Salem Falls

May 1, 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

They made her stand on a piece of paper and brush off her clothing, so that bits of dirt and leaves from the forest floated down. Gillian stared at the pristine white sheet, transfixed by the way it grew dirtier and dirtier.

The doctor, thank God, was a woman. She had asked Gilly’s age, height, weight, the date of her last period and Pap smear. She wanted to know if Gilly had ever had any surgeries or hospitalizations, if she’d been under psychiatric care, if she was on any medications, if she’d been sexually assaulted before. Then she asked where penetration had occurred, so she’d know where to collect evidence. Gillian had stared at her blankly. “Vaginally,” the doctor explained. “Orally. Anally.”

Gillian had no recollection of giving answers. She felt as if a steel shell had formed around the core of her, making it impossible to hear clearly or move swiftly. She pictured the shell growing thicker, until one day it cracked and inside there was nothing but dust. “Is my father here?” she whispered.

“Any minute. Okay?” The doctor smiled gently and put down the file she had been writing on. Gilly saw words scrawled across the top: Patient reports a sexual assault. It made her shiver.

Gillian unbuttoned her shirt. “My socks,” she begged in a whisper. “Can’t I leave them on?”

The doctor nodded. She glanced at the bloodstain on the blouse and carefully placed it into a paper bag marked for forensic testing. Gillian’s underwear-a yellow bikini marked FRIDAY, although it wasn’t-went into a separate paper bag. Finally, she folded the piece of paper beneath Gilly’s feet and put it in an evidence bag.

While Gilly stood like a horse on the auction block, the doctor walked in a slow circle around her. “I’m just looking for cuts and bruises,” she explained, bending down to get a closer look at a mark on Gillian’s thigh. “Where’d this come from?”

“Shaving,” Gilly murmured.

“And this?” the doctor pointed to a bruise on the bottom of her wrist.

“I don’t know.”

A camera was removed from a drawer; a photo was taken. Gilly thought of the carvings on the bottoms of her feet, the scars they could not see. Then the doctor asked Gilly to climb onto the examination table. She swallowed hard and clamped her thighs together as the doctor came closer. “Are you going to . . .”

“Not yet.” After the doctor turned off the lights in the room, a bright purple bulb flared to life. “This is just a Wood’s lamp.” She held it an inch above Gilly’s arms and breasts as she moved it over the surface of her skin.

It was pretty, the violet glow over her shoulders and belly and hips. With prompting, she relaxed the muscles in her legs so that they parted. The lamp swooped over and up. “Bingo.”

On her inner thigh, a small paisley-shaped spot gleamed alien green beneath the lamp. “What is it?” Gilly said.

The doctor looked up. “Dried semen, most likely.”

Amos Duncan roared into the hospital, wild-eyed and terrified. He stalked right to the nurse’s station in the ER. “My daughter. Where’s my daughter?”

Before the nurse could answer, Charlie Saxton slid an arm around his old friend’s shoulders. “Amos, it’s all right. She’s here, and she’s being taken care of.”

At that, the big man blanched, his face contorting. “I need to see her,” he said, heading in the direction of the swinging ER doors.

“Not now, Amos. God, think of what she’s been through. The last thing she needs is you barging in while the doctor is doing the physical exam.”

“A physical exam? You mean someone else is in there poking and prodding her?”

“DNA evidence. If you want me to catch the son of a bitch, I need to have something to work with.”

Slowly, Amos turned. “You’re right,” he said hoarsely, although he didn’t like the idea at all. “You’re right.”

He let Charlie lead him to a bank of chairs that faced the door Gilly would exit. Clasping his hands between his knees, he rocked back and forth. “I’m going to castrate him,” Amos said softly, his tone completely at odds with his expression.

Then Gillian walked out beside a young female doctor carrying a stack of evidence bags. Amos looked at his daughter and felt his insides constrict. Anxiety rose inside him, until it fairly pushed him off his chair. “Daddy,” Gillian whispered.

For a long moment they simply stared at each other, exchanging an entire conversation in silence. Gillian flew into his arms, burying her sobs against his shirt. “I’m here now,” Amos said soothingly. “I’m here, Gilly.”

She lifted a tear-stained face. “D-Daddy, I-I-”

Amos touched his fingers to her lips and smiled tenderly. “Don’t you say anything, sweetheart. Don’t say a word.”

Ed Abrams and Tom O’Neill had driven their own hysterical daughters home and had returned to the hospital to keep a support vigil for Amos Duncan. Now that Gillian had been treated, Charlie would begin an investigation. There was nothing left for them to do now but return to their families.

They walked through the lobby of the ER. “God, it’s a shame,” Ed said gruffly.

“Amos’ll make sure the motherfucker hangs. He’s got the resources to make it happen.”

The men stepped into a night as warm and rich as silk. As if by unspoken agreement, they stopped at the curb. “You don’t think . . .” Tom began, then shook his head.

“That he saw us?” Ed finished. “Jesus, Tom, I’ve been thinking that from the moment Charlie told us what had happened.”

“It was dark, though. And we all were wearing black.”

Ed shrugged. “Who knows what he focused on when we were beating him to a pulp? Maybe this . . . this was his way of getting back at us.”

“It worked.” Tom rocked back on his heels. “Think we ought to tell Charlie?”

“It’s not going to change anything now.” Ed let his gaze slide away. “I think . . . I think it’s best kept between us. That’s what Amos would say.”

“If I knew that something I’d done had hurt my own daughter, I’d want to shoot myself,” Tom murmured. “This must be killing him.”

Ed nodded. “That’s why he’ll kill Jack St. Bride instead.”

Charlie knocked on the door of the hospital lounge before entering. Amos had requested a moment alone with his daughter, and he wasn’t about to refuse the man. They sat huddled in plastic seats, their fingers knit together tightly. “Gillian. How are you doing?”

Her eyes, when they met Charlie’s, were absolutely blank. “Okay,” she whispered.

Charlie sat down. “I need you to tell me everything,” he said gently. Glancing quickly at Amos, he added, “It can wait until tomorrow morning, if you feel that’s better.”

“She wants to get it over with,” Amos answered.

“I’m going to have to ask you to leave us alone for a minute.”

“No!” Gillian cried, clutching at her father’s arm. “Can’t he stay with me?”

Charlie stared at her, seeing not the bedraggled teenager sitting across from him but a ten-year-old playing Capture the Flag in his backyard. “Of course,” he said, although he knew this would not be pleasant for Amos. Hell, if he’d been in the man’s position, he wouldn’t want to hear in graphic detail what had transpired.

He removed a tape recorder from his pocket and set it on the table between them. “Gillian,” Charlie said. “Tell me what happened tonight.”

Jack let himself into the diner with the key that Addie had given him weeks before, wondering how he could have been so stupid. To deliberately head toward those girls, instead of running in the other direction . . . well, maybe he could lay the blame on the fact that in his thirty-one years he could not remember ever feeling this awful. He reeked of alcohol. His head pounded; the scrape on his cheek throbbed. His eye, the one that had been punched, had nearly swollen shut. His mouth felt as if fur were growing on its roof; add to that the unwelcome realization that he was currently homeless, and Jack wanted nothing more than to turn the clock back twenty-four hours and rethink all his choices.

Jack was drawn toward the seating area of the diner, instead of the old man’s empty apartment. He moved cautiously in the darkness past the sleeping iron giant of an oven, past the warming table and the rows of canned goods. As soon as he pushed through the swinging saloon doors, he saw Addie, asleep in one of the booths.

He knelt before her with reverence. Her eyelashes cast a spider shadow, her mouth tugged down in a frown. She was so beautiful, although she never would have believed him if he’d said so. At his touch, she startled and cracked her skull against the edge of the Formica table. “God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Addie.”

As the sharp smack of pain dulled, she realized that Jack was there with her. “No,” she said slowly, her voice husky with sleep. “I am.” She kissed her fingers, then skimmed them over the purple knot of his eye. “You were right, Jack. You’re not my daughter.”

“No.”

“But you remind me so much of her.”

“I-I do?”

“Yes.” Addie gifted him with a smile. “Because I love you both.”

In that moment, Jack felt something inside him crack at its seams. He swallowed hard; he breathed deeply. And Jack, who knew when the first weather map had been created and where the sardine got its name and the only country in the world that began with the letter Q, did not know what to say.

He pulled Addie close and kissed her, hoping that his touch could communicate what his words could not. That he loved her, too. That she’d given him back his life. That when he was with her, he could remember the man he used to be.

She rested her face against his neck. “I think we deserve a happily-ever-after.”

“If anyone ever did, it’s us.”

Addie wrinkled her nose. “I also think you need to take a shower. It’s hard to tell over the whiskey, but it smells like you’ve been rolling in decaying leaves.”

“It’s been . . . a pretty bad night.”

“My thoughts exactly. Why don’t we just go home?”

“Home,” Jack said. He could not keep the grin off his face. “I’d like that.”

Meg inched past her parents’ room, pausing when her mother rolled over in her sleep. Downstairs, silent as a whisper . . . and then out the kitchen door, because the click of the lock in that room was less likely to register.

It took her fifteen minutes to jog to the woods at the edge of the cemetery, the small canvas ballet bag she’d last used when she was six tucked under her armpit. By then, she was gasping for air, sweating.

You could not grow up as the daughter of a detective without absorbing, through osmosis, a rudimentary understanding of police procedure. There would be officers crawling through the woods within a matter of hours, searching for any evidence they could unearth that would give credence to what Gillian had said. And the first thing they would find was the fire, the maypole, the sachets-all the remnants of their Beltane celebration.

It couldn’t happen.

Part of the reason she had wanted to try being a witch was because of the mystery and the secrecy, the feeling that she knew something about herself no one else would ever guess. She shuddered, imagining what her parents would say if they found out; what the other kids at school would think of her. It was hard enough fitting in when you were thirty pounds heavier than every other seventeen-year-old; she could only guess at the sneers that would be directed her way when this became common knowledge.

Her head still hurt from last night’s celebration; it throbbed with every footfall. It was only because of the flowering dogwood that she managed to find her way back to the spot where they’d all been, and for a moment she had a vision of Gillian’s swollen, wet face as she sobbed onto Meg’s father’s shoulder.

It fortified her.

Spilled across the ground were the paper cups left over from last night’s feast, and Gillian’s thermos. Meg shoved these into the ballet bag, then plucked the sachets from the dogwood tree and stuffed them in as well.

The maypole ribbons had unwound themselves and now danced like ghosts. Chelsea was taller than Meg; she felt like a troll staring up at the high branches where the ribbons had been tied. Biting her lower lip, she tugged at one, and to her delight it unwrapped itself easily. She bunched it up and tugged on the next, and the next, rolling the ribbons like volunteers had once rolled bandages during wartime. Finally, she tugged on the last ribbon, a silver one. It had been tied slightly higher than the other three. Meg yanked, but this one was more stubborn.

Frustrated, she glared up at the tree. With determination, she wrapped the free end of the ribbon around her wrist and jerked hard. It snapped so suddenly that Meg fell backward, sprawling on the forest floor. In the tree, Meg could still see a tiny flag of silver. Well, who would think to look up there, anyway? Resolved, she stuffed the last ribbon into the ballet bag.

She glanced around at the small clearing the same way she’d seen her mother look through hotel rooms at the end of a vacation, to make sure no one had left a teddy bear or bathing suit behind. And with their secret tucked firmly beneath her arm, Meg hurried home.

Chief Homer Rudlow was a figurehead in Salem Falls, a former high school football coach for whom Charlie had once played. Their everyday dealings were not much different from high school, actually: Charlie would bust his butt on a regular basis while Homer stood on the sidelines and occasionally offered a different page from the playbook.

Charlie sat in Homer’s living room. The chief wore a tartan robe over his pajamas, and his long-suffering wife had made fresh coffee and set out a plate of doughnuts. “The rape kit is all bagged,” Charlie said. “I’m going to take it down to the lab in Concord tomorrow.”

“Any chance of DNA evidence?”

“The bastard used a condom,” Charlie said. “But there was blood on the victim’s shirt, hopefully his.”

“Oh, that would be delightful,” Homer said wistfully. He took a long sip of his coffee and cradled the mug between his big hands. “I don’t have to tell you, Charlie, what kind of heat there’s gonna be on this. Amos Duncan’s not going to let us fuck up.”

“I wasn’t planning to.”

“Didn’t mean it that way,” the chief said.

“I know, I know. I’ve heard for years how Amos saved the town with his goddamned factory.” Charlie’s brows drew together. “I’m gonna catch this asshole, Homer, but not because Amos is breathing down my neck. I’m gonna do it because it could just as well have been Meg.”

Homer regarded him for a long moment. “Try Judge Idlinger. She’s less likely to jump down your throat when you wake her up to get an arrest warrant.” The detective nodded but remained seated, his head bowed. “What now?”

“It’s just . . . when I was in Miami . . .” Charlie lifted his gaze to the chief’s. “Things like this don’t happen in Salem Falls.”

Homer’s mouth flattened. “They just did.”

The police car pulled up to the curb of Addie Peabody’s home. In the passenger seat, Wes Courtemanche began to open the door and get out. He was champing at the bit, but Charlie shook his head, rested his wrist on the steering wheel. “Just wait a sec,” he said.

“I don’t want to wait a sec. I want to cuff the son of a bitch.”

“Cool down, Wes.”

The officer turned, his heart in his eyes. “He’s in there with her, Charlie. With Addie.”

Charlie knew Addie Peabody, of course-anyone who lived in town did. He’d known her before that, too, when they were both kids growing up in Salem Falls. But since he’d moved back, he’d had little contact with her.

Wes had told Charlie about Addie and Jack’s relationship . . . and he didn’t fault Addie one bit. People misjudged other people all the time-Charlie ought to know. And now he was going to have to walk in there and arrest Jack St. Bride in front of her.

He thought of the way her face would crumble the moment she opened the door and saw him holding his badge. It made him remember the way she had looked in high school, too: all pinched and quiet and curled up into herself.

Charlie sighed. “Let’s go,” he said, and turned off the ignition.

Over a bowl of cereal, Addie realized she could quite comfortably spend her life with Jack St. Bride. His hair still damp from a shower, he was bent slightly over his Lucky Charms-a brand that had made his face light up (“When did they start doing blue stars?”). As Addie poured him a glass of juice, he slipped his arm around her hips, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And when she sat down across from him to eat, too, the space between them was stuffed with the easy quiet of people who are sure of each other and will be for years.

Suddenly, he looked up, his mouth stretching into a lazy grin. “What?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, with a blush?” Jack laughed. “You look like I’m the next course.”

Addie raised one brow. “Not the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

“We have to get to the diner. There are hungry people out there.” But as he spoke, Jack tugged Addie into his arms. “Then again, there are hungry people in here.”

He began to nibble at her neck and kiss the freckle behind her ear, and Addie heard music. Tiny, tinkling silver chimes, the kind tied to the wings of angels. It took her a moment to realize that the noise was real and was coming from the doorbell.

On the threshold of the front door stood Charlie Saxton, with Wes slightly behind him. Addie stared at the policemen and felt all the life draining out of her, an island town evacuated before a storm. “Charlie,” she said stiffly. “What can I do for you?”

His face was red, and he couldn’t make eye contact with her. “Actually, I’m looking for Jack St. Bride.”

Addie felt a soft touch on her upper arm as Jack came to stand beside her. “Yes?”

Charlie waved a piece of paper, then stuffed it into his coat pocket. “Mr. St. Bride, I have a warrant for your arrest. You’ve been charged with committing the offense of aggravated felonious sexual assault against Gillian Duncan last night.”

Addie felt her entire body start to shiver from the inside out.

“What?” Jack cried. “I was nowhere near Gillian Duncan last night!

This is crazy!” He gazed wildly around, his eyes seizing on Addie. “Tell them,” he said. “Tell them I didn’t do it.”

He didn’t do it, Addie thought. And on the heels of that: He was not with me last night. He was drunk. We’d had a fight.

He might have done to Gillian Duncan what once was done to me.

Jack must have seen it, the what-if that flickered over her face before she managed to get her mouth to move. “He didn’t do it,” she whispered, but by then Jack had already turned away.

“We’re just gonna take a little trip to the station,” Charlie said. He stood back as Wes slid handcuffs over Jack’s wrists, then tugged him none-too-gently out the front door and into the waiting police car.

Addie wanted to throw up, to crawl into bed and die. She did not want to see Jack St. Bride, never again. She wanted to hold him close and tell him she believed in him.

She was so upset, in fact, that it took her a moment to realize Charlie remained on the steps outside the front door. “You all right?” he asked softly.

Her face came up, eyes hard and dark. “How dare you ask me that?”

Chagrined, Charlie reached forward to close the door, then hesitated. “It would be a big help if we could get the clothes he was wearing last night.”

“Do whatever you want,” she answered, crying. She remained in this small shell during the five minutes she could hear Charlie moving through her home. And she did not bother to glance up when he left with Jack’s muddy boots, his dirty clothing, and a handful of condoms from the nightstand beside her bed.

When Charlie led Jack to the booking room to take his mug shot and his prints, St. Bride moved through the routine easily, as if it were a complicated dance to which he had long ago learned the steps. Charlie photographed the cuts on his brow, his swollen eye, all without St. Bride saying a single word or giving him any trouble. He paid careful attention to a long scratch on the man’s cheek-a scratch Gillian Duncan had said she’d given him while trying to fight the guy off.

Charlie had gotten a warrant for Jack’s person, too, which meant securing blood and hair samples. Now, as he drove to the hospital, he glanced at St. Bride in the backseat. The man was staring out the window, deep in thought. “You got something on your mind, Jack?” Charlie said conversationally. “Or maybe on your conscience?”

St. Bride’s eyes met his in the rearview mirror. “Go to hell,” he murmured.

Charlie laughed. “Maybe later. First we’re going to the ER.”

In the parking lot, Charlie got out of the car and opened the back door for Jack to do the same. “I’m not coming,” he said. “You can’t force me to.”

This surprised Charlie; St. Bride had been so complacent up till now. “Actually, I can. I have a warrant that says I’m getting your blood and your hair whether you like it or not.” He squatted down, so that he was at eye level with his suspect. “And I’m thinking that when your trial comes up and I testify that you refused to give us samples, that jury is going to believe you have something to hide.” Charlie shrugged. “If you didn’t do it, then you’ve got nothing to worry about, right?”

“Right,” Jack said tightly, and unfolded himself from the car.

He was led into the ER in his handcuffs and almost immediately shuffled into a tiny cubicle. A nurse came in and efficiently drew blood from the veined valley of Jack’s arm. Charlie initialed the vial, so that he could verify the chain of custody of the blood. Jack hopped off the examination table, but Charlie stopped him with a shake of his head. “I’m not done with you.” Slipping his hand into a rubber glove, he yanked a swatch of hair from St. Bride’s head.

“That hurts!”

“Like I care,” Charlie muttered, sealing it into an envelope.

Jack’s gaze was murderous. “Are we finished yet?”

“Nope. Drop your pants.”

“I don’t think so.”

Charlie regarded him evenly. “Either I can pull your pubic hairs or you can have the honor.” Slowly, Jack extended his wrists, shaking the cuffs. “You don’t need a lot of range of movement for this,” Charlie said. “Nice try.”

Exhaling through his nose, Jack unbuttoned the fly of his jeans and reached into his boxer shorts. The handcuffs caught on the buttons, but Charlie pretended not to notice. If the asshole sliced his dick off by accident, the world would be a safer place. Jack flinched as he pulled out the first hair and set it on a sheet of white paper Charlie had placed on the exam table. “How many?”

For DNA analysis, the lab needed only a few hairs-five to ten, at most. Charlie met Jack’s gaze without flinching. “Thirty,” he said, and settled back to watch.

May 1, 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Matt Houlihan had the instincts of a pit bull and the face of Opie Taylor, a combination that led to a stunning number of convictions in his job as assistant county attorney and that made most local defense lawyers want to strangle him in his sleep. As he stood outside a conference room at 7 A.M. at the Grafton County Courthouse, listening to a particularly loud and obnoxious defense attorney argue with his equally loud and obnoxious client, he closed his eyes and thought of Molly.

He could conjure the exact cornflower blue of her eyes, and the softness of her skin, and even the sweet smell that he breathed in when he buried his face in her neck. She kept him up all night, but he didn’t mind at all. He was head over heels in love with her.

Had been, in fact, since the moment she was born six months ago.

He had always enjoyed getting convictions, but now that he had a baby, he was a man driven. He wanted to get every single bad guy behind bars, so that by the time his daughter was walking free in this world, it was a safe place to be. Sydney, his wife, told him he was headed right for hypertension medication and that he couldn’t play Superman all by himself. “Watch me,” Matt had answered.

Matt crossed his arms, wishing he could just be done with this case. The perp had been found with drugs in his hand, so the very fact that Matt had offered him a plea seemed a remarkable act of graciousness on his part, at least in his opinion. His lawyer had argued anyway, trying to get the state to reduce the charges. Matt had refused but offered to step out into the hall to let the attorney talk things over with his client.

“No,” the client said, for the fourth time. “I ain’t gonna take it.”

Rolling his eyes, Matt walked back into the conference room. He plucked the form out of the defendant’s hand and ripped it up, raining the pieces down over the man’s upturned, stunned face. “The plea’s no longer on the table.”

“Jesus!” the defense attorney shouted. “He was on the verge of accepting!”

Matt had the smaller man backed up against the table within seconds. “I don’t want him to plead,” he said, his voice soft. “I’m going to body-slam your client at trial until he wishes he had been more cooperative and you wish you had been more persuasive.” He stepped away suddenly, straightening his jacket. “Good-bye,” he said, and exited.

Matt checked his watch and smiled. He had two hours before he was expected at the office. With any luck, he could feed Molly her breakfast.

The room was airless and bare, with the exception of a card table, two folding chairs, and a tape recorder. A fluorescent bulb overhead spit and blinked at random intervals.

It was difficult to believe that this was really happening, that the steel circles linking his wrists were not playthings and that history had, in fact, repeated itself. Jack wasn’t frightened-instead, he was almost resigned, as if he’d been expecting this shoe to drop for a while. The painted messages on the diner and the beating should have been warning enough. But nothing so far-not the arrest nor Wes’s comments nor even the samples taken in the hospital-had left as deep a scar as the moment he realized Addie had her doubts.

The door opened and Charlie Saxton walked in. He slid a pack of cigarettes toward Jack. “Want one?” Jack shook his head. “Oh, that’s right. Big-time athlete, weren’t you?”

When Jack didn’t answer, Charlie sighed. He pushed the Record button, so that it glowed red and the tape began to turn. “You have the right to remain silent,” he said. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.” Charlie folded his hands on the table. “You want to tell me your story, Jack?”

Jack turned his head away, silent.

Charlie nodded; this wasn’t a shock. “Got a lawyer you want phoned?”

The last lawyer Jack had trusted with his life had landed him in jail for eight months. His jaw tightened at the thought of putting himself at the mercy of another leech who couldn’t care less about winning the case, as long as there was a retainer.

“Okay,” Charlie said on a sigh. He beckoned to another officer, who came into the interrogation room to lead Jack back to the holding cell. They were nearly out the door when Charlie’s voice made Jack stop. “Is there anyone you want me to call?”

Addie.

Jack stared straight ahead, and kept walking.

“Did you know,” Matt said, watching his wife sprinkle nutmeg onto cottage cheese for her own breakfast, “that if you inject that stuff intravenously it can kill you?”

“Cottage cheese? I would think so.”

“No, nutmeg.” Matt dipped the rubber-coated spoon into the jar of peaches again and held it to their daughter’s lips. Predictably, Molly spit it back at him.

Sydney slid into the seat beside Matt’s. “Do I want to know where you picked up such an esoteric knowledge of spices?”

He shrugged. “I put away a woman who killed her diabetic husband by mixing some in his insulin.”

“I’ll have to file that one away,” Sydney said, smiling. “Just in case you start getting on my nerves.”

Matt passed a washcloth over Molly’s face, and for good measure, rubbed it over his cheek as well. “I feel like I ought to invest in a haz mat suit.”

“Oh, I have great faith that by the time she marches down the aisle, she’ll be able to use a spoon with finesse.”

Molly, on cue, burst into a peal of giggles. “You’re not gonna walk down any aisle, are you, muffin?” Matt cooed. “Not until Daddy’s done background checks-”

They were interrupted by the telephone. Molly’s head swiveled toward the sound, her eyes wide and curious. “It’s for you,” Sydney said a moment later. “Charlie Saxton.”

He had last worked with Charlie over a year ago, on a grand theft auto charge that was pleaded down. Truth was, not too many cases came out of Salem Falls. “Charlie,” Matt said, taking the receiver. “What can I do for you?”

“We’ve got a rape case. A guy who just got out on an eight-month sentence for misdemeanor sexual assault attacked a teenage girl here last night.”

Matt immediately sobered. “The victim wants us to prosecute?” Too often, women who had been raped would suffer through the collection of evidence . . . and then decide they couldn’t go through with it.

“Yeah. Her dad is Amos Duncan.”

“Duncan, as in the drug company?” Matt whistled. “Holy cow.”

“Exactly.”

“So,” Matt repeated, “what can I do for you?”

“Meet me at the crime scene?” Charlie asked. “Nine o’clock?”

He took down directions. For a long moment after Charlie hung up, Matt absently listened to the dial tone while stroking the soft, vulnerable crown of his daughter’s head.

Meg, Whitney and Chelsea arrived at Gillian’s house shortly after 8 A.M. “Girls,” Amos said soberly, greeting them at the door. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

They were too polite to comment on his bloodshot eyes, his rumpled clothing. “Our parents said we should stay home.” Whitney spoke for the three of them.

“We wanted to make sure that Gilly was doing okay,” Chelsea added, her voice nearly a whisper, as if speaking of what had happened would only make it worse.

“I don’t know if she’s up to seeing . . .” Amos’s words trailed off as the girls shifted their attention to something over his shoulder. Gilly stood behind him, looking as fragile as a milkweed pod, a big quilt wrapped around her shoulders. Her feet were bare like a child’s, and this made Amos’s stomach knot.

“No, Daddy,” Gilly said. “I want to talk to them.”

The girls surrounded her, a princess’s court. They moved as a single unit up to Gillian’s bedroom and closed the door. As soon as they did, Whitney flew toward Gilly with a small cry, hugging her close. “Are you okay?”

Gillian nodded against her shoulder. Now that it was morning, it seemed impossible that last night had really happened.

“What did they make you do?” Chelsea asked, wide-eyed.

“A lot of tests at the hospital. And I had to talk to Mr. Saxton.” She looked from one girl to the other. “If I’m the one who went through it, why do you all look so awful?”

No one answered at first, embarrassed to have been caught thinking selfishly when Gillian had suffered the most. Whitney began toying with a stray fiber on the braided rug. “They’re going to find out about us now, aren’t they?”

“None of our fathers found out last night, did they?” Gilly said.

“But they’ll go back today. They’ll have to, after what you said.”

Meg, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, shook her head. “I took care of it.”

Gilly turned. “Took care of it?”

“I got rid of . . . everything. I went early this morning.”

At that, Gillian kissed Meg on the forehead. “You,” she pronounced, “are amazing.”

Meg blushed. Being the object of Gillian’s direct praise was a little like being a cat stretching itself in front of a sunny window-it felt so good, to the marrow of the bones, that it was impossible to turn away.

Gillian reached beneath her mattress and pulled out their Book of Shadows. “Keep this at your house,” she told Chelsea. “It’s too risky for me to have it here right now.”

Chelsea skimmed the pages-including the last entry, where Gillian had written a detailed account of the Beltane ceremony. For the first time since she’d been practicing Wicca, she felt empty inside. “Gilly,” she said quietly, “last night . . .”

“Who do you think everyone is going to believe?” Gillian’s gaze turned inward, until it seemed that she was very far away from the rest of them. “After what he did to me,” she said so quietly that the others had to strain to hear, “he deserves this.”

An entourage of men-Amos, Charlie, Matt, and a team of cops skilled at securing crime scenes and collecting evidence-followed Gillian up the path that led from the cemetery into the woods. She was pale and withdrawn, although they had done their best to handle her with kid gloves. Suddenly, she stopped. “This is where it happened.”

The marker was a huge flowering dogwood, its petals carpeting the floor of the forest like an artificial snow. Under Charlie’s direction, an officer roped off the area with yellow crime scene tape, using the trunks of the trees as stakes. Others knelt to take soil samples and to scour for anything else that might help in the prosecution of Jack St. Bride.

Charlie headed toward Amos and his daughter. Gillian’s eyes looked as big as dinner plates, and she was shaking uncontrollably. “Honey,” Charlie said. “do you remember where he held you down?”

Her gaze swept the small clearing. “There,” she pointed. It was a spot free of leaves, a spot that looked no different from any other spot nearby, but Charlie knew that experts could turn up treasures that weren’t visible to the naked eye.

He sent two of his men to check it. “Why don’t you take her home?” Charlie suggested to Amos. “She looks like she’s about to fall apart.”

“Gillian’s strong. She-”

“-doesn’t need to be here. I know you want to help us. And right now, the best way to do that is to give her a little TLC, so that when we need her to step up to the plate, she’s ready.”

“TLC,” Amos repeated woodenly. “I can do that.”

“Good. The minute I know anything . . .” he promised, and went to rejoin his colleagues.

Two men were working at the site of the rape. “Anything?” Charlie asked.

“No smoking gun. Or spurting, as the case may be.”

“Spare me,” Charlie muttered. “You find the condom yet? Or a wrapper?”

“Nope. But we got footprints. Looks like a struggle, too. Then again, a lot of people might just have walked over the same spot. We’re taking pictures.”

Matt Houlihan tapped Charlie on the shoulder. “Check this out.” He led the way across the clearing and pointed to the dark soil. “See that? Ashes.”

“So?”

“There was a fire here.”

Charlie shrugged. “Gillian said that, in her statement. I told you that already.”

“Yes, but it’s nice to have some corroboration.”

“Did you doubt her?”

“You know how hard sexual assault cases are to win . . . even when the perp has a prior. I need everything I can get that corroborates what the girl said.”

“She said she scratched the guy,” Charlie pointed out. “And I’ve got the proof of it on Kodak paper.”

“Mug shots alone aren’t going to get him convicted. She needs to be more precise.” Matt glanced up. “You couldn’t get her to pin down the length of the assault?”

“She said it was between five and ten minutes.”

“That’s the difference between a world record run and a high school track meet, Charlie.”

“Well, shit, Houlihan. I think she was a little too preoccupied at the time to take out her stopwatch.”

Sighing, Matt looked down. “She seeing a rape crisis counselor?”

“She’s seeing someone. A Dr. Horowitz, a shrink her dad knows.”

Matt nodded, then picked up a charred stick and began to toy with it, until a cop took it out of his hands with a scowl and stuck it into an evidence bag. “What did you get from the perp, besides his pictures?”

“Oh, well,” Charlie said. “Naturally, he wasn’t here.”

“He told you this after you mirandized him?”

Charlie shook his head. “He wouldn’t even look at me after I mirandized him. He said this about two seconds after I told him he was under arrest. A total knee-jerk response.”

Matt mulled this over. There would be a fight to get that statement admitted. Then again, he’d done it before.

“Lieutenant Saxton,” a cop called. “Come see this.”

Matt and Charlie ambled over to a spot beneath the dogwood tree. Almost perfectly delineated in the damp soil was a bootprint-one considerably larger than the foot of a teenage girl. The policeman who’d beckoned turned over the man’s boot he was holding, the same one Charlie had taken from Addie’s house. “I’m not saying it’s a match till the expert looks at the plaster cast,” the cop said, “but this looks pretty damn close to me.”

It was, right down to the crags in the pattern of the sole. Held up alongside, it was exactly the same size as St. Bride’s boot. And St. Bride had insisted he was nowhere near Gillian Duncan last night.

Matt smiled his wide, gap-toothed grin. “Now this,” he said, “is an excellent start.”

The judge was a man. In some corner of his mind, Jack breathed a sigh of relief. A man would surely know when another guy was being railroaded. He fixed his gaze on the Honorable Lucius Freeley, as if it were possible to sear his story right into the judge’s mind.

But the judge didn’t seem to notice him much at all. He glanced dispassionately at the cameras in the rear of the courtroom, and then at the prosecution’s table, where a tall redheaded guy who looked like the kid on Happy Days was leafing through some notes. Then he turned his attention to Jack and frowned. “We’re here today in connection with the State of New Hampshire versus Jack St. Bride. Mr. St. Bride, you’ve been charged with aggravated felonious sexual assault. That’s a class A felony, and you have the right to an attorney in connection with this offense. If you can’t afford one, one will be appointed.” The judge glanced meaningfully at the empty seat beside Jack, managing to convey in a single look that he thought Jack was a moron for not taking advantage of this quirk of the law.

Jack thought of Melton Sprigg and set his jaw. “Your Honor, I would prefer not-”

He broke off, feeling the cold green eyes of the prosecutor on him. “I can’t afford one,” he said, sealing his fate.

Bernie Davidson, the clerk of court, phoned the public defender’s office thirty minutes later, when Judge Freeley-who needed prostate surgery, and badly-called for his fourth bathroom break of the morning. “I need one of your guys,” he said, after faxing over the complaint.

“I got your stuff . . . but we can’t help you,” the coordinator said. “One of our attorneys defended the victim three years ago in a misdemeanor shoplifting charge, back before he joined the PD’s office. And you know we’re too tiny, Bernie, to build a Chinese wall around whoever takes St. Bride on.”

Bernie sighed. For a Friday, it was feeling a hell of a lot like a Monday morning. “Okay. I’ll go to my backup list. Thanks.”

He hung up and shuffled through a rubber-banded sheaf of cards he kept in the front compartment of his desk, a group of attorneys in private practice whom he called on, now and then, when the public defender’s office had a conflict. Finally, his eye caught on one name. “Here we go,” Bernie said, smiling slowly, and he picked up the phone.

The third time he heard a crash, Jordan put down his cup of coffee and went to investigate. He moved through the hallway like a bloodhound on a scent, until he found the source of the noise-behind Thomas’s closed bedroom door. Which was exceptionally strange, since Thomas had left for school nearly two hours earlier.

Another crash. Then: “Goddamn!” Jordan pushed open the door to find Selena sprawled on the carpet, which had been covered with newspaper. She wore a tank top and a pair of his own boxer shorts. Her mahogany skin was dotted with blue freckles, and a paint roller lay several feet away, in a puddle of its own pigment.

“Whatever kind of look you were going for . . . you missed,” Jordan said.

Selena narrowed her eyes, “If I throw a stick, will you leave?”

He stepped into the room. “Not until I figure out why you’re painting Thomas’s ceiling . . .” He paused to read the label on the can a few feet away. “Woodsmoke blue.”

“Because you haven’t done it?” She waved a hand about. “For God’s sake, Jordan. The kid’s fifteen. You think Easter egg purple and bunny wallpaper work for him?”

Jordan glanced around, seeing Thomas’s room through new eyes. It had belonged to a little girl when they’d bought the house. For a year now, Jordan had been promising Thomas it was something they’d tackle together. He glanced down at his sweatpants and river driver’s shirt. Nothing that couldn’t get ruined, he supposed. Stepping closer, he picked up the paint roller. “At least I know how to climb a ladder. Christ-from the racket, it sounded like you were holding a WWF tournament.”

“For your information, I could stay on the ladder just fine.” Selena frowned. “It was the roller that kept losing its balance, every time I let go of the handle.”

Jordan rolled a smooth rectangle of blue paint onto the ceiling. “Didn’t think you’d even need a ladder, Amazon that you are.”

By now, Selena was standing. She automatically lifted the paint tray so that Jordan wouldn’t have to dismount to refresh the roller. “Very funny.”

“Sarcasm is just one more service we offer.” He squinted. “Why blue?”

“It’s calming. And you’re missing that whole section. See?”

Jordan scowled. “It looks perfectly fine to me.”

“That’s because you’re as good as blind.” Selena slapped her hands on the rungs of the ladder, encircling Jordan, and began to climb up behind him. He twisted to allow her access to duck beneath his arm, as she reached up and pointed to a spot that had not been covered thoroughly. “There,” she said.

But Jordan wasn’t listening. He was inhaling the scent of Selena’s skin, feeling the heat of her pressed behind and beside him. He closed his eyes and, moving just the slightest bit, inclined his head closer to hers. “I’m not blind, Selena,” he murmured.

They remained tangled in a knot of possibility. And just as Jordan tipped forward to kiss Selena, she turned so that he grazed the nape of her neck, instead. “Jordan,” she whispered. “We know better.”

“This time, it could be different. I’m different.”

She smiled softly. “An erection doesn’t count as personal growth.”

He opened his mouth to contest that, but before he could, the telephone rang. Trying to extricate himself from his position on the ladder, he wound up knocking down both Selena and the paint roller once again. He leaped over her, ran down the hall, and grabbed the portable from the living room.

A moment later, he appeared at the threshold to Thomas’s bedroom. Selena stood on the ladder again, the muscles in her arms flexing as she stretched overhead to paint. When she turned, her gaze was positively blank, as if what had just passed between them had never happened. “Please tell me it’s that idiot mechanic telling me my car’s ready.”

“It was Bernie Davidson, at the courthouse,” Jordan said, still a little dazed. “Apparently, I’m back in practice.” He turned to Selena, a question in his eyes.

“Count me in,” she said, and stepped down beside him.

Like every other human over the age of eight in Salem Falls, Jordan knew that Jack St. Bride had been convicted once for sexual assault. That he was now on the receiving end of a rape charge didn’t bode particularly well, either. One thing was for certain: with a prior under his belt, St. Bride wouldn’t be getting bail. Which actually suited Jordan just fine, because a guy who was locked up couldn’t get himself into any more trouble.

His hair was still wet from his shower when he arrived at the county attorney’s office in Ossipee. As far as he was concerned, he had one job, and that was to get as much information as he could early in the game. Rape trials were always a bitch; the more Jordan knew, the better chance he’d have of landing on his feet.

He waited for the secretary to buzz Matt Houlihan, an assistant county attorney Jordan disliked just on general principles. The fucker was too cocky, and if Jordan felt that, it was really saying something. Jordan wasn’t sure what pissed him off more-the young county attorney’s persistence or the fact that his hairline wasn’t receding even the tiniest bit.

Matt appeared around the corner of a cubicle, grinning. “He has risen!”

Smiling just as widely, Jordan held out his hand to shake. “Reports of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.”

Matt gestured down the hall, toward his office. “Where have you been, Jordan? After the Harte case, you dropped off the face of the earth.”

“No . . . just into Salem Falls.” Jordan’s mouth twitched. “So you may have been right in the first place.” He took a seat across from Matt. “I’ve been appointed as counsel for Jack St. Bride,” he said without preamble.

“Thought he was getting someone from the PD’s office.”

“Apparently, there was a conflict. What you see is what you get.”

Matt’s eyes sparked. “I like a good challenge.”

There wasn’t much Jordan could say to that without the words getting stuck in his throat. Defending a guy who seemed to be a two-time loser against Matt Houlihan ranked just about at the bottom of things Jordan enjoyed doing. “I don’t see any reason to contest your bail request,” Jordan said confidently, although no attorney in his right mind would think there was any chance in hell St. Bride might be released. “Assuming you can give me the police reports you have up to this point.”

Matt tossed him a file. “There’s the charge, and the victim’s statement.”

It was a gift, Jordan knew. Without it, the victim would be a complete cipher and it would be nearly impossible to prepare a case. He opened the file, and the name of the victim leaped out. Jordan kept his face poker straight. “Well,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ll talk again.”

“About what?” Matt steepled his fingers, his casual pose completely at odds with the grim determination in his eyes. “I’ve got a young girl saying some jerk raped her, a jerk who was just in jail for doing the same thing. There’s nothing to talk about, Jordan. I’m gonna lock your client up for twenty long years.”

The moment Jordan McAfee walked into the celled corridor of the sheriff’s department beneath the county court building, Jack got to his feet. Jordan met his gaze immediately, something the deputies tried not to do. “Hi, Jack,” he said smoothly. “I know we’ve met, but I’m not sure you realize why I’m here. I’ve been practicing law for nearly twenty years, and occasionally I help out when the court needs someone because the public defender’s office has a conflict. I’ve been asked to stand up in your case.”

Jack opened his mouth to say something, but Jordan held up his hand. “There’s not much we can accomplish this morning, so we’re just going to keep our powder dry. We’re not going to say anything about the case, and we’re not going to ask the judge for anything.”

“You have to get me released on bail.”

“Jack, you have a prior conviction. You have about as much chance of walking out of here today as a groom at a shotgun wedding. You’re going to have to trust me on-”

“Trust you? Trust you?” Jack’s eyes were wild. “I don’t even know you.”

Jordan was quiet for a moment. “You know I take my coffee light and that I read the New York Times and not the Globe. You know I leave a twenty percent tip, every time. That’s more than most defendants know about their attorneys. Now, I wasn’t the one who landed you in this cell. . . . Apparently, you were able to do that all by yourself.”

“I don’t want to go back to jail,” Jack said desperately. “I didn’t do what they said.”

Jordan looked at Jack’s disheveled clothing, his wild eyes, the long scrape on his cheek, and let the words roll right off his back. If he’d had a nickel for every time he’d heard that, he’d have been living the high life in Belize. “I understand you’re upset right now. Let’s just get through the arraignment, and then we’ll start to look at our options.”

“The last time a lawyer told me we’d look at my options,” Jack said, “I spent eight months in jail.”

Jordan shrugged, silent. But he was thinking: This time, it’s going to be much worse.

“If this isn’t déjà vu,” said Judge Freeley, opening the file on his desk again. “Mr. St. Bride, I see you’re now being represented by Mr. McAfee.”

Jordan stood and neatly buttoned his suit jacket. Immediately, he could feel the eyes of the cameras in the back of the courtroom blinking to life. “Yes, Your Honor. I’ve explained the complaint to my client, and he’s read it and he understands it. If I could ask the court to enter a not-guilty plea on the defendant’s behalf?”

“Fine,” the judge said. “Is there an issue about bail?”

Matt Houlihan unfolded his lanky body and glanced at Jack. “This was an extremely violent crime, Judge. Moreover, the defendant already has a prior conviction and has virtually no ties to the community-he just moved here, has no family nearby, owns no property-all these facts indicate that he’s a flight risk. Finally, Your Honor, this community would not be safe if he were to be released. This man has been charged with violently sexually assaulting a young girl, and he has already been convicted once of doing the exact same thing. The court could expect that on release, he’d only go out and find yet another victim. For these reasons, Your Honor, the state requests that bail be denied.”

The judge turned toward the defense table. “Mr. McAfee?”

“I don’t have a problem with that at this point, Your Honor.”

Judge Freeley nodded. “All right then-”

“The reason,” Jordan interrupted, “that I don’t feel a need to contest the state’s request for denying bail is because frankly, it’s the safest place for my client. You see before you a man whose first amendment rights have been stripped away by the force of rumor and conjecture-a man who has committed no crime but in reality has been victimized. Your Honor, the town of Salem Falls has been out for Jack St. Bride’s blood since the moment he arrived.”

The judge gestured at the cameras. “I’m sure the academy is enjoying your Oscar-worthy performance, Mr. McAfee,” he said dryly. “Let’s pity the justice who draws your trial. Next?”

As the clerk called the following case, Jordan turned to his client, who was speechless. “What?” he demanded.

“I . . . I didn’t expect you to stick up for me,” Jack admitted.

Jordan stuffed the manila file from the county attorney’s office in with his other papers. “Well, if I can give you the benefit of the doubt, maybe you can find it in yourself to do the same.” He watched the bailiff approach to take his client away to the jail next door.

“Wait,” Jack called over his shoulder. “When am I going to talk to you again?”

“Not today. I’ve got a really busy schedule.” Jordan tucked his briefcase beneath his arm and walked out of the courtroom, wondering what Jack St. Bride would think if he knew that for the rest of the day, Jordan had absolutely nothing else to do.

November 1998

Loyal,

New Hampshire

Sometimes, when Jack watched his girls fly down the field, time stopped. He would hear only the beat of his own heart and see the small dark stitches sewn by their cleats as they ran from goal to goal, and he would think: It does not get any better than this.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” he called out, clapping. “Arielle’s open!”

He watched his strikers scuffle against the opposing team, a hurricane of feet and mud obliterating the play for a moment. Then his right wing sent the ball spinning toward Arielle, his center. The senior captain of the team, Arielle was the best striker he had. She was on the field continuously, with the second- and third-string centers coming in only briefly to give her a chance to catch her breath . . . and even then, only when Jack felt that they were winning by a decent margin. Jack watched with pride as she sped toward the net with her eye on the ball, intent on heading it in. But just as the crown of her head connected, she slammed her left shoulder into the post. The ball skimmed off the top of the net, rolling offside, as Arielle crumpled to the ground at the goalie’s feet.

A hush fell over the field. Players from both teams stood restless as colts, pawing at the ground in an effort to stay loose while they waited for Arielle to get up.

But she didn’t. Jack’s breath caught as the ref blew his whistle. He ran out across the field to where Arielle lay flat on her back, staring at the sky.

“I misjudged the goal,” she moaned, cradling her arm against her belly. Jack watched her hold the limb tight against her, rounding her shoulders against the pain. He’d bet anything it was her collarbone. Christ, he’d smashed his own three times when he was playing in college.

Sliding an arm around her waist, Jack helped Arielle off the field. There were cheers from the fans of both teams. “Maybe if I rest a minute, I can go back in,” Arielle suggested.

He loved her for that. “I think we’d better play it by ear,” Jack said. The ref held up his hands, looking to Jack for a replacement so that play could be resumed.

The second- and third-string centers on the bench stared up at him like wallflowers at a dance, praying with all their hearts that this time, they might be chosen. Jack’s eyes flickered from one to the next, settling on Catherine Marsh, the daughter of the school chaplain. Her teammates seemed to like her; Jack had never really paid enough attention to form an opinion. Now, she stared up at him, full of hope. It seemed to light her from the inside.

“All right,” Jack said. “You’re in.”

Ohmygod, Catherine thought. Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod.

She stood in the spot usually handled by Arielle, who had been taken to the hospital. Catherine’s eye was so focused on the ball that any minute she expected it to burst into flames. Coming in at the goal kick, the very play where the ball had gone out of bounds, gave her no time to ease into this.

Shaking out her arms and legs, she loosened her body and instructed herself to relax. Not that it did any good.

Settle down, she ordered, but it only made her heart beat harder. She imagined her blood raging like a river. Her eyes followed the trajectory of the ball as the wing attempted a shot. The goalie, a bulk of a girl if Catherine had ever seen one, deflected it with one massive hand . . . but the ball spiraled up and over the metal rim of the net, thudding down beyond the boundaries of the field.

“Corner kick,” the ref yelled from somewhere behind her. Catherine knew her position. As the wing stood at the squared edge of the field behind the goal, Catherine moved closer to the net. Her right fingertips brushed the goal, a sensory print of where she was standing. A hundred thoughts raced through her mind: If she arcs it, I can head it in. The rim of the goal is warm to the touch. The sun’s in my eyes. God, what if I miss? Fingertips grazing again, she fought to see around the goalie, who was a full head taller than she was. Eye on the ball. Wait. Head it square in. Don’t look like an idiot.

The wing’s foot shot out, but she whiffed the ball-Catherine craned her neck to see it arch, heading away from the goal. Oh, God, I’ll never get to it, thought Catherine, and an enormous pressure lifted from her chest, because she was no longer obligated to perform. Catherine watched the ball hang like a second sun in the air . . . and then it outpaced her, a spinning sphere angling over her right shoulder in a sweet, true arc.

Without conscious thought, Catherine leaped. As her shoulders dropped down, her legs came up, and she scissored her legs in a bicycle kick, so that her right foot rocketed the ball back in the direction from which it had come.

Catherine didn’t see the ball speed over her shoulder, to stretch the upper left corner of the net. She didn’t know at first why all her teammates were screaming and piling on top of her, so that she couldn’t have gotten up even if she’d wanted to. Instead, she lay flat on her back with the wind knocked out of her.

A teammate offered her a hand up. Catherine searched the sea of faces on the sidelines, all cheering for her . . . for her! She finally stopped when she found the one she was looking for. Coach St. Bride stood on the sidelines with his arms crossed. “Thank you,” he mouthed silently.

Catherine smiled so wide she was sure all her happiness would simply spill out at her feet. “My pleasure,” she whispered back, and turned to the field to play.

Muddy and spent, but buzzing with the euphoria that comes on a victory, the girls gathered their water bottles and jackets and headed into the locker room. Fans drifted from the sidelines like milkweed blowing from a pod, wandering to the white buildings of Westonbrook or the parking lot, where they could wait for the players they had come to cheer on.

The school nurse had passed along the news that Arielle’s collarbone had snapped; she’d be out of commission for six weeks. But where this news would have sent Jack into a tailspin just that morning, he was now remarkably calm. And all because of Catherine Marsh, a little wren he’d never even noticed simply because he’d been too busy admiring the peacock.

She was straggling behind. Her blond hair had managed to untangle itself from a ponytail and swung in front of her face like a veil as she bent to pick up her belongings. “Hey, Pelé,” Jack called out.

She glanced up blankly.

“God, you’re making me feel old. Forget Pelé. Mia, then. Or Brandi.”

“Not quite.” Ruefully, Catherine tugged at her jersey. “See, I still have my shirt on.” After a moment, she added, “Thanks for giving me a chance today.”

“A smarter move,” Jack said soberly, “would have been to let the wing trap the ball and bring it back into play. I could just as easily be standing here asking you what the hell you were doing, instead of holding you up as MVP.”

“I know.”

“If you’re going to do such a low percentage kick, I’d better teach you how to do it without hurting yourself in the process.”

Catherine’s head snapped up. “For real?”

“Yeah. Come here.” He tossed her a ball and ushered her toward the flag so that she could do a corner kick. In the meantime, he assumed the position she’d been in, by the goal. “Go on.”

She tried, but the first shot landed in the goal. “Sorry.”

Jack laughed. “Don’t ever apologize to your coach when you score.”

Smiling, Catherine tried again. The ball curved toward the midfield, and Jack started running. His blond hair caught on the wind, and he could feel every cell of his body straining with the pure joy of play as he kicked his feet up and pedaled them to change position, catching the ball and firing it back over his dropped right shoulder. As he fell, he braced his palms, landing on the flat of his upper back and rocking forward.

“Wow,” Catherine said. “You make it look so easy.”

“I make it look less painful.” Jack got up, then put his hands on Catherine’s shoulders. She smelled of powder, and there was mud caked on the tip of her ponytail. “You land here,” he said, skimming his palm over her upper back. He slid his arms down over hers, flexing the palms out. “You’re going to roll down your spine, so that you hit your shoulders and your elbows and your forearms and then your butt makes contact.”

They switched places, so that Jack could lob the ball over her shoulder from behind. With each try, Jack offered a new piece of advice; with each try, the sun sank a little deeper in the sky. On the seventh attempt, Catherine landed perfectly. “I did it. I did it!” She leaped to her feet and threw her arms around Jack’s neck. “This is so cool!”

Laughing, Jack set her away from him. If he could bottle the enthusiasm of the average fifteen-year-old, he’d be a very rich man. He tossed Catherine her water bottle and jacket. “Go on home, Pelé.”

“That’s Brandi, if you don’t mind.”

He grinned as she bounced her way across the darkening playing fields. And he wondered how, in the three months she’d been on his team, he ever could have underestimated Catherine Marsh.

“You’re shitting me.” Jay Kavanaugh stared at the television set over the bar, his bottle of Bud arrested halfway to his lips. “She’s not sixteen.”

“She is,” Jack insisted. “I kid you not.”

They both watched the teen pop princess jiggle her way through an MTV music video. “But . . . but . . . Jesus, look at her face.”

“It’s all makeup.”

“Guess she keeps the cotton balls to apply it stuffed in her bra, then?”

Jack took a pull of his drink. “Early bloomer.”

“That’s no bloom,” Jay muttered. “That’s a whole fucking tropical rainforest.” He grabbed the remote control off the bar counter and turned the channel to a movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger was pummeling a man bloody. “There. Something less inflammatory.” Jay slid his empty bottle across the counter and gestured for another one. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“Do what?”

“Stick yourself smack in the middle of sin every day.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Jeez, you’re surrounded by . . . by sixteen-year-old pop princesses all day long.”

“Jessica Simpson is not enrolled at Westonbrook.”

Jay shrugged. “You know what I mean. I know DAs who won’t drive home their teenage baby-sitters. How can you look at them day in and day out and not . . . notice?”

“Because I’m their teacher and that would make me as moral as a slug.” Jack grinned. “You don’t interview felons and suddenly decide to turn over a new leaf of crime, do you?”

Jay twisted the top off the bottle that the bartender set in front of him. “No . . . but sometimes I look at a drug dealer all decked out in Armani and before I can stop myself, I think: ‘It’s got to be a nice life, long as you don’t get caught.’ ”

Jack lifted the beer to his lips. “Well,” he admitted, laughing, “sometimes I think that, too.”

Dinner at the Marsh household was a stiff affair, with Catherine and her father sitting across from each other at a long, polished table and eating whatever she’d managed to cook for them. “Pasta again?” Reverend Marsh asked, picking up the bowl and bringing it closer to heap on his plate.

“Sorry. We’re out of meat and chicken.”

“The Lord turned water into wine. All I’m suggesting is a trip to the grocery store.”

Catherine reached for her glass of milk. “I haven’t had a chance, Daddy.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. You’ve had the chance. You just chose to use that time for a different purpose.”

“You have no idea how amazing an opportunity it is for me to be able to play first string. I can’t just throw that away.”

Ellidor twirled his fork in the spaghetti. “Barbaric, if you ask me. All those half-dressed young girls being put through their paces by some drill sergeant.”

“Daddy, we’re not half dressed. And Coach St. Bride isn’t the Devil.”

The minister pinned his daughter with a stare. “They are still not the sorts of girls you ought to be spending time with,” he said. He stood up, walked to the sideboard, and tossed a Glamour magazine onto the table. “Which one of them gave you this smut? It was right in your gym bag.”

“It’s not smut-”

Ellidor lifted the magazine and read from its cover. “ ‘How to look like a siren for less than $25’ ‘Can you keep your man happy?’ ” He glanced at Catherine. “ ‘Ten sex secrets to drive him wild.’ ”

Catherine stared at her plate. “Well, that one’s worse than normal. It was last year’s Valentine’s issue. Cynthia gave it to me because there was this really cool haircut in it.”

“I brought you here to Westonbrook so that you’d be less tempted by the things that lead young women into trouble. Magazines like this are just the first step. From here, it’s an easy slide to boys, to drugs, to drinking.” Ellidor sighed. “Catherine, what would people think if they knew that the chaplain’s daughter was a slut?”

“I am not a slut,” she said, her voice pitched low. “And if they saw me reading Glamour, they’d think I was like any other fifteen-year-old girl.”

“That’s the problem,” Ellidor said, touching his daughter’s cheek. “You’re better than all of them.”

Catherine leaned into his palm. And thought, But what if I don’t want to be?

“Well,” Jack said, looking up from his seat as Catherine emerged from the locker room. “You look nice.”

It was an understatement. Dressed in a short black skirt and a tight sweater, she appeared nothing like the ragged scrapper who’d run up and down the field under his explicit orders until he was certain she’d collapse if asked to take another step. He hadn’t asked, for just that reason: If he’d wanted it, Catherine would have driven herself into the ground.

Jack closed the salt-and-pepper composition book he used to record notes on the team’s practice. “Your dad taking you out to dinner?”

Catherine smiled wryly. “On a weeknight? That’s got to be a sin.”

Jack had wondered more and more often how a prig like the Right Reverend Ellidor Marsh had managed to create a girl as vibrant as Catherine. He knew Catherine’s mother, a free spirit who didn’t fit the mold of church wife, had walked out on the family when Catherine was still a toddler. Maybe that was where her personality came from.

“I am going out to dinner,” Catherine admitted shyly. “But on a date.”

“Ah. Your father knows, of course.”

“Oh, absolutely.” Catherine glanced at Jack’s book. “You write about me in there?”

“You bet.”

“What do you write?”

“All my wicked little thoughts,” he joked. “And a few decent plays we might try every now and then.”

The door opened, and Catherine’s date entered. His eyes lit on Catherine as if she were a feast. “You ready?”

“Yeah.” Catherine slipped her arms into her coat. “ ’Night, Coach.” At the door, the boy very properly put his hand on the small of her back.

“Catherine,” Jack said, “can you come here for a moment?”

She came so close that he could smell the conditioner she’d used in the locker room, and the harsh pink soap from the showers. “How well do you really know this guy?” Jack asked softly.

“I’m a big girl. I can take care of myself.” Catherine walked toward her date again. “But Coach,” she added, “thanks for wanting to do it for me.”

“For Christ’s sake!” Jack bellowed.

For the sixth time that day, the ball had sailed right past Catherine Marsh. His intersquad scrimmage was going to hell because his center couldn’t keep her mind on the game.

Jack blew his whistle and strode angrily to the middle of the field. “I’m sorry,” she said immediately.

“Sorry isn’t going to do you a hell of a lot of good when you get slammed in the head by a ball going twenty miles an hour! Or when we lose Districts because this team never gets itself together!” With every word she seemed to fold in on herself. “Catherine,” he sighed. “What’s the matter?”

“Coach,” another player called. “It’s five-thirty. Can we go shower?”

He looked at his watch. Technically, it was 5:20. But this entire afternoon had been a waste of a practice, because whatever fog Catherine had contracted seemed to be catching. “Go,” he barked. Catherine started to slink away, but he grabbed her upper arm. “Not you.”

She took one look at him and started to cry. “I need to get to Woodhaven.”

There was no public transit to Woodhaven, which was thirty miles away, and a cab ride’s cost would seem astronomical to a fifteen-year-old without an income. But as far as Jack knew, there was nothing in particular in Woodhaven that merited a visit. “What’s there that you can’t find in Loyal?”

“Planned Parenthood.”

The words fell between them like a wall. “Catherine, are you pregnant?”

She turned the color of the sunset. “I want to keep from getting that way.”

With a fundamentalist father, asking for birth control wasn’t going to go over very well. But there were other options that didn’t involve visiting a women’s clinic.

“He won’t wear them,” Catherine admitted softly, reading Jack’s mind. “He says they’re not a hundred percent and he doesn’t want to take that chance.”

Jack jammed his hands in his coat pockets, distinctly uncomfortable. Although he had taught teenagers long enough to know that sexual intercourse occurred shockingly young, there was something about Catherine doing it that made him feel a little sick. She had been his Atalanta, swift and unspoiled, running faster than anyone could catch her.

“Please, Coach,” she begged, just as embarrassed to be pleading as he was to be hearing her.

“Catherine,” he said, “we never had this conversation.” And he walked off, determined to believe that this was not-and never would be-his problem.

Catherine, a straight-A student, failed a test. And the next day’s pop quiz. “I want to talk to you,” Jack said to her as the other students filed out. “Wait for a minute.”

She remained at her desk. The exam, with its unprecedented scarlet letter, glared up at her. Jack slid into the seat beside hers. “You know this stuff cold,” he said quietly, and she shrugged. “I could give you a makeup test.”

She didn’t answer, and Jack felt temper swell like a wave inside him. “You’re too smart to throw your academic career away for some guy,” he argued.

Catherine turned slowly. “If I’m going to fuck up my life,” she said, “does it really matter which way I do it?”

Her eyes, which had always seemed to take in the whole world at once, were absolutely flat and expressionless. It was this that tugged the words from Jack he truly did not want to say. “Have you . . . has it . . .”

“No. We’re waiting, to be safe.”

Jack forced himself to look at her. “Are you sure? Because if you pick this moment, with this guy, you’re stuck with it for the rest of your life.”

Her brows drew together. “How do you know if you’re sure?”

God, how to answer that? His first time had been in the back of a limousine owned by the father of the rich girl he’d been seducing. Years afterward, he never could look their chauffeur in the eye.

“There’s one person,” Jack said, stumbling. “When you find him, you’ll know.”

Catherine nodded. “He’s the one.”

“Then I’ll drive you to Woodhaven.”

She had come out of the squat brown building holding a little compact full of birth control pills, which, when opened, looked like the toothed jaws of a gator. “I have to take them for a month before they start to work,” Catherine said, although by then Jack did not want to hear any more.

One month and four days after Jack had driven her to Woodhaven, Catherine showed up late to practice. She played hard that day, doggedly running up and down the field and firing the ball so hard at the practice goalie that twice, she knocked her down. She played, Jack realized, like she was punishing herself.

And that was how he knew it had happened.

Although he could not really articulate why, Jack didn’t speak to Catherine after that, unless it was to instruct her in a certain play. Catherine didn’t seek him out to ask questions on her technique. They won four games. And still Jack and Catherine moved quietly around each other, like two magnets of the same pole who are forced into close contact and cannot help but shy to the side.

It took all the courage in the world to knock on the door of his classroom.

“Come in.”

Catherine took a deep breath and wiped away the mascara underneath her eyes. Coach St. Bride stood in front of the chalkboard in the empty classroom. Posters dotted the walls: Charlemagne, Copernicus, Descartes. She walked up to one, mostly so that she wouldn’t have to look at Coach. “What made Alexander so great anyway?” she murmured.

“Take my class next year and you’ll find out.” He frowned and took off the wire-rimmed glasses he sometimes wore. “You okay?” he asked quietly.

She had always thought his voice was as lovely as wood smoke-a strange thing to compare it to, but in her childhood nothing had quite made her feel as much at home as walking through a brisk afternoon and seeing the curl of gray snailing out of the chimney. He started walking toward her, and oh, God, she was going to absolutely lose it. She had to tell him, she had to tell someone, and she thought that if she did, she would die of humiliation. It would be like . . . what was it, from biology . . . sublimation. Like being here one moment, and then poof, evaporating into thin air without a trace, so that no one would ever know you had even been there.

“Catherine?” he asked, just her name, and she turned away.

She found herself facing a map larger than any she’d ever seen. It covered nearly one entire wall of the classroom, an uneven patchwork quilt of countries and oceans. Lakes were the size of diamond chips, cities no bigger than a pinprick. You could step inside and lose yourself.

With a sob, she whirled and threw herself into Coach’s arms. He staggered back at the unexpected embrace, and when he realized she was crying, lightly patted her back. He did it awkwardly, not used to giving comfort to his students, and somehow that made it even sweeter.

“He broke up with me. He . . . he did it . . . and then . . . and then . . .” She couldn’t finish, and it didn’t matter, because Coach St. Bride understood.

His hand fell onto the crown of her head. “Oh, Catherine. I’m sorry.”

“No, I am. I am, because I was so stupid.” She wrapped her arms tighter around him. And she gradually noticed how the fine hairs on his nape were the color of Spanish gold; how his hands were large enough to hold her together. With great care, she opened her mouth and pressed it against his neck, so that he would think it was only her breath. But she could taste his skin, the salt and spice of it, and her eyes drifted shut. You were so, so right, she thought. When you find the one, you know.

May 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Different jails smell the same.

Stale. A little bit like piss and a little bit like biscuits rising. Sweat; swabbed disinfectant. And over all this, the heady scent of anxiety. Jack shuffled beside the correctional officer, his handcuffs swinging between his wrists. I am not here, he thought dizzily. I am lying on my back on a wide, green lawn, sleeping in the sun, and this is just a nightmare. Knowing that he was about to be locked up again when he was wrongfully accused was enough to make him tremble. Who would believe the man who pleaded his second case from the confines of a cell?

“Name,” barked the recording officer. He was overweight, stuffed into his little glass booth like a dumpling in a Pyrex dish. “St. Bride,” Jack said, his voice rusty. “Dr. Jack St. Bride.”

“Height?”

“Six-two.”

“Weight?”

“One-ninety,” Jack answered.

The officer did not glance up. “Eyes?”

“Blue.”

Jack watched his answers being scrawled across the booking card. Allergies. Medications. Regular physician. Distinguishing characteristics.

Person to call in the event of an emergency.

But, Jack thought, isn’t this one?

The guard led Jack to a room the size of a large closet. It was empty, except for a desk and a row of shelves stacked with prison-issue clothing. “Strip,” he said.

At that moment, it all came back: the feeling of being a number, not a name. The absolute lack of privacy. The mindlessness that came when every decision was made for you, from when you ate to when the lights were turned off to when you were allowed to see the sky. It had taken almost no time at all to strip him of his humanity at the Farm-and it had all started the moment Jack had put on the uniform of a convict.

“I’d rather not.”

The guard looked up at him. “What?”

“I’m here in custody. I’m not a prisoner. So I shouldn’t have to dress like one.”

The correctional officer rolled his eyes. “Just get changed.”

Jack looked at the stack of orange clothing. Faded and soft, from years of others wearing it. “I can’t,” he said politely. “Please don’t ask me to do this.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m telling you, quite clearly, to take off your goddamned clothes.”

Jack glanced down at his Hanes T-shirt, his striped boxers, and a pair of sweatpants he’d bought with Addie at Kmart. He had no great attachment to this wardrobe beyond the fact that he had been wearing it the moment before Charlie Saxton arrested him.

Jack set his jaw. “The only way you’re going to get those things on me is to do it yourself.”

For a second, the guard seemed to consider this. He was larger than Jack by half a head. But something in Jack’s eyes-some bright angry nugget of resolve-made him take a step back. “Shit,” he muttered, handcuffing Jack to the desk. “Why does this happen on my shift?”

He walked out, leaving Jack alone to wonder what avalanche he’d set in motion.

Roy’s eyes were so bloodshot that he was literally seeing red. He watched with astonishment as the orange juice poured crimson into his glass, then frowned at the label and squinted. It said Tropicana. He sniffed at the insides-and realized it was tomato juice, which he’d poured into the empty juice carton last week when the glass container of V8 didn’t fit in his fridge. Relieved, he took a sip, then cracked a raw egg inside and added a dollop of whiskey.

Best hangover remedy he’d ever found, and he should know.

Behind him the door opened. Roy tried to turn fast, and nearly heaved up his insides. Addie was on the rampage, not that he would have expected any less. “I know, I know,” Roy began. “It’s completely irresponsible of me to . . . Addie?” Now that she was closer, he could see tears on her face. “Honey? What’s the matter?”

“It’s Jack. Charlie Saxton arrested him.”

“What?”

“He said . . . oh, Daddy. Charlie said Jack raped Gillian Duncan last night.”

Roy sank onto a chair. “Gillian Duncan,” he murmured. “Holy mother of God.” There was something tickling the back of his mind, but he couldn’t seem to quite reach it. Then it came to him, and he looked up. “Addie, Jack was with me last night.”

Hope broke over her face. “He was?”

“You’re not gonna want to hear it, but we were at the Rooster. Drinking.” Roy grimaced. “Still, I guess it’s a sight better to be pegged a drunk than a rapist.”

“Jack was with you last night? All last night? And you can tell the police this?”

“He showed up about ten. I can vouch for him until about eleven-thirty, I guess.”

“What happened then?”

Roy ducked his head. “I, uh, passed out. Marlon-he’s the bartender-he let me sleep it off in the back room. I guess Jack left when the bar closed.”

“Which is when?”

“Midnight.”

Addie sat down beside him on the couch, thinking. “I didn’t see him until one-thirty in the morning. Where was he?”

Roy turned away so that he would not have to see the ache in his daughter’s eyes. “Maybe they made a mistake,” he said uncomfortably, when he was really thinking, Maybe we all did.

You had to pay your dues in jail. If you wanted a candy bar, it meant behaving well enough to be granted the commissary form. If you wanted the freedom of medium security, where you could wander through the common room during any hours except lockdown, you had to prove that you could conduct yourself well in maximum security. If you wanted to run in the courtyard, you had to earn the privilege. Everything was a step, a reckoning, a inch given in the hopes of receiving one in return.

Conversely, if you made trouble, you were punished.

And so Jack, who had been in the custody of the Carroll County Jail for less than an hour, found himself being escorted between two correctional officers to the office of the superintendent for a disciplinary review.

He was a big man with no neck, a silver buzz cut, and glasses from the 1950s. In fact, Jack realized, it was entirely possible the superintendent had been sitting here, pushing papers, for half a century. “Mr. St. Bride,” the superintendent said, in a voice so feathery Jack had to strain to hear, “you’ve been charged with failing to follow the instructions of a correctional officer. Not an auspicious beginning.”

Jack looked at a spot over the man’s shoulder. There was a calendar hanging behind the desk, the kind you get free from the bank. It was turned to March 1998, as if time had stopped. “From your past history, Mr. St. Bride, I’m sure you’re aware that transgressions that occur in a correctional facility . . . even minor ones . . . can have a significant effect on the sentence you receive if convicted. For example-this little tantrum of yours could add three to seven years to the time you’ll have to serve.” The superintendent folded his arms. “Do you have anything to say in your own defense?”

“I’m not guilty of any crime. I don’t want to look like someone who is.”

The superintendent’s mouth flattened. “Son,” he said quietly, “you don’t want to do this, believe me. This freedom-fighter angle doesn’t play well here. If you just keep your nose to the wheel and follow the rules, your stay will be a lot more pleasant.”

Jack stared straight ahead.

The older man sighed. “Mr. St. Bride, I find that you’re guilty of violating the rules of this facility by refusing to wear the required clothing, and you’re sentenced to spend three days in solitary.” He nodded to the two correctional officers. “Take him away.”

The worst part about being a prosecutor, in Matt Houlihan’s opinion, was that even when you won, you didn’t. The world was too black and white for that. Even if he got Jack St. Bride locked up for twenty years, it didn’t take away the fact that this asshole, who’d been convicted before, had committed a crime again. It didn’t change the truth that Gillian Duncan would have to live with this memory for the rest of her life. It was like securing the bull after he’d careened through the china shop-yes, you could pen him for a little while, but you still incurred the cost of the mess he’d left in his wake.

Matt had chosen to meet Amos Duncan and his daughter at their home. Normally, he didn’t make house calls, but he was willing to bend the rules. Inviting the girl into his office would only bring to the forefront the legal battle that lay ahead of her. Right now, it was in everyone’s best interests to keep Gillian calm, so that when Matt finally needed to call in his chip, she would respond the way he needed her to in front of the jury.

He reached for a cup of coffee that Gillian handed him, and he took a sip as she sat down beside her father on the couch. “Excellent stuff. Kona?”

Amos nodded. “Hi-test.”

“The Jamaican blend is just as good. Of course, back at the office, we’re lucky to get watered-down Maxwell House.”

“I will personally buy the county attorney’s office an espresso machine,” Amos vowed, “if you lock up this bastard.”

Latching onto the segue, Matt nodded. “Mr. Duncan, I understand completely. And that’s why I’m here today. St. Bride has been charged with aggravated felonious sexual assault, which carries up to twenty years in the state penitentiary. I fully intend to ask for the maximum sentence. That means this case isn’t going to go away with a plea.”

“Is he going to get out?”

Matt did not pretend to misunderstand Amos. “St. Bride is being held without bail, so he’ll stay in jail until the trial. After his conviction, he’ll serve twenty years and then be on lifetime supervision. A third sexual assault offense will land him in prison for life.” He smiled mirthlessly. “So, no, Mr. Duncan. He’s not going to get out anytime soon.”

Matt turned to Gillian. “Our office can get you in touch with rape crisis counselors, if you need that kind of support.”

“We’ve taken care of that already,” Amos answered.

“All right. We’re currently in the process of interviewing witnesses. Gillian, are there people that you can think of who would know something about last night?”

Gillian looked at her father, who’d gotten up to pace. “The others, I guess. Whitney and Chelsea and Meg.”

Matt nodded. “Detective Saxton will be speaking to them.”

“What about the stuff from the hospital?” Amos asked. “Did you find anything?”

“We won’t know for a couple of weeks, Mr. Duncan.”

“Two weeks? That long?”

“As long as we have lab results before we go to trial, we’re in good shape. I’m confident that we’ll find physical evidence to support Gillian’s testimony.”

“My testimony?”

Matt nodded. “I’m going to have to put you on the stand.”

She immediately started to shake her head. “I don’t think I can do that.”

“You can. We’ll go over your testimony; there won’t be any surprises.”

Gillian’s hands twisted the bottom of her sweater. “But what about the other lawyer? You don’t know what he’s going to ask.” A bright thought swelled in her mind. “If something from the lab proves he was there, do I still have to testify?”

This was a very common reaction for a rape victim, and even more common for a teenager. Smoothly, Matt said, “Don’t worry about it now. I don’t have all the evidence yet. I don’t have all the police reports. I don’t have all the witness statements. Just let me do my job, let Detective Saxton do his . . . and then we’ll put together the best possible case we can.” Matt hesitated. “There is one thing I need to know,” he said. “Gillian, I have to ask you if you were a virgin before this happened.”

Gillian’s gaze flew to her father, who had stopped in his tracks. “Mr. Houlihan . . .”

“I’m sorry. But the answer’s important.”

Her eyes were fixed on her father as she murmured, “No.”

Amos stood and walked away, gathering his composure. “I want to help with the investigation,” he announced suddenly, changing the topic.

The statement seemed to take his daughter by as much surprise as it did Matt. “Thank you for the offer. But it’s best to let the professionals take care of the details, Mr. Duncan. The last thing you want is to have St. Bride freed on a technicality.”

“Do I get to see it?” Amos demanded.

“See what?”

“The reports. The police statements. The DNA evidence.”

“During the course of this trial,” Matt said, “I’ll make sure you know everything I know after I know it, as soon as possible. I’ll show you anything you want to see.”

That appeased Amos. He nodded stiffly.

But Matt was more concerned with Gillian, who still seemed tangled in the unexpected realization that she would have to get on the stand. “Gillian,” he said softly. “I’ll take care of you. Promise.”

The lines in her forehead smoothed, and she smiled tentatively. “Thanks.”

Amos sat down again and slid his arm around his daughter, as if to remind her that he was there to help her, too. Matt looked away, to give them a moment of privacy. And he made a fierce vow to himself to put his entire self on the line for the Duncans, if only so that they could have back a fraction of the life they’d had before Jack St. Bride entered it.

The last time Gilly had been in Dr. Horowitz’s office, she’d been nine years old. She remembered playing with dolls while Dr. Horowitz wrote in a notebook. And that the psychiatrist had always given her mint Milano cookies when the sessions were over. One day, her father decided that Gillian had put to rest her mother’s death, and she stopped going for her weekly sessions.

“Gillian,” Dr. Horowitz said. “It’s been a while.”

Dr. Horowitz was now two inches shorter than Gillian. Her hair had gone gray at the temples, and she wore bifocals on a beaded chain. She looked old, and this shocked Gilly-if all this time had passed for Dr. Horowitz, it meant that it had passed for her as well. “I don’t need to be here,” Gillian blurted out. “I can take care of this by myself.”

Dr. Horowitz only nodded. “Your father thinks differently.”

Gillian remained silent. She was terrified of talking. It was bad enough speaking to the county attorney and Detective Saxton, but they at least came expecting to learn. Dr. Horowitz-well, her job was to pick through Gillian’s head, to see exactly what was there.

“Why don’t we decide together if I can help you?” the psychiatrist suggested. “How are you feeling today?” Gillian shrugged, silent. “Have you been able to eat? Sleep?”

“I haven’t wanted to.”

“Have you been able to concentrate?”

“Concentrate!” Gillian burst out. “It’s the only thing that’s on my mind!”

“What is?”

“Him.”

“Do you keep remembering what happened?”

“God, yes, over and over,” Gillian said. “But it’s like I’m not there.”

“What do you mean?”

Her voice became tiny. “Like I’m sitting . . . way up high and seeing this girl in the woods . . . how he grabs her . . . and when he runs away, it’s like all of a sudden I’m gone too.”

“That must be very upsetting.”

She nodded, and to her horror, tears came to her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m okay, really. I just . . . I just . . .”

Dr. Horowitz handed her a tissue. “Gillian, it wasn’t your fault. You have no reason to be ashamed or embarrassed about what happened.”

She brought her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “If that’s true,” Gilly said, “then of all the people in the world, why did he pick me?”

The solitary cell had a river of urine in its upper right corner and shiny, dried splotches on the cement block wall, the legacy of the last inmate to be confined. As the door was slammed shut, Jack sank down onto the metal bunk. The silver lining: He was wearing his clothes. His own clothes. He thought of all the Super Bowl winners who’d edged out the first goal, of countries that had won the first battle of an ultimately victorious war.

If the Carroll County Jail had custody of his body, then Jack would damn well keep custody of his own free will.

He felt along the metal links of the bunk and beneath the mattress, over the upper rim of the shower and in the drain, even around the base of the toilet. A pen, he prayed. Just a single pen. But whoever had neglected to disinfect the solitary cell had managed to strip it clean of anything that might be used for diversion.

Jack sat back down and inspected his fingernails. He scratched at a loose thread in his jeans. He unlaced his sneaker, and then retied it.

He closed his eyes, and immediately pictured Addie. He could still smell her on his skin, just the faintest perfume. Suddenly he felt his chest burn, his arm creep and tingle. A heart attack-Jesus, he was having a heart attack. “Guard!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. He shook the bunk, rattling it against the clamps that moored it to the wall. “Help me!”

But no one heard him-or if anyone did, no one came.

He forced himself to concentrate on something other than this pain. If you have pogonophobia, you’ll probably be avoiding these.

Focus, Jack. What are beards.

The unique food you’d give a butterwort plant.

Inhale. Exhale. What are insects.

An archtophilist would have a pile of these.

What are teddy bears.

He spread his hand over his chest as the pain ebbed, eased, stopped. And was not really surprised to find that he could no longer feel the beat of his heart.

Gillian watched the last of the candle flame sputter and sink into a pool of wax. A piece of paper with her mother’s name on it sat smoking down to ash in a silver dish. Gillian stared at the candle, at the make-shift altar. Maybe the reason she doesn’t come is because she hates the person I’ve grown up to be.

It wasn’t a new thought for Gillian, but today, it nearly brought her to her knees. She stood up slowly, drawn to the mirror. Picking up a pair of scissors, she stood in front of the glass and lifted a thick strand of her red hair. She chopped it off at the crown, so that a small tuft stood up, and the rest cascaded to the floor like a silk scarf.

She lifted another section, cutting it. And another. Until her skull was covered with uneven spikes, short as a boy’s. Until her bare feet were covered with hanks of her hair, a pit of auburn snakes. Until her head felt so light and free that Gilly thought it might lift from her neck like a helium balloon and soar as far away as possible.

Now, she thought, he wouldn’t look twice at me.

The conference rooms at the jail were narrow and ugly, with battered legal books stacked on a scarred table, windows that had been sealed shut, and a thermostat cranked up to eighty degrees. Jordan sat on one of the two chairs, strumming his fingers on the table, waiting for Jack St. Bride to be brought through the door.

St. Bride was clearly a loser-getting himself caught in a similar situation twice. But to learn that Jack had also managed to get thrown into solitary within an hour of his arrival . . . well, defending him was like being given a sow’s ear and told to make a silk purse.

The correctional officer who opened the door pushed Jack in. He stumbled once, glancing over his shoulder. “Nice to know the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply here,” he muttered.

“Why would it? This isn’t a war, Jack. Although, rumor has it you’ve been ready for combat from the moment you stepped in here.” Jordan came to his feet in one smooth motion. “Frankly, it doesn’t do me any good to find you in solitary after just one day. I had to offer my balls on a silver platter to the guards to get to meet with you in private in a conference room instead of through the slit in the steel door down there. You want to play the rebel here, fine-just be aware that everything you say and do here is going to wind up getting back to the prosecutor, and that you might feel the ripples all the way through your case.”

The speech had been intended to put the fear of God into Jack; to scare him into good behavior. But Jack only set his jaw. “I’m not a prisoner.”

Jordan had been a defense attorney long enough to ignore him. Denial was something his clients excelled at. Christ, he’d once stood up for a guy who was arrested in the act of plunging a knife into his girlfriend’s heart, and who maintained all the way to the State Pen that the cops had mistaken him for someone else. “Like I said yesterday, you’ve been charged with aggravated felonious sexual assault. Do you want to plead guilty?”

Jack’s jaw dropped. “Are you kidding?”

“You did the last time you were charged.”

“But that was . . . that was . . .” Jack couldn’t even get the words out. “I was wrongly accused. And my attorney said it was the safest course of action.”

Jordan nodded. “He was right.”

“Don’t you want to know if I committed this crime?”

“Not particularly. It isn’t important to my job as your defense attorney.”

“It’s crucial.” Jack leaned over the table, right in Jordan’s face. “The last thing I need is another lawyer who doesn’t even listen to me when I tell him the truth.”

“You listen to me, Jack. I didn’t put you in jail last year, and I didn’t get you arrested this time around, either. Whether you get acquitted or convicted, I get to leave that courtroom free and clear. My role here is simply to be your advocate, and to translate that into the simplest terms possible, it means I’m your best goddamned hope. While you’re sitting in solitary, I get to go out and fight on your behalf. And if you cooperate with me rather than jump down my throat every other fucking minute, I’m bound to fight considerably harder.”

Jack shook his head. “You listen. I didn’t rape her. I was nowhere even close to her that night. That’s the God’s honest truth. I’m innocent. That’s why I don’t want to wear their clothes and sit in their cell. I don’t belong here.”

Jordan returned his gaze evenly. “You were willing enough to do it before when you accepted a plea, in spite of your . . . innocence.”

“And that’s why,” Jack said, his voice breaking, “there’s no way I’m going to do it again. I will kill myself before I sit in jail again for a crime I didn’t commit.”

Jordan looked at Jack’s rumpled clothing, his wild eyes. He’d had clients before who seemed to feel that an impassioned cry for justice was the only way to muster an attorney’s enthusiasm for a case; they never seemed to realize that a good lawyer could identify bullshit by its stink. “All right. You weren’t there that night.”

“No.”

“Where were you?”

Jack picked at his thumbnail. “Drinking,” he admitted.

“Of course,” Jordan muttered, amazed that this case could get any worse. “With whom?”

“Roy Peabody. I was at the Rooster’s Spit until they closed up.”

“How much did you drink?”

Jack glanced away. “More than I should have.”

“Fabulous,” Jordan sighed.

“Then I went out for a walk.”

“A midnight walk. Did anyone see you?”

Jack hesitated, for only an instant. “No.”

“Where did you go?”

“Just . . . around. Behind town.”

“But not near the woods behind the cemetery. Not anywhere near Gillian Duncan.”

“I told you, I never saw her that night, let alone touched her.”

“That’s funny, Jack. Because I’m looking at that scratch on your cheek, the one that Gillian Duncan said she gave you in her victim’s statement.”

“It was a branch,” Jack said through clenched teeth.

“Ah. From the forest you weren’t in?” Jordan’s gaze skimmed over Jack’s bruised face. “Did she beat you up, too?”

“No. It was a bunch of guys in ski masks.”

“Ski masks,” Jordan repeated, not buying a word of it. “Why were people in ski masks beating you up?”

“I don’t know.”

Jordan sighed. “What else can you remember about that night?”

Jack hesitated. “I remember leaving Addie’s . . . and then finding her again at the diner.”

“How much time elapsed in between?”

“Four hours.”

“And what were you doing during those four hours?”

At Jack’s silence, Jordan rolled his eyes. “You don’t want to plead. You say you weren’t in the woods that night, but you can’t provide an alibi. You tell me, then-what have we got?”

“A liar,” Jack said succinctly. “I don’t know why she’s doing it, or what she’s got against me. But I didn’t do this, I swear it. I didn’t rape Gillian Duncan.”

“Fine,” Jordan said, although he didn’t believe him in the least. “We’ll go to trial.”

“No,” Charlie said.

On the other end of the phone, Matt paused in the notes he was writing to himself on a yellow pad. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean I can’t, Matt. I don’t have the time for this.”

Matt set down his pen. “Maybe you’ve forgotten the way this works, Charlie. We have a case; I tell you what I need; you get it. And if that means putting down your doughnut and getting your ass out of your swivel chair to interview Addie Peabody, then do it.”

“I’ve got to drive the rape kit down to the lab in Concord. Then I’ve got three teenage girls to interview. And somewhere in there I have to figure out who the hell stole the VCR from the high school audiovisual lab. Did I mention that I happen to be the only detective on staff here at the SFPD?”

“I’m sorry your town budget doesn’t include the salary for a sidekick. But be that as it may, you’re the only one who can take Addie’s statement.”

“You can do it,” Charlie suggested. “Besides, you aren’t the one whose face she remembers every time she thinks back to the moment her boyfriend was arrested. She’ll probably be more forthcoming with you.”

Matt knew Addie Peabody would talk to him. Hell, everyone talked to him. Even after they said they didn’t want to, he’d ask a question, and they’d start spilling their guts. The issue here was what would happen if she told Matt one thing and then said another thing on the stand. “She’s not a sure thing, Charlie. If she changes her story between now and the trial, I can’t call myself as a witness to impeach her.”

“She won’t lie.”

“You don’t know that,” Matt said. “So what if she was shocked at the arrest? Who wouldn’t be? By now, she may have decided that she’ll stay on St. Bride’s ship until it sinks. Or that she can play Mata Hari with the prosecution and somehow secure his acquittal. She’s exactly the kind of witness who’ll keep me up nights before the trial.”

“Look, I know Addie. I’ve known her my whole life.” Charlie sounded as if the words were being tugged out of him, all angles and cramps. “She’s the kind of person who takes a shitty situation and deals with it, instead of pretending it never happened. If it makes you feel better, take Wes Courtemanche along during the interview; he can take the stand for you if it comes to impeaching Addie. Now, are you finished? Or do I have to let your physical evidence sit in the fridge during another lecture?”

“I hope you hit traffic,” Matt growled, and slammed down the receiver.

She’d been all thumbs since the moment she set foot in the diner that morning-breaking three glasses, letting a platter of pancakes tumble over the front of her apron, spilling coffee on a customer’s paper. “Addie,” her father said, putting his hand on her shoulder, and that was enough to nearly make her topple the entire tray of table six’s food. “I think maybe you ought to call in Darla.”

Ignoring him, she swung into the kitchen, Roy following. “Thank the holy Lord,” Delilah said. “I hope you’re here to wash.” She nodded toward the stack of filthy china piled high.

Addie tucked an order into Delilah’s rotating file. “Sorry. Too swamped.”

The cook lifted the slip of paper and frowned. “Well, honey, I’ll make you your frittata, but I’m gonna have to serve it up on a dirty plate.”

“Frankly, Delilah, I don’t care if you bring it out in one of your shoes.”

Addie held tight to the last thread of her self-control. She had gone to work in the hopes that staying busy would keep her from dwelling on what had happened. After all, it had helped after Chloe. But it seemed that everywhere she went in the diner, all she could concentrate on was the fact that Jack wasn’t there, too.

“Addie,” her father said, “you’re a mess. No one’s going to think any less of you if you go up and lie down for a little while.”

“Some of us might even think a little more of you if you found us a new dishwasher,” Delilah muttered.

It was the last straw. Tears sprang to Addie’s eyes as she ripped off her apron and flung it onto the kitchen floor. “Do you think I don’t know that I haven’t slept in three nights? Or that we don’t have enough kitchen staff? A man that I . . . that I thought I could love was arrested right in front of me for rape. And I can’t tell you if he did it or not. That’s what I’m thinking about, not whether the goddamned dishes get washed or if I’ve dropped an order all over the floor. I am trying to make everyone happy. For God’s sake, what do all you people want from me?!”

The voice that answered was unexpected, quiet, and cool. “Well,” said Matt Houlihan, standing behind her with Wes. “For starters, how about a little talk?”

Houlihan seemed like a perfectly nice man, even if he was aiming to lock Jack away for twenty years. When he smiled, there was a gap between his front teeth, and to Addie’s surprise, his eyes seemed to reflect an understanding she never would have expected to find. “This must be very difficult for you, Ms. Peabody,” Matt said. In the corner of Roy’s living room, Wes snorted, then covered it with a cough.

“Do I have to talk to you?”

“No, of course not. But I’d like to talk to you, so that you’ll know what I’m going to be asking you in court, instead of just subpoenaing you cold turkey.” He smiled sympathetically. “I understand you were intimately involved with Mr. St. Bride.”

Addie nodded, certain that she wouldn’t be able to force a single word of explanation out of her narrow throat.

“Can you tell me about him?”

She picked up her father’s television remote control in her hands and thought of Jack watching Jeopardy! “He’s very smart,” Addie said softly. “A trivia buff.”

“How long have you been involved with him?”

“I hired him two months ago, in March. He started working as a dishwasher.”

“Did you know at the time that he had a criminal record?”

Addie’s cheeks burned. “I thought . . . he was down on his luck.”

She could feel Wes’s eyes on her, and studiously ignored them. “Did St. Bride ever say anything to you about Gillian Duncan?” Matt asked.

“No.”

“Did you ever see them together?”

“Only when she and her friends came to the diner and Jack had to clean their table.” As she spoke, her mind fishtailed back, trying to remember if she’d ever seen Jack smiling at the girls, flirting, staying a moment too long after clearing their plates. What had she missed? What had she wanted to miss?

“Did he ever read pornography?”

Addie’s head snapped up. “What?”

“Pornography,” the county attorney repeated. “Playboy magazines, maybe a video . . . Internet sites of nude children?”

“No!”

“Was your own relationship with him sexually deviant?”

“Excuse me?”

That wide, gap-toothed smile again. “Ms. Peabody, I realize these questions are rude and personal. But I’m sure you see why it’s information we need to have.”

“No,” she said.

“No, you don’t see . . . ?”

“No,” Addie interrupted, “he was not sexually deviant.” In the background, there was a snap as Wes broke the arm off a little clay figurine of a fisherman that sat on her father’s bookshelves. He hastily balanced it and turned away, muttering an apology.

“Was St. Bride ever violent toward you?”

Addie raised her chin. “He was the gentlest man I’ve ever met.”

“Did he drink?”

Her lips formed a thin line. She knew what the prosecutor was getting at; and God help her, even if Jack was guilty, she didn’t want to contribute to his downfall any more than she already had.

“Ms. Peabody?”

Then again, a girl was out there. A girl who had been raped.

“He was drinking that night,” Addie admitted. “With my father.”

“I see,” Matt said. “Were you together that night?”

“He left my house about nine-thirty P.M. My father was with him until eleven-thirty P.M. I didn’t see him again until one-thirty in the morning.”

“Did he tell you where he’d been?”

Addie closed her eyes. “No. And I . . . I never asked.”

The dimpled ball sailed over the wide, green sea of the driving range, landing somewhere in the vicinity of a sand trap. Without missing a beat, Jordan bent down and took another one out of the bucket to balance on the tee. He lifted his club, readying for the swing . . . and jerked at Selena’s voice.

“Whose face are you seeing on that little thing? Houlihan’s . . . or St. Bride’s?”

Jordan swung and carried through, shading his eyes against the sun to see the ball fall way off the mark. “Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to interrupt a golfer?”

Selena set down the peel of the orange she was dissecting and popped the first section into her mouth. “You’re not a golfer, Jordan; you’re a dilettante.”

Ignoring her, Jordan hit three more balls. “Got a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“If you were charged with murder, who would you get to defend you?”

Selena frowned, considering for a moment. “I think I’d try for Mark D’Amato. Or Ralph Concannon, if Mark wasn’t available.”

Jordan glanced at her over his shoulder. “Mark’s good,” he conceded.

She burst out laughing. “God, Jordan, you’ve got to work on your poker face. Go on, ask me why I didn’t pick you.”

He set down his club. “Well . . . why not?”

“Because you’re the only person I’d ever get angry enough with to actually kill, so you wouldn’t be around to defend me. Happy now?”

“I’m not sure,” Jordan frowned. “Let me think on it.”

Selena glanced at the half bucket of balls. “You get enough stress out of your system to tell me about your meeting this morning?”

“That might take six buckets.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Why do I feel that this one’s gonna be a huge pain in the ass?”

“Because St. Bride is dragging you out of a cushy retirement. An open-and-shut acquittal would still make you grumpy. Is he gonna plead?”

“Nope. Our marching orders are to go to trial.”

“No kidding?”

“You heard me.”

She shrugged. “Okay. Do we have a game plan?”

“We’ve got nothing from our esteemed client, who’s conveniently amnesiac. Which means you get to prove the girl is a liar.”

Selena was so quiet that Jordan went through six more shots before he realized she hadn’t responded. “I know,” he commiserated. “It’ll be next to impossible. Everything I’ve seen in her statement checks out so far.”

“No, that’s not what I was thinking.” She looked up. “Who’s Dr. Horowitz?”

“You’ve got me. Someone from ER?”

“He . . . or she . . . is the doctor mentioned in the victim’s statement. My guess is a psychiatrist Gillian Duncan met with in the past.”

For the first time that day, Jordan’s ball landed within spitting distance of the flag. He turned slowly from the green and stared at Selena, who raised her brows and handed him the last slice of the orange. As he took it, their fingers brushed. “Good guess,” he said.

It was all Jack could do to look at the pile of clothes folded neatly on the chair beside him and not start scratching.

In the three days he’d been in solitary confinement, he’d been fastidious about showering. At first, he’d dried off with his T-shirt. Then, as it began to mildew, he let himself air dry, bare-chested. But to be brought to the superintendent’s office, the guard made him put on his shirt again. It stuck to his skin and smelled like the bottom of a sewage tank.

Jack looked longingly at the clothes. “Attractive, aren’t they?” the superintendent said. “They’re yours for the taking.”

“No, thank you.”

“Mr. St. Bride, you’ve made your point.”

Jack smiled. “Tell me that when you’re standing in my shoes.”

“The clothing is for your own safety.”

“No, it’s for yours. You want me to put on that jumpsuit so that every other man in here knows I follow your rules. But the minute I do, you’ve got control of me.”

The superintendent’s eyes gleamed; Jack knew he was treading on very thin ice. “We don’t use our solitary cells as penthouse suites. You can’t stay there forever.”

“Then let me wear my clothes into a regular cell.”

“I can’t do that.”

Jack let his gaze slide to the fresh clothing on the seat beside him. “Neither can I,” he answered softly.

The guard behind him stepped forward at a nod from the superintendent. “Put Mr. St. Bride back in solitary for six days. And this time, turn off the water line to his shower.”

Jack felt himself being hauled to his feet. He smoothed the front of his shirt as if it were the tunic of a king.

“Mr. St. Bride,” the superintendent said. “You’re not going to win.”

Jack paused, but did not turn around. “On the other hand, I have nothing to lose.”

Francesca Martine had the body of a Playboy centerfold and the brain of a nuclear physicist, something that didn’t usually sit well with the men who got up the nerve to ask her out. Then again, she had learned her lesson: Instead of telling dates that she was a DNA scientist, she simply said that she worked in a lab, leaving them to assume she spent her days getting lunch for the real scientists, and cleaning out the cages of mice and rats.

She set a sample beneath a microscope. “So, Frankie,” Matt said, grinning. “That come from one of your boyfriends?”

“Oh, yeah. I have so little to do here I’ve taken to swabbing myself to see what’s swimming around, just in case the fact that I haven’t had a relationship in six months isn’t enough to tip me off.” She squinted into the lens. “How’s that cute kid of yours?”

“Molly . . . God. I can’t even describe how incredible she is. So I guess you’ll have to have one yourself.”

“How come perfectly normal people become matchmakers the minute they get married themselves?”

“It’s Darwinian, I think. Trying to keep the species going.” Restless, Matt got to his feet. “Besides, you brainy types need to be reminded that it’s nice to replicate DNA in something other than a thermocycler.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Frankie said dryly. “Did you specifically come here to talk about my pathetic love life, or is there something else?”

“That rape kit Charlie Saxton brought in-”

“I haven’t gotten to it yet, Matt. I was in court yesterday, and this morning I-”

“I’m not rushing you.” He smiled sheepishly. “Well, not any more than I usually do, anyway. I just wanted to let you know what I’m looking for.”

“Let me guess,” Frankie said deadpan. “Semen?”

“Yeah. I’d like to know about the blood on the shirt, too. And the soil from the boots.” He swung away from the counter. “So, you’ll get me my results in two weeks?”

“Three,” Frankie murmured, peering into a microscope.

“Gosh, yeah-ten days would be great.” Matt backed away before she could complain. “Thanks.”

Frankie turned to the scope again. Sperm frozen in time, tailless and immobile. “That’s what they all say,” she sighed.

Addie didn’t know where she got the courage necessary to knock on the heavy door of the Carroll County Jail. If they don’t come, I’ll just turn away, Addie thought. I’ll go home and try some other day, when I feel more the thing.

A guard opened the door. “Can I help you?”

“I . . . I . . .”

A kindly smile spread across the man’s face. “First visit? Come on in.”

He led Addie into a vestibule, where a small line of people snaked like a tapeworm from a glass-enclosed booth. “Wait here,” the guard said. “They’ll tell you what to do.”

Addie nodded, more to herself than to the guard, who had already moved away. Visiting hours were Wednesday nights, from 6 to 9. She’d called the switchboard for that information, which had been easy enough. Getting in her car and driving there had been slightly more challenging. Downright impossible would be the moment she saw Jack again and struggled for something to say.

It was after speaking to Matt Houlihan that she realized she needed to do the one thing she hadn’t: hear Jack’s side of the story, before she believed anyone else’s.

She was terrified that he would lie to her, and that their whole time together would just have been an extension of that lie. She was equally terrified that he would tell her the truth, and then she would have to understand how God could be cruel enough to let her give her heart to a man who’d committed rape.

“Next!”

Addie advanced as the man before her was buzzed through a barred door. She found herself facing a correctional officer with a face as misshapen as a potato. “Name?”

Her heart leaped beneath her light jacket. “Addie Peabody.”

“Name of the inmate you’re here to visit.”

“Oh. Jack St. Bride.”

The officer scanned a list. “St. Bride’s not allowed visitors.”

“Not allowed-”

“He’s in solitary.” The guard glanced over her shoulder. “Next!”

But Addie didn’t move. “How am I supposed to get in touch with him?”

“ESP,” the officer suggested, as Addie was shoved out of the way.

The human scalp has 100,000 hairs.

In an average lifetime, a person will grow 590 miles of hair.

Jack scratched at his thickening beard again, this time drawing blood. There was a rational part of him that knew he was all right, that going without a shower for a week wouldn’t kill him. And in spite of what it felt like, a colony of insects had not taken up root on his scalp. But sometimes, when he sat very still, he could feel the threads of their legs digging into his skin, could hear the buzz of their bodies.

Insects outnumber humans 100,000,000 to one.

He thought of these things, these useless facts, because they were so much easier to consider than other things: Would Addie come to see him? Would he remember what had happened that night? Would he, once again, be convicted?

Suddenly, from a distance, there were footsteps. Usually, no one came down here after the janitor’s soft-soled shoes paced the length of the hall, rasping a mop in their wake. These shoes were definitive, a sure stride that stopped just outside his door.

“I take it you’re still mulling over your decisions,” the superintendent said. “I wanted to pass along a bit of information to you. You had a visitor today, who of course was turned away, since you’re in a disciplinary lockdown.”

A visitor? Addie?

Just the thought of her walking into a place like this, the knowledge that she wouldn’t have had to if not for Jack, was enough to make him cry a river. Tears sluiced down his face, washing away the grime, and maybe a little bit of his pride.

Reaching up, he scratched vigorously at his temple.

The average person, Jack thought, accidentally eats 430 bugs in a year.

As a defense attorney, Jordan had dealt with his share of society’s losers-all of whom were convinced they’d been given the fuzzy end of the lollipop. It wasn’t his job to judge them on the things they’d done, or even on their own misconceptions of entitlement. Never, though, had Jordan been treated to a client who was so single-mindedly hell-bent on his own destruction-and all in the alleged pursuit of justice. He pulled in his folding chair as another cavalcade of prisoners returned from the exercise yard, disrupting the meeting he was holding on the other side of the solitary cell’s metal door. “They’re clothes, Jack,” Jordan said wearily, for the tenth time in as many minutes. “Just clothes.”

“You ever hear of the human botfly?” Jack answered, his voice thin.

“No.”

“It’s a bug. And what it does, see, is grab another insect-like a mosquito, for instance-and lay its eggs on the mosquito’s abdomen. Then, when the mosquito lands on you, your body heat makes those eggs fall off and burrow under your skin. As they grow, you can see them. Feel them.” He laughed humorlessly. “And the whole time, you’re thinking that the worst that’s happened is a mosquito bite.”

A psych exam, Jordan thought, would not be out of order here. “What are you trying to tell me, Jack? You’re infested?”

“If I put on their uniform, I become one of them. It’s not just clothing. The minute it touches me, the system’s gotten underneath my skin.”

“The system,” Jordan repeated. “You want me to tell you about the system, Jack? The system says that as soon as Superintendent Warcroft decides he needs your little cell for someone else, he’s gonna ship you over to the State Pen’s secure housing unit. And if you think being stuck here is no picnic, believe me, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Down in Concord, in the SHU, the COs wear full body armor-shields and helmets with face masks and steel-toed boots. They escort you everywhere, anytime you have to leave your little pod, which is next to never. And oh, yeah, the pods are arranged around a bulletproof control booth, where the COs sit and watch every move you make. They watch you eat, they watch you sleep, they watch you shit. They watch you breathe, Jack. You and the other three assholes who share your cell, and who probably got sent there for doing something far more violent than refusing to wear a jumpsuit.”

“I won’t go to the State Pen.”

“They don’t fucking ask your permission!” Jordan yelled. “Don’t you understand that? You are here. Deal with it. Because every minute I spend worrying whether you’re behaving yourself is time taken away from your case, Jack.”

For a while, there was no noise from inside the cell. Jordan placed his palm against the door. Then a voice came back, quiet, broken. “They’re trying to make me into someone I’m not. This shirt . . . these pants . . . they’re the only things I have left of the person I know I am. And I need to keep seeing them, Jordan, so I don’t start to believe what they’re saying.”

“What should they be saying, Jack?” Jordan pressed. “What really happened?”

“I can’t remember!”

“Then how the hell do you know for sure you didn’t rape her?” Jordan argued. He fought for control, shaking his head at the door separating him from his client. He wasn’t going to fall for a sob story. If his client was intent on getting shipped off to Concord . . . well, the court would pay Jordan for mileage incurred. “I filed a motion for a speedy trial, and the prosecutor already signed off on a subpoena ducef tecum,” he said briskly, changing the subject. “We should be receiving Gillian Duncan’s psychiatric records shortly.”

“She’s crazy. I knew it.”

“These come from when she was a child and might have no bearing on this case.”

“What else have you got?” Jack asked.

“You.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s got to be enough.” Jordan leaned his forehead against the metal. “Now do you see why I need you to shape up?”

“Okay.”

The consent came so softly, Jordan frowned, certain he’d misheard. “What?”

“I said I’ll do it. I’ll put on the jumpsuit. But you have to do me a favor.”

Jordan felt anger bubbling inside him once more. “I don’t have to do you any favors. You, on the other hand-”

“A pen, for Christ’s sake. That’s all I want.”

A pen. Jordan stared at the Rollerball in his hand. Jack’s change of heart had been too hasty. He imagined his client taking the pen and jamming it into his jugular.

“I don’t think so . . .”

“Please,” Jack said quietly. “A pen.”

Slowly, Jordan slipped the pen through the slot in the metal door. A few seconds later it came back, wrapped tight with a pale blue scroll. T-shirt, Jordan realized. Jack had ripped off a piece of his goddamn precious T-shirt to write something.

“Can you get that to Addie Peabody?” Jack asked.

Jordan unrolled it. A single word was written on the cloth, a word that might have been meant as praise or accusation. “Why should I help you?” he asked. “You aren’t doing anything to help me.”

“I will,” Jack swore, and for just a moment-the time it took the attorney to remember to whom he was talking-Jordan actually believed him.

“Jesus, Thomas.” Jordan winced as the door slammed shut. “Do you have to be so damn loud?”

Thomas stopped at the sight of his father, sprawled on the couch with a washcloth covering his forehead. Selena touched him on the shoulder. “Poor baby had to work today,” she clucked. “He’s cranky.”

“He can hear you talking about him, and he has a headache the size of Montana,” Jordan scowled.

“More accurately, the size of Jack St. Bride,” Selena murmured.

Thomas walked into the kitchen and took a carton of milk from the refrigerator. After swilling a long gulp, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Lovely,” Selena said.

“I learned it all from my role model of a dad.” Thomas set the milk on the counter. “What’s the problem with the guy, anyway? He seemed nice enough at the diner.”

“So did Ted Bundy,” Jordan muttered.

“Ted Bundy used to work there?” Thomas said. “No shit!”

Jordan sat up. “What are they saying in school?”

“Everything. By fourth period there was a rumor that he’d escaped and raped some seventh grader.”

“He hasn’t escaped, and it’s only an alleged rape.”

“Amazing, isn’t it,” Selena mused, “how he can stick to doing his job even when the client is driving him up a tree?”

“Not so amazing, but then again, he insists he loves me, and still, I’ve been grounded by him before.” Thomas sat down on the floor and reached for the remote control of the TV, but Jordan grabbed it first.

“Hang on,” he said. “Tell me more.”

Thomas sighed. “I guess some people feel bad for Gillian.”

“And the others?”

“They think what they’ve always thought . . . that she’s a bitch.”

“A bitch? Gillian Duncan isn’t the homecoming queen?” Selena asked.

Thomas burst out laughing. “She’d probably kill herself if she got elected. She thinks she’s better than all that, and she lets everyone know it. Just goes around with her little circle of friends and tries to keep them from mingling with the peons. When I first tried to talk to Chelsea-”

“Who’s Chelsea?”

Thomas gave him a long look. “Dad. You know.”

“Ah, right.”

“Well, anyway, Gillian was all over that, trying to tell Chelsea I wasn’t worth her time. I mean, you ask me, Gillian had this coming-acting better than everyone else, you’re gonna piss someone off sooner or later. But when I said that to Chelsea, she told me it wasn’t like that at all.”

“No?”

“She was there, when Gillian came out crying . . . afterward. And she told me Gillian could barely talk. That she’s still pretty messed up.”

Jordan balled the damp washcloth into a knot. He exchanged a glance with Selena, then looked at his son. “Thomas,” he suggested, “find out what else Chelsea has to say.”

The envelope was tucked between an electric bill and a flyer advertising the candidacy of George W. Bush for president. ADDIE PEABODY, it said, scrawled in block lettering she did not recognize. There was no stamp; someone had dropped this off while she was at work.

She slit open the envelope with her finger.

Inside was a small roll of fabric, the same blue as the T-shirt Jack had been wearing the morning of his arrest. Addie unraveled it and found, in his handwriting, one word.

Loyal.

She sank onto the ground at the base of the mailbox, turning the fabric over and over in her hands and trying to understand the cryptic message. Was he accusing her of not sticking up for him during the arrest? Was he begging for her support?

The corners of her memory began to curl, like paper set on fire.

Then again, maybe this was not an adjective at all.

The phone startled Jordan out of a sound, deep sleep. He knocked over his clock-radio reaching for it, and dragged the base halfway across the bed. “Hello,” he said gruffly.

“You are about to receive a collect call from Carroll County Jail,” a computerized voice said. “Are you willing to accept the charges?”

“Oh, fuck,” Jordan muttered.

“I’m sorry, I did not understand your-”

“Yes,” Jordan yelled. “Yes, yes!”

“Thank you.” The next moment, St. Bride was on the other end. “Jordan? Jordan, you there?” Jack was frantic, breathless.

“Calm down. What’s the matter?”

“I gotta see you.”

“Okay. I’ll come by tomorrow.”

“No, I’ve got to see you now.” Jack’s voice cracked on a sob. “Please. I remember. I remember now.”

“I’m on my way,” Jordan said.

An hour later, Jack stood before him, sweating and wired from the story he’d just told. The clock on the wall of the tiny conference room ticked like a bomb. “Let me get this straight,” Jordan said finally. “You keep seeing things hanging from the trees.”

Jack nodded. “Tied to them.”

“Like tinsel?”

“No,” Jack said. “Ribbons, and little sachets. Weird shit. Like that movie . . . The Blair Witch Project.”

Jordan folded his arms across his stomach. “So creepy twig crucifixes were hanging from the trees when you were walking past them, in the dark, in the forest where you did not encounter Gillian Duncan. This is what you woke me up for?”

“There was something strange going on. I thought that was patently important to my case, but pardon the hell out of me for disturbing your beauty sleep.”

“Well, it’s not important, Jack. Important would be if you remembered someone who saw you between midnight and one-thirty. Important would be just admitting you slept with the girl.”

“I didn’t have sex with Gillian Duncan,” Jack yelled. “Why don’t you believe me?”

“You were drunk! What would you find easier to believe-that some guy who’s six sheets to the wind got a little too aggressive with a girl he happened across . . . or this Halloween/Scream decor in the middle of the forest you’re telling me about? Stuff, I might add, that neither the cops nor my investigator found traces of?”

Jack flung himself into a chair. “I want a polygraph,” he said.

Jordan closed his eyes. God save me from defendants. “Even if you took a polygraph and passed, it’s not admissable in court. You’d be doing it only for yourself, Jack.”

“And for you. So that you know I’m telling you the truth.”

“I already told you, I don’t care whether you committed the crime. I’m still going to defend you.”

Jack bowed his head over his knotted hands. “If you were sitting in my seat,” he said quietly, “would that be enough?”

Roy blinked at his daughter again, certain that what he’d heard her say had been a misunderstanding.

It was Delilah who asked outright. “You’re telling me that you’re up and leaving Salem Falls? That this ol’ washed-up drunk is in charge?”

“This old washed-up drunk was in charge before you were hired,” Roy scowled.

Addie jumped into the fray. “Not in charge, Delilah. More like a foster parent.”

“Then this little diner of yours is gonna grow up crooked, honey.”

“I just don’t understand why you have to go off on this . . . this quest,” Roy said.

Addie tried to ignore the small voice inside her that was asking the same thing. Ironically, it was Jack who had taught her, through Chloe, that she needed to put things to rest. Finding out that he had lied to her could not possibly be any more painful than not knowing for sure if he had done this horrible thing. “I’m not asking you to understand. I’m just asking you to help me.” Addie turned to her father. “It’ll only be for a little while.”

Roy glanced around at the gleaming countertops, the sizzling spit of the grill. “And if I don’t want all this back?”

Addie hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “I guess we’ll close.”

“Close!” Delilah cried.

Roy frowned. “Close? We haven’t closed for years. We haven’t closed since . . .”

“Since Mom died,” Addie finished quietly. She took a deep breath. “Darla’s agreed to work my shifts. Delilah, it’s going to be the same old routine for you, except a new face is going to be handing you tickets. And Daddy, all you have to do is to take general responsibility.”

Roy looked into his lap. “That’s not my strong point, Addie.”

“Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I wouldn’t be asking if this didn’t mean so much to me? All these years I’ve watched you sneak out to drink, and I pretended I didn’t see. All the times I’ve understood that sometimes a person needs to do something, and the hell with the consequences . . . why can’t you grant me the same privilege?”

Her father leaned forward, covering Addie’s hand with his own. “Why are you doing this to yourself? When something bad happens, why do you have to pick at it until it bleeds all over again?”

“Because!” Addie cried. “What if he didn’t do it?”

“And what if Chloe hadn’t really died? And what if your mom walked right through those swinging doors?” Roy sighed. “You’re not going because you want to prove to yourself he’s guilty; a court is gonna do that soon enough. You’re going because you don’t want to believe the truth that’s right in front of you.”

“You don’t even know where to start looking,” Delilah added.

“I’ll figure it out.”

“And if you don’t find what you’re looking for?”

At Roy’s question, Addie looked up. “Then all I’ve lost is time.”

It wasn’t true, and all of them knew it. But neither Roy nor Delilah, nor even Addie, wanted to admit that after a certain point, a heart with so many stress fractures would never be anything but broken.

Jordan stood in front of the bathroom mirror with a towel wrapped around his waist and scraped the razor over his beard stubble. Each stroke cleared a line through the shaving foam, like a snowplow. It made him think of Jack, who had been showered and shaved-thank the good Lord-when he’d summoned Jordan in the middle of the night to talk about twig crucifixes or whatever the hell was hanging from the trees.

He tapped the razor against the edge of the sink and rinsed the blade before lifting it to his jaw again. He could always go with a variation of the infamous Twinkie defense, which had acquitted a murderer by suggesting he was on a sugar high. Or he could imply that physical impairment wasn’t the only side effect of liquor . . . that psychologically, one’s thoughts were disabled, too. Maybe he could even find a crackpot shrink to say that drinking caused dissociation, or some other nifty catchword that excused Jack of being aware of his actions at the time he committed them. It was a cousin to the insanity defense . . . not guilty by reason of inebriation.

“Dad?”

As Thomas opened the door, Jordan jumped a foot, lost in his own thoughts. The razor nicked his cheek, and blood began to run freely down his jaw and neck. “Goddamn, Thomas! Can’t you knock?”

“Jeez. I only wanted to borrow the shaving cream,” he said. He squinted in the mirror at his father’s face. “Better do something about that,” he advised, and closed the door behind him.

Jordan swore and splashed water onto his cheeks and jaw. The shaving cream burned where it seeped into the cut. He patted his face dry with a towel and looked up.

It was one long, straight, thin cut, carved down the center of his right cheek.

“Jesus,” he mused aloud. “I look like St. Bride.”

He blotted toilet paper against it, until it stopped bleeding, then wiped up around the sink and started out of the bathroom to get dressed. A moment later, he found himself in front of the mirror again, staring more carefully at his cheek.

Gillian Duncan stated that she’d scratched Jack in an effort to get him away from her. Charlie Saxton had photographed the corresponding scrape on Jack’s cheek when he was being booked; it was in the le. But a man who had been scratched by a girl fighting off a rape would have four or five parallel marks-the scars of several fingernails, where they’d connected with his skin.

And Jack didn’t.

May 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Charlie crumpled the handwritten ode that had been left taped to his computer terminal. “Not funny,” he yelled in the general vicinity of the rest of the precinct, then plastered a smile to his face as the first of his three interviewees entered the building, clutching her father’s arm.

“Ed,” Charlie said, nodding. “And Chelsea. Good to see you again.”

He led them to the small conference room at the station, which in his opinion was a slight cut above the interrogation room. These girls were nervous enough already to be party to an investigation; he didn’t need to make them any more jittery. Holding the door open, Charlie let Ed and his daughter pass inside.

“You understand why it’s important for me to take your statement?” Charlie asked, as soon as they all were seated.

Chelsea nodded, her blue eyes wide as pools. “I’ll do anything to help Gilly.”

“That’s good. Now, I’m just going to tape our talk here today, so that the prosecutor gets a chance to hear what a loyal friend you are, too.”

“Is that really necessary?” Ed Abrams asked.

“Yeah, Ed, I’m afraid it is.” Charlie turned to Chelsea again, then started the microcassette recorder. “Can you tell me where you went that night, Chelsea?”

She glanced sideways at her father. “We were just getting cabin fever, you know?”

“Where did you go?” Charlie asked.

“We met at the old cemetery on the edge of town, at eleven P.M. Meg and Gilly came together; Whit and me were waiting when they got there. Then we all went up that little path that goes into the woods behind it.”

“What were you going to do?”

“Just talk, girl stuff. And build a re, so we’d have, like, some light.” Her head snapped up. “Just a tiny fire, not the kind you need a permit for or anything.”

“I understand. How long were you there?”

“I guess about two hours. We were getting ready to go when . . . Jack St. Bride showed up.”

“You knew who he was?”

“Yeah.” Chelsea brushed her hair away from her face. “He worked at the diner.”

“Had he talked to you before that night?”

She nodded. “It was . . . kind of creepy. I mean, he was a grown man, and he was always trying to make jokes with us and stuff. Like he wanted us to think he was cool.”

“What did he look like?”

Chelsea sat up straighter in her chair. “He was wearing a yellow shirt and jeans, and he looked like he’d been in a fight. His eye, it was all bruised and swollen.” She wrinkled her nose. “And he smelled like he had been swimming in whiskey.”

“Were there any cuts on his face?”

“Not that I remember.”

“How did you feel?”

“God,” Chelsea breathed, “I was so scared. I mean, he was the reason we were all supposed to be at home that night.”

“Did he seem angry? Upset?”

“No.” Chelsea blushed. “When I was little, my mom used to make me watch this commercial about not taking candy from strangers. And that’s what he reminded me of . . . someone who looked all normal on the outside but who would turn to the camera when we weren’t looking and smile like a monster.”

“What happened?”

“We said we were getting ready to leave, and he said good-bye. A few minutes later, we left, too.”

“Together?”

Chelsea shook her head. “Gilly went in a different direction, toward her house.”

“Did you hear anything, after you left?”

Chelsea bowed her head. “No.”

“No screaming, scuffling, hitting, shouting?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what happened?” Charlie asked.

“We were walking for a while, just out of the woods on the edge of the cemetery, when we heard something crashing through the trees. Like a deer, that’s what I thought. But it turned out to be Gilly. She came running at us, crying.” Chelsea closed her eyes and swallowed hard. “Her . . . her hair, it was all full of leaves. There was dirt all over her clothes. And she was hysterical. I tried to touch her, just to calm her down, and she started to hit me. It was like she didn’t even know who we were.” Chelsea pulled the sleeve of her shirt down over her wrist and used it to wipe her eyes. “She said that he raped her.”

“Why did you let Gilly leave by herself?”

Chelsea looked into her lap. “I didn’t want to. I even offered to walk her home.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No,” Chelsea said. “Gilly told me I was being just as bad as our parents. That nothing was going to happen.” She twisted the hem of her shirt into a knot. “But it did.”

Whitney O’Neill frowned at a spot on the conference table. “None of your friends suggested it might not be a bright idea to let your friend go off into the woods alone?” Charlie asked.

“Is my daughter a witness or a suspect?” Tom O’Neill blustered.

“Daddy,” Whitney said. “It’s okay. It’s a good question. I guess we were all just tired, or maybe even a little shaky after having him show up . . . Chels and Meg and I hadn’t gone ten feet before we realized that we probably ought to go with her. That’s when I yelled for Gilly.”

“You yelled,” Charlie clarified. “Not Chelsea or Meg.”

“Yeah,” Whitney said defensively. “Is that so hard to believe?”

Charlie ignored the heated stares of the girl and her father. “Did Gillian answer?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t go back to check? To make sure Gillian was all right?”

“No,” Whitney whispered, her lower lip trembling. “And you have no idea how I wish I had.”

When Meg had been a little kid, she used to hide under the sofa every time her father dressed in uniform. It wasn’t that she was afraid of police officers, exactly . . . but when her dad wore his shiny shoes and brimmed hat and sparkling badge, he was not the same man who fixed her Mickey Mouse-shaped pancakes on Sundays and who tickled her feet to get them underneath the covers at night. When he was working, he seemed harder, somehow, as if he could bend only so far before snapping in half.

Now, it was totally weird to be sitting on her bed with all her stuffed animals . . . and to have her dad interviewing her with his tape recorder. Even weirder, he looked just as freaked out as she was.

Meg’s heart beat as fast as a hummingbird’s, so fast she was certain it would just explode out of her chest any minute. That whole night was a blur, one that faded in and out like the colors on a kaleidoscope. Not for the first time, she wished she’d been able to give her statement with Chelsea and Whitney in attendance. You can do this, she told herself.

She closed her eyes and thought of herself sneaking back to the woods, to clear the branches of the dogwood and the ribbons from the maypole. She’d done that, and no one had found out.

“Honey?” her father asked. “You all right?”

Meg nodded. “Just thinking of Gillian.”

He leaned forward, brushing her hair back from her face and catching it behind her ear. “You’re doing great. We don’t have much more to go over.”

“Good, because it’s hard to talk about,” Meg admitted.

Her father turned on the recorder again. “Did you hear anything after you left?”

“No.”

“No screams from Gillian? Fighting? Trees rustling?”

“Nothing.”

Charlie looked up. “Why did you let her go off alone?”

“It . . . it’s hard to remember exactly . . .”

“Try.”

“It was Gilly’s idea,” Meg said faintly. “You know how she is when she gets something in her head. After talking with him for a while, I guess she figured she was brave enough to handle anything.”

“Did someone try to get her to rethink this?”

Meg nodded quickly. “Chelsea . . . or maybe Whitney, I can’t really remember. Someone told her she shouldn’t go.”

“And?”

“And she just . . . didn’t listen. She said she wanted to walk through the lion’s den and live to tell about it. She’s like that sometimes.”

He stared at her, every inch a detective, so that it was impossible to tell what he was thinking. “Daddy,” Meg whispered. “Can I say something . . . off the record?”

He nodded, and turned off the tape recorder.

“That night . . . when I sneaked out of the house . . .” Meg lowered her eyes. “I shouldn’t have.”

“Meg, I-”

“I know you didn’t say anything when I told you on tape,” she continued in a rush. “And I know it’s your job to be the detective, not the dad. But I just wanted you to know that I should have stayed home, like you wanted. I knew better.”

“Can I say something, too? Off the record?” Her father looked away, at a small watermark on the ceiling, blinking hard as if he were crying, although that impression must have been a mistake, because in her whole life Meg had never seen him do that. “The whole time I was taking Gillian’s statement, I kept hearing your voice. And every piece of evidence I drove to the lab I pictured coming from you. I hate that this happened to your friend, Meg . . . but I’m so goddamned grateful that it didn’t happen to you.”

He leaned down to embrace her. Meg buried her face against her father’s neck, as much for comfort as to keep herself from confessing something he was not allowed to know.

Molly’s pink feet churned like pistons as Matt slapped the front of the diaper over her and secured the tapes at the sides. “Get her on a changing table,” he mused, “and suddenly she wants out as bad as Sirhan Sirhan.”

Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out his gold shield. He dangled it over the baby’s reaching hands, distracting her long enough for Matt to get her jumpsuit snapped at the crotch again. “I don’t think Meg was ever that tiny.”

“Yeah, well I don’t think Molly is ever gonna get that big.”

Matt lifted his daughter off the table and carried her into the living room of his house, Charlie following.

“You’d be surprised,” Charlie said. “You go to bed one night singing her a lullaby, and she wakes up listening to Limp Bizkit.”

“What the hell is Limp Bizkit?”

“You don’t want to know.” Charlie sat on the couch as Matt slid the baby beneath a brightly colored activity gym.

“I’ve been thinking of marketing these in prisons,” Matt joked. “You know, you hang them from the ceiling . . . little mirrors and jingly shit and squeaky buttons to keep the inmates busy. Figure they’ve got about the same brainpower as a five-month-old, although Molly may actually have an edge there.” He sank down into a chair opposite Charlie. “Maybe it’ll make me the million I’m not going to get as a prosecutor.” Reaching across the coffee table, he picked up a stack of statements.

Immediately, Charlie shifted gears into his work mode. “Looks like a pretty straightforward case, doesn’t it?”

Matt shrugged.

“Victim can ID her attacker, attacker has a history, and there’s an excellent chance of physical evidence. And now you’ve got three corroborating eyewitness reports.”

“Corroborating,” Matt repeated. “Interesting word choice.” He lifted the first transcript and flipped it open to a page where part of the dialogue had been highlighted with a marker. “You see this?”

Charlie took it from him and scanned it. “Yeah. After she left, Whitney O’Neill got a conscience and yelled for her friend, who was too busy being attacked to answer.”

Matt handed him a second transcript, Chelsea’s. “This girl says she offered to walk Gillian home before leaving. Which Whitney O’Neill doesn’t mention in her statement.”

Charlie snorted. “That’s not exactly a salient point. So what if they can’t recall every single instant of that night? For Christ’s sake, they all say the same thing about what time the guy showed up, what he said to them, what he looked like. They all admit they heard nothing after walking off. That’s the stuff that’s going to snag your jury.”

“Your own daughter,” Matt continued, ignoring the detective, “says Gillian insisted on walking home alone, as a dare. Gotta tell you . . . if I had been there that night, that would have stuck in my head.” He slapped the three transcripts down on the table. “So which is the right story?”

Charlie glanced at the cooing baby on the floor. “You get back to me when she’s sixteen. You talk to a girl who’s scared shitless after her friend gets raped in the woods in the middle of the night, and see how much she can recall detail for detail. Jesus, Matt, they’re kids. They’re were an arm’s length away from the Devil and lived to tell about it . . . but they’re still shaking. And even if they can’t remember this one thing exactly right, they weren’t the ones who were assaulted. Their statements aren’t as substantive as Gillian’s-they’re only supposed to be used to verify what she said.”

When Matt didn’t answer, Charlie exploded. “You’re telling me you made me put those girls through hell for nothing? They’re upset. A jury is going to weigh that against some pissy little discrepancy that doesn’t even signify.”

“Doesn’t signify?” Matt’s voice rose. “Everything signifies, Charlie. Every damn thing. The job you do impacts the job I do. This isn’t some petty theft. This is a predator, and the only person who’s got a gun to shoot him down is me. If every t isn’t crossed and every i isn’t dotted, it’s that much easier for this asshole to walk out of the courtroom and do it all over again.”

“Hey, look, it isn’t my fault-”

“Then whose is it? Whose fault is it going to be when Gillian Duncan wakes up with nightmares and has trouble trusting men for the rest of her life and can’t have a normal sexual relationship? Even if St. Bride spends forever locked up, the victim never gets to walk away from this. And that means neither do you, Charlie, and neither do I.”

The fury in his voice startled Molly. She rolled away from her baby gym and started to cry. Matt swept her into his arms, holding her close against his chest. “Shh,” he whispered, bouncing her, his back to Charlie. “Daddy’s here.”

Loyal, New Hampshire was the kind of town that looked just right when the leaves were falling like jewels or when the snow settled in a down blanket to even the hills and valleys. Even now, in mud season, the whitewashed buildings and uniformed schoolgirls made the sloppy central green feel like a movie set instead of a place where people went about their lives.

Addie parallel-parked in front of a general store, where a woman wearing hiking boots and a handkerchief skirt was painting a sale sign on the front window. Shading her eyes from the sun, Addie approached her. “Boots for $5.99? That’s a good deal.”

The shopkeeper turned, assessing her with a single glance. “We still get girls who come to board at Westonbrook who haven’t figured out the land’s a swamp from April till June. We sell Wellies like they’re going out of style.”

“I imagine you get a lot of business from the school.”

“Sure, since it’s the only show in Loyal. Put our town on the map back in 1888, when it was founded.”

“Really?” Addie was surprised it had been around for that long.

The woman laughed. “You’ll get the grand tour and fancy brochures at the admissions office. Come to check it out for your daughter, have you?”

Addie turned slowly. This woman had just given her the means to an end. She couldn’t very well barrel into the headmaster’s office and ask him about Jack. On the other hand, if she was a concerned parent who’d heard rumors . . . well, she might find more people who were willing to explain what had happened.

“Yes,” Addie said, smiling. “How did you guess?”

“Mrs. Duncan, is it?” Herb Thayer, headmaster of Westonbrook, walked into the office. Addie was waiting on a Hepplewhite couch, drinking tea from a Limoges cup, doing everything she possibly could to try to hide her battered old boots beneath the furniture.

“Oh, please, don’t stand on ceremony.” He gestured to his own feet, encased in thick rubber boots. “Unfortunately, when William Weston founded this school on the banks of his brook, he forgot about how the mud would be exacerbated by a New Hampshire spring.”

Addie simpered, pretending that he’d said something remotely amusing. “It’s a pleasure to meet with you, Dr. Thayer.”

“Mine, completely.” He sat down across from her, taking his own cup of tea from the tray. “I’m sure you were told in admissions that the application deadline has unfortunately passed for next term-”

“Yes, I have. Gillian’s been at Exeter . . . but Amos and I would much prefer it if she were at a school a little closer to Salem Falls.”

“Amos,” the headmaster repeated, feigning surprise. “As in Amos Duncan of Duncan Pharmaceuticals?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Thayer smiled more broadly. “I’m certain that we’d be able to squeeze her in, with a little ingenuity. After all, we wouldn’t want to turn away a girl who would be a real asset to Westonbrook.”

More like you’re considering all her daddy’s assets and what they could endow. “We’re very interested in your school, Dr. Thayer, but we’ve heard some disturbing . . . information. I was hoping you might be able to clear things up for me.”

“Anything I can do,” Thayer said solemnly.

Addie looked him straight in the eye. “Is it true that one of the faculty here was convicted for sexual assault?”

She watched heat creep up the headmaster’s cheeks like mercury in a thermometer. “I assure you, Mrs. Duncan, our faculty is an elite corps of the finest teachers.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Addie said coolly.

“It was a very unfortunate situation,” Thayer explained. “A consensual relationship between an underage student and a faculty member. Neither one of them is affiliated with Westonbrook anymore.”

Addie’s heart fell. She had been hoping Thayer would say that it had never happened at all. And here, close enough to touch, were the words that proved Jack had lived here, done something, been convicted.

Then again, statutory rape was different from forcible rape. Falling for a girl half his age wasn’t the same crime as assaulting one by force. Addie could understand neither . . . but this one, she could possibly forgive.

“What happened, exactly?”

“I’m not at liberty to say-protecting a minor and all that. I assure you that the school has taken measures to ensure that this will never happen again,” the headmaster continued.

“Oh? Are all your teachers now younger than sixteen? Or are your students older?”

The minute she said the words, she wished them back. She gathered her coat and her dignity and stood quickly. “I think, Dr. Thayer, that Amos and I will have to discuss this further,” she said stiffly, and left before she could make any more mistakes.

“So when you move the variable to this side, dividing it,” Thomas explained, “it’s like you’re pulling a rug out from under its feet . . . and it disappears on this side of the equals sign.”

Chelsea was so close to him that he was amazed he could even explain basic algebra to her. The scent of her shampoo-apples, and a little bit of mint-was enough to make his head swim. And God, the way she leaned down over his notebook to see what he’d written . . . her hair brushed back and forth over the metal rings, and all Thomas could think about was what it would feel like to have those curls sweeping over his skin.

Thomas took a deep breath and put an extra few inches between them. It didn’t help that they were sitting on Chelsea’s bed-her bed, for Christ’s sake!-where every night she slept in something pink and flimsy that he’d seen peeking out from beneath one of her pillows.

When he shifted away, Chelsea smiled up at him. “I’m starting to get the hang of this.” She moved in the direction he had, erasing the buffer zone he’d so carefully put between them. Then, scrawling a few more lines with a pencil, she grinned triumphantly. “A=5B + 1/4C. Right?”

Thomas nodded, and when Chelsea whooped with delight, he scooted backward again. She’d invited him here to teach her math, not to attack her. Swallowing hard, he forced himself to ignore how amazingly gorgeous she was when she smiled, and he put another foot between them for good measure. His hand slid beneath her blankets and bumped into something hard, dislodging it from beneath the comforter.

“What’s that?” he asked, at the same time Chelsea jumped on the black-and-white composition notebook.

“Nothing.” She tucked it under her leg.

“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be so freaked out.”

Chelsea chewed on her lower lip. “It’s a diary, all right?”

Thomas wouldn’t have read it if it was private, but that didn’t keep him from wondering whether the reason Chelsea didn’t want him to see it was because, holy God, there might even be an entry in there about him. He looked at the salt-and-pepper cover, peeking out from under her thigh. “Book of . . .” he read.

Suddenly Chelsea was in his arms, pressing him back on pillows that released her scent and surrounded him, the most wonderful web. “What’s the going rate for a math tutor these days?” she whispered.

Pinch me, Thomas thought, because I have to be dreaming. “A kiss,” he heard himself say, “and we can call it even.”

And then her mouth moved over his. She drew back for a moment, surprise in her eyes, as if she never expected to quite find herself here, either . . . and was astonished to realize it was this good a t. More slowly this time, their heads dipped together. And Thomas was so stunned by the soft weight of the goddess on top of him, by the sugar taste of her breath, that he never noticed Chelsea slipping the diary between the bed and the wall.

Jordan was engrossed in reading about Gillian at age nine, which explained why he didn’t even look up when Selena opened the passenger door and slid into the seat beside him with a look that could have stopped a Gorgon in its tracks.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” she said.

Jordan grunted.

“The factory is on strike. The part’s not coming in for ages. Shit, I ought to just rent a car and go.”

“Maybe not quite yet.”

Selena turned to him. “Care to elaborate on that?”

But Jordan’s nose was buried in a folder. Selena grabbed it from him. “What’s got you so entranced?” She turned the envelope, reading the name on the side. “Gillian Duncan’s psychiatric records? Houlihan gave these to you without a fight?”

Jordan shrugged. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And listen to this stuff, it’s beautiful. ‘No evidence of psychosis . . . information from collateral sources contradict her account . . . manipulative . . . history of mendacity regarding interpersonal relationships.’ ” He grinned. “And she stole shit from stores, too.”

“Give me that.” Selena snatched the folder again and scanned the pages. “Why was she seeing a shrink when she was nine?”

“Her mother died.”

Selena clucked softly. “Makes you feel sorry for her.”

“Feel sorrier for Jack St. Bride,” Jordan suggested.

“So what are you going to do with this?”

He shrugged. “Use it to impeach her, if I need to.”

“But presumably, she’s better now.”

He arched a brow. “Who’s to say this isn’t the way Gillian Duncan reacts under stress? Here’s a girl who historically says whatever she needs to, to get attention.”

Selena winced. “I hate it when you use me for test runs of your defense theories.”

“Yeah, but how is it?”

“The jury isn’t going to let you go there. You’re being too hard on a victim. You’ll lose your credibility.”

“You think?” Jordan sighed. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Plus, there’s every bit as much of a chance that St. Bride’s the one who’s lying.”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “There is that.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, looking straight ahead. “So . . . should we look for a Hertz dealership?”

Selena busied herself with securing her seat belt. “I’m in no rush,” she said.

His hand was on her, melting the skin where it touched. It slid from her hip to her waist, then fumbled over her breast. Hot, like a stone in the sun. She froze, hoping he’d pull away, praying he wouldn’t.

“Are you prepared in the event of an accident?” said the announcer on the radio spot, waking Meg instantly. She rolled over and hit the alarm’s button to shut it off.

A knock on the door. “You up?” her mother called.

“Yes,” Meg murmured. But instead of rising, she stared at the ceiling; wondering why she was soaked in sweat, breathing so hard she might have run a mile in her dreams.

Charlie tried very hard not to stare at the hatchet job that was now Gillian Duncan’s hairstyle. He’d seen enough victims in Miami to know that she’d done this to herself, and it was probably better than cutting up her arms or worse, trying to commit suicide. “What you need to remember,” he said, as he walked Gillian through the police station, “is to keep a cool head. You have all the time in the world when it comes to a lineup.”

She nodded, but Charlie could tell that she was still nervous. He glanced at Matt, who shrugged. This was the first time they’d insisted the girl be separated from her father during the investigation, and with her anchor missing, she was completely adrift. But Matt had been adamant-today, he didn’t want anyone around who could influence Gillian. Not even Amos Duncan.

Matt stepped around them to open the door. A uniformed officer stood guard over the proceedings. “All right.” Charlie let Gillian step up to a table, while he and Matt stood a few feet behind. “Do you remember which one you saw that night?”

The table was covered with six different kinds of condoms in an array of colors and variations. Charlie knew this for a fact, since Matt had made the detective go out and buy them himself at the drugstore. There were ribbed ones and natural-skin ones and even glow-in-the-dark . . . and mixed up among them was the brand Charlie had seized from the nightstand beside Addie Peabody’s bed.

Voice shaking, she asked, “Can I . . . can I touch them?”

“Of course.”

She reached out, going straight for the purple-packaged Trojan. But her hand veered to the left, and her fingers skimmed over a Contempo, two LifeStyles, and a Durex.

She picked up the Durex, then the Prime sitting beside it.

Suddenly, she flung the condom back onto the table and buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know,” she cried. “It was dark . . . and I was . . . I was so scared . . . and . . .”

Matt jerked his head toward Gillian, and Charlie quickly slid his arm around her shoulders. “It’s okay, honey. You just relax.”

“But you wanted me to be able to pick it. For evidence.”

“We have other evidence,” Matt said.

Gilly sniffed loudly. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Charlie said. “This is just icing on the cake. Okay?”

She nodded. “Okay.”

“You want to stop?”

“No.” Gilly turned back to the counter, her hands clenched at her sides as if she could will herself to remember. “It was purple,” she said a minute later. “The package was purple.” When she smiled, it transformed her entire face. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

“You bet,” Matt said, collecting the condom from her hand.

Charlie walked her to the door and opened it. “Joe,” he said to the officer standing outside. “Would you be kind enough to walk Miss Duncan back to her father?”

“Sure, Lieutenant.”

Charlie watched Gillian walk away with the big patrolman, then went back inside to the county attorney. He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “She picked the Trojan.”

Matt nodded. “Unfortunately,” he said, “that wasn’t the brand you took from the house.”

It made Jack look good.

The unexpected thought hit Jordan like a punch to the belly, driving all the air from his lungs. To his absolute shock, there were things in the discovery he’d received from Matt Houlihan that evening that actually worked in his favor.

Jordan blew a ring of cigar smoke in the direction of his bare feet, levered onto the railing of the porch. The police statement from Charlie Saxton lay open on his lap. Beside him on the wooden floor were the testimonies of the girls who had been eyewitnesses, and the surprising result of the condom lineup. The only missing piece of the discovery was the forensic scientist’s workup, which had been delayed for a week owing to lab overload.

The past two weeks had not convinced Jordan of Jack St. Bride’s innocence-he was certain his client’s one-note performance of the I-wasn’t-there refrain was grounded in nothing more than wishful thinking. The Nelson Mandela tactics in jail were not a measure of a clear conscience as much as they were a nuisance. And the crazy story about decorations in the forest said less about the man’s credibility than the brand of whiskey he’d been drinking.

But right now, staring over the county attorney’s discovery, Jordan wondered whether Jack St. Bride might not be the real thing.

He slid open the door and padded down the hallway to his own bedroom, which he’d chivalrously given up to Selena. A pie slice of moonlight illuminated her, and for a moment the sight of this woman in his bed again took his breath away. He was not surprised when Selena sensed his presence and immediately woke, sliding her hand under the pillow.

“You don’t sleep with a gun at my house,” Jordan murmured. “Which is a good thing for me, I imagine.”

Selena rolled away. “Get out of my bedroom, Jordan,” she muffled into the covers.

“It’s my bedroom.”

“I still don’t want you in it. And that’s a clear invite to leave, unless you’ve been taking lessons from your client on social interaction with females.”

“It’s about Jack. I need to talk to you.”

Resigned, Selena flopped onto her back. “At three in the morning.”

“Four, but who’s counting?” Jordan eased down onto the bed beside her. “Did you read the discovery?”

“Some of it.”

“Well . . . there are holes.”

Selena shrugged. “There are always holes. Or so you tell me.”

“But half the time I’m lying. In this case, it’s true.”

“Such as?”

“The scratch. Remember I told you about that? And the psych records. And the girls’ stories don’t match a hundred percent.”

“What about the physical evidence?”

“Hasn’t come back from the lab yet,” Jordan admitted.

Selena read over the transcript, then looked at him. “But you’re thinking . . . ?”

“Yeah,” Jordan said with surprise. “That it just might tell us what Jack’s been telling us all along.”

In his nightmare, Matt was in court.

He stared at the jury as if he had the power to mesmerize, because a rape case really came down to whom they believed the most. The judge called his name. “Mr. Houlihan!”

“Yes, Your Honor. Excuse me.” He pulled at his collar, trying to keep from being strangled by his tie. “The state calls Gillian Duncan to the stand.”

There were camera flashes and rustles of movement as the entire gallery strained to see the prosecution’s star witness make her way toward the front of the courtroom. But the doors did not open; the girl didn’t appear. Matt tried to ask the bailiff where his witness was but was stopped once again by the judge’s voice. “Counsel, now what’s the problem?”

“My witness,” Matt said. “I can’t find her.”

“She’s right here.” The judge pointed down at the stand.

But Matt couldn’t see anything past the lip of the box. He walked toward the bench quickly, although his legs felt like pudding beneath him, and put his hand on the carved railing. “Please state your name for the record,” he said. When no answer came, he peered into the witness box.

And saw his own baby lying at its base, smiling up at him as if she knew he’d be able to save her.

There was some guilty pleasure that came from watching Jack appear with a correctional officer at the door of the small conference room, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Jordan,” he said, “it’s the middle of the night.”

“Didn’t bother you before.” Jordan sat back, studying his client.

“What?” Jack asked, looking down at his jumpsuit as if there might be bloodstains or some other incriminating evidence on it. “Did I get convicted?”

At that, Jordan almost smiled. “You would have been in the courtroom with me if you had.”

“Then why are you here?”

Jordan rested his elbows on the table. “Because,” he said slowly, “I am having a spiritual moment of sorts.”

Jack looked at him warily. “Good for you.”

“And for you, actually.” Jordan pushed a manila envelope across the table to Jack. “I got the discovery from the county attorney today. Everything but the lab results, anyway.” As he watched Jack open the packet and scan the pages, Jordan cleared his throat uncomfortably. “This isn’t something I’ve said very often, and never directly to a client, so it’s a little hard for me. Christ.” He shook his head, a crimson flush rising up his neck. “Three little words, and I can’t even choke them out.”

Jack glanced up, eyes guarded. “You’re not going to tell me you love me, are you?”

“Hell, no,” Jordan said. “I believe you.”

Then Jack managed to draw a breath into his burning lungs. “You what?”

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

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

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

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

1989

New York City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay.”

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

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

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

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

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

Rap rap rap.

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

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

“It’s not that. Your mother’s here.”

“My mother?”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Mom, I can explain-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He was so young,” one said.

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

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

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

“Just a second, sweetheart,” Annalise said.

“No. Now.”

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

“How did he die?”

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

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

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

“He what?”

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

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

Annalise touched his cheek. “Not enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I beg your pardon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rose. Just Rose.”

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

“You . . . you wanted to thank me?”

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

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

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

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

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

“You made him happy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“-is smiling,” Annalise finished.

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

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

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

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

“There’s nothing to like,” Jack said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You sure?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How couldn’t I, Jack thought.

June 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

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

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

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

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

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

“It couldn’t nail O. J.”

“Other than that?”

“Well . . . it’s why I have ten toes,” Matt answered.

“And, no doubt, that razor-sharp mind,” Frankie said dryly. “Did you even pass biology in high school?”

“I was a wordsmith, not a scientist.”

“Okay. Basic genetics: everything about you came from your mom and your dad. She gives you one allele, he gives you another . . . and that’s why you wind up with blue eyes or good teeth or dangling earlobes.”

“Or excessive charm,” Matt added.

“Well, sometimes you get the short end of the straw,” Frankie sympathized. “Anyway, all those traits are on the DNA molecule, which is microscopically over six feet long. But for forensic purposes, you don’t care if someone has dangling earlobes. So I test eight areas that the general public has no idea about-like TPOX or CSF1P0. Every person is going to have a ‘type’ at those areas-two alleles . . . one from Mom and one from Dad.”

Matt nodded, and glanced at Frankie’s results.

“The one hundred line is the sample of blood that came from the victim. The two hundred line is the sample that came from the suspect. These are the standards . . . the known samples that we use to compare everything else we get. The numbers in each of those boxes are alleles, found at different places on the DNA molecule. The DNA we extracted from the blood on the shirt, as you can see, is an identical match to the suspect’s standard.”

“So far,” Matt said, “I’m a happy camper.”

“Good. Because the fingernail residue is a slightly different story. The victim’s own skin cells are naturally there, as well as some skin cells that are not hers.”

“Like a mixture?” Matt asked.

“Exactly. You’ll see numbers that correspond to the victim and the other party.”

“Is that what the parentheses are for?”

“Yup. Different intensities, based on the combination of alleles from each person. Say, for example, that the suspect and the victim both have an eleven at the TPOX location . . . but only the victim has an eight. In a combination of their DNA, I’d expect to find a thicker band at the eleven than I would at the 8. The parentheses suggest just that.”

The waitress sailed over and slapped two chocolate milk shakes down on the table. “Thanks,” Frankie and Matt said simultaneously.

They left the glasses sweating rings, their attention absorbed by Frankie’s chart. “For the semen, unfortunately, the results were inconclusive.”

Matt’s face fell. “Why?”

“There’s no result in the CSF system and the D16 system. That’s because sometimes, when there’s not much DNA, we can’t get readings at those loci.”

Staring at the numbers, Matt frowned. “Can you tell me anything about it?”

“Yes. Since we’re talking about semen, I know it’s going to be a mixture of the victim’s inner thigh skin and some male’s sperm.”

“Like the fingernail residue?”

Frankie nodded. “Compare those two lines.”

Matt studied the chart for a moment, then shrugged. “The numbers are all the same . . . they’re just mixed up in a few spots. That means you can’t eliminate the suspect, doesn’t it?”

“Technically, that’s right,” Frankie admitted. “But there’s something there making me a little hesitant to finger him, too.”

Matt tossed the papers down and leaned back in his chair. “Talk.”

“Think of all the people in the world, and all the different alleles they’ve inherited. I’ve never seen a mixture of two unrelated individuals where I didn’t have four distinct numbers at some location. You’d think, just by probability statistics, that there’d be some place where the suspect would be-let’s say-a twelve, thirteen and the victim would be an eleven, fourteen . . . but not according to this.” She pointed to the thigh analysis. “Look at the overlap. In fact, at only a handful of locations is there any number foreign to the victim’s own DNA.”

“Are you telling me there’s a lab error?”

“Thanks so much for the vote of confidence.”

“Maybe you didn’t have enough DNA. Isn’t it possible that if the sample was better, you might have gotten four alleles?”

“It’s remotely possible,” Frankie conceded. “But that’s not all that’s bugging me. Look at the TH01 system, for example. The victim and a suspect are both six, seven there, so a mixture of their DNA should always be six, seven there.”

“It is.”

“Not in the semen sample. There’s a lighter seven, along with the six. That doesn’t make sense.” She shook her head. “I’m not trying to ruin your case. But while I can’t eliminate your suspect . . . he’s not the most perfect fit, either.”

Matt was silent for a moment, tracing his finger through the wet stain the milk shake had left on the table. “C’mon, Frank. You could combine the DNA of every guy in Salem Falls with my victim’s and still not come up with a precise textbook mixture.”

Frankie considered this. “Maybe they’re related.”

“Suspect and victim? Not a chance.”

“Well, then, the suspect you gave me to test . . . and another guy who actually did contribute to the sperm sample. Relatives have DNA profiles that overlap . . . which can sometimes account for bizarre results.”

Matt exhaled slowly. “You’re telling me my victim scratched the hell out of the suspect, who bled all over her shirt . . . and then brought his brother in to rape her?”

Frankie raised an eyebrow. “It’s a possibility.”

“It would be if the suspect had a brother!”

“Don’t shoot the messenger.” Frankie gathered up her reports. “A private lab could test more systems to see if there’s an elimination further down.”

“And if we don’t have the funding for that?”

“I’d go check your suspect’s family tree.”

Matt drained his milk shake and took out his wallet. “Is it his blood?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“And is there a good chance that he got scratched by the victim?”

Frankie nodded.

“And you can’t say that sperm sample isn’t his.”

“No.”

Matt tossed a ten-dollar bill on the table. “That’s all I needed to hear.”

The girls arrived, flushed and sweaty in their silky shorts and bouncing ponytails, like a flock of sparrows that had swept into the locker room through an open door. Chattering in twos and threes, they made their way toward the showers, ignoring the woman who stood in the entry staring at last year’s varsity photo.

Jack was pictured with his team, his hair as bright as the gold that glinted off the trophy one of the girls held. His head was turned in profile, admiring these young women.

“Are you lost?”

The voice jolted Addie out of her reverie. “Sorry,” a teenage girl said, smiling. “I didn’t mean to scare you to death.”

“No . . . no, that’s all right.”

“Are you somebody’s mother?” the girl asked.

Addie was stunned by the personal question, until she realized that she was taking it the wrong way. This girl was not talking about Chloe at all; in fact, Addie was only being mistaken, once again, for someone she was not. Why wouldn’t a student invite her mother to join her after practice, maybe for a cup of tea?

“I’m a prospective mother,” Addie said.

The girl grinned, a dimple showing in her cheek. It was so guileless that Addie felt her stomach cramp; she was wishing that hard that this child might have been hers. “Oh. One of those,” the student teased.

“What does that mean?”

“That your daughter plays all-state and that you want to talk to the coach.”

Addie laughed. “Where is he, then?”

The girl’s eyes darted to the photo. “She should be here any minute now.”

“She?”

“We got a new coach this year. After our old one . . . had to leave.”

Addie cleared her throat. “Oh?”

The girl nodded and touched her hand to the glass. “It was some big horrible scandal, or it was supposed to be, anyway. But if you ask me, it was like Romeo and Juliet, a little. You know, falling in love with the person you’re not supposed to.” She frowned slightly. “Except they didn’t die at the end.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“No . . . Coach and Catherine.”

“Ladies! Why don’t I hear water running?” A strident voice boomed through the locker room as the new coach clapped her hands and scattered her team toward the showers.

“That’s her,” the girl said. “In case you didn’t figure it out.” With a tiny wave, she jogged toward the bathroom section of the locker room.

The coach approached with a smile. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“I was just looking around. If that’s all right.” Addie pointed toward the gleaming trophy. “That’s quite a Cracker Jack prize.”

“Yeah, they worked hard for it. Good group of kids.”

Addie leaned closer to the photo. But instead of looking at the girls, she scanned the calligraphy of the caption. L to R: Suzanne Wellander, Margery Cabot, Coach St. Bride, Catherine Marsh.

The girl next to Jack, holding the trophy. The girl who, Addie now realized, he was staring at.

“This is a copy of your statement,” Matt said, handing it across his desk to Gillian. “I want you to take it home and read it, so that you remember everything you said.”

Beside her, Amos glanced at the thin leaflet. “I damn well hope you’ve got more for your case than just that.”

“We do,” Matt answered smoothly. “But your daughter’s allegations are the foundation of our case.” He opened up another folder and gave Duncan a copy of Frankie’s forensic report. “These results all corroborate what Gillian said. His blood on her shirt, the skin beneath the fingernails, the semen.”

“Semen?” Gilly whispered.

“Yes.” Matt grinned. “I was delighted to hear that, too. I had my doubts, since you said he used a condom. Apparently, a swab of seminal fluid was taken from your thigh for DNA analysis. And that will go some distance toward establishing the burden of proof.”

“From your thigh,” Amos repeated, and squeezed his daughter’s hand.

The county attorney completely understood their astonishment. He’d told the Duncans, going into the process, that a rape conviction could be a long shot-and this dramatically altered the odds. Matt smiled broadly at Gillian and her father. “Sometimes,” he said, “we just get lucky.”

Thomas tossed the Airborne Express envelope onto his father’s lap. “For you.”

Jordan put down the joystick he was using to cream his son at Nintendo and slit open the package. “Must be the DNA,” he said, and quickly skimmed the brief note Matt Houlihan had written as a cover sheet-not saying much of anything, really, which was exactly what Jordan would have done if faced with the sort of results the forensic scientist must have turned up . . . namely, that Jack was nowhere near Gillian Duncan that night.

He leafed through the first page, then the second, and with a curse slapped the entire package down on the floor before getting to his feet. “I’ve got to go out,” he muttered.

On the screen, Thomas killed off one of his father’s players. “But you’re winning.”

“No,” Jordan said. “I’m not.”

Clients lie. It was the first thing you learned as a defense attorney, a rule Jordan had cut his teeth on. After all, a guy who shoots his mother in cold blood or robs a convenience store is going to be not a paragon of honor but rather someone who will do or say just about anything to save his own ass. Jordan was not surprised to find out Jack had been bullshitting him for weeks now. What did stun him was the fact that he’d been so gullible.

His mood was markedly different from the last time he’d been sitting in this conference room, filled with the righteous belief that he was saving a truly maligned soul from the channels of the court system. Jack noticed the change, too, the moment he came in. The smile fell off his face and fluttered to the floor like the old skin of a snake.

“You know,” Jordan began pleasantly, “it doesn’t particularly surprise me to find out that you lied.”

“But you . . . you said the other day-”

“In fact, I couldn’t care less. What does upset me is that you have completely fucked yourself over by telling Saxton you weren’t anywhere near Gillian Duncan that night.”

“I wasn’t.”

Jordan slammed his palms on the table. “Then what the hell is that soil doing in your boots, Jack? What the hell is your blood doing on her shirt, your skin under her nails? And your goddamned semen on her thigh? You want to explain that to me? Or perhaps you’d like to wait and explain it to the jury when you get up on the stand and Houlihan impeaches you with an inconsistent statement.”

Jack sank down into a chair, silent.

“First thing the prosecutor is going to do is ruin your credibility by dragging that up. If I were sitting on that jury and heard that a guy lied to the police . . . a guy whose DNA was found all over the place, I’d vote in an instant to hang you. Why lie . . . unless you had something to hide?”

Frustrated, Jordan tossed the forensic lab report toward his client and let Jack skim the results. “So,” he said briskly. “I assume we’re going with consent.”

“What?” Jack’s head swung up, slow as a bull’s.

“You were obviously in the woods that night with the girl.”

“I was,” Jack said evenly, “but we didn’t have sex.”

“Could we just stop with the Boy Scout act, Jack? Because frankly, I’m losing my patience.” Jordan frowned. “Or are you going to pull a Clinton and come up with a creative definition of intercourse?”

“I didn’t have intercourse with her, Jordan, not any kind. I was drunk, and I saw them all in the woods. And . . . she was naked. She came on to me.” Jack looked up, miserable. “Can you see why I didn’t want to tell this to you? Or to Saxton? Who’d believe me?”

“Seems to me it didn’t make much of a difference,” Jordan muttered.

“All I wanted to do was get away, and she kept trying to get me to stay.”

“How? What did she do? Say?” Jordan demanded.

“I can’t remember! Jesus, Jordan, I try. I try so hard I think my head is going to explode. So I was there-so what? It doesn’t mean I had sex with her. I pushed her away from me, and then I ran.”

Jordan folded his hands on the table. “And somehow, in that charming exchange, you lost several drops of seminal fluid?”

“I never got undressed. I don’t know whose semen they found, but it isn’t mine.”

“Do you have any idea how unlikely that will seem to a jury? Especially once they hear the DNA scientist say it’s your blood and your skin in that rape kit?”

“I don’t care,” Jack said. “It happens to be the truth.”

“Ah, right. The truth.” Jordan grabbed the papers, stuffed them into his folder, and stood up. “For how long this time, Jack?” he said, and he strode from the conference room without glancing back.

The Honorable Althea Justice liked rare things. One-of-a-kind snuffboxes from Europe, Chinese silk, ink made from horse chestnuts. She lived in a glass home far more suited to the beach in L.A. than the woods of New England, drove a restored 1973 Pacer, and owned a puppy that had come thousands of miles from Belarus and was rumored to be one of thirty in existence in the world. She liked to stand out in a crowd, which was a good thing. As the only black female superior court judge, she really didn’t go unnoticed.

The law had been a self-fulfilling prophecy for a little girl named Justice, and although no one in her family had been to college, the pattern of her life was as true to Althea as the lines that crossed the palm of her hand. It would have been remarkable for her to ascend to the bench as either a woman or a person of color-but the fact that she was both made her New Hampshire’s answer to equal opportunity, and a bonafide wonder.

She was six-two in her stocking feet, which was the way she usually trekked through Carroll County Superior Court. Under all those black robes, who cared whether she was wearing shoes, and if anyone did, no one had the balls to bring it up to her. Attorneys who entered her courtroom did so knowing that they weren’t going to be able to put one by her. A woman didn’t get to where Althea had by falling for snow jobs.

Her new secretary was a young man who actually believed that kissing her ass was going to get him something . . . she didn’t quite know what. A good position in the county attorney’s office? A break, when it came his turn to try a case in front of her? He had a habit of running off at the mouth and citing little-known rulings that came from Bumfuck, Iowa, and other distant locales, as if Althea’s life on the bench could only be better served by knowing such minutiae. The only task she’d assigned him so far was to walk her monster of a puppy on days when she was stuck in trial for hours, something for which he didn’t really need a JD, but that he seemed to take as a windfall all the same.

It had been a rotten morning-her Belarussian ridgeback had peed in front of the kitchen sink, she’d been awake for over an hour and still hadn’t had anything caffeinated to speak of, and to top it all off, she had gotten her period, which meant that smack in the middle of her schedule today she was going to be good for nothing but a hot water bottle and an OD of Midol.

“In ten seconds or less, Mark, and by all means time yourself: What have you got for me?” Althea asked, folding her bare feet beneath her.

“Black,” her assistant said, handing her coffee. “Just the way you like it.” Then he blushed the a shade of pomegranate. “I didn’t mean that to be a racial comment.”

Althea regarded him over the lip of the mug. “It wasn’t until you just said so.”

“I’m sorry.” Mark colored again. These white boys, with their face a whole palette.

Althea decided to take him off the hook. That way, she could always bait him again. “Tell me what we have today.”

“Motions hearing in State of New Hampshire v. Jack St. Bride.”

She took the proffered file. “The rape case?”

“Yes.” Mark took a deep breath. “If you look in there, you’ll see the research I’ve done, and some of my opinions.”

“Well, matter of fact, I do want to know if any of the counsel has been snooping around you, trying to size me up.”

Again, that blush. “Well, Your Honor, there’ve been a few questions . . .”

“Prosecution or defense?”

Matt looked at his polished shoes. “Both, ma’am.”

When Althea Justice smiled, which wasn’t all that often, it transformed her face, like a valley being touched by the sun. She knew of this case; hell, with the reporters swarming on the steps of the courthouse like bees at a hive, it would be impossible not to know of it.

She thought of Matt Houlihan and Jordan McAfee, the counsel that would be standing in front of her a few hours from now, at the mercy of a big bad black bitch. “Mark,” Althea said, grinning, “this may turn out to be a fine day after all.”

An hour after the motions hearing in the St. Bride case, Jordan lay on his back in the woods, watching the sun leap from branch to branch like a iridescent squirrel. He could feel the moisture from the ground sinking into his skin, right through the shoulders of his dress shirt. The dirt smelled like dying things, but Jordan conceded that maybe his current state of mind was coloring his senses. He had a case that completely sucked, a dead end of a defense, and a client who wasn’t willing to budge in any of the directions that would lead to a plea. Jack St. Bride hadn’t had sex with Gillian Duncan in this very spot, in spite of the fact that his skin was under her nails and his blood was on her shirt. Maybe if Jordan stayed here long enough, the aliens that had apparently come down to rape Gillian would return to zap him with a death laser, so some other hapless attorney could be appointed to Jack’s case.

“I had a feeling I’d find you here.”

Jordan sat up, squinting. “Oh, it’s you,” he said dully.

“You think Lancelot got that kind of reception?” Selena muttered, grunting as she tried to haul Jordan to his feet.

“You’re my white knight?”

“Well, I’m trying to be. You’re not exactly making it easy.”

She had wrapped herself around him to get him upright. Jordan could smell the soap she used-honey, and some kind of flower, mixed together and sitting cozy next to his own bar of Ivory. “What are you saving me from?”

“Yourself,” Selena said. “Despair. Root rot. Take your pick.” She regarded Jordan thoughtfully. “I heard you had a lousy hearing.”

“Lousy?” Jordan laughed. “I wouldn’t say it was lousy. Downright abysmal. This judge has a chip on her shoulder the size of the whole goddamned courthouse. She ruled against my motion to suppress Jack’s statement about not being with the girl that night. But she granted Houlihan’s motion to admit Jack’s prior conviction for sexual assault.”

“I heard you won one.”

“Yeah,” Jordan snorted. “The rubber-stamp motion for a speedy trial, which I put in weeks ago. The one I wanted before I knew I’d be dealing with a client who changes his tune more often than a fucking jukebox.” He sighed. “Oh, and did I happen to mention the DNA test came back?”

“And?”

“Jack’s blood’s all over the girl’s shirt. His skin was under her nails. There was semen on her thigh, and although the results weren’t quite as conclusive, it could be his, too.”

“Maybe it’s not his.”

“Yeah, and maybe I’m Johnnie Fucking Cochrane.”

Selena smirked. “Trust me, you don’t have quite the same tan. Besides, Johnnie wouldn’t lay down and let a prosecutor steamroll him.”

“Johnnie didn’t sign Jack St. Bride as a client.”

Selena braced herself against the trunk of the dogwood. “Can’t win ’em all, Jordan.”

“Thanks for reminding me, because you know, that thought hadn’t entered my consciousness for at least a half a second.”

Jordan skimmed his hands down the freckled bark of a tree. It reminded him of age spots, which reminded him that he was getting old, and what the hell did he have to show for it? And that reminded him that Jack St. Bride would turn fifty in prison, probably shouting with every breath that he hadn’t committed a crime.

He turned on his investigator. “What have you been doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Other than eating my groceries and sucking up the air conditioning I’m paying for . . . what have you dug up about this case?”

“Nothing. Addie Peabody is still out of town, and she’s our best hope to make Jack look good.”

“That’s if she’s still speaking to him,” Jordan pointed out. “Being arrested in front of your girlfriend has an uncanny way of ruining a relationship. What else have you got?”

Selena sighed. “Everywhere I turn, there’s someone telling me what a good kid Gillian Duncan is. Smart, sweet, Daddy’s little girl. Add that kind of credibility to the physical evidence . . . well, Jordan, there just isn’t a lot I can offer here.” She reached down between her feet and pulled up the towhead of a dried dandelion. “Here. Make a wish.”

“Just one?” Jordan said.

“Don’t want to overload the magic, do you?”

He closed his eyes. “I wish things were different.”

Selena held her breath until Jordan blew, scattering the seed pods over the wind. “What do you mean?”

“I wish I could trade this job for whatever’s behind door number one. I wish Jack St. Bride’s blood wasn’t on Gillian’s shirt. I wish you and I could . . .”

His voice trailed off, and Selena stared at him. “Could what?”

“Could find something to get our client acquitted.”

Selena dusted off her jeans. “Nothing’s gonna get done with us standing here. Let’s go.” But Jordan didn’t follow, and before she knew it, she was standing at the edge of the woods again. Frustrated, she tried to peer through the trees but couldn’t make him out. “You coming?” she called. “I’m gonna be halfway home before you get out of the forest.”

In the clearing, Jordan turned at the sound of Selena’s voice. I’m gonna be halfway home before you get out of the forest. “Where are you?” he called.

“Waiting for you!”

Jordan hurried down the narrow trail that led toward the cemetery. He counted each footfall . . . thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . . and finally broke out of the thicker vegetation to find an annoyed Selena tapping her sneaker. “Fifty-one,” Jordan announced.

“No, actually, I’m only thirty-eight. You’re just giving me gray hair.” Selena turned her back on him. “Can we just get going now?”

“No. Selena, where are we?”

She peered at Jordan. “You hit your head on a branch back there?”

“This is where Saxton found Gillian. Where she’d caught up to her friends after the rape. Right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“I could hear you. When you called my name, I could hear you.”

Selena’s mind picked up the ball Jordan had thrown. “But could you hear something other than a voice? Like two people wrestling?”

“I don’t know. Wait here.” He ran back into the woods, then started kicking at the leaves. “Can you hear that?”

Selena strained. Daytime sounds-birds, and trucks in the distance-were louder, but every now and then she got a slight sense of disturbance. “Kind of,” she called back. “Real faint, though.” Selena jogged to the clearing again. “I’m guessing it’s about fifty yards,” she said. “You can hear a lot of things from fifty yards away.”

“Yes,” Jordan agreed, “and you also can’t get a lot done in the time it takes to walk it.” His hands went to the buttons of his trousers, and Selena took a step back. “Don’t flatter yourself; I’m testing something. Start walking slowly.”

Selena looked at him askance. “What are you gonna do?”

“Simulate a rape.”

She looked down at his pants, then his hand. “By yourself?”

“Simulate,” Jordan repeated. “Not stimulate.”

Selena started to walk. She crept forward far more slowly than a girl would, especially one in a hurry to get home before her parents found her missing. She stopped once to shake a rock out of her sneaker and a second time to stare at a toad with black button eyes, and then finally reached the edge of the woods. “I’m here.”

“Already?”

“If I went any slower, I would have grown moss.”

“Eighty-seven seconds,” Jordan said, approaching.

“Gillian said the rape took five minutes. Yet when she managed to catch up with her friends, they were only fifty yards away.”

“And if they’d been walking that slowly-”

“-then they would have heard a struggle,” Selena finished.

Jordan turned to her. “Assuming,” he said, “there was a struggle at all.”

June 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Delilah threw up after the lunch crush ended and before the supper crowd arrived. She sat at the small card table in the kitchen, a Handi Wipes towelette wet down and plastered against her forehead. “She’s burning up, Roy,” said Darla.

“I’m fine. I just can’t stand cooking clam chowder is all.”

Roy folded his arms across his chest. “You’ve been making meatloaf.”

Delilah’s runny red eyes focused on Roy, and she managed a tiny smile. “Guess I’m sick, boss,” she said softly.

He squatted down so that he was at eye level. “Now I’m worried. The Dee I know would never in a million years admit to it.”

Delilah rested her heavy head on her hands. “Maybe in another million years, I’ll feel good enough to argue that point.”

“One of those summer viruses,” Darla said. Looking at Roy, she added, “I just hope she didn’t give it to everyone who ate here this morning.”

Roy eyed her big frame uneasily. “I could carry her up to my place . . .”

“No, her son’s coming to take her home. I called him twenty minutes ago.” Darla blinked at him. “So what are we gonna do?”

“Roy’s gonna take over as my replacement, aren’t you, Roy?” Delilah said. “On account of otherwise, this diner’s going to close . . . and that would kill Addie.”

“I can’t do that,” he whispered. “You know why.”

Delilah shrugged. “Sometimes we don’t have a choice about what life throws us. And right now, it’s throwing you a spatula.”

At that moment, Delilah’s son came into the kitchen. She let herself be lifted and supported by him, a lumberyard supervisor who was every inch as tall and forbidding as his mother. “You all try to get along without me,” she said, and left.

Roy glanced at the flat black face of the grill, the steam rising like a song. He wouldn’t be cooking, really. He’d just be finishing up what Delilah had started.

He inched toward the line where food was prepared. He could feel the ridges on the chopping block where knives had edged out their history the better part of the past twenty years. And he waited for his heart to stop, just like Margaret’s had.

Roy, you daydreaming again or are you gonna cook me up Adam and Eve on a raft?

Just like that, he could hear his wife’s voice again, teasing him about how long it could possibly take to fry two eggs and set them on a piece of toast. He could see her reaching up on tiptoe to put her ticket in the circular holder. He could feel the ache of the scar he’d gotten when she’d sneaked behind the line to kiss him and, lost in the moment, he’d pressed his hand flat on the open waffle iron.

“In the weeds,” he whispered, cook’s lingo for being overburdened.

“Here.” Darla held out a white chef’s coat so old it had moth holes in some places. “Addie told me she’d been saving this for you.”

Roy took it slowly, then shrugged it on. To his surprise, it fit. He’d imagined that he’d grown a size or two, thick around his middle with stubbornness. Darla watched him button up, and she smiled a little. “Don’t you look smart,” she said softly.

She cleared her throat suddenly, as if she was wary of giving in to her emotions in front of someone else. “What’s the special tonight?” she asked briskly.

Roy curled his hand around the base of a wooden spoon, the gesture first tentative, then coming smoother, as if he were an old-time big leaguer lifting a bat once again. “Anything,” he said with pride. “You tell them I’ll cook them whatever they want.”

Addie sat on a wicker chair across from Reverend Marsh and his daughter, and took a sip of her iced tea. “Thank you,” she said. “This is lovely.”

The reverend was a skinny stick of a man with an Adam’s apple that jutted out like a burl. His daughter’s hands were folded neatly in her lap; her eyes were fixed on a spot on the porch floor. Catherine Marsh no longer had long, silky dark tresses, an athletic body, and a winning smile. She was thinner, swimming in her oversize T-shirt and carpenter jeans, and her hair was cropped short. Addie stared at the girl as she traced a circle on the sweating side of her glass. Did Jack do this to you?

“I’m delighted you sought me out,” the reverend said. “Sometimes I think today’s papers are so frightened to explore religion they veer too far toward an atheist’s position.”

After getting Catherine Marsh’s name, Addie had looked her up in the local phone book. The Right Reverend Ellidor Marsh was listed in Goffeysboro, a tiny town thirty miles east of Loyal. Addie had called, knowing he would never invite her to his home to discuss the statutory rape of his daughter, and pretended to be a reporter on a nonsecular beat.

“I have something to confess,” she said now, setting her iced tea down.

The reverend smiled and tugged at his white collar. “I get a lot of that,” he joked. “But technically, I’ll have to send you down the road to Father Ivey.”

“I’m not a reporter,” Addie blurted out.

Catherine Marsh’s gaze lifted for the first time since she’d come, at her father’s beckoning, to join them. “I’m here because of Jack St. Bride,” Addie said.

What happened next was like an unexpected nor’easter: The Reverend Marsh’s complacent demeanor was swept away only to be replaced with a cold fury so intense that it was easy to imagine him hurling damnation from a pulpit. “Do not mention that man’s name in my presence.”

“Reverend Marsh-”

“Do you know what it’s like to realize that your daughter’s been ruined by a man twice as old as she is? By a man whose moral compass is so defunct he can’t see the wrong in seducing an innocent?”

“Daddy-”

“No!” Ellidor thundered. “I won’t hear any of it, Catherine. I won’t. And you, weak as any woman . . . weak as your own mother . . . believing that you loved him.”

“Reverend Marsh, I just wanted to know-”

“You want to know about Jack St. Bride? He’s a calculating, depraved pervert who baited my daughter like a Pied Piper and used her own innocence against her to get her into his bed. He’s a sinner of the worst kind-the sort of man who pulls angels out of heaven and drags them down for the fall. I hope he rots in Hell for what he did to my child.”

Catherine’s features twisted in agony, or memory. Ellidor stood abruptly and hauled his daughter up against his side. “Please leave,” he bit out, and he started inside.

Addie’s head whirled. As condemnations went, this was fairly clear-Marsh truly believed his daughter had been wronged. And who knew a child better than her parent? It meant that the charge of sexual assault against a minor a year ago in Loyal had not been a misunderstanding. A horrible offense had occurred, and Jack had been at the root of it.

He had lied to her about Catherine Marsh. And, most likely, about Gillian Duncan.

Still, something made her call out at the last minute. “Catherine!”

The girl turned, anchored by the reverend.

“Is that what happened?” Addie asked softly.

Catherine’s glance slid to her father. She nodded, then let herself be swallowed up by his anger and buoyed into the house.

And that, more than anything, made Addie give up hope of Jack’s innocence. After all, she had been like Catherine, years ago. She had survived a rape. And that was something no woman would ever consciously choose to claim as a memory-no, it was something that scarred you so deeply you couldn’t forget.

Sitting up is so hard, when her head is this heavy. Heavy as the moon, dropped to the ground. Heavy with thoughts . . . things she should not be doing, things she can’t quite remember now.

Someone comes to help her. A hand with hair on the back, sprinkled like pepper. Those hands, the pepper hands, reach for her, cup her breast as she tumbles down again. Her own hand, smooth and white, pushing at the ridge of his erection.

Blessed be.

Meg sat up in bed, wild-eyed, the covers falling away from her. The memories were like the ocean at the Cape, where they’d gone on vacation last summer. They kept running after her, and no matter what she did to try to keep them away, they managed to find her feet and suck her more firmly into the sand.

The hose sprayed wildly, soaking the girls who gathered barefoot around the Range Rover. Shrieks cut through the buzz of the summer air, falling flat into the puddles of soap on the driveway. Meg turned the nozzle away from Chelsea and Whitney and onto Gillian, who squealed and jumped out of the way.

“At this rate,” Charlie said, watching from the deck behind the Duncan house, “your car won’t be washed until October. I don’t think they’ve managed to hit a sponge on anything but each other yet.”

Amos only smiled. “I could care less about the Rover. Look at her.” Gillian turned, a smile on her face, her short hair sticking up in porcupine spikes. “They make her act like the girl she used to be.”

“I know, Amos.” Charlie tried to say more, but there was a lump in his throat. How many times had he sat with his old friend after hours, drinking a beer, watching their daughters play? Who would have guessed that those children would grow up overnight? He set his bottle on the armrest of his Adirondack chair. “How’s she doing?”

Amos took a pull of his beer and grimaced. “She goes to the appointments with Dr. Horowitz and sometimes it makes her cry, sometimes it makes her angry, sometimes it makes her just want to be alone. She still has nightmares.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.” Amos looked at his daughter. “Every night.”

“It must be hard on you, too. Having to deal with this all by yourself.”

“No, I thank God that Sharon died before she had to see this happen. This would have killed her if the breast cancer hadn’t. I mean, Christ, Charlie. I’m her father. I’m supposed to love her and watch over her. So how could I have let this happen?” Blowing softly over the lip of the bottle, he made it sing like an oboe. “I would trade every cent I have,” Amos said quietly, “for a chance to make her mine again.”

Gilly had grabbed the hose now and was launching an attack on her friends. She laughed, showering the others until they were soaked from head to toe. In that moment, she looked like any teenager.

Charlie rubbed his thumbnail along a hairline crack in the green paint of his chair. “Do you ever wonder if there’s someone up there keeping count, Amos?” he asked softly. “You know . . . if you wind up getting what’s coming to you?”

Amos frowned. “Gillian didn’t deserve what happened to her.”

“No,” Charlie murmured, staring at him. “Not Gilly.”

Selena figured it was like this: A girl who lied to her daddy about sneaking out of the house was probably hiding other things from him, too. And a girl whose daddy was the richest guy in town probably had been given a charge card billed to that same daddy sometime in the vicinity of her sixteenth birthday.

Hacking was illegal, but investigators knew how to bend laws to suit their needs. The first step, of course, was to make sure your uptight attorney was out for the night, and it didn’t hurt to know his son had gone on a date, either. The second step was to mentally gather together everything you’d learned in years of investigative work . . . such as the fact that the average person’s passwords were not nearly as complex as they ought to be. Selena guessed that Gillian’s birthdate, in some permutation, was the key to her America Online account, and after three tries, she got it right. It was a little trickier to find her most recent online purchases-Selena abortively tried Amazon.com and Reel.com before finding a CD store with an account set up in Gilly’s name. Breaking through the encryption in their secure ordering system took another ten minutes, and finally Selena had an American Express number.

She called the customer service line, and gave Amos Duncan’s mother’s maiden name when prompted-something she’d traced through public records.

“Yes, Gillian,” the representative said. “What can I do for you today?”

“Well, there’s a problem on my bill.” Selena pretended to be searching for a moment. “On April twenty-fifth, for $25.60 at the Gap?”

Because Selena was spouting all this off the top of her head, it was no surprise when the representative didn’t find the purchase. “On April twenty-fifth?”

“Yes.”

“I see two charges listed for April twenty-fifth-one for $47.75 at the Wiccan Read and one for $10.70 at CVS. Nothing from the Gap. Are you sure you’re looking at the right month’s billing statement?”

Selena was furiously scribbling on the corner of Jordan’s newspaper. “Oh, God, I feel like such a loser. This is my MasterCard,” she said, and giggled. “Like, duh.”

“Is there anything else I can help you with?”

“Not today. Sorry about that,” Selena added, and hung up. CVS-not an extraordinary place to spend ten bucks. A nail polish, Kit Kat bar, and pack of gum probably cost that much. Or even, perhaps, a pack of condoms.

The Wiccan Read was a bigger mystery. “Wiccan,” Selena said aloud, meandering into Thomas’s room, where the big Webster’s dictionary was kept for homework assistance. She scanned the W’s, but found nothing. Wicked was the closest, and although that might have described Gillian Duncan, it wasn’t what Selena was looking for.

But she’d heard the word before; Selena would have bet on it. She logged onto the computer again, this time as herself, and settled into a search engine.

Wiccan, she typed.

After a moment, the first five hits of 153,995 came up.

Pagan and Wiccan Sites. The Wiccan and Faerie Grimoire of Francesca Celestia. How to Contact a Local Coven. Bright Blessings-the Awesomest Teen Wiccan Home Page.

And one that caught Selena’s eye: Why are we afraid of witches?

Now Selena remembered where she’d heard the word. “Why, Miss Gillian,” she murmured, clicking on the site to find a graphic of a cauldron, fathomless and bubbling black. “What have you gotten yourself into?”

Thomas had his hand up Chelsea Abram’s shirt and was thinking of British monarchs. James I, Charles I, the Cromwells . . . Charles II, James II, William and Mary. It was the most boring thing he could call to mind, thanks to a class in European history-God knew if he thought of the softness of Chelsea’s skin or the scent that rose from it, he was going to come right then and there and have to suffer the humiliation of explaining the wet spot on the front of his pants.

She knew how to kiss. Boy, did she know. Her tongue curled into his mouth, dancing and retreating until he could not believe that an hour before, he’d never tasted this ambrosia. Who would have guessed that Thomas would get to second base with a girl two years older than he was? Who would have guessed that this girl would have even agreed to go out on a date?

They were underneath the bleachers at the football field, a long-established makeout place for Salem Falls High. Because Thomas didn’t even have a learner’s permit, Chelsea had picked him up in her parents’ car. They’d gone to a movie, and out for coffee after that-Thomas paying, as if that might make them both forget that she was older than he was. Now, they were stretched beneath a stadium bench, mapping each other’s bodies with the slow and wondrous discovery that comes only the first time you touch someone. “Thomas,” she breathed, “like this.” Reaching up between her breasts, she unclasped her bra.

Oh, Jesus. Anne and George I and II and hell, all the Georges and William IV and Victoria . . .

Suddenly Chelsea drew back. Could a girl get shy when she was only half dressed? “Do you . . . do you want to stop?” Thomas choked out, although he thought he might fling himself off the nearest cliff if she said yes.

“Do you?”

He couldn’t see her eyes in the dark. Was she nervous . . . or did she think he was? “Chels,” he said with absolute candor, “I’d like to keep doing this for my next three lifetimes.”

Her smile caught the light of the moon. “Only three?” she whispered, and her breasts spilled, soft as snow, into his hands.

Oh my God, Thomas thought. Chelsea tugged his shirt off and pressed against him, a line of fire licking their bodies where skin met skin. She bit his ear. “Who are George and Elizabeth?”

“Good friends,” Thomas gasped, as she rolled him onto his back. A medallion that hung between her breasts swayed over his face. He reached for it.

“Leave it,” Chelsea said.

But it swung and clicked against his teeth, just when he was hoping to connect with something softer, pinker. Thomas held it up and squinted. “Pretty,” he said. “A Jewish star?”

“Those have six points. This has five,” Chelsea said. And then, “Do you really want to talk about it?”

“No, I want to take it off.”

“I can’t.”

“I’ll hold it in my pocket. I swear I won’t lose it.” He kissed the side of her neck and began to work the clasp.

“Thomas, stop. I promised to wear it all the time.”

“Promised who? Some ex?”

She didn’t say anything, and Thomas stared at the little silver charm on her chest. He’d never seen one before-but maybe it was some funky religious symbol, a Hindu equivalent of the cross or something. Not that Chelsea looked particularly Indian.

Chelsea was watching him intently. “Do you like me, Thomas?”

He could barely breathe . . . was this leading where he thought it was? He didn’t think all the regents in the British Empire from the beginning of time would help him control his overloaded hormones if he actually started to have sex with Chelsea.

Nodding furiously, he swallowed hard.

“If I shared something with you, something I’ve never shared with anyone before, would you swear not to tell anybody?”

Holy cow. She was a virgin, too. Thomas felt all the blood in his body pool in his groin. “Sure,” he croaked.

Chelsea lifted her hand and trailed it from her throat, over her breast, to the funny little necklace. “I’m a Pagan,” she whispered, and kissed him.

The word echoed, fuzzy, in his mind. “A Pagan?” Thomas repeated. “Like those guys at Stonehenge?”

“Those are Druids. A Pagan believes in God . . . and the Goddess. And the pentagram . . . this star . . . shows the five elements we celebrate. Spirit, Air, Water, Fire, and Earth.” She stared soberly at Thomas, waiting for him to pass judgment. “Weird, huh?”

“No,” he said quickly, although he wasn’t sure he believed himself. “So . . . you’re just, like, really into nature?”

Chelsea nodded. “Yeah, but that’s not how a lot of people see it. When Gillian and Meg and Whit and I formed a coven, we knew we had to keep it to ourselves. We figured if people heard about it, they’d take it totally the wrong way.” Suddenly, she grinned. “My God, Thomas, do you know how good it feels to tell someone this?” She wound her arms around his neck and kissed him deeply. “Nine out of ten guys would be looking for my broomstick now, or expecting me to cast a love spell.”

Suddenly Thomas went still inside. “You mean you’re-”

“A Pagan, a witch, whatever you want to call it,” Chelsea said. “All four of us are.”

His hands stopped roaming over Chelsea’s back, and he suddenly realized that even if she ripped off her pants right now and climbed on him, he would be too distracted to do anything. For Christ’s sake, there was a beautiful, half-naked girl next to him, and all he could think about was his father’s case.

The crime scene was different in the still of the night. Owls called to each other from dark places in the sky, a symphony of crickets tuned their bows, and small creatures tangoed in the pine needles at Jordan’s feet. He didn’t really know why he’d come here. For inspiration, maybe? Certainly, he had a leg to stand on now for his defense . . . but it was shaky. The discrepancy in time and distance here didn’t effectively exclude Jack as a rapist-it only suggested that Gillian Duncan was covering something up.

If Jordan were a betting man, he’d lay odds that Jack and Gillian had had sex and after the fact, she’d been mortified and had spun this story to explain away what had happened. But why wouldn’t the other girls have heard the sounds of their passion? Why wouldn’t Jack have told him, if that was the way it had gone down?

He said he hadn’t touched Gillian. And there was also the strange fact that the other girls who had been there would have seen something-a look, a smile, a touch exchanged between Gillian and Jack that flirted with the possibility of sexual attraction. Yet not a single one of them had mentioned it. Were they protecting their friend? Or was it simply that-as Jack said-he’d never had sex with her?

Either Jack was a liar who had committed a brutal rape-a very fast and quiet one-or Gillian was a liar . . . and nothing had happened at all.

In the tree above Jordan’s head, the great yellow eyes of an owl stared at him sagely. “Whooo.”

“Wish I knew.” Jordan tilted his head to the sky. His eye caught a small flash of silver on a branch, a star that had fallen and gotten lodged in the crook of the tree. Curious, Jordan got to his feet and dusted off the seat of his jeans. He was just tall enough to reach the object when he stood on his tiptoes.

Damn. It was stuck.

Gritting his teeth, Jordan twisted his fingers more firmly around a loop and tugged.

He landed sprawled on the ground again, a thin strip of silver ribbon in his lap. “What the-”

Ribbons, and little sachets. Weird shit.

Ribbons.

Jordan ran as quickly as he could down that fifty-yard path to his car and then drove straight to the Carroll County Jail.

“Think!” Jordan ordered.

Jack paced the confines of the small room. “I told you,” he said. “I remember the ribbons. They were wrapped around a tree. And the ends were loose. Fluttering, like.”

It sounded completely unbelievable. In fact, Jordan still would have scoffed at Jack’s recollection if he didn’t happen to have a piece of silver ribbon in his pocket. “Like streamers at a high school dance?”

“Like a pole,” Jack clarified. “A maypole.”

The only maypole Jordan had ever seen was a re-creation done by a touchy-feely granola-and-Birkenstock nursery school Thomas had gone to for exactly three weeks before his father had yanked him out. People in today’s world didn’t weave maypoles.

“The things hanging on the dogwood . . . were they ornaments of some kind?”

“Not Christmas tree balls, if that’s what you mean. More like those little things that women stick in their lingerie drawers.”

“And Gillian Duncan was naked,” Jordan said.

Jack nodded. “Two other girls had their shirts off, too, but got dressed when I came.”

Jordan bowed his head, utterly lost. “Was it some kind of orgy?”

“With each other? They weren’t . . . doing anything like that when I came.”

“What were they doing?”

Jack thought for a moment. “Dancing. Around the fire. Like Native American warriors.”

“Ah, yes. Clearly, they were celebrating the kill of a buffalo.”

“A celebration,” Jack said slowly. “That’s what Gillian called it, too.”

It was after two in the morning when Jordan eased his way into the house, taking care not to wake anyone up. His mind was humming so strongly that it took him a moment to realize the lights were still on. When he stepped into the foyer, Thomas and Selena were waiting.

“You won’t believe this,” Jordan began, grinning from the inside out.

“Dad,” Thomas interrupted, stealing his thunder. “She’s a witch.”