Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

Gillian sighed. She didn’t want to deal with her friends right now. She didn’t want to do anything but figure out how to keep her father from being such a goddamned warden, so that she could make Jack see what he was missing. “What time for what?”

“The meeting?”

“The meeting . . .”

“I could have sworn I put down April thirtieth on my calendar.”

Understanding bloomed. “Oh, Beltane,” Gilly said.

“How could you forget?”

Gillian hadn’t forgotten, exactly; she’d just been preoccupied with Jack. Her coven had made plans to meet in the woods behind the cemetery, at the base of the flowering dogwood tree. Meg was bringing Georgia fatwood to light a bonfire, Whit had been given the task of sewing herb sachets to hang on the tree as gifts to the God and Goddess, and Chelsea was going to figure out some kind of maypole. Gilly’s job had been the Simple Feast, the sharing of food and drink within a circle that had been cast.

Her father would kill her if she sneaked out of the house.

Her gaze lit on a small ceramic vase that had once been her mother’s. There was a sprig of pussywillows inside, but no water. Instead, hiding at the base, was the vial of atropine she’d taken from the R & D lab.

“Eleven,” she said into the phone. “Be there.”

They attacked him from behind. Jack had no sooner stepped out of the small halo of light cast by the lantern hanging beside the door than he was grabbed, his arms pinned behind him while fists slammed into his ribs, his belly, his face. Blood ran down his throat, tinny; he spat it back at them. He struggled to find their faces, to mark them in his mind, but they were wearing stocking caps pulled low and scarves tugged high; all Jack could see was an ocean of black, a series of hands, and wave after wave of their anger.

Addie brushed out her hair, then sprayed perfume onto her wrists and knees and navel. Jack had been gone awhile, which was strange; even stranger, she could hear an occasional crash. If it was raccoons, it was a hell of a lot of them.

She stepped to the bedroom window and pulled back the Swiss organdy curtain. It was dark for eight o’clock, and at first she could not see Jack at all. Then a foot appeared in the yellow periphery cast by the porch light. An elbow. Finally, the entire body of a man, dressed in black, his hands bright with blood.

“Jack,” she gasped, and she reached underneath the bed for the rifle she kept there. She had used it once in twenty years-to shoot a rabid coon that had wandered into the yard where Chloe was playing. She loaded it on the run, hurrying downstairs, and threw open the front door to fire once into the night sky. Five faces turned, and their owners then ran off in disparate directions into the woods behind her house, tracks spreading like the spokes of a wheel.

On the gravel, in a boneless, battered heap, lay Jack.

Addie set down the gun, ran to his side, and gently rolled him over. Oh, God, she thought. What have they done to you?

Jack coughed, his lips pulling back to show teeth shiny with blood. He tried to sit up, wincing away from Addie’s hands. “No,” he grit out, that one syllable staining the stars. “Noooo!”

His cry bent back the young grass lining the driveway; it shouldered aside the violet clouds and left the moon to shiver, bare-boned. “Jack,” she soothed. But his voice rose, until it was an umbrella over Salem Falls, until people on the far side of town had to close their windows to the sweet night air just to block off the sound of his pain.

The last thing she wanted to do was poison herself. To that end, Gilly logged onto the Internet at about 8:15 P.M., hoping to find the correct dosage of atropine. Thanks to Columbine, it was common knowledge now that you could even build a bomb with the help of the World Wide Web. Surely it would be a piece of cake to find the amount of hallucinogen it took to get high.

While the Web pages loaded, she painted her fingernails-one hand at a time, so that she could zip from one search engine to another, looking up herbal journals for information about belladonna and atropine sulfate. Finally, she found a site that listed adult dosages. In pill form, 5 milligrams. To dilate pupils, 1/50,000 of a grain. And taken internally, 1/20 to 1/100 of a grain.

Gilly frowned. Seemed like quite a range. What if she could take 1/20 of a grain but Whitney, who was tiny, only needed 1/100?

The telephone rang again. “Gilly,” her father said. “I wanted to check in on you.”

“Check up on me, you mean.”

“Now, sweetheart. You know why I’m doing this.”

Her heart began to pound in triple time. “Aren’t you supposed to be jogging?”

“Just finished. I should be home soon.”

What would she do if he arrived to find her missing? “Actually,” Gilly said, “I’m glad you called. Meg wants to know if I can come over tonight.”

“I really don’t think it’s a terrific idea, Gilly, with all that’s going on.”

“Please, Daddy. Her mom is going to pick us up for a ten o’clock movie, and who’s going to be stupid enough to hurt me while I’m out with a detective’s wife?” When he didn’t respond, Gilly forged ahead. “Mrs. Saxton says I can stay over. If it’s okay with you.” She was amazed at how easily the lies came, now that she had them in her mind. She was going to celebrate Beltane tonight, come hell or high water or Amos Duncan.

She could hear her father’s resolve cracking just the tiniest bit. Meg’s dad was a cop; her mom, a woman they’d known their whole lives. Gilly would probably be safer in the Saxton household than in his own. “Okay,” he said. “But I want you to call me when you get home from the movie. No matter what time it is.”

“I will. Love you, Daddy.”

“Me, too.”

For a long moment after she hung up, Gilly just stared at the phone and smiled. Webs were the very easiest things to spin.

She logged off the computer and walked to the kitchen. Astral projection was going to be her Beltane surprise for the coven; the effects would be even more startling if they were completely unexpected. Gilly stirred the thermos of iced tea and considered the vial in her hand once again.

Courage.

She trickled a tiny bit of the liquid into the tea, then stuck her finger into the thermos for a taste . . . nope, it was still tea, if a little bit bitter-1/20 of a grain? 1/100? Shrugging, Gilly emptied the entire contents of the test-tube into the thermos and screwed on the cap.

Jack woke to find Addie curled beside him, her hand clutching a washcloth that was spreading a water stain over the comforter in the shape of a bell. He came up on one elbow, wincing at the ache of his ribs, and touched the side of her face. When she didn’t stir, he carefully levered himself off the bed.

What might his life have been like if he’d had someone like her standing by his side during the nightmare in Loyal? What if he’d served his time but met her every Tuesday night in the common room where inmates could face their visitors over long folding tables, under the watchful eyes of the guards? What if he’d had Addie to come home to?

He paced through the dark house, wishing he could do for her all she’d done for him. Thanks to Addie, Jack no longer spent time reviewing his mistakes. He had put them into a box and shut the lid tight. Addie, though . . . she sorted through the box daily, holding up each memory to the light like an heirloom, even though it made her bleed inside.

He found himself standing in front of Chloe’s bedroom door.

Within minutes, he had stripped the bed of its sheets and covers and removed the posters from the walls. He stacked Chloe’s toys in a box he’d found in her closet. If he could just clear out the constant reminder of what Addie had lost, maybe it wouldn’t be so hard for her to look forward rather than back.