The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  He shakes his head. “Nina,” he sighs, “why do you think I’m so worried?”

  • • •

  “What were you thinking when you woke up the morning of October thirtieth?” Fisher asks me, minutes later.

  “That this would be the worst day of my life.”

  Fisher turns, surprised. After all, we have not rehearsed this. “Why? Father Szyszynski was about to be arraigned.”

  “Yes. But once he was charged, that speedy trial clock would start ticking. Either they’d bring him to trial or let him go. And that meant Nathaniel would have to get involved again.”

  “When you arrived at the courthouse, what happened?”

  “Thomas LaCroix, the prosecutor, said they were going to try to clear the courtroom because this was such a high-profile case. It meant the arraignment would be delayed.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told my husband I had to go to the office.”

  “Did you?”

  I shake my head. “I wound up at a gun shop, in the parking lot. I didn’t really know how I’d gotten there, but I knew it was a place I was supposed to be.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went in when the store opened, and I bought a gun.”

  “And then?”

  “I put the gun in my purse and went back to court for the arraignment.”

  “Did you plan what you were going to do with the gun during the drive?” Fisher asks.

  “No. The only thing on my mind was Nathaniel.”

  Fisher lets this lie for a moment. “What did you do when you arrived at the courthouse?”

  “I walked in.”

  “Did you think about the metal detectors?”

  “No, I never do. I just walk around them because I’m a prosecutor. I do it twenty times a day.”

  “Did you purposefully go around the metal detectors because you were carrying a gun in your purse?”

  “At that moment,” I answer, “I was not thinking at all.”

  • • •

  I am watching the door, just watching the door, and the priest is going to come out of it at any moment. My head, it’s pounding past the words that Caleb says. I have to see him. I can’t hear anything but my blood, that buzzing. He will come through that door.

  When the knob turns, I hold my breath. When the door swings open, and the bailiff appears first, time stops. And then the whole room falls away and it is me and him, with Nathaniel bound between us like glue. I cannot look at him, and then I cannot look away.

  The priest turns his head and, unerringly, his eyes find mine.

  Without saying a word, he speaks: I forgive you.

  It is the thought of him pardoning me that breaks something loose inside. My hand slides into my purse and with almost casual indifference I let it happen.

  Do you know how sometimes you know you are dreaming, even while it occurs? The gun is tugged forward like a magnet, until it comes within inches of his head. At the moment I pull the trigger I am not thinking of Szyszynski; I am not thinking of Nathaniel; I am not even thinking of revenge.

  Just one word, clamped between the vise of my teeth:

  No.

  • • •

  “Nina!” Fisher hisses, close to my face. “Are you all right?”

  I blink at him, then at the jury staring at me. “Yes. I’m . . . sorry.”

  But in my head I’m still there. I hadn’t expected the recoil of the gun. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Kill a man, and you will be punished.

  “Did you struggle when the guards fell on top of you?”

  “No,” I murmur. “I just wanted to know he was dead.”

  “Is that when Detective Ducharme took you into the holding cell?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you say anything to him back there?”

  “That I didn’t have any choice. I had to do it.”

  Which, it turns out, was true. I had said it, at the time, to deliberately sound crazy. But what those psychiatrists have testified to is technically accurate—I had no conscious control of my actions. They are only wrong in thinking that this means I was insane. What I did was no mental illness, no psychotic break. It was instinct.

  Fisher pauses. “You found out some time later that, in fact, Father Szyszynski was not the man who sexually abused your son. How did that make you feel?”

  “I wanted to be put in jail.”

  “Do you still feel that way?” Fisher asks.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  In that instant, my eye falls on the defense table, where neither Fisher nor I are sitting. It is already a ghost town, I think. “I did what I did to keep my son safe. But how can I keep him safe when I’m not with him?”

  Fisher catches my eye meaningfully. “Will you ever take the law into your own hands again?”

  Oh, I know what he wants me to say. I know, because it is what I would try to draw from a witness at this moment too. But I have told myself enough lies. I’m not going to hand-feed them to this jury, too.

  “I wish I could tell you I never would . . . but that wouldn’t be true. I thought I knew this world. I thought I could control it. But just when you think you’ve got your life by the reins, that’s when it’s most likely to run away with you.

  “I killed someone.” The words burn on my tongue. “No, not just someone, but a wonderful man. An innocent man. That’s something I’m going to carry with me, forever. And like any burden, it is going to get heavier and heavier . . . except I’ll never be able to put it down, because now it’s a part of who I am.” Turning to the jury, I repeat, “I would like to tell you that I’d never do anything like this again, but then, I never thought I was capable of doing anything like this in the first place. And as it turned out, I was wrong.”

  Fisher, I think, is going to kill me. It is hard to see him through the tears. But my heart isn’t hammering, and my soul is still. An equal and opposite reaction. After all this time, it turns out that the best way to atone for doing something blatantly wrong is to do something else blatantly right.

  • • •

  But for the grace of God, Quentin thinks, and it could be him sitting in that box. After all, there is not that much difference between himself and Nina Frost. Maybe he wouldn’t have killed for his son, but he certainly greased wheels to make Gideon’s conviction for drug possession go down much easier than it might have. Quentin can even remember that visceral pang that came when he found out about Gideon—not because he’d broken the law, like Tanya thought, but because his boy must have been scared shitless by the system. Yes, under different circumstances, Quentin might have liked Nina; might even have had something to talk to her about over a beer. Still, you make a bed, you’ve got to lie in it . . . which has landed Nina on the other side of the witness box, and Quentin six feet away and determined to take her down.

  He raises one eyebrow. “You’re telling us that in spite of everything you know about the court system and child abuse cases, on the morning of October thirtieth you woke up with no intention of killing Father Szyszynski?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that as you drove to the courthouse for this man’s arraignment, which—as you said—would start the clock ticking . . . at that point, you had no plans to kill Father Szyszynski?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Ah.” Quentin paces past the front of the witness stand. “I guess it came to you in a flash of inspiration when you were driving to the gun store.”

  “Actually, no.”

  “Was it when you asked Moe to load the semiautomatic weapon for you?”

  “No.”

  “So I suppose when you skirted the metal detector, back at the courthouse, killing Father Szyszynski was still not part of your plan?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “When you walked into the courtroom, Mrs. Frost, and took up a position that would give you the best vantage point to kill Glen Szyszynski witho