Salem Falls Part 2

Literally. Charlie's first thought, pure detective, was that the guy couldn't be from around here-no one who lived in New Hampshire was stupid enough to wear a sports jacket and dress shoes in the freezing slush of early March. Still, he didn't seem particularly distraught, like the recent victim of a crime, or nervous, like a perp. No, he just looked like a guy who'd had a lousy day. Charlie extended his hand. "Hi there. Detective-Lieutenant Saxton." Charlie's first thought, pure detective, was that the guy couldn't be from around here-no one who lived in New Hampshire was stupid enough to wear a sports jacket and dress shoes in the freezing slush of early March. Still, he didn't seem particularly distraught, like the recent victim of a crime, or nervous, like a perp. No, he just looked like a guy who'd had a lousy day. Charlie extended his hand. "Hi there. Detective-Lieutenant Saxton."

The man didn't identify himself. "Could I have a few minutes of your time?"

Charlie nodded, his curiosity piqued. He led the way to his office, and gestured to a chair. "What can I do for you, Mr. ..."

"Jack St. Bride. I'm moving to Salem Falls."

"Welcome." Ah, it all was falling into place. This was probably some family man who wanted to make sure the locale was safe enough for his wife and kids and puppy. "Great place, great town. Is there something in particular I can help you with?"

For a long moment, St. Bride was silent. His hands flexed on his knees. "I'm here because of 651-B," he said finally.

It took Charlie a moment to realize this well-dressed, soft-spoken man was talking about a legal statute that required certain criminals to report in to a local law enforcement agency for ten years or for life, depending on the charge for which they had been convicted. Charlie schooled his features until they were as blank as St. Bride's, until it was clear that his former words of welcome had been rescinded. Then he pulled from his desk drawer the state police's form to register a s.e.xual offender.

March 2000 Salem Falls, New Hampshire "What are you doing?"

Jack spun at the sound of his new employer's voice. He hid his fists behind his back. "Nothing."

Addie's lips tightened, and she stuffed her order pad into the waist-band of her ap.r.o.n. "Look," she said, "I don't put up with anything shady on this job. Not drugs, not drinking, and if I catch you stealing, you'll be out on your b.u.t.t so quick you won't know what kicked you." She extended a hand, palm up. "Give it over."

Jack glanced away from her and pa.s.sed her the steel wool he'd been using.

"This is what you're hiding? A Brillo pad?"

"Yeah."

"For G.o.d's sake ... why?"

Jack slowly uncurled his fist. "My hands were dirty." He stared again at the pads of his fingers, still black with ink from when Detective Saxton had taken a set of prints for the station's records. The baby wipes at the booking room had been ineffective, and Jack could have asked to use the men's room, but the feeling of having his fingers rolled one by one, again, was so unsettling that he wanted only to put the building far behind him. By the time he'd arrived at the diner, the ink had dried, and no amount of soap had managed to remove it.

He held his breath. There was no way she'd be able to tell, was there?

"Ink," Addie announced. "It happens to me, too, when I read the newspaper. You'd think they could figure out a substance that stays on the page instead of your fingers."

With relief, Jack followed her into the small pantry off the kitchen. She held out a bottle of industrial cleaner. "I got this from a customer, once, a farmer. It's probably used to cure leather or something ... but it also cleans just about every mess you can imagine." Smiling, she held up her hands-chapped, red, cracked. "You keep using Brillo, you'll wind up looking like me."

Jack nodded and took the bottle from her. But what he really wanted to do was touch her hand, feel the tips of her fingers, see if they were the catastrophe she made them out to be or if they were simply as warm as they looked.

Roy sat up in bed with a start, cradling his head. G.o.d, it hurt. The room was spinning, but that was nothing compared to the noise that was nearly splitting his skull. Scowling, he stood. d.a.m.n Delilah Piggett, anyway. The cook thought she had a right to play alley cat with the pots and pans when people were trying to sleep just above her.

"Delilah!" he roared, stamping down the stairs that led into the kitchen.

But Delilah wasn't there. Instead, a tall blond man who looked entirely too polished to be working as a dishwasher was standing at the big sink, rinsing out cookware. He finished another cast-iron pot and set it down-with a righteous, ear-splitting clank-onto a makeshift drying rack. "Delilah went to the bathroom," the man said over his shoulder. "She should be back in a second."

Delilah had left several burgers going on the grill. Fire hazard. Fire hazard. He never would have done that in his days on the line. "Who the h.e.l.l are you?" Roy barked. He never would have done that in his days on the line. "Who the h.e.l.l are you?" Roy barked.

"Jack St. Bride. I was just hired as a dishwasher."

"For crying out loud, you don't do it by hand. There's a machine just over there."

Jack smiled wryly. "Thanks, I know. It's broken." He stood uneasily before the old man, wondering who he was and why he'd appeared from a back staircase. The alcohol fumes coming off the guy could have pickled the cuc.u.mbers Delilah had sliced for garnish. Jack grabbed another dirty pot and set it into the soapy water. As he scrubbed, black smoke began to rise from the grill. He looked at his hands, at the pot, then at the older man. "The burgers are burning," Jack said. "Do you mind flipping them?"

Roy was two feet away from the grill; the spatula lay within reach. But he sidled away from the cooking area, giving it a wide berth. "You do it."

With a muttered curse, Jack turned off the water again, wiped his hands dry, and physically pushed Roy out of the way to flip the hamburgers. "Was that so hard?"

"I don't cook," the older man said succinctly.

"It's a hamburger! I didn't ask you to make beef Wellington!"

"I can make a h.e.l.l of a beef Wellington, matter of fact, if I feel like it!"

The swinging doors that led to the dining room swelled forward like an eruption, then parted to reveal Addie. "What's going on? I can hear you yelling all the way up front ... Dad? What are you doing down here? And where's Delilah?"

"Bathroom." Jack turned to the sink, a.s.suming his hired position. Let the old man explain what had happened.

But she didn't even ask. She seemed delighted, in fact, to find her father in the kitchen. "How are you feeling?"

"Like a guy who can't get any rest because someone's downstairs banging around."

Addie patted his hand. "I should have warned Jack that you were upstairs napping."

Napping? Comatose, more like.

"Jack, if you've got a minute ... there are some booths in the front that need clearing."

Jack nodded and picked up a plastic bucket used for busing tables. His heart started to pound as he entered the front of the restaurant, and he wondered how long it would take until he no longer felt like his every move was being watched. But the diner was empty. Relieved, he cleared one table, then headed toward the counter. Jack put a coffee cup into the bin, then reached for a full plate, the food cold and untouched. French fries and a cheeseburger with extra pickles-someone had paid for a meal and hadn't even taken a bite.

He was starving. He'd missed breakfast at the jail because he was being processed for release. Jack glanced around ... Who would ever know? Who would ever know? He grabbed a handful of fries and quickly stuffed them into his mouth. 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 h.e.l.l 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 a.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 U and and I I should be together." 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 b.u.t.ter sandwich every day for lunch, although he hated peanut b.u.t.ter. 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! HOT STUFF! CRAZY 4 U! With a fingernail, Charlie edged out the candy of the day and read its message aloud. "Kiss and tell." 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 s.e.xual a.s.sault against a minor ... but a final disposition for simple s.e.xual a.s.sault, 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 s.e.xual 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 h.e.l.l to pay.

He could start a s...o...b..ll 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 G.o.ddess and the Father G.o.d," 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, unb.u.t.toning 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 a.s.sure 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?"

Addie sighed. "I don't have a date tonight, period."

"That's news to me." Addie jumped as Wes Courtemanche breezed through the door. He was no longer wearing his police uniform but a spiffy coat and tie. "I clearly recall you saying I could take you out to dinner on Wednesday. Darla, is it Wednesday?"

"Think so, Wes."

"There you go." He winked. "Why don't you change, Addie?"

She stood rooted to the spot. "You've got to be kidding. You couldn't possibly believe that I might want to go out with a man who arrested my father."

"That's business, Addie. This is ..." He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a curl of sound. "Pleasure."

Addie moved to another table and began to scrub it. "I'm busy."

"You've got Darla here to do that. And from what I hear, some new kid, too."

"That's exactly why I have to stay. To supervise."

Wes covered her hand where it lay on the table, stilling her motion. "Darla, you'd take care of the new guy, wouldn't you?"

Darla lowered her lashes. "Well ... I could probably teach him a thing or two."

"No doubt," Addie said under her breath.

"Well, then. Come on. You wouldn't want me to think you've got some objection to going out with me, me, would you?" would you?"

Addie met his eye. "Wes," she said, "I have an objection to going out with you." you."

He laughed. "G.o.d help me, Addie, but that p.i.s.s-and-vinegar thing you've got going is some turn-on."

Addie closed her eyes. It wasn't fair to have to deal with Wes Courtemanche on a day like this one. Even Job was eventually cut a break. She also knew that if she refused to go, Wes would just sit in the diner and get on her nerves all night. The easiest way to get rid of him was to simply go out, then plead sick in the middle of the appetizer course.

"You win," Addie conceded. "Let me just go tell Delilah where I'm off to."

Before she could reach the kitchen, however, Jack emerged, holding her parka. Seeing the others, he blanched and ducked his head. "Delilah said I should bring this in," he mumbled. "She said a night off won't kill you."

"Oh ... thanks. Well, I'm glad you came out. I want you to meet Darla." Darla held out her hand, which Jack did not take. "Charmed," she said.

"And this is Wes," Addie said shortly, shrugging into her coat. "All right. Let's get this over with. Darla, you'll tell Delilah to have Chloe in bed by eight?"

No one seemed to be listening. Darla was turning up the TV volume from behind the counter, and Wes squinted at Jack, who was trying to sink between the cracks of the linoleum. "Have we met?" Wes asked.