The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  Chelsea stared at Whitney. “Gillian’s not here now,” she said. “She’s never going to know what we talk about. And even if you won’t admit it, Whit, you know that we shouldn’t have—”

  “—been discussing this,” Whitney said firmly. She surreptitiously slid a CD into her macrame purse and made her way out of the store, fully expecting her friends to follow her lead.

  Charlie knew better. As a detective, the rules of evidence . . . and the methods of their collection . . . had been drilled into him for years. There had been recent cases where evidence was ruled inadmissible when taken without a teenager’s consent from a room within his parents’ house. Drug evidence.

  “What are you doing?”

  His wife’s voice startled him out of his reverie, and he nearly stumbled out of Meg’s closet. “Just looking,” Charlie managed.

  Barbara didn’t bat an eyelash. “For a corduroy skirt?”

  He looked at the hanger clutched in his hands. “For a shirt. One Meg borrowed.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said. “Try the dresser. Third drawer down.”

  She left, and Charlie rested his head against the closet door. He didn’t want Barbara to know what he was searching for. Didn’t want to admit he was doubting his daughter.

  He fingered a worn friendship bracelet tied around the knob of the door—striped red and blue and green, it was one Meg had made her first summer at sleep-away camp. She’d called home crying every hour of the first two days, insisting that keeping her there was a form of child abuse. But by the time Charlie and Barbara had driven up to Maine to get her, Meggie had settled in, and she sheepishly told them to go on home.

  Kneeling, Charlie rummaged through nearly untouched sports paraphernalia—it’d taken him nearly a decade to learn that his little girl was never going to be a willing athlete—and shoes several sizes too small. There was a teddy bear with an eye missing and a poster Meg had made for a school project about the New Hampshire state bird, the purple finch. There was an old pink ballet bag and an assortment of dolls she had outgrown but couldn’t bear to give away. Charlie smiled and reached for one, a naked baby with yellow hair and one stuck glass eye. A girl who sentimentally saved things like this wouldn’t hide drugs from her father, would she?

  He had seen enough teen drug cases in Salem Falls to know they followed a pattern: Either the child and the parents had a complete lack of communication between them or the child was resentful of the parents or the parents were too self-absorbed to really see what their child had turned into. None of that fit the bill for himself and Meg—they’d always been closer than most parents and kids. This was something McAfee had misunderstood. Maybe his kid had heard wrong. Maybe Chelsea, for whatever reason, had been lying.

  Satisfied, Charlie went to stuff Meg’s mess back into the closet in as disorganized a fashion as possible, lest she realize someone had been snooping through her things. In went the teddy bear, the hockey stick, the Rollerblades. He lifted the ballet bag and felt his hand close around something cylindrical and firm.

  Ballet clothes, ballet shoes, ballet tights—everything in that bag ought to be soft.

  Charlie unzipped the pink bag. Reaching inside, he pulled out a length of silver ribbon, long and silky. He removed a small stack of plastic cups and a thermos.

  The cups and the thermos were empty, except for what looked like a residue of white powder. Cocaine? Charlie sniffed it, then touched his pinky finger to the powder and lifted it up to his tongue to taste.

  It was probably nothing.

  Weary, he ran a hand down his face and rubbed his tired eyes. He would get it tested anyway, just to put his mind at ease. He had a buddy at the state lab who could run a tox screen—and who owed him a favor.

  That was what Charlie was thinking moments later when his pupils became so dilated he could not see.

  As the wiper blades on Addie’s car whispered rumors to each other, she drove aimlessly through the streets of Salem Falls. She needed to go home and unpack; she needed to get back to the diner as quickly as possible. But she found herself standing instead in the narrow plastic coffin of a phone booth, scanning the tattered white pages of the phone book for the street address of Jordan McAfee.

  A few minutes later, a black woman opened the door of the house at the address she’d found. “I-I’m sorry . . .” Addie stammered. “I think I have the wrong address.” She headed into the driving rain, only to be called back.

  “Addie Peabody, isn’t it?” When Addie nodded, the woman smiled. “My name’s Selena, and no, I’m not the maid. Come on in and wait out the storm.”

  It wasn’t until she stepped inside that Addie remembered where she’d seen her before. “You came to the diner,” she said out loud. “You ordered hot water with lemon.”

  “Damn, that’s impressive!” Selena said, taking Addie’s slicker. “Jordan’s due back soon. I know he’d like to talk to you. If you want, you’re welcome to wait here with me.”

  Addie sat down on an overstuffed couch in the living room. “I’m here because of Jack St. Bride.”

  “I see.”

  “He didn’t do it,” Addie said.

  Selena sat down on the edge of the coffee table. “Do you have an alibi for him?”

  “No. It’s just . . . I know he’s innocent.” She sat forward, her hands twisted in her lap. “I went to find out about his previous conviction, up in Loyal. And that girl . . . the one he supposedly seduced . . . she was lying. She never had a relationship with Jack.”

  “Is she willing to testify to that?”

  “No,” Addie whispered.

  Selena’s eyes softened. Addie’s feelings were written all over her, clear as permanent marker on her pale skin. “This may seem like I’m prying, Ms.—”

  “Addie, please.”

  “Addie. Why didn’t you come to us two weeks ago?”

  For a long time, Addie didn’t answer. Then, she quietly explained, “I needed to see for myself first if Jack was the man I made him out to be.”

  Selena thought of the morning she’d told Jordan that she would not marry him. And of every single morning since then, when she’d second-guessed herself. “I know you’d like to help, but without an alibi, there’s not too much you can add to his case.”

  “That’s not why I came,” Addie said. “I was hoping that you could help me.”

  “Saxton here.”

  “Hey, Charlie, it’s me.”

  Charlie froze. There was only one reason Albert Ozmander would have been calling, and it directly involved the thermos Charlie had seized from his daughter’s room. Not that Oz knew where the thermos came from. As far as the toxicologist was concerned, this was just a routine workup on some evidence in an unnamed case.

  He felt his foot tapping so nervously beneath his desk that he had to physically restrain himself with his own hand. “Got a match for you,” Oz said, “but it’s a weird one. Don’t ask me why the kids in your town aren’t smoking pot or doing coke like the rest of the free world, Charlie, but this stuff tested positive for atropine sulfate.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Yeah, you have. It’s a drug used to control digestive tract problems, among other things. You ever taken Lomotil?”

  Once, God, yes, when he and Barbara had visited Mexico and got sick as dogs. Charlie squirmed just remembering it. “Why would kids try to get off on an antidiarrheal?”

  “Because if you take enough of it, it’ll make you high. I’m sending the results right now.” The fax beeped on in the corner of Charlie’s office; he watched the paper curl its way out and somersault into the wire bin beneath.

  “Thanks, Oz,” Charlie said, and hung up the phone. He sat at his desk, hands covering his face. Meg, who had never lied to her father in her life; Meg, for whom he would tilt the world on its axis . . . Meg had somehow come to be in possession of this drug.

  His heart sank so low that it changed his center of gravity, and Charlie had to fight his way upright so that he cou