The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Stuyvesant, the bartender, flips over a tarot card from a deck. From the looks of it, he’s playing solitaire. Patrick shakes his head. “That’s not what they’re for, you know.”

  “Well, I don’t know what the hell else to do with ’em.” He is sorting them by suit: wands, cups, swords, and pentacles. “They got left behind in the ladies’ room.” The bartender stubs out his cigarette and follows the line of Patrick’s gaze toward the door. “Jesus,” he says. “When are you going to tell her?”

  “Tell her what?”

  But Stuyvesant just shakes his head and pushes the pile of cards toward Patrick. “Here. You need these more than I do.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Patrick asks, but at that moment Nina walks in. The air in the room hums like a field full of crickets, and Patrick feels something light as helium filling him, until before he knows it he has gotten up from his seat.

  “Always a gentleman,” Nina says, tossing her big black purse beneath the bar.

  “And an officer, too.” Patrick smiles at her. “Go figure.”

  She isn’t the girl who used to live next door, hasn’t been for years. Back then she had freckles and jeans with holes at the knees and a ponytail yanked so tight it made her eyes pull at the corners. Now, she wears pantyhose and tailored suits; she has had the same short-bob hairstyle for five years. But when Patrick gets close enough, she still smells like childhood to him.

  Nina glances at his uniform as Stuyvesant slides a cup of coffee in front of her. “Did you run out of clean laundry?”

  “No, I had to spend the morning at an elementary school talking about Halloween safety. The chief insisted I wear a costume, too.” He hands her two sugars for her coffee before she asks. “How was your hearing?”

  “The witness wasn’t found competent.” She says this without betraying a single emotion on her face, but Patrick knows her well enough to realize how much it’s killing her. Nina stirs her coffee, then smiles up at him. “Anyway, I have a case for you. My two o’clock meeting, actually.”

  Patrick leans his head on his hand. When he went off to the military, Nina was at law school. She’d been his best friend then, too. Every other day that he was serving on the USS John F. Kennedy in the Persian Gulf, he received a letter from her, and through it, the vicarious life he might have had. He learned the names of the most detested professors at U of Maine. He discovered how terrifying it was to take the bar exam. He read about falling in love, when Nina met Caleb Frost, walking down a brick path he’d just laid in front of the library. Where is this going to take me? she had asked. And Caleb’s answer: Where do you want it to?

  By the time Patrick’s enlistment was up, Nina had gotten married. Patrick considered settling down in places that rolled off the tongue: Shawnee, Pocatello, Hickory. He went so far as to rent a U-Haul truck and drive exactly one thousand miles from New York City to Riley, Kansas. But in the end, it turned out that he’d learned too well from Nina’s letters, and he moved back to Biddeford, simply because he could not stay away.

  “And then,” Nina says, “a pig leaped into the butter dish and ruined the whole dinner party.”

  “No shit?” Patrick laughs, caught. “What did the hostess do?”

  “You’re not listening, Patrick, goddammit.”

  “Sure I am. But Jesus, Nina. Brain matter on the passenger seat visor that doesn’t belong to anyone in the car? Might as well be a pig in the butter dish you’re talking about.” Patrick shakes his head. “Who leaves his cerebral cortex behind in someone else’s rig?”

  “You tell me. You’re the detective.”

  “Okay. My best guess? The car’s been reconditioned. Your defendant bought it used, never knowing that the previous owner drove to a secluded rest stop and blew his brains out in the front seat. It got cleaned up well enough for resale value . . . but not for the indomitable Maine State Lab.”

  Nina stirs her coffee, then reaches across to Patrick’s plate to take a French fry. “That’s not impossible,” she admits. “I’ll have to trace the car.”

  “I can get you the name of a guy we used as an informant once—he ran a reconditioning business before he started dealing.”

  “Get me the whole file. Leave it in my mailbox at home.”

  Patrick shakes his head. “I can’t. That’s a federal offense.”

  “You’re kidding,” Nina laughs. “It’s not like you’re leaving a bomb.” But Patrick doesn’t even smile; for him the world is a place of rules. “Fine, then. Leave it outside the front door.” She glances down as her beeper sounds, pulls it from the waistband of her skirt. “Oh, damn.”

  “Problem?”

  “Nathaniel’s preschool.” She takes her cell phone from her black bag and dials a number. “Hi, it’s Nina Frost. Yes. Of course. No, I understand.” She hangs up, then dials again. “Peter, it’s me. Listen, I just got a call from Nathaniel’s school. I have to go pick him up, and Caleb’s at a job site. I’ve got two motions to suppress on DUIs; can you cover for me? Plead the cases, I don’t care, I just want to get rid of them. Yeah. Thanks.”

  “What’s the matter with Nathaniel?” Patrick asks as she slips the phone back into her bag. “Is he sick?”

  Nina looks away from him; she almost seems embarrassed. “No, they specifically said he wasn’t. We got off to a rocky start today; I’m betting he just needs to sit on the porch with me and regroup.”

  Patrick has spent plenty of hours on the porch with Nathaniel and Nina. Their favorite game in the fall is to bet Hershey’s kisses on which leaf will drop from a given tree first. Nina plays to win, just like she does with everything else in her life, but then she claims she is too stuffed to reap the bounty and she donates all her chocolate to Nathaniel. When Nina is with her son, she seems—well, brighter, more colorful—and softer. When they are laughing with their heads bent close, Patrick sometimes sees her not as the attorney she is now but as the little girl who was once his partner in crime.

  “I could go get him for you,” Patrick suggests.

  “Yeah, you just can’t leave him in my mailbox.” Nina grins and grabs the other half of Patrick’s sandwich from his plate. “Thanks, but Miss Lydia made a personal request to see me, and believe me, you don’t want to get on that woman’s bad side.” Nina takes a bite, then hands the rest to Patrick. “I’ll call you later.” She hurries out of the bar before Patrick can say good-bye.

  He watches her go. Sometimes he wonders if she ever slows down, if she’s moving so fast through her own life that she cannot even realize the physics of the trajectory she’s taken: Bend the curve of time, and even yesterday looks unfamiliar. The truth is, Nina will forget to call him. And Patrick will phone her instead and ask if Nathaniel is all right. She’ll apologize and say she meant to get back to him all along. And Patrick . . . well, Patrick will forgive her, just like he always does.

  • • •

  “Acting out,” I repeat, looking Miss Lydia in the eye. “Did Nathaniel tell Danny again that I’d put him in jail if he didn’t share the dinosaurs?”

  “No, this time it’s aggressive behavior. Nathaniel’s been ruining other children’s work—knocking down block structures, and at one point he scribbled over a little girl’s drawing.”

  I offer my most winning smile. “Nathaniel wasn’t quite himself this morning. Maybe it’s some kind of virus.”

  Miss Lydia frowned. “I don’t think so, Mrs. Frost. There are other incidents . . . he was climbing the swing set today, and jumping off the top—”

  “Kids do that kind of thing all the time!”

  “Nina,” Miss Lydia says gently, Miss Lydia who in four years has never used my first name, “was Nathaniel speaking before he came to school this morning?”

  “Well, of course he—” I begin, and then I stop. The bed-wetting, the rushed breakfast, the black mood—there is much I remember about Nathaniel that morning, but the only voice I hear in my mind is my own.

  • • •

  I would