The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  “There’s no family to fight it?”

  “The mother gave consent already.”

  Ted sighs. “The publicity is going to be outrageous.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Quentin grins. “Let me take care of it,” he offers.

  • • •

  Fisher storms into the district attorney’s office, uncharacteristically flustered. He has been there before, of course, but who knows where the hell they’ve ensconced Quentin Brown while he’s prosecuting Nina’s case. He has just opened up his mouth to ask the secretary when Brown himself walks out of the small kitchen area, carrying a cup of coffee. “Mr. Carrington,” he says pleasantly. “Looking for me?”

  Fisher withdraws the paperwork he’s received that morning from his breast pocket. The Motion to Exhume. “What is this?”

  Quentin shrugs. “You must know. You’re the one who asked for the DNA records to be rushed over, after all.”

  Fisher has no idea why, in fact. The DNA records were rushed over at Nina’s behest, but he’ll be damned if he lets Brown know this. “What are you trying to do, counselor?”

  “A simple test that proves the priest your client killed wasn’t the same guy who abused her kid.”

  Fisher steels his gaze. “I’ll see you in court tomorrow morning,” he says, and by the time he gets into his car to drive to Nina’s home, he has begun to understand how an ordinary human might become frustrated enough to kill.

  • • •

  “Fisher!” I say, and I’m actually delighted to see the man. This amazes me—either I have truly bedded down with the Enemy, or I’ve been under house arrest too long. I throw open the door to let him in, and realize that he is furious. “You knew,” he says, his voice calm and that much more frightening for all its control. He hands me a motion filed by the assistant attorney general.

  My insides begin to quiver; I feel absolutely sick. With tremendous effort I swallow and meet Fisher’s eye—better to come clean eventually, than to not come clean at all. “I didn’t know if I should tell you. I didn’t know if the information was going to be important to my case.”

  “That’s my job!” Fisher explodes. “You are paying me for a reason, Nina, and it’s because you know on some level, although apparently not a conscious one, that I am qualified to get you acquitted. In fact, I’m more qualified to do that than any other attorney in Maine . . . including you.”

  I look away. At heart, I am a prosecutor, and prosecutors don’t tell defense attorneys everything. They dance around each other, but the prosecutor is always the one who leads, leaving the other lawyer to find his footing.

  Always.

  “I don’t trust you,” I say finally.

  Fisher fields this like a blow. “Well, then. We’re even.”

  We stare at each other, two great dogs with their teeth bared. Fisher turns away, angry, and in that moment I see my face in the reflection of the window. The truth is, I’m not a prosecutor anymore. I’m not capable of defending myself. I’m not sure I even want to.

  “Fisher,” I call out when he is halfway out the door. “How badly will this hurt me?”

  “I don’t know, Nina. It doesn’t make you look any less crazy, but it’s also going to strip you of public sympathy. You’re not a hero anymore, killing a pedophile. You’re a hothead who knocked off an innocent man—a priest, no less.” He shakes his head. “You’re the prime example of why we have laws in the first place.”

  In his eyes, I see what’s coming—the fact that I am no longer a mother doing what she had to for her child, but simply a reckless woman who thought she knew better than anyone else. I wonder if camera flashes feel different on your skin when they capture you as a criminal, instead of a victim. I wonder if parents who once fathomed my actions—even if they disagreed with them—will look at me now and cross the street, just in case faulty judgment is contagious.

  Fisher exhales heavily. “I can’t keep them from exhuming the body.”

  “I know.”

  “And if you keep hiding information from me, it will hurt you, because I won’t know how to work with it.”

  I duck my head. “I understand.”

  He raises his hand in farewell. I stand on the porch and watch him go, hugging myself against the wind. When his car heads down the street, its exhaust freezes, a sigh caught in the cold. With a deep breath I turn to find Caleb standing not three feet behind me. “Nina,” he says, “what was that?”

  Pushing past him, I shake my head, but he grabs my arm and will not let me go. “You lied to me. Lied to me!”

  “Caleb, you don’t understand—”

  He grasps my shoulders and shakes me once, hard. “What is it I don’t understand? That you killed an innocent man? Jesus, Nina, when is it going to hit you?”

  Once, Nathaniel asked me how the snow disappears. It is like that in Maine—instead of melting over time, it takes one warm day for drifts that are thigh-high in the morning to evaporate by the time the sun goes down. Together we went to the library to learn the answer—sublimation, the process by which something solid vanishes into thin air.

  With Caleb’s hands holding me up, I fall apart. I let out everything I have been afraid to set free for the past week. Father Szyszynski’s voice fills my head; his face swims in front of me. “I know,” I sob. “Oh, Caleb, I know. I thought I could do this. I thought I could take care of it. But I made a mistake.” I fold myself into the wall of his chest, waiting for his arms to come around me.

  They don’t.

  Caleb takes a step back, shoves his hands in his pockets. His eyes are red-rimmed, haunted. “What’s the mistake, Nina? That you killed a man?” he asks hoarsely. “Or that you didn’t?”

  • • •

  “It’s a shame, is what it is,” the church secretary says. Myra Lester shakes her head, then hands Patrick the cup of tea she’s made him. “Christmas Mass just around the corner, and us without a chaplain.”

  Patrick knows that the best road to information is not always the one that’s paved and straightforward, but the one that cuts around back and is most often forgotten as an access route. He also knows, from his long-lapsed days of growing up Catholic, that the collective memory—and gossip mill—most often is the church secretary. So he offers his most concerned expression, the one that always got him a pinch on the cheek from his elderly aunts. “The congregation must be devastated.”

  “Between the rumors flying around about Father Szyszynski, and the way he was killed—well, it’s most un-Christian, that’s all I have to say about it.” She sniffs, then settles her considerable bottom on a wing chair in the rectory office.

  He would like to have assumed a different persona, now—a newcomer to Biddeford, for example, checking out the parish—but he has already been seen in his capacity as a detective, during the sexual abuse investigation. “Myra,” Patrick says, then looks up at her and smiles. “I’m sorry. I meant Mrs. Lester, of course.”

  Her cheeks flame, and she titters. “Oh, no, you feel free to call me whatever you like, Detective.”

  “Well, Myra, I’ve been trying to get in touch with the priests that were visiting St. Anne’s shortly before Father Szyszynski’s death.”

  “Oh, yes, they were lovely. Just lovely! That Father O’Toole, he had the most scrumptious Southern accent. Like peach schnapps, that’s what I thought of every time he spoke . . . . Or was that Father Gwynne?”

  “The prosecution’s hounding me. I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where I could find them?”

  “They’ve gone back to their own congregations, of course.”

  “Is there a record of that? A forwarding address, maybe?”

  Myra frowns, and a small pattern of lines in the shape of a spider appears on her forehead. “I’m sure there must be. Nothing in this church goes on without me knowing the details.” She walks toward all the ledgers and logs stacked behind her desk. Flipping through the pages of a leather-bound book, she finds an entry and smacks it with the f