Salem Falls (11 page)

“I was her mother. It was my job to make it better.”

Jack repeated what she’d said to him. “You were only doing what you thought was right.”

But she didn’t answer. She stared, instead, at the ridge of burned skin on his palm that would turn into a scar. Slowly, giving him time to pull away, Addie kneeled and bent over Jack’s hand. Kissed it. He couldn’t help it; he flinched.

Immediately, she drew back. “It still hurts.”

Jack nodded. “A little.”

“Where?”

He touched his heart, unable to speak.

When Addie brushed her lips over his chest, Jack felt his body sing. He closed his eyes, terrified to let himself wrap his arms around her, even more terrified that she would pull away. In the end, he did nothing but let her lean against him while his arms remained at his sides. “Better?” Addie murmured, the word burning into his sweater.

“Yes,” Jack answered. “Perfect.”

April 2000

Salem Falls,

New Hampshire

A s Gillian watched her father schmooze on his office phone, words dripping from his lips like oil, she wondered what it would be like to shoot him in the head.

His brains would splatter the white carpet. His secretary, an older woman who always looked like she was choking on a plum, would probably have a heart attack. Well, that was all too violent, too obvious, Gilly thought. More like she’d poison him slowly, mixing one of his precious drugs into his food, until one day he simply didn’t wake up.

Gilly grinned at this, and her father caught her eye and smiled back. He cupped his hand over the phone. “One more minute,” he whispered, and winked.

It came over Gilly so quick, sometimes: the feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin, as if anger had swelled so far and fast inside her that it choked the back of her throat. Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river. It was not something she could talk about with her friends, because what if she was the only freak who felt this way? Maybe she could have confided in her mother . . . but then, she had not had a mother for years and years.

“There!” her father said triumphantly, hanging up the phone. He slung an arm around her shoulders, and Gillian was enveloped by the scents she would always associate with her childhood: wood smoke and cinnamon and thin Cuban cigars. She turned in to the smell, eyes closing in comfort. “What do you say we swing through the plant? You know how everyone likes to see you.”

What he meant was that he liked to show off his daughter. Gilly always felt self-conscious walking through the line, nodding at the gap-toothed workers who smiled politely at her but all the while were thinking, correctly, that they made less in a week than Gillian got for allowance money.

They entered the manufacturing part of the operation. Noise ricocheted around her, huge pistons calibrated meticulously, so that mixtures would be infallible. “We’re making Preventa today,” her father yelled in her ear. “Emergency contraception.”

He led her to a man wearing protective headphones and circulating around the floor. “Hello, Jimmy. You remember my little girl?”

“Sure. Hey, Gillian.”

“Give me a second, honey,” Amos said, and then he began to ask Jimmy questions about stockpiling and shipments.

Gillian watched the bump and grind of the machines measuring out the active ingredients: levonorgestrel and ethinyl estradiol. The device she was standing beside funneled newly formed pills through a narrow slot at its neck, counting them into batches that would be sealed dose by dose into childproof packaging.

It took only a few seconds to dart her hand into the sorting tray and grab some.

Her hand was still in her pocket, buried deep with her secret, when Amos turned. “Have I bored you to tears?”

Gilly smiled at her father. “No,” she assured him. “Not yet.”

In retrospect, Addie realized that the whole event should have been much more terrifying: breaking into a cemetery near midnight, on an evening when the moon was a great bloodshot eye in the sky. But suddenly it did not matter that she was trying to gain access to a graveyard in the darkest part of the night, that she was going to see her daughter’s grave for the first time in seven years. All she knew at that moment was that someone would be with her when she took this monumental step.

Heat swam from the ground, old souls snaking between Addie’s legs. “When I was in college,” Jack said, “I used to study in the cemetery.”

She did not know what she was more surprised by: the nature of the revelation or the fact that Jack had made it at all. “Didn’t you have a library?”

“Yeah. But in the graveyard it was quieter. I’d bring my books, and sometimes a picnic lunch, and-”

“A lunch? That’s sick. That’s-”

“Is this it?” Jack asked, and Addie realized that they stood in front of Chloe’s grave.

The last time she had seen it, it was bare earth, covered with roses and funeral baskets from well-wishers who could not offer explanations and so instead gave flowers. There was a headstone, now, too; white marble: CHLOE PEABODY, 1979-1989. Addie turned her face up to Jack’s. “What do you think happens . . . you know . . . after you die?”

Jack stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat and shrugged, silent.

“I used to hope that if we had to give up our old life, we’d get a new one.”

A huff of breath fell in the air between them, Jack’s answer.

“Then . . . after . . . I didn’t hope that at all. I didn’t want Chloe to be anybody else’s little girl.” Addie gently stepped off a rectangle around the grave. “But she has to be somewhere, doesn’t she?”

Jack cleared his throat. “The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they’re happy.”

She watched Jack pull two unlikely blossoms from his pocket to lay on the grave. The bright heads of the chives that Delilah grew on the windowsill were a brilliant splash of purple against the headstone.

This time of night, the sky was flung wide open, stars spread like a story across the horizon. “Those Inuit,” Addie said, tears running down her cheeks. “I hope they’re right.”

Addie’s hands shook as she walked Jack to the apartment he shared with her father. Did he feel it, too, every time their shoulders bumped up against each other? When he came into a room Addie was already in, did he notice the air squeezing more tightly around them? This was new to her, this sense that her bones were sized all wrong in the confines of her body. This feeling that you could be in the company of a man and not want to turn tail and run.

They reached the top of the stairs. “Well,” Jack said, “see you in the morning.” His hand moved to the doorknob.

“Wait,” Addie blurted out, and covered his fingers with her own. As she expected, he stilled. “Thanks. For coming tonight.”

Jack nodded, then turned to the door again.

“Can I ask you something?”

“If it’s about fixing the insulation on the receiving door, I meant to-”

“Not that,” Addie said. “I wanted to know if you’d kiss me.”

She saw the surprise in his eyes. Apprehension rose from her skin like perfume.

“No,” Jack gently answered.

Addie could not breathe, she’d made such a fool of herself. Cheeks burning, she took a step backward, and came up against an unforgiving wall.

“I won’t kiss you,” Jack added, “but you can kiss me.”

“I-I can?” She had the odd sense that Jack was as uncertain about this as she was.

“Do you want to?”

“No,” Addie said, as she came up on her toes so that her lips could touch his.

It was all Jack could do to not embrace her. To let her trace the seam of his mouth, to open and feel her tongue press against his. He did not touch her, not when her hands lighted on his chest, not when her hair tickled his neck, not when he realized she tasted of coffee and loneliness.

This is the worst thing you could do, he told himself. This is going to get you in trouble. Again.

But he let Addie play the Fates, spinning out the length of the kiss and cutting it when she saw t. Then he let himself into Roy’s apartment, intent on crawling into bed and forgetting the last ten minutes of his life. He had just begun to cross the darkened living room when a light snapped on. Roy sat on the couch, in his robe and pajamas. “You hurt my daughter,” he said, “and I will kill you in your sleep.”

“I didn’t touch your daughter.”

“Bullshit. I saw you kiss her, right through the keyhole.”

“You watched? What are you, some kind of peeping Tom?”

“Well, what are you? Some kind of gigolo? You get yourself hired and boink the business owner, so that you can steal her money in the middle of the night and run?”

“First off, she hired me. And second, even if I was stupid enough to do something like that, don’t you think I would have targeted the jewelry store owner or a banker?”

“Addie’s better looking than any of them.”

Jack unzipped his coat and threw it angrily on a chair. “Not that it’s any of your business, but Addie kissed me.”

“She . . . she did?”

“Is it so hard to believe?”

The old man stood up, a smile playing over his face as he started back toward his bedroom. “Actually,” he mused, “it is.”

Jordan strolled through the doors of the Carroll County Superior Court, his eyes falling into the familiar routine of scanning rooms to see which ones were involved in hearings and skimming over the sorry souls awaiting their fifteen minutes of testimonial fame. He felt naked in his Oxford cloth shirt and pullover sweater-he who used to wear Armani to try cases.

It was not that he’d ever planned on leaving the law permanently; he had just wanted to get away from it for a little while, and Salem Falls was as good a place as any to lose oneself. He had the money to rest on his laurels for a year or two, after those last few cases he’d tried down near Bainbridge, which had been particularly enervating. Each direct examination and cross-examination grew harder and harder to force from his throat, until Jordan realized that his job had become a noose, notching tighter with each client he defended.

Maybe it hadn’t been his job, though. Maybe it had been his relationship with his private investigator.

If anyone had told Jordan ten years ago that he’d want to get married again, he would have chuckled. If anyone had told him that the woman he chose would turn him down, he’d have laughed himself into a hernia. Yet that was exactly what Selena had done. Turned out her best investigative work had targeted Jordan himself-revealing human weaknesses he would rather never have learned.

He made his way to Bernie Davidson’s office. The clerk of the court was always a useful person to know. He was responsible for scheduling cases, and access to that came in handy when you really wanted to take a trip to Bermuda in March. But more than that, he had the ear of every district judge, which meant that things could get done much more quickly than through the normal channels-a motion slipped right into a judge’s hands, an emergency bail hearing stuffed into a jammed calendar. Jordan knocked once, then let himself inside, grinning widely when Bernie nearly fell out of his chair.

“Holy Christ-if it isn’t the ghost of Jordan McAfee!”

Jordan shook the other man’s hand. “How you doing, Bernie?”

“Better than you,” he said, taking in Jordan’s worn clothes and ragged haircut. “I heard a rumor you moved to Hawaii.”

Jordan slipped into a chair across from Bernie’s desk. “How come those are the ones that are never true?”

“Where are you living now?”

“Salem Falls.”

“Quiet there, huh?”

He shrugged. “Guess that’s what I was looking for.”

Bernie was too sharp to miss the hollowness of Jordan’s voice. “And now?”

Jordan concentrated on scraping a piece of lint off his sweater. After a moment, he lifted his head. “Now?” he said. “I think I’m starting to crave a little bit of noise.”

Addie stuck her head in through the back door of the kitchen. “Hey, Jack, can you give me a hand?”

He looked up through a haze of steam from the open dishwasher door. “Sure.”

It was cold outside, and the mud sucked at the soles of his sneakers. Addie disappeared behind a high fence that enclosed the garbage bins. “I’m having a little trouble with the latch,” she said. Once Jack had followed her inside to check the mechanism, she snaked her arms around him. “Hi,” she said into the weave of his shirt.

He smiled. “Hi.”

“How are you?”

“Great. You?”

Addie smiled wider. “Greater.”

“Well, see you,” Jack teased, grinning as Addie hung onto him for all she was worth. Bubbles rose inside him, the carbonation of happiness. When was the last time someone had so badly wanted him to stay put? “Is there really a problem with the latch?”