The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  What I want to write—what I need to write—is not what the New Hampshire Gazette is paying me for. Sitting down at my laptop, I erase what I’ve written. I start fresh.

  VI

  Why is there then

  No more to tell? We turned to other things.

  I haven’t any memory—have you?—

  Of ever coming to the place again.

  —Robert Frost, “The Exposed Nest”

  Eric

  Chris Hamilton’s paralegal spends three days trying to trace the current whereabouts of the neighbors who used to live next door to Elise and Andrew twenty-eight years ago. She sticks her head in the door of the conference room shortly after lunchtime. “Want the good news or bad news?”

  I look up over the stack of papers I’m wading through. “There’s actually good news?”

  “Well, no. But I thought I’d make you feel better.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “Alice Young,” she says. “I found her.”

  Alice Young was a teenager who lived with her parents next door to Elise and Andrew; at one point she had babysat for Delia. “And?”

  “She’s in Vienna.”

  “Good,” I say. “Subpoena her.”

  “Might want to rethink that. She lives with the sisters of the Order of the Bloody Cross.”

  “She’s a nun?”

  “She’s a nun who took a vow of silence ten years ago,” the paralegal says.

  “For Christ’s sake . . .”

  “Exactly. However, I did manage to find the other neighbor, Elizabeth Peshman. She’s at some place called Sunset Acres; I assume it’s a retirement community.”

  I take the information. “Did you call?”

  “No one answers,” she says.

  It’s a Sun City, Arizona, address; it can’t be that far away. “I’ll go find her.”

  It takes me two hours to reach the town, and there are so many retirement communities I wonder how I’ll ever find the right one. However, the clerk who sells me gas and a Snickers bar knows the name right away. “Two lights, and then a left. You’ll see the sign,” she says, as she rings me up.

  From the looks of things, Sunset Acres is not a bad place to finish up one’s life. It is a turn off the main drag, a long drive lined with saguaros and desert rock gardens. I have to stop at a stucco guard booth—apparently these seniors value their privacy. The man inside is stooped and age-spotted, and looks like he could be a resident himself. “Hi,” I say. “I’m trying to find Elizabeth Peshman. I tried to call—”

  “Line’s down,” the guard says. He points to a small parking lot. “No cars allowed. I’ll take you up.”

  As I walk beside the guard, I wonder what sort of facility wouldn’t allow cars up to the main building. It seems like quite an inconvenience, given the fact that some of the residents have to be arthritic or even disabled. As soon as we crest the hill, the guard points. “Third from the left,” he says.

  There are acres of crosses and stars and rose quartz obelisks. OUR DEAR MOTHER, reads one tombstone. NEVER FORGOTTEN. DOTING HUSBAND.

  Elizabeth Peshman is dead. I have no witness to corroborate the fact that thirty years ago, Elise Matthews was the drunk that Andrew says she was. “Guess you’re not talking either,” I say out loud.

  Although it is beastly hot, there are fresh flowers wilting in pots beside Elizabeth’s tombstone. “She’s real popular,” the guard says. “There are some folks here who never get visitors. But this one, she gets calls from a bunch of old students.”

  “She was a teacher?” I ask, and my mind catches on the word. A teacher.

  “You get what you need?” the guard asks.

  “I think so,” I say, and I hurry back to my car.

  * * *

  Abigail Nguyen is mixing paste when I arrive. A slight woman with two knots of hair at the top of her head, like the ears of a bear, she looks up and gives me a smile. “You must be Mr. Talcott,” she says. “Come on in.”

  When the preschool where Delia went closed down in the mid-eighties, Abigail started her own Montessori classes in the basement of a church. She was the third school listed in the Yellow Pages, and she had answered the phone herself.

  We sit down, giants on miniature chairs. “Mrs. Nguyen, I’m an attorney, and I’m working on behalf of a girl you taught in the late 1970s . . . Bethany Matthews.”

  “The one who was kidnapped.”

  I shift a little. “Well, that hasn’t been determined yet. I’m representing her father.”

  “I’ve been following it all in the papers, and on the local news.”

  As has the rest of Phoenix. “I wonder, Mrs. Nguyen, if you might be able to tell me about Bethany back then.”

  “She was a good child. Quiet. Tended to work by herself, instead of with her peers.”

  “Did you get a chance to know her parents?”

  The teacher glances away for a moment. “Sometimes Bethany came to school disheveled, or wearing dirty clothes . . . it raised a red flag for us. I think I even called the mother . . . what was her name again?”

  “Elise Matthews.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “What did Elise say when you called?”

  “I can’t remember,” Mrs. Nguyen says.

  “Do you recall anything else about Elise Matthews?”

  The teacher nods. “I assume you mean the fact that she smelled like a distillery.”

  I feel my blood flow faster. “Did you report her to child protective services?”

  The teacher stiffens. “There weren’t any signs of abuse.”

  “You said she came to school disheveled.”

  “There’s a big difference between a child not being bathed every night, and parental neglect, Mr. Talcott. It’s not our job to police what happens at home. Take it from me—I’ve seen children burned on the soles of their feet by their parents’ cigarettes, and I’ve seen children come to school with broken bones and welts on their backs. I’ve seen children who hide in the supply closet at pickup time because they don’t want to go home. Mrs. Matthews might have liked her afternoon cocktail, but she deeply loved her little girl, and Bethany clearly knew that.”

  You’d be surprised, I think.

  “Mrs. Nguyen, thank you for your time.” I hand her my card, with Chris Hamilton’s office number penciled in. “If you think of anything else, please call me.”

  I have just started my car in the parking lot when there is a knock on the window. Mrs. Nguyen stands with her arms folded. “There was one incident,” she says, when I roll down the window. “Mrs. Matthews was late to pick up. We called the house, and kept calling, and there was no answer. I let Bethany stay for the afternoon session of school, and then I drove her home. The mother was passed out on the couch when we got there . . . so I took her home with me and let her stay the night. The next day, Mrs. Matthews apologized profusely.”

  “Why didn’t you call Bethany’s father?”

  A breeze blows a strand of Mrs. Nguyen’s hair from her bun. “The parents were going through a divorce. A week before, the mother had specifically asked us not to allow her husband to have any contact with the child.”

  “How come?”

  “Some threat he’d made, if I remember right,” Mrs. Nguyen says. “She had reason to believe that he might take Bethany and run.”

  * * *

  Andrew looks thinner; although that might just be the baggy prison uniform. “How’s Delia?” he asks, like always. But this time, I don’t answer. My patience is wound too tight.

  I stand with my hands in my pockets. “You told me that the kidnapping of your child was a spur of the moment thing, a knee-jerk reaction to a bad situation. You told me that when you went home to get Delia’s blanket, you saw your ex-wife passed out and knew it was time to take matters into your own hands. Did I get that right?”

  Andrew nods.

  “Then how do you explain the fact that you threatened to take your daughter away fro