The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

Whatever I’m about to say is interrupted as Caleb leans down and yells right into Nathaniel’s face. “No!” Nathaniel quails, but not before Caleb grabs his arm and pulls him away.

  “Caleb—”

  “You don’t touch the antifreeze,” Caleb yells at Nathaniel. “How many times do I have to tell you that? It’s poison. It can hurt you badly.” He picks up the bottle of Prestone he’s been mixing into the mortar to keep it from freezing in this temperature, and then covers the mess Nathaniel’s made with a cloth. A stain, alien green, seeps through and spreads. The dog laps at the sweet spill, until Caleb shoves it away. “Get out of there, Mason.”

  In the corner, Nathaniel’s on the verge of tears. “Come here,” I say, opening up my arms. He flies into them, and I kiss the top of his head. “Why don’t you go get a toy from your room to play with while Daddy’s working?”

  Nathaniel runs off to the house with Mason at his heels, both of them smart enough to know a reprieve when it comes up and grabs them. Caleb shakes his head in disbelief. “Just undermine me, Nina, you go right ahead.”

  “I’m not undermining you. I’m . . . well, look at him, Caleb, you scared him to death. He wasn’t doing it on purpose.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He was told and he didn’t listen.”

  “Don’t you think he’s been through enough lately?”

  Caleb wipes his hands on a towel. “Yes, I do. So how’s he going to take it when the dog he loves drops dead, because he broke the rules and did something he was expressly told not to do?” He caps the Prestone, sets it high on a shelf. “I want him to feel like a normal kid again. And if Nathaniel had done this three weeks ago, you can bet I would have punished him.”

  This logic I can’t even follow. Biting down on my response, I turn and walk out. I am still angry with Caleb by the time I reach the police department and find Patrick asleep at his desk.

  I slam the door of his office, and he nearly falls out of his chair. Then he winces, holds his hand to his head. “I’m just glad to see that you public servants are really earning all my tax dollars,” I say sourly. “Where’s the digital lineup?”

  “I’m working on it,” Patrick responds.

  “Oh, yeah, I can see that you’re really exerting yourself.”

  He stands up and frowns at me. “Who peed in your coffee?”

  “I’m sorry. Just some domestic bliss spilling over. No doubt I’ll find my manners by the time you find probable cause to lock up Szyszynski.”

  Patrick looks me right in the eye. “How’s Caleb?”

  “Fine.”

  “Doesn’t sound like things are fine . . .”

  “Patrick. I’m here because I need to know that something’s going on. Anything. Please. Show me.”

  He nods and takes my arm. We move through corridors I have never navigated at the Biddeford Police Department, and finally wind up in a back room not much bigger than a closet. The lights are off, a green screen hums on a computer, and the boy who sits in front of the keyboard has acne and a fistful of Munchos. “Dude,” he says to Patrick.

  I turn to Patrick, too. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nina, this is Emilio. Emilio helps us with digital imaging. He’s a computer whiz.”

  He leans over Emilio and hits a button on the keyboard. Ten photos appear on the screen, one of them Father Szyszynski’s.

  I lean forward, look close. There is nothing in the priest’s eyes or his easy smile that would make me believe he is capable of such an abomination. Half of the people in the photos are dressed in the vestments of priests; the other half are wearing the standard issue jumpsuit of the local jail. Patrick shrugs. “The only picture I could find of Szyszynski was in his clerical collar. So I have to make the convicts look like priests, too. That way there won’t be any cause for question later on, after Nathaniel makes his ID.”

  He says it like it is going to happen. For that, I adore him. As we watch, Emilio superimposes a collar over a picture of a ham-faced thug. “Got a minute?” Patrick asks me, and when I nod, he leads me out of the little makeshift office, through a side door, and into a courtyard.

  There is a picnic table, a basketball hoop, and around this, a high chain link fence. “All right,” I say immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “If nothing was wrong, you would have been able to talk to me in front of your teenage hacker.”

  Patrick sits down on the bench of the picnic table. “It’s about the lineup.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Will you just stop?” Patrick waits until I sit down, then looks right into me. Those eyes, they’ve got a history with mine. They were the first things I saw when I came to, after being hit in the skull with a baseball thrown by Patrick at Little League. They were the fortification I needed at sixteen to ride the chairlift at Sugarloaf, although I am terrified of heights. For almost my whole life, they’ve told me I’m doing all right, during moments when it was not in my own power to answer. “You need to understand something, Nina,” Patrick says. “Even if Nathaniel points right to Szyszynski’s picture . . . it’s a weak disclosure. Surveying a lineup isn’t something a five-year-old can really understand. It could be he picks the only familiar face; it could be he points to anyone, just to get us to leave him alone.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?”

  “You understand what it takes to secure a conviction. We can’t lead him into making an ID just because you want this case to move faster. All I’m saying is that Nathaniel might be able to talk a week from now. Maybe even tomorrow. Eventually, he’s going to be able to say the name of the perp, and that’s going to be a much stronger accusation.”

  Leaning forward, I bury my hands in my hair. “And then what am I supposed to do? Let him testify?”

  “That’s the way it works.”

  “Not when my child’s the victim,” I snap.

  Patrick touches my arm. “Nina, without Nathaniel’s testimony against Szyszynski, you have no case.” He shakes his head, certain I haven’t really thought this through.

  But I have never been more sure of anything in my life. I will do what it takes to keep my son from being a witness. “You’re right,” I tell Patrick. “And that’s why I’m counting on you to get the priest to confess.”

  • • •

  Before I realize it, I’ve driven to St. Anne’s. I pull into the parking lot and get out of my car, avoiding the front walk to tiptoe, instead, around to the back of the building. The rectory is here, attached to the main body of the church. My sneakers leave prints in the frost, the trail of an invisible man.

  If I climb onto the ridge of a drainage well, I can see into the window. This is Father Szyszynski’s personal apartment, the living room. A cup of tea sits, the bag still draining, on a side table. A book—Tom Clancy—is cracked open on the couch. All around are gifts he’s received from parishioners: a handmade afghan, a wooden Bible stand, a framed drawing by a child. All of these people believed him, too; I have not been the only sucker.

  What I am waiting for, exactly, I don’t know. But as I stand there I remember the day before Nathaniel had stopped speaking, the last time we had all gone to Mass. There had been a reception for the two clergymen who’d come to visit, a banner hung from the serving table wishing them a safe journey home. I remember that the flavored coffee that morning was hazelnut. That there were no powdered sugar doughnuts left, though Nathaniel had wanted one. I remember talking to a couple I had not seen in several months, and noticing that the other children were following Father Szyszynski downstairs for his weekly storytime. “Go, Nathaniel,” I’d said. He had been hiding behind me, clinging to my legs. I fairly pushed him into joining the others.

  I pushed him into it.

  I stand here on the drainage ditch for over an hour, until the priest comes into his living room. He sits down on the couch and picks up his tea and he reads. He doesn’t know I’m watching him. He doesn’t realize that I can slide into his life,