Salem Falls

June 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

A ddie paid ten dollars for a copy of Jack’s first conviction, but didn’t know what she was going to do with it. Keep it in the re-safe box where Chloe’s birth and death certificates were? Burn it, in some kind of ritual? Bury it in the yard, with all her other dreams?

A night of tossing and turning had convinced her that Jack had spun lies as easily as a silkworm crafted threads, and the result was something just as beautiful to behold. She couldn’t blame him for telling her that he hadn’t had a relationship with Catherine Marsh, or that he hadn’t raped Gillian Duncan, or even that he loved Addie. A lie took two parties-the weaver of the tale and the sucker who so badly wanted to believe it.

The clerk of the Grafton County Superior Court handed Addie a receipt. “Here you go,” he said. “State of New Hampshire v. Jack St. Bride.”

Addie thanked the man and looked at the court records. “Jack St. Bride?” a voice said to her left.

The tall man wore a police uniform. He had salt-and-pepper hair, a nose that was too big for his face, and many laugh lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. “Yes,” Addie answered.

“You know him?”

Her fist gripped the paper so tightly it bunched in her hand. “I thought I did.”

Addie noticed there was something about Jack’s name that brought a sad shadow to the man’s eyes, just like it did to hers. “I know,” he said finally. “So did I.”

It was the first time Addie could recall sitting in a diner as a patron rather than as an owner. Jay Kavanaugh ordered an entire breakfast, but Addie wasn’t hungry. She had to fight the overwhelming urge to stand up and get her own coffee from the burner.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Jay said, after hearing that Jack had again been charged with rape. “Sexual perps tend to be repeaters. What does surprise me is that I fell for it the first time around.” Shaking his head, he added, “I’m a cop, so I have this incredible sixth sense-like I can tell it’s bullshit, pardon my French, from half a mile away. And I swear to God, I believed hook, line, and sinker that Jack was just some struggling prep school teacher-you know, an ordinary guy. Then it comes out that his family is rich as the Rockefellers and that in his spare time he wasn’t doing lesson plans but seducing students.”

“The Rockefellers?” Addie said. “Jack’s broke.”

Jay glanced up. “That’s just something else he told you.” He shrugged. “It’s good to hear he’s a career con artist. Makes me feel less like a moron.”

He continued talking as the waitress set down his plate. “Jack was Mr. Spontaneous all the time-Go climb a mountain? Sure! Cover some teacher’s class that period? No problem!-But every time I suggested we go out for a beer or to play a game of racquetball after his soccer practices, he turned me down. Couldn’t go until late at night, he said. Told me he had a standing engagement at seven-and never, not once, did he back down from that. I figured it was some faculty meeting or something. ’Course, later on, the girl said that was when they met. Every night, seven P.M., in the locker room.”

It was both liberating and depressing to find this man, another casualty of Jack’s. Yet no matter how grievously wronged Jay Kavanaugh felt, he had not let Jack slip beneath his defenses, into his heart, into his body. He had not heard Jack say I love you. He had not listened, wide-eyed, and believed it.

“Hey,” Jay said. “You’re a million miles away.”

“No, just thinking.”

“About Jack?”

Addie shook her head. “About how much I don’t like men.”

“Don’t judge us all by Jack. Most of us are a lot stupider than he is and don’t have nearly the finesse to carry off that kind of ruse.” Jay smiled gently. “Hindsight’s always twenty-twenty. And it doesn’t hurt as much, after a while. I’ve had ten months to think on this. But I still remember sitting at my desk after I had to arrest him-my best friend!-and wondering how the hell this had slipped by me.”

Addie watched him spear the yolk of an egg. It ran across the plate, a yellow pool dammed by a wall of hash browns. “How is the girl now?”

“She left Westonbrook. I hear that she’s being home-schooled and that she doesn’t keep in touch with friends who are still in Loyal.” He paused, then added quietly, “I think she just wants to forget this ever happened.”

That was when Addie remembered Catherine Marsh had believed she loved Jack, too. “She won’t be able to,” Addie whispered.

In her hotel room, Addie packed up her suitcase again, with Rosie O’Donnell keeping her company on the TV. She folded her shirts and stacked them on top of her jeans. She tucked her boots into plastic bags so that they did not get anything else dirty.

“I swear, John,” Rosie was saying, “I’m going to win. I’ve been practicing.” Addie looked up as the comedienne’s face filled the screen. “Kelsey Grammer and Joy Behar,” she said, “do you know your potent potables?”

“What’s a potable?” her bandleader asked.

“A drink,” Rosie said. “If you were destined to be the celebrity Jeopardy! champion, you’d know that, as well as the largest lake in Africa and the fact that the queen in the Netherlands is second cousins to the Archduke Francis Ferdinand. I’m making that last one up, John, but see, only a celebrity Jeopardy! champion like myself would even realize this.”

Laughter from the audience. Addie felt her heart contract as she heard Jack’s voice in her head. They water down the questions for the celebrity tournament, he’d told her. Because otherwise, none of those stars would get a single one right.

Jack would have. Most of us are a lot stupider than he is, Jay had said. “Seven P.M. tonight, here on ABC,” Rosie announced. “I’m telling you, John, this could be a whole new career for me.”

Addie remembered Jack telling her about prison, how his knowledge of trivia had saved him from being abused. She remembered unsuccessfully trying to distract him with her body during the show. All that trivia in his head, she used to think. How can there be room for me?

Suddenly, she began to tear through the papers on the table welcoming her as a guest to this hotel. There was a small guide to the Dartmouth-Sunapee region of New Hampshire, and a flyer from an outlet store, and a placard from a pizza place that would deliver until three in the morning. From underneath the mess of blankets and sheets on the bed, she unearthed the complimentary local newspaper. Scanning the pages, she finally found what she was looking for-the little grid of local television programming.

In Loyal, Jeopardy! was syndicated and aired on ABC. At 7 P.M.

Addie did not know nearly as much as Jack did about geography or presidents or even potent potables. She did not know if a discrepancy like this would have ever stood up in a court of law. But she did know that for one half hour a day, nothing would come between Jack and a television trivia show.

Not even Catherine Marsh.

The occult bookstore smelled like an apothecary, and rows of glass jars with small scripted labels held things that Selena really didn’t want to consider. Books were jammed into the narrow shelves, with titles like Anastasia’s Grimoire and Transfiguration for Beginners and The Solitary Witch’s Guide. A cat with a bell around its neck stalked the countertop, and an opiate cloud of incense hung in the air.

Starshine glanced at the untouched cup of tea in Selena’s hand. “Go ahead. It won’t turn you into a toad.”

She seemed to be a cross between an earth mother and a flower child, with stray braids dotting her silver hair and a ring on every toe. It made Selena nervous. She kept expecting to be zapped into nothingness, or for this woman to wiggle her nose.

She glanced around at the walls of the store. “You get a lot of teenagers in here?”

“Too many,” Starshine said, and sighed. “The spells attract most of the kids. They hear the word witch, and immediately think they’ll be able to wave a wand and hurt the bullies in school or to make the star of the basketball team fall madly for them.”

“Something tells me they’re not running home to tell Mom and Dad they’re Wiccans.”

“No,” Starshine agreed, “and it goes right back to the Inquisition, I’m afraid. Being a witch is not something that invites confidence, because too many people misunderstand what it means if you say that you are one. And unfortunately, I think teenagers are attracted to that part of Wicca-doing something, even something natural and innocent, behind their parents’ backs.”

“Does Gillian Duncan come in here often?”

The older woman shrugged. “Just recently, she came in looking for belladonna.”

“Belladonna? The poison?”

Starshine nodded. “She wanted it for an obsolete recipe, once used for out-of-body experiences and psychic visions. Needless to say, I tried to redirect her focus.”

“How?”

The cat leaped into the woman’s lap; she stroked its fur until its eyes slit shut. “I told her to celebrate the upcoming sabbat instead.”

“Do you remember when that conversation occurred?”

“Right before Beltane,” Starshine said, then noticed Selena’s blank look. “The night of April thirtieth.”

“What if she found it somewhere else?” Jordan asked. He and Selena sat on a teak bench in his backyard, watching a blue jay fight a flock of finches at the bird feeder. They sat side by side, and Jordan could have told her exactly how many centimeters of space separated their bodies from shoulder to hip to thigh. Christ, the electricity between them was enough to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Selena didn’t seem to notice. Or if she did, she was doing a damn good job of hiding it. “The belladonna?” she asked.

“Yeah. What if she made her recipe and passed it out the night of April thirtieth? Then Jack stumbles by, drunk, and Gillian hallucinates the assault.”

Selena frowned. “It must have been some pretty good shit, then, to conjure up the semen on her thigh.”

“Okay,” Jordan conceded, “that’s a sticking point.”

“No pun intended?”

“I can’t explain the semen. But that’s not my job. All I have to do is make the jury think for a nanosecond that there might be another explanation for what happened that night, other than rape. And the victim’s credibility is called into question if we prove that her recollections are drug-impaired.”

“Still, Jordan,” Selena argued, “it’s not like there are occult suppliers on Main Street. Belladonna’s a poison. It isn’t easy to come by.”

“She could have substituted another hallucinogenic drug.”

Selena snorted. “From the local pharmacy?”

“From the high school dealer,” Jordan corrected, and then smiled slowly. “Or from Daddy.”

It took three and a half hours for the Reverend Marsh to leave the house, three and a half hours that Addie spent sitting behind a small clot of hydrangea in the front yard. She waited until he had driven off in his Buick and then she knocked on the door.

“You lied,” Addie said, the minute Catherine Marsh opened it.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You didn’t have a relationship with Jack St. Bride. You never slept with him. I don’t know why, Catherine, and I don’t know how, exactly, but you somehow got this rumor started and managed to ruin his life.”

“He told me . . . he told me . . .”

“He didn’t tell you anything he wouldn’t have told any other student.”

Catherine started to protest but then crumbled. There was no other word for it-the edges of her mouth waffled in, her eyes drifted shut, and all her bravado collapsed. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she whispered. “My father . . . he found birth control pills in my underwear drawer, and it made him crazy. Then he found my diary . . . and read that, too.” Catherine swallowed. “It was only pretend. I mean, we all had crushes on Coach. When my boyfriend broke up with me . . . Coach took extra care to make sure I was okay, to let me cry on his shoulder. I pretended it was because he liked me, you know, that way, a little. So I wrote about him. I wrote about us.”

“Fiction,” Addie said, to clarify, and Catherine nodded miserably. “And when your father went to the police? Did you ever think that maybe you ought to tell them?”

“I did. But they all thought I was just trying to keep him out of jail because I loved him.” She dashed a tear from her cheek. “When I was lying, they hung on every word. And when I told the truth, no one listened.”

“Catherine-”

“I am so ashamed,” the girl whispered. “I am so sorry I did this to him.”

Addie fought for control. “Then help him now.”

“You’re the last guy I expected to see,” Charlie said, holding the door open so that Jordan could walk inside.

“That’s because I’m not here as an attorney,” Jordan answered. “Just as a dad.”

Charlie invited Jordan to sit down on a floral couch with an afghan hanging over the back. “That’s right. I forget you have a kid.”

“Bad news, I guess.” Jordan grinned. “We defense lawyers can procreate.”

That surprised a laugh out of Charlie. “Your boy’s in, what? His freshman year?”

“Yeah.” Jordan could feel himself sweating through the back of his short-sleeved polo shirt. He had absolutely no proof of what he was about to tell Charlie-this was a pure hunch, one that he hoped would prey on the detective’s parental sensibilities and net Jordan a windfall. Short of this white lie, he didn’t know how else to confirm his intuitions. “Charlie, first things first. This is all off the record, all right?”

The detective nodded slowly.

“My son-Thomas-has been seeing Chelsea Abrams.”

“Oh?” Charlie said easily. “She’s a sweet kid.”

“Yeah. Well, he certainly thinks so, anyway.” They both laughed. “This is a little awkward, Charlie,” Jordan said, exhaling heavily. “Thomas came home with some information I thought I should pass along.”

At that, Charlie sat up, immediately alert.

“Chelsea said that the night the girls were in the woods, they were doing drugs.”

Charlie didn’t move a muscle. “My daughter doesn’t . . . she wouldn’t do that.”

“I didn’t think so. And you have to know, given our circumstances right now, this was about the last thing I figured you’d want to hear from me. But as a father-well, hell, if someone knew that about Thomas, I’d want to be told.” He stood, wary of overstaying his welcome. “It’s probably a misunderstanding.”

“Probably.” Charlie led the way out of the house. He watched the lawyer walk down the slate path that led to the driveway. “Jordan.”

For a moment, the two men simply stared at each other.

“Thank you,” Charlie said.

As laboratory technician, Arthur Quince had enough trouble trying to keep afloat at Duncan Pharmaceuticals without investigators coming along to foul up the rhythm of his day. Especially investigators who arrived with a light in their eyes, intent on linking your place of business to a crime. First the rape of his boss’s daughter, and now a drug case right here in Salem Falls? What was this world coming to?

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you,” Arthur told Selena Damascus. “On any given week, we might be making six drugs at a time.”

“Like which six?”

Jesus, the woman was like a dog with a bone. Arthur punched up records on his computer and pointed to the screen. “Recently, we’ve been making fentanyl citrate, lidocaine hydrochloride, and phenobarbital sodium.”

“What about before that?”

He scrolled up to the previous three-week period, starting the week of April 24. “Acyclovir, pemoline, risedronate, and atropine were in various stages of production.”

“Are any of those hallucinogens?”

“We’re not in the habit of making drugs that are sold on the street.”

“I understand. That’s why it’s imperative that Duncan Pharmaceuticals be ruled out as the source of the substance we’re investigating.” Selena lowered her voice. “Look, Dr. Quince, I don’t think you guys are responsible. But you find something like this in the halls of Salem Falls High . . . in the same town where there’s a pharmaceutical company . . . well, to cover all of our own asses, if you’ll excuse my language, we have to just make sure we’re not talking about the same stuff.” She turned her attention to the screen again. “How come that one has a star next to it?”

Arthur looked where she was pointing. “Duncan Pharmaceuticals is introducing a new homeopathic line-prescription drugs derived from all-natural sources instead of chemical ones. The atropine was one of the drugs in that focus group.”

Selena hiked herself up on a stool beside him. “Natural sources? Where does it come from?”

“The belladonna plant.”

“Belladonna?”

“That’s right. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s extremely poisonous.”

“Can you overdose on it?”

Immediately, Arthur bristled. “Almost any drug on the market has adverse effects, Ms. Damascus.”

“What would some of these adverse effects be?”

“Confusion. Agitation.” Arthur sighed. “Delirium.”

“Delirium? So it is a hallucinogen.”

At that moment, Amos Duncan entered the lab. Noticing Selena, he did a double take. He’d seen her around town, certainly, but because Selena had known better than to try to talk to Amos directly, there was no way he’d know she was there on Jordan’s behalf. “Arthur,” he boomed, walking toward them. “I need to speak to you.”

“Ms. Damascus was just leaving,” Arthur hurried to explain. “She’s here gathering information for a drug case.”

In spite of what Arthur had thought, this information didn’t make Amos the least bit nervous, as if he knew how tight a ship he ran. “You work for Charlie Saxton? You’ve got my sympathy!” Amos said, but he was grinning. Selena grinned right back. If he wanted to mistakenly believe she was a local cop, she wasn’t going to be the one to correct him.

No, he’d figure it out for himself when he saw her in the courtroom.

They wandered through the aisles of the music store, clicking their fingernails on CDs arranged neatly as teeth. Without any conscious effort, other eyes gravitated toward these girls, light to a black hole. And how couldn’t you look? Such ripe beauty, bursting at the seams; such confidence, left behind them as sure as footprints.

Chelsea, Meg, and Whitney were oblivious to the power of their attraction. They shopped aimlessly, each of them as aware of their missing mate as a soldier with pain in a phantom limb.

Meg tripped and knocked over an entire display of CDs. “Oh, gosh. Let me help,” she said in apology to the pimpled employee who came to clean up.

“Fucking cow,” he muttered.

Whitney turned, hands on her hips. “What did you say?”

Reddening, the boy didn’t look up.

“Listen here, you little toad,” Whitney whispered fiercely. “With a snap of my fingers, I could make your dick curl up and rot.”

The kid snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“Maybe I’m bluffing. And then again, maybe I’m a witch.” Whitney smiled sweetly. “You wanna stick around and take that chance?”

The employee scurried into the back room. “Whit,” Meg chided. “I don’t think you should have done that.”

“Why not?” She shrugged. “He was pissing me off. And besides, I could do it, too, if I wanted.”

“You don’t know that,” Chelsea said. “And even if you could, you’re not supposed to. Magick isn’t about getting rid of everything blocking your path.”

“Says who? Healing’s boring. So is all that crap about moon cycles. Now that we’ve figured out spells, we’re supposed to just keep them all inside us?”

“It’s safer that way.” Chelsea shrugged. “Fewer people get hurt.”

Whitney laughed. “That little asshole made fun of Meg. Just like Hailey McCourt.”

“She’s better now,” Meg pointed out. “And nicer.”

“She learned a lesson, thanks to us.” Whit stared in the direction the boy had fled. “The little weasel deserves to be humiliated.”

“And what about Jack St. Bride?”

The question, which fell from Chelsea’s mouth like a burning match, devoured the air between them. “Jesus,” Whitney managed finally. “I don’t think this is a public conversation, Chels.”

But now that it had burst from her, Chelsea couldn’t stop. She held her hand up over her mouth, and still the words bled through. “Don’t you wonder, Whit? Don’t you think about it all the time?”

“I do,” Meg murmured. “I can’t get it off my mind.”

Chelsea stared at Whitney. “Gillian’s not here now,” she said. “She’s never going to know what we talk about. And even if you won’t admit it, Whit, you know that we shouldn’t have-”

“-been discussing this,” Whitney said firmly. She surreptitiously slid a CD into her macrame purse and made her way out of the store, fully expecting her friends to follow her lead.

Charlie knew better. As a detective, the rules of evidence . . . and the methods of their collection . . . had been drilled into him for years. There had been recent cases where evidence was ruled inadmissible when taken without a teenager’s consent from a room within his parents’ house. Drug evidence.

“What are you doing?”

His wife’s voice startled him out of his reverie, and he nearly stumbled out of Meg’s closet. “Just looking,” Charlie managed.

Barbara didn’t bat an eyelash. “For a corduroy skirt?”

He looked at the hanger clutched in his hands. “For a shirt. One Meg borrowed.”

“Oh,” Barbara said. “Try the dresser. Third drawer down.”

She left, and Charlie rested his head against the closet door. He didn’t want Barbara to know what he was searching for. Didn’t want to admit he was doubting his daughter.

He fingered a worn friendship bracelet tied around the knob of the door-striped red and blue and green, it was one Meg had made her first summer at sleep-away camp. She’d called home crying every hour of the first two days, insisting that keeping her there was a form of child abuse. But by the time Charlie and Barbara had driven up to Maine to get her, Meggie had settled in, and she sheepishly told them to go on home.

Kneeling, Charlie rummaged through nearly untouched sports paraphernalia-it’d taken him nearly a decade to learn that his little girl was never going to be a willing athlete-and shoes several sizes too small. There was a teddy bear with an eye missing and a poster Meg had made for a school project about the New Hampshire state bird, the purple finch. There was an old pink ballet bag and an assortment of dolls she had outgrown but couldn’t bear to give away. Charlie smiled and reached for one, a naked baby with yellow hair and one stuck glass eye. A girl who sentimentally saved things like this wouldn’t hide drugs from her father, would she?

He had seen enough teen drug cases in Salem Falls to know they followed a pattern: Either the child and the parents had a complete lack of communication between them or the child was resentful of the parents or the parents were too self-absorbed to really see what their child had turned into. None of that fit the bill for himself and Meg-they’d always been closer than most parents and kids. This was something McAfee had misunderstood. Maybe his kid had heard wrong. Maybe Chelsea, for whatever reason, had been lying.

Satisfied, Charlie went to stuff Meg’s mess back into the closet in as disorganized a fashion as possible, lest she realize someone had been snooping through her things. In went the teddy bear, the hockey stick, the Rollerblades. He lifted the ballet bag and felt his hand close around something cylindrical and firm.

Ballet clothes, ballet shoes, ballet tights-everything in that bag ought to be soft.

Charlie unzipped the pink bag. Reaching inside, he pulled out a length of silver ribbon, long and silky. He removed a small stack of plastic cups and a thermos.

The cups and the thermos were empty, except for what looked like a residue of white powder. Cocaine? Charlie sniffed it, then touched his pinky finger to the powder and lifted it up to his tongue to taste.

It was probably nothing.

Weary, he ran a hand down his face and rubbed his tired eyes. He would get it tested anyway, just to put his mind at ease. He had a buddy at the state lab who could run a tox screen-and who owed him a favor.

That was what Charlie was thinking moments later when his pupils became so dilated he could not see.

As the wiper blades on Addie’s car whispered rumors to each other, she drove aimlessly through the streets of Salem Falls. She needed to go home and unpack; she needed to get back to the diner as quickly as possible. But she found herself standing instead in the narrow plastic coffin of a phone booth, scanning the tattered white pages of the phone book for the street address of Jordan McAfee.

A few minutes later, a black woman opened the door of the house at the address she’d found. “I-I’m sorry . . .” Addie stammered. “I think I have the wrong address.” She headed into the driving rain, only to be called back.

“Addie Peabody, isn’t it?” When Addie nodded, the woman smiled. “My name’s Selena, and no, I’m not the maid. Come on in and wait out the storm.”

It wasn’t until she stepped inside that Addie remembered where she’d seen her before. “You came to the diner,” she said out loud. “You ordered hot water with lemon.”

“Damn, that’s impressive!” Selena said, taking Addie’s slicker. “Jordan’s due back soon. I know he’d like to talk to you. If you want, you’re welcome to wait here with me.”

Addie sat down on an overstuffed couch in the living room. “I’m here because of Jack St. Bride.”

“I see.”

“He didn’t do it,” Addie said.

Selena sat down on the edge of the coffee table. “Do you have an alibi for him?”

“No. It’s just . . . I know he’s innocent.” She sat forward, her hands twisted in her lap. “I went to find out about his previous conviction, up in Loyal. And that girl . . . the one he supposedly seduced . . . she was lying. She never had a relationship with Jack.”

“Is she willing to testify to that?”

“No,” Addie whispered.

Selena’s eyes softened. Addie’s feelings were written all over her, clear as permanent marker on her pale skin. “This may seem like I’m prying, Ms.-”

“Addie, please.”

“Addie. Why didn’t you come to us two weeks ago?”

For a long time, Addie didn’t answer. Then, she quietly explained, “I needed to see for myself first if Jack was the man I made him out to be.”

Selena thought of the morning she’d told Jordan that she would not marry him. And of every single morning since then, when she’d second-guessed herself. “I know you’d like to help, but without an alibi, there’s not too much you can add to his case.”

“That’s not why I came,” Addie said. “I was hoping that you could help me.”

“Saxton here.”

“Hey, Charlie, it’s me.”

Charlie froze. There was only one reason Albert Ozmander would have been calling, and it directly involved the thermos Charlie had seized from his daughter’s room. Not that Oz knew where the thermos came from. As far as the toxicologist was concerned, this was just a routine workup on some evidence in an unnamed case.

He felt his foot tapping so nervously beneath his desk that he had to physically restrain himself with his own hand. “Got a match for you,” Oz said, “but it’s a weird one. Don’t ask me why the kids in your town aren’t smoking pot or doing coke like the rest of the free world, Charlie, but this stuff tested positive for atropine sulfate.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Yeah, you have. It’s a drug used to control digestive tract problems, among other things. You ever taken Lomotil?”

Once, God, yes, when he and Barbara had visited Mexico and got sick as dogs. Charlie squirmed just remembering it. “Why would kids try to get off on an antidiarrheal?”

“Because if you take enough of it, it’ll make you high. I’m sending the results right now.” The fax beeped on in the corner of Charlie’s office; he watched the paper curl its way out and somersault into the wire bin beneath.

“Thanks, Oz,” Charlie said, and hung up the phone. He sat at his desk, hands covering his face. Meg, who had never lied to her father in her life; Meg, for whom he would tilt the world on its axis . . . Meg had somehow come to be in possession of this drug.

His heart sank so low that it changed his center of gravity, and Charlie had to fight his way upright so that he could reach the buttons of his phone. “Matt,” he said, when the prosecutor answered, “we have to talk.”

Jack dragged himself through the gray halls, trailing the officer who led him to the conference room where Jordan was waiting. The trial was only days away; no doubt his attorney had come with the prosecution’s plea. Not that Jack was going to accept. He would stand up and hear a guilty verdict read twenty times by the jury, but he wasn’t giving up his own freedom like an extra piece of gum he’d never miss. If they wanted him, they’d get him . . . kicking and screaming all the way to the appellate court.

“Save your breath,” he said to Jordan, as the CO opened the door. “I’m not-” He stopped abruptly as he realized that Jordan was not the only one there. Sitting beside him, looking fragile and tired and so beautiful it made his stomach ache, was Addie.

Jordan stood up, sending ripples through Jack’s shock. “How did you-”

“Happy birthday,” Jordan said.

“It’s not my birthday.”

“I know,” Jordan admitted, and he left the conference room.

Jack didn’t know what to do. The last time he had seen Addie was during his arrest. He took a step toward her, his heart racing.

He had shamelessly used Addie during these weeks in jail, in solitary. She was the image his mind turned to for comfort. She was the reason he could survive in a cell-because presumably, one day, he would be able to get out and explain.

What if she had come to tell him she never wanted to speak to him again?

Addie turned away, and that stopped Jack in his tracks as effectively as any gate. “Don’t.” She closed her eyes and began to speak. “I’m so sorry, Jack. That morning when Charlie showed up and started saying things, I shouldn’t have heard him. I shouldn’t have heard him, because I was supposed to be too busy listening to you.”

“Addie-”

“Let me finish. Please.” She looked down at her hands. “I went to Loyal. I met Catherine. She . . . she’s a very pretty girl.” Jack remained absolutely still. “I’m ashamed that I even had to go there. I wish I could have just looked up at Charlie that morning and told him he had the wrong man. I wish I could turn back time and do it all over again . . . differently . . . except for one thing.” She looked up, smiling through her tears. “A very wise man once told me that you can’t look back-you just have to put the past behind you, and find something better in your future.”

And then he was in her arms, burying his face in the sweet fall of her hair and holding tight to the only anchor he had. His lips moved over her skin, her sorrow tightening his own throat. He swallowed, then whispered, “Do you think I did it?”

Addie cupped his cheek. “How can you know so much and not know the answer to that?”

Jack had been a hero in so many walks of life-academically, physically, socially. He knew what it was like to be the one other heads turned to follow, and he understood how far a fall it was from such a pedestal. But until this moment, when Addie handed over her trust like the keys to a golden city, Jack had never felt such honor.

“I wish you didn’t have to see me here. Like this.”

“I’m not. I’m seeing you stretched out on a picnic blanket in my backyard with an entire feast you’ve cooked just for me.” Addie smiled at him. “And I’m seeing me wearing . . . nope, I don’t think I’m going to tell you.”

“That’s cruel.”

“Guess you’ll have to get out of here and see for yourself.”

He pulled Addie close again and held her until their hearts tuned together in perfect pitch. Then Jack spoke softly, so that his words were nothing more than a thought set on the shell of Addie’s ear. “About the past,” he whispered. “I would do it all over. The conviction, the jail, the arrest-all of it-if that was the only way I’d get to meet you.”

Shadows chased across Addie’s face in the spectral shapes of her rape, her daughter, her mother. “Oh, Jack,” she said, her voice shaking. “I love you, too.”

The last week of June 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

You could fall asleep with your eyes open.

Meg knew this because sometimes, in school, she would be staring at a bug on the wall and suddenly class would be over. She didn’t sleep well at night anymore, because of the Memory. If her mind chose to zone out in broad daylight, it was all right with her.

Meg tried to make sure there was always something to focus on, other than That Night. But she couldn’t keep her father from talking about what he’d done for Matt Houlihan and who the witnesses were going to be at trial. She couldn’t stop her friends from whispering about it. All of it was pulling at Meg, ripping her apart at the seams.

She ran into the house and past her mother. This was her obsession, a Lady Macbeth spot check she did every afternoon when she came home. She flung open her bedroom door, gasping for breath, and stuck her head inside the closet.

“Margaret Anne Saxton,” her mother said from the doorway.

Meg startled, smashing her head on the wooden frame of the closet.

“Honey, are you all right?” Meg’s mother walked over and touched her forehead lightly, feeling for fever, or maybe insanity. “You look like you’re being chased by the hounds of hell.”

“No hounds,” Meg managed, with a weak smile. “Only a heap of homework.”

“I’m worried about you. You don’t look right.” She glanced at Meg’s clothing. “You’re losing weight.”

“Jesus, Mom, you’ve been suggesting I go on a diet for years.”

“I never said that. I only felt that with a face as lovely as yours, you might want not to draw attention away from it.”

Meg rolled her eyes. “I love you too, Ma,” she said dryly. “Now can I please have some privacy? For once?”

The moment her mother closed the door, Meg dove into the closet. On her hands and knees, she tossed aside her dolls and shoes . . . but the ballet bag that had been there just yesterday afternoon was missing. “Oh, shit,” she whispered, and then felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up.

Her father had quietly opened the door of her bedroom and now leaned against it, holding the pink sack. “Looking for this?”

Meg hung her head. Just shoot me, she thought.

He came into the room, closed the door, and sat down on the floor across from her. “You want to talk first, or should I?”

Suddenly, Meg felt herself dissolve. From the inside out, like those disgusting bacteria in sci-fi movies that leave people with Jell-O instead of organs. She felt her mind go blank.

“Meggie,” her father said, in a voice so quiet it made her ache, “did you bring drugs to the woods that night?”

Meg shook her head, stunned. That thermos . . . the one Gillian had brought filled with iced tea . . . it had been full of drugs?

And her father believed that Meg was responsible.

Memories chased each other at the heels: the forest shimmying that night before her eyes; the white blanks still crowding out huge blocks of time in her mind; the four of them, hysterical and sobbing, when her father had found them. Suddenly, the dam burst. In her life, Meg had never cried like this, sobbing until she shook, until she couldn’t make any sound at all, until her mother raced into the room in a panic. “Charlie,” she heard her mother say, from a tunnel of distance. “Do something!”

Meg cried for Gillian, for the expression on her father’s face, for what she was beginning to remember. She flung her arms wide and kicked at whoever came close to her.

In the end, a paramedic gave her a shot of Haldol. She drifted back to earth like one of the flowers that had fallen from the dogwood that night. Her father’s strong arms were wrapped tight around her, and his coffee breath fell onto her cheek. “Meggie,” he said, his voice broken. “Who?”

They were not speaking of the same thing, not at all, and in some small corner of her mind Meg knew this. But as her eyes drifted shut, as she fell headfirst into that night again, she murmured, “It could have been me.”

It was the first time that Gillian had been in Matt Houlihan’s office without her father sitting beside her. Granted, he was only a hundred feet away in the waiting room, maybe even had his ear pressed to the door, but the privacy was empowering. “I hope you feel comfortable being here alone with me,” Houlihan said.

What a sensitive guy, Gillian thought. Making sure the rape victim isn’t threatened by a Big Bad Male and a small closed room. She looked into her lap. “I’m okay,” she said.

“The reason I asked to speak to you without your father present is because of some new evidence that I thought you might feel more comfortable discussing in private.”

Every cell in Gillian’s body went on alert. She froze, waiting for him to speak again.

“Detective Saxton found a thermos and some cups in his daughter’s room, Gillian. Meg said they belonged to you.”

Gillian was so relieved that this was the crucial evidence, she nearly laughed out loud. “That’s true.”

“Did the residue of drugs in the thermos and cups belong to you, too?”

Gillian blinked. “What drugs?”

“Atropine. It’s a prescription drug . . . that can also make you high.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“Well, according to Meg, you’re the one who brought the drinks that night. Atropine and all.”

The bitch. “Meg said that?” Gilly managed, her voice so tight she thought her vocal cords might snap like the strings of a rock guitar. “I would never bring drugs. I would never do drugs.” She laughed, but it sounded forced. “Mr. Houlihan, I’ve grown up around pharmaceuticals my whole life. My first memory is of my dad telling me to say no to drugs.” She looked toward the waiting room. “Go ask him if you don’t believe me.”

“If you didn’t bring the atropine, who did?”

“I have no idea,” Gillian said. “Probably Meg.”

“Meg’s father is a policeman. Presumably, she’s heard the same party line as you.”

“That’s not my problem,” she snapped.

Houlihan sighed. “I couldn’t care less who’s the dealer here, Gillian. That’s not in the least important to my case. What I need to know is if you drank any of the tea that night.”

Before Gilly could answer, the telephone rang. The county attorney picked it up, spoke for a moment, and then turned, apologetic. “I have to see someone before they go off to trial,” he explained. “Will you excuse me?”

Two seconds later, Gillian was alone in the office.

Had she taken the drugs that night? Well, of course. But hearing that wasn’t going to make Houlihan happy. Someone who took a hallucinogen wasn’t a reliable eyewitness.

Then again, it had been nearly six weeks. No drug stayed in your system that long, especially one ingested in such a small volume. Houlihan could draw blood this instant and never know if Gillian was lying.

The ER had drawn blood.

The memory hit her; the doctor drawing vial after vial. Chewing on her bottom lip, Gillian stared at the folder on Houlihan’s desk.

It took her less than a second to decide to open it. The front page gave the lab results from the rape kit. She skimmed the odd numbers and phrases until she came to the typing for VICTIM, KNOWN SAMPLE. And all the drugs for which she had tested negative.

Atropine wasn’t on the list . . . but it hadn’t been flagged in her system, either.

She slid the folder back on the edge of the leather blotter just as Houlihan came in. “I didn’t drink anything,” Gilly said.

“You’re absolutely certain?”

“Yes. Meg borrowed my thermos, but she brought iced tea. I hate iced tea.”

The lawyer studied her, then nodded, satisfied. He opened a drawer of his butt-ugly metal desk and began to unravel a silver ribbon. “You have any idea what this is?”

“No,” she said, letting it slide through her fingers. “Where did you find it?”

“With the thermos and cups.”

“Well,” Gillian shrugged. “Then it must be Meg’s, too.”

Addie came into the diner after the dinner rush to find Darla playing chess with her father in the kitchen. “You’re back,” Roy said.

An apron-her father was wearing an apron. Before she could get past this startling fact, Darla was in her face. “I had to work double shifts, on account of Delilah getting sick, and don’t think I’m not expecting time and a half.” Turning to Roy, she said, “Check,” and then sashayed into the front room.

“Look at you,” Addie said, swallowing past the sadness in her throat.

“Yeah.” Her father laughed, twirling like a beauty queen. “Go figure.”

“First time I up and leave, you go . . . you go . . .” That was as far as she got, and then the tears came. Exhausted, tired from putting on a brave face for Jack, she moved into her father’s embrace, which had always been the softest spot in the world.

“Ah, Addie,” he said. “I’m sorry about him.”

Addie drew back. “He’s innocent, Daddy.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“Because,” Addie said, “I’m the only one who thinks so.”

Roy walked to the stove, then poured her a bowl of potato leek soup. This he set down in front of his daughter with a spoon. “Eat,” he ordered.

“I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”

He lifted the spoon to her mouth, made the soup trickle down the constriction of her throat. “Isn’t that fine?”

Addie nodded and lifted the spoon herself. Meanwhile, Roy moved around his kitchen, heaping potatoes and steamed carrots, breads and stuffings and gravies, all onto a tremendous platter. He piled it high with starches and placed it in front of Addie.

This time, she didn’t even hesitate. She tucked into the meal with a hunger she had not even known she’d had, until her belly swelled. “Better?” he asked.

Addie realized she no longer hurt inside. She imagined all these soft foods, rices and puddings and couscous, forming an extra barrier within. Her father had filled her, because he knew better than anyone that the best way to prevent a heartache was to cushion the coming blow.

“Relax,” Gillian said, looking at each of her friends. “They don’t know anything.”

They were sitting in a small garden behind the Duncan household, one hidden from public view by a thicket of roses. “My dad is gonna kill me,” Chelsea said. “If he finds out there were drugs there-”

“Why were there drugs there?” Whitney demanded. “I’m a little curious, Gill, since you were the one responsible for bringing the refreshments.” The others looked at Gillian, too. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t have tried it . . . but I would have liked to have had the choice.”

“Whit, don’t be such a priss. It was a pinch of stuff, so little that it wouldn’t even affect you. God, you’d have gotten more of a buzz from a wine cooler.” Gillian stared intently at the others. “Think hard. Do any of you remember getting high that night?”

“I was dancing around without a shirt on,” Whitney hissed.

“Before you drank a damn thing,” Gilly pointed out.

Meg’s eyes were dark, striped with betrayal. “My dad says it screws up the case.”

“Matt Houlihan doesn’t think so,” Gillian said.

“Only because you told him that the drugs were mine. If a jury hears that you were stoned, they’re not going to believe anything you say.”

“I wasn’t stoned, Meg. No more than you were.”

“Then how come I have to be the fall guy?”

Gillian narrowed her eyes. “Because if you don’t, it’s going to hurt all of us.”

“Says who?”

The other girls shrank back at Meg’s response. You didn’t cross Gilly. Everyone knew that.

“Look, Meg, this isn’t about you or me; it’s about sticking together so that our stories match. The minute that starts to fall apart, so does everything else.” Gillian swallowed, her throat working.

“You aren’t the only one who can’t forget that night. But the difference between us is that you don’t want to.” Meg’s hands closed into fists. “You are so fucking full of it, Gillian. If I tell my father I never saw the thermos before, you think he’ll assume we’re witches? No, he’ll believe exactly what I tell him . . . that you brought it so we could get high.”

Gillian went white. “You wouldn’t, Meg.”

“Why not?” Meg said, pushing her way out of the rose arbor. “You did it to me.”

“That,” Matt sighed, “is heaven. Do it again.”

In her stocking feet, Sydney Houlihan gingerly stepped on the small of her husband’s back. He grunted, his face ground into the carpet. Beside them, in her baby seat, Molly clapped. “I don’t think this is the smartest thing for her to see,” Sydney said.

“What? Mommy walking all over Daddy? She’s a little young for metaphors.” Matt grunted as Sydney hit a particularly sore spot. “You know why I married you?”

“Because I was the only woman who agreed to this kinky stuff?”

“Because you weigh exactly the right amount.”

Sydney carefully stepped onto the carpet and sat down cross-legged. “So what was it this time?”

“What was what?”

“Your back always gets pretzeled when you’re stressed out about a case.”

Matt rolled over. “Married you for your ESP, too.” He drew his knees up, stretching muscles along his spine. “Gillian’s friends were taking drugs the night of the rape.”

“And Gillian?”

“Said she wasn’t.”

Sydney shrugged. “So?”

“Well, no matter what, it’s exculpatory. I have to turn it over to the defense.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that she was raped, does it?”

“No,” Matt said slowly.

Sydney raised her brows. “You think she’s lying to you.”

“Ah, hell.” Matt got to his feet and started pacing. “I don’t know. She said it was her thermos but that Charlie’s daughter brought the stuff. And that she didn’t drink anything that night because she wasn’t thirsty. I can probably get Meg to admit to procuring the drugs when I put her on the stand. But still . . . there were five cups there with residue in them-one for each of the girls and one for St. Bride. McAfee is going to be all over this.”

“Maybe it was poured for her but she didn’t drink it.”

“Maybe.”

Sydney was quiet for a moment. “Do you think she was lying about the rape, too?”

He shook his head. “I’ve got too much evidence. The blood on her shirt, the scratches on his face, the semen.”

She wrapped her arms around Matt’s waist. “You never liked sharing your toys.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’re growling because you have to turn over something that hurts your case.”

“But it doesn’t,” Matt argued. “Sure, it doesn’t make Gillian look like an angel . . . but I can still get St. Bride convicted.”

Sydney leaned up and kissed his chin. “Don’t you feel better now?”

To his surprise, Matt realized he did. His back wasn’t aching, and for the first time all day, he was itching to just get this case to trial already. “That’s the third reason I married you,” he said, and stamped a kiss on her mouth.

“Five cups don’t mean squat, Jordan,” Selena argued.

“Reasonable doubt. All I have to do is plant the seed.”

“I don’t care if you plant a whole frigging tree. You can’t say that just because a cup was there that a kid drank out of it. Your car’s in the garage. Does that mean I drive it?”

Thomas looked up from the kitchen table, where he was struggling through a trigonometry proof. “Could you two take this somewhere else?”

But neither Jordan nor Selena paid him any attention. “If I say that Gillian lied about taking drugs, it suggests that she lied about a number of things. Including this rape.”

“Jordan, listen to yourself! Matt Houlihan could drive a freight train through the holes in that argument.”

“You got anything better?” Jordan snapped. “Because I don’t. I have a client who says the victim came onto him, but he can’t offer us any more details. I have proof that the victim is into some pretty strange shit, but discrediting her isn’t going to acquit Jack. Which means, for God’s sake, that if all I have to throw at Goliath is a fucking pebble, I’m going to wind up my arm as best I can.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Thomas muttered. He started gathering his books and papers together, intent on moving to a quieter area. Like maybe a blasting zone.

Suddenly, all the fire went out of Jordan. He sank into a chair across from Thomas and rested his head in his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m being an idiot.”

“No argument here,” Selena said.

“It’s just that I only have four days, Selena, and then we’re standing up in front of the judge. And everything you’ve turned up in the past week-well, God, it’s fantastic. But I went into this assuming that I was trying a simple case-girl says guy raped her, guy has a previous conviction. Indictment, arraignment, trial. And suddenly, every time I turn around, there’s something new-this witch stuff, and the drugs, and evidence that doesn’t match up. This isn’t the case I thought I had.” He pressed his thumb and forefinger deep into the sockets of his eyes. “I want a year to prepare. Then the next second, I don’t, because at the rate we’re going we’ll probably find out that Gillian’s got connections to the Sicilian mob.”

“Nah. Although I did turn up something about her being a presidential intern.”

“Not funny,” Jordan muttered. “I have no idea what to say happened that night.”

“Jack was beaten up badly hours before. You could say he was in too sorry a physical state to commit the crime.”

“But not so sorry a physical state that he couldn’t manage to get to a bar and drink himself sick.” Jordan shook his head. “I can defuse what the girl says, but I can’t refute it. The only pieces of that night Jack can recall are laughable. Ribbons and bonfires and naked teenagers-”

“Naked?” Thomas squeaked. “Chelsea was naked?”

“How am I supposed to get a jury to buy that? And then to vote for an acquittal?”

“That’s why you need proof, Jordan,” Selena said gently. “Reasonable doubt works most of the time . . . but like you said, the alternative you’re proposing is so strange that it’s still going to be hard to swallow. You need to hand the jury your own evidence, so that they know Gillian was playing witch in the forest that night. And a cup doesn’t cut it.”

Thomas stacked his books and headed down the hall. “See you,” he muttered. “I’m sure you’ll really miss me being in here.”

“I know,” Jordan sighed. “But if she took the atropine, it was nearly two months ago. The half-life of the drug is about six hours. It’s not like we can get a sample of her blood tonight and still find it swimming around in there.”

“We should have had her blood screened by a private lab right after Jack’s arrest. What were we thinking?”

Jordan met her gaze. “That she was telling the truth.”

Thomas’s voice floated down the hall. “You did have her screened,” he called out. “In the ER.”

“Routine drug tests don’t show atropine.”

“So . . . why couldn’t you try it again with some fancy test? What did they do with the blood when they were done?”

“It went off to the state lab with the rest of the rape kit,” Jordan explained, and suddenly his jaw dropped. “Holy shit, the rape kit. The known samples they used to type DNA came from blood that was taken that night.”

“And they save that stuff.” Selena was already out of her seat. “How fast can you get the judge to sign off on a motion for independent testing?”

Jordan reached for the briefcase that held his laptop. “Watch me,” he said.

Roman Chu had started Twin States Forensic Testing in a clean room partitioned off in his parents’ garage. Having cultivated a reputation for getting things done in a fraction of the time it took the state lab to do them, he generated enough work to pay for his own building, and to hire ten employees who worked miracles for attorneys at the eleventh hour.

“I appreciate this,” Jordan said for the twentieth time.

After the judge had granted the motion, Selena had secured Gillian’s blood sample from the state lab. The prep work had been done during DNA analysis: The blood had been spun down and separated from the cells, the serum frozen. All Roman had to do was run the mass spectrometry. Now, they both stared at the computer, waiting for the results. “I want Cuban cigars,” Roman muttered. “Not that crap from Florida you got me last year.”

“You got it.”

“And I’m still charging you for overtime.”

The screen blinked green, and suddenly a stream of numbers came up. Roman grabbed a reference text and compared it to what was on the computer, then whistled softly.

“Translate,” Jordan demanded.

Roman pointed a finger at the percentiles. “The blood’s got atropine in it.”

“You’re certain?”

“Oh, yeah. The drug concentration’s so high I’m surprised it didn’t put her into a coma.”

Jordan crossed his arms. “So what do you think the physical effect was?”

Roman laughed. “Buddy,” he said, “she was tripping.”

For the first time in nearly a decade, Addie took a lunch break during lunch hours. With Delilah and her father sharing the kitchen and Darla waiting tables, Addie had found herself wandering around useless. She would have gone to see Jack, but visiting hours were not until tomorrow-the night before the trial started. So instead, she went to see Chloe.

“This,” Addie said, “was your favorite kind of day.” She set a small nosegay of Queen Anne’s lace in front of Chloe’s gravestone. “Do you remember when we used to pretend it was summer, in the middle of January? With a beach blanket picnic, and the heat turned up, and you and me in our bathing suits in the bathtub.” She touched the granite slab. It was warm from the sun, nearly as warm as a child’s skin. “Is it summer all the time up there, Chlo?” she whispered.

What she wished, more than anything, was that she had a store of memories like those. Losing Chloe had been like reading a wonderful book only to realize that all the pages past a certain point were blank. Addie had been cheated out of watching her daughter get her first training bra, helping her choose a prom dress, seeing her eyes darken the first time she spoke of a boy she loved. She missed driving her to the high school, and getting ice cream cones and swapping halfway through to try the other flavor. She missed talking, and hearing an answer back.

“Miz Peabody?”

The sound of a girl’s voice startled Addie so much she whirled around to find its source. Meg Saxton stood a few feet away, looking just as surprised as Addie.

“Meg . . . I didn’t know you were here.”

There was a wall between them, invisible but thick. The last time Addie had spoken privately to Meg was at Chloe’s funeral. Meg and Chloe had played together on the swing set in her yard. But here Meg was, all grown up, and Chloe was dead.

“How . . . have you been?” Addie asked politely.

“Fine,” Meg answered. Silence sprouted. “Did you come to visit her?”

They both turned toward the gravestone, as if expecting Chloe to appear. “I wish I’d known her,” Meg confessed. “I mean, she was older than me, but I think . . . I think if things had been different, we could have been friends.”

“I think Chloe would have liked that,” Addie said softly. Tears filled the young girl’s eyes, and she turned away, trying to hide. “Meg? Are you all right?”

“No!” Meg cried, a sob hitching the word in half. “Oh, God.”

Instinctively, Addie reached for her, and the contact was electric. Meg smelled of shampoo and cheap cosmetics and childhood, and Addie was overwhelmed by the shape and feel of a girl roughly the same age as Chloe. So this is what it would have been like, she thought, her eyes drifting closed.

Meg whispered so quietly that Addie didn’t believe she had heard correctly. “She’s so lucky.”

“Who is?”

“Chloe.”

Addie’s hands stilled. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do.” Meg wiped at her face with the bottom of her T-shirt. “I wish I were dead.”

It hit Addie then, what Meg had been doing at the cemetery. She had come back to the spot where the alleged assault had occurred. Jack hadn’t done it-she knew this as surely as she knew that Chloe was buried close by-but something had rattled Meg that night, all the same.

Addie squeezed Meg’s shoulders. “I think we should go. This place has bad memories for both of us.”

Meg reluctantly glanced in the direction of the clearing. “Ms. Peabody,” she whispered, miserable. “I think . . . I think he touched me, too.”

“Touched . . . you?” Addie said, the words round, with no sound behind them.

“Touched me,” Meg repeated, mortified. “You know.” And God help her, Addie did.

In the end, it came down to this: Being a mother was something that stayed with you, dormant, ready to flare at a single match-stroke of circumstance. And apparently it didn’t matter if the child was one of your body or just one with a place in your heart-instinct was instinct.

Addie loved Jack. She believed him when he said he hadn’t attacked Gillian Duncan. But she was a mother, and she knew what had to be done. So she took Meg to Charlie’s office at the police station and closed the door behind them. She kept her expression blank. Then, holding Meg’s hand tight for moral support, she listened as this girl-this friend of her daughter’s-told Charlie what she’d told Addie minutes before.

Charlie knew the floor was stable, but he could feel it rocking beneath his feet. He cleared his throat for the hundredth time and swallowed, then turned on the tape recorder that sat between himself and his daughter.

Meggie was shivering, although she wore the blue uniform jacket that usually hung on the back of his office door. Her hands fell at elbow-length in the jacket, and it made him think of how he and Barb would dress her up when she was just a baby, crazy angel wings made out of real feathers and soft headbands with antennae, things like that that were immortalized in dusty photo albums.

Oh, Christ.

“Where, um, did he touch you?”

She couldn’t look him in the eye, and that was fine, because Charlie couldn’t look at her, either. “Here. And here.”

“The victim,” Charlie said thickly, “is indicating her left hip and breast.”

Every muscle in his body was rigid with tension. How was he going to tell Barbara about this? How was he ever going to finish? You could not be a detective when you wanted so badly to be simply a father.

“Charlie.” Houlihan’s voice fell heavily. “You don’t have to do this.”

Charlie shook his head tightly. “Meg, did Jack St. Bride expose himself to you?”

“No,” his daughter whispered.

“Did he touch you anywhere else? In any other way?”

“Did any part of his body come in contact with part of yours?” Matt asked quietly.

“Jesus Christ!” Charlie was out of his seat, punching the button on the tape recorder to shut it off. Why couldn’t you rewind your own life? He paced to the far end of the room, Matt coming up beside him. “My little girl,” Charlie choked. “He did this to my little girl.”

“We’ll get him,” Matt promised. “We’ll press charges for this, too.”

Nodding, Charlie started back to the table, only to be restrained by Matt. “No,” the county attorney said. “Let me.”

Molly lay curled like a fiddlehead against her flannel crib sheets, her thumb tucked in her mouth as she slept. Matt stared down at her and could easily imagine the kind of pain that Charlie was in right now. God, if someone ever did anything to his child, he couldn’t be held accountable for his actions.

This latest drama was not what Matt needed the night before the trial began. But Meg’s accusations would be a different case, brought before a different judge on a different day . . . if there was enough evidence to try it. He would never have told Charlie, but part of Matt had to wonder how reliable Meg’s tearful confession was. She had already been taking hallucinogenic drugs that night. . . . It was possible that this alleged assault was imagined.

And that was how it affected his current case-he could no longer risk Meg as a witness. If she testified to bringing the drugs and then confessed to being attacked, too, would the jury believe her? And if they didn’t, would they still believe Gillian?

Matt couldn’t say for sure whether Meg was going to help or hurt the case. He didn’t need her to convict Jack St. Bride; therefore, he would simply omit her. He’d call Chelsea Abrams up for her eyewitness account, instead . . . and if her story didn’t match quite as neatly with Whitney O’Neill’s as Meg’s had, it was still less of a gamble with the jury.

Matt touched his hand lightly to the sweet globe of his daughter’s head. “Good night,” he whispered, but for long minutes afterward, he made no move to leave her.

The moon slipped over the windowsill and beneath the covers, but Jordan and Selena didn’t notice. Selena stared down at her arms, tangled with Jordan’s just below her breasts. “What are you thinking?”

“That I plead temporary insanity.”

“Ah.” Selena turned in his embrace. “Feeling guilty?”

“No. I feel . . . I feel . . .”

She swatted at his hand. “Yeah, I see what you feel.” Laughing, she darted out of the way. “Get out of there.”

“That’s not what you said ten minutes ago.”

“Maybe I’m pleading temporary insanity, too.”

They had fallen asleep sitting on the couch, watching reruns of Perry Mason on TVLand. Somehow, when they’d awakened, they’d been lying down in each other’s arms, pressed together from chest to thigh. It was all the impetus they needed; a subliminal reminder that no matter how hard they tried, they weren’t meant to be apart. From there, they’d been lucky to make it to the privacy of a bedroom.

“Hey, Selena?”

“Mmm?”

“Why didn’t we do this a month ago?”

“Oh, take your pick: We were smarter then. We had better self-control.”

Jordan looked at her soberly. “You really think that?”

For once, she had no smart answer. “Actually,” Selena admitted, “I don’t.” She stared at him. “How do you think this will all turn out?”

Jordan shook his head. “I have no idea.”

Selena smiled against his chest. “Are you talking about us, or the case?”

“Either one.” He sighed, choosing the easier route of conversation. “All we’ve really been able to prove is that she’s a witch.”

“A witch on drugs. I’ve thought about it,” Selena confessed. “And I can explain away just about all the evidence, and clear Jack in my head. Except for that semen. That’s not something you leave behind while you’re just chatting it up with someone.”

“The semen’s the most inconclusive evidence Houlihan’s got. A jury will see that.”

“You hope.”

“I hope.”

“Jack could still be lying to you,” Selena pointed out.

“So could Gillian Duncan.”

They were quiet for a while, soaking up the heat and the memory of each other’s bodies. “Speaking of lies,” Selena whispered. “I have to tell you something.”

Jordan came up on one elbow. “What?”

“My car was ready two weeks ago.”

“I have to tell you something, too.” His teeth flashed in the darkness. “Your car would have been ready five weeks ago, but I paid the mechanic to say the part was delayed.”

Selena came up on an elbow. “You’d go to all that trouble to keep from losing your best investigator?”

Jordan leaned forward and kissed her lightly. “No,” he said. “I’d go to all that trouble to keep from losing you.”

They held hands across a cafeteria table, surrounded by men who had murdered others in fights and beaten their wives and burned houses to the ground with people still inside. A correctional officer stood guard. When Addie had first embraced Jack, the CO had tapped her on the shoulder and politely explained that sort of touching was not allowed.

Addie looked at the couple beside them. The man had a snake tattooed around his neck. His visitor was a woman with spiked green hair, an eyebrow ring, and a dog collar.

In fifteen hours, the trial would begin.

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

“No. I figure the sooner we get this over with, the sooner I’ll be with you.”

Addie bent her head. “That,” she said, “will be wonderful.”

“I’ve been thinking about it, you know. We’ll go to the Carribbean. June is the rainy season, but I figure we could both use a vacation. I want to be outside all day long. I want to sleep outside. Hell, maybe we won’t even have to pay for a room.”

Addie choked on a laugh, one that rounded neatly into a little sob. She looked up at Jack and tried to smile.

“If you’re that upset, sweetheart, I’ll get us a hotel.” He spoke softly, stroking her palm with his thumb.

A deep, shuddering breath wracked Addie. “What if-”

“Ah, Addie, don’t.” Jack put his finger to her lips a moment before the guard frowned at the contact. “Sometimes, when I think I’m going to lose it in here, I just imagine that I’m already out. I think about what we’re going to do for the weekend, and whether the diner’s going to be busy that day, and how all I want is for it to be nighttime so that I can sleep holding onto you. I think about us, six months from now. Six years from now. Until I can remember what it’s like to have a normal life back.”

“A normal life,” Addie repeated, with longing.

“We can even practice,” Jack said earnestly. He cleared his throat. “Hi, honey. What did you do today?”

Addie stared into his eyes, those beautiful ocean eyes. She thought of Meg. And then she imagined a beach as wide as the world, a froth of waves that raced over her feet and Jack’s as they watched the sun seal another absolutely ordinary day. “Nothing,” she said, smiling hard from the bottom of her heart. “Nothing at all.”

1979

New York City

Jack and J. T. and Ralph hunkered down in the crawl space beneath the staircase that led up to the second floor of the St. Bride penthouse, a spot usually reserved for the vacuum but that worked equally as well as a clandestine spot for ten-year-old boys trading baseball cards and secrets. “I’ll give you Keith Hernandez for Luis Alvarado,” J. T. said.

“You think I’m a moron?” Ralph scowled. “Hernandez is worth three White Sox.”

“I’ve got Bruce Sutter,” Jack said. “I’ll trade him for Hernandez.”

“Cool.”

The boys swapped cards, turning them over to read the stats, a faint bubble-gum smell enveloping the deal.

“I’ve got a Don Baylor,” J. T. said.

“California sucks this year.”

Ralph snickered. “I wouldn’t use a Baylor card to scrape dog shit off the street.”

“He’s an MVP, you jerk.” But J. T. shuffled the card to the back of his shoebox all the same.

Suddenly, Ralph held up the crown jewel of baseball cards that summer, Willie Stargell from the Pittsburgh Pirates. “I’m willing to trade. For the right price.”

Jack riffled through the heap of cards he’d collected. Ralph wouldn’t take a Palmer or a Guidry, the two best players Jack had. There was only one other card he could even think of trading for equal value, although the player was just a really crappy outfielder for the Chicago White Sox who couldn’t have hit a curveball if it were hanging dead still on a string in front of him. What made Jack’s card the envy of every other young collector was the name on it.

“Holy shit,” J. T. breathed. “Jack’s got Rusty Kuntz.”

The three boys dissolved into fits of laughter. “Man, you have Kuntz,” Ralph said.

“I need Kuntz!” J. T. cried, and then rolled on the floor, giggling so hard he couldn’t catch his breath.

Ralph held out his hand for the card. “Bet it’s easy to give up Kuntz when you can get the real thing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Ralph pursed his lips, kissing at the air. “Oh, Jack,” he said in a falsetto. “You are the awesomest boy in the whole school!”

J. T. snorted. “Rachel Covington might as well take out a billboard at Yankee Stadium, she’s so in love with you.”

“She is not,” Jack scowled. “She’s just a girl.” Okay, so she hung around him a lot since he’d gotten an older kid to stop spreading the rumor that she’d gotten her period when she was only eight years old. So what if she had big boobs stuffed into a training bra? All the girls were gonna, one day, and as far as Jack could see, they were an incredible nuisance, probably slapping you under the chin when you were trying to run for speed or distance.

“Jack and Rachel sitting in a tree . . .” Ralph sang out.

“Shut up!” Jack reached over and snatched his Kuntz card out of Ralph’s hand.

“Hey!”

“I don’t like Rachel Covington, okay?”

“Whatever,” Ralph muttered.

Suddenly the small door to the alcove opened. Corazon, the cook and housekeeper, frowned at them, fists planted on her thick hips. “Out,” she ordered. “I need to clean.”

The boys scrambled from their hiding place with their boxes of baseball cards, J. T. and Ralph elbowing each other as they walked down the hall. “I don’t have a girlfriend,” Jack yelled after them, squeezing Rusty Kuntz’s card so hard it folded down the middle.

It turned out that Corazon wasn’t just doing her routine sweep and vacuum of the penthouse. Jack’s mother had called and told her to get ready for a guest. Jack sat on a kitchen stool, watching the Mexican woman slap at a lump of dough on the butcher block. He kept looking at it and wishing it was Ralph’s face.

“You want some bread so badly,” Cora said, “you might try the loaf that’s already been cooked.”

“I don’t want bread.”

“No? Then how come you stare like a starving man?”

Jack set his elbows on the counter. “Just wishing I had something to beat up, too.”

Cora pushed the dough across the table. “Be my guest.” She wiped her palms on her apron, leaving behind daffodil handprints. “J. T. and Ralph left in some hurry today.”

Jack shrugged. “They’re losers.”

“Oh, sí? Just this morning you couldn’t even sit through breakfast, waiting for them to show up.” She covered Jack’s hands and molded the dough along with him, giving him a rhythm. “You have a fight?”

“I don’t like Rachel Covington. You know, I mean, I like her . . . I just don’t like her. I don’t like any girl.”

“They were teasing you about that?”

“All’s I did was stick up for her because she was too scared to do it for herself.”

“Then it’s no wonder she’s fallen for you, querido.”

Jack leaned his cheek against his hand, heedless of the mark of flour he left behind. “Cora, what makes girls like that? Why can’t they just say thanks and get out of your hair?”

Corazon smiled at him. “You know how your mother keeps her Christmas card list? How she sends to people who send her one, and that list gets longer and longer every year?”

“Yeah,” Jack muttered. “I have to lick the damn stamps.”

“Watch your mouth,” Cora reprimanded. “See, love’s like that. Once you give it, even by accident, you’re on that list forever.”

“What if I don’t want to send Rachel a card back?”

The housekeeper laughed. “You never know. Maybe she’ll keep them coming anyway. But maybe one day she’ll go through that list and cross you off.”

“I don’t want her to be in love with me,” Jack muttered. “I’m gonna tell her to stop.”

“You can tell her, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna change anything.”

Jack punched at the dough. “Why not?”

“Because it’s her heart,” she said, “and she gets to choose where it goes.”

It was not unusual for Annalise St. Bride to come home with a mission in tow, one wearing spandex and high heels, who’d been stolen away from a pimp on Seventh Avenue. Often the woman would arrive at the penthouse sporting a split lip or a broken nose, gathering her shame as tightly around her as the cut-rate chenille coat she wore. She’d stay in the chrysalis of St. Bride House for a week or so, and then one day she would emerge from the guest room wearing Levi’s and an oxford-cloth shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail away from her healing face, which was scrubbed free of makeup. Jack was always amazed at the transformation. They went in looking like old ladies; they came out as teenagers.

They were prostitutes. Jack wasn’t supposed to know that, because he was only ten and his parents liked to pretend things like that didn’t exist in New York City, along with muggings and rats in Central Park and a Democratic mayor. And he wasn’t allowed into their rooms. His mother went in and out like Florence Nightingale, carrying soup and clothing and books by women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, writers Jack’s dad once described as chicks who wanted dicks. But even if Jack was supposed to pretend that the whore upstairs was no different than a visiting cousin, and even if his dad tended to simply look the other way when his mom went off on a tear like this, he knew the truth . . . and somehow it always left him feeling a little sick to his stomach.

Like always, once the penthouse was clean and the bread in the oven, an air of anticipation spread until it filled every corner. Jack sat on the stairs, idly leafing through his baseball cards but really just waiting to see who it was this time around.

At three-forty-five, his mother came home. And the woman she brought with her wasn’t a woman at all.

For one thing, she was smaller than Jack. Her eyes were so large and black they dominated her face, and her tiny white slash of a mouth was the saddest thing Jack had ever seen. Her hands twitched at her sides, as if they desperately needed something to hold.

“This is Emma,” his mother said, and the girl turned and ran right back into the elevator.

That was the second thing that was different about this one: She didn’t want to be here.

“Fine, then,” Annalise said. “I’ll go to jail.”

Joseph St. Bride sighed. “Annie, I know it kills you to see this stuff. But you can’t remove a child from her home without the permission of Child Protective Services.”

“Have you seen her? What did you expect me to do?” Her voice got so low that Jack had to work harder to eavesdrop from outside the library door. “She’s nine, Joseph. She’s nine years old and her forty-year-old uncle is raping her.”

Jack knew about rape; it was hard to live with his mother, the queen of crusaders against violence against women, and not know about it. Rape had to do with sex, and sex was something too gross to even think about. He tried to picture Emma, the girl who’d been carried kicking and screaming upstairs, doing that with a grown-up. It made him gag.

“Go see for yourself,” his mother yelled, and all of a sudden they burst out of the library, so intent on their fight that, thankfully, they never noticed Jack sitting there at all.

He crept up the stairs after them and hovered outside Emma’s room. They had locked her in. In all the years his mom had done this kind of thing, Jack couldn’t remember a single woman getting locked in.

His father knocked softly. “Hi, Emma,” he said gently. “I’m Annalise’s husband.”

Emma opened her mouth and began to scream. It echoed right through Jack’s head and, he figured, probably broke some crystal downstairs. “Just go outside,” Jack’s mother ordered. “She’s obviously afraid of you.”

Joseph walked into the hall again, closing the door. Then he looked down at Jack. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

From the spot where he was sitting, Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry for Emma,” he answered.

Annalise went to court and got temporary custody of Emma. A month passed, and the girl began eating and looking healthier. But every night, she tried to run away.

Once, they found her under the stairs, where Jack and his friends liked to hide. Once, she was in the trash chute. Another time she made it all the way to the lobby before Corazon managed to catch up with her.

His mother said that it was because Joseph reminded Emma too much of what had happened. “I’m not moving out of my own house,” Jack’s father had thundered, and that started a fight between them that still flared like a brush fire every now and then.

Jack didn’t say so, but he thought his mother ought to stop worrying what Emma was running away from. In his opinion, the big mystery was where she was heading.

He rigged up a burglar alarm. Jack stretched a length of nylon fishing line across the front of her door, and sure enough, he woke up to the sound of a soft thud against the carpet. He jumped out of bed to find Emma dressed and sprawled on the floor.

She looked up at him, evaluating whether she could take him down or whether he was someone she ought to be afraid of. “It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “I’m not going to tell.”

He had not known until that moment that he was going to keep her secret, maybe even let her steal away, without sounding a siren. Emma’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”

It sounded wrong on the mouth of a little girl, like a horde of flies swimming out of her lips the moment they opened. Jack held out a hand to help Emma up, but she rose without touching him. “I’m getting out of here,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You can’t stop me.”

Jack shrugged. “I wasn’t going to.” He crossed his arms, hoping he looked as cool as he thought he might.

Emma walked past him. God, if his mother found out what he was doing, he’d never hear the end of it. He watched the girl pad softly down the oriental runner on the staircase. “Emma,” he whispered.

She turned.

“You like baseball?”

He had never in life wanted to spend any time with a girl, much less actually give something that could be construed as a gift, but he worked out a deal with Emma. Every night she didn’t try to leave, he’d give her two of his baseball cards. She had no idea that Steve Renko and Chuck Rainey sucked, which meant that at least Jack wasn’t losing any of his good stuff. They sat on the floor of his bedroom, and he taught her about batting averages and playing positions and the Cy Young Award.

She didn’t speak much. When she did, it was weird. She talked about hearing the bed knock against the wall when his mother and father were doing it, which was totally repulsive. She said Corazon had forgotten what it was like to have a man in her bed. It was as if she wanted to shock Jack. But every time Emma got going, he just stared as if those flies were swarming from her lips again and didn’t say a thing.

One night, he woke up to find Emma standing next to him. “You overslept.”

He looked at the clock; it was two in the morning. “Sorry,” Jack muttered, sitting up. Then he remembered that he didn’t have anything else to give her. “You’ve got half my baseball cards, Emma. I don’t have any more.”

“Oh.” She looked very small in her nightgown and robe. The sash of the robe went around her waist twice. It was one of his; his mother had filched it from the closet.

Jack swung his legs over the side of the bed. “So I guess if you’re going to go, you’d just better go ahead.”

Emma looked down at the floor. She was a strange kid, always staring hard at the tiniest things. She knew how many freckles were on Jack’s ear, and that the third stair riser had a crack in it that was shaped like a W. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she said.

A week later, they lay side by side on his bed, not touching. Emma kept a buffer of a few inches between herself and everyone else she came in contact with; Jack had noticed that early on. “Do you have a girlfriend?” Emma asked.

“No.”

“How come?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t like girls.”

“You like me.”

Well, yeah. He did. He looked down at her. The question he’d wanted to ask forever swelled inside his stomach like a balloon. “Where would you go?”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “Home. Where else?”

Of all the answers she could have given, that was the one Jack least expected. “But . . . you can’t,” he stammered. “You just got away.”

Emma blinked at him. “Your mother took me away. What makes you think I wanted to leave?”

Jack felt heat creeping up the neck of his pajama top. “You weren’t safe there. Your uncle-”

“Loves me,” Emma said fiercely. “He loves me.”

Jack would have bet every single baseball card left in his possession that Emma didn’t even know she was crying.

Jack found Corazon in the laundry room, separating colors from whites. “You know,” she said, “if I tell you another seven hundred times, maybe one of these days you might turn your clothes right side out when you put them in the hamper, eh?”

He hopped on top of the dryer, swinging his legs. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“How do you know if you love someone?”

Corazon looked up, her hands stilling for a minute. “Well, that’s quite a question,” she said. “And usually it’s something you figure out for yourself.”

“If you love someone, you want to take care of them, right?”

She smiled slyly. “Someone’s had a change of mind about Rachel Covington?”

“And if you love someone, you’re not supposed to hurt them.”

“No,” Cora answered, “but you usually do at some point, anyway.”

Well, that made the whole thing about as clear as mud. Jack thanked Cora and scrambled out of the laundry room, up the stairs. Emma’s door was shut, as usual. But she’d managed to sneak out when no one was looking, because a stack of neatly banded baseball cards were set just inside the threshold of his own bedroom door.

That was how he knew she was planning to leave.

Eyelids, Jack thought, must weigh something like forty pounds each, or why would it be so hard to keep them up after midnight? He got down on the floor and did another fifty sit-ups, then paced around his room. He couldn’t risk falling asleep, not yet. And his parents had only just gone to bed. He knew Emma would make sure they were sound asleep before she sneaked away.

At 1:20, Jack swallowed hard and walked to Emma’s room. It was the first time he’d ever gone to her space instead of letting her come to his. And although he only had a vague impression of what must have happened between Emma and her uncle, he guessed it probably happened in her own bed.

Either this was going to work, Jack thought, or she was going to scream loud enough to bring down the whole building.

He turned the key in the lock she knew how to pick anyway and slipped inside on the slice of light from the hallway. One second Emma was facing the wall, and the next she was staring at him, her eyes huge in her face, her whole body going rigid.

“Shh,” Jack said. “It’s just me.”

That didn’t seem to make it any better. Emma was dead silent, just as still.

“Can I sit down?”

She didn’t answer, and with a slight pang in his stomach Jack realized that no one had ever asked for her permission. His weight tilted the mattress, and Emma rolled against his bent knee like a cylinder of wood. “I wanted to show you something,” he whispered. “I wanted to show you that someone who loves you doesn’t always have to hurt you.” And taking a deep breath, he reached down and held her hand.

She froze. It was the first time they had ever touched, beyond accidental brushing when they passed baseball cards back and forth. She was waiting for him to do something else, something disgusting Jack didn’t really want to picture in his head. But he just sat there, his fingers tangled with hers, until Emma’s other hand came up to cover his, until she crawled into his arms like the child she’d forgotten how to be.

June 29, 2000

Carroll County Jail

New Hampshire

Jack threaded his tie into a Windsor knot, pulled it tight, and tried his best not to think of a lynching. He smoothed the fabric down, never taking his eyes off the stranger in the mirror. Blue blazer, khaki pants, loafers, tie-this had become his trial uniform. And the man staring back at him was someone who understood that the legal system didn’t work.

There was a sharp rap on the other side of the bathroom wall. “Get moving,” a CO called out. “You’re gonna be late.”

Jack blinked twice, the man in the mirror blinked twice. He raised his hand to his forehead, where his hair was beginning to curl in the damp humidity of the shower room. He told himself it was time to go.

But Jack’s feet didn’t move. They might as well have been nailed to the cement floor. He grabbed the edge of the sink and tried to force one leg back but was literally paralyzed by the fear of what was yet to come.

The CO stuck his head into the bathroom. Humiliated, Jack met his eyes in the mirror, only to find that he could not force out a single word.

The guard wrapped his hand around Jack’s upper arm gently and pulled until Jack fell into step beside him.

“I’m sorry,” Jack murmured.

The CO shrugged. “You ain’t the first one.”

“And don’t forget to tell Darla the blue-plate special, when you decide,” Addie said.

Roy slipped his arm around his daughter’s waist. “We can do fine without you.” He faced her, so proud of his girl in this pale peach suit, with low heels on her feet and her brown hair pulled back from her face with a simple gold clip. Christ, she looked like a professional business woman, not some two-bit waitress. “You are beautiful,” Roy said quietly. “Jack won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”

“Jack won’t be able to see me. I have to sit outside, sequestered, because I’m a witness.” Suddenly, Addie stripped off the fitted jacket of her suit. “Who am I kidding?” she muttered, reaching behind the counter for her apron. “I’m just going to drive myself crazy sitting there all day. At least here I’ll be able to focus-”

“-on what’s going on at court,” Roy said, interrupting. “You have to go, Addie. There’s something about you . . . like you’re a lighthouse, and other people see the beam. Or an anchor, with the rest of us just hanging on to you for dear life. You ground us. And right now, I figure, Jack needs something to grab on to.” He held out her suit jacket, so that she could shrug it on. “Go on, get down to that courthouse.”

“It’s only six-thirty, Daddy. Court doesn’t convene until nine.”

“Then drive slow.”

When he went back into the kitchen, Addie stood alone in the early light of the diner, watching the sun leapfrog over shadows on the linoleum floor. Maybe if she arrived early, she could find the entrance where the deputy sheriffs brought the inmates from the jail. Maybe she could be there when Jack was brought in, could catch his eye.

Then something beneath the counter stool where she liked to imagine Chloe sitting drew her attention. Shriveled and brittle, more brown than red-it took a moment for Addie to recognize it as the little bouquet she had once confiscated from Gillian Duncan, tucked into her apron and forgotten.

It was the craziest thing, but when she lifted the dead flowers to her nose, she could swear they were as fragrant as new blossoms.

Amos Duncan flattened his tie against his abdomen as he hurried downstairs to the kitchen. “Gillian,” he called over his shoulder. “We’re going to be late!”

He headed toward the kitchen, intent on swilling at least one cup of coffee to settle his stomach before he began the grim hell of this trial. Houlihan would put Gillian on the stand first. The thought of his daughter sitting up there with a thousand eyes on her, television cameras rolling, and twelve men and women bearing witness-well, it was enough to make him want to kill someone. Jack St. Bride, in particular.

He would have given anything to take the stand in her stead, to make their life private again. But instead, all he would be able to do was watch, like everyone else, and see how it played out at the end.

The smell of coffee grew stronger as Amos entered the kitchen. Gillian sat at the kitchen table, dressed in the virginal white outfit Houlihan had hand-picked for her. She was shoveling cornflakes into her mouth behind a barricade of brightly colored cereal boxes.

Amos looked at her, nearly hidden from his view by the cartons. He fixed his coffee, black, the way he liked it. Then he slid into the chair across from his daughter.

There were three boxes blocking her from his view. He pushed the Life cereal box away. When he moved a second box, Lucky Charms, his daughter stopped chewing.

Finally, Amos shifted the cornflakes, so that he could see her unobstructed. Bright color stained her cheeks. “Gilly,” he said softly, offering up a whole story in that one word.

Gillian reached for the Lucky Charms and set it up again, a wall. She took the cornflakes and the Life cereal and made barriers on either side of the first box. Then she lifted her spoon and began to eat in silence, as if her father were not there at all.

“Sydney!” Matt hollered at the top of his lungs, holding his squealing daughter at arm’s length as she fought to hand him the arrowroot biscuit she’d been gumming. “Don’t you do this to me, you little monster. This is my last clean suit.”

His wife rounded the corner, carrying a stack of clean laundry. “Where’s the fire?”

“Here,” Matt said, thrusting the baby into her free arm. “And it’s raging out of control. I can’t have her mess me up, Syd. I’m on my way to court.”

Sydney brushed her lips over the baby’s head. “She just wants to give you her good luck charm, isn’t that right, honey?”

“I’m not taking her cookie, dammit.”

His wife shrugged. “Well, someone’s going to be awfully sorry when the jury comes back with an acquittal.”

Matt gathered up his files and stuffed them into his briefcase. “I’m just not a rabbit’s foot kind of fellow.” He leaned down to kiss Sydney good-bye, then ran a light hand over the soft fuzz of his daughter’s head.

Sydney followed him to the front door, bouncing the baby in her arms. “Wave good-bye,” she told Molly. “Daddy’s going to go lock up the bad guys.”

Charlie took a deep breath and knocked on the bathroom door. A moment later, it opened, steam spilling into the hallway, his daughter’s face hovering in the mist left in the wake of her shower. “What?” she said belligerently. “Did you come to strip-search me?”

She threw open the door and spread her arms, the towel she’d wrapped around her damp body riding low. He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know who this girl was, because she no longer acted like his daughter. So he opted for the practical, the functional, as if pretending that the wall of mistrust between them was invisible would keep it from hurting every time he slammed up against it. “Have you seen my badge?” Charlie asked. He needed it to complete his dress blues, before heading to court.

Meg turned away. “You didn’t leave it in here.”

Still, Charlie looked over her shoulder, at the edge of the sink, checking.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” she said. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe me.”

“Meg . . .” He did believe her, and that was the problem. All he had to do was look at her and he saw her, again, sobbing at the station as she recounted a memory of being sexually assaulted. What Charlie wanted to do, more than anything, was turn back time. He wanted to go through Meg’s closet and never find that thermos. He wanted to keep her under lock and key, so nothing bad would ever happen to her.

He had not broached the subject of the atropine with Meg. He could barely conduct a completely innocuous conversation with her, much less one charged with so much suspicion.

“Then again, maybe I’ve got your badge, Daddy,” Meg said, tears in her eyes. “Maybe I hid it at the bottom of my closet.”

Charlie took a step forward. “Meg, honey, listen to yourself.”

“Why? You don’t.”

The sorrow broke over her, and she stood in her towel before him, crying so hard it made Charlie’s chest ache. He grabbed for her, held her in his arms the way he had when she was small and had believed there were monsters hiding under her bed. There are no monsters, he’d told her back then, when what he really should have said was: There are no monsters there.

Suddenly, Meg went stiff in his arms. “Don’t touch me,” she said, drawing away. “Don’t touch me!” She pushed past him, running for the sanctuary of her bedroom.

As the door flew open in her wake, Charlie saw something glinting on the floor. His badge, which must have fallen behind the door when he was in the bathroom washing his hands. Charlie knelt and picked it up, fastened it, then looked in the mirror. There it was, shiny and silver, pinned to the requisite position on his chest-a shield that covered his heart but had not been able to protect it.

“Shit,” Jordan said. “They beat us here.”

Selena squinted into the sun at the steps of the courthouse, thick with cameras and television reporters. “Is there a back entrance?”

He cut the ignition. “I have to run the gauntlet, you know that.” They got out of the car, Selena straightening her stockings and Jordan shrugging into his jacket. “Ready?”

The reporters reminded Jordan of black flies, those horrible bugs that take over the Northeast for a few weeks every summer and fly heedless up your nose and into your ears and eyes as if they have every right to be there. Jordan pasted a smile on his face and began to hustle up the stone steps of the court, bowed in the middle from years of defendants trudging up in hope and down in victory or defeat. “Mr. McAfee,” a female reporter called, making a beeline to his side. “Do you think your client will be acquitted?”

“I most certainly do,” Jordan said smoothly.

“How will you account for the fact that he’s been in jail for sexual assault before?” another voice shouted.

“Come on inside,” Jordan answered, grinning. “And I’ll show you.”

The press loved him. The press had always loved him. He was cocky and photogenic and had long ago mastered the art of the sound bite. He shouldered aside cameras and microphones, wondering how far behind he’d left Selena.

One step away from the top, a woman blocked his progress. She wore a blood-red turban and a T-shirt that read TAKE BACK THE NIGHT. “Mr. McAfee,” she bellowed, “are you aware that in the United States alone, 132,000 women reported a stranger rape last year-and that if you include the estimated number of women who don’t report violence against them, there may be as many as 750,000 women who were raped?”

“Yes,” Jordan said, meeting her gaze. “But not by my client.”

Jack sat in the rear of the small cell in the sheriff’s office beneath the court, chewing on a thumbnail and staring at the floor between his shoes, completely oblivious to the fact that his attorney had arrived. “Jack,” Jordan said quietly.

He was struck by how well Jack cleaned up. But then again, this was what Jack had been born to: preppy blazers and rep ties and loafers. Jordan offered a confident smile. “You all set?”

“I suppose so.”

“I don’t have to tell you what it’s going to be like in there. You’ve done this drill before. A lot of shit’s going to be said before it’s over, and the most important thing you can do is keep your cool. The minute you blow up is the same minute the prosecutor proves that you’re just one big violent act waiting to happen.”

“I won’t blow up.”

“And remember, we get to go last,” Jordan said. “That’s the best thing about being a defense attorney.”

“And here I thought it was the truly fascinating people you got to fraternize with.”

A surprised laugh bubbled out of Jordan, but when he lifted his gaze, he found Jack staring at him, sober and intense. “Did you know that the average sentence for a felon convicted of a violent offense is one hundred five months?”

Jordan snorted. “Says who?”

“The Bureau of Justice Statistics. Over a million adults were convicted of felonies last year.”

“Maybe this year, the number will be 999,999.”

An uneasy silence settled over the men, punctuated by the cough of a prisoner two cells over. Jordan sighed. “I have to mention something one last time, Jack. You still haven’t given me much to work with here. But there are six men on that jury, and every single one of them has been in the situation where they’re fooling around and then the woman’s changed her mind at the last minute. As a defense against a rape allegation, it’s an easy sell.” He leaned closer. “Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to go with consent?”

Jack’s hands knotted together between his legs. “Jordan, do me a favor?”

The attorney nodded, and Jack turned, his eyes cold. “Don’t ever ask me that again.”

Matt reached into his briefcase for his notes and found them glued together with the dried remains of a mashed arrowroot biscuit. Shaking his head, he began to carefully peel apart the pages of his yellow legal pad.

“Ooh,” winced Jordan McAfee, passing the prosecutor’s table en route to his own. “The last time I saw something like that was in law school, when a guy tossed his cookies in the briefcase of the judge he was clerking for.”

“Friend of yours, no doubt,” Matt said.

“Actually, I think he went on to become a DA.” Jordan hid a smile as one of Matt’s papers ripped. “Careful. You don’t want to ruin your cheat sheet.”

“McAfee, I could try this case in my sleep and still win.”

“Guess that’s your plan, then, since you’re clearly dreaming.” He reached into his own briefcase and took out a pack of Kleenex, which he threw onto the prosecutor’s table. “Here,” Jordan said. “A peace offering.”

Matt took a tissue to wipe the cookie residue off his legal briefs, then tossed the pack back to Jordan. “Save the rest for consoling your client after the conviction.”

A side door opened as a deputy sheriff entered, escorting Jack to the seat beside Jordan’s. He still wore his blazer and tie, but he was handcuffed. As the deputy released the cuffs, Jordan focused on his client, who was such a bundle of nervous energy that heat seemed to emanate from his body. “Relax,” he mouthed silently.

That, Jordan realized, was nearly impossible. The gallery was full-media reps from states as far away as Connecticut were reporting on the trial, and there were a fair number of local townspeople who’d come to make sure that Salem Falls remained as morally pure as it had always been. Amos Duncan stared vehemently at Jack from his spot behind the prosecutor’s table. There had to be close to 200 people in that wide audience, all with their attention riveted on the defendant . . . and not a single one in support of Jack.

“Jordan,” Jack whispered, a thread of panic wrapped around his words. “I can feel it.”

“Feel what?”

“How much they hate me.”

Jordan remembered then that Jack had not ever suffered through an actual trial. His conviction had been a plea bargain-an uncomfortable hearing, but one not nearly as grueling as the one that was about to occur. The legal system sounded good on paper, but the truth was that as long as Jack sat beside a defense attorney, every person watching this trial would consider him guilty until proven innocent.

The six men and eight women who made up the jury and its alternates streamed solemnly in from a door on the side of the courtroom. Just before taking a seat, each one turned, scrutinizing Jack. Beneath the table, Jack’s hands clenched on his knees.

“All rise!”

The Honorable Althea Justice billowed to a seat behind the bench. Her cool gray eyes surveyed the gallery: the cameras, the reporters with their cell phones, the tight rows of residents from Salem Falls. “Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “I see we have a packed house today. So let’s all start out on the right foot. At the first sign of any inappropriate behavior”-she glanced at a cameraman-“or any outbursts”-she glanced at Amos Duncan-“you will be escorted from my courtroom, and will remain outside it for the duration of the trial. If I hear a beeper or cell phone go off during any testimony, I will personally collect everyone’s electronic devices and burn them in a pyre outside the court building. Finally, I’d like everyone to remember-including counsel-that this is a court of law, not a circus.” She slipped her half glasses down and peered over them. “Mr. Houlihan,” the judge said, “let’s get rolling.”

“On the evening of April thirtieth, 2000, Amos Duncan kissed his daughter good-bye and went out for a quick run. She was seventeen years old, and although he worried about her every time he left her alone, he had chosen to live in Salem Falls because it was a safe place to raise his child. Amos Duncan certainly didn’t expect that the next time he saw his daughter, she would be sobbing, hysterical. That her clothes would be ripped. That she’d have blood on her shirt, skin beneath her fingernails, semen on her thigh. That she’d be telling the police she had been raped in the woods outside Salem Falls, New Hampshire.”

Matt walked slowly toward the jury. “The evidence that the state will present to you today will show that on April thirtieth, 2000, Gillian Duncan left her home at 8:45 P.M. She met up with her friends and went to a clearing in the woods behind the Salem Falls Cemetery. They made a small bonfire and enjoyed each other’s company, teenagers having fun. And just as they were getting ready to leave shortly after midnight, this man came up to them.”

Matt jabbed his finger at Jack’s face. “This man, Jack St. Bride, approached the girls where they were sitting. He was unsteady on his feet. They could smell alcohol on his breath. He started speaking to them conversationally, even sat down with them to chat. When the girls made it clear they were on their way home, he stood up and left.

“Minutes later, Gillian and her friends departed on different trails. Worried about the safety of the smoldering ashes they’d left behind, Gillian decided to turn back and kick some dirt over the remains of their bonfire. At that moment, Jack St. Bride stepped into the clearing, pushed her to the ground, and brutally raped her.”

Matt faced the jury again. “Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Matt Houlihan, and I’m an assistant county attorney for the state of New Hampshire. I met you all during jury selection, but I wanted to introduce myself again, because it’s my job-as a representative of the state-to prove to you all the elements of this crime beyond a reasonable doubt. Jack St. Bride has been charged with committing aggravated felonious sexual assault against Gillian Duncan . . . but please, don’t take my word for it.”

He smiled, his very best Opie Taylor grin, one that invited the jury to believe that they were in excellent hands. “Instead, I urge you to listen to Gillian Duncan, when she tells you what she suffered at the hands of Jack St. Bride. And to her girlfriends, who were also there that night. Listen to the detective who found Gillian after the attack, and who investigated the crime scene. Listen to an expert witness, who did DNA analysis on evidence collected from the scene. Listen to the doctor who examined Gillian Duncan after the assault.” Matt looked at each member of the jury. “Listen carefully, ladies and gentlemen, because at the end of this case, I’m going to ask you to find Mr. St. Bride guilty . . . and on the basis of everything you’ve heard, you will.”

Jordan watched Matt return to his seat. The jury knew he was supposed to follow that opening act; most of the men and women in the box had their eyes turned expectantly on him. But he sat an extra moment longer, as if he, too, were considering Houlihan’s words at face value. “You know,” he said conversationally, “if the only evidence you were going to hear was what Mr. Houlihan just laid out in his opening, then I’d agree with him a hundred percent. From everything he just said-heck, it sure does look like Jack St. Bride committed this crime. However, there are two sides to every story. And you’re not just going to hear the state’s version of what happened that night . . . you’re going to hear Mr. St. Bride’s version as well.”

He ran one hand lightly along the railing of the jury box. “My name is Jordan McAfee, and I’m here to represent Jack St. Bride. And just like Mr. Houlihan, I want you to listen carefully . . . but I also want to remind you that things aren’t always what they seem to be.” Suddenly, Jordan leaned forward, as if to pluck something from behind a juror’s ear. The woman blushed as he stepped back, brandishing a shiny quarter.

“Objection,” Matt called out. “Is this an opening argument or a David Copperfield show?”

“Yes, Mr. McAfee,” the judge warned. “Did I not say something about turning this court into a circus?”

“I beg your pardon, Your Honor. I just wanted to prove a point.” Jordan grinned, holding up the coin. “I think we all know I didn’t just pull this out of juror number three’s head. But it sure looked that way, didn’t it? Like I said-things aren’t always what they seem to be. Not even when you experience them firsthand.” Jordan flipped the quarter into the air-and after spinning, it appeared to simply vanish. “It’s certainly something to keep in mind when you listen to the prosecution’s eyewitnesses.”

Matt sprang to his feet. “Objection!”

“On what grounds, Mr. Houlihan?” asked the judge.

“Your Honor, the credibility of all the witnesses is in the hands of the jury. It’s not for Mr. McAfee to determine whether testimony is credible or not . . . particularly during an opening statement.”

She arched a brow. “Mr. Houlihan, can we just get through this opening statement?”

“I’d like a ruling for the record, Judge,” Matt said stiffly.

“Overruled.” She turned back to Jordan. “Proceed.”

“Listen to everything,” Jordan advised the jury. “But don’t trust everything you hear. Picture what the witnesses tell you . . . but don’t assume that’s what actually happened. As Mr. Houlihan said, your job on this jury is crucial. Yet where the prosecutor would like you to act as a sponge, I want you to be a filter. I want you to ask yourself who was there. Ask yourself what they saw. And then ask yourself if you believe them.”

Rape victims, Matt thought, were the worst.

By the time larceny and assault cases made it to trial, victims put on the stand were angry about what had happened. In a murder case, of course, there was no victim left at all. No, it was only in a sexual assault case that someone who had been terrorized and was still, for the most part, traumatized, had to face her attacker from just a few feet away.

“That’s him,” she replied in response to Matt’s last question. She pointed with a trembling finger.

“Judge,” Matt said, “may the record reflect that the witness has identified the defendant.” He stepped smoothly in front of her, again blocking her view of St. Bride. “Gillian, what happened that night?”

Gillian bent her head, hiding her face. “I told my father I was going to my house, but I wasn’t, not really. We all lied, just to get out. Things had been so crazy . . . and our parents told us we couldn’t . . . well, it was like a dare for us.”

“Where did you go?”

“To the forest behind the cemetery. There’s a big dogwood there.” Gilly swallowed. “We built a campfire, and we were just sitting around it telling jokes and trying . . . trying to act brave.”

“Who was with you?”

“Meg was. And Whitney and Chelsea.”

“What time was this?” Matt asked.

“Around eleven o’clock.”

“What happened next?”

“After midnight, we decided . . . that it was time to go home. We were putting out the fire when he showed up.”

“Who, Gillian?”

“Jack St. Bride,” she whispered.

“What was he wearing?”

“A yellow T-shirt. And jeans, and boots.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“He smiled,” Gillian answered. “He said hello.”

“Did you say anything in return?”

“We were all really scared. I mean, we all knew what everyone had been saying about him raping that other girl-”

“Objection,” Jordan said. “Hearsay.”

“Sustained.” The judge glanced at the jury. “You’ll disregard that last statement.”

“You were scared,” Matt prompted.

“Yes . . . and all of a sudden he was right there with us, and looking a little wild. So, actually, none of us said anything. We were too terrified.”

“What happened next?”

Gillian seemed to draw into herself, remembering. “He looked at the fire,” she said, “and sat down. He asked us if we were roasting marshmallows. I remember thinking that . . . well, that it was an ordinary question. I expected someone who was supposed to be such a dangerous man to be . . . a little more dangerous.”

“Then what happened?”

“I told him we were just on our way home. He said that was too bad. Then he said good night and headed into the woods.”

“Do you remember which trail?” Matt asked, pointing to a map propped beside her.

Gillian touched a thin line arcing north, one that didn’t lead back to the cemetery. “This one.”

“Then what?”

“Well, as soon as he was gone we were all, like, Can you believe it? Can you believe it was him?” She hunched her shoulders. “Then we left.”

“What path did you take?”

Gillian pointed to a trail that led to the northeast, tracing it to the far edge of the woods. “I took this one,” she said softly. “It’s a shortcut for me. But the others were going toward the cemetery, because it was the quickest way back to their side of town.”

“Did you feel nervous about walking home alone?”

“No,” Gillian said. “I mean, this guy who was supposed to be the Devil himself had left. What else was there to be afraid of, once he was gone?”

“What did you do next?”

Tears began to well in Gillian’s eyes, and Matt’s heart turned over. Christ, he didn’t want to make her relive this. “I hadn’t gone more than a few seconds before I realized that I never checked the fire. I mean, we put it out and all, but it was still smoking a little. So I figured I’d go back and make sure it hadn’t caught on again.” Her words stretched thin. “When I got to the clearing, it was empty. I kicked dirt over the fire, and all of a sudden he . . . he grabbed me from behind. He must have been hiding . . . or . . . or following me,” she said.

“What happened next, Gillian?”

She made a low, horrible noise in the back of her throat. “He pushed me down . . . and he put his hand over my mouth. He said if I made any noise, he’d kill me.” Turning her head away, Gillian shut her eyes. “He pinned my hands up over my head and unbuttoned my jeans. He . . . he took a condom out of his pocket and told me I should put it on him.”

“Did he let your hands go?”

“Yes.” Tears ran freely down her face, into the collar of her dress. “I pretended I was going to rip open the packet, and instead I scratched his cheek. I tried to get away. But he grabbed my wrists and pushed me back down and put the condom on himself.”

“And then?”

“And then . . . then. . .” She shrank back in the seat, her voice striped with pain. “And then he raped me.”

Matt let that statement stand for a moment. “How long did it last?”

“Forever,” Gillian murmured.

“Did he insert his penis into your vagina?”

“Yes.”

“Did he ejaculate?”

“I . . . I guess,” Gilly said. “He stopped, anyway.”

“Was he saying anything while this was happening?” Matt asked.

“No.”

“Were you?”

“I was crying. I couldn’t look at him.”

“Did you try to move at all?”

Gilly shook her head. “He was holding me down. Tight. And every time I tried to roll away, he just shoved me harder into the ground.”

The jury was staring intently at Gillian. “What happened after he was done?”

Her answer came softly, from a place deep inside her. “He got up and zipped his pants,” Gilly said, wrapping her arms around herself. “He told me if I talked to anyone, he’d come back for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I watched him go, and then counted to a hundred and started running.”

“Which direction did he leave in?”

“The path that went closest to my house,” Gillian said. “So I ran in the other direction. Toward the cemetery. Where my friends had gone.”

“How long did it take you to catch up to the others?”

“I don’t know. A few minutes, I guess.”

“What happened when you found your friends?” Matt asked.

“I couldn’t stop crying. And my legs . . . they just collapsed. I felt so dirty, and I just couldn’t get out what had happened.”

Matt walked toward the defense table. “Had you ever seen Jack St. Bride before?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

She let her gaze slide over Jack, then fall to her lap like a stone. “He worked in this diner in town. Every now and then, my friends and I went there.”

“Had you ever talked to him before?”

“Sometimes he’d come over to our table and start a conversation.”

Matt nodded. “Did you ever indicate to him that you were interested in having a relationship with him?”

Gillian shook her head vehemently. “No.”

“Is there any doubt in your mind, Gillian, that the defendant is the man who sexually assaulted you shortly after midnight on May first?”

The muscles in Gillian’s jaw clenched. “I can still feel his body on top of me. I smell him, sometimes, in empty rooms. And I wake up suffocating, sure that it’s happening again.” Her eyes roamed the gallery until they clung tight to her father’s. “I don’t have any doubts,” Gilly whispered. “It was him.”

“Nothing further,” Matt said, and sat down.

The moment Jordan stood up, he could feel the tightrope beneath his feet. He needed to discredit Gillian carefully. Matt had spent a half hour here getting the whole courtroom to feel sorry for her; if Jordan was too harsh, the jury would turn against him rather than Gillian.

He gave her a moment to compose herself and approached her slowly, having learned from experience that even the most pitiful-looking stray puppies sometimes turned around and snapped. “Ms. Duncan, when you were in the woods with your friends and Mr. St. Bride came up to you, did you feel scared around him?”

“Yes. I’d been told for weeks that I shouldn’t be anywhere near him.”

“Yet you also said that the reason you went to the woods that night was to be brave. To defy your parents, who were making a ‘big deal’ about staying away from Mr. St. Bride. So being close to him was the ultimate defiance, wasn’t it?”

Gillian shook her head. “I would never have done that.”

“Did you leave the minute he came up to you?”

“Yes.”

“By your own statement, though, Ms. Duncan, he asked you a question about roasting marshmallows and sat down with you all, isn’t that true?”

A light glinted in Gillian’s eyes. “But then I told him we were all leaving, because it was the quickest way to get rid of him.”

“Get rid of him? Because you were still scared?”

She lifted her chin. “Yes.”

“Yet you said that once he left, you weren’t scared.”

“That’s right.”

“You never thought Mr. St. Bride was going to attack you?”

Gilly shook her head. “If I had, I would have stuck with my friends.”

“You never thought he would attack you, although everything you’d heard about him from your parents and friends indicated that he was waiting for the opportunity to assault young women?”

She was between a rock and a hard place-and knew it. Jordan waited patiently for her answer. “N-no,” Gillian said.

“All right. You started to walk home and then turned around to make sure the fire was out?”

“Yes.”

“How far had you gone at that point?”

“Not far. Only a few seconds.”

“And Mr. St. Bride allegedly attacked you when you returned to the clearing?”

“That’s right,” she said quietly.

“Had you seen him hiding there before you and your friends left?”

“No. He walked off down a path.”

“And how long after he left did you all depart?”

“A few minutes, maybe. Not long.”

Jordan nodded. “If he expected you to be leaving the clearing, Ms. Duncan, then why would he have circled back to it to attack you? Why not lay in wait along one of the paths, where he had a better chance of intercepting you?”

Gillian stared at Jordan. “I don’t know.”

“If you hadn’t decided to check on the ashes, you wouldn’t even have come back to the clearing, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“Did Mr. St. Bride take off your clothes?”

“He pulled down my jeans and my underwear,” Gillian whispered.

“And your sweater? Did he take that off?”

“No.”

“Unbutton it?”

“No,” Gillian said.

“How about his own clothes?”

“His pants.”

“Did he pull down his pants before or after he pulled down yours?”

Tears filled her eyes, and she shook her head. “Ms. Duncan,” the judge said kindly, “I’m going to need you to answer the question.”

“I can’t remember,” Gilly murmured.

“Did he pull down his pants before or after he asked you to put on the condom?”

“Before.”

“Was he still holding your hands over your head when he took off his jeans?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“He kept one hand on my wrists,” Gillian said. “He used the other one to pull down his pants.”

“So even though you were struggling against him, and he was using his lower body to pin you down and one hand to hold your wrists, he managed to unfasten his jeans and work them down over his hips?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about how you scratched Mr. St. Bride that night.”

“It was after he threw me on the ground,” Gillian said. “When he let go of my hands and told me to put on the condom, I went for his eyes, but I missed and got his cheek.”

“Which cheek?”

“His right.”

“Did you use one finger?”

“I used my whole hand.” Gillian made a claw. “Like this.”

“Did you scratch him with four fingers?”

“I don’t know. I just raked my hand down his face, trying to get away. Then he grabbed my hand and slammed me down really hard.”

“You said after Mr. St. Bride raped you, you counted to a hundred, then ran after your friends. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“How did you count?”

Gillian looked up, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Well, how quickly? Was it one-two-three . . . or one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi . . .”

He shrugged. “Maybe you could count to ten for us, today, like you did that night.”

She glanced at Matt Houlihan, who shrugged imperceptibly. “One,” Gillian said slowly, “two . . . three . . .”

When she reached ten, Jordan looked up from his watch and did some quick math. “So you waited about eighty seconds before leaving the clearing?”

“I suppose.”

“Did you walk to your friends? Crawl? Tiptoe?”

“I ran. As fast as I could.”

“And it took several minutes to reach your friends?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain about that?”

Gillian nodded. “It was about five minutes.”

Jordan pointed to the path on the oversize map that led toward the cemetery. “This is the route you took?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Do you have any idea how long a distance this path is, Ms. Duncan?”

“No.”

“It’s fifty-two yards. One hundred fifty-six feet,” Jordan said. “Can you show me where, along this path, your friends were when you caught up with them?”

She pointed to the edge of the cemetery. “Right here. Outside the woods.”

“And Detective Saxton found you, right at the spot where you stopped?”

“Yes.”

“While you and your friends were together in the woods, you had no alcohol and no drugs, is that true?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing to eat or drink for the entire hour you were there?”

“I had a snack. Cookies. That’s it.”

“Did your friends have anything to drink that night?”

“Yes,” Gilly said. “Iced tea.”

“Have you ever heard of the drug atropine?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know about it?”

“It’s something my father’s made in his lab,” Gillian said.

“Do you know how atropine is taken?”

“No.”

“Did you have any atropine that night in the woods?”

“No!” Gillian insisted.

“Are you aware that traces of atropine were found in the thermos containing the iced tea your friends had brought?”

“Yes. Mr. Houlihan told me.”

“Yet you are testifying under oath today that you didn’t have any?”

“I didn’t. I don’t do drugs.”

Jordan approached the witness stand. “Is it possible you could have been given some by accident?”

“I didn’t drink the iced tea.”

“Could the drug have been slipped into something else you drank that night?”

“No,” Gillian said firmly. “The only thing I had to drink was a soda, before I left my house. I didn’t have any of that stuff, I swear it.”

Jordan turned away from her. “You know, Ms. Duncan, you’ve told us all quite a lot about what happened that night . . . but you don’t always tell the truth, do you?”

Gillian’s brows drew together. “Yes, I do.”

“Isn’t it a fact that you have a long history of misrepresenting what really occurred? That shortly after your mother’s death, you were taken to a psychiatrist because of repeated episodes of lying to your father?”

“I was nine,” Gillian said. “And I was really confused at the time. I’m a totally different person now, and my father and I are really close. I tell him everything.”

“Everything?” Jordan repeated.

“Yes.”

“Then why didn’t you tell him where you were really going that night?”

Gillian’s cheeks colored brightly. “I . . . I . . .”

“That’s all right, Ms. Duncan,” Jordan said, sliding into place beside Jack. “We already know the answer.”

As soon as Judge Justice called for a fifteen-minute recess, Jack turned to his attorney. “I need to take a leak,” he said. He glanced nervously over his shoulder, where reporters were streaming out of the courtroom to call in information about Gillian’s testimony to the papers.

Jordan called over the deputy. “Can you take my client down to-”

“Nope,” the man said. “It’s backed up in the holding cell. Plumber’s down there now.”

Jordan grimaced. He didn’t want to take Jack out of the plastic bubble of the courtroom, where he would be a moving target for the media or anyone else who wanted a piece of him. But hell, a leak was a leak. “Come on,” he muttered. “I’ll take you.”

The moment they stepped outside, cameras exploded like a meteor shower, blinding Jordan temporarily. “No comment,” he said, dragging Jack toward the men’s room and shoving him inside. “Hey, guys, a little privacy?” he begged of the reporters, and held the door closed.

Jack stepped up to the urinal. “How do you think it’s going?”

“I think it’s early,” Jordan said.

Suddenly, a toilet flushed, and the door to one of the stalls swung open. “Mr. Duncan,” Jordan said, anxious to avoid an incident before it started.

But the man held up a hand. He stopped just inches away from Jack, who was furiously working to zip up his pants.

“They should have cut it off,” Duncan said, then walked out of the bathroom, leaving Jack to stare after him.

“Dr. Paulson, did you have occasion to treat a patient by the name of Gillian Duncan on May first?” Matt asked.

The ER doctor was comfortable on the stand. “Yes, I did.”

“At what time?”

“Approximately one-thirty A.M.”

“Did you have any medical information about her when you approached her?”

“Yes. An ER nurse had taken a history and physical. She had a BP of one twenty over eighty, and a rapid heart rate. She was alert and oriented and in no acute distress, although she was frightened. She’d come in alleging a forcible vaginal sexual assault.”

“How did you examine Gillian?”

“First I had her undress over a sheet,” Dr. Paulson said. “Then I did a basic general exam. Chest and cardiac exams were unremarkable. The abdomen was soft, nontender, and nondistended with normal bowel sounds. There was no rebound tenderness. Some significant bruising was present on the patient’s right wrist; I took pictures of these.”

Matt asked permission to approach the witness, then handed Dr. Paulson the pictures. “Do you recognize these?”

“Yes. They’re the photographs I took of the patient.”

“Do they fairly and accurately represent the bruises on Gillian Duncan that night?”

“Yes, they do.”

“I’d like to move them in as State’s Exhibits Two and Three,” Matt said. “Doctor, what other examinations did you perform that night?”

“A pelvic exam. The external genitalia were unremarkable, and there were no visible signs of forced penetration. I used a colposcope, which is basically a large magnifying glass with a light on it, to see inside the vaginal canal.”

“What did you find?”

“The vaginal vault was unremarkable, without lesions or semen. The cervix was closed and without cervical motion tenderness. The uterus was small, anteflexed and anteverted, and nontender, and the adnexa were nonpalpable and nontender. The patient didn’t report anal penetration, so the rectovaginal exam was deferred.” The doctor smiled at the jury. “It’s a lot of medical jargon, but basically, she looked normal on the inside.”

“Is it unusual to find no lesions or bruising or abnormalities inside a patient who has reported a violent sexual assault?”

“No,” the doctor said. “Sometimes you get bruising; sometimes you don’t. The vagina is made for sexual intercourse and, quite frankly, can withstand an awful lot. Often traumatic intercourse can occur without leaving behind any visible vaginal proof.”

“So how can you tell if someone’s had intercourse?”

“Only by the presence of semen. However, its absence doesn’t rule out intercourse, either. A condom could have been involved. A man might have had a vasectomy.”

“Did you examine any other area, Doctor?”

“Yes. I examined the patient’s thighs and groin.”

“What did you find?”

“With an ultraviolet lamp, I detected the presence of what appeared to be semen.”

“What did you do?”

“I took a sterile swab from a sexual assault evidence recovery kit and swabbed the area.”

“What did you do with it?”

“I put the swab in the paper envelope included in the kit. I wrote my name and the date and the patient’s name on it, then sealed it and put my initials over the seal.”

“Did you take any other physical evidence from Gillian that night?”

“Yes. I did a pubic hair combing and put the evidence in the kit. I clipped her fingernails and collected each one in a separate, sterile white paper envelope, which was also included in the kit. Finally, I drew blood from the patient for a known sample, marked it, and put it in the kit.”

“After you marked and sealed all these envelopes and swabs and vials, what did you do with the kit?”

“I handed it to Detective Saxton, who had brought the patient in.”

“Between the time you collected all of this evidence and the time you turned it over to the detective, did anyone else have access to it?”

“No.”

“Did you treat Gillian?”

“Yes. We gave her a heavy dose of antibiotics to protect against venereal disease, and a pill to prevent pregnancy.”

Matt crossed to stand in front of the jury. “Dr. Paulson, when you first walked into the ER cubicle . . . when you first saw Gillian . . . what did she look like?”

For the first time during her testimony, the doctor’s professional demeanor slipped. “Very pale, and quiet. Lethargic. She was skittish, too, about having me touch her.”

“Is that behavior you’ve seen before in your line of work?”

“Unfortunately, it is,” Dr. Paulson admitted. “In victims of sexual abuse and sexual assault.”

“If there’s no semen in the vagina, Doctor, you can’t tell from a pelvic exam if someone has recently had intercourse . . . right?”

Dr. Paulson regarded Jordan coolly. “No, you can’t.”

“And there wasn’t any semen visible during Gillian’s pelvic exam?”

“No, there wasn’t.”

“Isn’t it also true that you didn’t find any bruising inside Gillian’s vagina?”

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t find any bruising on her external genitalia?”

“No.”

“Did you find bruises on her face?”

“No.”

“Her neck?”

“No.”

“How about her upper arm, or her thighs?”

“No. Only on her right wrist, Mr. McAfee.”

Jordan crossed to the jury box. “You found semen on Ms. Duncan’s inner thigh?”

“Yes.”

“Did you know that this victim had reported to Detective Saxton that she was sexually active at the time this happened?”

“That wasn’t part of my exam,” Dr. Paulson said.

“So you have no way of knowing if that semen you swabbed from Gillian Duncan’s thigh had anything to do with this alleged assault or with some other man she had sexual relations with recently.”

“No.”

“Doctor, isn’t it true that there is no physical evidence that conclusively supports Ms. Duncan’s claim of being subjected to violent sexual intercourse that night? That all we really have is what Gillian said happened?”

“That’s correct.”

“Do you have any way of knowing whether she was lying?”

Dr. Paulson shook her head. “I don’t.”

Whitney O’Neill was a nervous wreck. She kept chewing her fingernails, to the point where Jordan expected them to bleed at any moment. It was a small miracle, in fact, that she’d even made it through the direct examination. “So ten seconds after you left the clearing with Meg and Chelsea, you called out to Gillian?” Jordan said, wanting clarification.

Whitney bit her lower lip. “Yeah, but she didn’t answer.”

“No one had suggested, prior to her departure, that she stay with you? Do some kind of buddy system?”

“No,” Whitney said.

“How much longer after you called out to her did Gillian come running up to you?”

“Um, maybe like another ten or fifteen minutes.”

Jordan walked up to the map Matt had brought. “Do you know how far it is from the edge of the cemetery to the point where you and your friends lit the bonfire?”

“No.”

“Fifty-two yards, Ms. O’Neill. That’s half the length of a football field.” Jordan took a few steps forward. “Do you have any idea how incredibly slow you’d have to walk in order for it to take fifteen minutes to cover fifty yards of ground?”

“I, um, it may-”

“You could have been blindfolded, going backward in crab walk, and it would take you five minutes, at the most.”

“Objection,” Matt sighed. “He’s badgering my witness.”

“Have a care, Mr. McAfee,” said the judge.

“My apologies,” Jordan told the girl, but anyone could see he wasn’t all that sorry.

“Maybe it didn’t take fifteen minutes, exactly,” Whitney whispered.

“Are you telling me that you lied a minute ago? Under oath?”

Whitney blanched. “No. I mean, it just felt like forever. Or about fifteen minutes.”

Jordan shrugged. “You know what? Let’s compromise. Let’s say it took ten. Does that seem fair?”

The girl nodded vigorously.

“While it was taking you ten minutes to walk the fifty-two yards, your friend was supposedly within fifty-two yards of you, being assaulted. Given that extremely brief distance, don’t you think you might have heard something going on?”

Whitney swallowed. “I didn’t. It was too far away.”

“You didn’t hear your friend calling out?”

“No.”

“You didn’t hear branches breaking? Or a scuffle?”

“No.”

Jordan stared at her for a moment. Then he asked for permission to approach the bench. “Judge, I’d like a little leeway for a physical demonstration.”

Judge Justice narrowed her eyes. “Mental browbeating isn’t enough?”

“I’d like to make this particular point a little more realistic for the jury.”

“Your Honor,” Matt said, “it’s completely inappropriate for Mr. McAfee to re-create the scenario that night.”

The judge looked from one man to the other, then to the witness cowering on the stand. “You know, Mr. Houlihan, I’m gonna allow this. Go ahead, Mr. McAfee.”

Jordan took a yardstick from Selena in the gallery. “I’m just going to measure off fifty-two yards,” he explained. He paced his way down the aisle of the courtroom, through the double doors, and into the lobby. Conversation stopped as he continued past the banks of blue chairs and the office of the clerk of the court and a few vending machines. Finally, he rapped the yardstick on the floor and peered down the straight course, to where the witness sat. “Ms. O’Neill,” he called, “can you hear me?”

He saw her nod her head, saw her lips form the word yes.

Jordan strode back to the courtroom. “Thank you,” he said. “That’s all.”

Whitney started to rise, intent on getting off the witness stand as quickly as possible. But before she could, Matt rose, furious. “Redirect, Your Honor,” he barked. “Ms. O’Neill, did you just hear Mr. McAfee call out to you from fifty-two yards away?”

“Um, yes.”

Matt pointed to the rear of the courtroom. “If Mr. McAfee had been fifty-two yards away but pinned to the ground with someone else’s hand over his mouth and fighting for his life against a rapist, do you think you would have been able to hear him call out?”

“N-no,” Whitney said.

Matt turned on his heel. “Nothing further.”

At the breakfast table that morning, Thomas had asked if Jordan was going to cross-examine Chelsea Abrams. “Don’t know for sure,” he’d answered. “It depends on what she says on direct.”

Thomas’s shoulders had rounded so much his face had nearly dipped into his cereal bowl. “Just do me one favor,” Thomas had said. “Try not to be a dick.”

That, in a nutshell, was why Jordan was going to blast Chelsea Abrams’s testimony to pieces. Because the pretty girl looking up at him with a tiny smile was seeing him as Thomas’s dad when she should have been considering him an adversary.

“Ms. Abrams,” Jordan said, standing up to do his cross, “tell me again who was there that night in the woods.”

Confusion clouded Chelsea’s eyes as she realized Jordan meant business. “Meg, Whitney, Gilly, and me.”

“And Jack, my client?”

“Yeah.”

“And Jack left first.”

“Yes.”

“The rest of you, though, were standing together for a minute before you went home?”

“Yes.”

“So if anyone said something before you left, the four of you would have heard it?”

“Sure.”

“You testified that before you left, you asked Gillian whether she wanted you to walk her home.”

“Yes.”

“Where was Whitney standing when you asked this?”

“Right next to me.”

“After you and Whitney and Meg left, did anyone say anything?”

“No,” Chelsea said. “We just walked down the path single file.”

He looked at the jurors, hoping to hell that every single one of them remembered that Whitney had said something different. “Isn’t it true that April thirtieth, the night you all met in the woods, was Beltane?”

He had to give her credit: Chelsea looked blankly at him. “What?”

“Isn’t Beltane a sabbat, according to the earth-based Wiccan religion?”

“I haven’t got a clue.”

“Objection,” Matt said. “The witness obviously can’t answer this line of questioning.”

“Your Honor, if you’d just give me a moment-”

“So this time you can measure your way to Kentucky?” Matt said under his breath.

Jordan scowled. “This goes toward my argument, Your Honor.”

“I’m giving you one more question, Mr. McAfee,” the judge warned.

“Isn’t it true, Ms. Abrams, that you and your friends had gone to the clearing that night to celebrate Beltane, just as witches all over the world were doing at that time?”

At the prosecutor’s table, Matt Houlihan was choking on something. Or maybe just trying to keep from laughing out loud. “Objection!”

But before the judge could respond, Chelsea did. Her cheeks were bright with anger, and her expression was one only a teenager could manage, putting Jordan in a mental place she reserved for slugs and sewer refuse. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, or what all this Bel-whatever stuff is. My friends and I went to chill. Period.”

“Mr. McAfee,” the judge said, “you will move on. Now.”

The jury was looking at Jordan with nearly the same scorn as Chelsea. Okay, so maybe he’d pushed a little hard . . . and what he was driving at was, admittedly, nuts. He’d dismiss the witness. With luck, it would all work out in the end and Thomas would still be speaking to him.

Thomas.

Jordan silently winged an apology to his son. “Ms. Abrams, do you wear jewelry?”

Again, that look. God, was it something they were teaching in public schools these days? “No,” she said.

“No earrings?”

“Sometimes, I guess.”

“No bracelet or necklace or ring?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it true that you’re actually wearing a necklace right now?”

“Yes,” she said tightly.

“And isn’t it true that you never take that necklace off your body?”

“Well, I-”

“Could you show it to us?”

Chelsea looked to the prosecutor for permission. Then she slowly tugged a long chain from the neckline of her blouse, to reveal the five-pointed star.

“What is that symbol, Ms. Abrams?”

“I don’t know. I just think it’s pretty.”

“Are you aware that a five-pointed star is called a pentagram?”

“No.”

“And that the pentagram is a symbol of pagan religions . . . the same groups that would have been celebrating Beltane the night of April thirtieth?”

Chelsea slipped the necklace beneath her collar again. “It’s just a necklace.”

“Of course . . . and you and your friends were just chilling that night.”

“Objection!”

“Withdrawn,” Jordan said. “Nothing further.”

Later that day

Carroll County Courthouse

Oh, God, it hurt to see him here.

The moment Addie had been escorted into the courtroom as a witness, her eyes had zeroed in on Jack. Her heart hurt so badly she had to slide her hand inside her jacket, just to press down against the ache. When he smiled at her and nodded, as if to say she could get through this, Addie thought she was going to burst into tears.

Please, God, she prayed, as she was sworn in. Just a small earthquake. A fire. Anything that will just stop this whole nightmare, right now, before I have to become a contributing party.

At that moment, the doors of the courtroom burst open, and her father pushed his way inside. “Dad!” He was carrying a huge basket, from which came the most delicious smell. Steam rose from beneath a blue checkerboard cloth that was tucked over the contents. He hurried down the aisle toward the bench and winked at his daughter. “You knock ’em dead, honey,” Roy said. “I gotta give these out while they’re still hot.”

Setting the basket beside the court stenographer’s machine, he opened up the napkin, filling the room with the aroma of freshly baked muffins. “Here, Your Honor. You’re the head honcho, so you get the first bite.”

By that time, Althea Justice had recovered her voice. “Mr . . .”

“Peabody, at your service. You can call me Roy.”

“Mr. Peabody,” the judge said, “you cannot come barging into the middle of a trial.”

“Oh, I’m not barging.” Roy began to place muffins on the defense table, in front of the prosecutor, into the outstretched hands of the jury. “Consider me the chuck wagon.”

“Be that as it may . . . is that peanut butter?”

“Good nose, ma’am. PB & J muffins. What makes mine different, though, is that the peanut butter is mixed right into the batter, instead of set in the center like the jelly. Comfort food, which I figured you all could use about now.” He hefted the basket and turned to the gallery. “The rest are for you all,” Roy said. “Except I wasn’t counting on there being quite so many. So maybe you could all just share with your neighbor.”

“Your Honor,” Matt said, incensed, “this man has no right to be here. He’s a sequestered witness, for God’s sake.”

Jordan swallowed a bite of the muffin. “Ah, come on, Houlihan, don’t get your knickers in a knot. He’s just bringing us a treat.”

“He’s blatantly trying to influence the jury,” Matt snapped. “Look at them.”

Every juror was either in the throes of peeling back the cupcake liner at the base of the muffin or stuffing a bite into his or her mouth. “Mr. Peabody,” the judge said, her mouth full, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave until you’re called by the defense.”

“I understand, Your Honor.”

“You didn’t happen to bring any milk, did you?” she asked.

Roy grinned. “Next time. I promise.”

“There will not be a next time,” Matt thundered. “I want the record to reflect that I object to this . . . this shenanigan McAfee’s dreamed up.”

“Me?” Jordan cried. “I didn’t tell him to play Betty Crocker!”

“Mr. Houlihan, your objection will be so noted, after the court reporter has finished her snack,” the judge said. “Now, really. This was nothing more than a lovely surprise, I’m sure. You go on and eat, and then we’ll resume with your witness.”

“I will not eat that muffin,” Matt vowed.

The judge raised her brows. “Well, Mr. Houlihan, it’s a free country.”

Roy waved off thank-yous and exited.

“Your Honor,” Jordan said. “Approach?”

The attorneys walked toward the bench. “Yes, Mr. McAfee?” prompted the judge.

“If the county attorney isn’t going to eat his, can I have it?”

Judge Justice shook her head. “I’m afraid that isn’t for me to say.”

“I hope you’re enjoying this,” Matt snarled to Jordan. “I hope you can sleep nights, knowing you’ve turned a rape trial into a farce.” He stalked back to his table and provocatively set his untouched muffin on the corner closest to the defense. “The state calls Addie Peabody,” he said.

For over ten minutes, Addie had not let herself make eye contact with Jack. You can get through this, she told herself. Just answer the questions. “You’re not here today voluntarily, are you, Ms. Peabody?” Houlihan asked.

“No,” she admitted.

“You’re still involved in a relationship with Jack St. Bride.”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell us what happened after you found him outside, unconscious?”

Addie twisted her hands in her lap. “When he came to, I got him up to the bedroom. I cleaned him up with a washcloth, and we both fell asleep.”

“Did you get a good look at his face, Ms. Peabody?”

“Yes. His face had cuts all over it, and his eye was swelling shut.”

“Where was he scratched?”

“Over his eye, on his forehead.”

“Were there any scratches on his cheek?” the prosecutor asked.

“No.”

“How long did you sleep?”

“A couple of hours.”

“What woke you up?”

“I don’t know. I think the fact that he wasn’t sleeping beside me anymore.”

“What did you do?”

“I went to go look for him . . . and heard a noise coming from my daughter’s room.”

“Was that unusual?”

Addie took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said. “My daughter died seven years ago.”

“Did you go in?”

Addie began to pull at a thread on the hem of her skirt. She thought of how life could happen that way-one slipped stitch, and suddenly the most solid binding could fall apart. “He was boxing up her things,” she said softly. “Stripping the bed.”

The county attorney nodded sympathetically. “Did you argue?”

“Yes, for a few minutes.”

“Did the fight become physical?”

“No.”

“How did it end?”

She’d been sworn in and had known it would come to this moment-the point where her words might as well have been arrows, aimed right at Jack’s heart. “I told him I wanted him to leave.”

“Did he?”

“Yes.”

And if she hadn’t forced him out, he wouldn’t have been in the woods that night. He wouldn’t have been anywhere near Gillian Duncan. It was what she’d wondered a thousand times . . . how could the blame have come to rest heavily on Jack, when she herself was so clearly at fault?

“What time was it when Mr. St. Bride left?”

“About nine forty-five.”

“When did you next see the defendant?”

“About one-thirty in the morning,” Addie whispered. “At the diner.”

“Can you describe his physical appearance?”

Every word ripped into her. “His cuts, they were bleeding again. He had a scratch on his cheek, and dirt on his clothes, and he reeked of liquor.”

“What did he say to you?”

Addie took a deep breath. “That it had been a tough night.”

“Ms. Peabody,” Matt asked, “was Mr. St. Bride with you between the hours of nine forty-five P.M. and one-thirty A.M.?”

She exhaled heavily but didn’t reply.

“Ms. Peabody?”

The judge leaned toward her. “You’re going to have to give a response.”

She wanted to answer, but she wanted the answer to be the right one. She wanted to look the prosecutor in the eye and tell him that he had collared the wrong man, that the Jack she knew was not the person who had committed this horrible crime.

She wanted to save him, like he had saved her.

Lifting her face, Addie said, “Yes, he was.”

The county attorney turned, shock written all over his face. “I beg your pardon?”

“Yes,” Addie repeated, her voice stronger. “He was with me that whole night.”

Houlihan narrowed his gaze. “You’re aware you’re under oath, Ms. Peabody. Perjury is a criminal act.”

Her eyes were shining, damp. “He was with me.”

“Really,” the prosecutor said. “Where?”

Addie’s hands stole over her heart, as if that might be enough to keep it from breaking. “Right here.”

“When the police came to arrest Jack, what were you thinking?”

At Jordan’s question, Addie looked up. “I really didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t my finest hour.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was in shock. There had been rumors around town . . .”

“Rumors?”

“That Jack had done time in jail.”

“Did he ever tell you that he’d been convicted for sexual assault?”

“He told me that a girl had wrongly accused him of carrying on an intimate relationship. One of his students. And that he plea-bargained the case on the advice of his lawyer, because it was the way to serve the least time and put the whole thing behind him.”

Jordan frowned. “But he specifically said he wasn’t guilty?”

“Over and over,” Addie answered.

“And you believed him?”

“One hundred percent,” she vowed. “But so many people in town were . . . well, they were like vultures, waiting to strike. And I guess I got so used to hearing people expect the worst of Jack that when the police came, at first, I . . . I did too.” She frowned. “It wasn’t until I sat down later and really thought, This is Jack they took. Jack. Then I knew that he couldn’t ever have done what they said.”

“Ms. Peabody, you saw Jack being beaten up by five men that night?”

“Yes.”

“Was he fighting back?”

She shook her head. “He passed out.”

“Did you call the police?” Jordan asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Addie looked at Matt Houlihan, then at the judge. She leaned toward the bench and whispered something to Althea Justice, who nodded.

“I didn’t call the police,” Addie said, “because I thought they might have been involved.”

When court adjourned for the day, Jordan handed his briefcase over the railing of the gallery to Selena. “Try to get some rest,” he told Jack. A deputy cuffed him and led him silently through the tunnels that wound beneath the courthouse parking lot to the jail. Once they’d been buzzed inside, a guard took over Jack’s transformation back to prisoner, leading him into the room near the jail entrance to strip. “We’ll take these right down to the dry cleaner and have ’em pressed,” the CO joked, folding Jack’s trousers over his arm. Because Jack had left the premises, the guard waited until he was naked and then checked Jack’s mouth, nostrils, ears, and anus for contraband.

This Jack St. Bride was a different man than the one who had come through the door two months ago in protective custody. His face was a blank wash of expression, like every other prisoner rotting in his cell. He shrugged out of his civilian clothes like a snake giving up its skin, as if he knew that it wouldn’t fit him in this next stage of his life. Through the violation of the cavity search, Jack closed his eyes and did what he was told.

It didn’t matter anymore, none of it. He’d seen the faces of the men and women on that jury-the way they’d cried along with Gillian Duncan, the slanted looks they knifed at him that they thought he surely could not feel. He’d watched his own attorney leave the courtroom, headed home to his own life-one that didn’t factor in the innocence or guilt of Jack St. Bride and that wouldn’t change, no matter what verdict was handed down.

Jack fell into step beside the guard and walked, docile as a fawn, toward his cell. Get used to this, he thought.

He might not yet have been sentenced, but it was only a matter of time.

“Oh my God,” Gillian said, sitting up on her bed the minute Meg opened the door of the bedroom. “You have no idea how glad I am to see you.” The door cracked open a little wider, and Gillian saw her father standing behind her Meg. “Daddy,” she said, startled.

His eyes were dark, hooded. “I didn’t know if you were up to a visit.”

“I am,” Gillian said quickly. “Really.” She grabbed Meg’s hand and yanked her inside, then waited for her father to close the door and leave them in privacy.

It was, Meg thought, as if their fight about the drugs in the thermos had never happened. Gillian fluttered around her like a gypsy moth, buzzing about the trial and the witnesses and who had said what. “You have no idea how much I want to talk to Whit and Chelsea,” she chattered. “But I’m sequestered, in case I need to be recalled by one of the lawyers later. Still, I heard that Whit was peeing in her pants. And that Thomas’s father was a total prick to Chelsea.”

“That’s his job,” Meg said, her mouth dry.

Gillian stepped in front of her. “What’s been said about me?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, right. You haven’t been on the stand yet. Do you think you’ll be called tomorrow? It’s not so bad, really. One of the jurors has the most disgusting mole on the side of her neck. I swear I couldn’t stop looking at it the whole time-”

“I’m not testifying,” Meg mumbled.

“You’re not?”

She shook her head. “Mr. Houlihan, he changed his mind.”

Dumbfounded, Gilly stared at Meg. “If this is something you’re pulling because of that atropine . . .”

“Jesus, Gilly . . . does everything have to be about you?” Meg turned away, mortified. “He touched me,” she confessed. “He put his hands all over me, Gilly. I remembered.”

Beside her, Gillian stood like a stone sentry. “He did not.” She raked angry eyes over Meg’s disheveled form, her double chin, her dimpled arms. Her nostrils flared, once.

“Then why do I remember it?” Meg cried. “Why can I feel his hands on my-”

“No!” Gillian slapped her so hard Meg’s head snapped back and the red-pencil print of a hand stamped her cheek. Tears ran down Meg’s face, and her nose was running, and she couldn’t manage to hold onto a single thought. “He did not touch you,” Gillian said. “Do you understand?”

Meg nodded quickly.

“He touched me.” Gillian grabbed Meg’s arm and squeezed it. “Say it!”

“He touched you,” Meg sobbed.

“Good,” Gillian said, the fierce fire in her eyes banking. She reached for Meg, cradling her friend against her chest, wrapping her tight in her arms. She stroked Meg’s cheek until the red print faded, then leaned down and pressed a kiss to her damp skin. “That’s right,” Gillian whispered. “Don’t forget.”

The jury was sluggish the next morning, something not helped by the first witness-a retired FBI soil analyst older than Methuselah who used far too many chemical terms to explain that the dirt found in the treads of Jack’s boot was consistent with the known soil sample taken from the crime scene. By the time the prosecutor put his forensic scientist on the stand to explain DNA, Jordan almost felt sorry for him. Would the judge declare a mistrial if the entire jury went into a coma?

But Jordan had been counting on a typical DNA scientist-a brainy geek with a receding hairline and a technical vocabulary. What he got instead was Frankie Martine.

She easily could have moonlighted as a Playboy model, with her bee-stung lips and long blond hair and hourglass figure. Jordan glanced at the jury and wasn’t surprised to find them all sitting up, listening. Hell, she could have recited a grocery list, and the six men in that box would have given her their undivided attention.

“You get half of your DNA from your mother, and half from your father,” Frankie said. “You know how people say, ‘Oh, I’ve got my mom’s nose . . . or my dad’s chin.’ In the same manner, we inherit thousands of genetic traits that mean nothing to anyone but us geeky forensic scientists.” She smiled at the jury. “You with me?”

They all nodded. And the jury foreman, a bald man with a protruding belly, winked.

Surely he’d imagined that. Jordan did a double take as Frankie Martine continued, unfazed. “For example, the average Joe doesn’t know that he’s CSF1P0 type twelve, thirteen . . . yet that’s something that could come in handy if he’s ever accused of a crime and the perp leaves behind DNA evidence of being CSF1P0 type ten, eleven.”

Jordan glanced at the jury box and nearly fell off his seat as the jury foreman winked again at the witness.

“Objection,” he said, standing up.

Matt Houlihan looked at him as if he were crazy, with good reason. Nothing Frankie Martine had said was objectionable.

“On what grounds, Mr. McAfee?”

He felt heat creeping up from his collar. “Distraction, Your Honor.”

The judge frowned. “Get up here, counsel.” Jordan and Matt approached the bench, hesitating at the scowl on the justice’s face. “You want to tell me what you’re up to now?”

“Your Honor, I believe that the witness is distracting certain members of the jury,” Jordan said in a rush.

“Which members?”

The ones with Y chromosomes, Jordan thought. “The foreman, in particular. I think Ms. Martine’s physical attributes have, um, caught his eye.”

Matt Houlihan started to laugh. “You have got to be kidding. The witness is a professional forensic scientist.”

“She’s also quite . . . attractive.”

“What do you want me to do? Have her testify with a paper bag over her head?”

“The foreman keeps winking at her,” Jordan said. “I have reason to believe that he’s not concentrating on the task at hand.”

“Why does this happen in my court?” The judge sighed. “I will not stand for you talking about the witness this way, Mr. McAfee. Even if you can’t get your own mind out of the gutter, I have faith that the members of our jury can. Your objection is overruled.”

Jordan slunk back to his seat. The prosecutor approached his witness, shook his head, and continued. “Ms. Martine, why is DNA used to profile evidence?”

“Let me put it in simple terms,” she said. “You’re driving to work and you’re side-swiped by another vehicle. When you call to make a police report, they ask you to describe the car. The more information you give them, the more likely they’ll be able to track down the exact car. So, if you tell the police only that the car was blue, well, it’s not very helpful to their search, since there are blue trucks, blue cars, blue vans, of all makes and models. However, if you tell them that it was a blue Acura 1991 hatchback, with a sunroof and a SAY NO TO DRUGS bumper sticker, the easier it will be for them not only to find a car matching that description but also to determine that it was indeed the car that side-swiped you. The more characteristics you give, the smaller the pool of suspect cars becomes.

“Similarly, the more genetic characteristics I can give you about the evidence results in the more people I can eliminate. Therefore, when you do find a person who matches the profile, the less likely it is that someone else exists with the exact same criteria.”

“How complex is the analysis?”

“Very,” Frankie said. “By its nature, it has to be extremely sensitive.”

“What precautions do you take to avoid contamination during your analysis of the evidence?” Matt asked.

“I work on only one piece of evidence at a time, label it immediately, and close it before I begin work on the next piece. I always work on the evidence before working on the known blood samples, and clean my scissors, forceps, and work surface between samples. I change my lab coats and gloves frequently and use as many disposable supplies as necessary, so there is no carryover or contamination of DNA. Finally, I have designated samples during my analysis that contain no intentionally added DNA. If at any point in the procedure I detect DNA in these samples, I assume all the samples are contaminated, and I start over.”

The prosecutor turned around and slipped on a pair of plastic gloves. Then he held up a girl’s blouse, spotted with blood. “Ms. Martine,” he said, “do you recognize this?”

“Yes. It’s the blouse I was asked to test.”

Matt entered the clothing into evidence, and then asked Frankie to identify each swab and envelope and vial that had come from the rape kit. “After testing all these items, what were your results?”

Frankie slipped a chart onto an overhead projector. This was the point at which a forensic scientist usually lost her audience. Unfortunately, Jordan thought, grimacing, that probably wasn’t going to be the case here. The jury could see her legs, which-Jordan couldn’t help but notice-were damn nice.

Appropriately, Frankie did a striptease of the chart, revealing each line only as she spoke about it. “Line one hundred,” Frankie explained, “is everything I can tell you about the victim’s known blood sample. And each of those eight weird combinations of letters and numbers to the right is an area on the DNA chain. Think of it like that side-swiping car . . . the first column is the make of the car. The second column is the model. The third is the color . . . all the way up to the eighth column, the bumper sticker. At each location, the victim received one allele from her mother, and one from her father. For example, at the CSF1P0 location, Ms. Duncan inherited a type twelve from each of her parents.

“Line two hundred is the defendant’s known blood sample. Each pair of numbers at those eight loci are alleles he inherited from his mother and father.” She pointed to the row beneath that. “On the shirt Mr. Houlihan held up, I extracted DNA from the bloodstains. You’ll see that at each location, the profile of the stains matches the profile of Mr. St. Bride.”

“How many other people might have a profile that matches the evidence?”

“It’s not possible to DNA-type everyone in the world, so I apply a mathematical formula that helps me predict the answer to that question. According to my calculations, that profile is found only once in greater than six billion, which is the approximate population of the world.”

“Can you explain the next row to us?” Matt asked.

“I know that the DNA profile detected under Ms. Duncan’s fingernails is consistent with a mixture, because at certain locations, there are three numbers-and a person inherits only two alleles. This isn’t surprising. Ms. Duncan can’t be eliminated as a possible cocontributor to the genetic material in this mixture, since I expect cells from her own hands were present. Of particular interest is whose DNA is mixed with hers. And based on the numbers in the profile of Mr. St. Bride-row two hundred-he cannot be eliminated as a cocontributor.”

“What would have eliminated him, Ms. Martine?”

“If a number came up at a location that was nowhere in his own genetic profile.”

“But that isn’t the case in this particular mixture?”

“No,” Frankie said. “It’s two hundred forty million times more likely that the defendant is the cocontributor to that sample than a randomly chosen individual in the population.”

“And the thigh line?”

She frowned. “That was a sample of semen, found on the thigh swab. Here, two locations I tested yielded inconclusive results.”

“What does that mean?”

“There wasn’t enough DNA present to profile all eight loci,” Frankie said. “In the remaining six, Mr. St. Bride could not be eliminated. It is seven hundred forty thousand times more likely that Mr. St. Bride is a cocontributor to the semen sample than another person chosen randomly from the population.”

“Thank you, Ms. Martine,” the prosecutor said.

And the jury foreman winked.

First, the cat died.

Now, it wasn’t such a big thing, taken by itself. Magnolia had been suffering with diabetes for three years, and twelve was pretty old for a cat. It had happened, her mother said, while Chelsea was at court, testifying on behalf of poor Gillian.

That afternoon, her little brother had fallen off a jungle gym and broken his arm in three places.

“When it rains,” her father said, “it pours.”

But they didn’t know about the Law of Three; they didn’t understand that all it took was one pebble to start an avalanche of dynamic proportion. What you did came back to you triplefold-both the good . . . and the bad. Chelsea wasn’t sure how much of that shit she believed, but she did know some things: She’d sworn an oath in a court of law and had gotten on the stand, and this was what had come of it. Her pet, her brother-by karmic proportions, she had one more devastation coming her way, to make up for what she’d done.

At dinner that night, she stared at her parents intently. Her mother had a mammogram scheduled the next day. Would it turn out to be cancer? Her father was planning on driving back to work that night . . . would he crash unexpectedly? Would she stop breathing, just like that, in her sleep? Would she wake up and find the Devil sitting beside her?

“Chelsea,” her mother said, “you haven’t touched your food.”

She couldn’t stand not knowing what tragedy was coming. Pushing away from the table, she ran upstairs and locked her bedroom door behind her and rummaged through her drawers, finally finding what she’d so carefully buried.

Could you wipe out your misdeeds with good intentions, like an abacus working in reverse? Chelsea didn’t know. But she tied the small bundle tight, with three knots. She stuffed it into a padded envelope that had come from an online CD store. She scrawled a new address across the front, added stamps, and ran out of her house with her parents’ concerned questions trailing her like the string of a kite.

She ran until she reached the end of the block, where the big blue mailbox sat. Collection times, it said, were at 10 A.M. and 2 P.M. With shaking hands, Chelsea dropped the packet into the moaning mouth of the box. She did not think of Gillian. She did not think of anything that might change her mind. Instead, she focused on climbing the slippery slope of hope, which promised her that by noon tomorrow, her life might turn itself around.

“You analyzed the pubic hair combings in the rape kit, didn’t you, Ms. Martine?” Jordan said, getting up from his seat.

“Yes.”

“What did you find?”

“No hairs with DNA foreign to the victim.”

Jordan raised his brows. “Isn’t it extremely difficult to violently rape someone without leaving behind a single pubic hair?”

“I see it all the time. We don’t normally even test pubic hair when we have DNA, since hairs can be transferred in the most innocent of ways. For example, when you went into the bathroom during the last recess, Mr. McAfee, you probably came away with other people’s pubic hair on your shoes, yet I’ll assume that you weren’t committing rape.”

She looked lovely, Jordan thought, even when she was reaming him. Abandoning that line of defense, he said, “You testified that the blood found on the victim’s shirt is a match for the defendant’s, isn’t that correct?”

“No. I testified that the locations I tested matched.”

“Whatever.” Jordan waved away the distinction. “Can you tell whether the blood you tested came from a scratch on the defendant’s cheek . . . or from a cut above his eye?”

“No.”

“Is it possible to tell from the blood on the shirt whether he was scratched by a human, or by a branch?”

“No,” Frankie said, then shrugged. “However, DNA was found beneath the victim’s fingernails, a mixture from which the defendant couldn’t be excluded as a cocontributor.”

“Was the victim wearing nail polish?”

She smiled a little. “As a matter of fact, she was. Candy-apple red. The nails were fairly long, too, which made for a very good sample of skin cells beneath.”

“Do you have to scratch someone to get his skin under your fingernails?”

“Not necessarily.”

“You can get his skin beneath your fingernails if you massage his scalp, right?”

“I suppose so.”

“Or if you gently rake your hand down his arm while you’re flirting?”

The forensic scientist made a face that let him know what she thought of his alternative scenario. “It’s possible.”

“Let’s examine some of the evidence,” Jordan said. “The semen and the nail residue . . . those are both mixtures of DNA?”

“Yes.”

“Presumably, they’re mixtures of the two known samples you have here-Ms. Duncan’s and Mr. St. Bride’s?”

“Possibly, yes.”

“Then how come the two lines aren’t identical?”

“You’re noticing the discrepancies in intensities-the numbers that are parenthesized versus the numbers that aren’t. And those can come from a variety of sources,” Frankie explained. “If we did the mixture of the DNA in the lab, it would be very precise-two drops of each cocontributor’s blood. But a mixture that was handed to us to analyze may not be equally divided between the two contributors. Obviously, in the fingernail residue mixture I wasn’t detecting as much DNA from the cocontributor as I was from the victim.”

“But if we’re talking about semen, shouldn’t there be a pretty good amount of DNA from the male?”

“Depends on how much sperm he has in it,” Frankie said. “If he’s a frequent ejaculator, he won’t have much sperm. If he’s a crack addict, he won’t have much sperm. If he’s an alcoholic or a diabetic, he won’t have much sperm. Many factors are involved.”

“To your knowledge, Ms. Martine, is the defendant a frequent ejaculator?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you know if he’s a crack addict?”

“No.”

“Do you know if he’s alcoholic or a diabetic?”

“Again, no.”

Jordan rocked back on his heels. “So when you looked at those two different mixture profiles . . . it didn’t bother you to see so many incongruities between them?”

She hesitated. “An intensity difference isn’t really an incongruity. Sometimes we’ll see a number come up in parentheses that we didn’t expect . . . but that can be due to many things-from the percentage of each contributor’s DNA in the mixture, to whether or not the contributors are related. We don’t exclude a suspect based on such an infinitesimal differentiation.”

“There’s a big difference between being two hundred forty million times more likely than anyone else to be a cocontributor-such as in the fingernail sample-or being seven hundred forty thousand times more likely to be a cocontributor-like in the semen sample.”

“That’s true.”

“What if you’d had results at the two locations that dropped out?”

“That’s a big if, Mr. McAfee,” Frankie said. “It’s possible that your client might have been excluded. It’s also possible that he might have been further included.”

“Isn’t it true that certain labs test more than eight locations?” Jordan asked.

“Yes. The FBI lab does thirteen.”

“Isn’t it possible that if you typed more systems, you might have excluded Jack as a suspect?”

“Yes.” She looked at the jury. “If you narrow the search even further, to a 1991 blue Acura hatchback with a sunroof and bumper sticker . . . and a cracked windshield and dent on the fender and all-weather tires, the group of potential suspects shrinks even more.”

“Did the state ask you to perform this additional test?”

“Our state lab doesn’t yet have that capability.”

“Ms. Martine, if you don’t mind, may I add a line to your chart?” When she nodded, Jack walked up to the projector and set down a handwritten sheet, adding a new profile.

“Ms. Martine, is this sample different from the known sample you profiled of Jack St. Bride?”

“Yes.”

“So it would have come from a different person?”

“Theoretically,” Frankie said.

“Now, if you don’t mind . . . could you estimate what we might see in a controlled mixture of line one hundred and the new sample . . . Gillian Duncan and a hypothetical suspect?”

Frankie picked up a marker and began to write on the bottom of her chart.

“Ms. Martine,” Jordan asked, “what does that line remind you of?”

“The semen profile.”

“So could the person who gave this hypothetical blood sample have been a contributor to the semen mixture?”

“Yes, this person would not be ruled out, either.”

“Then it’s possible that there’s someone other than Jack St. Bride walking around out there . . . someone with this particular DNA makeup, for example . . . who might be included as a suspect?”

Frankie met his eye. “Anything’s possible, Mr. McAfee, but my lab deals with concrete evidence. I didn’t have this hypothetical blood sample, and I don’t know this hypothetical suspect. But when you find him? You give me a call . . . and I’ll run the tests.”

As Charlie tried to concentrate on the prosecutor’s questions, his attention kept straying to Addie Peabody.

She sat behind the defense, almost in a direct line from Jack St. Bride, her eyes boring a hole into the back of the man’s neck. Her hair was slipping out of a bun, and her suit-the only one she had, he’d bet-was wrinkled as a newborn’s skin.

He didn’t want to be there. He wanted to be home, unraveling the mystery that was his daughter. He wanted to grab Addie and shake her until all the truths Meg had confessed to her spilled onto the floor at Charlie’s feet.

“What was her demeanor at that time?” Matt was asking, the words swimming to Charlie from a long tunnel.

Frightened. Withdrawn. Numb.

He had wanted to run home after Chelsea’s testimony, to grab Meg and ask her if she, too, was a witch. But he had already accused her once, and look at where it had gotten him. What if he did it a second time? How much damage could be done before the bond between a father and his daughter was irretrievably broken?

Broken.

He didn’t realize he’d spoken aloud until Matt asked another question. “After you took her statement, what did you do?”

“I went to the station and typed up an affidavit for an arrest warrant,” Charlie said.

“Did you obtain this warrant?”

“Yes.”

“Where did you go to serve it?”

“Addie Peabody’s house,” Charlie answered, and although he did not look her way, he could feel her straighten in her seat. “I asked for Mr. St. Bride and told him he was under arrest for the aggravated felonious sexual assault of Gillian Duncan the previous evening.”

“What happened?”

“He said he was nowhere near her that night.”

“Did you ever go back to the clearing behind the cemetery?”

“Yes, the next morning.”

“What did you find?”

“The remnants of a bonfire,” Charlie said. “Some spots where leaves were kicked around. A boot print.”

“Did you find a condom?”

“No.”

“A condom wrapper?”

“No.”

“Did you see Gillian again the next day?”

“Yeah,” Charlie murmured. “I stopped in to check up on her.”

“How did she look?”

The way Meg does now, Charlie realized, and as he stared into the dark, empty eyes of Jack St. Bride, he could feel himself drowning.

Jordan stalked toward the witness before the prosecutor had even settled in his chair. “The search you did at the cemetery wasn’t the only search you did in conjunction with this case, was it?”

“No.”

“In fact, Detective, you searched your own daughter’s room and found evidence that you believed was connected, correct?”

A memory flashed between them: Jordan sitting on the edge of Charlie’s couch, as he awkwardly confessed his suspicions to the policeman. “Yes.”

Jordan took an item from the prosecutor’s table, one he’d requested to have brought along. “Do you recognize this?”

“Yes. It’s a ribbon I found.”

“Where?”

“In my daughter’s closet.”

“What else did you find with this ribbon?” Jordan asked.

“Some plastic cups, and a thermos.”

“Was there a powdery residue in them?”

“Yes.”

“Which you had tested.”

Charlie nodded. “Yes.”

“That powder was atropine, wasn’t it?”

“That’s what I was told,” he admitted.

“Do you know what atropine is?”

“A drug,” Charlie said.

“Isn’t it true that atropine can occasionally produce side effects consistent with more traditional recreational drugs?”

“Yes.”

“So, in fact, Detective, the only evidence you found of a criminal act was in your own daughter’s room, wasn’t it? Because you didn’t find anything at the cemetery that would indicate a sexual assault happened there, did you?”

“Not specifically.”

“Isn’t it true that you asked Ms. Duncan to look at several condoms to see if she could pick out the one used that night?”

“Yes.”

“Yet she couldn’t identify it, could she?”

“No . . . but I imagine she wasn’t comparison-shopping at the time of the rape.”

The judge frowned at Charlie. “Just answer the question, Detective.”

“When you found the girls that night, they were at the edge of the cemetery?”

“Yes.”

“How far was that from the spot where the bonfire had been lit?”

“The clearing is about fifty yards away,” Charlie said.

“How long did it take you to walk there?”

“I didn’t time myself.”

Jordan walked toward Charlie. “Longer than thirty seconds?”

“No.”

“Were there any obstacles in the way?”

“No.”

“No rocks you had to climb over? No ditches to fall into?”

“It’s a flat, level path.”

By now, Jordan was almost face-to-face with the detective. “After his arrest, my client told you he was innocent, didn’t he?”

“Yes.” Charlie shrugged. “So do most perps.”

“But unlike most perps, you didn’t get a confession out of my client at the station. In fact, my client has steadily denied his involvement in this crime, isn’t that true?”

“Objection!” Matt cried.

“Sustained.”

Jordan didn’t blink. “When you met Gillian Duncan at the edge of the cemetery, how did her clothing appear to you?”

“Dirty, covered in leaves. Her shirt, it was buttoned all wrong.” Charlie glanced at Jack. “Like she’d had it ripped off her.”

“I have here the transcript of Ms. Duncan’s testimony yesterday, Detective. Would you mind reading the section I’ve marked off?” Jordan handed Charlie a piece of paper.

“ ‘How about your sweater? Did he take that off?’ ” Charlie read, and then gave Gillian’s answer. “No. ‘Unbutton it?’ No.”

“Thank you.” Jordan held up a photograph of Jack that had been placed on the evidence table. “Did you take this photo of Mr. St. Bride?”

“Yes.”

“Is it a fair and accurate representation of how he looked when you arrested him?”

“Yes.”

“Take a look at the scratch on his face. Is that one scratch or five?”

“One.”

“Is that consistent with five fingers being raked across a face?”

Charlie suddenly remembered Gillian’s hands twisting in her lap, how Amos had reached for one to hold. She’d had long fingernails, bright red, the same color polish his daughter had come home wearing that week after visiting Gilly at her house. “I’m not sure,” Charlie murmured.

Jordan slapped the picture down. “Nothing further.”

The incense cast a lavender cloud over Gilly’s bedroom, and as she drew it in, she imagined that she was drifting with the smoke, dissolving, energy rising. Cinnamon sprinkled freckles over her mother’s cheek, the worn photo tucked beneath a candle. “I call upon the Earth, Air, Fire, Water,” she whispered. “I call upon the Sun, Moon, and Stars.”

She did not know what was going on in the courtroom across town, and at this moment, she truly did not care. In fact, she was not thinking of her father, seated behind Matt Houlihan like the dragon who guarded Gilly’s virtue. She was not thinking of Jack St. Bride. Sweet sage tickled the inside of her nose, and with all she had inside her, Gillian wished for her mother.

Just on the edge of the circle, she could see her, a translucent figure with a laugh that fell into the shell of Gilly’s ear. And this time, something happened. Instead of the candle sputtering out and her mother simply disappearing, she looked Gillian in the eye and sang her name, a series of bells. “You shouldn’t,” her mother said, and the flame on the candle roared so bright it was blinding.

By the time Gillian realized the rug was on re, her mother had gone. She batted at the flames but didn’t manage to save the photograph. It was charred through, the only remaining fragment a piece of her mother’s hand, now curled and scorched with heat.

Gillian threw herself down beside the ashes, breathing in the smoke and sobbing. She would not learn until much later that she had burned her hands putting out the flames, that each broken blister would scar in the shape of a heart.

Matt Houlihan was tired. He wanted to go home and have Molly fall asleep on his chest while Syd rubbed his feet. He wanted to drink himself into oblivion, so that when he was tottering at the edge of consciousness, he wouldn’t have to see Gillian Duncan’s face.

He was almost done.

That, more than anything else, drew Matt to his feet. He slipped a piece of paper from a manila envelope and offered it to McAfee, who’d known ever since the motions hearing that it was coming. “Judge, the state has no more witnesses for its case in chief. However, at this time I’d like to offer a certified copy of the conviction of Jack St. Bride for sexual assault on a plea of guilty entered August 20, 1998, in Grafton County, New Hampshire. To wit, Mr. McBride admitted that he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old victim and received a sentence of eight months to serve in the Grafton County Correctional Facility.”

The jury gaped. They looked at Matt, they looked at the defendant, and they thought what any reasonable man or woman would think when presented with this evidence-if he’s done it before, he most likely has done it again.

Matt placed the conviction on the clerk’s desk, then looked directly at Jack St. Bride, hoping to hell the bastard was fully suffering the terror of being at someone else’s mercy, someone who held all the cards. “Your Honor,” Matt said. “The state rests.”

1969

New York City

That morning, while drinking her imported Sumatran coffee, Annalise St. Bride had read a story in the New York Times about a woman whose baby had been born in a tree. The woman lived in Mozambique, a country suffering from a flood, and had climbed to safety when her hut washed away. The baby was healthy, male, and rescued by helicopter a day later.

Surely that was worse than what was happening now.

She had been on Astor Place shopping for the most darling christening outfit when her water broke. Two weeks early. The ambulance told her she couldn’t get to Lenox Hill-the hospital where she’d planned to have her baby-because there was a parade blocking traffic one way, and a broken water main had locked up the conduit through Central Park. “I am not going to St. Vincent’s,” she insisted, as two paramedics hefted her into the back of the ambulance.

“Fine, lady,” one said. “Then drop the kid right here.”

A band of pain started at her groin, then radiated out to every nerve of her skin. “Do you know,” she gasped, “who my husband is?”

But the paramedics had already set the ambulance screaming crosstown.

Through the tiny window over her feet, Annalise watched the city roll past, a palette of gray angles and swerving pedestrians. In minutes, they arrived at the last hospital in New York City she could possibly wish to be.

Drug addicts and homeless people were splashed along the sides of the building like decorative puddles; Annalise had even heard of patients who had died in the halls simply waiting to be cared for. It was a far cry from Lenox Hill, with its lushly appointed exclusive birthing suites meant to offer a couple the feel of being at home.

St. Vincent’s? Being born in a tree was a better pedigree than this.

As the paramedics loaded the stretcher off the ambulance, she realized she had to fight in earnest. But the moment the wheels of the gurney slapped onto the pavement, she felt shock rocket through her. Her spine was shattering-she could feel the vertebrae at the base cracking, she was certain of it. In her womb, where she’d been carrying a baby, there was now a huge fist. It twisted like a puppeteer’s, pulled so hard and so long that she writhed, at odds in her own body.

I am going to die, she thought.

When she opened her mouth, all she could say was, “Get Joseph.”

She was admitted before the shifty-eyed drunks and the mothers with six sniffling children hanging like ornaments from their limbs. The curtained room smelled of alcohol and cleaning fluids, and Annalise’s gaily wrapped package stuck out awkwardly, a Meissen vase in a Woolworth’s living room. “She’s eight centimeters,” said the doctor, an Asian man with hair that stood straight, like a rooster’s comb.

“I want to wait for my husband,” Annalise gritted out. The contractions were slicing her in half, like the magician’s assistant.

“I don’t think your baby’s got the same idea,” a nurse murmured, coming up behind Annalise to brace her shoulders.

She and Joseph had toured the rooms at Lenox Hill, with their silk bedding and faux fireplaces. Just around the corner was their favorite Italian restaurant. Joseph had promised to bring her penne alla diavolo, the restaurant’s specialty, the night she delivered.

Suddenly, there was a crash as a new patient was wheeled into the cubicle beside Annalise’s. “Maria Velasquez. Thirty-year-old female, primip, twenty-seven weeks’ gestation,” the paramedic said. “BP one thirty over seventy, heart rate one-oh-five sinus rhythm. Beaten up one side and down the other by her husband.”

Annalise stared at the curtain that separated her from this woman. The nurse behind her gently turned her face away. “You concentrate on you,” she said.

“Are you having contractions?” The question came from the other side of the drape, the one Annalise was gazing at so fixedly she expected it to fly off its hangers at any moment in a feat of telekinesis.

“Sí, los tiene,” the woman moaned.

“Looks like she’s bleeding. Could be a placenta previa. Call OB.”

Annalise licked dry lips. “What’s . . . what’s the matter with the woman over there?”

Her doctor glanced up from a spot between her legs. “I need you to push,” he said. “Now, Annalise.”

She bore down with all her strength, squeezing her eyes so tight the room swam about her, and the words that filtered through the curtain came thin and quivering.

“No pueda!”

“It’s coming . . . get me a gown and gloves, for Christ’s sake.”

“BP’s falling. She’s ninety over palp.”

“Ah, damn. She’s bleeding out.”

“Respire, Mrs. Velasquez. No empuje.”

“Primero salvo mi bebé! Por favor, salvo mi bebé!”

Annalise felt herself being opened from the inside, a seal yawning and widening. She had a sudden vision of Joseph pulling on a weekend turtleneck sweater, the wool stretching taut as his head slowly emerged to show his smile, his tousled hair.

“Here we go,” the doctor said.

“Ringer’s lactate, wide open. Type and cross her. Where the hell is OB?”

“We’ve got to do this now. Ahora, Mrs. Velasquez. Empuje.”

“Pedi’s here.”

“About time. Take the baby.”

“Él se llamo Joaquim!”

“Yes, Mrs. Velasquez. That’s a lovely name.”

“One more push,” the nurse said to Annalise, “and you’re gonna have yourself a little one.”

“Suction the infant . . . I want him intubated and bagged with one hundred percent oxygen . . .”

“No quiera morir . . .”

“Pulse ox ninety-eight. Heart rate’s one-fifty.”

A high whine of machinery. “The mother’s bleeding out.”

“Massage her uterus. Hard. Harder!”

“Hang pitocin, and two units of O neg on the rapid infuser. IV fluids wide.”

“Where the hell is OB? Put in a central line.”

Annalise grabbed the nurse’s collar and pulled her close. “I don’t want to die.”

“You’re not going to,” the woman said.

“One more push, Annalise. One good one.”

She clenched her teeth, pressed down, and suddenly her son came into the world.

“The baby’s abdomen is filling with air.”

“You intubated the esophagus. Do it again.”

“Pulse ox sixty-three. Heart rate seventy.”

“Put in an umbilical line. Give him one cc of atropine, point three of epi, and three milliequivalents of bicarb.”

“Draw a blood gas.”

“She’s coding!”

“He’s in v-fib!”

Groggy, Annalise looked down at the healthy bundle in her arms and clutched him tightly.

On the other side of the curtain, two separate wars were being fought. One was to save the life of a woman who’d been beaten to near death by her husband. The other was to allow her child to have any kind of a life at all. From time to time, the curtain billowed in toward Annalise, the frenzy spilling into the limits of her own space.

She could identify two voices now, the doctor taking care of Mrs. Velasquez, and the doctor taking care of the woman’s newborn.

“Starting chest compressions.”

“Charge the paddles to three hundred fifty watts . . . intubate her!”

Thump, thump, thump-the sound of electricity jolting to jump-start a body.

“Give her another one mil of epi.”

“Give him another point three of epi.”

Thump.

“Asystole.”

And a moment later, “Asystole.”

Then the two doctors, speaking simultaneously. “Call it.”

Annalise should have been moved up to OB but had been forgotten because of the crisis next door. Now, the voices that had swelled the curtain a half hour before were silent.

The clock on the wall ticked, an animal grinding its teeth. Very slowly, Annalise slipped off the delivery table, walked to the bassinet, and gathered her son into the crook of her arm. She was sore and sagging, but she had never felt so strong. She pulled back the corner of the drape that separated her from the body of Maria Velasquez.

The woman lay on her back, a tube rising out of her throat like a periscope. Her face and neck were jeweled with cuts and bruises. Annalise slipped down the blue sheet covering her chest, saw the belt of purple welts along the still-swollen abdomen.

Two hours ago, the worst thing in the world she could imagine was coming to a place like St. Vincent’s to deliver a baby. She had cried because the labor room didn’t have wallpaper, because the doctor who’d been the first person to touch her son had not been raised in a family that had come over on the Mayflower. She had believed that her child needed to start his life in a certain manner, so that he could grow up to be just like Annalise.

God help him.

Maria Velasquez lived in a city Annalise did not know, one where women were raped and beaten, then left to sink in their own sorrow. Annalise’s friends worried about how to seat guests at dinner, how to turn down invitations politely; how to make sure the maid wasn’t drinking on the job. If they ever noticed the others struggling to survive, they quickly turned away . . . because what you did not see, you did not have to account for.

Annalise, on the other hand, had heard this woman die.

The baby’s body lay in a bassinet. He was the size of a half loaf of bread, his bones light as a bird’s and stretched with thin skin. Juggling the weight of her own son, Annalise lifted Maria Velasquez’s stillborn boy into her other arm.

What difference did it make if you were born in Lenox Hill, in St. Vincent’s, in a tree? She glanced at Maria Velasquez’s battered body and swallowed hard. What it came down to was simply that you had a chance to love and be loved.

She jumped when a nurse walked in. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I . . . I just . . .” Annalise took a deep breath, and raised her chin. “I just thought someone should hold him, once.”

The nurse, who had been ready to castigate her, stilled. Without saying a word, she nodded at Annalise and then stepped away, closing the curtain behind her.

The nurse who had been Annalise’s labor coach came into her cubicle, accompanied by Joseph, who looked frantic and overwhelmed by his surroundings. She left them to their privacy, as Joseph approached Annalise and stared at the wonder of his son. The baby yawned and pushed a fist out of his blanket. “Oh, Annie,” he whispered. “I was too late.”

“No, you were just in time.”

“But you had to come here.” When Annalise didn’t answer, Joseph shook his head, mesmerized. “Isn’t he something.”

“I think he just might be,” Annalise answered.

Her husband sat down beside her. “We’ll get you out of here right away,” he assured her. “I already called Dr. Post at Lenox Hill, and he-”

“Actually, I’d like to stay at St. Vincent’s,” she said, interrupting. “Dr. Ho was quite good.”

Joseph opened his mouth to argue but took one look at the expression on his wife’s face and nodded. He stroked the infant’s head. “Does he . . . have a name?”

Él se llamo Joaquim.

“I think,” Annalise said, “I’d like to call him Jack.”

July 3, 2000

Carroll County Jail

Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you-but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like a cartographer learning a country by heart?

Addie reached for Jack as if she were drowning, their hands joined across the old table in the basement of the Carroll County Jail. She touched him with all the emotion she’d kept curtained inside her since her testimony. She touched him a thousand times, for every moment that she’d wanted to walk up to Jack at the defense table and lay a hand on his shoulder, press a kiss to his neck. She touched him and found that even something as innocent as the lacing of their fingers could raise all the hairs on the back of her neck and make her blood beat faster.

And she was so fascinated by the way they fit together-Jack’s palm big enough to swallow hers whole-that Addie did not realize the man she was clutching was someone who desperately wanted to get away.

It was when he gently pried her fingers from his that Addie looked up. “We have to talk,” Jack said softly.

Addie stared at his face. The stubborn jaw, the soft mouth, the fine golden stubble that covered his cheeks like glitter flung by a fairy-they were all still there. But his eyes-flat and blue-black-there was simply nothing behind them.

“I think it’s going pretty well, don’t you?” she said, smiling so hard her cheekbones hurt. She was lying, and they both knew it. Hanging over them like an impending storm was the unspoken memory of Matt Houlihan reading that former conviction. If that thundercloud had followed Jack and Addie home, every single one of the jurors was being dogged by it, too.

“Jack,” Addie said, rolling his name around her mouth like a butterscotch candy. “If this is about my testimony-I’m so sorry. I never wanted to be subpoenaed.” She closed her eyes. “I should have just lied for you when Charlie came that morning. That’s it, isn’t it? If I’d lied, you’d have an alibi. You’d be free now.”

“Addie,” Jack said, his voice painfully even. “I’m not in love with you.”

You can be strapped to the most stable chair and still feel the world give way beneath you. Addie’s hands clutched the edge of the table. Where was the man who had told her she was the bright light getting him through this misery? At what ordinary moment between yesterday and now had everything changed?

Sometimes, when I think I’m going to lose it in here, I just imagine that I’m already out.

Tears arrowed at the backs of her eyes, small, hot darts. “But you said-”

“I say a lot of things,” Jack said, bitterly. “But you heard the prosecutor. They’re not always true.”

She turned her head toward the one window in the basement, a tiny square of dirty glass set nearly flush to the ceiling. She kept her eyes wide, so that she wouldn’t cry in front of Jack. And maybe because of that, she had a clear vision of her father, years ago, after her mother had died. She’d found him one day in his living room, sober for once, surrounded by papers and mementos. He’d handed her a box of knick-knacks. “This is my will. And some . . . some stuff you ought to have. The first letter I ever wrote your mom, my medal from the Korean War.”

Addie had leafed through the box, her fingers going cold and stiff. These were the items you collected when someone died-as her father had done after they buried her mother, as Addie had only recently done with Chloe’s things. You pulled the loose threads of their lives free, so that you could move on. Addie watched her father place his fancy gold watch into the box and understood: He was putting his affairs in order, so that she wouldn’t have to.

“You’re not dying,” Addie had told him, thrusting the box back into his hands.

Roy had sighed. “But I might as well be.”

Now, Addie turned slowly toward Jack. He had no will to offer her, no medals, no memories. But he was giving her back her heart, so that when he left her life, there would be no strings attached.

“No,” she said firmly.

Jack blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”

“You should be. Lying to me, like that. For God’s sake, Jack, if you really wanted to end things between us, you should have used an excuse I might actually have believed. Like . . . you aren’t good enough for me. Or that you didn’t want me to suffer along with you. But to tell me you aren’t in love with me . . . well, that’s just something I don’t buy.”

She leaned forward, her words aimed right at his heart. “You love me. You do. And goddammit, I’m tired of having the people who love me leave before I’m ready for them to go. It is not going to happen again.” She stood up, anger and determination hanging from her shoulders like the mantle of a queen. Then she walked toward the door where a guard stood posted, leaving Jack to suffer the sucker punch of being abandoned.

“If you don’t get to sleep,” Selena said, “you’re not going to be of any use tomorrow.”

Two in the morning, and they lay side by side in bed, staring at the ceiling. “I know,” Jordan admitted.

“You’re all knots.” She came up on an elbow. “Although that seems impossible, after what we just did.”

“I can’t help it. I keep hearing Houlihan reading the goddamn conviction.”

Selena thought for a moment. “Then I’ll make you think of something else.”

“Selena, I’m forty-two. You’re gonna kill me.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter, McAfee.” She sat up cross-legged, drawing the sheet around her like a medicine man’s shawl. “So this guy gets sued because his mailman slips and breaks his pinky on a icy patch of his driveway. Two days later, the guy’s wife sends a threatening letter, via her divorce attorney. He gets so fed up with lawyers that he goes to a bar to drink away his sorrows.”

“Now that,” Jordan interrupted, “sounds promising.”

“Ten shots of tequila, and he’s drunk as a skunk. He gets up on top of the bar and shouts at the top of his lungs, ‘All lawyers are assholes!’”

“Excellent. And this is supposed to relax me why?”

Selena ignored him. “A man on the other end of the bar yells, ‘Hey! Watch your mouth.’ And the drunk guy sneers and says, “Oh? Are you a lawyer?’”

Jordan finished the joke. “‘No. I’m an asshole.’”

Selena looked crushed. “You’ve heard it before.”

“Honey, I could have written it.” He sighed. “I need to get a nice, relaxing job. Maybe there’s an opening for an IRA operative.”

“You ought to try working for this lawyer I know,” Selena said.

Jordan smiled. “You gonna sue me for sexual harrassment?”

“I don’t know. Are you gonna sue me?”

“I can think of better things to do with you,” Jordan murmured, but when she expected him to reach for her, he simply turned away.

Selena leaned over him, her braids brushing his shoulder. “Jordan?”

He caught her hand, wishing it could be just that easy to hold to the rest of her. “Are you going to leave me again, Selena?”

“Are you going to smother me again, Jordan?”

“I asked you to marry me. I didn’t realize that was a criminal act.”

“Jordan, you didn’t want to marry me. You were still reeling after the Harte case. And I was the closest thing to grab onto.”

“Don’t tell me what I wanted. I know what I wanted. You. I still do.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re smart and you’re gorgeous and you’re the only woman I know of who would tell a defense attorney a really shitty lawyer joke at two A.M.” His grip on her wrist tightened. “Because you make me believe that there are things worth fighting for.”

“Sleeping with me might make you a happier attorney, Jordan, but it doesn’t make you work any harder for your clients.” She shook her head. “You’ve always tangled up your work and your life. And you’ve made me do it, too.”

“Stay with me, Selena. I’m asking you now, so that you know it has nothing to do with the outcome of this case.”

“Maybe it should,” she said lightly, trying to joke her way out of this. “Maybe we should ask the jury to decide, since you and I don’t seem to be very good at it.”

“Juries hand down wrong decisions every day.”

She stared at him. “Are they going to be wrong this time?”

Jordan didn’t know if she was talking about the verdict for Jack St. Bride or for their own relationship. He lifted her hand and brushed his lips over her knuckles, a promise. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

By three o’clock in the morning, Gillian not only had counted 75,000 sheep but she’d moved onto other barnyard animals for diversity. Time passed exceedingly slow, each second melting. But then, she had reason to be anxious. In six hours, court would reconvene, and Jack St. Bride’s attorney would have a chance to unravel all the work that the prosecutor had done.

She had tossed and turned so much that the covers were knotted. Sighing, she threw back the blanket and let the air cool her skin. At the sound of a footstep in the hall, she froze.

The light went on, and Gillian curled her hands into fists. The sound of running water, another creak. Very gently, very quietly, she reached down and drew up the quilt, a tight cocoon.

By the time her father opened her door, Gillian had turned to her side, pretending to be asleep. She felt the floor tremble as he crossed the room, sat on the edge of her bed. His hand fell like a prayer on her temple. “My baby,” he whispered, the pain in his voice rocking her.

Gillian didn’t move. She kept her breathing steady, even when a tear slid between her father’s hand and her own cheek, as binding as glue.

Sad to say, the high point of Thomas’s day was getting the mail. It wasn’t even that he ever expected to get anything-well, the occasional solicitation for a credit card and some goddamned Boy Scouting magazine that he’d canceled when he was twelve but that had managed to follow him from address to address like a beleaguered ghost. But when you were fifteen and had to pick a daily peak experience from, oh, eating stale cereal for breakfast, reading assigned novels for next year’s English class, and strolling out to get the mail, this won hands down.

Jordan McAfee, c/o Thomas McAfee.

The package was light and bulky and reminded him too much of a dead mouse that had been sent in the mail by the brother of a Mafia client of his father’s who had been convicted. With trepidation, Thomas unsealed one end and shook a small notebook into his hands.

He frowned at it. A black-and-white composition book was no big deal. But this one was wrapped like a birthday gift in a glittery silver ribbon. On its front were the words Book of Shadows. Thomas untied the bow and let the notebook fall open. How to Bring Money to You. Love Spell #35. The entries were arranged like the insides of a cookbook-ingredients, followed by directions. They were lettered by hand, but the writing varied, as if many different contributors had worked on it. In the margins were small notes and funny faces, like the ones he made in his history binder when he was bored.

A longer entry: Imbolc, 1999. This one looked like a play written for four actors, with lines for each player. But the things they were saying, doing . . . it was like nothing he’d ever seen before. Brows drawing together, Thomas began to read.

“So you understand how important your answers are,” Jordan murmured, nervously regarding the woman at his side. With her wild silver hair and rope sandals, her silver bangles and swinging earrings, she seemed a little offbeat-more the kind of person you’d expect to find beside you at a Grateful Dead concert than telling you truths from the witness stand.

“Completely, Mr. McAfee,” Starshine said. She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small blue bag tied with purple thread. “Would you give this to your client?”

“Jack? What is it?”

“A charm, of sorts. Just some bay laurel, High-John-the-Conqueror root, St.-John’s-wort, and vervain. Oh, a little pine nut, tobacco, and mustard seed too, just in case. And of course, a picture of an open eye.”

“Of course,” Jordan repeated faintly.

“So that justice will look favorably on him.”

What to say to that? Jordan slipped the little bag into his breast pocket like a handkerchief, and Starshine ascended to the witness stand.

Immediately, she had the jury’s attention. Starshine slipped her hand free of the long cowl of her sleeve and touched it to the Bible. “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” She smiled. “And Goddess.” Then she turned to the judge. “May I have just a moment?”

Judge Justice seemed beyond the power of speech. She waved the witness on.

Starshine reached into a hemp bag she’d carried up to the stand and withdrew a thermos, a green candle, a cup, a packet of sugar, and a spice bottle marked SAFFRON.

“Here we go again,” Matt Houlihan muttered. Then, louder, “Objection, Your Honor.”

“Sustained,” the judge said. “Ma’am, I have to ask you what you’re doing.”

But the woman was swaying slightly, her arms splayed and her eyes shut. “Just raising energy, Your Honor,” Starshine said. “I’m doing a safespace spell.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“May I turn the chair? I need to be facing south.”

At the defense table, Jordan buried his face in his hands.

The judge deferred to the prosecutor, who let a smile creep across his face. “Oh, by all means,” Matt said. “If we need a safe-space spell, we need a safe-space spell.”

Starshine lit the candle, then poured some of the liquid from the thermos into its attached cup. “It’s just milk,” she said, then added the two packets. “Mixed with a little saffron and sugar.” She lifted the cup to her mouth and inhaled deeply, her eyes drifting shut as she imagined a woman in black, a woman in red, and a woman in white all walking toward her. “I have been with you from the beginning,” she said, and drank.

A calm settled over the courtroom. Even the people in the gallery could feel it, small susurrations of surprise swept through the rows. Starshine earthed the power in her mind, bound the spell, and released the circle. “I think that takes care of it.”

Judge Justice turned to Jordan. “Have fun, Mr. McAfee,” she said.

Jordan rose, shaking his head. On the one hand, having Starshine be a crackpot worked nicely with his defense, because Gillian was playing at Wicca, too. On the other hand, if the woman was too much of a nut, the jury would never believe anything she said. “Do you know Gillian Duncan?” he began.

“Yes, I do. She comes into my shop quite often.” Starshine turned to the jury, suddenly a saleswoman. “I run the Wiccan Read, an occult bookstore in Windham.”

“An occult bookstore? What’s that?”

“We sell books and charms and herbs for people who follow earth-based religions.”

“When did Ms. Duncan last come into your shop?”

“On April twenty-fifth.”

“What was she looking for?” Jordan asked.

“Objection,” Matt called out. “Hearsay.”

“Judge, this goes toward impeaching her credibility on what happened that night,” Jordan argued.

“Overruled, Mr. Houlihan. I definitely want to hear this one.”

Starshine continued. “She wanted to ask me about witch’s flying ointment.”

“Maybe we ought to back up for a moment,” Jordan said, feigning confusion. “Witches?”

“Yes. That’s just what followers of the Wiccan religion are called.”

“Can you tell us what Wiccans believe?”

“It’s very simple, actually. First, do no harm, but follow your will. Second, that any witch is capable of raising energy, casting spells, performing magick, and communicating directly with the Goddess.”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Matt said. “This is a rape trial, not an episode of Bewitched.”

Jordan turned. “If I could just have a minute, Judge. I’m laying a little groundwork.”

The judge overruled the prosecutor. “Are there many witches?” Jordan asked.

“Three to five million worldwide, but not too many come right out and tell you.” She glanced at the judge. “Why, this lady herself could still be in the proverbial broom closet.”

“Don’t count on it,” the judge said dryly.

“Old habits die hard, and discrimination is very real, although all witches really do is honor women and respect the environment. It’s not unlikely for a witch to be blamed for things that go wrong in a town, or to be singled out as a Satanist.” She smiled. “Why, in Salem Falls, you only have to look as far as the statue of Giles Corey on the green to remember the hysteria of 1692.”

“You said Ms. Duncan was asking about flying ointment. What’s that?”

“Back in medieval times, witches used astral projection ointment to produce psychedelic effects. It contained elements like hashish and belladonna, which created the psychic tripping, if you will. Needless to say, we don’t use it nowadays. Gillian came into my shop asking if I had a recipe for it.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That it was illegal. I suggested she should redirect her energy and celebrate Beltane instead.”

“Beltane? What’s that?”

“The last of the three spring fertility festivals, a sabbat that marks the wedding of the God and the Goddess. In a word, Mr. McAfee,” she said, “it’s all about sex.”

“Is there a traditional way to celebrate Beltane?”

“Witches hang offerings of food and herbs to the God and Goddess in the branches of a tree. There’s often a bonfire to leap over and toss away your inhibitions.”

“A bonfire?” Jordan repeated.

“Yes. And a maypole, and often there’s handfasting, too-”

“Handfasting?”

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

“Well,” Jordan said, coloring. “That sounds festive.”

Starshine winked. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

“Is Beltane celebrated on a certain date?”

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

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

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

“I’m not in her coven, if that’s what you mean.”

“Were you in the clearing behind the cemetery on Beltane?”

“No. I was celebrating elsewhere.”

“In fact, you didn’t see Gillian that night, did you?”

“No.”

“And you didn’t see Mr. St. Bride that night, either?”

“I’ve never met the man,” Starshine said.

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

“No.”

Matt started to walk back to his seat but then turned. “That safespace spell you did when you got up here . . . is that something other witches would know?”

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

“What does it protect you from?”

“Negative energy,” Starshine said.

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

“Objection!” Jordan cried.

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

“Sustained!”

“-could a protection spell keep a witch from being raped?”

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

“Withdrawn,” Matt said. “Nothing further.”

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I did.”

“What were your results?”

“The blood sample I tested showed signs of the substance atropine.”

At the prosecutor’s table, Matt went very still. The jury leaned forward, riveted by the proof that Gillian had lied.

“Atropine?” Jordan asked. “What’s that?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Was the level of atropine found in Ms. Duncan’s blood consistent with a normal dosage?”

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

“What does that mean?”

“Ms. Duncan had overdosed,” Chu said.

“Would that have impaired her functioning?”

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

“Are the effects lasting?”

“Nope. It’s a short trip,” Chu said, grinning.

“But hallucinations are likely?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Objection,” Matt called out. “This isn’t the witness’s area of expertise.”

“I’m going to allow it,” the judge said.

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

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

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

“What’s the name of this plant, Dr. Chu?”

“Oh,” he said. “That would be Atropa belladonna.”

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

“Don’t you ever lie to me again.”

She dropped her pencil. “W-what?”

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

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The atropine, Gillian. It was found in your blood.”

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

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

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

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

“He won’t be acquitted.”

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

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

“Isn’t it true, Doctor, that hallucinogens produce a wide range of effects?” Matt asked.

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

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

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

“So if you take this drug, you’re not even guaranteed to have hallucinations?”

“Not necessarily.”

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

“No,” Chu said. “I’ve never met her.”

“Then you don’t know what her personality is like.”

“No.”

“You don’t know the environment she was in at the time.”

“No.”

“You don’t even know the potency of this particular drug, do you?”

“No.”

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

“No.”

“So you don’t know if she was having hallucinations, do you?”

“No.”

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

Chu nodded. “Yes.”

“And when was the sample you examined drawn?”

“At approximately two A.M.,” the toxicologist said.

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

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

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

“I guess so.”

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

“Yes.”

Matt nodded. “You don’t know who provided the atropine that evening, do you?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it possible that Mr. St. Bride arrived in the woods and suggested they take it?”

“It’s possible.”

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

“Usually not.”

“Can you taste it?” he asked.

“No.”

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

“I suppose.”

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

“Yes.”

“Can you explain what it is, for those of us who don’t know?”

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

“Why is Rohypnol so frighteningly effective?”

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

“Aren’t every single one of those properties something that could be said about atropine?”

“As a matter of fact,” Chu said. “Yes.”

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

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

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

“I’ve got it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

Jack didn’t crack a smile. “Good to know.”

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

“Can you honestly tell me that my testimony is going to make a difference?” Jack answered softly. “It’s not even a testimony, for God’s sake. It’s a big gaping blank.”

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

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

“You’ve got a gut feeling, Jack,” Jordan sighed. “That’s going to have to be enough.”

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

“Sure.”

“Do you believe I’m innocent?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer was a high-pitched squeal.

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

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

“I said yes,” Dr. Dubonnet repeated.

“What did you review?” Jordan asked.

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

“In your expert opinion, what do they reveal?”

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

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

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

“Why would a child do these things, Doctor?” Jordan asked.

“In Ms. Duncan’s case, it probably had to do with getting noticed. Her mother’s death was an event that generated pity and attention for Gillian, and in her mind, the best way to continue that focus on herself was to keep creating fiascoes of some sort.”

“In your opinion, Doctor, when a child is diagnosed as a pathological liar, what happens by the time he or she grows up?”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Matt said. “This expert’s projection on children in general has absolutely no bearing on what did happen with Gillian Duncan.”

“Overruled,” the judge murmured.

“The rule of thumb in psychiatry,” Dr. Dubonnet replied, “is that boys who lie have conduct disorders and become sociopaths . . . whereas girls who lie have personality disorders and become manipulative in interpersonal ways.”

“Thank you,” Jordan said. “Nothing further.”

Matt stood immediately. “Doctor, you’ve never talked to Gillian Duncan, have you?”

“No.”

“All you’ve done is read records that took place almost half her lifetime ago?”

“Yes.”

“Your rule of thumb. . . you can’t really say that every boy or girl follows this path, can you? You’re just making a broad assumption about what often happens?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you have no way of knowing if that’s what happened to Gillian, do you?”

“No.”

“Isn’t it true that Gillian had just lost her mother at age nine?”

“So I understand.”

“And that was the reason she began therapy, correct? Not because she had been lying compulsively.”

“Yes.”

“You said that the reason you believed Gillian was a pathological liar was because as a kid, she started some rumors about a younger woman and then denied them?”

“Among other things.”

Matt smiled. “Forgive me, Doctor, but when I was a kid, we just called that being a girl.”

“Objection!”

“Withdrawn,” Matt said. “Isn’t it true, though, that this is what girls do all the time? Boys punch each other; girls start rumors?”

“Objection,” Jordan called again. “I want to know when Mr. Houlihan got his clinical psychology degree.”

“Withdrawn. Doctor, you also mentioned a shoplifting incident that Ms. Duncan denied?”

“That’s right.”

Matt turned and stared directly into Jack’s eyes. “Well, isn’t it fairly common for a person who commits a crime to deny that he’s done it?”

“Ah . . . oftentimes . . .”

“Isn’t it fairly common for a person who commits a crime to deny that he’s done it, even when there’s physical evidence linking him to the crime?”

“I-I suppose so.”

“So it isn’t all that unusual, is it, Doctor, to lie to get out of trouble?”

“No.”

“Does that make someone a pathological liar?”

Dr. Dubonnet sighed. “Not necessarily.”

Matt glanced at the witness. “Nothing further.”

He smelled like sweat and blood. His smile was sweet, too, and Meg would have bet he had no idea what he’d just gotten into. Dutifully, she pressed her lips to his cheek and almost immediately lost her balance. She fell into his lap, heard his grunt as her full body hit. “You okay?” he asked, only trying to help her up, his hands sliding awkwardly over her chest and wide bottom before he got the leverage to do it.

What you want and what you get are two very different countries; sometimes imagination builds a bridge before you have the chance to realize it won’t hold weight. He hadn’t been fondling her; he’d been breaking her fall. But oh, had Meg wished otherwise.

And in that moment she realized that she hadn’t been the only one.

This time, Roy brought sandwiches. Roast beef piled high on a crusty roll, tuna salad on wheat, even veggie pitas for the meatless crowd. The judge and the jury and even Jack gratefully dug into this treat, but Matt sat with his back stiff, his untouched turkey sub resting on the corner of the prosecution’s table.

“It’s the chives,” Roy confessed to the clerk, who’d asked a question about the ingredients in the chicken salad. “You don’t expect them, which is why they come right back and bite you.”

Head leaning against his hand, Matt drawled, “Your Honor, does this witness have anything to contribute to the defense’s case besides a large dose of cholesterol?”

“Getting around to it,” Roy muttered, taking his seat. He straightened his tie, cleared his throat, and scowled at Matt. “Skinny folk always have an attitude.”

With his roast beef sub in one hand and his notes in the other, Jordan stood. “Can you state your name and address for the record?”

“Roy J. Peabody. I live above the Do-Or-Diner, in Salem Falls.”

“Where were you the afternoon of April thirtieth, Mr. Peabody?”

“Working,” Roy said.

“Do you know who Gillian Duncan is?”

“Ayuh.”

“Did you see her that day?”

“Ayuh.”

Jordan took another bite of his sandwich. “Where?” he asked, then swallowed.

“She came into the diner ’bout three-thirty.”

“Was Jack working at that time?”

“Sure was.”

“Did you ever see the two of them together?” Jordan asked.

“Ayuh.”

“Can you tell me about that?”

Roy shrugged. “She came in and ordered a milk shake. Then she changed her mind, said she wasn’t hungry, and walked out. I saw her go ’round back, to where Jack was putting the trash into the Dumpster.”

“You saw this?”

“My cash register sits next to a window,” Roy said.

“What exactly did you see?”

“She must have said something to him, because he looked up after a minute and they started talking.”

For taciturn Roy, that pretty much said it all, too. Jordan hid a smile. “How long did they talk?”

“Had to have been ten minutes, because I changed the cash drawer then. Takes some time to count up all those bills and coins.”

“Thank you, Roy.” Jordan lifted the sandwich. “For everything.”

As soon as Matt stood up for his cross-examination, Roy turned to the judge. “Can I ask him a question?”

She seemed surprised, but nodded. “All right, Mr. Peabody.”

“What the heck was wrong with my muffin?” Roy barked.

“Excuse me?”

“You didn’t eat it, did you? Just like you didn’t eat my sandwich today.”

“It wasn’t a personal affront, Mr. Peabody. I was making a statement,” Matt said.

“’Bout what? That my food isn’t good enough for you?”

“If you take muffins from a witness, you’re more likely to believe him.”

Roy blinked, confounded.

“Let’s just say I’m on a gluten-free diet,” Matt said with a sigh. “Do you mind if I ask you a few things now?”

“Go on ahead. I took the whole afternoon off for you.”

Matt rolled his eyes. “Mr. Peabody, were you inside when you saw Gillian leave?”

“That’s what I said.”

“And Gillian went around the back of the diner?”

“Yes.”

“Was your window open?”

“No, Addie says it’s a waste of the air-conditioning.”

“So you didn’t hear who called whom over, then?”

“No. But I sure noticed she was pissed off when she left.”

Matt looked at the judge. “I’d like to move to strike that statement.”

“I wouldn’t,” Judge Justice said. “Mr. Peabody, what led you to believe she was angry?”

“Her nose was so high in the air I thought she’d trip on the sidewalk. She was walking a mile a minute. Huffing, like she was fit to tie Jack.”

Jordan grinned from ear to ear. If he won this trial, he’d eat lunch at the Do-Or-Diner every day of his life from now on. And he’d tip Roy, as well as his waitress.

“Do you know, Mr. Peabody, why she was angry?”

“Can’t say.”

“Well, for example, what if he’d made an improper advance toward her? Wouldn’t that have upset her?”

Roy slanted a look at Jack. “I suppose.”

“Or if he touched her inappropriately? Might that account for a rapid retreat?”

The old man hesitated, then said, “Maybe.”

Matt walked back to the county attorney’s table and picked up his sandwich. He took a huge bite, chewed and swallowed. “Thank you, Mr. Peabody,” he said, smiling. “It’s not every day a defense witness caters to the prosecution, too.”

Meg knew better than to cast a spell that tried to control another person. If a spell was going to work, it meant that energy and power poured through you into someone else-so a connection had been made between the two of you. Which meant if you sent harm out, eventually you’d be the recipient of it, too.

Hexing, though, wasn’t the same as using magick to destroy. After all, when they’d cast a spell for old Stuart Hollings, they were trying to get rid of his tumor. A growing cancer had to be dissipated. And a person who repeatedly threatened the safety of others had to be stopped. That was why Meg had to do a binding spell.

It was the first time she’d ever cast a circle by herself. Meg knelt between the shrubs in her backyard, praying her mother wouldn’t come home early from work. A black candle burned in front of her, and an ashtray she’d dug up from the attic held a stick of incense.

She was supposed to have a poppet, a wax or cloth doll made to represent the person she wanted to stop from doing harm. But Meg had never been crafty and so had no idea how to go about making a representation of someone. In the end, she’d rummaged through her closet, into the bin of old Barbie and Ken dolls she’d had as a kid. Naked, the doll was obscene, the hair matted. Meg sprinkled it with salt water and whispered the words she’d copied from a grimoire at the Wiccan Read. “Blessed be, you creature made . . . uh, in China . . . and changed by life. You are not plastic, but flesh and blood. You are between the worlds, in all the worlds, so mote it be.”

She held the doll in her hands and imagined a silver net falling out of the sky. Then she took a length of red ribbon from the pocket of her shorts and wrapped it tight around the doll’s hands, mouth, and groin. Finally, Meg took all the energy that trembled through her nerves, feeding her fear, and she directed it into the doll, until the thin figure jumped out of her palms and fell onto the ground before her. “By Air and Earth, by Water and Fire, so be you bound, as I desire.”

Meg would not be hurt again. She would not let anyone else be hurt again, either. Lies were only as strong as the suckers who believed them; and figuring that out late, Meg knew, was better than never figuring it out at all. Opening the circle, she took a spade from her mother’s gardening set and buried the doll beneath the roots of a hydrangea bush. On top of this, she set the heaviest rock she had been able to drag over. And when the poppet meant to represent Gillian Duncan was safely underground, Meg patted the mound with satisfaction.

In the middle of Matt’s cross of Roy Peabody, the bailiff walked up to Jordan and handed him a note. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he muttered, balling it up in his hand. He waited until the prosecutor had finished and then asked to approach the bench.

“Your Honor, could we take a ten-minute recess?” he asked.

“You’ve had plenty of time to confer with your client,” Matt began.

“I’m not going to talk to my client. If it makes you happy, you sit here and baby-sit him.” Jordan turned to the judge. “This is a personal matter, ma’am.”

She nodded and granted Jordan the time. He hurried back to the defense table, motioned to Selena, and strode out of the courtroom.

Thomas was waiting for him there. “This’d better be good,” Jordan said.

“I think it is.” He held out his hand, presenting a notebook. “This came in the mail for you.”

Jordan stared daggers at his son. “And you felt the profound need to bring it to me in the middle of a trial?”

“Book of Shadows,” Selena read, taking it from Thomas. “I saw these at the Wiccan Read, when I was there.”

“If Starshine felt the need to send a gift, I could have used a goodluck charm.”

“I don’t think Starshine sent it, Jordan,” Selena said quietly, pulling the silver ribbon that Thomas had used as a bookmark out in a long spool.

Jordan fingered the ribbon. Then he took the book from Thomas’s hand and flipped through it, skimming. The last page with writing on it held his attention for a long time.

It was little-known fact, but witnesses were allowed to use anything-anything at all-to refresh their recollection.

Engrossed, Jordan did not take his eyes from the final entry. He touched the page with reverence. “Where did it come from?”

Thomas thought for a moment before he answered. “A good witch,” he said.

Sitting on the witness stand, Jack looked warily at the enemy.

His lawyer.

At first, Jordan had not wanted Jack to testify, believing that he usually did a better job of speaking for his clients. But his defense so far consisted of a witch, a pair of toxicologists, a shrink, and Roy-it sounded more like the punch line to a joke than a legal rebuttal. Jack was well spoken, clean-cut, educated-even if he had nothing to counter Gillian Duncan’s story, he would look good sitting on the stand.

It was no small measure of irony that the last person in the world Jack would ever trust was the only one who could help him now. As he sat on the stand and watched Jordan’s antics-his hand motions, his calculated frowns at the jury-Jack thought, They are all alike. Liars, the lot of them. And just as he’d been screwed once before by a lawyer, Jack believed he’d be screwed again.

Don’t act defensive or angry or they’ll think you capable of violence, Jordan had said moments ago. Just follow my lead. This is what I do for a living. But that was impossible for Jack to do. It was as if Jordan stood at the bottom of a cliff urging Jack to jump, trusting the promise he’d catch him . . . yet Jack was still beaten and bruised from his last fall.

Jordan leaned close, so that only Jack could see his anger. “Pay attention, dammit,” he hissed. “I can’t do this without you.” Then a pleasant expression whitewashed his features, and he said, “What happened next?”

He was back there for a moment, their laughter sparkling over his head like stars, close enough to catch. “I was on the edge of a clearing in the woods,” Jack said slowly, “and when I looked up, there were a group of girls standing there. Naked.”

That single word stilled the court. “Wait a second.” Jordan shook his head. “You’re telling us you stumbled upon a bunch of naked girls?”

“I know. That’s exactly what I thought, too. That I’d had so much to drink I was hallucinating.”

“I can imagine. What else do you remember?”

Jack shook his head. “It looked . . . well, like nothing I’d ever seen. There were candles. And ribbons, hanging from the trees.”

Jordan crossed to the evidence table and lifted one. “Ribbons like these?”

“Yes. But longer.”

“Can you recall anything else?”

Jack closed his eyes, struggling. “Only bits and pieces. Like I’ll close my eyes and see the bonfire. Or I’ll wake up in the morning and there’s a sweetness on my tongue, a taste I can place from that night.” He shook his head, frustrated. “But there’s so much of it that’s just empty space, and the things that do come to me make no sense.”

Jordan began to walk toward his client. “Do you remember any particular items laying around that night?”

“Objection,” Matt called lazily. “If the witness is drawing a blank, Mr. McAfee isn’t allowed to fill in the picture with his own crayon.”

“Sustained.”

Undeterred, Jordan caught Jack’s eye. “Is it annoying to be unable to remember what happened that night?”

“You have no idea.” Jack reached deep for the words. “I know I didn’t do what they say. I just know it. But I can’t see it clearly.”

“What do you think it would take to jog your memory?”

“I don’t know,” Jack admitted. “God knows I’ve tried everything.”

“Me, I have to hold some souvenir in my hands, and boom, I’m back there.” Jordan grinned. “I have a foul ball I caught during game seven of the 1986 American League championships, the one when Henderson hit a three-run blast off Donnie Moore of the California Angels. Every time I pick it up, I think of the Sox pulling ahead from behind and making it into the World Series.”

“Once again, Your Honor, objection. As much as I love getting Mr. McAfee’s life history, it’s beside the point.”

“But Judge, it’s not. I’d like to enter into evidence this notebook and let the witness use it to refresh his recollection.” Reaching behind the defense table, Jordan took the black-and-white composition book from Selena, then brought it toward the evidence table.

“Approach!” Matt yelled, coming to his feet.

“All right, Mr. McAfee, what’s up your sleeve now?” Judge Justice asked.

“Your Honor, the rules of evidence say I can refresh my witness’s memory with any document at my disposal. This is a book of shadows-a witches’ log, if you will, that documents the Pagan ritual that took place the night of the alleged crime.”

Judge Justice turned it over in her hands, flipping through it, then handed it to Matt to examine. “This is inappropriate, Your Honor,” Matt insisted. “The witness didn’t write a single page of this book . . . he has no original knowledge of what’s in it. His memory isn’t going to be refreshed by reading it-it’s going to be created new.” He narrowed his eyes at Jordan. “Mr. McAfee is finding a way to put words into his client’s mouth.”

“Even if the witness was not a party to its creation, Mr. Houlihan, the defense is welcome to use this item to spark a memory.” The judge turned to Jordan. “I myself saved a souvenir cup from the 1975 World Series, game six, when Carlton Fisk’s fly stayed inside the foul line by inches, and as long as I have that godawful plastic mug, I’ll never forget the magic of that moment. Objection overruled.”

As soon as Jordan handed the composition notebook to his client, Jack’s hand began to shake. “That night,” he murmured. “She was writing in this, under the dogwood tree.”

“And then?”

“She stood up,” Jack said slowly. “She stood up, and she said my name.”

A more sober man would have turned and walked away, but Jack could not hold that thought in his mind. It was too full with other things-ribbons hanging where they did not belong; a knife set perpendicular to a white candle; the scent of cinnamon; the simple fact that she was asking for him. “You’re just in time,” Gillian said. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Clearly, he was asleep and this was a dream. A bad dream. The car follow ing him, his run-in with Wes, and now, these half-dressed girls. Yes, it all made sense now. This was a trick of the mind. He felt safer now, knowing it was not real.

When Gillian took Jack’s hand, his entire body jerked. “Oh,” she said sooth ingly, running her fingers through his hair. “Poor Jack.” She touched the cuts on his brow and cheek, then lifted her discarded shirt and dabbed at the blood.

Her beautiful breasts were an inch from his mouth, and they looked as real as anything he’d ever seen. From the far corners of his mind, Jack began to struggle. “I can’t . . . I need to . . .”

“Stay here.”

Gillian finished for him. She smiled at her friends. “What’s the one thing we haven’t done tonight?”

The short, plump girl’s mouth rounded. “You wouldn’t, Gilly.”

Jack could suddenly see the scene as if from a great height. This girl, his hand in hers, the ribbons fluttering behind them. You cannot be here, he warned himself, because . . . but he could not finish the sentence. He willed his feet to move, but he was too drunk. Get away, he thought, and did not realize he’d spoken aloud until Gillian turned to him. “Don’t you like us?”

“I have to go,” he said, his voice breaking.

“But you’ll help me first, won’t you? I need a man for this.”

Jack made himself a deal: He would reach something up high or open a pickle jar and then he’d be on his way. But to his surprise, Gillian laced his fingers with hers and tugged him toward the fire. She began to run, until he had no choice but to do what she did, to leap it.

They fell to the ground. Gillian’s face was flushed. “Now you’re tied to me, for a year.”

Jack didn’t understand, but then he didn’t understand much of anything. The forest was spinning around him. He watched the girls pour drinks from a thermos, pass out biscuits. “For you,” Gillian said, and maybe he would have even drunk it if one of the other girls hadn’t lost her balance and fallen on top of him.

“Steady.” He looked at her-Meg, that was her name, and she was related to a detective in town-but in that moment, she might well have been Catherine Marsh. That was how pure the need was in her eyes. Jack’s heart began to pound, and he turned to the other girl, the taller one, and to Gillian-and they all looked that way. They all wore that expression. That want, that incredible one- sided want that had nearly ruined him before.

Jack staggered upright and crashed through the woods, finding the path he had come in on. He stumbled forward for nearly a minute, and then Gillian came running up from behind. She was near tears, her hair wild around her face. “The fire-we can’t get it out. We’re going to burn the whole forest down. Please,” she begged. “You have to come.”

He followed her to the clearing, where there was no fire . . . and no one else. Before he could ask her what was going on, she threw her arms around his neck and pressed her mouth to his. He choked on the whole of her; he backed up along the edge of the glowing fire, unsure which was the greater danger. Gillian writhed against him, aiming to slip under his skin. And then she took his hand and brought it up to her breast, holding his gaze the whole time, so that he knew this was an offering.

“No,” Jack whispered. “No.” He put his hands on Gillian’s forearms and set her away, fireflies sparking around their bodies. “I said no,” he answered more firmly. No. The pine needles quivered, the stars slipped from their perches, history looped back on itself. This was not Gillian Duncan; this was Catherine Marsh. And Jack was being given the chance to defend himself, in a way h never had last year. “You get away from me,” he said, his chest heaving, “and you stay away.”

But Gillian Duncan, who had always gotten what she wanted and then some, grabbed at him. “I cast a spell,” she insisted. “You came to me.”

“You came to me,” Jack corrected. “And I’m leaving.” With a shove, he sent Gillian sprawling, and he ran down the path so far and so fast that for the first time in months, he managed to outstrip his past.

“Jack,” Jordan asked. “Did you rape Gillian Duncan on the night of April thirtieth?”

“No.”

“How did your skin get under her fingernails?”

“She was trying to keep me there, when I kept trying to get away. Her hands kept grabbing at me. And when she . . . kissed me, she had her fingers raking into my scalp.”

“How did you get the scratch on your face?”

“From a branch, when I was running. I had it before I ever saw her that night.”

“How did your blood get on her clothes?”

“She used her shirt to dab at my cheek.”

Jordan crossed his arms. “Do you have any idea how difficult it’s going to be for these twelve people to believe your story?”

“Yes.” His eyes swept the jury members, compelling them to listen. “I could lie to you and tell you a version of that night that’s easier to digest . . . like that we were getting intimate and then she changed her mind at the last minute . . . but that isn’t what happened. The truth is just like I told it. The truth is I didn’t rape her.”

“Then why would Gillian make up a story like this?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really know her at all, in spite of what she’s said. But if I were seventeen and I was discovered in the woods doing something I didn’t want my father to know about . . . I guess I’d spin a different story, too. And if I were really smart, I’d dream up a tale that would ruin the credibility of the person who’d intruded . . . so that no one would believe him, even if he told the truth.”

Jack met his attorney’s eyes. That, Jordan communicated silently, is the best we can do. “Your witness,” he said, and offered Jack up for sacrifice.

It was all Matt could do to not laugh out loud. That had to have been the absolute worst defense he’d ever heard in his life, and he truly believed he could get up and speak Swahili and still manage to win this case. “Ribbons, candles, naked girls . . . are you sure, Mr. St. Bride, that you didn’t leave out any pink elephants?”

“I’m sure I would have had no trouble remembering those,” Jack answered dryly.

“But you yourself say it’s hard to believe.”

“Just being honest.”

“Honest.” Matt snorted, to let Jack know what he thought of that assessment. “You testified that you were very drunk. How can you be sure this recollection is accurate?”

“I just know it is, Mr. Houlihan.”

“Isn’t it possible that in your . . . drunken stupor . . . you raped Ms. Duncan and then blacked it out of your mind?”

“If I was drunk enough to suffer a blackout,” Jack countered, “surely I was too drunk to be physically capable of sexual intercourse.”

Matt turned, surprised by the gauntlet the defendant had thrown. “So your theory of why Gillian Duncan became hysterical, sobbing, claimed you raped her, went to the hospital to undergo an invasive physical exam and have a sexual assault kit done, reported the rape to the police, and now has come to tell a panel of strangers the intimate details of how you sexually assaulted her . . . is because she was scared of her father?”

“I don’t know. I’m just telling you what happened.”

“All right,” Matt said. “You’ve given us your explanation for why your skin was found beneath Ms. Duncan’s fingernails . . . because she was grabbing at you to get you to stay, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Ms. Duncan didn’t give you the scratch on your cheek-the injury was sustained in the woods, on a branch?”

“Yes.”

“Your blood was on her clothes because she was trying to clean up that scratch by dabbing it with her shirt?”

“Yes.”

Matt frowned. “Then what’s your explanation for why semen matching yours was found on her thigh?”

“Objection!” Jordan leaped up, furious. “Approach!”

The judge waved the attorneys closer. “The semen wasn’t a match,” Jordan said angrily. “The state’s expert even deemed the results inconclusive.”

Matt scowled. “She said this defendant was seven hundred forty thousand times more likely to have been the donor of the semen than anyone else. Those are still pretty damn good odds.”

“However,” the judge said, “it’s too prejudicial. The jury has the information about the semen; they can do with it what they will. I’m sorry, Mr. Houlihan, but I’m not going to allow you to pursue that line of questioning.” She turned to the jury as the lawyers returned to their corners. “You’ll disregard that last question,” Judge Justice instructed, although Matt’s words still hung in the air, as sharp and as precarious as a guillotine’s blade.

“Mr. St. Bride,” Matt said, “you find yourself in the woods with a quartet of teenage girls who are not only perhaps interested in having sex . . . but are naked . . . yet you don’t turn around and run as fast as humanly possible away from there?”

“I said I needed to get away, over and over.”

“Actually, you said you jumped over a fire hand in hand with one of them. And that you looked around closely enough to see there were things hanging from the trees.”

“I also said that Gillian Duncan was the one who came on to me,” Jack said, trying very hard to keep his voice from rising.

“Was anyone else around when she attacked you?”

“No.”

“Where were the other girls?”

“I don’t know.”

“How convenient. Was she still naked?”

Jack shook his head. “She had gotten dressed.”

“And then she proceeded to throw herself at you?”

“Yes.”

Matt crossed his arms. “This five-foot-four, one hundred ten-pound girl forcibly held you there?”

“I got away as quickly as I could. I said no, shoved her off me, and ran. Period.”

“So . . . this is the second time in a space of two years that a teenage girl has falsely accused you of sexual assault?”

“That’s correct.” Heat climbed the ladder of Jack’s neck.

Matt raised his brows. “Aren’t you asking the jury to believe you’re the unluckiest man on the face of this earth?”

Jack took a deep breath. “I’m asking the jury to believe me.”

“Believe you,” Matt repeated. “Believe you. Huh. Mr. St. Bride, you heard the expert who testified that soil from your boots matches the soil in the clearing of the woods?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And you heard the DNA expert who showed that your blood was on Ms. Duncan’s clothing and your skin was underneath her fingernails?”

“Yes.”

“You heard Ms. Duncan testify that you were with her that night?”

“Yes.”

“And you heard Ms. Abrams and Ms. O’Neill corroborate that?”

“Yes, I did.”

“You’ve seen numerous amounts of evidence that place you at the crime scene, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

Matt tilted his head, questioning. “Then how come when the police came to arrest you, the very first thing you did was lie about being there?”

Jack’s mouth opened and closed, no words rising to the surface. “I-I don’t know,” he finally managed to say. “It was an instinctive response.”

“Lying is an instinctive response for you?”

“That’s not what I meant-”

“But,” Matt argued, “it’s what you said. Did you or did you not already lie once about your whereabouts that night?”

“Yes, I did,” Jack murmured.

The prosecutor turned and pinned him with his gaze. “Then why should the jury believe you now?”

“He’s good,” Selena mused. “He’s really, really good.”

Jordan slammed the car door and stalked up the walk toward his house. “If you’re such a huge fan, then why don’t you go sleep with Matt Houlihan tonight?”

The defense had rested and court had been dismissed. Closing arguments would begin the next morning, which meant Jordan had approximately seventeen hours to conjure sheer brilliance. Burning against his heart was the little packet Starshine had given him for Jack’s defense. He was going to sleep with it under his goddamn pillow; at this point, he’d take any help he could get.

He knew and the prosecutor knew-and even the jury knew-that Jordan had not conducted a defense of his client-he’d simply tried to make Gillian out to be something other than the little princess she made herself out to be. But a witch could be raped. A drug user could be raped. And if Jordan had been sitting on that jury, he would not have been inclined to believe anything Jack St. Bride had to say.

At the door, he tried to jam his key into the lock and couldn’t manage to get it to fit. “Goddamn,” he said, wedging it in again. “Goddammit!”

A second attempt, and the key stuck fast. With a mighty wrench, Jordan managed to pull it free of the hole, then swore and hurled his entire key chain into the bushes off the porch. He stared after it, his whole body shaking.

“Jordan,” Selena said, touching his arm.

He burrowed into her embrace, pressed his face against her neck, and silently apologized to Jack St. Bride.

Addie volunteered to close up the diner. “Come upstairs,” Roy urged through the door of the ladies’ room, as she changed. “We’ll have iced tea, watch a little TV.”

Zipping up her uniform, Addie came out of the restroom. “Dad, I need to do this. I want to do this.” What she really wanted, actually, was to hit something until her bones broke. Scouring floors, scrubbing counters, wiping the grill-these were better uses of her time.

She pushed past her father into the kitchen. It always seemed like a ghost town after hours, bathed in shades of gray and haunted by the scents of the foods it had harbored. Addie picked up the wire brush that hung on the side of the stove and began to scrape down the grill with brusque, mechanical movements.

“I’ll help you, then,” her father said, rolling up his sleeves.

“Dad.” She met his eyes. “Right now, I just want to be alone.”

“Ah, Addie.” Roy moved forward, hugging her tightly, until the wire brush dropped from her hand and her sob curled into his chest like a kitten’s mewing.

“I’m not going to be able to say good-bye,” Addie whispered. “Visiting hours aren’t until next Wednesday. And by then . . . by then, he could be in the prison in Concord.”

“Then you’ll go visit in Concord. I’ll drive you every day after work, if I have to.”

Addie offered him a weak smile. “On what, Dad? The lawn mower?” She squeezed his hand. “Maybe I will come up for iced tea, all right? Just give me a while to sort things out in my head.”

She felt her father’s eyes on her as she took a jug of bleach from a shelf and began to wash down the dishwashing table and stainless sinks. Her mother used to say that a little bleach could go a long way toward making the shabbiest circumstances shine.

Her mother had not been in love with Jack St. Bride.

Once Roy went upstairs, Addie attacked the kitchen. She rubbed down the sneeze guard of the cold table and wiped clean its cool innards. She scraped burned patches from the base of the oven. She scrubbed and washed until her knuckles bled within her rubber gloves, and she had to wrap her hands in a damp dishcloth, just to ease the pain.

She was working with such a frenzy, she never heard the front door of the diner open. “I hope you’re paying yourself well,” Charlie said.

Addie jumped a foot, slamming her head against the base of the warming table. “Oh!”

“Jeez, Addie, are you all right?” Charlie rushed forward to help her, but the moment he was within the range of being able to touch, they both froze. Addie backed off, her hand to her forehead.

“Fine. That was just stupid of me.” She hugged her arms to her chest. “Is this about Jack?”

Charlie shook his head. “Is there . . . could we sit down for a second?”

Nodding slowly, Addie followed him into the front room of the diner. They slid across from each other in a booth. The barrier of a table between them helped, and being away from the bleach fumes cleared her head. But Charlie showed no signs of speaking. “How is Meg?” Addie asked after a moment.

“All right. Thanks for asking.” Charlie tapped his fingertips on the table. “After all that’s been said in that courtroom, I don’t know what’s going to come of her, really.”

“Take it one day at a time.” Addie looked at the clock. Swallowed.

“Addie,” Charlie said, “I owe you an apology.”

Her eyes reluctantly met his. “Why?”

“I’ve been listening to the testimony. And I’ve been helping the prosecution for weeks. And it’s made me . . . it’s made it all come back clearer than ever. God, I’m doing a shitty job of this . . .” Charlie rubbed his hand over his face. “I thought I’d live in Miami, get a job on the force, and just forget Salem Falls. Then Chief Rudlow invited me back north, and I told myself enough time had passed to just wipe away the memory. After nearly a decade, I assumed that if I didn’t think about it, no one else would, either.” He hunched over the table, as if drawing strength from within. “But you’ve thought about, every day, haven’t you?”

Addie closed her eyes, then nodded.

“I knew what was coming that afternoon under the bleachers, when Amos called you over. I was drunk, sure, but I knew what I was doing. And for reasons I can’t even stand to think of, I went along with it . . . and then followed the others, when they acted like it hadn’t happened at all.” Charlie lowered his gaze. “Damn, Addie, how do you tell someone you’re sorry you ruined their life?”

It took Addie a long time to speak. “You didn’t ruin my life, Charlie. You raped me. There’s a difference: One, I couldn’t keep from happening . . . but the other, I could. I did.” She thought of Chloe, of Jack. “The more you get past pain, the more it goes from coal to diamond.”

Charlie’s eyes were red-rimmed, stricken. “I’m not going to ask you to forgive me, and I know I can’t ask you to forget. But I want you to know, for whatever it’s worth, that I don’t forgive myself . . . and I’ll never forget, either.”

“Thank you,” Addie whispered, “for that.”

She heard the door jingle closed behind him and she sat at the booth with her legs completely limp, waiting for her heart to stop beating triple-time. After all these years, who would have expected validation? After all these years, who would have expected that simply hearing the words made her feel like starting over?

She was jolted out of her reverie by the sound of the door opening again. Charlie must have forgotten something. But before she could turn around, Addie heard the voice of a young woman, the thud of a suitcase being dropped on the floor. “They said I’d find you here.”

And suddenly Addie was face to face with Catherine Marsh.

July 5, 2000

Carroll County Courthouse

The air in the courtroom was thick the next morning, so heavy with anticipation it beaded on the foreheads of the reporters and misted the lenses of the camera crews. Judge Justice strode to the bench with the air of a magistrate whose mind is already turned toward her next case. “I believe we’re starting the day with closing arguments,” she said. “Mr. McAfee, are you ready to begin?”

Jordan stood. “Actually, Your Honor, I need to reopen my case.”

A moment later, he and Houlihan were standing at the bench. “I have another witness,” Jordan explained. “An unexpected one, whose testimony is crucial to the defense.”

“Perhaps you’d like to tell me why you didn’t know about her before?” the judge asked. “Does the state know this witness and what they’re going to testify to?”

“No, I don’t,” Matt said, irritated. “The defense already rested. You didn’t see me dancing a parade of new witnesses in front of the court after the prosecution finished.”

“Judge,” Jordan explained, “it’s the victim from my client’s previous conviction. She’s recanting.”

“Which is totally irrelevant. It’s too late,” Matt insisted.

The judge stared at each lawyer in turn, then addressed the jury. “Ladies and gentlemen, you may recall that yesterday the defense rested. However, the court is going to allow Mr. McAfee to reopen his case to call one final witness.”

Jordan smoothed down his tie and glanced toward the rear of the courtroom. “The defense calls Catherine Marsh.”

She was small and shaken, and Jordan had his doubts about whether she would even make it to the stand without assistance. But at the steps, Catherine rallied, repeating the words to swear herself in in a true, ringing voice.

“How old are you, Ms. Marsh?”

“I’m sixteen.”

Jordan glanced at his client. “Do you know Jack St. Bride?”

It was the first chance Catherine had to see her former teacher. She met Jack’s eyes, and a story hung between them, one torn into a spotty snowflake pattern by contrition. “Yes, I do,” she murmured.

“How?”

Catherine took a deep breath. “I’m the one he was convicted of sexually assaulting last year.”

A gasp rolled through the courtroom like a tide. “Why are you here today, Ms. Marsh?”

“Because.” Catherine looked at her knotted hands. “I let it happen the first time, and I’m not going to be responsible for letting it happen a second time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jack St. Bride never sexually assaulted me. He never touched me inappropriately. He never did anything wrong at all. He was the best teacher I ever had and . . . and maybe I thought of him that way and wished he would be attracted to me . . . but it never happened.”

“Why did you let him get convicted, then?” Jordan asked.

A single tear rolled down Catherine’s cheek as she took a deep breath. “Coach believed in me and was kind to me. When I had a boyfriend and wanted to have sex for the first time, Coach took me to a clinic to get birth control pills. He didn’t want to, but he did it, because it was so important to me. And when the same guy broke up with me, all I could think was that I wished he’d been more like Coach-more mature, more into me, more . . . Jack.” She looked at the jury. “I started to write about him. . . about us . . . in my diary. I made it up, the way I wanted it to be. And when my father found my birth control pills and read my diary-God, for a moment, I just wanted it to be true. I wanted to believe what my father believed . . . that I was someone Coach was attracted to, instead of just the other way around.

“By the time I tried to take back what I’d said, it was so big and so ugly, I couldn’t swallow it down. I was a little girl playing with dolls who turned out to have real feelings and real lives that could get ruined.” She looked into her lap. “My father and the prosecutor and the judge-they all thought I was protecting a man I loved.” Catherine turned, addressing the jury. “The last time I told the truth in court, nobody believed me. I need you all to believe me now.”

“Thank you, Ms. Marsh,” Jordan said. “Your witness.”

Matt leaned forward in his chair, elbows resting on knees, hands clasped. “All right,” he said slowly, getting to his feet. “Where were you on the night of April thirtieth?”

“In Goffeysboro,” Catherine said.

“You weren’t in the clearing behind the cemetery here in Salem Falls, were you?”

“No.”

“So you don’t know whether something happened to Gillian Duncan that night?”

“No.”

“In fact,” Matt accused, “all you know is that a year ago, you made a terrible mistake.”

“Yes.”

“And a year ago, you were so in love with this man you didn’t want him to get hurt, correct?”

“Yes,” Catherine murmured.

He softened quite suddenly, his face rounding into a friendly smile. “You wish things with Coach St. Bride had ended differently, don’t you, Ms. Marsh?”

“Like you can’t imagine.”

“Even now, you don’t want to see him get hurt, do you?”

Borne along on his questions, Catherine shook her head vehemently. “Of course not. That’s why I came today.”

“What a surprise,” Matt said. “Nothing further.”

Jordan watched Catherine leave the witness stand. “Once again, Your Honor,” he said, “the defense rests.”

“This,” Jordan said to the jury, “is going to be hard.”

He walked to the box, where they sat in anticipation of his closing argument. “When you hear a young girl like Gillian Duncan say she was raped, you want to believe her. You don’t want to find out that she’s making things up, or that there are inconsistencies in her story. You want to think a girl like that would come in and tell you what really happened . . . but the fact is, you can’t just assume that what Gillian Duncan said is the truth.

“Gillian Duncan had specifically been told by her father not to go out at night. That there was a dangerous man running loose. So what did she do? She tried to see what she could get away with. She just didn’t realize that it was going to get away from her . . . and that’s why we’re here today.”

Jordan set his hands on the railing, leaning into the jury box. “The judge has instructed you, and will instruct you again, that you need to listen to all of the evidence . . . not just Gillian’s testimony. And the evidence in this case shows there are too many inconsistencies for you to find Jack St. Bride guilty of aggravated felonious sexual assault.”

Jordan began to tick off a list on his fingers. “Gillian told you that she was going to the woods to hang out with her friends, but in reality she went into an occult bookstore and spoke to the proprietor about celebrating Beltane. Jack told you he saw ribbons and candles and an altar . . . something strange and difficult to believe, to be sure. Yet silver ribbons were found later at the scene of the crime, and in Meg Saxton’s bedroom closet.”

Ticking off another point, Jordan continued. “Gillian said that her friends left, and that she headed home in the other direction. But she’d arrived in the company of friends specifically because she believed that Jack St. Bride was dangerous. After meeting him face to face, why would she leave by herself and run the risk of meeting up with him?”

Then Jordan gestured down the central aisle. “And Gillian said that after the rape, she counted to one hundred and ran as fast as she could to catch up to her friends. Ladies and gentlemen, the distance she had to go from that clearing to where her friends were is approximately half a football field in length. It takes a high school linebacker about six seconds to cover that distance. Now, Gillian isn’t a high school linebacker . . . but according to her testimony, it took her five minutes to travel that path. Five minutes, plus the length of time it took her to count to a hundred. Does it seem likely that a young girl who was scared, hysterical, and running as fast as possible would move that slowly? Does it seem likely that from only half a football field away, her friends would never have heard her struggles?”

Jordan walked to the evidence table and held up the picture of Jack’s scraped cheek. “You heard evidence that Mr. St. Bride’s DNA was found beneath Gillian’s fingernails. We don’t contest that . . . but he told you she was grabbing his arm in an effort to keep him there. He said the lone scratch on his cheek came from a branch . . . consistent with a single twig raking the skin, rather than five long red fingernails.

“You also heard that these girls were taking drugs that night. What kind of drugs? The kind that don’t show up in a tox screen at the hospital. The kind that Gillian didn’t mention to the police when she made her statement. The kind that obliterate your short-term memory of an event and cause hallucinations.”

Jordan shook his head. “It doesn’t add up. And the reason it doesn’t is either because Gillian doesn’t remember it clearly or because she doesn’t want us to. Afraid of her father’s reaction to discovering her drug use and her commitment to witchcraft, Gillian Duncan pointed a finger in blame at the man who stumbled unexpectedly on her secrets. She told a lie about Jack St. Bride before he had a chance to tell the truth about her.

“The only crime Jack St. Bride committed was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It happened once before with a girl this age-a gross miscarriage of justice. Jack came to Salem Falls, expecting to turn over a new leaf . . . but was seen as a stain on the community. People waited for him to make a mistake that might lead to his exile . . . and Gillian’s accusation became just the match to start a conflagration.

“There’s been a witch hunt here in Salem Falls,” Jordan said, turning toward his client. “But the victim, all along, has been Jack St. Bride.”

Matt smiled at the jury. “We’ve heard about witches,” he said. “We’ve heard about Beltane. The only element that’s been missing in this court is the Devil . . . unless, of course, you happen to include Jack St. Bride.

“What matters at this trial isn’t whether Gillian is a witch, or whether she crawled to her friends on her belly, or even whether she was experimenting with an illegal substance. What this comes down to is evidence-hard facts that prove Jack St. Bride committed rape. Evidence like the defendant’s DNA; found beneath Gillian Duncan’s fingernails. Evidence like his blood, found on her shirt. Let Mr. McAfee explain that away, if he’d like. But he can’t account for that drop of semen on Gillian’s thigh. It’s not something you tend to leave behind without having intimate contact. According to the expert who testified, the chance of randomly selecting an unrelated individual other than the defendant whose DNA matches the crime scene DNA at the locations tested is one in seven hundred forty thousand. That’s a big number, ladies and gentlemen. Realistically, where did this semen come from, if not Mr. St. Bride?”

Matt turned toward the jury. “Evidence,” he repeated. “You heard Gillian Duncan speak of the most brutal and intimate event of her life, although it clearly pained her to do so in front of strangers, with cameras in her face and a judge hanging on her words. You heard her describe the gathering of evidence for a sexual assault kit-one of the most invasive exams a young girl can undergo. And you heard the testimonies of two girls, a police detective, and an ER doctor, who all agree that Gillian was hysterical when she was found.”

Matt raised his brows. “On the other hand, nothing in Mr. St. Bride’s testimony matches anything else you’ve heard from eyewitnesses that night. He’s got a convenient explanation for the bruises and the scratch on his face. He’s got a convenient explanation for why he was at the bar drinking. He’s got a convenient explanation for why he was in the woods. But he doesn’t have any proof, ladies and gentlemen. All he has is his story . . . which, to use Mr. McAfee’s terms, doesn’t add up.” Matt stared hard at the jury. “Jack St. Bride has more incentive than anybody in this entire courtroom to lie to you, because he has more at stake. Having been in jail before, he knows he doesn’t want to go back.”

The prosecutor started back. “The defendant chose to go out and get drunk. Is that what impaired his judgment enough to rape a girl? Maybe. Is his violent nature what caused him to rape a girl? Maybe. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he did it. And that the state has proved he did it, beyond a reasonable doubt.

“Mr. McAfee has offered you a lot of mumbo jumbo about Gillian’s actions and behavior . . . because he can’t offer you the truth.” Matt leaned over the counsel table, his finger two inches from Jack’s face. “But the truth is that this man went into the woods on April thirtieth, 2000. This man jumped Gillian Duncan and ripped her clothes off and forced her to have sex with him. This man,” Matt said, “is the one I’m asking you to convict today.”

Jack was brought back to the sheriff’s holding cell pending the jury’s verdict. The deputy who was on the front desk was an older man with a white handlebar mustache and a tendency to whistle “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” He nodded as Jack passed, en route to a six-by-six space that was beginning to feel frighteningly comfortable.

Jack stripped off his jacket and tie and lay down on the metal bunk, pressing his fists against his eyes. How big a difference could Catherine Marsh make? Jordan said it would depend on whether the jury wanted to hang its hat on her testimony, although to Jack, one young girl with a case of puppy love seemed an awfully meager reason for acquittal.

Once the jury handed back a conviction, he would be taken directly to the state penitentiary in Concord. If he were sentenced for the maximum term, he would be fifty-one years old when he was released. His hair would have gone gray, his stomach soft, his skin lined. He would have age spots on the backs of his hands, markers for all the empty years gone by.

He would miss the feel of snow on his face. And the taste of Irish whiskey. He would miss the pattern of his mother’s china and the luxurious width of a double bed and the thin orange line where dawn bled into day.

He would miss Addie.

In the distance, Jack could hear the muted conversation of the deputy in the front office. Maybe Jordan had come to tell him the verdict was in. Or maybe some other prisoner had been brought here, to purgatory, to wait.

The thick-soled shoes of the deputy squeaked on the linoleum, stopping in front of Jack’s cell. “I’m going to take a whiz,” he announced.

“Good for you.”

“I’m telling you this,” the deputy said slowly, “because I have no control over who comes through that door when I’m gone, if you understand what I’m saying.”

Jack didn’t. “Believe me, if some nut comes in here and shoots me in cold blood, I’d probably thank him for it.”

The deputy laughed, already halfway down the corridor. Jack lay back down, covering his eyes with his forearm.

“Jack.”

It wasn’t real-it couldn’t be. Addie stood on the other side of the bars, close enough to touch.

Without a word, Jack lunged forward, sticking his arms through the slatted steel and working them around her as best as he could. Her face came up to the cold metal, her nose and mouth jutting forward enough to meet his. She was pushing so hard to get closer that Jack could see red lines forming on her cheekbones and jaw, a cell of their own making.

His hands cupped her face, tilted her forehead against his. “I didn’t think I would get to see you,” he confessed.

“I traded the deputy a chocolate cream pie,” Addie said. “For five minutes.”

Bringing his lips up, he kissed her brow. “What would he have done for a whole meal?” Jack held her back when she would have burrowed closer, tracing his hands over the delicate bones in her face and the bridge of her nose, lighting slight as a butterfly on her eyelids and trailing her lips like a whisper, over and over.

“W-what are you doing?”

He stroked her brows, her widow’s peak. “Taking you with me,” Jack said.

In that moment, an incredible peace fell inside him. He would not be like the other prisoners in the state pen. He would never be like them, because he’d been exposed to something truly beautiful, and it had gotten into his system. For the rest of his life, he would carry it around, hot as a secret under his skin, and just as jealously guarded.

“I will never forget you, Addie Peabody,” Jack said softly, covering her mouth once more.

He tasted of grief. She swallowed his sorrow like a seed, and breathed hope to the center of him. “You won’t have to,” Addie promised. “I’ll be here waiting.”

The sound of the deputy hurrying down the hall made Addie step back, although her hands still rested loosely in Jack’s. “Sorry to break this up,” the man said, “but you have to go.”

“I understand,” Addie said, her throat closing like a bud.

“Not you, ma’am.” The deputy turned to Jack. “Verdict’s in already.”

Some of the jury looked at him; some didn’t. “It’s normal,” Jordan assured him. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Mr. Foreman,” Judge Justice said, “have you reached a verdict?”

The cameras buzzed behind Jack’s shoulder, and he concentrated very hard on making the muscles of his legs work. If he were being recorded for posterity, he wanted to be sure he could stand on his own two feet.

“We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said.

“Will the defendant please rise?”

Jordan locked his arm through Jack’s, to draw him to his feet. Weak-kneed, Jack managed to remain upright and breathing.

“Mr. Foreman, how do you find the defendant on the charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault?”

Jack glanced at the jury, still poker-faced. The foreman looked at the paper he held in his hands. A thousand years later, he read, “Not guilty.”

The cry of outrage from Amos Duncan was drowned out by the immediate whoop of delight behind Jack, as Selena Damascus hopped the barricade and threw herself into Jordan’s arms. And then Addie was in his own, and Jordan was shaking his hand, telling him he’d known it would turn out this way all along.

The world revolved, a haze of glances and jurors and camera lenses. “The defendant is free to go,” the judge called over the melee, and that one word fixed in Jack’s consciousness and bloomed, obliterating all the noise and joy and surprise of the moment. Free. Free to go home. Free to shout out his innocence in the middle of the town green. Free to pick up the yarn of his life and see how it would knit together.

A liberated man, Jack turned around with a grin on his face-and found himself staring at the people of Salem Falls, who now had even more reason to hate him.

Amos Duncan wanted to take the prosecutor apart, piece by piece. “You said he’d be locked up for years,” the man growled. “And now I have to see him on the streets of the town where my daughter and I live?”

Matt couldn’t possibly feel any worse than Duncan wanted him to feel. Losing cases was always a disappointment . . . losing one that seemed to be open and shut was downright devastating.

“What can I say?” Matt answered humbly. “Amos, Gillian-I’m so sorry.” He began to gather his notes and papers, stuffing them haphazardly into his briefcase.

“I hope you carry this with you, Houlihan,” Duncan spat. “I hope you can’t sleep at night, knowing he’s out there.”

In counterpoint to her blustering father, Gillian’s voice was quiet and firm. “You said it was a sure thing.”

Matt glanced at her. He looked at Amos Duncan, too. Then he thought of McAfee’s closing, of the atropine in Gillian’s blood sample, of Catherine Marsh testifying that she’d been afraid of her father. “Nothing’s a sure thing,” he muttered, and he walked up the aisle of the courtroom, heading home.

The champagne bottle popped, shooting its cork into the ceiling of Jordan’s porch. Foam sprayed and ran down the sides, soaking Selena’s toes and the wooden slats beneath her feet. “To justice!” she cried, pouring some into Dixie cups.

“May she continue to be conveniently blind,” Jordan said, toasting.

Thomas grinned, lifting his own glass. “And deaf and dumb, when you need it.”

They drank, giddy with the sheer delight of winning. “I knew I wanted to get back into trying cases again,” Jordan said, and behind his back, Thomas and Selena rolled their eyes. “Of course, I couldn’t have done it without the two of you.”

“If you’re feeling so charitable, then you can explain to Chelsea why I’m not a complete jerk.”

“Ah, that’s easy,” Selena said. “Just tell her you take after your mother.”

“Thomas.” Jordan slung his arm around his son’s shoulders. “We’ll have her over to dinner, and I’ll show her my enchanting side.” He smothered a laugh. “No pun intended.”

Selena poured herself a second glass of champagne. “She could bring along something to drink . . . or something to slip into the drink.”

“Very funny,” Thomas muttered.

Jordan, on the other hand, grinned at her. “Maybe I’ll get some atropine myself, stir it into your hot water, and tell you that we tied the knot.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to drug me for that,” Selena said lightly, but her words fell flat.

There was a thick beat of silence. “Do you-” Jordan asked, staring hard at her.

Selena’s smile started slow, then unrolled like a banner. “Yeah. I do.”

When they fell onto the porch swing in a tangle of arms and legs and joy, Thomas discreetly slipped into the house. He walked down the hall into his father’s bedroom, sat on the bed, and unzipped the linings of each of the two pillows. It took some rummaging, but he managed to find them-the small herbal charms Chelsea had given him weeks before. Red cloth, filled with sweet-smelling flowers and a penny, then tied with blue ribbon in seven knots. “You can’t force someone to love someone else,” Chelsea had warned, when he asked her to make these. “All a spell can do is open a person’s eyes to what’s out there.”

Thomas had shrugged. “I think that’s all they need.”

As his father and Selena embraced outside, Thomas slipped the charms back into their pillows. And then, toasting himself, he drank down the rest of his champagne.

Charlie knocked on the door of his daughter’s bedroom. “Hi,” he said, sticking his head in the door. “Can I come in?”

“Since when do you ask?” Meg shot back. She didn’t look at him.

This angry girl, huddled on her bed, looked nothing like the child who’d once followed him around with a tinfoil badge pinned to her dress, so that she could be just like her father. Betrayal sat between them, a monster of enormous proportions. “I guess you heard that Jack St. Bride got acquitted.”

Meg nodded. “Gillian’s a mess about it.”

The detective sighed. “Understandable, I guess.” He took a deep breath. “We can still press charges, if you want.”

His daughter shook her head, her cheeks flaming. “No,” she murmured.

“Meggie?”

“I knew,” she blurted out. “I knew that Gillian was doing all this just to hurt Jack. At first I didn’t care, because of the things . . . the things I remembered. But now I know they weren’t real.” Meg’s round, sweet face was turned to his, waiting for him to make it all better, the way he used to do when she’d fallen down and scraped her knee. A Band-Aid, and a kiss. If only that was what it took once they grew up. “Gilly lied . . . and she told us to lie . . . and we did it, because we were all so afraid of what would happen if we didn’t. Maybe we were a little curious, too, to see if we could pull it off.”

“Pull what off?”

Meg picked at a cuticle. “Punishing him. Ruining his life. Making him leave Salem Falls. Gillian just wanted to get him back-not for what he did to her, but for what he wouldn’t do.”

She had known about Gillian lying? And hadn’t told him? “Why didn’t you come to me, Meg?”

“Would you really have listened, Daddy? People hear only what they want to hear.”

He was the last person qualified to lecture his daughter on falsehoods and moral responsibility. Addie Peabody’s name flashed through his mind like a stroke of lightning, and he touched his daughter’s hand. “Maybe we’ll go talk to someone,” Charlie said. “Someone who can sort things like this out, who does it for a living.”

“Like a psychiatrist?”

Charlie nodded. “If you want.”

Meg suddenly seemed very, very young. “You’d go with me?” she whispered.

Charlie held out his arms, and his daughter crawled right where she belonged. He rubbed her spine, buried his face in her hair. “Anywhere,” he vowed, “and back again.”

For a horrible moment, Addie thought she had lost him. She moved through the house, wondering if she’d imagined his acquittal, calling his name and getting no answer.

Finally, she discovered Jack sitting out on Chloe’s wooden playset. In her bare feet, she padded out across the lawn to settle on a swing beside him. “Want a push?” she asked.

Jack smiled softly. “No thanks. I’ll jump when I’m ready.”

He untangled his fist from the chain and laced his fingers with Addie’s. They sat in summertime silence, bordered by the songs of crickets, watching the hot wind jump like a monkey through the fingers of the trees. “How does it feel?” Addie asked quietly.

Jack brought his fist to his chest. “Like the whole world has settled right here.”

She smiled. “That’s because you’re home.”

“Addie,” he said, “the thing is, I’m not. I can’t stay here.”

“Of course you can.”

“I meant that I can’t stay in Salem Falls, Addie. Nobody wants me here.”

“I do,” she said, going very still.

“Yes.” Jack reached for her hand, and kissed it. “That’s why I’m going to leave. God, you saw what happened today, after we left the courthouse. The mother who pulled her kid away from me on the street. The guy at the diner who walked out as soon as he saw I was there. I can’t live like that . . . and neither can you. How are you going to run a local business when people start ostracizing you, too?”

Maybe it was the heat breaking as the night rolled into Salem Falls, maybe it was the memory of her daughter playing in this very spot, maybe it was just a soul that had suffered too much to give up without a healthy fight-but at that moment, Addie made a decision. She stood, planting her feet on either side of Jack, to keep him where she wanted him. “I already told you,” Addie said, her eyes blazing, “you don’t get to leave me behind.”

“But Addie, I’m a drifter. You have a place where you belong.”

“Yes. With you.” She kissed him, her faith a brand.

By the time Addie lifted her head, Jack was smiling. “What diner?” he murmured, and yanked her onto his lap.

“My father can run it. He needs that. And I have . . . oh, about forty-two weeks of vacation time accrued.”

They swung lazily as the sun set, licking a fire up the slate path and charging the stars in the night sky. Jack imagined taking Addie to Greece, to Portugal, to the Loire Valley. He envisioned her by the Trevi Fountain, in the Canadian Rockies, on the top of the Empire State Building. “We’ll visit my mother,” he said, the thought forming in his mind like a crystal. “I think she’d like to meet you.”

“She lives in New York?”

Jack nodded. It was as good as place as any, he thought, to find a happy ending.

Shortly after midnight, Amos Duncan awakened. He lay in bed, gathering his sixth sense around him like an extra blanket, certain that something wasn’t right.

Shrugging into his robe, he padded down the hall to Gillian’s bedroom. The door was wide open, the covers on her bed thrown back.

He found her in the kitchen, sitting at the table in the dark. A glass of milk sat in front of her, untouched. Her head rested heavily on the heel of her hand; her eyes were focused on something only she could see.

“Gilly,” he whispered, so he wouldn’t startle her.

She came out of her trance, blinking, surprised to find him there. “Oh,” she said, flustered. “I was . . . I just couldn’t sleep.”

Amos nodded, his hands in the pockets of his robe. “I know. I understand. But Gillian . . . maybe it’s better this way.” She turned her face to his, so like her mother’s in this half-light. “Maybe we should just get on with our lives. Try to put this past us. Make things the way they used to be.”

When Gillian glanced away, Amos touched her jaw. “You know I’m only looking out for you, Gilly,” he murmured, smiling tenderly. “Who loves you most?”

“You do,” Gillian whispered.

Amos held out his hand, and she placed hers in it. Then he pulled her into an embrace, an old, old dance. Gillian closed her eyes, years past tears. Her mind was already a million miles away by the time her father’s mouth settled over hers, sealing their deal once again.