Salem Falls (9 page)

The two girls the phys-ed teacher had picked came front and center, with a confidence that said they were used to standing there. Suzanne Abernathy was a field hockey captain; Hailey McCourt had led the soccer team to a district championship last year. They stared down the group of girls, sorting the athletes from the losers in their minds.

“Sarah.”

“Brianna.”

“Leah.”

“Izzie.”

Gilly was picked-she was no athlete, but she was quick and smart. The choices narrowed, leaving only a small huddling puddle of girls who had little coordination. Meg shivered each time a name was called, as if each time one of them walked away, a piece of protective armor had been removed.

Finally, only two girls remained: Meg, and Tessie, the Down syndrome kid who’d been mainstreamed this year. Hailey turned to Suzanne. “What do you want? The retard or the tub of lard?”

Laughter rained down on Meg. Beside her, Tessie clapped her hands with delight.

“Tessie, you’re with Suzanne,” the phys-ed teacher announced.

As the ball was set into play, Meg stared at Hailey, thinking of boils and leprosy and third-degree burns, horrible things that would take away her honey hair, her Cover Girl complexion, and leave her in the same boat as the rest of the misfit world. Then the ball came directly toward her. “Saxton!” Hailey yelled out. “To me!”

Meg lifted her foot-how hard could it be to kick a soccer ball?-and let loose with such force she slid and landed on her butt in the mud.

The snickers of the class didn’t take away from this slow-motion moment, the ball spinning skyward like a missile. Meg was a little stunned at how far it went, even if it was soaring in the complete opposite direction from Hailey. The ball continued so far out of bounds that it landed on the baseball field.

Hailey walked past Meg, deliberately splattering her with even more mud. “If you can’t shoot straight, hippo, pass the ball!”

“Hailey!” the teacher said sharply. And then sighed. “Meg, go get it.”

Meg jogged off, painfully aware of Hailey whispering about the way she looked while she was trying to run. One day she’d be reincarnated as an anorexic. Or a supermodel. Or maybe both at the same time. Head down, Meg concentrated on the fire in the pit of her lungs and her belly, instead of the tears pricking the backs of her eyes.

“Here you go.”

A man handed her the out-of-bounds ball. He was tall, and the sun caught his hair like it did Gilly’s. He had a kind smile, and she would have thought he was incredibly handsome if he wasn’t as old as her father. “Don’t kick it with your toe,” he said.

“What?”

“Raise your knee, push your toes down, and hit it with your shoelaces. Swipe under the ball.” He grinned at Meg. “You’ve got more power in one leg than that blond girl has in her whole body.”

Meg let her eyes slide away. “Whatever,” she muttered. She slogged onto the field, letting the action fly around her. She was facing her own goal when the ball slammed her in the back of the knees. “Knee up, toe down, on the shoelace!” Meg heard his voice again, and without thinking about it, she did exactly what he said.

The ball flew low and strong, driving straight toward the opposite goal. Maybe it was the surprise that Meg Saxton had actually hit it; maybe it was-as that man had said-that she had power she didn’t even realize-but for whatever reason, the ball streaked past the defense and snugged in the net.

For a moment, everything stood still, and Meg felt herself suddenly cloaked in the thick satisfaction of doing something perfectly right. “Killer shot!” one girl said, and another patted her on the back. Gillian ran up to her side. “Unbelievable. Did you cast a spell?”

“No,” Meg admitted, a little amazed this had happened without witchcraft.

But Gillian’s attention was on the field, where the man was walking off, hands in his pockets. “Who’s your coach?” she asked.

Meg shrugged. “Some guy. I don’t know.”

“He’s cute.”

“He’s old!”

Gillian laughed. “Next time,” she said, “ask his name.”

The basement of the diner held the lion’s share of the food that couldn’t fit in the narrow kitchen: a stacked ladder of hamburger rolls and breads, huge tins of sweet corn, tubs of ketchup large enough to fill half a bathtub. Jack had been sent down there by Delilah for a fifty-pound bag of potatoes. Hefting the bag onto his shoulder, he yanked it out of its spot on the shelf and found himself looking right at Roy.

The old man was in back of the metal shelving, his fist closed around a bottle of cooking sherry. “Oh, shit,” he sighed.

“Addie’s going to kill you.”

“Only if she finds out about it.” Roy offered his most charming smile. “I’ll let you watch whatever you want on TV for a week if you pretend you never saw me.”

Jack considered this for a moment and nodded. Then he balanced the potatoes on his shoulder, trudged up the narrow stairs, and dumped the sack at Delilah’s feet. “Start peeling,” she ordered.

“Have you seen my father?” Addie demanded, hurrying into the kitchen. “We’ve got a line a mile long at the cash register.”

Delilah shrugged. “He’s not here or I’d have tripped over him. Jack, you see Roy in the basement?”

Jack shook his head but he didn’t meet Addie’s eye. Then, with impeccably lousy timing, Roy sauntered through the basement door. His face was glowing, and even from across the room Jack could smell the cheap alcohol on his breath.

Addie’s face went bright red. Tension filled the confines of the kitchen, and Jack tried to ignore the fact that someone was going to say something any moment that he or she would regret. Words, he knew, could scar.

So he squeezed the base of the potato he was peeling, then watched it fly in an arc over his shoulder toward the grill. Then, taking a deep breath, he grabbed for it, deliberately pressing his palm to the burning plate of metal.

“Goddamn!” he cried, geniune pain pricking behind his eyes and making him weak in the knees. Delilah pulled him away from the stove as Addie hurried to his side. With the brisk expertise of someone who’d done this before, she led him toward the hand-washing sink and ran the cold water. “It’s going to blister. How badly does it hurt?”

It hurt, but not the way she thought. It hurt to have her fingers stroking the back of his hand, to feel her concern flowing over him like a river. Missed opportunities were never superficial wounds; they cut straight to the bone.

Addie fussed over the red streaks branded into his skin, a scarlet letter that in his imagination took the shape of an A. “Really,” she scolded, now that the danger had passed, “you’re no better than Chloe.”

Jack shook his head. He pressed Addie’s fingers to his chest, so that his heart beat in the palm of her hand.

Thomas glanced up to find the very girl he was daydreaming about standing less than two feet away from him. “Uh, hi,” he managed. Brilliant.

“Would you mind if I sat down?” Chelsea asked, her gaze lighting on the other lunch tables. “Pretty crowded today.”

“Mi table es su table.”

“What?”

“It’s Spanish. Well, kind of. I don’t know how to say table . . .” Shut up, Thomas, before you hurt yourself.

“Thanks.” Chelsea set down her lunch, then waved. And suddenly Thomas realized that the princess came with an entourage. Gillian Duncan and two others sat down, and the minute they arrived, it was as if Thomas himself didn’t exist.

Still, it was better to eat his lunch with Chelsea Abrams just six inches away from him on a wooden bench than by himself. His breath caught when she mistakenly reached for Thomas’s napkin and touched it to the corner of her mouth in nearly the same spot where Thomas had touched it to his own mouth. He winged a silent prayer to God for Chelsea to leave first, so that she wouldn’t see his thoughts broadcast across his groin.

“Maybe he’s some kind of pervert,” Meg said, and Thomas jumped a foot, wondering if they could sense his hard-on even through the barrier of the picnic table. Then he realized that Meg was talking about someone else entirely. “You don’t see other grown men lurking around outside the high school gym.”

“Lurking? God, Meg. You think you’re being dramatic enough?” Whitney tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Perverts live in places like Detroit and L.A., not Salem Falls.”

“First off, my dad has always said that crime statistics don’t mean much if you’re the victim in that one percentile. Second-I talked to him, you didn’t.”

“Still,” Gillian pointed out, “I wouldn’t be so quick to cast stones at someone who made you look like Mia Hamm.”

“Are you talking about the guy out by the soccer field?” Thomas asked.

Chelsea turned. “Do you know him?”

Thomas felt the heat of their attention. “Sure. He works at the diner in town.”

Gillian took a drink from a water bottle and glanced in the direction of the playing fields, where the man might even now be standing.

“You can work at a diner and still be a pervert,” Meg murmured. “That’s all I’m saying.”

It seemed to Jack that the kid at the counter had been there long enough to warrant concern, but then again, it wasn’t his diner or his place to care. He sat stone-faced at the cash register, a job he’d won by default because he couldn’t get his bandage wet.

The girl kept staring at him. She was lean and pretty, coltlike, although she wore too much makeup. She was in the process of ripping open her sixteenth sugar packet and pouring its contents on the counter.

Addie burst through the swinging doors, plates balanced on her arms like armor. “Help me a second, will you?” Jack obligingly stood up and trailed in her wake. He lifted each dish, setting it down where Addie directed.

“Thanks,” she said. “If I can keep Chloe from getting underfoot, I just may actually finish getting out the orders for the dinner rush.” She started back into the kitchen but stopped when Jack called her name.

“That girl . . . she’s been here for three hours.”

“She can stay here for three years if she wants, as long as she’s hungry and has her daddy’s charge card. That’s Gilly Duncan . . . daughter of the guy who owns the pharmaceutical plant.”

Jack sat back down and watched Gilly Duncan rip open sugar packets number seventeen and eighteen and pour them on the Formica. Well, hell. It was one thing if Jack himself was busing tables, but with his burn, Addie had taken on that work. The thought of her having to sweep up after this spoiled little brat fueled his courage. “You’re making a mess,” he said.

Gillian raised one delicate red brow. “Oh, my. Did I spill?” She stuck her forefinger in her mouth, rolled it in the white grains, and started to suck on it. “Sweet.” She coated her finger in sugar again and held it up. “Very sweet.”

Jack jumped back, as if she’d brandished a gun.

“I didn’t mean to make more work for you.” She began to scoop the spilled sugar into the cup of her hand and empty it onto the side of her saucer. “There. I’m Gilly, by the way. And you are?”

“Going,” Jack said, and he ducked from behind the counter and walked out the diner’s door.

In Whitney’s garage, Gillian cupped a small heap of cinnamon in her hand and began the third casting, trailing a ring around her friends. “Set me apart from the world of man. Set me apart from the world of spirit. Hold me between the two, so I might work my magick.” The last bit of cinnamon sparked from her fingers, and she turned to the others. “The circle is perfect.”

She knelt in front of the altar and reached for the green candle they’d brought to the garage. Rubbing oil from the tip to the base, she began to chant: “Heal him whole, heal him whole.” Using the quartz from the Wiccan Read, Gillian scratched into the candle a crude sketch of a caduceus, to symbolize perfect health. “Who has the matches?”

Whitney grimaced. She pointed toward the hood of her mother’s car, a silvery Volvo. “Damn. I left them over there.” She picked up the knife on the altar and cut through the invisible boundaries of the circle to open it, reached for the matches, and then stepped back inside. “Here,” she said, pressing the small box into Gilly’s hand.

The flame rose higher every time the girls breathed in, visualizing Stuart Holling as he rose from his hospital bed and walked away from it. Wax slid down the candle until the etched snakes were smooth again. And then, a quick draft coming from beneath the garage door blew the fire out.

“Do you think that means he’s better?” Chelsea whispered.

“Either that or he’s dead.”

“Maybe we should call the hospital to see.”

“They wouldn’t tell us,” Gillian pointed out. “We’re not related to him. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens tomorrow.”

The girls sat, lost in thought. “It was different tonight,” Whitney said finally.

“Like I was humming inside,” Meg agreed.

“Maybe it was because we weren’t just doing it for ourselves.” Whitney spoke slowly, choosing her words with care. “When we cast a spell for money or for love . . . it was to change us, to help us. This time, we were sending all that energy to Mr. Hollings.”