eat his lunch with Chelsea Abrams just six inches away from him on a wooden bench than by himself. His breath caught when she mistakenly reached for Thomas’s napkin and touched it to the corner of her mouth in nearly the same spot where Thomas had touched it to his own mouth. He winged a silent prayer to God for Chelsea to leave first, so that she wouldn’t see his thoughts broadcast across his groin.

“Maybe he’s some kind of pervert,” Meg said, and Thomas jumped a foot, wondering if they could sense his hard-on even through the barrier of the picnic table. Then he realized that Meg was talking about someone else entirely. “You don’t see other grown men lurking around outside the high school gym.”

“Lurking? God, Meg. You think you’re being dramatic enough?” Whitney tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Perverts live in places like Detroit and L.A., not Salem Falls.”

“First off, my dad has always said that crime statistics don’t mean much if you’re the victim in that one percentile. Second-I talked to him, you didn’t.”

“Still,” Gillian pointed out, “I wouldn’t be so quick to cast stones at someone who made you look like Mia Hamm.”

“Are you talking about the guy out by the soccer field?” Thomas asked.

Chelsea turned. “Do you know him?”

Thomas felt the heat of their attention. “Sure. He works at the diner in town.”

Gillian took a drink from a water bottle and glanced in the direction of the playing fields, where the man might even now be standing.

“You can work at a diner and still be a pervert,” Meg murmured. “That’s all I’m saying.”

It seemed to Jack that the kid at the counter had been there long enough to warrant concern, but then again, it wasn’t his diner or his place to care. He sat stone-faced at the cash register, a job he’d won by default because he couldn’t get his bandage wet.

The girl kept staring at him. She was lean and pretty, coltlike, although she wore too much makeup. She was in the process of ripping open her sixteenth sugar packet and pouring its contents on the counter.

Addie burst through the swinging doors, plates balanced on her arms like armor. “Help me a second, will you?” Jack obligingly stood up and trailed in her wake. He lifted each dish, setting it down where Addie directed.

“Thanks,” she said. “If I can keep Chloe from getting underfoot, I just may actually finish getting out the orders for the dinner rush.” She started back into the kitchen but stopped when Jack called her name.

“That girl . . . she’s been here for three hours.”

“She can stay here for three years if she wants, as long as she’s hungry and has her daddy’s charge card. That’s Gilly Duncan . . . daughter of the guy who owns the pharmaceutical plant.”

Jack sat back down and watched Gilly Duncan rip open sugar packets number seventeen and eighteen and pour them on the Formica. Well, hell. It was one thing if Jack himself was busing tables, but with his burn, Addie had taken on that work. The thought of her having to sweep up after this spoiled little brat fueled his courage. “You’re making a mess,” he said.

Gillian raised one delicate red brow. “Oh, my. Did I spill?” She stuck her forefinger in her mouth, rolled it in the white grains, and started to suck on it. “Sweet.” She coated her finger in sugar again and held it up. “Very sweet.”

Jack jumped back, as if she’d brandished a gun.

“I didn’t mean to make more work for you.” She began to scoop the spilled sugar into the cup of her hand and empty it onto the side of her saucer. “There. I’m Gilly, by the way. And you are?”

“Going,” Jack said, and he ducked from behind the counter and walked out the diner’s door.

In Whitney’s garage, Gillian cupped a small heap of cinnamon in her hand and began the third casting, trailing a ring around her friends. “Set me apart from the world of man. Set me apart from the world of spirit. Hold me between the two, so I might work my magick.” The last bit of cinnamon sparked from her fingers, and she turned to the others. “The circle is perfect.”

She knelt in front of the altar and reached for the green candle they’d brought to the garage. Rubbing oil from the tip to the base, she began to chant: “Heal him whole, heal him whole.” Using the quartz from the Wiccan Read, Gillian scratched into the candle a crude sketch of a caduceus, to symbolize perfect health. “Who has the matches?”

Whitney grimaced. She pointed toward the hood of her mother’s car, a silvery Volvo. “Damn. I left them over there.” She picked up the knife on the altar and cut through the invisible boundaries of the circle to open it, reached for the matches, and then stepped back inside. “Here,” she said, pressing the small box into Gilly’s hand.

The flame rose higher every time the girls breathed in, visualizing Stuart Holling as he rose from his hospital bed and walked away from it. Wax slid down the candle until the etched snakes were smooth again. And then, a quick draft coming from beneath the garage door blew the fire out.

“Do you think that means he’s better?” Chelsea whispered.

“Either that or he’s dead.”

“Maybe we should call the hospital to see.”

“They wouldn’t tell us,” Gillian pointed out. “We’re not related to him. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow.”

The girls sat, lost in thought. “It was different tonight,” Whitney said finally.

“Like I was humming inside,” Meg agreed.

“Maybe it was because we weren’t just doing it for ourselves.” Whitney spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. “When we cast a spell for money or for love . . . it was to change us, to help us. This time, we were sending all that energy to Mr. Hollings.”

Chelsea frowned. “But if we were sending the energy away, how come it felt so powerful in the circle?”

“Because it takes more strength to change someone else’s life than it takes to change your own,” Gillian replied.

“And if it works-” Whitney said.

“When it works.”

“When it works . . . it will be something he wanted all along, anyway.” Whitney stared at the altar, at the smoking candle. “A true witch can cast spells for someone else.”

“A true witch can cast spells on someone else.” Gillian raised her finger, smudged brown with cinnamon, and blew so that it clouded the air in front of her. “What if we hadn’t healed Mr. Hollings? What if we made him sicker?”

Chelsea’s eyes widened. “You know that goes against the Wiccan rede, Gilly. Whatever you do comes back to you threefold.”

“Well, okay. Mr. Hollings is a stupid example. But if Wicca’s all about keeping the balance of nature, then why couldn’t we use magick for that?”

Whitney looked at Gillian. “I don’t get it.”

Meg leaned forward. “She means if we help people who’ve helped others, it’s natural to hurt people who’ve hurt others. Right?”

Gillian nodded. “And to do it so that they don’t know who’s making it happen.” Her voice skimmed over the others’ reservations, smoothing in its wake. “Think about how powerful you felt tonight, healing someone. And then imagine how powerful you’d feel if you could ruin someone’s life.”

“Hailey McCourt,” Meg whispered.

Gillian turned. “That’s a start.”

“And where have you been?” Addie demanded, as Jack entered the diner.

“Out.”

It was empty of patrons, quiet in the kitchen. Overhead, Jeopardy! played on the television, the sound muted. Jack pulled off his jacket, determined to help close for the night.

“Well, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you can’t just walk off a job without an explanation. Or maybe that’s what got you red from teaching?”

He fixed his eyes on the screen above her left shoulder. The core of a quarter is made of this metal.

What is zinc? Jack thought. “I’m sorry,” he said aloud.

“You should be. I needed you here tonight. I may not be paying you a lot, but-”

The bells over the diner door jingled. Addie narrowed her eyes at Jack, blaming him for forgetting to lock the door behind himself. Wes Courtemanche walked in in uniform. “Coffee, Addie?”

“Sorry, Wes. I just cleaned out the pots.”

“I have a perfectly nice Mr. Coffee in my kitchen.”

Jack stuck the mop in the bucket and inadvertently knocked it over. A small flood spread beneath Wes’s feet. “Sorry,” Jack murmured, hurrying to swab the spill.

“Even if I wasn’t so tired, Wes, I couldn’t. Chloe’s asleep in the back, and I have to get her home.”

Wes didn’t know what to say to that. “Chloe,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“You know, I’ve been blown off before, Addie . . . but never because of a ghost.”

None of your business, Jack thought to himself over and over. He pushed the mop over the black and white tiles in a smooth, easy rhythm.

The last surviving Brontë sister.

“C’mon, Addie.”

Not Emily.

“No, Wes. I can’t.”

Not Jane.

From the corner of his eye, Jack saw Courtemanche reach for her, saw Addie back away.

Who is Charlotte?

He dropped the mop and wedged between Addie and Wes, pinning the policeman to the wall. “She doesn’t want to go with you.”

“Jack, don’t!”

Wes shoved, sending Jack sprawling. “I could throw your ass in jail for that.”

Jack did not move from where he’d fallen. Wes jammed his hat on his head and stormed out of the diner, furious. Addie, Jack thought. I did this for Addie.

“Are you crazy?” She leaned down so that her face was level with his, her eyes hard and cold. “He’s a policeman, Jack. He can make a small-business owner’s life miserable. And if that isn’t bad enough, this is only going to make him try twice as hard to come after me next time.”

Jack hauled himself to his feet, yanked on his jacket, and for the second time that day left without telling Addie where he was going, or why.

Addie’s strongest memory of Chloe took place underwater. Chloe had been seven the year Addie managed to scrape together enough money to take the two of them to the Caribbean. They stayed in a tiny rental house that was sixteen giant Mother-May-I steps from the beach. Palm fronds batted against the peeling pink shutters, and every morning on the sand there would be a new coconut.

One afternoon, Addie watched Chloe streaking back and forth beneath the water, as if she were logging mileage. “What are you doing?”

“I’m a mermaid. Come and watch.”

And so Addie had waded in with her daughter’s scuba mask. Underwater, Chloe wriggled: legs tight, hips undulating, as her bright blond hair streamed out behind her. Through the ripples of the water Addie could see the sun quivering like the yolk of an egg. Suddenly Chloe turned to face her, eyes wide, hair snaking soft about her face, arms blued by the shadows of the sea.

Addie could remember being a kid in the pool at the Y, pretending that she was a mermaid, too. There were moments she was certain it had happened-that her legs had turned into a scaled tail, that her lungs could take in water, that the wide thighs of women in the water aerobics class had thickened into pillars of coral. Beneath the water, the world was a different place, and you could be anything you wanted to be. Beneath the water, you moved slowly, so slowly you might never have to grow up.

On the day that Chloe died, the nurses had let Addie sit with her body for an hour, alone in the hospital room. Addie had tucked the sheets tight around Chloe’s still legs. She had witnessed those thin limbs going blue from lack of oxygen; she had seen Chloe’s cheeks and temples glisten wet from the spots where her own tears had fallen-and she’d thought, You are a mermaid, baby.

She’d thought, Wait for me.

The neurologists at the hospital had never seen anything quite like it-a man with significant damage in the aftermath of a stroke suddenly get up and start the day as if nothing had happened. But the nurses had been standing right there: Stuart Hollings, who could not speak or move an entire side of his body, had awakened asking for breakfast . . . and then threatened to leave when it didn’t arrive fast enough.

Three hours after finishing his bacon, eggs, wheat toast, and neurological exams, Stuart’s doctors pronounced him well enough to recuperate at home.

It was standard procedure at the SFPD to alert all duty officers about potential problems . . . including felons who had recently moved to town, although in the past this had never been an issue.

There was a small piece of Charlie-the piece that would probably have gotten him tossed out of law school, had he decided to attend-that hated this part of his job. It seemed to him that if you planted the seed of doubt in people’s minds, they were more likely to take a look at new growth and yank it out by its roots as a potential weed, when it could very well have turned into something as harmless as a daisy.

On the other hand, St. Bride just might drag off a local high school girl and assault her, in which case Charlie would wish he’d set up a frigging billboard.

He began to type a memo on his laptop, one that would be distributed that same day through internal mail. He’d barely gotten through the header when his secretary opened the door. “Dispatch just got a call. You supposed to be at the district court?”

“Ah, shoot.” He’d completely forgotten an arraignment. Hurrying to the door, he decided he’d get the St. Bride memo out when he came back; it would be there along with the other 200 things on his to-do list.

Unfortunately, his secretary didn’t know that. So when she came in later to lay a fax on Charlie’s desk and saw the computer still on, she shut it off. And when Charlie returned to the courthouse, he had completely forgotten about Jack St. Bride.

Hailey McCourt could not read the words in her textbook because they were tap-dancing on the page. She slid her ponytail holder out of her hair and tied it up a little less tightly. Her mom got migraines . . . maybe she was predisposed to inheriting them. But God, of all days to find that out! As long as it waited until after soccer tryouts, then Hailey didn’t care if she dropped dead in the locker room.

Mr. O’Donnell asked her to put last night’s homework on the board, some horrendous trigonometry proof. Hailey swallowed and stood up, trying to find her center before she walked to the front of the room. But she stumbled on a desk, collapsing on top of the kid sitting in it.

There were a few titters, and the girl she’d fallen on gave her a dirty look. Finally, Hailey reached a spot just behind Mr. O’Donnell, who was busy collecting papers. She tried to pick up the chalk, but every time she did, it slipped out of her fingers. This time, the whole class snickered.

“Ms. McCourt,” the teacher said, “we don’t have time for this today.”

She swiped for the chalk, holding it primitively, as if her hand was no better than a paw. Then she looked up.

The classroom was upside down.

She was standing, all right, and the blackboard was in front of her. But her feet rested on the ceiling, and the kids in the class, behind her, were suspended, feet first from their seats.

She must have made a sound, because Mr. O’Donnell approached. “Hailey,” he said quietly, “do you need to see the nurse?”

The hell with soccer. The hell with everything. Hailey felt tears spring to her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered.

She turned and fled, forgetting about her books and her knapsack. She suddenly didn’t fit into this world, and she had no idea how to move in it with grace. That was Hailey McCourt’s last thought before she walked directly into the door frame and knocked herself unconscious.

Unlike many of the houses in Salem Falls, which were close together, Addie’s sat all by itself in the woods up a long, winding driveway. Tiny and neat with weathered shingles and a green roof, the little cape seemed to suit her. Smoke rose from the chimney to cut a signature across the night sky. Set off in the yard, in a moonlit mud puddle, was a rusty swing set.

Jack sat on a curved rubber seat. The racket that came when he swung back and forth was painful, like old bones being brought to life. Surely, inside, Addie was listening.

When the door opened, Jack watched feelings chase across her face-hope, as she turned to the swing set; disappointment, as she realized he was not her daughter; curiosity, as she wondered what had brought him here.

As she approached, Jack saw a final emotion: relief. “Where have you been?”

Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry about not showing up for work today.”

Even in the dim light, Jack saw Addie blush. “Well, I asked for it. I should never have treated you the way I did the other night. I know you were only doing what you thought was right.”

Jack sucked in a deep breath, using it to force out the explanation lodged in his chest. “There’s something I need to tell you, Addie.”

“No . . . I think I ought to talk first.” She stood in front of him, trailing the toes of her boots in the mud. “That day at Stuart’s . . . you asked me what happened to Chloe.”

Jack went very still, the way he would have if a rare butterfly suddenly landed a foot in front of him. “I know she’s dead,” Addie confessed. “I may say or do differently, but I know.” She set her swing rocking slightly. “She woke up one morning and she had a sore throat. That’s it-just a sore throat, the same thing a hundred other kids get. Her fever wasn’t even past ninety-nine. And I . . . I had to work that day. So I stuck her upstairs at my dad’s on the couch, with cartoons on TV, while I waitressed. I figured if it was a virus, it would go away. If it was strep, I’d make a doctor’s appointment after the lunch crunch.” Addie lowered her face, her profile edged in silver. “I should have taken her in right away. I just didn’t think . . . she was that sick.”

“Bacterial meningitis,” Jack murmured.

“She died at 5:07. I remember, because the news was coming on TV, and I thought, What could they possibly tell me about the world gone bad that is more awful than this?” Finally, she met Jack’s eyes. “I go a little crazy sometimes when it comes to Chloe. I know she’s never going to eat the sandwich I set out for her at the diner, not anymore. But I need to put it there. And I know she’s never going to get in my way again when I’m serving plates, but I wish she would . . . so I pretend that she does.”

“Addie-”

“Even when I try my hardest, I can’t remember exactly what her smile looked like. Or if the color of her hair was more gold or more yellow. It gets worse . . . harder . . . every year. I lost her once,” Addie said brokenly. “I can’t stand to lose her all over again.”

“A doctor might not have caught it in time, Addie. Not even if you’d brought Chloe in that morning.”

“I was her mother. It was my job to make it better.”

Jack repeated what she’d said to him. “You were only doing what you thought was right.”

But she didn’t answer. She stared, instead, at the ridge of burned skin on his palm that would turn into a scar. Slowly, giving him time to pull away, Addie kneeled and bent over Jack’s hand. Kissed it. He couldn’t help it; he flinched.

Immediately, she drew back. “It still hurts.”

Jack nodded. “A little.”

“Where?”

He touched his heart, unable to speak.

When Addie brushed her lips over his chest, Jack felt his body sing. He closed his eyes, terrified to let himself wrap his arms around her, even more terrified that she would pull away. In the end, he did nothing but let her lean against him while his arms remained at his sides. “Better?” Addie murmured, the word burning into his sweater.

“Yes,” Jack answered. “Perfect.”

April 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

A s Gillian watched her father schmooze on his office phone, words dripping from his lips like oil, she wondered what it would be like to shoot him in the head.

His brains would splatter the white carpet. His secretary, an older woman who always looked like she was choking on a plum, would probably have a heart attack. Well, that was all too violent, too obvious, Gilly thought. More like she’d poison him slowly, mixing one of his precious drugs into his food, until one day he simply didn’t wake up.

Gilly grinned at this, and her father caught her eye and smiled back. He cupped his hand over the phone. “One more minute,” he whispered, and winked.

It came over Gilly so quick, sometimes: the feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin, as if anger had swelled so far and fast inside her that it choked the back of her throat. Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river. It was not something she could talk about with her friends, because what if she was the only freak who felt this way? Maybe she could have confided in her mother . . . but then, she had not had a mother for years and years.

“There!” her father said triumphantly, hanging up the phone. He slung an arm around her shoulders, and Gillian was enveloped by the scents she would always associate with her childhood: wood smoke and cinnamon and thin Cuban cigars. She turned in to the smell, eyes closing in comfort. “What do you say we swing through the plant? You know how everyone likes to see you.”

What he meant was that he liked to show off his daughter. Gilly always felt self-conscious walking through the line, nodding at the gap-toothed workers who smiled politely at her but all the while were thinking, correctly, that they made less in a week than Gillian got for allowance money.

They entered the manufacturing part of the operation. Noise ricocheted around her, huge pistons calibrated meticulously, so that mixtures would be infallible. “We’re making Preventa today,” her father yelled in her ear. “Emergency contraception.”

He led her to a man wearing protective headphones and circulating around the floor. “Hello, Jimmy. You remember my little girl?”

“Sure. Hey, Gillian.”

“Give me a second, honey,” Amos said, and then he began to ask Jimmy questions about stockpiling and shipments.

Gillian watched the bump and grind of the machines measuring out the active ingredients: levonorgestrel and ethinyl estradiol. The device she was standing beside funneled newly formed pills through a narrow slot at its neck, counting them into batches that would be sealed dose by dose into childproof packaging.

It took only a few seconds to dart her hand into the sorting tray and grab some.

Her hand was still in her pocket, buried deep with her secret, when Amos turned. “Have I bored you to tears?”

Gilly smiled at her father. “No,” she assured him. “Not yet.”

In retrospect, Addie realized that the whole event should have been much more terrifying: breaking into a cemetery near midnight, on an evening when the moon was a great bloodshot eye in the sky. But suddenly it did not matter that she was trying to gain access to a graveyard in the darkest part of the night, that she was going to see her daughter’s grave for the first time in seven years. All she knew at that moment was that someone would be with her when she took this monumental step.

Heat swam from the ground, old souls snaking between Addie’s legs. “When I was in college,” Jack said, “I used to study in the cemetery.”

She did not know what she was more surprised by: the nature of the revelation or the fact that Jack had made it at all. “Didn’t you have a library?”

“Yeah. But in the graveyard it was quieter. I’d bring my books, and sometimes a picnic lunch, and-”

“A lunch? That’s sick. That’s-”

“Is this it?” Jack asked, and Addie realized that they stood in front of Chloe’s grave.

The last time she had seen it, it was bare earth, covered with roses and funeral baskets from well-wishers who could not offer explanations and so instead gave flowers. There was a headstone, now, too; white marble: CHLOE PEABODY, 1979-1989. Addie turned her face up to Jack’s. “What do you think happens . . . you know . . . after you die?”

Jack stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat and shrugged, silent.

“I used to hope that if we had to give up our old life, we’d get a new one.”

A huff of breath fell in the air between them, Jack’s answer.

“Then . . . after . . . I didn’t hope that at all. I didn’t want Chloe to be anybody else’s little girl.” Addie gently stepped off a rectangle around the grave. “But she has to be somewhere, doesn’t she?”

Jack cleared his throat. “The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they’re happy.”

She watched Jack pull two unlikely blossoms from his pocket to lay on the grave. The bright heads of the chives that Delilah grew on the windowsill were a brilliant splash of purple against the headstone.

This time of night, the sky was flung wide open, stars spread like a story across the horizon. “Those Inuit,” Addie said, tears running down her cheeks. “I hope they’re right.”

Addie’s hands shook as she walked Jack to the apartment he shared with her father. Did he feel it, too, every time their shoulders bumped up against each other? When he came into a room Addie was already in, did he notice the air squeezing more tightly around them? This was new to her, this sense that her bones were sized all wrong in the confines of her body. This feeling that you could be in the company of a man and not want to turn tail and run.

They reached the top of the stairs. “Well,” Jack said, “see you in the morning.” His hand moved to the doorknob.

“Wait,” Addie blurted out, and covered his fingers with her own. As she expected, he stilled. “Thanks. For coming tonight.”

Jack nodded, then turned to the door again.

“Can I ask you something?”

“If it’s about fixing the insulation on the receiving door, I meant to-”

“Not that,” Addie said. “I wanted to know if you’d kiss me.”

She saw the surprise in his eyes. Apprehension rose from her skin like perfume.

“No,” Jack gently answered.

Addie could not breathe, she’d made such a fool of herself. Cheeks burning, she took a step backward, and came up against an unforgiving wall.

“I won’t kiss you,” Jack added, “but you can kiss me.”

“I-I can?” She had the odd sense that Jack was as uncertain about this as she was.

“Do you want to?”

“No,” Addie said, as she came up on her toes so that her lips could touch his.

It was all Jack could do to not embrace her. To let her trace the seam of his mouth, to open and feel her tongue press against his. He did not touch her, not when her hands lighted on his chest, not when her hair tickled his neck, not when he realized she tasted of coffee and loneliness.

This is the worst thing you could do, he told himself. This is going to get you in trouble. Again.

But he let Addie play the Fates, spinning out the length of the kiss and cutting it when she saw t. Then he let himself into Roy’s apartment, intent on crawling into bed and forgetting the last ten minutes of his life. He had just begun to cross the darkened living room when a light snapped on. Roy sat on the couch, in his robe and pajamas. “You hurt my daughter,” he said, “and I will kill you in your sleep.”

“I didn’t touch your daughter.”

“Bullshit. I saw you kiss her, right through the keyhole.”

“You watched? What are you, some kind of peeping Tom?”

“Well, what are you? Some kind of gigolo? You get yourself hired and boink the business owner, so that you can steal her money in the middle of the night and run?”

“First off, she hired me. And second, even if I was stupid enough to do something like that, don’t you think I would have targeted the jewelry store owner or a banker?”

“Addie’s better looking than any of them.”

Jack unzipped his coat and threw it angrily on a chair. “Not that it’s any of your business, but Addie kissed me.”

“She . . . she did?”

“Is it so hard to believe?”

The old man stood up, a smile playing over his face as he started back toward his bedroom. “Actually,” he mused, “it is.”

Jordan strolled through the doors of the Carroll County Superior Court, his eyes falling into the familiar routine of scanning rooms to see which ones were involved in hearings and skimming over the sorry souls awaiting their fifteen minutes of testimonial fame. He felt naked in his Oxford cloth shirt and pullover sweater-he who used to wear Armani to try cases.

It was not that he’d ever planned on leaving the law permanently; he had just wanted to get away from it for a little while, and Salem Falls was as good a place as any to lose oneself. He had the money to rest on his laurels for a year or two, after those last few cases he’d tried down near Bainbridge, which had been particularly enervating. Each direct examination and cross-examination grew harder and harder to force from his throat, until Jordan realized that his job had become a noose, notching tighter with each client he defended.

Maybe it hadn’t been his job, though. Maybe it had been his relationship with his private investigator.

If anyone had told Jordan ten years ago that he’d want to get married again, he would have chuckled. If anyone had told him that the woman he chose would turn him down, he’d have laughed himself into a hernia. Yet that was exactly what Selena had done. Turned out her best investigative work had targeted Jordan himself-revealing human weaknesses he would rather never have learned.

He made his way to Bernie Davidson’s office. The clerk of the court was always a useful person to know. He was responsible for scheduling cases, and access to that came in handy when you really wanted to take a trip to Bermuda in March. But more than that, he had the ear of every district judge, which meant that things could get done much more quickly than through the normal channels-a motion slipped right into a judge’s hands, an emergency bail hearing stuffed into a jammed calendar. Jordan knocked once, then let himself inside, grinning widely when Bernie nearly fell out of his chair.

“Holy Christ-if it isn’t the ghost of Jordan McAfee!”

Jordan shook the other man’s hand. “How you doing, Bernie?”

“Better than you,” he said, taking in Jordan’s worn clothes and ragged haircut. “I heard a rumor you moved to Hawaii.”

Jordan slipped into a chair across from Bernie’s desk. “How come those are the ones that are never true?”

“Where are you living now?”

“Salem Falls.”

“Quiet there, huh?”

He shrugged. “Guess that’s what I was looking for.”

Bernie was too sharp to miss the hollowness of Jordan’s voice. “And now?”

Jordan concentrated on scraping a piece of lint off his sweater. After a moment, he lifted his head. “Now?” he said. “I think I’m starting to crave a little bit of noise.”

Addie stuck her head in through the back door of the kitchen. “Hey, Jack, can you give me a hand?”

He looked up through a haze of steam from the open dishwasher door. “Sure.”

It was cold outside, and the mud sucked at the soles of his sneakers. Addie disappeared behind a high fence that enclosed the garbage bins. “I’m having a little trouble with the latch,” she said. Once Jack had followed her inside to check the mechanism, she snaked her arms around him. “Hi,” she said into the weave of his shirt.

He smiled. “Hi.”

“How are you?”

“Great. You?”

Addie smiled wider. “Greater.”

“Well, see you,” Jack teased, grinning as Addie hung onto him for all she was worth. Bubbles rose inside him, the carbonation of happiness. When was the last time someone had so badly wanted him to stay put? “Is there really a problem with the latch?”

“Absolutely,” Addie confessed. “I’m unhinged.”

She kissed him, then, pulling his arms around her waist to hold her. They were wrapped tight as a monkey’s paw, secluded from public view by the walls of the fence. The stench of refuse rose around them like a dank jungle, but all Jack could smell was the vanilla that seemed to come from the curve of Addie’s neck. He closed his eyes and thought if he could hold onto one moment for the next fifty years, this might be it.

Addie burrowed closer, and the movement set her off balance. They went tumbling backward, knocking over a row of metal garbage cans. The racket scattered the few birds who were whispering like old gossips about the two of them. They swooped over Jack and Addie, picking at spilled chicken bones and vegetable peels curled into tiny tornadoes, cawing disapproval.

Jack took the brunt of the fall. “This gives a whole new meaning to the term trashy romance.”

Addie was laughing, but at his words, she stopped. “Is that what this is?” she asked, a child standing in the presence of a rainbow and afraid to blink even once, for fear that it might be gone when she opened her eyes. “Are you my romance?”

Before Jack could answer, the door to the fence-unlatched-burst open, and he found himself staring into the single black eye of a revolver.

“Jesus, Wes, put that thing away!” Addie pushed herself off Jack and got to her feet, dusting off her uniform.

“I was walking by for a cup of coffee, and I heard the bins fall. I figured it might be a robber.”

“A robber? In the trash bins? Honestly, Wes. This is Salem Falls, not the set of Law and Order.”

Wes scowled, annoyed because Addie didn’t appreciate his daring rescue attempt. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Nothing deodorant soap won’t cure. I knocked over the trash can, that’s all. Last time I checked, that wasn’t even a misdemeanor.”

But Wes wasn’t listening. He was staring at Jack, who’d been pulled upright by Addie and was still grasping her hand. Neither one seemed inclined to let go, and even more strange, neither one seemed to realize they were holding onto each other.

“Oh,” Wes said, his voice very soft. “It’s like that.”

“He works in a diner,” Whitney said, drawing on her straw until it made a slurping noise. “What would your father think if he knew you were hot for a guy nearly his own age who washes glasses for a living?”

Gillian drew a fat J in the grease on her plate. “Money isn’t everything, Whit.”

“Easy to say when you’ve got it.”

Gilly did not hear her. She scowled, wondering why Addie had been the only employee to come into the restaurant part of the diner. If she didn’t even see Jack, her spell would never work. Gillian lifted her elbow and deliberately knocked over a milkshake. “We need some napkins over here!”

Addie sighed at the mess but hurried over with a packet of napkins and a Wet-Wipe. “Let me get someone to mop the floor.”

Jack came out then, all six-foot-two inches of him. When he bent to swab beneath the table, Gilly saw the crooked part in his golden hair, a spot she had a sudden, urgent desire to kiss. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I can clean it up.”

“It’s my job.”

“Well, at least let me help.” Gilly reached for the napkins and this time knocked over Meg’s Coke. Jack jumped backward, the crotch of his pants soaked.

“Oh my gosh.” Gilly pressed the wad of napkins high against Jack’s thigh, until he stiffly removed her hand.

“I’ve got it,” he said, and left for the men’s room.

The minute he was gone, the girls began to whisper: “Jesus, Gilly, did you have to give him a hand job right in the middle of the diner?”

“You knocked my drink over on purpose . . . You’d better pay for a new one!”

“He does look a little like Brad Pitt . . .”

“I’m going to the bathroom,” Gilly announced. As she reached the restrooms, Jack came out of the one on the right. “Sorry about that again,” she said cheerfully, but he didn’t even answer. He sidled past her, trying hard not to touch her in any way. Well, that didn’t matter. He wouldn’t be able to keep his hands off her once she cast her spell.

Gilly crept into the men’s room, fascinated at the site of the urinal with its smelly little cake in the bottom. The sink was still dripping water. Gilly shut the nozzle more tightly, then shed from the trash can the top-most piece of paper toweling. Surely this was the one that Jack had used; it was still damp. She tore off a square from the part she imagined had touched his skin. Then she opened up her little purse.

Inside was a scroll of paper on which she’d written JACK ST. BRIDE, a red rose, a white rose, and a piece of pink ribbon. She tucked the piece of toweling inside the scroll and rolled it up again. Then she took a Swiss army knife her father had given her the year she was ten and sliced each rose in half lengthwise. She placed together a white half and a red half, sandwiching the scroll in between, and wrapped them tightly with the ribbon.

“One to seek him,” Gilly whispered. “One to find him. One to bring him, one to bind him. Whoever keeps these roses two, the sweetest love will come to you.”

She turned on the tap-it really should have been a stream, but this was all the running water she could find-and held the head of the combined rose beneath it, then tossed the remaining petals into the trash.

“What are you doing?”

Gilly almost jumped a foot to find Addie Peabody there. “Washing my hands,” she said, trying to hide the posy.

“In the men’s room?”

“Is it? I didn’t look at the sign.” She could tell Addie wasn’t buying a single word, so she decided to go on the defensive. “What are you doing in the men’s bathroom?”

“I own it. And I clean it hourly.” Addie narrowed her eyes. “Whatever you were doing in here, just finish up and leave. . . . What’s that?”

Gilly quickly tucked her hand behind her back. “Nothing.”

“If it’s nothing, why are you trying to hide it from me?” Addie grabbed Gilly’s arm and pried open her fingers. “I suggest you and your friends pay your bill and leave.” Without even glancing at it, she absently slipped the posy into the wide pocket of her apron and left Gillian standing alone.

Wes had returned from the Do-Or-Diner that day on a mission. The reason Jack St. Bride looked so familiar was because Wes had seen him at the station. Now, a man could come to the police station for a hundred things-but the memory stuck in Wes’s mind like a thorn. He knew better than to run a records check without reason, and he’d probably have to answer to Charlie Saxton about it when the detective checked the NCIC log-but he told himself that he was doing this for Addie’s safety.

It had nothing to do with the fact that, in a heartbeat, he’d want her for himself.

In a town like Salem Falls, Wes had plenty of free time on his hands between 911 calls. He dispatched an ambulance to the old folk’s home, and then typed St. Bride’s name into the SPOTS terminal, which had the capability to run records throughout the country.

Wes lifted his gaze to the screen, eyes widening. “Oh, Addie,” he murmured.

“Turn around,” Amos Duncan commanded.

Gillian pivoted in a slow circle, her black skirt flaring around her thighs, the rhinestone clips winking in her hair.

“That’s a better outfit. But the skirt’s too short.”

She rolled her eyes. “Daddy, you say that even when I wear ankle length.”

“I just don’t want any of those football players getting ideas.”

“As if,” Gilly said under her breath, thinking that the very last person in the world she’d ever let touch her was a Salem Falls jock. “Meg’s dad is chaperoning, anyway.”

“That’s good. There’s something comforting about knowing your daughter’s best friend has relatives in law enforcement.”

The teakettle began to whistle in the kitchen. “I’ll get it,” Gillian said.

“I can make my own cup of tea.”

“But I want to.” She tossed a smile back over her shoulder. “It’s the least I can do, considering I’m leaving you here all alone to mope around.”

Amos laughed. “Maybe I can find something to do to pass the time. Like count the number of tiles in the shower stall.”

“But you did that the last time I went out at night,” Gilly joked. She went into the kitchen, took a mug from a cherry cabinet, then placed a strainer filled with leaves of her father’s favorite blend of Darjeeling. Before she closed the little silver hatch, she reached into her blouse and added several of the pills from her father’s factory.

Ten minutes later, when she opened the strainer, there was nothing left of them. She carried the mug to the library, where her father was waiting.

“That’s what you’re wearing?” Jordan said, looking up from the paper.

Thomas took a swig of milk from the carton in the refrigerator, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Well, nothing, I guess, given the fact that you’re acting like a total slob, too.” Jordan frowned at his son’s backward baseball hat and faded jersey, at the pants riding so low on his hips they seemed in danger of sliding down. “When I was your age, a guy would dress up for a dance.”

“Yeah, and then you’d hook your team up to the buckboard to drive over to the little red schoolhouse.”

“Very funny. I’m talking about a nice shirt. A tie, maybe.”

“A tie? Christ, if I walked in wearing one they’d lynch me with it. They’d think I was one of those Jesus freaks who go around handing out pamphlets in the cafeteria.”

“They do?” Jordan asked. “During school hours?”

“Careful, Dad, your civil liberties are showing.”

Jordan folded the newspaper and stood up. “Who’s driving tonight?”

“Don’t worry. I’ve got a ride.”

“Oh, yeah?” Jordan smiled. “Did Chelsea Abrams fall under your considerable McAfee charm and decide to take you?”

“No, I got someone else to go with me.” As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Thomas wished them back. The gleam in his father’s eye was too strong.

“Details?” When Thomas shrugged, Jordan raised a brow. “You might as well give up now. I weasel information out of people for a living.”

Thomas was saved by the doorbell. “See you, Dad. Don’t wait up.”

“Now hang on.” Jordan dogged his heels. “I want to see her face. If I can’t live vicariously through you, what’s the point of having a teenage son?” He grinned at Thomas’s abject humiliation. “So? Is she hot?”

The door opened before Thomas could answer. Standing there was a six-foot black woman with a model’s body and anger swimming in her eyes. “You certainly used to think so, Jordan,” said Selena Damascus, and she pushed her way inside.

The first thing that happened: Words began to swim on the page in front of Amos Duncan. About then, he noticed that the room was warmer and that every time he lifted his eyes toward his daughter, who sat waiting for her ride to the school dance, he felt queasy. A moment later, he barely reached the bathroom before vomiting all over the floor.

“Daddy!” Gillian cried, standing in the doorway.

He was kneeling in his own puke, his eyes and nose running the way they did after a violent heave, and the only thought caught in his mind was that he was going to do it again. This time, he retched over the bowl, then rested his head against the porcelain.

He felt Gilly come up behind him; then place a cool, damp hand towel on the back of his neck. Amos vomited again, his belly a great, aching Möbius strip. In the distance, he heard the doorbell. “You . . . go. I’ll be fine,” he rasped.

“No,” Gilly answered firmly. “There’s no way I’m leaving you like this.”

Amos was vaguely aware of her moving away, of the murmur of voices. The next thing he knew, he was lying on his back in his bed, wearing a clean T-shirt and pajama bottoms. Gillian sat on a chair beside the bed, dressed in jeans and a sweater. “How are you doing?”

“The . . . dance.”

“I told Chelsea to go without me.” She squeezed his hand. “Who else was going to take care of you?”

“Who else?” Amos said, stroking her wrist, as he drifted back to sleep.

“You’re telling me you invited Selena to the school dance?” Jordan was yelling by now, an ugly vein pounding in the center of his forehead. His son, and his former private investigator. His former lover.

He and Selena had always worked well together-when the situation in question was a professional one. Their minds ran on the same track; their blood heated to a boil at the thought of a challenging case. But all that had changed a year ago in Bainbridge, New Hampshire, when Jordan had defended a boy accused of murdering his teenage girlfriend. He’d done the unprecedented-had let his job get under his skin. And the moment that line had blurred, so had the one between him and Selena. That case had almost killed him; Selena had been the one who nearly struck the final blow.

“I didn’t have anything to do tonight,” Selena said, grinning at Thomas. “I always promised him I’d go to the prom, but then I heard about this Chelsea girl and realized desperate measures need to be taken. We’re gonna show them, aren’t we, Thomas? Can’t be too many freshmen who’ll show up with seventy-two inches of mouth-watering dark chocolate on their arm!”

“Can we back up? Can someone tell me how after months of no communication whatsoever, you managed to waltz back into our lives?”

“First things first,” Selena said. “You left me behind. Second, my whereabouts were never a secret. You know damn well I’ve never had a publicly listed residential phone number. It seems to me that if you looked half as hard as you do to find evidence for acquittal, you could have found me in less than ten minutes.”

“That’s about what it took,” Thomas agreed, shrugging. “Over the Internet.”

Sinking down on the couch, Jordan covered his face with his hands. “You’re twenty-three years older than Thomas.”

“God, Dad, this isn’t a date date. Is that why you’re losing it? You’re jealous?”

“No, I am not jealous. I just can’t imagine that bringing Selena to your school dance is any less jarring than, for example, wearing that tie we were talking about.”

Selena elbowed Thomas. “Hermès silk can’t move as smooth as I can on a dance floor-isn’t that right?”

Thomas laughed. “Just as long as you don’t curse me if I dump you for Chelsea.”

“Honey, are you kidding? That’s the whole point.”

Jordan stood. “Okay. Okay! If you two want to act like . . . like children, be my guest. But I don’t have to stand here and listen to the woman who ruined my life cavort with my son as if nothing ever happened in the first place!” He stormed out of the living room, and a moment later the door to his bedroom slammed shut.

“Who’s acting like the child?” said Thomas.

Selena smirked. “I didn’t think we were cavorting, per se. Did you?”

“Not in the least.”

She lifted Thomas’s arm and crooked it so that she could slip her hand through. “You didn’t tell him I’d be sleeping on the couch tonight, did you?”

Grinning, Thomas shook his head. “Nope.”

“Do you think you ought to mention it? So he has time to work through his fit before we come home?”

Thomas nodded, and then on second thought, shook his head. “A little mystery never hurts,” he said.

Wes knew that some of the officers who pulled shifts at the high school dances liked to pull low their hats and stare at the nubile girls from beneath the brims-the fluid curves and candy-glitter makeup a guilty pleasure. In his opinion, though, the ones that bore watching were the young boys. They’d push and shove at each other with their thick, sloped shoulders, take slight over whose foot fell first on a block of brick, raise their voices just to be heard-these were children’s minds, trapped in the bodies of men.

“Ten bucks says that kid in the Abercrombie & Fitch hat throws a punch before the hour’s out,” Wes said, leaning toward Charlie Saxton. It was strange to see him decked out like an officer; usually, as the squad’s detective, he wore plain clothes beneath his shield.

“Last time I checked, Wes, betting was against the law in New Hampshire.”

“It’s an expression.”

Charlie glanced dismissively at him. “Thank you, Mr. Pop Culture.”

“Hey, it’s the patrol officers who know what’s really going on in this town.” He was bursting with his knowledge, desperate to tell. “You ever hear of a Jack St. Bride?”

Charlie sighed. “Aw, goddammit. Yeah, I have. He came in to register.”

“He did?”

“Yeah. And I fucked up. I was going to send out a memo to everyone and somehow lost track of it.”

The wind had gone out of Wes’s sails. “So you knew about him.”

“Yeah.”

“Sexual assault.”

Charlie nodded. “It was plea-bargained down from rape.”

“And you know that he’s living in Salem Falls now.”

“Ex-cons have to live somewhere. You can’t round ’em up and stick ’em on a reservation.”

“We don’t have to roll out a welcome mat, either,” Wes said.

Charlie turned, shielding the conversation from public view. “I didn’t just hear you say that, you understand?”

Chagrined, Wes nodded. Charlie outranked him. “I still think people have the right to know someone’s a jerk before they get involved with him.”

Charlie stifled a smile. “Gotta admit, that policy could come in handy.”

“I’m glad you think this is so funny. Let’s see how hard you’re laughing the first time one of these girls is sitting across from you with her clothes torn, crying because she happened to have the bad luck to cross paths with St. Bride.”

Charlie opened his mouth to respond, but the boy in the Abercrombie & Fitch hat punched one of the other kids. “Ten bucks,” he murmured, and followed Wes through a sea of slack-jawed teens to do his job.

Thomas could feel the weight of a hundred pairs of eyes on his shoulders as he rocked back and forth on the dance floor with Selena. She stood a full head taller than he, which made it awkward, since his face was pressed up against her breasts, and he was a guy after all, so of course he couldn’t get that fact out of his mind, even if it was just Selena.

But nobody else knew that. A senior-one who’d stuffed him in a locker for the hell of it last month-had come over to ask if that was really Tyra Banks. Another wanted to know the going rate for an escort service these days. But that wasn’t nearly as rewarding as knowing that Chelsea was watching. He’d seen her standing off to the side of the gym with two of the three girls she usually hung with, the look on her face almost comical.

Thomas lifted his face to Selena’s. “If you kiss me, I’ll give you all the money in my college fund.”

Selena laughed out loud. “Thomas, honey, Bill Gates couldn’t pay me enough to kiss you here in the middle of a dance floor. On the one hand, see all those cops? I’m not about to be locked up for statutory rape. On the other hand, it’s just plain creepy. You’re like a nephew or something.”

The music ended, a faint sappy warbling. Selena patted Thomas’s cheek. “How about you stay here and make up stories about how you met me, while I get us some punch?”

She walked off, her perfect ass twitching beneath the silk tube of her dress. And that wasn’t even the most attractive part of Selena-there was her sense of humor, her sharp mind, and the way she’d yell at schoolyard bullies who killed slugs for the hell of it or kicked sand up into the faces of toddlers. Shit, Thomas thought. If he’d been his father, he would have chained her to the bed.

“Thomas.”

He wheeled around to find Chelsea standing there, and the floor dropped out from beneath him. “Hi,” he said.

Before he could follow that up with a coherent comment, Selena returned with two dripping cups. “Disgusting stuff,” she muttered. “Enough sugar in it to kill a horse.” She handed one cup to Thomas, then smiled brightly at the girl beside him.

“I’m Chelsea Abrams,” she said, sticking out her hand.

“Selena Damascus. Charmed.”

“Apparently,” Chelsea whispered beneath her breath.

The DJ resumed his post at the head of the gym, and music pulsed around them again. “So,” Thomas said, “would you like to dance?”

“Love to,” Selena said, at the same moment that Chelsea answered, “Sure.”

Chelsea reddened and stepped back. “I’m sorry . . . I thought . . .”

“I did,” Thomas assured her. “I was.”

“You two go on ahead,” Selena demurred. “I want to finish this drink first.” Grimacing, she took a large gulp and smiled over the edge of the cup.

But Chelsea shook her head. “My friends . . . they’re waiting for me,” she said, and darted away.

Thomas’s chest ached as he watched her navigate the crowd. He would have given anything to touch her hand and lead her onto the dance floor, to see her smile at something he’d said, to feel his pulse speed up at the possibility of what might happen next. And yet here he was once again, the victim of another missed opportunity. He tried to pretend that he was perfectly fine, schooling his face into nonchalance before turning to Selena.

But it was there in his eyes, this wish that things had turned out differently. Selena did a double take, as if she could not quite believe what she was seeing.

“What?” Thomas asked.

“Nothing.” Selena sipped her drink. “For a moment there, you just looked so much like your father.”

When the door of the diner opened after hours, Jack glanced up in surprise. He’d assumed Addie had locked it, and he felt a quick flash of anger-who dared to interrupt the time he had alone with this woman?

The man who entered was a regular trying very hard not to appear as drunk as he actually was. “Ms. Peabody,” he said, “can you help me mainline some caffeine?”

Jack stepped forward. “I’m sorry, but we’re-”

Suddenly Addie’s small hand was on his arm, and he lost the power of speech. “I think we can manage that, Mr. McAfee.” She gestured imperceptibly toward the man, so that Jack would understand. The guy was certainly having a rough night; that much was clear from the way his hair stood on end and his eyes sank into red-rimmed sockets, from the scent of despair that buzzed around him like a cloud of midges. “It’ll just be a minute.”

Characters in this literary work include the characters Christian, Faithful, and Evangelist.

Jordan glanced up at the sound of Alec Trebek’s voice. “The Biography of Jerry Falwell.”

Addie grinned. “Is he right, Jack?”

“No. It’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.”

When the answer was announced, Jordan laughed. “Impressive.” He picked up the steaming mug of coffee Addie had given him. “Tell me then, what great oeuvre includes the characters Spurned, Screwed, and Royally Fucked?”

Jack looked at Addie and blinked.

“That,” Jordan said, belching, “would be the story of my life.” He took a healthy swig from his mug. “No offense, Ms. Peabody, but women . . . God, they’re like broken glass lying in the middle of the road. Cut a man to shreds before he realizes what’s happened.”

“Only if you’re intent on running us over,” Addie said dryly.

Jordan gestured toward Jack. “You ever have trouble with women?”

“Some.”

“You see?”

Addie refilled Jordan’s coffee cup. “Where’s your son tonight, Mr. McAfee?”

“School dance. And he took that goddamn piece of glass with him.”

“Piece of . . . glass?”

“The woman!” Jordan moaned. “The one who ruined my life!”

“I’m going to call you a cab now, Mr. M,” Addie said.

Jack leaned his elbows on the counter. It turned out people truly did cry into their coffee cups. Worse, Jordan McAfee seemed to have no idea that he was doing it. “What did she do to you?”

Jordan shrugged. “She said no.”

At the words, a shudder ripped through Jack.

Suddenly, the door opened as Wes blustered in, his stint as a chaperone now finished. “Addie, you got some coffee for a guy who’s been forced to listen to rap for the past four-”

“We’re closed,” Jack said.

Wes’s eyes passed over Jordan and landed on Jack. “Thank God you’re not alone with him,” he said to Addie.

She smiled. “Mr. McAfee may be a little tipsy, but he’s not dangerous . . .”

“I’m not talking about McAfee.” He protectively closed his hands around her upper arms. “You okay?”

“Fine,” she said, wrenching away.

“Oh, I get it. You’ll let scum like St. Bride touch you, but not me.”

“Watch what you say, Wes,” Addie warned.

The policeman whirled toward Jack. “You gonna let her fight your battles? Maybe you want to tell your boss what you didn’t tell her the day she hired your sorry ass.”

For a moment, the only sound was Alec Trebek’s voice: With 8,891 points, Dan O’Brien holds the world record in this track and field event. Jack felt the floor shift beneath his feet and thought, not for the first time, that life is in the details.

He could not bear to meet Addie’s eyes-Addie, who had trusted him. “I was in jail,” Jack admitted. “For eight months.”

It was all coming together for her now-why Jack had surfaced from nowhere, why a man moving to a town would have only a box of possessions and the clothes on his back, why he did not talk about his past. Jack waited for her to speak, his own mouth dry as a desert.

“Tell her why,” Wes prodded.

But that, Jack wouldn’t do.

“I’m sure if this is true, Jack can explain,” Addie said shakily.

“He raped a woman. You think there’s any explanation for that?”

The room fell away, until all that was left was the small rectangle of silence that trapped both Jack and Addie. Her nostrils flared; her eyes were bright with disbelief. “Jack?” she said softly, urging him to set Wes straight.

Jack knew the exact moment she realized that he wasn’t going to answer.

Addie grabbed for her coat, slung over a counter chair. “I have to go,” she managed, and she stumbled out the front door.

Jack started after her, and found a hand at his throat. “Over my dead body,” Wes said quietly.

“Don’t tempt me.”

The policeman’s wrist cut into Jack’s windpipe. “Want to say that on the record, St. Bride?” Then, abruptly, Wes released him. “Do us all a favor. Lock the door behind you; keep walking until you cross the town line.”

When Wes left, Jack sank down onto a banquette and buried his face in his hands. As a kid, his favorite toy had been a snow globe, that held a small town of gingerbread buildings and peppermint streets. He’d wanted so badly to live there that one day he’d smashed the glass ball-only to find that the houses were made of plaster, the candy stripes painted on. He had known that this existence he’d carved in Salem Falls was an illusion, that one day it would crack open just like that snow globe. But he’d hoped-God, he’d hoped-that it wouldn’t just yet.

“They can’t do that to you, you know.”

Jack had completely forgotten that Jordan McAfee was still here. “Do what?”

“Run you out of town. Threaten you. You paid your debt to society for eight months; you’re now free to join it again.”

“I didn’t belong in jail.”

Jordan shrugged, as if he’d heard this a hundred times before. “You just spent three-quarters of a year in a place because you had to. Don’t you think you deserve to stay somewhere because you want to?”

“Maybe I don’t want to.”

A pair of headlights swept the interior of the diner, the arriving cab. “Well, I’m a pretty good judge of character. And that sure wasn’t the story I got from the look you gave me when I interrupted your evening with a certain waitress.” Jordan set his empty coffee mug in the clean-up basin behind the counter. “Thank Addie for me.”

“Mr. McAfee,” Jack asked. “Would you mind if I shared your taxi?”

The light from the porch fell over him, brightening an unlikely halo around Jack’s head. “I didn’t do it,” he said immediately. There was still a screen door between them, and Addie pressed one hand up against it.

Jack placed his own hand on the other side of the screen. Addie thought of jail and wondered if he had received visitors, with a wall between him and them, just like this.

“Wes told me everything,” she said. “The records are computerized down at the station. He said you even came in to register as a sexual offender.”

“I had to. It was part of the plea bargain.”

There were tears in Addie’s eyes. “Innocent people don’t get sent to jail.”

“And children don’t die. Addie, you know better than anyone that the world doesn’t always work the way it ought to.” Jack hesitated. “Did you ever wonder why I’m never the one to reach for you? Why you’re the one who kisses me, who takes my hand?”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t ever want to be the man they all said I was. I don’t want to be some animal, out of control. And I am afraid that once I touch you, really touch you, I won’t be able to stop.” Jack turned his cheek, so that his lips brushed her palm through the wire screen. “You have to believe me, Addie. I would never rape a woman.”

“I never thought they would, either.”

“Who?”

She lifted her face. “The boys who did it to me.”

She had been sixteen, a straight-A student at Salem Falls High School. The editor of the school newspaper, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Deadlines often kept her working late, but because her parents were busy with the diner, she wasn’t missed at home.

It was cold for April, so cold that when she closed the door behind her and struck off across the playing fields she wished she’d worn jeans instead of a thin skirt. Pulling her coat tight, she skirted the football field, heading toward town.

She heard their voices first-three letter athletes, seniors, who’d led the team to a state championship this year. Shy-brains didn’t mix with jocks-she gave them a wide berth, pretending that she hadn’t seen their bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Addie,” one of them said, and she was so surprised they knew her name that she turned.

“Come here for a second.”

She went over the way a bird hops toward food-cautious, a little hopeful, but ready to fly at the first movement of a human nearby. “You remember that article you wrote on the last game of the season? You did a real nice job. Didn’t she, you guys?”

The other boys nodded. There was something almost beautiful about them, with their flushed faces and the bright caps of their hair, like some strange breed she had read about but never really studied firsthand. “Problem was, you spelled my name wrong.”

“I didn’t.” Addie always checked everything; she was a stickler for detail.

The boy laughed. “I may not be as smart as you, but I know how to spell my own name!” The others elbowed each other and snuffled laughter. “Hey, you want a sip?” Addie shook her head. “It’ll warm you up . . .”

Gingerly, she took a drink. A comet, streaking down her throat-she coughed up most of it into the grass, her eyes tearing. “Whoa there, Addie,” he said, bracing his arm around her. “Take it easy, now.” His hand began to slide up and down. “You know, you aren’t nearly as skinny as you look walking around the halls.”

Addie tried to draw away. “I’ve got to go.”

“First I want you to learn how to spell my name.”

As a compromise, it seemed fair. Addie nodded, and the boy beckoned her closer. “It’s a secret,” he whispered.

Playing along, she bent down, her ear near his lips. And felt his tongue slide inside.

She backed away, but his arms held her tight. “Now you repeat it,” he said, and ground his mouth into hers.

Addie did not remember much after that. Except that there were three of them. That the bleachers, underneath, were painted blaze orange. That fear, in large doses, smells of sulfur. And that there is a place in you that you don’t even know exists, where you can simply stand back and watch without feeling any pain.

“Did you never wonder about Chloe’s father?” Addie asked.

Standing in her living room now, Jack swallowed around the block that had settled in his throat. “Which one was it?”

“I don’t know. I never wanted to find out. I figured after that, I deserved for her to be mine and only mine.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone?”

“Because I would have been branded as a slut. And because I’m not sure . . . I’ve never been sure . . . that they even remembered it happened.” Her voice hitched. “Wish I had been so lucky. For years I’ve wondered what I did that made them do that to me.”

“You were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Jack murmured. We both were.

For eight months, he’d hated the system, which gave women the benefit of the doubt. But seeing Addie-well, a million men could be locked up wrongfully, and it still couldn’t make up for what had happened to her.

“Do they . . . live in town?”

“Going to slay my dragons, Jack?” Addie smiled faintly. “One died in a motorcycle crash. One moved to Florida. One stayed here.”

“Who.”

“Don’t go there.” She shook her head. “No one ever knew what happened except my father, and now you. People figured I was sleeping around and got in trouble. And that’s okay with me, Jack.” Her features softened. “Out of that horrible thing, something wonderful happened. I got Chloe. That’s all I want to remember. That, and nothing else.”

Jack was quiet for a moment. “Do you believe I’m innocent?”

“I don’t know,” Addie admitted. Her voice dropped to a whisper. She had known Jack for such a short time that the depth of her feelings for him seemed disproportionate, as if she’d turned on a faucet and unleashed a geyser. She did not understand this, but then there was much in the world she did not understand. Raw love, like raw heartache, could blindside you. It could make you forget what you did not know to focus exclusively on those few pieces you could commit to heart. “I want to believe you,” she said.

“Then that’s where we’ll start.” Jack closed his eyes and leaned forward. “Kiss me.”

“I don’t think this is the time or-”

His eyes opened a crack. “I want to prove to you I’m who I say I am. I want to show you there is nothing you can do, nothing you can say, that’s going to make me attack you.”

“But you said-”

“Addie,” Jack murmured, “let’s do this for both of us.”

He spread his arms wide, and after a second, Addie leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. “Oh, come on. That’s not your best shot.” She trailed her mouth from his neck to his jaw. A filament of sensation sizzled between them, like a thin string of kerosene that, for the love of a match, could turn into a wall of fire.

This wickedness, this wanting . . . it was like seeing color for the first time and stuffing her pockets full of bright violets, rich oranges, sizzling yellows, afraid she was going to be caught for stealing something that wasn’t hers, but certain that if she took no souvenir, she would never remember it as clearly.

She was ready. She wanted. Addie lifted his hands to the top button of her uniform-only to have Jack move his arms back to his sides.

He won’t do it. He wants me to.

In her life, she had never undressed for a man. Her own father had not seen her naked since she was ten. Shy and fumbling, she fudged the button through its hole, then moved down to the next one. Shelled in the thin pink silk of her bra, her breasts blushed under Jack’s gaze. She unclasped the catch and drew Jack’s head down to map her skin.

“Are you all right?” he whispered.

In response, she kissed a trail down his chest and belly, stopping at the spot where Jack’s jeans tented. Her hands unbuttoned the fly so that the plum-purple weight of him rose into her outstretched hands.

In that moment, she had never felt so safe in her life.

“Let’s do this for both of us,” Addie repeated. In tandem, they reached between his legs, pulled aside her underwear, and gently fit themselves together. He fills me, Addie realized with wonder; at the same moment that Jack thought: So this is what has been missing.

July 1999

Loyal,

New Hampshire

“Jack,” the police officer said, “you need to come down to the station.” Jack tucked the portable phone against his shoulder to finish stuffing papers into his briefcase. “Can’t. I’ve got a meeting this afternoon. But let’s meet at the gym for a game at seven.” Since moving to Loyal and taking a job as the town’s sole detective, Jay Kavanaugh had been Jack’s frequent buddy and a hell of a racquetball partner-they’d whip each other’s asses on alternating days and then go lament the lack of single women in the town over a beer.

“Jack, I need you here now.”

He snorted. “Well, sweetheart, I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“Shut up,” Jay said, and for the first time Jack noticed the edge in his voice. “Look. I don’t really want to go into this over the phone, all right? I’ll explain when you get here.”

“But-”

A dial tone. “Shit,” Jack muttered. “This’d better be worth it.”

He had met Jay when the detective came to the school to talk about safety on Halloween. Immediately, Jay became the big brother that Jack had never had. On the steaming, laziest days of the summer, they went out in the Westonbrook crew launch to catch largemouth bass. Rods balanced in their hands, they’d drink beer and come up with outrageous scenarios to lure Heather Locklear to the small burg of Loyal.

“Think you’ll ever settle down?” Jack had asked once.

Jay had laughed. “I am so settled already, I’m growing roots. Nothing ever happens in Loyal.”

Jay stood up the moment Jack entered his office. He looked at the bookshelf, the carpet, Jack’s coat . . . anywhere but at Jack himself. “You want to tell me what was so damn important that it couldn’t wait?”

“Why don’t we take a walk?”

“What’s the matter with right here?”

Jay’s face twisted. “Just humor me, will you?” He led Jack into a conference room. There was nothing inside but a table, three chairs, and a tape recorder.

Jack grinned. “Do I get to play cop?” He folded his arms over his chest. “You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to an attorney . . .” His voice trailed off as Jay closed his eyes and turned away. “Hey,” Jack said quietly. “What the hell?”

When Jay looked at him again, his face was completely impassive. “Catherine Marsh said the two of you have been having an affair.”

“Catherine Marsh said what?” Jack took a second look at the spare room, the tape recorder, and Jay’s expression. “Am I . . . you’re not arresting me, are you?”

“No. We’re just talking now. I want to hear your side of the story.”

“You couldn’t possibly think . . . for God’s sake, Jay . . . she’s-she’s a student. I swear-I’ve never touched her. I don’t know where she’d get an idea like this.” In spite of himself, his heart was racing.

“On the basis of the evidence we have, we’ll be bringing charges against you,” Jay said stiffly. Then his voice softened. “You may want to get yourself a lawyer, Jack.”

A curtain of rage ripped across Jack’s vision. “Why did you want me to come in here to talk if you’re going to arrest me anyway?” The accusation hung between them, and Jack suddenly realized exactly why Jay had asked for his side of the story-it had nothing to do with their friendship and everything to do with catching Jack in a confession that could be used against him in court.

Loyal was a picture-perfect town, complete with a general store, a requisite wooden bridge, and a row of white clapboard buildings that flanked the town green, mirroring the architecture of Westonbrook Academy. Jack’s home was a little cape. From his front porch, he could see the house where Catherine Marsh and her father, the Right Reverend Ellidor Marsh, lived.

What Jack had liked best about the town was that he could not walk through it without saying hello to someone he knew. If not a student, then the woman who ran the general store. The postmaster. The elderly twin brothers who had never married but served as bank tellers at side-by-side windows.

Today, though, he walked with his head ducked, afraid of seeing someone familiar. He passed kids and felt their heads crane to watch him walk by. He veered around the broom of a shopkeeper, his face lighting with embarrassment as she paused in her sweeping and stared. I am innocent, he wanted to scream, but even that would not make a difference. It wasn’t truth that held their interest; it was the fact that rotten luck might be catching.

Catherine Marsh’s house was gaily laced with pink roses that grew skyward on a trellis. He rapped sharply on the door, falling back a step when Catherine answered.

She was young and pretty, with skin that seemed lit from the inside. In that first moment, Jack saw all the times he’d hugged her after a particularly fine goal on the field, all the times he’d noticed her jersey straining against her sports bra. A wide smile spread across her face. “Coach!”

He opened up his mouth to speak, to accuse her, to ask her why, but all the questions jammed. A face appeared behind hers: Ellidor Marsh, in all his fundamentalist fury.

“Reverend,” Jack began.

It was all Ellidor needed. His face revealed an internal war for the briefest moment, and then his fist shot out and clipped Jack in the jaw.

Catherine cried out as Jack tumbled down the steps, landing in a tangle of rosebushes. Thorns cut into the summer-weight wool of his trousers. He spat out blood, then wiped his hand across his mouth.

Catherine was trying to get to him, but her father had pushed her behind his own body. Jack narrowed his eyes at the chaplain. “Did the good Lord tell you to do that?”

“Go,” Ellidor said precisely, “to hell.”

A few weeks before, Jack had been teaching the Peloponnesian War to the summer term fourth-formers. He stood in front of his classroom, his shirt sticking to his chest in this July heat. “The Spartans weren’t happy with the peace treaty they’d signed, and the Athenians were getting a little power hungry themselves. . . .” He’d glanced over the rows of flushed faces of students cooling themselves with hastily folded looseleaf-paper fans. “And not a single one of you is listening right now.”

Jack winced as one girl’s eyes actually drifted shut. He was not a big fan of Westonbrook’s summer session, offered so students could pump up their academic credits for college applications. The hundred-year-old classrooms at Westonbrook, sweatboxes all, were not conducive to learning.

Catherine Marsh sat in the front of the class, her starched collar neat against the edge of her uniform cardigan, her legs crossed primly at the ankles. “Dr. St. Bride,” she whined, “what’s so important about a war that happened twenty-four hundred years ago in a different country? I mean, it’s not our history. So why do we have to learn it?”

The chorus of agreement swept like a wave. Jack glanced from one flushed young face to another. “Okay,” he said, “we’re taking a field trip.”

He did not really have a plan in mind, beyond getting them out of those godforsaken uniforms and into something more comfortable. Swimsuits were the most obvious choice . . . each girl had one roped to her gym locker. But he also had a very good sense of the mind of sophomore girls-who would rather cut off their left arm than show off physical flaws in front of classmates who were curvier, thinner, taller . . . or in front of a male teacher. Suddenly, Jack brightened, imagining a modest way to make the kids more comfortable-a way that could even be construed as part of their daily lesson.

He led them to the cafeteria, where arthritic townies were chopping heads of iceberg lettuce into salads. “Ladies,” he said in greeting, “we have need of some tablecloths.”

He was directed toward the main hall, where first-formers through sixth-formers took meals together. Neatly folded linens were stacked in piles. Jack took one tablecloth and tossed it to a student. He reached for another, and another, until every girl in his class was holding one. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do. And when in Greece . . .” He grabbed a cloth and wrapped it around his own body. “Voilà. The toga.”

He led them to the girls’ locker room. “I want you all to put on your swimsuits, and then drape your toga. Carry out your uniforms, just in case.”

“In case what?”

Jack grinned. “In case we need to beat a hasty retreat from the fashion police.” Or the headmaster, he thought.

“Might as well paint an L on my forehead right now,” a student murmured. “Loser.”

But in spite of the grumbling, they filed inside and then emerged one by one, each holding a stack of clothes. “You see?” Jack said. “Don’t you feel better already?”

The last girl to come out was Catherine Marsh. She was wearing her toga, too . . . but no tank suit. Her bare shoulder, smooth and tan, brushed Jack’s arm as she passed by.

Jack hid a smile. Girls this age-especially girls with crushes-were about as subtle as steamrollers.

He marched them to the soccer field, had them set down their bundles, and then line up. “Okay. At first, you’re all living in harmony, thanks to a peace treaty the Spartans signed.” Then he split the girls into two groups. “You Spartans,” he told the first bunch, “you want to fight a land war, because that’s what you’re good at. And you”-he pointed to the Athenians-“you want to fight a naval war, because that’s what you’re good at.”

“But how do we know who to kill?” one girl called out. “We all look the same.”

“Excellent question! Someone who’s your friendly neighbor one day is an enemy the next, simply because of a political issue. What do you do?”

“Ask before you draw your sword?”

Jack reached behind the girl who’d spoken, and pretended to slash her throat. “And in that second you hesitated, you’re dead.”

“Stay with your own kind,” one student shouted.

“Watch your back!”

“Strike first!”

Jack grinned as his listless group grew more animated, engaging in mock combat, until they were all rolling around the field, grass stains marking the knees and bottoms of their togas. Exhausted, they lay on their backs, watching cirrus clouds stretch across the sky like the long limbs of ballerinas.

A shadow loomed over Jack, and he looked up to find Herb Thayer, the headmaster of Westonbrook Academy. “Dr. St. Bride . . . a word?”

They walked out of earshot. “God, Jack. You trying to get us sued?”

“For what? Teaching history?”

“Since when does the curriculum include stripping?”

Jack shook his head. “Costuming. There’s a difference. Kids this age are like puppies; they need to get their blood moving before their brains kick into gear. And the classrooms are brutal in this heat.” He offered his most engaging smile. “This is no different from staging Shakespeare.”

Herb wiped a hand across his brow. “For all I care, Jack, you can put them through basic training to help them remember what you’re teaching. Just make sure they’re fully clothed before you send them out on the obstacle course.” He started off, then turned at the last minute. “I know what you’re doing and why. But the guy who’s crossing the street over there, who came in during the second act-he sees something totally different.”

Jack waited until Herb left. Then he approached his class again, curiosity playing over their faces.

“Who won?” Catherine Marsh asked.

“Well, Dr. Thayer is in favor of our mock battles but highly recommends that you do it in uniform.”

A groan rose from the group, but they began to gather the small bundles of clothing they’d carried out to the field.

“No,” Catherine said. “I meant, who won the war?”

“The Peloponnesian War? Nobody. Both sides believed their strategy would wear down the other side and make them surrender. But after ten years, neither had.”

“You mean they just stayed at war because no one would give in?”

“Yes. By the time they signed the Peace of Nicias, it wasn’t about who was right or wrong . . . just about not fighting anymore.” He clapped his hands for attention. “Okay, now. Let’s hustle.”

The girls trickled away. Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty, Jack thought, watching them. He took a step forward and felt something beneath his shoe. A wisp of fabric, a red satin bra accidentally dropped by one of the girls. Sewn along the inseam was a name label, de rigueur for any boarding-school student. CATHERINE MARSH, Jack read. Blushing, he stuffed it into his pocket.

Melton Sprigg’s office was by no stretch of the imagination impressive. It was a walk-up above the Chinese restaurant in Loyal, and the smell of kung po chicken was thick. There was no air conditioning, and papers littered the floor and the desk and the one filing cabinet. “Keep meaning to clean this up,” he huffed, moving a stack of journals out of the way so that Jack could sit down.

For one brief moment, Jack considered bolting. He forced himself to flatten his hands on the arms of his chair, to relax.

“So,” Melton said, “how can I help you?”

Jack realized he had never actually said the words before. They stuck like glue to the roof of his mouth. “I think I’m going to be charged with a crime.”

Melton grinned. “Good thing. If you said you wanted to order moo shu pork, you’d be in the wrong place. Why do you think you’re going to be charged?”

“The police said as much. They called me in to . . .talk. . . a few days ago. A girl . . . a student of mine . . . has implied that she and I . . . that we . . . ”

Melton whistled through his teeth. “I can guess the rest.”

“I didn’t do it,” Jack insisted.

The lawyer handed him a card. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”

In spite of the heat, Jack went running. He put on his old college soccer jersey and shorts and took off dead east from the porch of his house. He ran two miles, four, six. Sweat poured into his eyes, and he gasped great drafts of air. He passed the town line and kept running. He ran the perimeter of a pond, twice. And when he realized that no matter how hard he tried he could not outrace his fear, he collapsed at the edge, buried his face in his hands, and cried.

Catherine Marsh remembered with vivid clarity the first time Jack St. Bride had touched her.

She had been playing forward, her eye on the ball, so intent on ring it into the goal of the opposing team that she’d completely missed seeing the other player hurtling toward her with the same single-mindedness. They smacked heads with an audible crunch, the last noise Catherine could remember hearing before she was unconscious. When she came to, Coach was leaning over her, his golden hair haloed by the sun, the way it always looks in the movies when the hero comes along. “Catherine,” he asked, “you all right?” At first she hadn’t been able to answer because his hands were running up and down her body, checking for broken bones. “I think your ankle is swelling,” he said. Then he’d taken off her cleat and peeled off her sock, examining her sweaty foot like Cinderella’s prince. “Perfect,” he pronounced. And Catherine had thought, Yes, you are.

She knew that there was something special between them, from the way he kept her after practice to show her a drill to the way he sometimes slung an arm over her shoulders when they were walking off the field together. When she’d confided that she was thinking of sleeping with Billy Haines, Coach had been the one to drive her to the clinic two towns over, to get birth control pills. Oh, he hadn’t wanted to at first-but he’d given in because he cared about her. And when Billy had dumped her two days later, Coach had let her cry on his shoulder.

She wondered several times a day what he’d done with the bra she’d left behind after that Ancient History class. It had fallen out of her bundle of clothes completely by accident . . . or maybe it was just fate, now that she got to thinking about it. She’d realized it was missing and had gone back to the field to retrieve it . . . just in time to see Coach pick up her bra and pocket it. Something had made her turn away without asking for it back. Maybe he slept with it beneath his pillow. Maybe he just let the silk slip through his fingers and pretended it was her skin.

Yesterday, Catherine hadn’t gone to school. Her father wouldn’t let her. And it was probably best that way, since she did not know what she would have said to Jack. She had heard through the grapevine that he had been taken off to jail in handcuffs, like he was some criminal. If Catherine had been there, she would have knelt at his feet and kissed every spot on his wrists the metal touched. She would have asked to wear them in his place. She would do anything to show him how much she loved him, anything at all.

Jack leaned so close to Melton Sprigg he could see the weave of the attorney’s bow tie. “I didn’t do it,” he said through his teeth. “Doesn’t that count for anything?”

“I’m just saying that in today’s day and age, there are ways to make a jury understand why a man of . . . advanced years . . . might develop an interest in a younger girl.”

“Good. You can use that defense for a client who’s actually guilty.” Jack sank into a chair, suddenly overwhelmed. Today, his best friend had charged him with felonious sexual assault. He’d been arraigned. His bank account was $5,000 lighter, thanks to posting bail. His wrist was bruised where the handcuff had pinched it while he was being led up to the courtroom. “We’re going to fight this. That’s what the system is about, right? Giving each side the chance to speak. And who’s going to listen to what a fifteen-year-old says?”

Melton nodded and smiled, for his client’s sake. And did not tell him what he was thinking: that simply because Catherine Marsh was fifteen, everyone would be listening.

“I’ll cut right through the bullshit,” Herb Thayer said. “This is downright awkward.”

Finally, someone who agreed with him. “Tell me about it,” Jack said. “I had to walk into the station yesterday, so that Jay Kavanaugh could read me my rights! For God’s sake, I played racquetball with him last Saturday, and here he was booking me.” Once he began to speak, he didn’t think he’d ever be able to stop. “It came out of left field, Herb. I have no idea what this kid is thinking.”

“You and Catherine Marsh have a close rapport,” Herb stated.

“You . . . you don’t believe what she said, do you?”

“God, Jack, of course not. I’m just pointing out that I can see how . . . others . . . might have come to this conclusion.”

Jack got to his feet and began to prowl around the office. On a shelf behind him were four district championship trophies for girls’ soccer, each of which he’d earned by means of the close rapport Herb was questioning now. “I never touched her.”

Herb gazed out the window to where several students were eating lunch. “You know,” he said softly, “you’re the best teacher in this school. You can turn kids on to learning like I’ve never seen before.”

Jack felt a rush in his bloodstream, the swift realization that things might not turn out to be quite as dismal as he’d believed.

The headmaster picked up a pen, drummed it on the desktop. “Look, Jack. I believe you. But I’ve got parents who want to know what kind of school employs a teacher whose conduct is suspect. I’ve got Ellidor Marsh breathing down my neck-”

“Ellidor Marsh is a fundamentalist asshole who has no place being a private school chaplain.”

“He’s also a father who thinks his fifteen-year-old daughter was having sex with a guy twice her age who should have known better!” The accusation hung between them, black as smoke, hovering over the desk.

“Nothing’s been proven,” Jack said, words that tasted like dust.

Herb could not meet his eye. “Try to see it from my point of view, Jack. For the good of the school, I can’t have a teacher here who’s been accused of statutory rape.” He walked around the desk. “If there’s some other way I can help . . .”

“Don’t do me any favors,” Jack murmured, and left before Herb could say anything else.

Annalise St. Bride actually knew Brooke Astor. She had a tiger-skin rug in her bedroom-her husband had shot the beast on safari; she kept a home on the Upper West Side that had been featured in Architectural Digest more often than had Gracie Square. But these were not the amazing things about Annalise. It was far more interesting that she shared her apartment with her husband’s former lover, who was now her closest friend. Or that she knew just as many prostitutes as she did debutantes. She was best known for her decade-long crusade to fight violence against women. Twenty rape crisis centers dotted the seediest parts of New York City, thanks to Annalise’s checkbook and iron resolve.

So when Jack found his mother on the front doorstep of his home, he was stunned, to say the least.

That she had come to support him-without knowing all the details-cracked his heart wide. Just looking at her, Jack felt the protective wall he’d been building around himself begin to tumble down. He leaned forward to kiss her cheek, but she ducked away.

“I’m not staying, Jack. But what I came to say, I wanted to say in person.” Annalise regarded him soberly. “Do you know how many women I’ve seen after a rape?”

Jack tried to draw a breath but couldn’t. It was not enough that his employer, his students, his attorney, and his colleagues believed this charge. His own mother did, too.

“You . . . you can’t think I’m guilty,” he whispered.

Annalise raised her brows. “Why on earth would a woman lie about that?”

Suddenly Jack remembered when his mother had taken him to the Central Park Zoo as a child. He’d stayed too long in the dark hut of the bats, fascinated by the way they could fold themselves up like tiny umbrellas. When he’d turned around, his mother had been gone. He had not been afraid for himself, not even at seven; instead, he’d felt bad for his mother, who surely would have been frantic by now. But he found her standing outside the hut, talking to an acquaintance she’d met. Jack had pressed up against her leg, a limpet. “Oh,” she’d said blithely, as if she’d never noticed his absence. “Are we finished here?”

Now, Jack swallowed hard. “You have to believe me. I’m your son.”

“Not anymore,” said Annalise.

He puts his hands under my shirt, and I feel them burning. I’m aching for him. Oh, Jack. I know it won’t hurt with him, because he promises me. Even when he’s sticking it in me, I don’t mind, because finally we are one.

Jack pushed away the photocopied pages. “What is this shit?”

Melton shrugged. “Discovery. Evidence. This is the diary entry that apparently sent Catherine’s father over the edge.” He shuffled through his own notes. “Well, along with the birth control pills.”

“Did anyone ever stop to consider that maybe this is fiction?”

“Of course, Jack.” Melton pushed his half-glasses up on his nose. “But she also says you were the one who took her to get contraception.”

“By default, Melton. She wanted to sleep with her boyfriend and no one else would take her to Planned Parenthood!”

“According to Catherine, there was no boyfriend. She says she got the Pill because you wanted to sleep with her.”

“Look. She has a crush on me. I knew that on some level, even if I didn’t address it. I didn’t want to embarrass her, and I figured she’d just grow out of it. Things like this happen all the time.”

“There’s a difference between a minor imagining she has a crush on an older man and a minor who has sexual intercourse with that man.”

“You’ve got it backwards! She’s imagining the sex!” Jack took a deep breath. “Okay. So they have her testimony, and this diary. And some birth control pills. I don’t see how any of that conclusively points to my carrying on an intimate relationship with her.”

“I agree,” Melton said. “You’d be in much better shape if the police hadn’t found anything when they searched your house.”

Jack frowned. The police had arrived with a warrant, and he’d let them search the premises, but he hadn’t realized anything fruitful had come of it. Melton pushed a photograph across the table at him. “What is this, a rag?”

“Apparently,” Melton said, “it’s Catherine Marsh’s bra. It was in your briefcase.”

Jack stared at it for a second. Then he started laughing. “Christ, Melton, they can’t think . . . I picked it up for her after she left it in class. No, wait-that came out sounding bad. We were working on a unit on ancient Greek history in this sweltering heat, and the kids had all gotten into togas made out of tablecloths, and-”

“And the police found a bra, with Catherine Marsh’s name sewn into it, in your briefcase. That’s all they know, Jack. And that’s plenty.”

“But I can explain it.”

“I know,” Melton said. “Unfortunately, so can the prosecutor.”

Jack had to see her. He had read and reread the conditions of his bail, which stipulated in black and white that he stay away not only from minors but specifically from Catherine Marsh. If he was caught, there would be another hearing. He would be charged with violating his bail condition and held in contempt of court. He would most likely be put into jail until his trial came up on the docket.

If he were caught, it would contribute to the prosecution’s case against him.

But if he could get away with this one small thing, he had a chance of stopping this charge from going forward.

The schedules of students at Westonbrook had been computerized two years ago, thanks to the diligence of an intern who happened to be a technical whiz. It took Jack less than ten minutes to find Catherine Marsh’s whereabouts. Within an hour, he was standing behind a large oak at the edge of the campus, watching as girls passed by in small clusters, bright butterflies lighting from conversation to conversation.

Catherine was walking alone, the first stroke of luck since this whole debacle had begun. Sweat broke out on his brow as he willed her to come closer. The sun glinted off the brass clutch of her knapsack, momentarily blinding him.

He reached out to grab her upper arm. Pressing her up against the tree, his hand clapped over her mouth. Catherine’s eyes went wide with fear, then suddenly softened. He let go of her. “Coach,” she said, smiling, as if she had not overturned the whole bowl of his life.

He swallowed, reaching for reason, but it was the anger that finally pushed one sentence through, rough and rusty as a spike. “Catherine,” Jack hissed, “what the hell did you do?”

She had never seen him angry before. Well, maybe once or twice, but that usually had to do with a player whose mind was on some stupid guy instead of practice. The bite of his fingers into the bones of her shoulders scared her with one heartbeat, then thrilled her the next. He came here for me, she thought.

Suddenly, he got himself under control again. “What did you tell them?”

In that moment, her feelings were a featherbed, downy and inviting. Catherine took a deep breath and jumped. “That I love you.”

“You love me,” he repeated, the words sounding all wrong on the twist of his mouth. “Catherine, you don’t love me.”

“I do. And I know you love me, too.”

“Anything I’ve ever said to you or done with you I would have said or done with any student,” Coach said. “Catherine, you’ve got to stop lying to them. Don’t you see I could end up in jail?”

For a moment, Catherine’s heart stopped beating. And then she realized this was a test. A way of safeguarding his heart, until her own was laid bare. She smiled tremulously. “You don’t have to hide the truth anymore.”

“The truth?”

“You know . . . how we’re going to be together.”

His eyes flashed. “Before or after I’m tried for a felony?”

“Oh, Jack,” Catherine whispered, and she reached out to him.

He recoiled, unwilling to touch her, unwilling to be touched by her. And this, finally, gave Catherine pause. Even as she called to him, he continued to back away with his palms raised, as if he was no longer seeing a pretty young girl but a poisonous snake that might strike when he least expected.

“Of course she’s skittish,” the prosecutor said gently to Reverend Marsh. Loretta Winwood folded her hands on her desk, patient. “If she wasn’t reluctant to testify, I’d be concerned about her motivations. But it’s common to have underage witnesses balk. In fact, a hesitant witness on the stand is a powerful piece of evidence in a statutory rape case.”

“But you heard her! She says she made the whole thing up.”

Loretta gave the man a moment to compose himself. Poor guy, to find out just a few days ago that his daughter had been carrying on an affair with a teacher and then today to have her recant in a puddle at his feet. It was at moments like this that she truly understood why attorneys were called counselors. “Reverend Marsh, do you believe her?”

“My daughter’s a good Christian girl.”

“Yes, but she’s either lying about this sexual affair . . . or she’s lying about lying about it.”

Marsh pressed his fingers to his temples. “I don’t know, Ms. Winwood.”

“What reason would Catherine have to make up a story about a consensual sexual relationship that doesn’t exist?”

“None.”

“All right. Now, let’s assume that she has been involved in a relationship with Dr. St. Bride, upsetting as that is to consider. What reason would Catherine have to suddenly retract everything she’s confessed?”

Marsh closed his eyes. “To save him.”

Loretta nodded. “One reason it’s against the law to have intercourse with people under the age of sixteen is because minors are so susceptible to manipulation. What your daughter just told me-well, I see it a lot, Reverend Marsh. Unfortunately, these girls are in love. And once they triumphantly tell the world and the object of their affection is carted off in cuffs, they suddenly wonder if that was such a good idea.”

“Can . . . can you force her to be a witness?”

“I can force her to sit on the stand, but if she won’t testify, she won’t testify. That’s why so many of these cases never make it to trial.” She closed the file in front of her. “If Catherine tells the jury this affair existed only in her imagination, I can’t impeach her with her prior statements to the contrary. We have some incriminating evidence . . . but nothing as strong as Catherine’s testimony. And I’m sorry to say that means Jack St. Bride will most likely be acquitted-and will most likely seduce another underage girl in the future.”

Marsh’s face mottled pink. “He’ll burn in hell one day.”

This was a gray area in the law. If Catherine had been lying today about never having sex with St. Bride, it wasn’t really exculpatory evidence . . . which meant her confession didn’t have to be turned over to the defense . . . which meant that Melton Sprigg would not know that Catherine was unwilling to testify against his client. “Hell would be fine,” Loretta said. “But there might be something a little more immediate.”

“A plea bargain?” Jack said. “Doesn’t that mean they’re running scared?”

The attorney shook his head. “Most cases that go to court . . . well, ten percent are sure wins for the county attorney, and ten percent are sure losses. But the bulk of the cases-eighty percent-fall smack in the middle. Prosecutors offer pleas all the time, because they ensure a conviction.”

“So what am I, Melton? The ten percent that wins or the ten percent that loses?”

“With you, the odds are more like five percent on either side, ninety in the middle. Rape trials, Jack . . . a lot of the time, it comes down to one person’s word against another’s. Conviction or acquittal could hang on whether the jury had a good breakfast that day.”

“I’m not taking a plea,” Jack said. “I won’t admit to something I never did.”

“Well, just hear me out, then, all right? Because my job description says I have to read it to you.” Melton handed him the fax. “They’re willing to reduce the charge to a misdemeanor sexual assault. Eight months in jail, no probation. It’s a good deal, Jack.”

“It’s a good deal for someone who’s goddamned guilty!” Jack cried. “I never touched her, Melton. She’s lying.”

“Do you think you can convince twelve jurors of that? Do you really want to play that kind of Russian roulette?” He lifted Jack’s mug and took his napkin from underneath it, then drew a line down the middle with his pen. At the top he wrote PRO and CON. “Let’s look at what happens if you go to trial. Best-case scenario? You get acquitted. Worst-case scenario? You get convicted of a class B felony. You get sent to the state penitentiary for seven years.”

“I thought the sentence was three and a half years to seven.”

“Only if you get paroled, Jack. And to get paroled, you’d have to complete the sex offender treatment program there.”

Jack shrugged. “How hard could that be?”

“You’re not going to make it through day one unless you’re very forthcoming about every aspect of your sex offense. Which means you have to walk in there and tell them you have a thing for little girls.”

“That’s bullshit,” Jack said.

“Not if you’re convicted. In the mind of the parole board, you’ve committed that offense. Period. And you don’t get paroled until you’re amenable to treatment.”

Jack dug his thumbnail into a scar on the table. “The plea,” he managed to say. “What’s the pro?”

“First, you’re serving eight months, period. If you spend every second screaming you’re innocent, they’re still going to release you after eight months. Second, you’re serving time at the county jail, the Farm. You’re outside, working. It’s a whole different ball of wax from the State Pen. You finish your sentence and you go on with your life.”

“I’d still have a conviction on my record.”

“A misdemeanor,” Melton pointed out. “You can get it annulled after ten years, like it never existed. A felony sexual assault charge-well, that’s with you for life.”

To his horror, Jack felt tears climbing the ladder of his throat. “Eight months. That’s a hell of a long time.”

“It’s a lot less than seven years.” When Jack looked away, the lawyer sighed. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry you were the one who got his hand slapped.”

Jack turned to him. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Eight months,” Melton said in response. “You’d be out before you know it.”

The courtroom was claustrophobic. The walls were swaying in on Jack, and the air he drew in through his teeth sat like a block at the base of his stomach. He stood beside Melton Sprigg, his gaze square on Judge Ralph Greenlaw, a man whose daughter had been a goalie for Jack three years earlier. A nonpartisan trial? Not a chance. Every time the man met his eye, he could see him thinking of what might have happened if his own child instead of Catherine Marsh were sitting behind the prosecutor.

The judge scanned the plea bargain, that wisp of paper that had Jack’s signature on it, just as sure as if he’d scrawled away his soul in blood. “Did you read this form before you signed it?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Has any pressure, force, or promise been made to you in an effort to get you to plead guilty to this offense?”

Jack thought of the cocktail napkin, the pro and con list, that Melton had drawn up. He had saved it after their meeting. The next day, he’d flushed it down the toilet. “No.”

“Do you understand the rights that you are giving up by pleading guilty and not going to trial?”

Yes, Jack thought. The right to live my life the way I always imagined it would be. “I do,” he said.

“Do you understand that you’re entitled to a lawyer?”

“Do you understand that you’re entitled to a jury trial?”

“Do you understand that the jurors’ vote would have to be unanimous in order to find you guilty?”

“Has any evidence obtained illegally against you been used to secure this conviction?”

He felt Melton hold his breath as the judge asked the next question.

“Are you pleading guilty because you are guilty?”

Jack could not force a syllable from his throat.

Catherine couldn’t stand any of it-the weight of her father’s solid body pressed against hers, the stoic resignation of Jack sitting beside his attorney, the truth that she was the one who had set this cart in motion. And even after she’d tried to fix it, it had been too late. No matter how many times she insisted she’d made this all up, they didn’t want to hear. The prosecutor and her father and the psychiatrist he’d dragged her to for counseling all told her that it was perfectly normal for her to want to keep Jack out of jail but that he deserved to be punished for what he had done.

Me, Catherine thought. I deserve to be punished.

She wished with all her heart that this had happened differently, but she had learned that words were like eggs dropped from great heights: You could no more call them back than ignore the mess they left when they fell.

She felt herself coming out of her seat, as if she’d swallowed helium. “Don’t do this to him!” she cried.

“Sit down, Catherine.” Her father clamped an arm around her. The prosecutor and the judge didn’t stop the proceedings. It was like they’d expected her to say this.

The judge nodded at the bailiff. “Please remove Ms. Marsh from the courtroom,” he said, and suddenly a burly man was gently leading her outside, where she wouldn’t have to bear witness to her own folly.

It was as if Catherine had never spoken. “Mr. St. Bride,” the judge repeated, “do you admit that you knowingly had sexual contact with Catherine Marsh for the purpose of sexual arousal or gratification?”

Jack could feel the Reverend Marsh’s eyes on the back of his neck. He opened his mouth in denial, only to choke on words that had been lodged in the pit of his belly, fed to him by his own attorney: You finish your sentence, and then you go on with your life.

Jack gagged until his eyes teared, until Melton pounded him on the back and asked for a moment so that his client could compose himself. He coughed and hemmed and hawed, but something still seemed to be caught, irritating as a bone. “Try this,” Melton whispered, passing Jack a glass of water, but he only shook his head. He could drink an ocean and never dissolve the pride that was stuck in his throat.

“Mr. St. Bride,” the judge said, “do you admit to committing this offense?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Jack answered, in a voice that was still not his own. “I do.”

Late April 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Selena Damascus kicked the tire of her Jaguar so hard that pain shot up her leg. “Goddamn,” she yelled, so loudly that both Jordan and the mechanic jumped.

“Feel better?” Jordan asked, leaning against a tool chest.

“Shut up. Just shut up. Do you know how much money I put into that car?” Selena thundered. “Do you?”

“Every lousy red cent I ever paid you.”

She turned on the mechanic. “I could buy a Geo for the price you just quoted.”

The man looked distinctly uncomfortable, but Jordan understood. Selena was formidable when she was in a good mood. In a temper, she was downright terrifying. “Um, there’s something else,” the mechanic muttered.

“Let me guess,” Selena said. “You don’t have someone qualified to service Jags.”

“No, I can do that. But it’s gonna take a week or so to get the part.” A telephone rang in the service station, and the mechanic excused himself. “You make up your mind. This car ain’t going nowhere anyhow.”

Selena turned to Jordan. “This isn’t happening to me. I’m just going to turn my life back twenty-four hours and when your son calls, I’m gonna let the phone keep on ringing.” She shook her head. “You know this guy has a monopoly going on in this town.”

“Yes. The antitrust commission swung by last September to investigate.”

“Zip it, will you, Jordan?”

“You could get it towed,” he suggested. “You could rent a car.”

Selena shrugged, considering this.

“Or you could just stay with us for a while,” Jordan said, and the moment the words were out of his mouth, he wondered where they had come from. The last thing he wanted was Selena Damascus around, reminding him of what might have worked out in a different time and place.

“You can barely stand to look at me. God, Jordan, you took your cereal bowl into your bedroom this morning to keep us from having to eat breakfast together.”

He looked away.

“Not to mention all that . . . history . . . between us.”

She was asking him, Jordan realized, not telling him. He was very quiet for a moment, remembering how he had stayed up all night waiting to hear the tumblers in the lock announcing her return with Thomas, how he’d sat on the couch after putting away her blankets this morning and realized the scent of her was now a part of it, as much as its color and weave.

“If I stayed, we’d just be asking for trouble,” Selena said.

“It would be a stupid move,” Jordan agreed.

“Stupid?” she snorted. “It would be one of the ten biggest mistakes in the history of the world.”

He laughed along with her, both of them completely aware that they were already moving toward his car, inching in the direction of home.

If Addie was surprised to discover that she liked sex, she was absolutely stunned to realize that she was addicted to the moments afterward.

She would lie on her side, drawn into the shell of Jack’s body like a precious pearl. She could feel him the whole length of her, could taste herself on his fingers, could sense the moment his breathing evened into sleep. But most of all, while they were curled together, she knew that they were equals. No one was on top, no one was pleasing someone else, no one had the upper hand. It was just Addie, listening to Jack, who was listening to Addie.

Where would you go if you could board a plane for anywhere?

What’s the first thing you remember from your childhood?

Would you want to live forever?

These were the things they talked about while the night settled and bled into morning. His reticence to talk about the past had broken like a dam; now, he told her about his teaching days, about his arrest, about his time in jail. Sometimes, while Jack was asking her a question or answering one of hers, he’d slide his hand up to cover her breast. Sometimes his fingers would stroke her from the inside out, making it a challenge to listen. He did it so often, and so well, that she stopped jumping every time it happened.

“You can ask me anything,” Jack said solemnly, “and I’ll answer.”

Addie knew he was telling the truth. Which is why, sometimes, she bit down on the question she most wanted Jack to respond to: What would it take to make you run?

Jack stood at his window in Roy Peabody’s guest room, grinning like a fool at the sight of Stuart Hollings walking his cow down Main Street once again. He felt, unbelievably, like whistling. Addie had done that to him. He opened the door and sauntered into the living room, humming under his breath. “Roy, it’s such a good morning I think I can stomach even you.”

He stopped short at the sight of Addie, arguing with her father in heated whispers.

“Jack,” she said, blushing. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he answered. He stuffed his hands into his pockets.

Roy looked from one to the other and threw up his hands. “For the love of God. You think I don’t know what you two are up to? Christ, Jack. You’ve barely been sleeping here enough, Jack, for me to charge you rent. Forget the false modesty and sit down next to her. Just don’t start pawing her until I’ve had a cup of coffee, all right? There’s only so much a man my age can take without a strong jolt of caffeine.”

Addie smiled weakly at Jack. “So,” he said, feeling like a seventh grader beneath Roy’s hawkeyed regard. “What were you two talking about?”

“Well-” Addie began, at the same minute that Roy said, “Nothing.”

Then Jack noticed the bucket of soapy water beside Roy’s armchair. A sponge floated like seaweed on the top. “Planning on washing your car?”

Roy scowled. “Kick a man while he’s down, why don’t you?”

“He doesn’t have a car,” Addie said, sotto voce. “Those DUIs.”

“Ah. Spring cleaning, then?”

Roy and Addie exchanged a look. “Yeah,” he said, leaping on Jack’s explanation. “I’ve got to do these windows. It’s gotten so that when I look out ’em, I can barely tell Stuart from the cow.”

“I’ll do it,” Jack said, getting to his feet.

“No!” Addie and Roy said in unison.

“It’s no trouble. And I promise I’ll be down to work on time. Matter of fact, now that I think of it, isn’t there a ladder in the storeroom downstairs I can use?” He sidestepped the bucket, strolled to the door, and opened it.

The paint was still dripping, angry and red: GO HOME.

Jack touched the words with one shaking finger. “This isn’t the first time, is it?”

“Happened yesterday, too,” Roy admitted. “I got it off before you woke up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Jack rounded on Addie. “Or you?”

“Jack . . . If you ignore whoever’s doing this, they’ll just go away.”

“No,” he said. “If you ignore it, it steamrolls you.” Then he pushed out the door, bracing his hand on the wall, leaving behind a smudge of red paint like first blood drawn.

Gillian dreamed that the doorbell was ringing. She was in bed, so sick she could barely lift her eyelids, but whoever it was wouldn’t go away. After eons she managed to swing her legs over the side of the bed. She stumbled down the stairs and yanked open the door. Standing there was her father, holding a gun. “Gilly,” he said, and then he shot her in the heart.

She woke with a start, sweating, and pushed back the comforter on her bed. It was still early-barely 6:30 in the morning-but she could hear voices rising from downstairs.

Moments later, she inched toward the kitchen. “All I’m saying, Tom, is that I live here for a reason,” her father said.

He was talking to Whitney’s dad. Peeking in, Gilly saw Ed Abrams, too, and Jimmy from the pharmaceutical plant. “I don’t see how we can do anything about it,” Tom answered. “Noticed you didn’t invite Charlie Saxton to this tête-à-tête, either.”

“Charlie’s welcome to join me anytime, so long as he checks his gold shield at the door.”

Ed shook his head. “I don’t know, Amos. It’s not like he’s made a move.”

“Who?” Gilly said, coming out of her hiding spot and entering the kitchen. She poured herself a cup of coffee with the aplomb of a woman twice her age, then slid beneath her father’s arm. “Morning, Daddy,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Hi, Mr. Abrams. Mr. O’Neill. Jimmy.” The men muttered greetings, turning their eyes away from her pajamas: a babydoll T-shirt and a pair of her dad’s boxers. A thin line of powder-pink skin showed between the sagging waistband and the hem of her shirt. “Who hasn’t made a move?”

“This,” Amos said suddenly. “This is why we have to take the first step.” He grabbed the edge of his daughter’s T-shirt, wrinkling it in his hand, so that it pulled tight across the buds of her breasts. Gilly froze, caught somewhere between absolute humiliation and the strange power she had knowing her body could keep these men in thrall.

Tom O’Neill stood up. “Count me in.”

Ed Abrams nodded, and so did Jimmy.

Amos walked the men out, talking quietly in a voice Gilly was not meant to hear. Something had happened, though, something she meant to find out. She waited for her father to return. “Daddy, aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on?”

Amos stared at her for a moment before finding his voice. “Let’s get you dressed,” he said simply, and he took her hand and led her upstairs.

Charlie jumped as the door to his office burst open. Standing on the threshold, fuming, was his resident registered sexual offender, Jack St. Bride. A step behind, his secretary shrugged. “Sorry, boss. I tried to get him to wait, but-”

“I’ll take it from here. Mr. St. Bride? You want to come in for a minute?” He gestured at the chair opposite his desk as if St. Bride were any visitor, instead of a man so angry Charlie could nearly see steam rising from his skin. “Now. What can I do for you?”

“Everyone knows,” St. Bride said tightly.

Charlie did not pretend to misunderstand him. “The list of registered offenders is public. If a resident comes in requesting it, I have no choice but to hand it over.”

“How many?”

“How many what?” Charlie repeated.

“How many people have asked to see the list since my name’s been on it?”

“I’m not at liberty to-”

“Just tell me. Please.”

Charlie pursed his lips and stared at the ceiling, at a crack that marched across it like a panoramic peak of mountains. “None that I know of.”

“That’s right. No one would know I was on that list at all if it weren’t for one of your own officers.”

The detective rubbed the bridge of his nose. Goddamn Wes, anyway. “We have protocols at the department, Mr. St. Bride, and it’s always a disappointment to hear that a staff member hasn’t followed them.”

“A disappointment.” Jack looked into his lap, and when he lifted his face again his eyes were shining-with fury or with tears-Charlie didn’t know for sure and wasn’t certain he wanted to know, either. “This little disappointment of yours . . . it’s going to ruin my life.”

Charlie refrained from saying what he wanted: that St. Bride had ruined his life all by himself. “I’m sorry, but it’s not within my power to keep rumors from spreading.”

“How about vandalism, Detective? Can you stop people from painting on Roy Peabody’s door charming little graffiti messages about how I ought to leave?”

“You can le a complaint, but I’ll tell you now that the chance of anything coming of it is awfully slim.” Charlie looked the other man directly in the eye. “No one in this town can force you to move out of it. No matter what they say or do, it’s your right to stay if you want to.”

At that, St. Bride’s shoulders relaxed just the slightest bit.

“Unfortunately,” Charlie added, “it’s their right to say and do whatever they want to try to change your mind.”

“And if they hurt me . . . if they send me to the hospital, or worse . . . is that what it will take to get you on my side?”

“I’m on the side of the law. If it comes to assault, they’ll be punished.” Charlie twisted a paper clip in his hands, until the heat that came from the motion snapped it in two. “But that goes both ways, Mr. St. Bride. Because I’m going to be watching you, too. And if you so much as look at a teenage girl in Salem Falls, you’ll find yourself moving out of town as quick as a sheriff’s patrol car can take you.”

St. Bride seemed to crumble from the inside out, like a building Charlie had once seen blown up in Boston. First the eyes closed, then the shoulders dropped, then the head bowed-until it seemed to Charlie that all he was looking at was a shell of the man who had walked in on such a rush of anger. This man is a criminal, Charlie reminded himself, although it felt as though he were staring at something with feathers and webbed feet and a bill and insisting it was a dog. “Is that clear?”

Jack did not open his eyes. “Crystal.”

Gilly leaned across the aisle when Mrs. Fishman’s back was turned and snatched the folded note out of Whitney’s hand.

Tituba should have hexed them all, it read. She hid the paper between the folds of her dog-eared copy of The Crucible.

“Why did the girls accuse the goodwives of the town of seeing the Devil?” Mrs. Fishman said. “Gillian?”

She had read the play-it was their homework assignment. Totally lame, too. A bunch of Puritan girls saying the town biddies were witches, just so that one of them could do the nasty with a married man and not have to worry about his loser of a wife finding out. “Well, at first they didn’t want to get caught for practicing voodoo. So they tried to take the heat off themselves by telling a lie. But this lie . . . it turned out to be the one thing that brought all these other truths out into the open.”

“Such as?”

“Like Proctor and Abigail hiding the salami,” the jock behind her called out, and the rest of the class laughed.

Mrs. Fishman’s lips twitched. “Thank you, Frank, for putting it so succinctly.” She began to walk through the aisles. “Rumor has it that Abigail wound up as a prostitute in Boston. Elizabeth Proctor remarried after her husband was hung. And New Age witches, of course, are no longer accused of consorting with the Devil.”

Gilly bowed her head, so that her hair spilled forward to shield her face from view. You’d be surprised, she thought.

It was 8 A.M., and already Addie was so tired she could barely stand. “More coffee?” she asked, holding the pot so it hovered like a bumblebee above the bloom of Stuart Hollings’s mug.

“You know, Addie, the docs said I ought to stop drinking it because it wasn’t good for my heart.” Then he grinned. “So I said, if three cups a day got me to see the sunny side of 86, I’m just gonna keep doin’ what I’ve been doin’!”

Smiling, Addie poured. “Let’s hope this gets you another 86 years.”

“Christamighty, no,” Wallace groaned, beside him. “I’m hoping he’ll buy the farm before me, just so’s I can have a decade of peace and quiet.”

At the cash register, Roy cracked a package of pennies like an egg and let the coins shimmy into the bowl of the money drawer. “Busy today,” he remarked as Addie passed by, seating more customers.

She sighed. “We haven’t had this kind of volume since the summer we offered free blue plate specials every time the thermometer topped a hundred degrees.”

She smiled at her father, and he smiled back, but they both knew what had caused the sudden increase in patronage. People who had never set foot inside the Do-Or-Diner had come because there was a spectacle on display in their town, a criminal who had the nerve to choose their own small hamlet as a place of residence, and they wanted to see what kind of man would be so daring, or so stupid. It seemed impossible that the news had spread so quickly from Wes to filter into this group of customers, but then Addie only had to look as far as herself to know that it had happened before. Rumor grew and morphed, until a man accused of assault might turn into a serial rapist, until a grieving mother was seen as a madwoman.

The sad truth was, nothing was better for a small-town diner than gossip.

So far, of course, they’d been denied a show. But even as Addie thought this, the door opened and Jack slipped inside, intent on making his way to the safety of the kitchen before anyone could speak to him. His appearance electrified the tiny room: Diners paused with their coffee mugs held in midair, their forks suspended with a bite of food while they stared at a man who had, overnight, transformed from “the dishwasher at the diner” into “the convicted rapist.” “Sorry I’m late,” Jack muttered.

Addie planted herself directly in his path, unwilling to budge until he looked up at her. “What happened?”

“Please, Addie. Could we just not talk about it now?”

She nodded briskly. “Well, I need you out here to clear.”

The thought of a task was a brass ring, and Jack grabbed on with both hands. “Just let me get my apron.” Slowly, the diner thawed into activity as Jack disappeared behind the swinging doors, the two sides snapping together in an overbite.

Jack reappeared with an empty busing bin. She watched him approach a family that had finished eating: a mother, a father, a little boy. “Mommy,” the child said in a stage whisper, “is that the bad man?”

Addie was at his side in a moment. “I’ll take over.” Her voice jolted Jack out of his surprise. With a nod, he crossed the room to bus the counter.

Stuart winked. “Guess Addie sent you here because we’re safe. Not a perky set of hooters between the two of us.”

Flushing deeply, Jack reached for their dirty silverware.

“Don’t blame you, anyhow. You ever watch that MTV station? Heck, you’d have to be six feet under to keep from noticing that Britney Spears gal.” Stuart grinned. “Reckon she might have given me a stroke I wouldn’t have minded, if you know what I mean.”

“Them girls,” Wallace agreed. “They’re asking for it.”

Jack’s hands tightened on the busboy’s bin. “They don’t ask for it.”

“You’re right,” Stuart said, and chuckled. “They see a guy like you and they beg for it.”

It happened so quickly that later, Jack couldn’t recall the exact moment he grabbed Stuart by the parchment folds of his neck, lifting him off the stool with a single hand. Or how Roy tried to wrestle Jack off the octogenarian. The collective attention of the diner was riveted on a performance beyond their wildest dreams.

“Jack!” Addie cried, her voice cutting to the quick. “Jack, you have to stop.”

He let go immediately, and Stuart rolled to his side, coughing. The blood that had been pounding in Jack’s head flowed evenly again, and he stared at his hands as if they’d grown from the ends of his wrists just moments before. “Mr. Hollings,” he stammered. “I’m so sorry.”

“The doc was almost right,” Stuart wheezed. “It ain’t the coffee what’ll kill me, but the guy who cleans it up.” With Wallace’s support, he struggled to his feet. “Oh, you’re tough, Jack. It takes a real man to beat up a guy as old as me . . . and to fuck a child.”

Jack’s hands twitched at his sides. “Stuart, Wallace,” Addie said. “I’m so sorry.” She took a step forward, smiling as graciously as she could. “Of course, breakfast is on the house. For everyone.”

There was a cheer, and as Stuart and Wallace became immediate heroes again, the tension dissolved like fog. Addie turned to Jack. “Can I talk to you? In private?”

She led him into the women’s bathroom, pretty and floral and smelling of potpourri. Jack didn’t let himself meet her eyes; he just shuffled and waited for the storm to break.

“Thank you,” Addie said, winding her arms around his neck as delicately as ivy.

A moment later, the taste of her still on his lips, Jack spoke. “Why aren’t you angry at me?”

“I admit, I wish it hadn’t been Stuart. And I wish it hadn’t been in front of so many people, who came here looking for just this. But sooner or later, they’re going to wonder why a rapist would have taken the victim’s side.” She pulled him closer, so that his grateful face was buried against the curve of her neck, and his breath fell between the buttons of her blouse. “Come over tonight?” she whispered. And she felt his smile against her skin.

In one corner of the Salem Falls High School cafeteria, a makeshift altar had been erected. It overflowed with carnation bouquets and teddy bears and handmade cards that wished Hailey McCourt a speedy recuperation following surgery to remove a brain tumor. “I heard,” Whitney said, “that it was the size of a grapefruit.”

Gillian took a sip of her iced tea. “That’s ridiculous. It would have been pushing out the side of her head.”

Meg shuddered. “Hailey was horrible and all, but I don’t wish that on anyone.”

Amused, Gilly said, “You don’t wish that on anyone?”

“Of course not!”

“Meg, you’re the very reason it happened! Don’t you find it just the slightest bit coincidental that we cast a spell on her, and the next day she started falling down?”

“Jesus, Gill, do you have to tell the whole school?” Meg glanced nervously at the altar, where two students were leaving an oversize spiral lollipop tied with ribbon. “Besides, we didn’t do . . . that. A person can’t grow a tumor overnight.”

Gilly leaned forward. “That’s because it came from us.”

Now, Meg was white as a sheet. “But we’re not supposed to do any harm. Gill, if we gave her a brain tumor, what’s going to happen to us?”

“Maybe we ought to heal her,” Chelsea suggested. “Isn’t that what being a witch is all about?”

Gillian dipped her spoon into her yogurt and licked it delicately. “Being a witch,” she said, “is whatever we need it to be.”

Amos Duncan banged a hammer on the pulpit at the front of the Congregational Church. The buzzing in the filled pews stopped instantly, and attention turned to the silver-haired man. “Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for coming on such short notice.”

He surveyed the crowd. Most were people he’d known all his life, people born and raised in Salem Falls like himself. Many worked at his plant. All had been summoned to the town meeting with a hastily photocopied flyer, stuffed into mailboxes by enterprising young boys who had been willing to earn a few dollars.

In the rear, Charlie Saxton leaned against a wall. To keep the peace, he had said.

“It has come to my attention,” Amos began, “that there is a stranger among us. A stranger who slipped into our midst under false pretenses and who even now is waiting for the best moment to strike.”

“I don’t want no rapist living here!” called a voice from the rear of the church, quickly seconded by a buzz of support.

Amos held up his hands for silence. “Friends, I don’t want one living here, either. You all know I have a little girl. Hell, half of you do, too. So which of us is going to have to suffer before action is taken to drive this man out?”

Tom O’Neill stood up. “We have to listen to Amos. It’s not like we don’t have proof . . . this is a man who served jail time for the assault of a minor.”

Charlie sauntered down the aisle. “So what are you guys gonna do?” he said, all innocence. “Shoot him in front of the O.K. Corral? Challenge him to pistols at dawn? Or maybe you’re planning to just burn down his place when he’s conveniently in it?” He reached the podium and gave Amos a stern look. “It’s my job to remind you that no one’s above the law. Not St. Bride, and not any of you.”

“We’ve got righteousness on our side,” someone yelled.

“We’re talking about innocent children!”

A woman in a business suit popped out of her seat. “My husband and I chose Salem Falls as a place to raise our family. We moved here from Boston precisely because there’s no crime. No threats. Because we could leave our door unlocked.” She looked around the room. “What kind of message does it send if we’re not willing to preserve that ideal?”

“Beg pardon.” All eyes swiveled to the left side of the church, where Jordan McAfee lazed in a pew. “I recently moved here, too, to get away from it all. Got a son about the same age as most of those daughters you’re worried about.” Finally, he got to his feet and walked to the front of the church. “I support Mr. Duncan’s initiative. Why, I can’t even count the number of crimes that might have been avoided if the trouble had been nipped in the bud before it even got started.”

Amos smiled tightly. He didn’t know McAfee from Adam. Still, if the fellow wanted to cast his support Amos’s way, he wasn’t fool enough to turn it down.

Jordan stepped up to the podium, so that he was standing beside Amos. “What do I think we ought to do? Well, lynch him. Metaphorically . . . literally . . . it doesn’t matter which. Do whatever it takes, right?”

There were murmurs of assent, rolling like a wave before him.

“One thing, though. If we’re going to be honest, now, and we start taking care of business this way, we’d better get used to a few changes. For example, all you people out there with children, how many is that?” Hands crept up like blades of grass. “Well, I’d recommend you go home and start spanking, or doing a time-out, or whatever it is you do for punishment. Not because those kids have done anything wrong, mind you . . . but because they just might in the future.” Jordan smiled broadly. “For that matter, Charlie, why don’t you come up here and start cuffing, oh, every fifth person. Figure sooner or later they’re going to get into trouble. And maybe you could just do a computer check of license plates in the town and issue tickets at random, since someone’s going to be speeding eventually.”

“Mr. McAfee,” Amos said angrily, “I believe you’ve made your point.”

Jordan turned on him so quickly the bigger man fell back a step. “I haven’t even begun, buddy,” he said softly. “You can’t judge a man by actions he hasn’t committed. That’s the foundation of the legal system in this country. And no pissant New Hampshire village has the right to decide otherwise.”

Amos’s eyes glittered. “I will not stand by and let my town suffer.”

“This isn’t your town.” Yet he knew, as did everyone else, that that wasn’t true. He walked past Duncan and Charlie Saxton and 300-odd angry locals. At the back of the church, he paused. “People change,” Jordan said softly. “But only if you give them room to do it.”

Gillian sat cross-legged on her bed in her robe, her hair still damp from a shower, as she fixed her makeshift altar and considered what she had learned that day.

By this afternoon, the rumor had spread through the school: The dishwasher at the Do-Or-Diner had raped some girl back where he used to live. It was what her father had been talking about with her friends’ dads; it was why she’d been told she couldn’t leave the house after sundown. Gilly thought of Jack St. Bride, of his gold hair falling over his eyes, and a shiver shot down her spine. As if she would ever be afraid of him.

It made Gilly laugh to watch the townspeople scurry like field mice before a storm, hoarding bits of safety to last them through this latest crisis. They all thought Jack St. Bride had brought evil, single-handedly, to Salem Falls, but it had been here all along. Maybe Jack was the match, setting fire to the straw, but it was unfair to lay the blame at his feet.

More than ever, he needed a . . . friend.

Gillian loosened her robe, and lit the wick of the candle before her. “Craft the spell in my name; weave it of this shining flame. None shall come to hurt or maim; hear these words and do the same.”

She was warm now, so warm, and the fire was inside her. Gilly closed her eyes, smoothing her palms up from her own waist, cupping her breasts in her hands and imagining that it was Jack St. Bride touching her, heating her.

“Gilly?” A quick knock, and then the door opened.

As Gillian’s father walked into her bedroom, she pulled the edges of her robe together, holding it closed at the throat. He sat on the edge of the bed, inches behind her. Gilly forced herself to remain perfectly still, even as his hand touched the crown of her damp hair, like a benediction. “You and those candles. You’re going to burn this place down one day.” His hand slipped down to her shoulder. “You’ve heard by now, haven’t you?”

“Yes.”

His voice was thick with emotion. “It would kill me if anything happened to you.”

“I know, Daddy.”

“I’m going to keep you safe.”

Gilly reached up, twining her fingers with his. They stayed that way for a moment, both of them mesmerized by the dancing flame of the candle. Then Amos got to his feet. “Good night, then.”

Her breath came out in a rush. “ ’Night.”

The door closed behind him with a soft click. Gilly imagined the fire again, consuming her. Then she lifted one foot, inspecting the sole. The cuts she had made last week were still there, a thin spiral on the arch, like the soundhole on a violin. There was one on her other foot, too. She reached into the pocket of her robe for a penknife, then traced the seam of the skin to reopen the wound. Blood welled up, and Gilly gasped at the pain and the beauty of it.

She was clipping her own wings-making it impossible to walk away from this house, because she’d be suffering with every step. She was marking herself. But as she did, she thought of how normal it would feel to have a scar on the outside that anyone could see just by looking.

An image flashed on the screen of the Salem Falls High School auditorium: a wholesome, all-American teenage girl holding hands with an equally picture-perfect blond boy. APPROPRIATE-the word, in red letters, was stamped over their legs. The slide projector clicked, and there was the same girl. This time, though, a dark and greasy older man had his hand resting on her ass. INAPPROPRIATE.

Thomas looked up from his algebra homework. He hadn’t been listening to Mr. Wood, the guidance counselor, and from the looks of the 400 other students, he wasn’t the only one. Kids in the front were tossing spitballs, trying to see who could land one on Wood’s Stegmann clogs. In front of Thomas, a cheerleader was French-braiding her hair. A corps of Goths with their pale faces and dyed black hair sat making out with their girlfriends in the back of the room, as Mr. Wood held this forum on being touched decently.

He wouldn’t have been doing his math homework, either, but fate had landed him in a seat next to Chelsea. Add this to Mr. Wood’s lecture (“Breasts? Can we use that word here, please, without the snickering?”) and Thomas had a boner the size of Alaska. Every time he imagined Chelsea looking over and seeing the pole growing in his pants, he turned red and got a little harder. So finally, he slapped open a book to hide the evidence-and to distract himself from the fact that if he leaned six inches to the left, he would be able to discover whether she was as soft as she looked.

“I never could do that when I was a freshman,” Chelsea said, pointing at the battered text in his lap.

All he could think was: If the book wasn’t there, she’d have her hand on me.

“All that x and y stuff,” Chelsea whispered. “I used to get them backward.”

“It’s not that hard. You just do whatever you have to do to get x alone on one side of the equals sign.”

“It makes no sense. What’s a negative y, anyway?”

Thomas laughed. “A why not.”

Chelsea smiled at him. On the screen, the same sleazy guy was slapping a girl across the face. INAPPROPRIATE. “Does he think we’re morons?” she whispered.

“Uh . . . yes.”

“I heard he used to live on a commune in Vermont. And that he screwed sheep.”

Thomas glanced at the guidance counselor’s Mexican poncho and his straggly gray ponytail. “Well, at least he’s qualified to teach us about being assaulted from behind.”

Chelsea giggled. The next slide clicked into place: the girl and the blond boy with his arm slung over her shoulder. But to Thomas, it looked like the boy’s fingers were getting awfully close to copping a feel. “A trick question,” he murmured.

“Look at her face,” Chelsea said. “She wants it.”

“Appropriate,” Mr. Wood announced.

Thomas shook his head. “Bad call.”

“Obviously, you need some extra help here. A little tutorial.”

“With Wood? Thanks-I don’t think so.”

“With me,” Chelsea said, and just like that, Thomas couldn’t breathe. She snaked her arm over the algebra book until her hand was touching his ribs. Was she thinking how skinny he was? How easy it was to string along a loser?

She pinched him, hard. “Ow!”

Several heads turned. But by then, Chelsea’s hands were folded in her lap and she was staring demurely at the screen.

“Inappropriate,” she mouthed silently.

Thomas rubbed his hand over his side. Shit, she’d probably given him a bruise. Suddenly her fingers slipped over his, weaving, until their two hands were clasped. Thomas stared, speechless at the sight of his own skin flush against an angel’s.

Reluctantly, he met her gaze, certain she would be laughing at him. But she was dead serious, her cheeks bright as poppies. “Appropriate.”

He swallowed. “Really?”

Chelsea nodded and did not pull away.

Thomas was certain the room was going to come crashing in on him, or that his alarm clock would ring out at any moment. But he could feel the pressure of Chelsea’s palm against his own, and it was as real as the blood speeding through his heart. “I think I get it now,” he said softly.

Chelsea smiled, a dimple appearing in one cheek, an invitation. “It’s about time.”

“Do I know astral projection?” Starshine said, the silver bells of her earrings swinging. “Yes. Will I teach you? Not a chance.”

“I can do it,” Gilly insisted. “I know I can.”

“I never said you couldn’t.” The older woman sat down on one of the rocking chairs in the Wiccan Read, stroking the cat that leaped into her lap. “But if you’re looking for a psychic vision, you can get the same effect from trance induction. On the other hand, if you’re just looking to get high, try your local dealer.”

Gillian couldn’t tell Starshine that what she wanted most was to fly-to leave her body behind and to live in her mind. She was destined for more than this insignificant town, she just knew it, and she couldn’t even look forward to college providing a portal out, because her father would never let her move that far away. In Gilly’s mind, that meant taking matters into her own hands. But none of the books at the Wiccan Read held the old recipe for witches’ flying ointment, the herbal oil that had produced such startling psychedelic effects in the Middle Ages that witches who applied it to their foreheads believed they could soar. The newer recipes were safer, more politically correct: a mishmash of chimney soot and mugwort and benzoin. In other words, a poor substitute.

Starshine looked at the girl’s stubborn face and sighed. “No one makes astral projection ointment anymore. The recipe called for the fat of an unbaptized infant, for goodness’ sake. You can’t get that at the supermarket deli counter.”

Gilly thrust out her chin. “That wasn’t the active ingredient.”

“Ah, I forget who I’m talking to . . . the pharmaceuticals heiress. No, it wasn’t. I believe the effect was brought on by tripping on hashish and belladonna-neither of which I sell, because the first will land you in jail and the second can land you in a coma. It just isn’t safe, honey.”

At the girl’s crestfallen expression, Starshine squeezed her hand. “Why not concentrate on Beltane, instead? It’s right around the corner, and it’s such a wonderful sabbat to celebrate. Sensuality and sex, and the earth coming to life again.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. “There is nothing like leaping naked over a bonfire.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Well, except maybe for a handfasting ceremony. I did that one Beltane, you know, when I wasn’t much older than you.”

“Handfasting?”

“A trial marriage. For a year and a day. A test period, if you will, before the final commitment.”

“What happened after that?”

“After a year I chose to go my separate way. But that Beltane . . . oh, we danced barefoot with my coven and wove the maypole, and then the two of us celebrated the Great Rite like the God and Goddess right there in the meadow.”

Gilly’s eyes widened. “You had sex right in front of everyone else?”

“Guess so, because I still remember it. On Beltane, the first thing to go are your inhibitions.” She began to move around the tiny shop, plucking herbs and dried flowers off the cluttered shelves. “Here. Use primrose and St.-John’s-wort, cowslip and rosemary, some bloodstone on your altar. Courage, Gillian. Beltane’s all about filling your soul with the courage to do the things you might not otherwise be able to do.”

Gillian took the collection from Starshine’s hands. Courage. If she couldn’t fly, maybe this would be the next best thing.

“Figures,” Delilah said, shaking her head. “First time I let you behind the stove and you make a mess of it.”

Jack grimaced and tried to scrape the worst of the spaghetti sauce off his clothing. Okay, so it hadn’t been brilliant to leave the vat sitting on the edge of the cold table while he cleared a spot on the stove for it to heat. Now that it had fallen and splattered everywhere, he was going to have to make another pot from scratch, because Delilah had a thing about using canned sauce for her pasta dishes. “We don’t have any more tomatoes,” she said, handing Jack another clean dishrag.

“Good thing you’ve got me to go get some, then,” he said without missing a beat.

Addie walked into the kitchen to hand Delilah an order. “What happened to you?” she asked, glancing at Jack.

“He got on the wrong side of a pot of sauce. I’m sending him out for fresh produce,” Delilah said.

“Better change first. People are going to think you’ve been gut-shot.”

Jack didn’t answer, just huffed his way up the set of stairs that led from the kitchen to Roy’s apartment. In his bedroom, he bent down to retrieve a clean shirt from his bottom drawer. Suddenly, above him, the window exploded.

Jack flattened himself on the carpet, aware of all the places his hands were being cut as they pressed against shards of glass. Heart pounding, he cautiously got to his feet and looked out the broken pane.

He smelled the smoke first. The brick had landed on the carpet, and the flaming newspaper it was wrapped in had already started to burn. “Fire,” Jack whispered hoarsely. Then he lifted his head, and bellowed. “Fire!”

Addie was the first one into the room, holding the extinguisher they kept next to the stove. She sprayed the foam all over the flames, all over Jack’s feet. By the time Jack gathered his wits, Roy and Delilah had crowded into the doorway of the room, too. “What the hell did you do?” Roy demanded.

Addie reached into the foam and pulled out the thick brick, still wrapped with a rope and some residual paper. “Jack didn’t do anything. Someone did it to him.”

“Better call Charlie Saxton,” Delilah said.

“No.” This, flat, from Jack. “What if I hadn’t been here? What if we were all working downstairs, and this happened, and the whole place burned down?”

He began to pull his clothes from the drawers: a few pairs of jeans, some underwear, his T-shirts. “What are you doing?” Addie asked.

“Moving. I’m not staying here while all this is going on. It’s too dangerous.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I don’t know yet.”

Addie stepped forward, staring at his clothes. These Hanes T-shirts and Levi’s were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, simply because they were his. She thought about opening her closet and seeing Jack’s things pressed up against her own. “Come live with me,” she said, but what she really meant was: Here is my heart; have a care.

Their eyes met as if there was no one else in the room. “I won’t put you in danger either, Addie.”

“No one has to know. I’m the last person in the world this town would expect to have a . . . a . . .”

One corner of Jack’s mouth turned up. “A boyfriend?”

“I’ll be damned,” Delilah whispered.

They turned, suddenly remembering the presence of the others. “If you say a single word,” Addie said fiercely, “I’ll-”

Delilah pantomimed locking her lips and throwing away the key, then led Roy back downstairs. Jack stepped closer to Addie, a fistful of socks in his hands. “It doesn’t have to be . . . well, you know. Like that. I could stay on the couch.”

“I know.”

“Are you doing this to save your father?” Jack asked quietly. “Or me?”

She cradled the empty fire extinguisher in her arms, like an infant. “I’m doing this to save myself,” she said.

Gilly had been five the first time she had seen medicine made-an aspirin-and its unlikely source was a tree. “Salicylic acid,” her father had explained. “It comes from willow bark. It’s why the Indians used to brew willow bark tea to bring down a fever.” Nowadays, of course, her father’s R & D lab was the biggest, most impressive part of Duncan Pharmaceuticals, filled with an alphabet soup of Ph.D.s who could create synthetic compounds used to heal. Sometimes it freaked her out to walk through the lab-it always smelled of science, and there were those creepy lab rats and rabbits that had tumors pulsing out of their sides or had gone hairless from the doses of medicine sent into their bloodstreams. But Gilly knew this was where her father preferred to spend the lion’s share of his day.

“Daddy?” she said, poking her head into the restricted area. She shrugged into a white coat and goggles and plastic gloves, required couture for the R & D area. It was quiet today, staffed with a few of the grunts-the guys who only had master’s degrees, not doctorates. They looked up as Gilly entered but weren’t surprised; most knew her by sight.

She found her father-and most of the other scientists-gathered in the rear of the lab, near those disgusting animals. Gilly’s father was carrying a bowl of what looked like hairy white carrots. Like everyone else, he seemed to be holding his breath. Gilly followed his gaze to the gas chromatograph, and its capillary tube, which held the substance that was being tested. Zap-the flash of light from the mass spectrophotometer hit the gas in the tube. The technician let a computer printout feed into his hungry hands, a graph full of peaks and valleys that measured exactly what was floating around inside the thin glass thread. He handed it to Gilly’s dad, who compared it for several long moments to a reference graph from a chemical library. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Amos said, his face breaking into a smile, “natural atropine!”

There was a volley of cheering, and Amos clapped the shoulder of his lab tech. “Great work, Arthur. See if you can isolate one hundredth of a gram on the gelatin disc.” As the group broke up, he walked to his daughter. “To what do I owe this surprise?”

“Just passing by,” Gilly said absently. “Did you make a new drug?”

“No. An incredibly old one,” Amos said, leading her out of the R & D room. “We’re trying to break into the homeopathic market-going back to nature to find the sources we’ve been imitating in the lab. Atropine’s amazingly cost effective. Did you see that tiny bit of gas? Just that much alone could provide ten thousand doses.”

Gilly tuned him out. For all that her father loved what he did, he could be talking about drawing blood from a stone and it would have made the same impression on her. As they reached his office, she sprawled across the white couch along the far wall. “Did you hear about the fire at the Do-Or-Diner?”

“No,” he said, sitting down. “What happened?”

“It was upstairs in Roy Peabody’s apartment. Meg’s mom was having lunch there when it happened.”

“Was anyone hurt?” her father asked, his hands steepled before him.

“Not that I heard.” Gilly sat up, reaching for a bowl of mints. “But people are saying it wasn’t an accident.”

“Addie couldn’t get much insurance money even if she burned the place to the ground.”

“Not her. Supposedly, someone else set the fire. As a warning.” She stared hard at her father, waiting for him to confide in her.

“Gilly,” he said softly, shocked. “You don’t think I’d do anything like that?”

Something in her chest loosened. “No. I just wondered if you knew someone who would.”

“Oh, I imagine any one of a hundred people in this town might have done it.”

“But that’s awful!” Gilly burst out. “He could have gotten hurt!”

“Better him than one of you.”

There was a knock on the door. “Mr. Duncan,” the secretary said, “how much more belladonna did you want ordered?”

Gilly turned. “Belladonna?”

“Let’s start with seven hundred fifty plants,” Amos said. As his secretary left, he turned to Gilly. “What about it?”

“How come you need it?”

“It’s the plant we extracted the atropine from,” Amos explained. “Why?”

Gilly truly believed in fate. It was why, she knew, she had chosen to visit her father on the afternoon that he was working with belladonna, the same plant Starshine had mentioned a day ago when they were discussing witches’ flying ointment. Hash and belladonna, Gilly remembered. Well, she could probably get hashish with a single query to one of the Goths at her school. But even if she didn’t, maybe belladonna had enough strength to work by itself. Maybe she could mix her own flying ointment and no one would be the wiser. And what better time to soar than Beltane?

Courage, she thought. “Nothing,” Gilly lied. “It’s the name of this really phat band.” She leaned over the desk to kiss her father’s cheek. “I’ll see you later.”

“You’re going home,” he ordered. “I don’t want you walking around town alone.”

“It’s not like he’s Jack the Ripper, Daddy.”

“Gilly.”

“Whatever,” she muttered, already halfway out the door. But she didn’t turn left at the hallway, toward the exit. Instead, she retraced her steps back to the R & D lab. Arthur, the lab technician, was mashing those furry white carrots-belladonna. “Miss Duncan,” he said without glancing up. “What can I do for you?”

“Um, my dad asked me to bring a sample of atropine to his office.”

“What for?”

Gilly blanched. She hadn’t gotten this far in her mind. “I don’t know. He just asked me to get it.”

“How much?”

She pointed to a little pool in the base of a test tube. “He didn’t say. I guess that’s enough.”

The supervisor capped the tube and handed it to her. “Wear your gloves out of the lab. You don’t want to touch that stuff with your bare hands.”

“Thanks.” She slipped the vial into the pocket of her fleece jacket, keeping her hand fisted around her treasure as she walked straight home, just like her father had wanted.

“This is the bathroom,” Addie said, blushing faintly.

Jack smiled. “You don’t have to give me the grand tour. Really.” It had been some time since Addie had had to share her space. Add to that the forced intimacy in a relationship still so new Jack could still see the shine on it, and he could not help but wonder if he was making a tremendous mistake.

“And this,” Addie said, her hand on a doorknob, “is Chloe’s room.”

It was the only room in the house Jack had not seen. And as Addie slowly opened the door, he also realized it was the only room in the house that was not neat. Toys littered the floor like landmines, and clothes were draped over the back of a chair. A poster of a boys’ band that hadn’t made a record in nearly a decade was taped to the wall, peeling from one corner. On a shelf sat a parade of outgrown teddy bears, missing eyes and frayed at the limbs. The bed, a confection of pink ruffles, was unmade, as if Addie slept in it from time to time-a thought that tugged at Jack but seemed less heartbreaking than the alternative: that for eleven years, Addie had simply left this room as a shrine.

Still, it was only a bed, and linens could be changed. Toys could be put away. “I could stay here,” Jack suggested. “Give you a little more privacy.”

“No. You can’t.” She stood beside the chair, smoothing her hand over the fabric of an impossibly small white shirt.

“Addie-”

“You can’t,” she repeated. “You just can’t.”

“All right,” he said softly, understanding that this was a line he could not cross. He followed her out and closed the door quickly, thinking all the while of Pandora’s box: of what he had let loose by breaching the seal of this room, and of hope, which might still have been trapped inside.

The scent of smoke was strong at the diner, but it didn’t bother Selena. “It’s like a barbecue,” she said, watching Jordan wrinkle his nose as he slid into the booth.

“Yeah. Except it’s the facility that’s roasting.”

Addie came to the table carrying two mugs and a pot full of coffee. “Cream and sugar, right?”

Selena smiled at the waitress. “Can I get a cup of hot water, with lemon?”

Addie nodded and went off toward the counter. “It’s disgusting, you know, the way you drink that,” Jordan said. “People use the same thing to wash their dishes.”

“Then think how clean my insides are.” She took the steaming mug from Addie.

“I had a customer who used to drink hot water,” Addie mused. “She lived to be a hundred and six.”

“Get out,” Jordan said.

“Honestly.”

“How did she die?” asked Selena.

“Another waitress here served her coffee instead one day.” Addie winked. “I’ll be back to get your order in a minute.”

Selena watched her go. “She seems nice enough.”

“She comes from good people, as they’d say around these parts.” Jordan shook out his copy of the paper. “Certainly doesn’t deserve all the flak she’s getting now.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, the fire. And the backlash about the fellow who works in the kitchen.”

Jordan raised the paper to read the headlines. With a fork, Selena tugged down the edge. “Hello,” she said. “Remember me? I’m your breakfast date.”

“Give me a break.”

“Don’t tempt me. What’s the story with the guy who works here?”

Jordan pushed the newspaper across the table. Folded to the editorial page, there were no less than six letters addressing the “unsavory influences” that had recently moved into town. Selena scanned the brief missives, all in favor of riding Jack St. Bride out on a rail. “What did he do? Rob a bank?”

“Rape a girl.”

Selena looked up, whistling softly. “Well, you can’t blame a community for trying to protect itself. You ask me, that’s the whole point behind Megan’s Law.”

“At the same time, it’s prejudicial to the person who has to report in. If an entire community identifies a guy by his past convictions, how will anybody ever get past that to accept his presence?”

Selena peeked under the table. “What the hell are you doing?” Jordan asked.

“Making sure you’ve gotten off your soapbox. You know damn well that perps of sex crimes are repeat offenders. How do you think you’d feel if he targeted, oh, fifteen-year-old boys?”

“Repeat offenders,” Jordan said, snapping the newspaper open again, “are good for business.”

Selena’s jaw dropped. “That is quite possibly the most inhuman thing I’ve ever heard fall out of your mouth, McAfee, and believe me, there’ve been plenty.”

“Ah, but defense attorneys aren’t supposed to be human. It makes it easier to sink down to everyone’s very low expectations.”

But Selena didn’t take the bait. She was thinking that Jordan was human, far too human, and she should know, because she was the one who had broken his heart.

“Come on,” Gilly urged. “What’s he going to do? Attack us right on the counter?”

Beside her, Meg squinted at the neon sign overhead. The R had never been quite as bright as the other letters. She could remember giggling about it years ago, because back then the most hilarious thing in the world was the thought of a restaurant called the Doo Diner. “My dad would kill me,” Meg said.

“Your dad will never know. Come on, Meggie. Do you want to be the kind of person who hides in the back when everyone else is fighting the dragon, or do you want to be holding the sword?”

“That depends. What’s my chance of being burned to a crisp?”

“If he molests you, I will selflessly throw my body over yours as a substitute.”

Meg shook her head. “I don’t even want him to know what I look like.”

“For God’s sake, Meg, this isn’t even about him. I’m thirsty is all. He probably won’t come out from the back. We’ll see Crazy Addie and get our milk shakes and go.”

Slowly, Meg backed away. “Sorry, Gill. My dad said I shouldn’t.”

Gillian fisted her hands on her hips. “Well, so did mine!” Meg was already halfway down the street. “Fine. Be that way!” Smarting, Gilly pushed inside the diner. It was virtually empty, except for an old fart at the cash register who was hunched over a crossword puzzle. She sat down and rapped her nails impatiently on the table.

Within moments, Crazy Addie came over. “What can I get for you?”

Gilly glanced at her dismissively. She couldn’t even conceive of living a life so small that you’d grow up in this nothing town and work and die there. Clearly, the woman was a loser. Who looked at the bright ball of her future and thought, Oh, one day I want to be a waitress in a totally dead-end job.

“A black-and-white shake,” Gilly said, and then, from the corner of her eye, saw Jack come down the hallway from the bathrooms carrying a large trash bag.

He didn’t notice her.

“Actually, now that I think about it, I’m not hungry,” Gillian murmured, and walked out. The sunlight was blinding; she stumbled before slipping along the edge of the building, where a fence cordoned off the green Dumpster. Jack was moving around in there; she could hear metal clanging and the rustling of plastic as trash was hauled over its wide lip.

Gilly sucked her lower lip between her teeth, to give it some color. She unbuttoned her jacket, then slid the zipper of her cropped sweatshirt low enough to show the rise of her breasts. Walking to the gate, she waited for Jack to notice her.

He did, after a minute, and looked away.

“Hey,” Gilly said, “what are you doing?”

“Skiing the Alps. Can’t you tell?”

Gillian watched his muscles flex as he lifted another bag of garbage high. She thought about him pinning her, grabbing her wrists in his hands. Hard. She wondered if the girl he had raped had liked it, even a little.

“Food’s a lot better inside,” Jack said.

“I’m not hungry.”

God, his eyes were a color blue she’d never seen. Dark and smooth, like the inside of a fire. There should have been a word for it-Jackquoise, maybe, or-

“Then why did you come here?”

Gilly lowered her lashes. “To ski, of course.”

He shook his head, as if he couldn’t believe she was standing here in front of him. It only made her more determined. “Bet you were the kind of kid who used to poke crabs on the beach to get them moving,” Jack mused, “even if it meant they might snap.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means stick to the bunny slope, Gillian,” Jack said flatly.

Her eyes darkened, caught somewhere between tears and rage. Jack started to leave, but Gillian was blocking the exit. For an uncomfortable moment, they danced around each other, Jack unwilling to let his body brush up against hers, Gillian unwilling to let him go.

“Gillian.”

At the sound of another voice, they jumped apart. Wes Courtemanche rounded the corner, dressed in uniform. “Something tells me your father wouldn’t be delighted to find you standing back here.”

“Something tells me you’re not my father,” Gillian said testily. But she stepped away so that Jack could get by.

“Going home now, aren’t you?” Wes said to the girl.

“I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of anyone.” As if to prove it, Gillian turned on her heel, passing close to Jack. She blew a kiss as she sailed by, a gesture meant for his eyes only that might have been a promise, or might have a threat.

7:40. Wes had twenty minutes left on duty before he could head home. Usually, this time of night, high school kids were hanging in small clots near the rear of the post office or idling in their cars in the parking lot, but these days Main Street looked like a ghost town, as if kids believed the closer they got to the Do-Or-Diner, the more likely they were to fall prey to the local criminal.

The sound of footfalls behind Wes had him turning, his hand on his gun belt. A jogger approached, reflective markings on his stocking cap and sneakers winking in the glare of the streetlights.

“Wes,” said Amos Duncan, slowing down in front of the policeman and drawing in great gulps of air. He set his hands on his knees, then straightened. “Nice night, isn’t it?”

“For what?”

“A run, of course.” Amos wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “God, though. You’d think there was a curfew, based on what this town looks like.”

Wes nodded. “Dead, for about seven-thirty.”

“Maybe people are eating later,” Amos suggested, although they both knew this was not the case. “Well, I’d better get home. Gilly’ll be waiting.”

“You might want to keep a close eye on her.”

Amos frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I saw her this afternoon, down by the diner. She was talking to St. Bride.”

“Talking?”

“That’s all.”

A muscle along Amos’s jaw tightened. “He started talking to her?”

“Can’t say, Amos.” He chose his words carefully, knowing that alienating Duncan would put him in the doghouse with the department for months. “Just seemed to me that Gilly . . . well, that she didn’t have a real strong sense of how dangerous he is.”

“I’ll speak to her,” Amos said, but his mind was elsewhere. He was wondering how a guy could come into a town where he wasn’t wanted and act like he had a right to be there. He was wondering how many innocent conversations it took before a girl followed you home, a deer eating out of your hand. He envisioned St. Bride calling out his daughter’s name. Imagined her turning, smiling, like she always did. He saw what he wanted to believe had happened.

Amos forced his attention back to Wes. “You off soon?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Good, good.” He nodded. “Well, thanks for the tip.”

“Just trying to keep everyone safe.”

Amos held up his hand in farewell, already moving off. Wes headed back toward the green again. He never noticed that Amos had turned away from the road that led to his house and was running quickly in the opposite direction.

Tom O’Neill swung the door open, surprised to find Amos Duncan on his doorstep, panting hard.

“Amos, you all right?”

“Sorry to bother you.”

Tom glanced over his shoulder. In the dining room, his family was gathered around their dinner. “No, no problem at all.” He stepped out onto the porch. “What’s the matter?”

Amos soberly met his gaze. “Well,” he said. “It’s like this.”

April 30, 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Addie couldn’t get Jack out of her mind. Now, she leaned forward, kissing the nape of his neck in a blatant attempt to draw his attention from the TV set in her living room. The Formosa type of this tea is more famous than the Amoy, Foochow, and Canton varieties.

“What is oolong,” Jack said, his elbows resting on his knees. Addie opened her mouth and licked the soft shell of his ear. “Cut it out! I’m on a roll.”

“You could be on me.” Most hours of the day, Jack could be counted on to catch her gaze across the diner, hot enough to make her stumble, or manage to pass by her so closely their bodies brushed. But when Jeopardy! came on, she could have paraded in front of him completely naked without managing to capture his attention.

Jack was addicted to Jeopardy! In three years, he had gone only one day without seeing the show, and that was because he was driving in a sheriff’s cruiser to the jail at the time. He was delighted that because he and Addie had taken the afternoon off to move his things, today he’d have the chance to watch at both 7 and 11 P.M. Addie, however, had a different agenda.

She began to unbutton his shirt, but Jack brushed her away. “I’ll get you back during the commercial,” he warned halfheartedly.

“Ooh . . . now I’m scared.”

Demeter brought famine upon the earth after this daughter was abducted to the underworld.

“I bet you know this one,” Jack said.

In response, she slipped her hand down the front of his jeans.

He jumped. “Addie!” he said, even as he swelled into her palm.

“Who is Persephone?” the contestant said on the screen.

Addie squeezed gently. “Aha. You missed.”

Beneath her, Jack’s hips moved. “I knew the answer. I was just distracted before I could give it.”

Jefferson said it “is no excuse in any country . . . because it can always be prevented.”

Addie straddled him, blocking his view of the television set. Finally, Jack gave up fighting. He drew her face down and kissed her, slipping the answer into her mouth: “What is ignorance of the law.”

“Ignorance,” Addie repeated. “A very nice segue to bliss.” She arched her throat, tilting back her head, and suddenly stilled. “Did you hear that?”

But Jack’s famous concentration was now focused entirely on Addie. “No.”

A crash, the sound of running. Addie sat up a little straighter. “There it is again.”

“It’s an animal,” Jack suggested. “You live in the woods.”

She pulled away from him, even as he grabbed for her hand and groaned at the loss of her soft weight on his lap. Peering out the window, Addie could only see the edge of the swing set, serrated by the moonlight. “Nothing out there.”

“Then try looking here.” Jack stood up, his erection straining against his jeans. He took Addie into his arms. “It’s probably raccoons. Why don’t you go upstairs while I get rid of them?”

“You’re going to miss Final Jeopardy?” Addie teased.

“Never,” he said, all seriousness, and then he winked. “There’s a rerun at eleven.”

Gilly could not get Jack out of her mind. She relived the moment outside the diner a hundred times, playing different scenarios like a slide show-things she should have said and done instead, images of Jack grabbing her and kissing her so hard her lips bled. Every time she stumbled over the part where Jack had treated her like a child, her stomach clenched, and she’d start to cry, dying a hundred deaths all over again. A moment later, she’d be spitting mad, itching for the next opportunity she might have to show him she wasn’t a child after all.

Her father had kept a hawk’s eye on her all afternoon and evening; then he’d gone running and made her swear she would be there when he got home. Now she was drowning her sorrows in the emotional angst of Sarah McLachlan and painting her fingernails bloodred as the phone rang. Whitney’s voice came on the line. “Gil, what time tonight?”

Gillian sighed. She didn’t want to deal with her friends right now. She didn’t want to do anything but figure out how to keep her father from being such a goddamned warden, so that she could make Jack see what he was missing. “What time for what?”

“The meeting?”

“The meeting . . .”

“I could have sworn I put down April thirtieth on my calendar.”

Understanding bloomed. “Oh, Beltane,” Gilly said.

“How could you forget?”

Gillian hadn’t forgotten, exactly; she’d just been preoccupied with Jack. Her coven had made plans to meet in the woods behind the cemetery, at the base of the flowering dogwood tree. Meg was bringing Georgia fatwood to light a bonfire, Whit had been given the task of sewing herb sachets to hang on the tree as gifts to the God and Goddess, and Chelsea was going to figure out some kind of maypole. Gilly’s job had been the Simple Feast, the sharing of food and drink within a circle that had been cast.

Her father would kill her if she sneaked out of the house.

Her gaze lit on a small ceramic vase that had once been her mother’s. There was a sprig of pussywillows inside, but no water. Instead, hiding at the base, was the vial of atropine she’d taken from the R & D lab.

“Eleven,” she said into the phone. “Be there.”

They attacked him from behind. Jack had no sooner stepped out of the small halo of light cast by the lantern hanging beside the door than he was grabbed, his arms pinned behind him while fists slammed into his ribs, his belly, his face. Blood ran down his throat, tinny; he spat it back at them. He struggled to find their faces, to mark them in his mind, but they were wearing stocking caps pulled low and scarves tugged high; all Jack could see was an ocean of black, a series of hands, and wave after wave of their anger.

Addie brushed out her hair, then sprayed perfume onto her wrists and knees and navel. Jack had been gone awhile, which was strange; even stranger, she could hear an occasional crash. If it was raccoons, it was a hell of a lot of them.

She stepped to the bedroom window and pulled back the Swiss organdy curtain. It was dark for eight o’clock, and at first she could not see Jack at all. Then a foot appeared in the yellow periphery cast by the porch light. An elbow. Finally, the entire body of a man, dressed in black, his hands bright with blood.

“Jack,” she gasped, and she reached underneath the bed for the rifle she kept there. She had used it once in twenty years-to shoot a rabid coon that had wandered into the yard where Chloe was playing. She loaded it on the run, hurrying downstairs, and threw open the front door to fire once into the night sky. Five faces turned, and their owners then ran off in disparate directions into the woods behind her house, tracks spreading like the spokes of a wheel.

On the gravel, in a boneless, battered heap, lay Jack.

Addie set down the gun, ran to his side, and gently rolled him over. Oh, God, she thought. What have they done to you?

Jack coughed, his lips pulling back to show teeth shiny with blood. He tried to sit up, wincing away from Addie’s hands. “No,” he grit out, that one syllable staining the stars. “Noooo!”

His cry bent back the young grass lining the driveway; it shouldered aside the violet clouds and left the moon to shiver, bare-boned. “Jack,” she soothed. But his voice rose, until it was an umbrella over Salem Falls, until people on the far side of town had to close their windows to the sweet night air just to block off the sound of his pain.

The last thing she wanted to do was poison herself. To that end, Gilly logged onto the Internet at about 8:15 P.M., hoping to find the correct dosage of atropine. Thanks to Columbine, it was common knowledge now that you could even build a bomb with the help of the World Wide Web. Surely it would be a piece of cake to find the amount of hallucinogen it took to get high.

While the Web pages loaded, she painted her fingernails-one hand at a time, so that she could zip from one search engine to another, looking up herbal journals for information about belladonna and atropine sulfate. Finally, she found a site that listed adult dosages. In pill form, 5 milligrams. To dilate pupils, 1/50,000 of a grain. And taken internally, 1/20 to 1/100 of a grain.

Gilly frowned. Seemed like quite a range. What if she could take 1/20 of a grain but Whitney, who was tiny, only needed 1/100?

The telephone rang again. “Gilly,” her father said. “I wanted to check in on you.”

“Check up on me, you mean.”

“Now, sweetheart. You know why I’m doing this.”

Her heart began to pound in triple time. “Aren’t you supposed to be jogging?”

“Just finished. I should be home soon.”

What would she do if he arrived to find her missing? “Actually,” Gilly said, “I’m glad you called. Meg wants to know if I can come over tonight.”

“I really don’t think it’s a terrific idea, Gilly, with all that’s going on.”

“Please, Daddy. Her mom is going to pick us up for a ten o’clock movie, and who’s going to be stupid enough to hurt me while I’m out with a detective’s wife?” When he didn’t respond, Gilly forged ahead. “Mrs. Saxton says I can stay over. If it’s okay with you.” She was amazed at how easily the lies came, now that she had them in her mind. She was going to celebrate Beltane tonight, come hell or high water or Amos Duncan.

She could hear her father’s resolve cracking just the tiniest bit. Meg’s dad was a cop; her mom, a woman they’d known their whole lives. Gilly would probably be safer in the Saxton household than in his own. “Okay,” he said. “But I want you to call me when you get home from the movie. No matter what time it is.”

“I will. Love you, Daddy.”

“Me, too.”

For a long moment after she hung up, Gilly just stared at the phone and smiled. Webs were the very easiest things to spin.

She logged off the computer and walked to the kitchen. Astral projection was going to be her Beltane surprise for the coven; the effects would be even more startling if they were completely unexpected. Gilly stirred the thermos of iced tea and considered the vial in her hand once again.

Courage.

She trickled a tiny bit of the liquid into the tea, then stuck her finger into the thermos for a taste . . . nope, it was still tea, if a little bit bitter-1/20 of a grain? 1/100? Shrugging, Gilly emptied the entire contents of the test-tube into the thermos and screwed on the cap.

Jack woke to find Addie curled beside him, her hand clutching a washcloth that was spreading a water stain over the comforter in the shape of a bell. He came up on one elbow, wincing at the ache of his ribs, and touched the side of her face. When she didn’t stir, he carefully levered himself off the bed.

What might his life have been like if he’d had someone like her standing by his side during the nightmare in Loyal? What if he’d served his time but met her every Tuesday night in the common room where inmates could face their visitors over long folding tables, under the watchful eyes of the guards? What if he’d had Addie to come home to?

He paced through the dark house, wishing he could do for her all she’d done for him. Thanks to Addie, Jack no longer spent time reviewing his mistakes. He had put them into a box and shut the lid tight. Addie, though . . . she sorted through the box daily, holding up each memory to the light like an heirloom, even though it made her bleed inside.

He found himself standing in front of Chloe’s bedroom door.

Within minutes, he had stripped the bed of its sheets and covers and removed the posters from the walls. He stacked Chloe’s toys in a box he’d found in her closet. If he could just clear out the constant reminder of what Addie had lost, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard for her to look forward rather than back.

“What the hell are you doing?” Addie’s voice throbbed, as if she’d taken a punch.

“Cleaning up. I thought that if you didn’t have to look at this every day-”

“That I wouldn’t see her face first thing when I wake up in the morning anyway? That I don’t know her by heart? Do you think that I have to look at a . . . a hair clip to remember the person I love the most in the world?”

“Loved,” Jack said quietly.

“That doesn’t stop just because she’s not here anymore.” Addie sank into the tousled sheets, the fabric floating up around her like the petals of a tulip.

“Addie, I didn’t do this to hurt you. If what we’ve got means anything . . .”

She turned her face to his. “You will never, ever mean more to me than my daughter does.”

Jack reeled back, her words more painful than any blow he’d felt that night. He watched her fold herself into the pool of linens, her spine rounding. “What did you do with it?” she said, suddenly lifting her tearstained face.

“With what?”

“The smell of her. Of Chloe.” Addie scrabbled through the sheets and pillows. “It was here; it was here just this morning . . . but it’s gone now.”

“Sweetheart,” Jack said gently. “Those sheets don’t smell like Chloe. They haven’t in a very long time.”

Her hands made fists in the fabric. “Get out,” she sobbed, turning her face away as Jack shut the door softly behind him.

The Rooster’s Spit had never, in anyone’s recollection, had anything to do with either chickens or expectorating, but a few old-timers could have told you that the bar tucked at the far edge of town had been a Knights of Columbus hall in a past life, and a Baptist church in another. Now, it was a dark, close space where a man could fall into a puddle of his own troubles, or a tumbler of whiskey, which was just as good.

Roy Peabody nuzzled the lip of his drink, closing his eyes at the sweet heat that rolled down his throat to bloom in his belly. After weeks of being hounded by Addie, or kept watch over by Jack St. Bride, he was in a bar again. He was alone, with the exception of Marlon, the barkeep, who was polishing glasses until they squeaked. Unlike some bartenders Roy had known-and Roy had known many-Marlon was gifted at simply staying quiet and letting a fellow savor his alcohol. In fact, Roy felt more at home in this bar, where no one expected a goddamn thing of him, than in his apartment.

When the door to the Rooster’s Spit swung open, both Roy and Marlon looked up in surprise. It was rare for people in Salem Falls to be out drinking at 10 P.M. on a weeknight, and Roy felt a small needle of resentment at the thought that now he would have to share this wonderful moment with someone else.

It was hard to say who was more stunned when each first saw the other: Jack or Roy.

“What are you doing here?”

“What does it look like?” Roy grimaced. “Run along now; go tell my daughter.”

But Jack just sat heavily down on the barstool beside him. “I’ll have whatever he’s having,” he said to Marlon.

The whiskey was stamped before him like a seal of approval. Jack could feel Roy’s eyes on him as he took his first long swallow. “You going to watch me the whole time?”

“I didn’t figure you for a drinking man,” Roy admitted.

Jack laughed softly. “People aren’t always what they seem.”

Roy accepted this, and nodded. “You look like shit.”

“Thanks so very much.”

The old man reached out and gingerly touched the cut over Jack’s eye. “You walk into a wall?”

Jack glanced at him sidelong. “You drinking lemonade?”

At that, Roy hesitated. “I take it Addie knows you’re here.”

“ ’Bout as much as she knows you are.”

“I told you, St. Bride, if you break her heart-”

“How about when she breaks mine, Roy?” Jack interrupted bitterly. “What are you going to do for me in that case?”

Roy took one look at the deep grooves carved beside Jack’s mouth and saw in his face something too, too familiar. “I’ll buy you a drink,” he said.

Once, on a Girl Scout campout, Gillian had built a fire. While the other kids were busy making their s’mores and singing “Kum ba Yah,” Gilly had fed things to the flame: sticks and pine needles and shoelaces, bits of bread and pennies and even a hapless toad. She had been mesmerized by its greed, by the way it devoured everything in its path. She’d stared at the bonfire and thought: I don’t have a heart. I have one of these inside of me.

Tonight’s bonfire was smaller . . . or maybe she was bigger. She stood holding hands with the others around it. But they were no longer Gillian, Chelsea, Whitney, and Meg. Goddesses all, they were a coven. And she was their high priestess.

The wind, ripe with spring, slipped between Gillian’s thighs like a lover. It was her only covering; her clothes lay in a pile by the dogwood. When she’d said that she wanted to be as pure as possible, the others had been surprised. But Whitney had whipped off her shirt. Chelsea shivered in her bra and panties. Only Meg, self-conscious, was fully dressed.

Gilly met the eyes of each of the others. Did they feel it? Never had her body buzzed like this. She tilted her head back, casting her voice into the night sky. “Guardians of the watchtowers of the east, where sun, moon, and stars are born, I do summon, stir, and call you up!”

The words wrote themselves, drawn from her heart like a ribbon, and for the first time Gilly understood what Starshine had meant about the power of writing your own spells. “Travel over our skin like a whisper, caress us. Bring us imagination; teach us to dance. Blessed be.”

The others swayed slightly. “Blessed be,” they repeated.

Whitney turned, her face glowing. “Guardians of the watchtowers of the south, passionate and hot, I do summon, stir, and call you up. Share your heat with us; make us burn inside. Blessed be!”

“Blessed be!”

“Guardians of the watchtowers of the west,” Chelsea continued, “the blood of the earth, I do summon, stir, and call you up. Let your mystery flow over us. Blessed be!”

“Blessed be!”

Finally, Meg spoke. “Guardians of the watchtowers of the north, night of cool magick, I do summon, stir, and call you up. Bury us deep in your soil; give us the power of earth and stone. Blessed be!”

“Blessed be!”

“Spirit,” Gilly cried, “come play with us as we weave our ribbons; sing with us as we light the fire. Take us to a world without words. Make this night magick . . . blessed be!”

“Blessed be!”

She knelt before the altar, her breasts swaying, and touched the incense burner, the water, the earth, and then sliced her hand through the flames of the bonfire. “I do cast out any and all impurities both of the spirit and the world. As I will it, so mote it be.” Gillian cast the circle three times-with water and earth, with incense, and finally with energy. Then she smiled. “The circle is perfect.”

Gillian brushed a branch of the dogwood tree, and a festival of delicate white petals rained over her shoulders. She raised her hands, her body slender and blued by the moon. “Mother Goddess, Queen of the night, Father God, King of the day, we celebrate your union. Accept these gifts.” Digging into the L.L. Bean canvas bag, she pulled out a sachet filled with the herbs she’d bought at the Wiccan Read. There were twenty in there, all crafted by Whitney. “You do it,” Gilly suggested, and she handed the sachet to her friend.

Whitney strung it on a branch, a poppy red ornament. She reached into the bag and handed out the rest of the sachets to the others, who began to trim the tree. Their gifts winked out from the thick profusion of blooms, a rainbow of offerings.

“Ouch!” Whit said, jumping. “I got nailed by a twig.”

“See, there’s a reason we wear clothes,” Meg said.

Chelsea sank down on the ground. “Well, nudity aside, it seems to me that the God and Goddess have all the fun.”

“What do you mean?”

“Beltane’s all about sex, right? But I don’t see Freddie Prinze Jr. hanging with our coven. No offense, Gill, but you don’t have the right equipment.”

Gillian turned. “But that little geek Thomas McAfee does?”

Chelsea’s cheeks flamed. “He’s not like that-”

“No? Then tell us what he is like. You’ve been hanging out with him so much I thought you might bring him along. You have to do that when you’re training a puppy, right? Keep a close eye on them?”

“Gilly-” Meg said, trying to keep the peace.

“Let’s conjure a man,” Whitney suggested. “We’re all just jealous. Right, Gill?”

But Gillian didn’t answer. The other girls exchanged glances, unsure of what to do, what to say. “We’d never agree on what to call up,” Whitney hastily continued. “You know, like I have a thing for redheaded guys, but Meg likes those squat, stubby bull types.”

“Italian,” Meg corrected. “And they’re not stubby.”

Finally, Gillian smiled. The others were careful not to show it, but inwardly, they all relaxed. This was the Gilly they knew, the Gilly they loved. “Maybe if we’re really good little pagans, the God and Goddess will give us a gift, too.”

She walked to the tree beside the dogwood, a pillar of a pine. God knew how, but Chelsea had managed to affix long streamers of ribbon from a branch nine feet off the ground. Gilly picked up a silver ribbon and smoothed it between her breasts, over her belly and thigh. She arched her back, and the other girls were transfixed-channeling a spirit was one thing, but here Gilly was shifting shape, turning into a siren as if she had done this a hundred times before. “Now,” she said softly, “we celebrate.”

Addie woke up, her cheek flush against Chloe’s pillow. It was so easy to see her daughter’s little face, her flyaway hair. She touched her hand to the worn cotton, pretending that it was Chloe’s soft skin beneath her fingers.

It isn’t.

She heard the words as clearly as if Jack had spoken them, a thought that dropped like a grenade, and was just as devastating. Even more upsetting was the intrusion of Jack into her mind when she was stubbornly trying to think about Chloe. She tried to force her memories to the surface but kept seeing more recent ones: Jack sliding his arms around her waist; Jack looking up at her as he chopped peppers in the kitchen, Jack’s slow smile. The truth was that although she found it hard to believe and had no idea how it had happened, she could no more picture her life without Jack than she could without Chloe.

Frustrated, she threw back the covers of the bed and began to pace through the house. At the bottom of the stairs, she automatically touched the small picture of Chloe that hung there, the same way she did every time she came up and down, as if it were a mezuzah. And that was the moment she realized she’d lied.

Jack might never mean more to her than Chloe. But God, he meant just as much.

Addie sank down onto the bottom step and rested her forehead on her knees. The last person she’d loved had been taken away. This time around, her second chance, she should have been holding onto him tightly, with both hands.

“I love him,” she murmured out loud, the words bright as a handful of new coins. “I love him. I love him.”

Addie stood suddenly, giddy and dazed, like a cancer patient who’d just been told that the disease had disappeared. And in a way, it was not all that different-to find out a heart she’d believed irrevocably broken had somewhere along the way been fixed. She took a deep breath and felt it: every space in her soul that had been left empty when she lost Chloe was now swelling with the very thought of Jack.

She had to find him. She had to apologize. Addie slipped on her clogs and shrugged into a coat. She was halfway to the door when she hesitated. With the resignation of a man walking to the execution chamber, she started back up the stairs.

In Chloe’s room, she stripped the bed. She carried the linens downstairs in a bundle, remembering what it had been like to hold her newborn just like this in her arms and walk her through her colic at night. She threw the sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine, added soap, and turned the dial.

The fresh scent of Tide rose from the bowl of the machine. “Goodbye,” Addie whispered.

Amos Duncan couldn’t sleep.

He sat up in bed and turned on the light, finally giving in to his insomnia. He was being ridiculous, he knew. As a parent, he was overprotective; more than a few times he’d heard town matrons talking about the tragedy it was that he’d not married again, for Gilly’s sake. But Amos had never found anyone who meant more to him than his daughter. Where was the tragedy in that?

It was 11 P.M.; the movie she’d gone to see would probably let out in half an hour. It made sense to have Gilly stay over at the Saxtons’ because the movie theater and, well, just about everything else was on the other side of town. Plus, Charlie probably slept with a gun next to his bed. For all Amos knew, so did his wife. And not even Jack St. Bride would be stupid enough to tangle with the detective’s family.

Gilly would be in good hands.

Which didn’t explain why, at 11:30 P.M., Amos got dressed and drove to the Saxtons’ house to take his daughter home.

Jack tried to wipe the back of his mouth with his hand, but it took him three tries before he could connect. That made him laugh-great guffaws that gave him the hiccups, so that he had to take another long swallow of whiskey to get rid of the spasms-and by the time he did, he couldn’t remember what he had been laughing about. He canted back in his seat, only to realize his stool didn’t have a back. The next thing he knew, he was staring at the pitted ceiling, flat on the floor. “Roy,” he yelled, although the man was sitting ten inches away. “Roy, I think I may be getting a little drunk.”

Marlon snorted. “Fucking Einstein,” he muttered.

Jack staggered to his feet-something truly commendable, because he couldn’t sense anything past his knees-and hauled himself up by yanking on the rungs of Roy’s stool. He peered into the empty insides of his whiskey tumbler. “Jus’ one more,” he said, pushing it toward Marlon . . . but Marlon was no longer beside the bar. Craning his neck, he found the bartender standing beside Roy, who had passed out cold.

Jack would have been horrified . . . if he’d been in a condition to feel anything at all. Roy was slumped over the bar, snoring. “Lemme help,” Jack insisted, but the moment he stood up, the entire room became a tornado around him.

Marlon shook his head as Jack wilted back onto the stool. “You should have stopped after the fifth one.”

Jack nodded, his head as heavy as a bowling ball. “Absholutely.”

Rolling his eyes, Marlon heaved Roy into a fireman’s carry. “Where’re you taking him?” Jack yelled.

“Relax, buddy. Roy’s slept off plenty of late nights in the back room here.” He disappeared into an adjoining nook not much bigger than a closet. Jack could hear him banging around, dumping Roy’s unconscious body on a cot.

“I gotta go home,” Jack said, when Marlon reappeared. “But I don’t have a home.”

“Well, Roy here just took the only accommodations. Sorry, pal.” Marlon scrutinized Jack, assessing just how bad off he was, and apparently decided he was just about as bad as they come. “Hand over your car keys.”

“Don’t have any.”

The bartender nodded, satisfied. “Good thing. How much trouble can you get into walking?”

Jack staggered up from his stool. “Trouble,” he said, “is my middle name.”

Charlie opened the door in his bathrobe. “You may be the richest fucking guy in this town, Duncan, but that doesn’t mean you own the civil servants. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”

He started to close the door but was stopped by Amos. “For Christ’s sake, Charlie. I just came to pick up my daughter. She isn’t back yet, I take it?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

It was the absolute calm in Charlie’s voice that frightened Amos to the core. Charlie functioned under pressure by turning down his internal emotional thermometer.

“Meg invited her to a movie. Your wife . . . she went with them.”

“My wife is upstairs, asleep,” Charlie said. “Meg told me she was staying over at your house.”

“Charlie-”

But the detective had moved away from the door to grab his radio. Amos stepped inside the foyer, and Charlie met his sober gaze. “It’s Saxton,” he said, when dispatch picked up. “We’ve got a problem.”

Wes was in his cruiser, wishing for a cup of coffee, when the APB came through. Two-possibly up to four-teenage girls missing. They could be anywhere at all. Christ, that was a recipe for all hell breaking loose, especially with a rapist in town.

He turned on his cruiser’s silent blue lights and began to prowl slowly, ten miles an hour, through the back streets of Salem Falls. Dispatch would have called in the reserve officers, but as of right now there were only three cops on patrol in the town. If Wes found the girls before anyone else, he stood a very good chance of being awarded a promotion.

He had just turned the corner by the Rooster’s Spit when he saw something moving jerkily along the edge of the road. Something rabid? Every now and then the department had to shoot a coon. But no, it was too big for that. A deer?

Wes angled the car so that the beam of blue light caught the moving creature in its crosshairs. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, and parked his car.

Jack found it amazing that almost of their own accord, his feet managed to alternate one after the other, instead of just hopping left-left-left or right-right-right the whole time. Add to that the uncanny fact that the moon was the exact shape of a cat’s slitted eye, and the world was a wondrous place. He shuffled down along the road that led into Salem Falls, stumbling and managing to catch himself before he pitched face first onto the ground.

It was a few moments before he realized there was a car following him. Its headlights looked like the eyes of a wolf, yellow and tilted up at the edges. The motor purred behind him, dogging his every step.

Jack tried to walk faster, glancing over his shoulder every now and then.

Had the men who had beaten him up come to finish it? If they killed him, who would care enough to notice?

Breathing hard, he turned just enough to see that a man sat behind the wheel. He was too far away and dizzy to make out the features, but it looked like a man who had dark hair . . . or a man who was wearing a black knit stocking cap.

Christ, the car was speeding up. Jack could hear the rev of the motor beating in his brain, the knot of panic clotting the back of his throat. I’m going to be run over. Terrified, wild, he ran diagonally across the road to throw off the driver, stumbling once and slamming his hand against the hood of the car as he righted himself and scrambled down an alley between two buildings.

He emerged on a different block and was trying to control the violent shaking of his body when the town began to glow, as if some huge UFO were beaming down rays in preparation for landing. Jack’s gaze lit on the neon edges of the storefronts and curbs. Awestruck-it was fucking beautiful, in his mind-he stood in the middle of the street, so mesmerized that he completely forgot about his brush with death.

Suddenly, there was a police car not three feet away from him, and he had to hold his hand up to the glare. “Hey,” Wes Courtemanche called out. “You all right?”

It was that simple kindness that made Jack realize something was wrong. If Wes were the last guy on earth, he’d go out of his way to make sure Jack knew he was disliked. The whole town wanted him out; it would be easy for a cop to shoot someone and say it had been self-defense. Had Wes beaten him up earlier? Had it been his cruiser that had almost hit Jack? Without thinking beyond the fact that he wanted to be as far away from Wes as humanly possible, Jack started to run through the field behind the street, up paths that could not be followed by car.

Jack heard Wes swear, heard his boots hitting the pavement as he strained to catch up. He ducked into the woods behind the town cemetery, hoping to lose the policeman in the dark, and ended up hurting himself-he fell over an exposed root and scraped the palm of his hand, the cut over his eye reopened, and a branch snapped back and scratched his face, drawing blood. But even with these stumbling blocks, Jack, who’d been an athlete, easily outstripped Wes. He ran for five minutes, until he was certain he was safe, and then wandered through the woods, not sure of where he was or how he would get back to town.

When he paused to catch his breath and his bearings, he heard it: laughter. All the Greek myths he’d taught at Westonbrook came back in a flood, of Apollo chasing Daphne and Artemis running with her bow. And then, as if he’d dreamed her, he saw the Goddess herself-a flash of white skin silvering through the trees, her heels tripping on the air, her hair flying out like a banner behind her. Jack was momentarily confused: She was naked, like a nymph, but she seemed to be singing to him like a Siren.

Suddenly he realized that there were four of them, some in clothes and some without, and that the girl he’d been staring at was calling his name.

He heard the sound of sobbing first.

Charlie had caught plenty of that sound during his career on the force-what you hoped to be an animal with its leg trapped in a forked branch always wound up to be something far more human and heart-breaking. He forced himself to stop and listen more carefully, and then took off at a dead run toward the south.

Meg’s orange anorak was a flag, and with energy he didn’t know he possessed Charlie sprinted closer. Four girls were huddled together at the gate to the town cemetery. Their hair was straggling free of their combs and clips, and any one of them would be horrified to be seen in public looking the way they did, but Charlie counted them all in one piece and breathed an internal sigh of relief.

Meg, Whitney, and Chelsea were gathered around Gillian, who was crying. They hugged and soothed her, but she was inconsolable. In fact, Charlie had seen grief like that only once that he could remember-when he’d had to break the news to the survivor of a car crash that her two-year-old had not been as fortunate as she.

His daughter spotted him. “Daddy,” she said, and threw herself into his arms.

“Shh. Meggie, honey, it’s going to be all right.” With his girl tucked close, he approached Gillian. “What happened?” But none of the four spoke.

Charlie squatted down at Gillian’s side. “Honey,” he said, his careful eye noticing, now, the blood streaked over her shirt, the hastily mismatched buttons. “Are you all right?”

Her face came up, white and stained with tears, like a web of scars. Gillian’s throat knotted visibly, her mouth twisted as she forced her voice free. “It . . . was . . . him.”

Every muscle in Charlie’s body tensed. “Who, honey?”

“He raped me,” Gillian sobbed, the words shredded raw. “Jack St. Bride.”