Salem Falls (36 page)

He leaned down to embrace her. Meg buried her face against her father’s neck, as much for comfort as to keep herself from confessing something he was not allowed to know.

Molly’s pink feet churned like pistons as Matt slapped the front of the diaper over her and secured the tapes at the sides. “Get her on a changing table,” he mused, “and suddenly she wants out as bad as Sirhan Sirhan.”

Charlie reached into his pocket and pulled out his gold shield. He dangled it over the baby’s reaching hands, distracting her long enough for Matt to get her jumpsuit snapped at the crotch again. “I don’t think Meg was ever that tiny.”

“Yeah, well I don’t think Molly is ever gonna get that big.”

Matt lifted his daughter off the table and carried her into the living room of his house, Charlie following.

“You’d be surprised,” Charlie said. “You go to bed one night singing her a lullaby, and she wakes up listening to Limp Bizkit.”

“What the hell is Limp Bizkit?”

“You don’t want to know.” Charlie sat on the couch as Matt slid the baby beneath a brightly colored activity gym.

“I’ve been thinking of marketing these in prisons,” Matt joked. “You know, you hang them from the ceiling . . . little mirrors and jingly shit and squeaky buttons to keep the inmates busy. Figure they’ve got about the same brainpower as a five-month-old, although Molly may actually have an edge there.” He sank down into a chair opposite Charlie. “Maybe it’ll make me the million I’m not going to get as a prosecutor.” Reaching across the coffee table, he picked up a stack of statements.

Immediately, Charlie shifted gears into his work mode. “Looks like a pretty straightforward case, doesn’t it?”

Matt shrugged.

“Victim can ID her attacker, attacker has a history, and there’s an excellent chance of physical evidence. And now you’ve got three corroborating eyewitness reports.”

“Corroborating,” Matt repeated. “Interesting word choice.” He lifted the first transcript and flipped it open to a page where part of the dialogue had been highlighted with a marker. “You see this?”

Charlie took it from him and scanned it. “Yeah. After she left, Whitney O’Neill got a conscience and yelled for her friend, who was too busy being attacked to answer.”

Matt handed him a second transcript, Chelsea’s. “This girl says she offered to walk Gillian home before leaving. Which Whitney O’Neill doesn’t mention in her statement.”

Charlie snorted. “That’s not exactly a salient point. So what if they can’t recall every single instant of that night? For Christ’s sake, they all say the same thing about what time the guy showed up, what he said to them, what he looked like. They all admit they heard nothing after walking off. That’s the stuff that’s going to snag your jury.”

“Your own daughter,” Matt continued, ignoring the detective, “says Gillian insisted on walking home alone, as a dare. Gotta tell you . . . if I had been there that night, that would have stuck in my head.” He slapped the three transcripts down on the table. “So which is the right story?”

Charlie glanced at the cooing baby on the floor. “You get back to me when she’s sixteen. You talk to a girl who’s scared shitless after her friend gets raped in the woods in the middle of the night, and see how much she can recall detail for detail. Jesus, Matt, they’re kids. They’re were an arm’s length away from the Devil and lived to tell about it . . . but they’re still shaking. And even if they can’t remember this one thing exactly right, they weren’t the ones who were assaulted. Their statements aren’t as substantive as Gillian’s-they’re only supposed to be used to verify what she said.”

When Matt didn’t answer, Charlie exploded. “You’re telling me you made me put those girls through hell for nothing? They’re upset. A jury is going to weigh that against some pissy little discrepancy that doesn’t even signify.”

“Doesn’t signify?” Matt’s voice rose. “Everything signifies, Charlie. Every damn thing. The job you do impacts the job I do. This isn’t some petty theft. This is a predator, and the only person who’s got a gun to shoot him down is me. If every t isn’t crossed and every i isn’t dotted, it’s that much easier for this asshole to walk out of the courtroom and do it all over again.”

“Hey, look, it isn’t my fault-”

“Then whose is it? Whose fault is it going to be when Gillian Duncan wakes up with nightmares and has trouble trusting men for the rest of her life and can’t have a normal sexual relationship? Even if St. Bride spends forever locked up, the victim never gets to walk away from this. And that means neither do you, Charlie, and neither do I.”

The fury in his voice startled Molly. She rolled away from her baby gym and started to cry. Matt swept her into his arms, holding her close against his chest. “Shh,” he whispered, bouncing her, his back to Charlie. “Daddy’s here.”

Loyal, New Hampshire was the kind of town that looked just right when the leaves were falling like jewels or when the snow settled in a down blanket to even the hills and valleys. Even now, in mud season, the whitewashed buildings and uniformed schoolgirls made the sloppy central green feel like a movie set instead of a place where people went about their lives.

Addie parallel-parked in front of a general store, where a woman wearing hiking boots and a handkerchief skirt was painting a sale sign on the front window. Shading her eyes from the sun, Addie approached her. “Boots for $5.99? That’s a good deal.”

The shopkeeper turned, assessing her with a single glance. “We still get girls who come to board at Westonbrook who haven’t figured out the land’s a swamp from April till June. We sell Wellies like they’re going out of style.”

“I imagine you get a lot of business from the school.”

“Sure, since it’s the only show in Loyal. Put our town on the map back in 1888, when it was founded.”

“Really?” Addie was surprised it had been around for that long.

The woman laughed. “You’ll get the grand tour and fancy brochures at the admissions office. Come to check it out for your daughter, have you?”

Addie turned slowly. This woman had just given her the means to an end. She couldn’t very well barrel into the headmaster’s office and ask him about Jack. On the other hand, if she was a concerned parent who’d heard rumors . . . well, she might find more people who were willing to explain what had happened.

“Yes,” Addie said, smiling. “How did you guess?”

* * *

“Mrs. Duncan, is it?” Herb Thayer, headmaster of Westonbrook, walked into the office. Addie was waiting on a Hepplewhite couch, drinking tea from a Limoges cup, doing everything she possibly could to try to hide her battered old boots beneath the furniture.

“Oh, please, don’t stand on ceremony.” He gestured to his own feet, encased in thick rubber boots. “Unfortunately, when William Weston founded this school on the banks of his brook, he forgot about how the mud would be exacerbated by a New Hampshire spring.”

Addie simpered, pretending that he’d said something remotely amusing. “It’s a pleasure to meet with you, Dr. Thayer.”

“Mine, completely.” He sat down across from her, taking his own cup of tea from the tray. “I’m sure you were told in admissions that the application deadline has unfortunately passed for next term-”

“Yes, I have. Gillian’s been at Exeter . . . but Amos and I would much prefer it if she were at a school a little closer to Salem Falls.”

“Amos,” the headmaster repeated, feigning surprise. “As in Amos Duncan of Duncan Pharmaceuticals?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Thayer smiled more broadly. “I’m certain that we’d be able to squeeze her in, with a little ingenuity. After all, we wouldn’t want to turn away a girl who would be a real asset to Westonbrook.”

More like you’re considering all her daddy’s assets and what they could endow. “We’re very interested in your school, Dr. Thayer, but we’ve heard some disturbing . . . information. I was hoping you might be able to clear things up for me.”

“Anything I can do,” Thayer said solemnly.

Addie looked him straight in the eye. “Is it true that one of the faculty here was convicted for sexual assault?”

She watched heat creep up the headmaster’s cheeks like mercury in a thermometer. “I assure you, Mrs. Duncan, our faculty is an elite corps of the finest teachers.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Addie said coolly.

“It was a very unfortunate situation,” Thayer explained. “A consensual relationship between an underage student and a faculty member. Neither one of them is affiliated with Westonbrook anymore.”

Addie’s heart fell. She had been hoping Thayer would say that it had never happened at all. And here, close enough to touch, were the words that proved Jack had lived here, done something, been convicted.

Then again, statutory rape was different from forcible rape. Falling for a girl half his age wasn’t the same crime as assaulting one by force. Addie could understand neither . . . but this one, she could possibly forgive.

“What happened, exactly?”

“I’m not at liberty to say-protecting a minor and all that. I assure you that the school has taken measures to ensure that this will never happen again,” the headmaster continued.

“Oh? Are all your teachers now younger than sixteen? Or are your students older?”

The minute she said the words, she wished them back. She gathered her coat and her dignity and stood quickly. “I think, Dr. Thayer, that Amos and I will have to discuss this further,” she said stiffly, and left before she could make any more mistakes.

“So when you move the variable to this side, dividing it,” Thomas explained, “it’s like you’re pulling a rug out from under its feet . . . and it disappears on this side of the equals sign.”

Chelsea was so close to him that he was amazed he could even explain basic algebra to her. The scent of her shampoo-apples, and a little bit of mint-was enough to make his head swim. And God, the way she leaned down over his notebook to see what he’d written . . . her hair brushed back and forth over the metal rings, and all Thomas could think about was what it would feel like to have those curls sweeping over his skin.

Thomas took a deep breath and put an extra few inches between them. It didn’t help that they were sitting on Chelsea’s bed-her bed, for Christ’s sake!-where every night she slept in something pink and flimsy that he’d seen peeking out from beneath one of her pillows.

When he shifted away, Chelsea smiled up at him. “I’m starting to get the hang of this.” She moved in the direction he had, erasing the buffer zone he’d so carefully put between them. Then, scrawling a few more lines with a pencil, she grinned triumphantly. “A=5B + 1/4C. Right?”

Thomas nodded, and when Chelsea whooped with delight, he scooted backward again. She’d invited him here to teach her math, not to attack her. Swallowing hard, he forced himself to ignore how amazingly gorgeous she was when she smiled, and he put another foot between them for good measure. His hand slid beneath her blankets and bumped into something hard, dislodging it from beneath the comforter.

“What’s that?” he asked, at the same time Chelsea jumped on the black-and-white composition notebook.

“Nothing.” She tucked it under her leg.

“If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be so freaked out.”

Chelsea chewed on her lower lip. “It’s a diary, all right?”

Thomas wouldn’t have read it if it was private, but that didn’t keep him from wondering whether the reason Chelsea didn’t want him to see it was because, holy God, there might even be an entry in there about him. He looked at the salt-and-pepper cover, peeking out from under her thigh. “Book of . . .” he read.

Suddenly Chelsea was in his arms, pressing him back on pillows that released her scent and surrounded him, the most wonderful web. “What’s the going rate for a math tutor these days?” she whispered.

Pinch me, Thomas thought, because I have to be dreaming. “A kiss,” he heard himself say, “and we can call it even.”

And then her mouth moved over his. She drew back for a moment, surprise in her eyes, as if she never expected to quite find herself here, either . . . and was astonished to realize it was this good a t. More slowly this time, their heads dipped together. And Thomas was so stunned by the soft weight of the goddess on top of him, by the sugar taste of her breath, that he never noticed Chelsea slipping the diary between the bed and the wall.

Jordan was engrossed in reading about Gillian at age nine, which explained why he didn’t even look up when Selena opened the passenger door and slid into the seat beside him with a look that could have stopped a Gorgon in its tracks.

“You’re not gonna believe this,” she said.

Jordan grunted.

“The factory is on strike. The part’s not coming in for ages. Shit, I ought to just rent a car and go.”

“Maybe not quite yet.”

Selena turned to him. “Care to elaborate on that?”

But Jordan’s nose was buried in a folder. Selena grabbed it from him. “What’s got you so entranced?” She turned the envelope, reading the name on the side. “Gillian Duncan’s psychiatric records? Houlihan gave these to you without a fight?”