Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

“Together?”

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

“Did you hear anything, after you left?”

Chelsea bowed her head. “No.”

“No screaming, scuffling, hitting, shouting?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what happened?” Charlie asked.

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

“Why did you let Gilly leave by herself?”

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

“But you didn’t.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meg nodded. “Just thinking of Gillian.”

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

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

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

“No.”

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

“Nothing.”

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

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

“Try.”

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

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

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

“And?”

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

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

He nodded, and turned off the tape recorder.

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

“Meg, I-”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is Limp Bizkit?”

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

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

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

Matt shrugged.

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