Salem Falls (22 page)

7:40. Wes had twenty minutes left on duty before he could head home. Usually, this time of night, high school kids were hanging in small clots near the rear of the post office or idling in their cars in the parking lot, but these days Main Street looked like a ghost town, as if kids believed the closer they got to the Do-Or-Diner, the more likely they were to fall prey to the local criminal.

The sound of footfalls behind Wes had him turning, his hand on his gun belt. A jogger approached, reflective markings on his stocking cap and sneakers winking in the glare of the streetlights.

“Wes,” said Amos Duncan, slowing down in front of the policeman and drawing in great gulps of air. He set his hands on his knees, then straightened. “Nice night, isn’t it?”

“For what?”

“A run, of course.” Amos wiped the sweat off his face with the sleeve of his shirt. “God, though. You’d think there was a curfew, based on what this town looks like.”

Wes nodded. “Dead, for about seven-thirty.”

“Maybe people are eating later,” Amos suggested, although they both knew this was not the case. “Well, I’d better get home. Gilly’ll be waiting.”

“You might want to keep a close eye on her.”

Amos frowned. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I saw her this afternoon, down by the diner. She was talking to St. Bride.”

“Talking?”

“That’s all.”

A muscle along Amos’s jaw tightened. “He started talking to her?”

“Can’t say, Amos.” He chose his words carefully, knowing that alienating Duncan would put him in the doghouse with the department for months. “Just seemed to me that Gilly . . . well, that she didn’t have a real strong sense of how dangerous he is.”

“I’ll speak to her,” Amos said, but his mind was elsewhere. He was wondering how a guy could come into a town where he wasn’t wanted and act like he had a right to be there. He was wondering how many innocent conversations it took before a girl followed you home, a deer eating out of your hand. He envisioned St. Bride calling out his daughter’s name. Imagined her turning, smiling, like she always did. He saw what he wanted to believe had happened.

Amos forced his attention back to Wes. “You off soon?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Good, good.” He nodded. “Well, thanks for the tip.”

“Just trying to keep everyone safe.”

Amos held up his hand in farewell, already moving off. Wes headed back toward the green again. He never noticed that Amos had turned away from the road that led to his house and was running quickly in the opposite direction.

Tom O’Neill swung the door open, surprised to find Amos Duncan on his doorstep, panting hard.

“Amos, you all right?”

“Sorry to bother you.”

Tom glanced over his shoulder. In the dining room, his family was gathered around their dinner. “No, no problem at all.” He stepped out onto the porch. “What’s the matter?”

Amos soberly met his gaze. “Well,” he said. “It’s like this.”

April 30, 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

A ddie couldn’t get Jack out of her mind. Now, she leaned forward, kissing the nape of his neck in a blatant attempt to draw his attention from the TV set in her living room. The Formosa type of this tea is more famous than the Amoy, Foochow, and Canton varieties.

“What is oolong,” Jack said, his elbows resting on his knees. Addie opened her mouth and licked the soft shell of his ear. “Cut it out! I’m on a roll.”

“You could be on me.” Most hours of the day, Jack could be counted on to catch her gaze across the diner, hot enough to make her stumble, or manage to pass by her so closely their bodies brushed. But when Jeopardy! came on, she could have paraded in front of him completely naked without managing to capture his attention.

Jack was addicted to Jeopardy! In three years, he had gone only one day without seeing the show, and that was because he was driving in a sheriff’s cruiser to the jail at the time. He was delighted that because he and Addie had taken the afternoon off to move his things, today he’d have the chance to watch at both 7 and 11 P.M. Addie, however, had a different agenda.

She began to unbutton his shirt, but Jack brushed her away. “I’ll get you back during the commercial,” he warned halfheartedly.

“Ooh . . . now I’m scared.”

Demeter brought famine upon the earth after this daughter was abducted to the underworld.

“I bet you know this one,” Jack said.

In response, she slipped her hand down the front of his jeans.

He jumped. “Addie!” he said, even as he swelled into her palm.

“Who is Persephone?” the contestant said on the screen.

Addie squeezed gently. “Aha. You missed.”

Beneath her, Jack’s hips moved. “I knew the answer. I was just distracted before I could give it.”

Jefferson said it “is no excuse in any country . . . because it can always be prevented.”

Addie straddled him, blocking his view of the television set. Finally, Jack gave up fighting. He drew her face down and kissed her, slipping the answer into her mouth: “What is ignorance of the law.”

“Ignorance,” Addie repeated. “A very nice segue to bliss.” She arched her throat, tilting back her head, and suddenly stilled. “Did you hear that?”

But Jack’s famous concentration was now focused entirely on Addie. “No.”

A crash, the sound of running. Addie sat up a little straighter. “There it is again.”

“It’s an animal,” Jack suggested. “You live in the woods.”

She pulled away from him, even as he grabbed for her hand and groaned at the loss of her soft weight on his lap. Peering out the window, Addie could only see the edge of the swing set, serrated by the moonlight. “Nothing out there.”

“Then try looking here.” Jack stood up, his erection straining against his jeans. He took Addie into his arms. “It’s probably raccoons. Why don’t you go upstairs while I get rid of them?”

“You’re going to miss Final Jeopardy?” Addie teased.

“Never,” he said, all seriousness, and then he winked. “There’s a rerun at eleven.”

Gilly could not get Jack out of her mind. She relived the moment outside the diner a hundred times, playing different scenarios like a slide show-things she should have said and done instead, images of Jack grabbing her and kissing her so hard her lips bled. Every time she stumbled over the part where Jack had treated her like a child, her stomach clenched, and she’d start to cry, dying a hundred deaths all over again. A moment later, she’d be spitting mad, itching for the next opportunity she might have to show him she wasn’t a child after all.

Her father had kept a hawk’s eye on her all afternoon and evening; then he’d gone running and made her swear she would be there when he got home. Now she was drowning her sorrows in the emotional angst of Sarah McLachlan and painting her fingernails bloodred as the phone rang. Whitney’s voice came on the line. “Gil, what time tonight?”

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.