The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  He was starving. He’d missed breakfast at the jail because he was being processed for release. Jack glanced around . . . Who would ever know? He grabbed a handful of fries and quickly stuffed them into his mouth.

  “Don’t.”

  He froze. Addie stood behind him, her face white. “Don’t eat her meal.”

  Jack blinked. “Whose meal?”

  But she turned away without a response and left him wondering.

  At fifteen, Thomas McAfee knew he was going to be a late bloomer. Well, at least he sure as hell hoped so, because going through life five feet five inches tall, with arms like a chicken, wasn’t going to make for a pleasant adolescence.

  Not that ninth grade was supposed to be pleasant. After taking medieval history last semester, Thomas figured high school was the modern equivalent of running the gauntlet. The hearty survived and went off to Colby-Sawyer and Dartmouth to play lacrosse. Everyone else slunk to the sidelines, destined to spend their lives as part of the audience.

  But as Thomas stood on Main Street after school that day, freezing his ass off, he was thinking that Chelsea Abrams might like to root for the underdog.

  Chelsea was more than just a junior. She was smart and pretty, with hair that caught the sunlight during the keyboarding class Thomas had with her. She didn’t hang with the cheerleaders, or the brains, or the heads. Instead, she was tight with three other girls—including Gillian Duncan, whose dad owned half the town. Okay, so they dressed a little weird, with a lot of black and scarves—a cross between the art freak Goths who hung out in the smoking pit and gypsy wannabes—but Thomas knew, better than most, that the package was far less important than what was on the inside.

  Suddenly Chelsea turned the corner with her friends, even Gillian Duncan, who had been too sick to go to school but had made an amazing enough recovery now, to be out and about. Chelsea’s breath fogged in the cold air, each huff taking the shape of a heart. Thomas squared his shoulders and came up from behind, falling into step beside her.

  He could smell cinnamon in her hair, and it made him dizzy.

  “Did you know the alphabet’s all wrong?” he said casually, as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation.

  “Sorry?” Chelsea said.

  “The letters are mixed up. U and I should be together.”

  The other girls snickered, and Gillian Duncan’s voice fell like a hammer. “What’s it like at the moron end of the bell curve?” She looped her arm through Chelsea’s. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Thomas felt heat rising above his collar and willed it to go away. Chelsea was tugged forward by her friends, leaving him standing alone. Did she turn back to look at him . . . or was she only adjusting the strap of her knapsack? As they crossed, Thomas could hear Chelsea’s friends laughing. But she wasn’t.

  Surely that was something.

  Charlie Saxton ate a peanut butter sandwich every day for lunch, although he hated peanut butter. He did it because for some reason, his wife Barbara thought he liked it, and she went to the trouble of packing him a lunch each morning. Around Valentine’s Day, she’d bought those little sugary hearts with messages on them, and for a month now she’d been sticking one into the soft white bread: HOT STUFF! CRAZY 4 U! With a fingernail, Charlie edged out the candy of the day and read its message aloud. “Kiss and tell.”

  “Not me, boss. My lips are sealed.” The station’s receptionist hustled into his office and handed him a manila folder. “You know, I think it’s sweet when a guy over forty can still blush. This just came in on the fax.”

  She closed the door behind her as Charlie slid the pages from the folder, scanning the court records of Jack St. Bride. They showed his arrest for a charge of felonious sexual assault against a minor . . . but a final disposition for simple sexual assault, a misdemeanor.

  Charlie dialed the Grafton County attorney’s office, asking for the name of the prosecutor listed on the fax. “Sorry, she’s out for two weeks on vacation. Can someone else help you?” the secretary said.

  Charlie hesitated, making a judgment call. The list of registered sexual offenders was public record. That meant anyone could walk into the station and find out who was on it and where that person lived. As of this morning, his list stretched to all of one person. In spite of what secrets he knew as a detective, Salem Falls had the reputation of being a sleepy New England town where nothing happened, which was the way the residents liked it. As soon as word got out to the male populace that a guy who’d been charged with rape had moved in near their wives and daughters, there would be hell to pay.

  He could start a snowball rolling or he could give St. Bride the benefit of the doubt and just keep an eye on the guy himself for a couple of weeks.

  “Maybe you could ask her to call me when she gets back,” Charlie said.

  Gillian had been the first to try Wicca, after finding a Web site for teen witches on the Internet. It wasn’t Satan worship, like adults thought. And it wasn’t all love spells, like kids thought, either. It was simply the belief that the world had an energy all its own. Put that way, it wasn’t so mysterious. Who hadn’t walked through the woods and felt the air humming? Or stepped onto the snow and felt the ground reach up for one’s body heat?

  She was glad to have Meg and Whitney and Chelsea as part of her coven—but they didn’t practice in quite the same way Gillian did. For them, it was a lark. For Gilly, it was a saving grace. And there was one spell she didn’t share with the others, one spell she tried every single day, in the hope that one of these afternoons it would work.

  Now, while her father believed she was doing homework, she knelt on the floor with a candle—red, for courage. From her pocket, she withdrew a tattered photograph of her mother. Gilly visualized the last time she’d been held by her, until the feeling was so strong that she could feel the prints of her mother’s fingers on her upper arms.

  “I call upon the Mother Goddess and the Father God,” Gilly whispered, rubbing patchouli oil over the candle, middle to ends. “I call upon the forces of the Earth, Air, Fire and Water. I call upon the Sun, Moon, and Stars to bring me my mother.”

  She slid the picture of her mother beneath the candleholder and then set the candle inside it. She imagined her mother’s laugh, bright and full, which had always reminded Gilly of the sea. Then she sprinkled herbs in a circle around the candle: sage, for immortality, and cinnamon, for love. The room began to swim with scent. In the blue heat of the flame, she could see herself as a child. “Mama,” Gilly whispered, “come back.”

  That moment, just like always, the candle flickered out.

  Darla Hudnut twitched into the diner like a summertime mare. “Where you keeping him, Addie?” she called, unbuttoning her coat.

  Darla was the backup waitress, someone Addie asked to work when she knew she wouldn’t be able to. This time, though, Addie couldn’t remember calling her. “How come you’re here?”

  “You asked me last week, remember?” Darla said. She adjusted her uniform, stretched tight over her bust. “You said you were going out. But first I want to know all about the guy you hired.”

  “Good lord, are there billboards on the street?”

  “Oh, come on, Addie. Town like this . . . someone with a hangnail’s bound to get noticed. A tall, blond, handsome mystery that comes in out of thin air . . . you don’t think that might stir up some interest?”

  Addie began to wipe the Naugahyde seats of a booth. “What are people saying?”

  Darla shrugged. “So far I’ve heard that he’s your ex-husband, Amos Duncan’s brother, and the guy from the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Prize Patrol.”

  At that, Addie laughed out loud. “If he’s Amos Duncan’s brother, he hasn’t mentioned anything. As for my ex-husband, well, that’s interesting, since I was never married. And I can assure you that I’m not a million dollars richer, either. He’s just a guy who’s down on his luck, Darla.”

  “Then he’s not your date for tonight, either?”

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