Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

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.”