Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chelsea’s eyes widened. “For real?”

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

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

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

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

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

“A nap? I thought you were faking.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s blue.”

“And yours?”

Meg’s eyes drifted shut. “Pink.”

“Mine’s silver,” Whitney murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roy blinked. “My girl.”

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

“Oh, Addie. Don’t.”

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

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

Addie flushed. “That’s not true.”

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

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

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

“No.”

“This look familiar yet?”

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

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

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

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