The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Lacy sat down on the couch again. “I didn’t go into Peter’s room on purpose, because I was afraid of what I’d find,” she confessed. “I didn’t know that it could be even worse.”

  “Did you ever interrupt him when he was in his room? Knock on the door, pop your head inside?”

  “Sure. I’d come in to say good night.”

  “What was he usually doing?”

  “He was on his computer,” Lacy said. “Almost always.”

  “Didn’t you see what was on the screen?”

  “I don’t know. He’d close the file.”

  “How did he act when you interrupted him unexpectedly? Did he seem upset? Annoyed? Guilty?”

  “Why does it feel like you’re judging him?” Lacy said. “Aren’t you supposed to be on our side?”

  Selena met her gaze steadily. “The only way I can thoroughly investigate this case is to ask you the facts, Mrs. Houghton. That’s all I’m doing.”

  “He was like any other teenager,” Lacy said. “He’d suffer while I kissed him good night. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He didn’t act like he was hiding anything from me. Is that what you want to know?”

  Selena put down her pen. When the subject started getting defensive, it was time to end the interview. But Lacy was still talking, unprompted.

  “I never thought there was any problem,” she admitted. “I didn’t know Peter was upset. I didn’t know he wanted to kill himself. I didn’t know any of those things.” She began to cry. “All those families out there, I don’t know what to say to them. I wish I could tell them that I lost someone, too. I just lost him a long time ago.”

  Selena folded her arms around the smaller woman. “It’s not your fault,” she said, words she knew Lacy Houghton needed to hear.

  * * *

  In a fit of high school irony, the principal of Sterling High had placed the Bible Study Club next door to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance. They met Tuesdays, at three-thirty, in Rooms 233 and 234 of the high school. Room 233 was, during the day, Ed McCabe’s classroom. One member of the Bible Study Club was the daughter of a local minister, named Grace Murtaugh. She’d been killed in the hallway leading to the gymnasium, shot in front of a water fountain. The leader of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance was still in the hospital: Natalie Zlenko, a yearbook photographer, had come out as a lesbian after her freshman year, when she’d wandered into the GLAAD meeting in Room 233 to see if there was anyone else on this planet like herself.

  “We’re not supposed to give out names.” Natalie’s voice was so faint that Patrick had to lean over the hospital bed to hear her. Natalie’s mother hovered at his shoulder. When he’d come in to ask Natalie a few questions, she said that he’d better leave or else she’d call the police. He reminded her that he was the police.

  “I’m not asking for names,” Patrick said. “I’m just asking you to help me help a jury understand why this happened.”

  Natalie nodded. She closed her eyes.

  “Peter Houghton,” Patrick said. “Did he ever attend a meeting?”

  “Once,” Natalie said.

  “Did he say or do anything that sticks in your mind?”

  “He didn’t say or do anything, period. He showed up the one time, and he never came back.”

  “Does that happen often?”

  “Sometimes,” Natalie said. “People wouldn’t be ready to come out. And sometimes we got jerks who just wanted to know who was gay so that they could make life hell for us in school.”

  “In your opinion, did Peter fit into either one of these categories?”

  She was silent for a long time, her eyes still closed. Patrick drew away, thinking that she’d fallen asleep. “Thanks,” he said to her mother, just as Natalie spoke again.

  “Peter was getting ragged on long before he ever showed up at that meeting,” she said.

  * * *

  Jordan was on diaper detail while Selena interviewed Lacy Houghton, and Sam was appallingly bad at going to sleep on his own. However, a ten-minute ride in the car could knock the kid out like a prizefighter, so Jordan bundled the baby up and strapped him into the car seat. It wasn’t until he put the Saab into reverse that he realized his wheel rims were grinding against the driveway; all four of his tires had been slashed.

  “Fuck,” Jordan said, as Sam started to wail again in the backseat. He plucked the baby out, carried him back inside, and tethered him into the Snugli that Selena wore around the house. Then he called the police to report the vandalism.

  Jordan knew he was in trouble when the dispatch officer didn’t ask him to spell his last name—he already knew it. “We’ll get to it,” the officer said. “But first we’ve got a squirrel up a tree that needs a hand climbing down.” The line went dead.

  Could you sue the cops for being unsympathetic bastards?

  Through some miracle—pheromones of stress, probably—Sam fell asleep, but startled, bawling, when the doorbell rang. Jordan yanked the door open to find Selena outside. “You woke up the baby,” he accused as she lifted Sam out of the carrier.

  “Then you shouldn’t have locked the door. Oh, hi, you sweet man,” Selena cooed. “Has Daddy been a monster the whole time I’ve been gone?”

  “Someone slashed my tires.”

  Selena glanced at him over the baby’s head. “Well, you sure know how to win friends and influence people. Let me guess—the cops aren’t exactly scrambling to take your report?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Comes with the territory, I guess,” Selena said. “You’re the one who took this case.”

  “How about a little spousal understanding?”

  Selena shrugged. “Wasn’t in the vows I took. If you want to have a pity party, set the table for one.”

  Jordan ran a hand through his hair. “Well, did you at least get anything out of the mother? Like, for example, that Peter had a psychiatric diagnosis?”

  She peeled off her jacket while juggling Sam in one hand and then the other, unbuttoned her blouse, and sat down on the couch to nurse. “No. But he did have a sibling.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. A dead one, who—prior to being killed by a drunk driver—was the All-American Son.”

  Jordan sank down beside her. “I can use this . . .”

  Selena rolled her eyes. “Just for once, could you not be a lawyer and focus instead on being a human? Jordan, this family was in so deep they didn’t have a chance. The kid was a powder keg. The parents were dealing with their own grief and were asleep at the wheel. Peter had no one to turn to.”

  Jordan glanced up at her, a grin splitting his face. “Excellent,” he said. “Our client’s just become sympathetic.”

  * * *

  One week after the school shooting at Sterling High, the Mount Lebanon School—a primary grade school that had become an administrative building when the population of students in Lebanon dipped—was outfitted to be the temporary home for high school kids to finish out their school year.

  On the day that classes were beginning again, Josie’s mother came into her bedroom. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “You can take a few more weeks off, if you want.”

  There had been a flurry of phone calls, a pulse of panic that began a few days ago when each student received the written word that school would be starting again. Are you going back? Are you? There were rumors: whose mother wouldn’t let them return; who was getting transferred to St. Mary’s; who was going to take over Mr. McCabe’s class. Josie had not called any of her friends. She was afraid to hear their answers.

  Josie did not want to go back to school. She could not imagine having to walk down a hallway, even one not physically located at Sterling High. She didn’t know how the superintendent and the principal expected everyone to act—and they would all be doing that: acting—because to feel anything real would be devastating. And yet there was another part of Josie that understood she had to go back to school; it was where she belonged. The other students at Sterling High were the