Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

Jordan skimmed his hands down the freckled bark of a tree. It reminded him of age spots, which reminded him that he was getting old, and what the hell did he have to show for it? And that reminded him that Jack St. Bride would turn fifty in prison, probably shouting with every breath that he hadn’t committed a crime.

He turned on his investigator. “What have you been doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“Other than eating my groceries and sucking up the air conditioning I’m paying for . . . what have you dug up about this case?”

“Nothing. Addie Peabody is still out of town, and she’s our best hope to make Jack look good.”

“That’s if she’s still speaking to him,” Jordan pointed out. “Being arrested in front of your girlfriend has an uncanny way of ruining a relationship. What else have you got?”

Selena sighed. “Everywhere I turn, there’s someone telling me what a good kid Gillian Duncan is. Smart, sweet, Daddy’s little girl. Add that kind of credibility to the physical evidence . . . well, Jordan, there just isn’t a lot I can offer here.” She reached down between her feet and pulled up the towhead of a dried dandelion. “Here. Make a wish.”

“Just one?” Jordan said.

“Don’t want to overload the magic, do you?”

He closed his eyes. “I wish things were different.”

Selena held her breath until Jordan blew, scattering the seed pods over the wind. “What do you mean?”

“I wish I could trade this job for whatever’s behind door number one. I wish Jack St. Bride’s blood wasn’t on Gillian’s shirt. I wish you and I could . . .”

His voice trailed off, and Selena stared at him. “Could what?”

“Could find something to get our client acquitted.”

Selena dusted off her jeans. “Nothing’s gonna get done with us standing here. Let’s go.” But Jordan didn’t follow, and before she knew it, she was standing at the edge of the woods again. Frustrated, she tried to peer through the trees but couldn’t make him out. “You coming?” she called. “I’m gonna be halfway home before you get out of the forest.”

In the clearing, Jordan turned at the sound of Selena’s voice. I’m gonna be halfway home before you get out of the forest. “Where are you?” he called.

“Waiting for you!”

Jordan hurried down the narrow trail that led toward the cemetery. He counted each footfall . . . thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five . . . and finally broke out of the thicker vegetation to find an annoyed Selena tapping her sneaker. “Fifty-one,” Jordan announced.

“No, actually, I’m only thirty-eight. You’re just giving me gray hair.” Selena turned her back on him. “Can we just get going now?”

“No. Selena, where are we?”

She peered at Jordan. “You hit your head on a branch back there?”

“This is where Saxton found Gillian. Where she’d caught up to her friends after the rape. Right?”

“Yeah. So?”

“I could hear you. When you called my name, I could hear you.”

Selena’s mind picked up the ball Jordan had thrown. “But could you hear something other than a voice? Like two people wrestling?”

“I don’t know. Wait here.” He ran back into the woods, then started kicking at the leaves. “Can you hear that?”

Selena strained. Daytime sounds-birds, and trucks in the distance-were louder, but every now and then she got a slight sense of disturbance. “Kind of,” she called back. “Real faint, though.” Selena jogged to the clearing again. “I’m guessing it’s about fifty yards,” she said. “You can hear a lot of things from fifty yards away.”

“Yes,” Jordan agreed, “and you also can’t get a lot done in the time it takes to walk it.” His hands went to the buttons of his trousers, and Selena took a step back. “Don’t flatter yourself; I’m testing something. Start walking slowly.”

Selena looked at him askance. “What are you gonna do?”

“Simulate a rape.”

She looked down at his pants, then his hand. “By yourself?”

“Simulate,” Jordan repeated. “Not stimulate.”

Selena started to walk. She crept forward far more slowly than a girl would, especially one in a hurry to get home before her parents found her missing. She stopped once to shake a rock out of her sneaker and a second time to stare at a toad with black button eyes, and then finally reached the edge of the woods. “I’m here.”

“Already?”

“If I went any slower, I would have grown moss.”

“Eighty-seven seconds,” Jordan said, approaching.

“Gillian said the rape took five minutes. Yet when she managed to catch up with her friends, they were only fifty yards away.”

“And if they’d been walking that slowly-”

“-then they would have heard a struggle,” Selena finished.

Jordan turned to her. “Assuming,” he said, “there was a struggle at all.”

June 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

Delilah threw up after the lunch crush ended and before the supper crowd arrived. She sat at the small card table in the kitchen, a Handi Wipes towelette wet down and plastered against her forehead. “She’s burning up, Roy,” said Darla.

“I’m fine. I just can’t stand cooking clam chowder is all.”

Roy folded his arms across his chest. “You’ve been making meatloaf.”

Delilah’s runny red eyes focused on Roy, and she managed a tiny smile. “Guess I’m sick, boss,” she said softly.

He squatted down so that he was at eye level. “Now I’m worried. The Dee I know would never in a million years admit to it.”

Delilah rested her heavy head on her hands. “Maybe in another million years, I’ll feel good enough to argue that point.”

“One of those summer viruses,” Darla said. Looking at Roy, she added, “I just hope she didn’t give it to everyone who ate here this morning.”

Roy eyed her big frame uneasily. “I could carry her up to my place . . .”

“No, her son’s coming to take her home. I called him twenty minutes ago.” Darla blinked at him. “So what are we gonna do?”

“Roy’s gonna take over as my replacement, aren’t you, Roy?” Delilah said. “On account of otherwise, this diner’s going to close . . . and that would kill Addie.”

“I can’t do that,” he whispered. “You know why.”

Delilah shrugged. “Sometimes we don’t have a choice about what life throws us. And right now, it’s throwing you a spatula.”

At that moment, Delilah’s son came into the kitchen. She let herself be lifted and supported by him, a lumberyard supervisor who was every inch as tall and forbidding as his mother. “You all try to get along without me,” she said, and left.

Roy glanced at the flat black face of the grill, the steam rising like a song. He wouldn’t be cooking, really. He’d just be finishing up what Delilah had started.

He inched toward the line where food was prepared. He could feel the ridges on the chopping block where knives had edged out their history the better part of the past twenty years. And he waited for his heart to stop, just like Margaret’s had.

Roy, you daydreaming again or are you gonna cook me up Adam and Eve on a raft?

Just like that, he could hear his wife’s voice again, teasing him about how long it could possibly take to fry two eggs and set them on a piece of toast. He could see her reaching up on tiptoe to put her ticket in the circular holder. He could feel the ache of the scar he’d gotten when she’d sneaked behind the line to kiss him and, lost in the moment, he’d pressed his hand flat on the open waffle iron.

“In the weeds,” he whispered, cook’s lingo for being overburdened.

“Here.” Darla held out a white chef’s coat so old it had moth holes in some places. “Addie told me she’d been saving this for you.”