The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  • • •

  Moe Baedeker, proprietor of Moe’s Gun Shop, does not know what to do with his baseball cap. The bailiffs made him take it off, but his hair is matted and messy. He puts the cap on his lap and finger-combs his hair. In doing so, he catches sight of his nails, with grease and gun blueing caught beneath the cuticles, and he quickly sticks his hands beneath his thighs. “Ayuh, I recognize her,” he says, nodding at me. “She came into my store once. Walked right up to the counter and told me she wanted a semiautomatic handgun.”

  “Had you ever seen her before?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did she look around the store at all?” Quentin asks.

  “Nope. She was waiting in the parking lot when I opened, and then she came right up to the counter.” He shrugs. “I did an instant background check on her, and when she came out clean, I sold her what she wanted.”

  “Did she ask for any bullets?”

  “Twelve rounds.”

  “Did you show the defendant how to use the gun?”

  Moe shakes his head. “She told me she knew how.”

  His testimony breaks over me like a wave. I can remember the smell of that little shop, the raw wood on the walls, and the pictures of Rugers and Glocks behind the counter. The way the cash register was old-fashioned and actually made a ching sound. He gave me my change in new twenty-dollar bills, holding each one up to the light and pointing out how you could tell whether they were counterfeit or not.

  By the time I focus again, Fisher is doing the cross-exam. “What did she do while you were running the background check?”

  “She kept looking at her watch. Pacing, like.”

  “Was there anyone else in the store?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did she tell you why she needed a gun?”

  “Ain’t my place to ask,” Moe says.

  One of the twenties he’d given me had been written on, a man’s signature. “I did that once,” Moe told me that morning. “And, swear to God, got the same bill back six years later.” He’d handed me my gun, hot in my hand. “What goes around comes around,” he’d said, and at the time, I was too self-absorbed to heed this as the warning it was.

  • • •

  The cameraman had been filming for WCSH and was set up in the corner, according to Quentin Brown’s diagram of the Biddeford courtroom. As the videotape is slipped into a TV/VCR, I keep my eyes on the jury. I want to watch them watching me.

  Once, maybe, I saw this segment. But it was months ago, when I believed I had done the right thing. The familiar voice of the judge draws my attention, and then I cannot help but stare at this small screen.

  My hands shake when I hold up the gun. My eyes are wide and wild. But my motion is smooth and beautiful, a ballet. As I press the gun to the priest’s head my own tilts backward, and for one stunning moment my face is split into masques of comedy and tragedy—half grief, half relief.

  The shot is so loud that even on tape, it makes me jump in my seat.

  Shouts. A cry. The cameraman’s voice, saying, “Holy fucking shit!” Then the camera tilts on its axis and there are my feet, flying over the bar, and the thud of the bailiffs’ bodies pinning me, and Patrick.

  “Fisher,” I whisper. “I’m going to be sick.”

  The viewpoint shifts again, spinning to rest on its side on the floor. The priest’s head lies in a spreading pool of blood. Half of it is missing, and the spots and flecks on the film suggest the spray of brain matter on the camera lens. One eye stares dully at me from the screen. “Did I get him?” My own voice. “Is he dead?”

  “Fisher . . .” The room revolves.

  I feel him stand up beside me. “Your Honor, if I could request a short recess . . .”

  But there isn’t time for that. I jump out of my seat and stumble through the gate at the bar, flying down the aisle of the courtroom with two bailiffs in pursuit. I make it through the double doors, then fall to my knees and vomit repeatedly, until the only thing left in my stomach is guilt.

  • • •

  “Frost Heaves,” I say minutes later, when I have cleaned myself up and Fisher has whisked me to a private conference room away from the eyes of the press. “That’ll be tomorrow’s headline.”

  He steeples his fingers. “You know, I’ve got to tell you, that was good. Amazing, really.”

  I glance at him. “You think I threw up on purpose?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “My God.” Turning away, I stare out the window. If anything, the crowd outside has grown. “Fisher, did you see that tape? How could any juror acquit me after that?”

  Fisher is quiet for a moment. “Nina, what were you thinking when you were watching it?”

  “Thinking? Who had time to think, with all the visual cues? I mean, that’s an unbelievable amount of blood. And the brains—”

  “What were you thinking about yourself?”

  I shake my head, close my eyes, but there are no words for what I’ve done.

  Fisher pats my arm. “That,” he says, “is why they’ll acquit you.”

  • • •

  In the lobby, where he is sequestered as an upcoming witness, Patrick tries to keep his mind off Nina and her trial. He’s done a crossword puzzle in a paper left on the seat beside him; he’s had enough cups of coffee to raise his pulse a few notches; he’s talked to other cops coming in and out. But it’s all pointless; Nina runs through his blood.

  When she staggered from the courtroom, her hand clapped over her mouth, Patrick had risen out of his chair. He was already halfway across the lobby, trying to make sure she was all right, when Caleb burst out of the double doors on the heels of the bailiffs.

  So Patrick sat back down.

  On his hip, his beeper begins to vibrate. Patrick pulls it off his belt and glances at the number on the screen. Finally, he thinks, and he goes to find a pay phone.

  • • •

  When it is time for lunch, Caleb gets sandwiches from a nearby deli and brings them back to the conference room where I am ensconced. “I can’t eat,” I say, as he hands me one wrapped sub. I expect him to tell me that I have to, but instead Caleb just shrugs and lets the sandwich sit in front of me. From the corner of my eye I watch him chew his food in silence. He has already conceded this war; he no longer even cares enough to fight me.

  There is a rattle of the locked door, followed by an insistent banging. Caleb scowls, then gets up to tell whoever it is to go away. But when he opens it a crack, Patrick is standing on the other side. The door falls open, and the two men stand uneasily facing each other, a seam of energy crackling between them that keeps them from getting too close.

  I realize at that moment that although I have many photographs of Patrick and many photographs of Caleb, I haven’t got a single one of all three of us—as if, in that combination, it is impossible to fit so much emotion in the frame of the camera.

  “Nina,” he says, coming inside. “I have to talk to you.”

  Not now, I think, going cold. Surely Patrick has enough sense to not bring up what happened in front of my husband. Or maybe that is exactly what he wants to do.

  “Father Gwynne’s dead.” Patrick hands me a faxed Nexus article. “I got a call from the Belle Chasse police chief. I got tired of working on Southern time a few days ago, and I put a little pressure on the authorities . . . anyway, it seems that by the time they went to arrest him, he’d died.”

  My face is frozen. “Who did it?” I whisper.

  “No one. It was a stroke.”

  Patrick keeps talking, his words falling like hailstones onto the paper I’m trying to read. “ . . . took the damn chief two whole days to get around to calling me . . .”

  Father Gwynne, a beloved local chaplain, was found dead in his living quarters by his housekeeper.

  “ . . . apparently, he had a family history of cardiovascular disease . . .”

  “He looked so peaceful, you know, in his easy chair,” said Margaret Mary Seurat, who had work