The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “Did you feel nervous about walking home alone?”

  “No,” Gillian said. “I mean, this guy who was supposed to be the Devil himself had left. What else was there to be afraid of, once he was gone?”

  “What did you do next?”

  Tears began to well in Gillian’s eyes, and Matt’s heart turned over. Christ, he didn’t want to make her relive this. “I hadn’t gone more than a few seconds before I realized that I never checked the fire. I mean, we put it out and all, but it was still smoking a little. So I figured I’d go back and make sure it hadn’t caught on again.” Her words stretched thin. “When I got to the clearing, it was empty. I kicked dirt over the fire, and all of a sudden he . . . he grabbed me from behind. He must have been hiding . . . or . . . or following me,” she said.

  “What happened next, Gillian?”

  She made a low, horrible noise in the back of her throat. “He pushed me down . . . and he put his hand over my mouth. He said if I made any noise, he’d kill me.” Turning her head away, Gillian shut her eyes. “He pinned my hands up over my head and unbuttoned my jeans. He . . . he took a condom out of his pocket and told me I should put it on him.”

  “Did he let your hands go?”

  “Yes.” Tears ran freely down her face, into the collar of her dress. “I pretended I was going to rip open the packet, and instead I scratched his cheek. I tried to get away. But he grabbed my wrists and pushed me back down and put the condom on himself.”

  “And then?”

  “And then . . . then . . .” She shrank back in the seat, her voice striped with pain. “And then he raped me.”

  Matt let that statement stand for a moment. “How long did it last?”

  “Forever,” Gillian murmured.

  “Did he insert his penis into your vagina?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he ejaculate?”

  “I . . . I guess,” Gilly said. “He stopped, anyway.”

  “Was he saying anything while this was happening?” Matt asked.

  “No.”

  “Were you?”

  “I was crying. I couldn’t look at him.”

  “Did you try to move at all?”

  Gilly shook her head. “He was holding me down. Tight. And every time I tried to roll away, he just shoved me harder into the ground.”

  The jury was staring intently at Gillian. “What happened after he was done?”

  Her answer came softly, from a place deep inside her. “He got up and zipped his pants,” Gilly said, wrapping her arms around herself. “He told me if I talked to anyone, he’d come back for me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I watched him go, and then counted to a hundred and started running.”

  “Which direction did he leave in?”

  “The path that went closest to my house,” Gillian said. “So I ran in the other direction. Toward the cemetery. Where my friends had gone.”

  “How long did it take you to catch up to the others?”

  “I don’t know. A few minutes, I guess.”

  “What happened when you found your friends?” Matt asked.

  “I couldn’t stop crying. And my legs . . . they just collapsed. I felt so dirty, and I just couldn’t get out what had happened.”

  Matt walked toward the defense table. “Had you ever seen Jack St. Bride before?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  She let her gaze slide over Jack, then fall to her lap like a stone. “He worked in this diner in town. Every now and then, my friends and I went there.”

  “Had you ever talked to him before?”

  “Sometimes he’d come over to our table and start a conversation.”

  Matt nodded. “Did you ever indicate to him that you were interested in having a relationship with him?”

  Gillian shook her head vehemently. “No.”

  “Is there any doubt in your mind, Gillian, that the defendant is the man who sexually assaulted you shortly after midnight on May first?”

  The muscles in Gillian’s jaw clenched. “I can still feel his body on top of me. I smell him, sometimes, in empty rooms. And I wake up suffocating, sure that it’s happening again.” Her eyes roamed the gallery until they clung tight to her father’s. “I don’t have any doubts,” Gilly whispered. “It was him.”

  “Nothing further,” Matt said, and sat down.

  The moment Jordan stood up, he could feel the tightrope beneath his feet. He needed to discredit Gillian carefully. Matt had spent a half hour here getting the whole courtroom to feel sorry for her; if Jordan was too harsh, the jury would turn against him rather than Gillian.

  He gave her a moment to compose herself and approached her slowly, having learned from experience that even the most pitiful-looking stray puppies sometimes turned around and snapped. “Ms. Duncan, when you were in the woods with your friends and Mr. St. Bride came up to you, did you feel scared around him?”

  “Yes. I’d been told for weeks that I shouldn’t be anywhere near him.”

  “Yet you also said that the reason you went to the woods that night was to be brave. To defy your parents, who were making a ‘big deal’ about staying away from Mr. St. Bride. So being close to him was the ultimate defiance, wasn’t it?”

  Gillian shook her head. “I would never have done that.”

  “Did you leave the minute he came up to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “By your own statement, though, Ms. Duncan, he asked you a question about roasting marshmallows and sat down with you all, isn’t that true?”

  A light glinted in Gillian’s eyes. “But then I told him we were all leaving, because it was the quickest way to get rid of him.”

  “Get rid of him? Because you were still scared?”

  She lifted her chin. “Yes.”

  “Yet you said that once he left, you weren’t scared.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You never thought Mr. St. Bride was going to attack you?”

  Gilly shook her head. “If I had, I would have stuck with my friends.”

  “You never thought he would attack you, although everything you’d heard about him from your parents and friends indicated that he was waiting for the opportunity to assault young women?”

  She was between a rock and a hard place—and knew it. Jordan waited patiently for her answer. “N-no,” Gillian said.

  “All right. You started to walk home and then turned around to make sure the fire was out?”

  “Yes.”

  “How far had you gone at that point?”

  “Not far. Only a few seconds.”

  “And Mr. St. Bride allegedly attacked you when you returned to the clearing?”

  “That’s right,” she said quietly.

  “Had you seen him hiding there before you and your friends left?”

  “No. He walked off down a path.”

  “And how long after he left did you all depart?”

  “A few minutes, maybe. Not long.”

  Jordan nodded. “If he expected you to be leaving the clearing, Ms. Duncan, then why would he have circled back to it to attack you? Why not lay in wait along one of the paths, where he had a better chance of intercepting you?”

  Gillian stared at Jordan. “I don’t know.”

  “If you hadn’t decided to check on the ashes, you wouldn’t even have come back to the clearing, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Mr. St. Bride take off your clothes?”

  “He pulled down my jeans and my underwear,” Gillian whispered.

  “And your sweater? Did he take that off?”

  “No.”

  “Unbutton it?”

  “No,” Gillian said.

  “How about his own clothes?”

  “His pants.”

  “Did he pull down his pants before or after he pulled down yours?”

  Tears filled her eyes, and she shook her head. “Ms. Duncan,” the judge said kindly, “I’m goi