Salem Falls Read online

  He began to pull his clothes from the drawers: a few pairs of jeans, some underwear, his Tshirts. "What are you doing?" Addie asked.

  "Moving. I'm not staying here while all this is going on. It's too dangerous."

  "Where are you going to go?"

  "I don't know yet."

  Addie stepped forward, staring at his clothes. These Hanes Tshirts and Levi's were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, simply because they were his. She thought about opening her closet and seeing Jack's things pressed up against her own. "Come live with me," she said, but what she really meant was: Here is my heart; have a care.

  Their eyes met as if there was no one else in the room. "I won't put you in danger either, Addie."

  "No one has to know. I'm the last person in the world this town would expect to have a ... a ..."

  One corner of Jack's mouth turned up. "A boyfriend?"

  "I'll be damned," Delilah whispered.

  They turned, suddenly remembering the presence of the others. "If you say a single word," Addie said fiercely, "I'll--"

  Delilah pantomimed locking her lips and throwing away the key, then led Roy back downstairs. Jack stepped closer to Addie, a fistful of socks in his hands. "It doesn't have to be ... well, you know. Like that. I could stay on the couch."

  "I know."

  "Are you doing this to save your father?" Jack asked quietly. "Or me?"

  She cradled the empty fire extinguisher in her arms, like an infant. "I'm doing this to save myself," she said.

  Gilly had been five the first time she had seen medicine made--an aspirin--and its unlikely source was a tree. "Salicylic acid," her father had explained. "It comes from willow bark. It's why the Indians used to brew willow bark tea to bring down a fever." Nowadays, of course, her father's R & D lab was the biggest, most impressive part of Duncan Pharmaceuticals, filled with an alphabet soup of Ph.D.s who could create synthetic compounds used to heal. Sometimes it freaked her out to walk through the lab--it always smelled of science, and there were those creepy lab rats and rabbits that had tumors pulsing out of their sides or had gone hairless from the doses of medicine sent into their bloodstreams. But Gilly knew this was where her father preferred to spend the lion's share of his day.

  "Daddy?" she said, poking her head into the restricted area. She shrugged into a white coat and goggles and plastic gloves, required couture for the R & D area. It was quiet today, staffed with a few of the grunts--the guys who only had master's degrees, not doctorates. They looked up as Gilly entered but weren't surprised; most knew her by sight.

  She found her father--and most of the other scientists--gathered in the rear of the lab, near those disgusting animals. Gilly's father was carrying a bowl of what looked like hairy white carrots. Like everyone else, he seemed to be holding his breath. Gilly followed his gaze to the gas chromatograph, and its capillary tube, which held the substance that was being tested. Zap--the flash of light from the mass spectrophotometer hit the gas in the tube. The technician let a computer printout feed into his hungry hands, a graph full of peaks and valleys that measured exactly what was floating around inside the thin glass thread. He handed it to Gilly's dad, who compared it for several long moments to a reference graph from a chemical library. "Ladies and gentlemen," Amos said, his face breaking into a smile, "natural atropine!"

  There was a volley of cheering, and Amos clapped the shoulder of his lab tech. "Great work, Arthur. See if you can isolate one hundredth of a gram on the gelatin disc." As the group broke up, he walked to his daughter. "To what do I owe this surprise?"

  "Just passing by," Gilly said absently. "Did you make a new drug?"

  "No. An incredibly old one," Amos said, leading her out of the R & D room. "We're trying to break into the homeopathic market--going back to nature to find the sources we've been imitating in the lab. Atropine's amazingly cost effective. Did you see that tiny bit of gas? Just that much alone could provide ten thousand doses."

  Gilly tuned him out. For all that her father loved what he did, he could be talking about drawing blood from a stone and it would have made the same impression on her. As they reached his office, she sprawled across the white couch along the far wall. "Did you hear about the fire at the Do-Or-Diner?"

  "No," he said, sitting down. "What happened?"

  "It was upstairs in Roy Peabody's apartment. Meg's mom was having lunch there when it happened."

  "Was anyone hurt?" her father asked, his hands steepled before him.

  "Not that I heard." Gilly sat up, reaching for a bowl of mints. "But people are saying it wasn't an accident."

  "Addie couldn't get much insurance money even if she burned the place to the ground."

  "Not her. Supposedly, someone else set the fire. As a warning." She stared hard at her father, waiting for him to confide in her.

  "Gilly," he said softly, shocked. "You don't think I'd do anything like that?"

  Something in her chest loosened. "No. I just wondered if you knew someone who would."

  "Oh, I imagine any one of a hundred people in this town might have done it."

  "But that's awful!" Gilly burst out. "He could have gotten hurt!"

  "Better him than one of you."

  There was a knock on the door. "Mr. Duncan," the secretary said, "how much more belladonna did you want ordered?"

  Gilly turned. "Belladonna?"

  "Let's start with seven hundred fifty plants," Amos said. As his secretary left, he turned to Gilly. "What about it?"

  "How come you need it?"

  "It's the plant we extracted the atropine from," Amos explained. "Why?"

  Gilly truly believed in fate. It was why, she knew, she had chosen to visit her father on the afternoon that he was working with belladonna, the same plant Starshine had mentioned a day ago when they were discussing witches' flying ointment. Hash and belladonna, Gilly remembered. Well, she could probably get hashish with a single query to one of the Goths at her school. But even if she didn't, maybe belladonna had enough strength to work by itself. Maybe she could mix her own flying ointment and no one would be the wiser. And what better time to soar than Beltane?

  Courage, she thought. "Nothing," Gilly lied. "It's the name of this really phat band." She leaned over the desk to kiss her father's cheek. "I'll see you later."

  "You're going home," he ordered. "I don't want you walking around town alone."

  "It's not like he's Jack the Ripper, Daddy."

  "Gilly."

  "Whatever," she muttered, already halfway out the door. But she didn't turn left at the hallway, toward the exit. Instead, she retraced her steps back to the R & D lab. Arthur, the lab technician, was mashing those furry white carrots--belladonna. "Miss Duncan," he said without glancing up. "What can I do for you?"

  "Um, my dad asked me to bring a sample of atropine to his office."

  "What for?"

  Gilly blanched. She hadn't gotten this far in her mind. "I don't know. He just asked me to get it."

  "How much?"

  She pointed to a little pool in the base of a test tube. "He didn't say. I guess that's enough."

  The supervisor capped the tube and handed it to her. "Wear your gloves out of the lab. You don't want to touch that stuff with your bare hands."

  "Thanks." She slipped the vial into the pocket of her fleece jacket, keeping her hand fisted around her treasure as she walked straight home, just like her father had wanted.

  "This is the bathroom," Addie said, blushing faintly.

  Jack smiled. "You don't have to give me the grand tour. Really." It had been some time since Addie had had to share her space. Add to that the forced intimacy in a relationship still so new Jack could still see the shine on it, and he could not help but wonder if he was making a tremendous mistake.

  "And this," Addie said, her hand on a doorknob, "is Chloe's room."

  It was the only room in the house Jack had not seen. And as Addie slowly opened the door, he also realized it was the only room in the house that was not