Salem Falls (65 page)

The deputy laughed, already halfway down the corridor. Jack lay back down, covering his eyes with his forearm.

“Jack.”

It wasn’t real-it couldn’t be. Addie stood on the other side of the bars, close enough to touch.

Without a word, Jack lunged forward, sticking his arms through the slatted steel and working them around her as best as he could. Her face came up to the cold metal, her nose and mouth jutting forward enough to meet his. She was pushing so hard to get closer that Jack could see red lines forming on her cheekbones and jaw, a cell of their own making.

His hands cupped her face, tilted her forehead against his. “I didn’t think I would get to see you,” he confessed.

“I traded the deputy a chocolate cream pie,” Addie said. “For five minutes.”

Bringing his lips up, he kissed her brow. “What would he have done for a whole meal?” Jack held her back when she would have burrowed closer, tracing his hands over the delicate bones in her face and the bridge of her nose, lighting slight as a butterfly on her eyelids and trailing her lips like a whisper, over and over.

“W-what are you doing?”

He stroked her brows, her widow’s peak. “Taking you with me,” Jack said.

In that moment, an incredible peace fell inside him. He would not be like the other prisoners in the state pen. He would never be like them, because he’d been exposed to something truly beautiful, and it had gotten into his system. For the rest of his life, he would carry it around, hot as a secret under his skin, and just as jealously guarded.

“I will never forget you, Addie Peabody,” Jack said softly, covering her mouth once more.

He tasted of grief. She swallowed his sorrow like a seed, and breathed hope to the center of him. “You won’t have to,” Addie promised. “I’ll be here waiting.”

The sound of the deputy hurrying down the hall made Addie step back, although her hands still rested loosely in Jack’s. “Sorry to break this up,” the man said, “but you have to go.”

“I understand,” Addie said, her throat closing like a bud.

“Not you, ma’am.” The deputy turned to Jack. “Verdict’s in already.”

Some of the jury looked at him; some didn’t. “It’s normal,” Jordan assured him. “It doesn’t mean a thing.”

“Mr. Foreman,” Judge Justice said, “have you reached a verdict?”

The cameras buzzed behind Jack’s shoulder, and he concentrated very hard on making the muscles of his legs work. If he were being recorded for posterity, he wanted to be sure he could stand on his own two feet.

“We have, Your Honor,” the foreman said.

“Will the defendant please rise?”

Jordan locked his arm through Jack’s, to draw him to his feet. Weak-kneed, Jack managed to remain upright and breathing.

“Mr. Foreman, how do you find the defendant on the charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault?”

Jack glanced at the jury, still poker-faced. The foreman looked at the paper he held in his hands. A thousand years later, he read, “Not guilty.”

The cry of outrage from Amos Duncan was drowned out by the immediate whoop of delight behind Jack, as Selena Damascus hopped the barricade and threw herself into Jordan’s arms. And then Addie was in his own, and Jordan was shaking his hand, telling him he’d known it would turn out this way all along.

The world revolved, a haze of glances and jurors and camera lenses. “The defendant is free to go,” the judge called over the melee, and that one word fixed in Jack’s consciousness and bloomed, obliterating all the noise and joy and surprise of the moment. Free. Free to go home. Free to shout out his innocence in the middle of the town green. Free to pick up the yarn of his life and see how it would knit together.

A liberated man, Jack turned around with a grin on his face-and found himself staring at the people of Salem Falls, who now had even more reason to hate him.

Amos Duncan wanted to take the prosecutor apart, piece by piece. “You said he’d be locked up for years,” the man growled. “And now I have to see him on the streets of the town where my daughter and I live?”

Matt couldn’t possibly feel any worse than Duncan wanted him to feel. Losing cases was always a disappointment . . . losing one that seemed to be open and shut was downright devastating.

“What can I say?” Matt answered humbly. “Amos, Gillian-I’m so sorry.” He began to gather his notes and papers, stuffing them haphazardly into his briefcase.

“I hope you carry this with you, Houlihan,” Duncan spat. “I hope you can’t sleep at night, knowing he’s out there.”

In counterpoint to her blustering father, Gillian’s voice was quiet and firm. “You said it was a sure thing.”

Matt glanced at her. He looked at Amos Duncan, too. Then he thought of McAfee’s closing, of the atropine in Gillian’s blood sample, of Catherine Marsh testifying that she’d been afraid of her father. “Nothing’s a sure thing,” he muttered, and he walked up the aisle of the courtroom, heading home.

The champagne bottle popped, shooting its cork into the ceiling of Jordan’s porch. Foam sprayed and ran down the sides, soaking Selena’s toes and the wooden slats beneath her feet. “To justice!” she cried, pouring some into Dixie cups.

“May she continue to be conveniently blind,” Jordan said, toasting.

Thomas grinned, lifting his own glass. “And deaf and dumb, when you need it.”

They drank, giddy with the sheer delight of winning. “I knew I wanted to get back into trying cases again,” Jordan said, and behind his back, Thomas and Selena rolled their eyes. “Of course, I couldn’t have done it without the two of you.”

“If you’re feeling so charitable, then you can explain to Chelsea why I’m not a complete jerk.”

“Ah, that’s easy,” Selena said. “Just tell her you take after your mother.”

“Thomas.” Jordan slung his arm around his son’s shoulders. “We’ll have her over to dinner, and I’ll show her my enchanting side.” He smothered a laugh. “No pun intended.”

Selena poured herself a second glass of champagne. “She could bring along something to drink . . . or something to slip into the drink.”

“Very funny,” Thomas muttered.

Jordan, on the other hand, grinned at her. “Maybe I’ll get some atropine myself, stir it into your hot water, and tell you that we tied the knot.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have to drug me for that,” Selena said lightly, but her words fell flat.

There was a thick beat of silence. “Do you-” Jordan asked, staring hard at her.

Selena’s smile started slow, then unrolled like a banner. “Yeah. I do.”

When they fell onto the porch swing in a tangle of arms and legs and joy, Thomas discreetly slipped into the house. He walked down the hall into his father’s bedroom, sat on the bed, and unzipped the linings of each of the two pillows. It took some rummaging, but he managed to find them-the small herbal charms Chelsea had given him weeks before. Red cloth, filled with sweet-smelling flowers and a penny, then tied with blue ribbon in seven knots. “You can’t force someone to love someone else,” Chelsea had warned, when he asked her to make these. “All a spell can do is open a person’s eyes to what’s out there.”

Thomas had shrugged. “I think that’s all they need.”

As his father and Selena embraced outside, Thomas slipped the charms back into their pillows. And then, toasting himself, he drank down the rest of his champagne.

Charlie knocked on the door of his daughter’s bedroom. “Hi,” he said, sticking his head in the door. “Can I come in?”

“Since when do you ask?” Meg shot back. She didn’t look at him.

This angry girl, huddled on her bed, looked nothing like the child who’d once followed him around with a tinfoil badge pinned to her dress, so that she could be just like her father. Betrayal sat between them, a monster of enormous proportions. “I guess you heard that Jack St. Bride got acquitted.”

Meg nodded. “Gillian’s a mess about it.”

The detective sighed. “Understandable, I guess.” He took a deep breath. “We can still press charges, if you want.”

His daughter shook her head, her cheeks flaming. “No,” she murmured.

“Meggie?”

“I knew,” she blurted out. “I knew that Gillian was doing all this just to hurt Jack. At first I didn’t care, because of the things . . . the things I remembered. But now I know they weren’t real.” Meg’s round, sweet face was turned to his, waiting for him to make it all better, the way he used to do when she’d fallen down and scraped her knee. A Band-Aid, and a kiss. If only that was what it took once they grew up. “Gilly lied . . . and she told us to lie . . . and we did it, because we were all so afraid of what would happen if we didn’t. Maybe we were a little curious, too, to see if we could pull it off.”

“Pull what off?”

Meg picked at a cuticle. “Punishing him. Ruining his life. Making him leave Salem Falls. Gillian just wanted to get him back-not for what he did to her, but for what he wouldn’t do.”

She had known about Gillian lying? And hadn’t told him? “Why didn’t you come to me, Meg?”

“Would you really have listened, Daddy? People hear only what they want to hear.”

He was the last person qualified to lecture his daughter on falsehoods and moral responsibility. Addie Peabody’s name flashed through his mind like a stroke of lightning, and he touched his daughter’s hand. “Maybe we’ll go talk to someone,” Charlie said. “Someone who can sort things like this out, who does it for a living.”

“Like a psychiatrist?”

Charlie nodded. “If you want.”

Meg suddenly seemed very, very young. “You’d go with me?” she whispered.

Charlie held out his arms, and his daughter crawled right where she belonged. He rubbed her spine, buried his face in her hair. “Anywhere,” he vowed, “and back again.”

* * *

For a horrible moment, Addie thought she had lost him. She moved through the house, wondering if she’d imagined his acquittal, calling his name and getting no answer.

Finally, she discovered Jack sitting out on Chloe’s wooden playset. In her bare feet, she padded out across the lawn to settle on a swing beside him. “Want a push?” she asked.

Jack smiled softly. “No thanks. I’ll jump when I’m ready.”

He untangled his fist from the chain and laced his fingers with Addie’s. They sat in summertime silence, bordered by the songs of crickets, watching the hot wind jump like a monkey through the fingers of the trees. “How does it feel?” Addie asked quietly.

Jack brought his fist to his chest. “Like the whole world has settled right here.”

She smiled. “That’s because you’re home.”

“Addie,” he said, “the thing is, I’m not. I can’t stay here.”

“Of course you can.”

“I meant that I can’t stay in Salem Falls, Addie. Nobody wants me here.”

“I do,” she said, going very still.

“Yes.” Jack reached for her hand, and kissed it. “That’s why I’m going to leave. God, you saw what happened today, after we left the courthouse. The mother who pulled her kid away from me on the street. The guy at the diner who walked out as soon as he saw I was there. I can’t live like that . . . and neither can you. How are you going to run a local business when people start ostracizing you, too?”

Maybe it was the heat breaking as the night rolled into Salem Falls, maybe it was the memory of her daughter playing in this very spot, maybe it was just a soul that had suffered too much to give up without a healthy fight-but at that moment, Addie made a decision. She stood, planting her feet on either side of Jack, to keep him where she wanted him. “I already told you,” Addie said, her eyes blazing, “you don’t get to leave me behind.”

“But Addie, I’m a drifter. You have a place where you belong.”

“Yes. With you.” She kissed him, her faith a brand.

By the time Addie lifted her head, Jack was smiling. “What diner?” he murmured, and yanked her onto his lap.

“My father can run it. He needs that. And I have . . . oh, about forty-two weeks of vacation time accrued.”

They swung lazily as the sun set, licking a fire up the slate path and charging the stars in the night sky. Jack imagined taking Addie to Greece, to Portugal, to the Loire Valley. He envisioned her by the Trevi Fountain, in the Canadian Rockies, on the top of the Empire State Building. “We’ll visit my mother,” he said, the thought forming in his mind like a crystal. “I think she’d like to meet you.”

“She lives in New York?”

Jack nodded. It was as good as place as any, he thought, to find a happy ending.

Shortly after midnight, Amos Duncan awakened. He lay in bed, gathering his sixth sense around him like an extra blanket, certain that something wasn’t right.

Shrugging into his robe, he padded down the hall to Gillian’s bedroom. The door was wide open, the covers on her bed thrown back.