The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  The officer is someone I’ve worked with; Greta and I helped him find a robbery suspect who ran from the scene of a crime. “Delia,” he greets.

  My voice is as hollow as the belly of a cave. “Rob. Did something happen?”

  He hesitates. “Actually, we need to see your dad.”

  Immediately, relief swims through me. If they want my father, this isn’t about Eric. “I’ll get him,” I offer, but when I turn around he’s already standing there.

  He is holding a pair of my socks, which he folds over very neatly and hands to me. “Gentlemen,” he says. “What can I do for you?”

  “Andrew Hopkins?” the second officer says. “We have a warrant for your arrest as a fugitive from justice, in conjunction with the kidnapping of Bethany Matthews.”

  Rob has his handcuffs out. “You have the wrong person,” I say, incredulous. “My father didn’t kidnap anyone.”

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Rob recites. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to speak to an attorney, and to have an attorney present during any questioning—”

  “Call Eric,” my father says. “He’ll know what to do.”

  The policemen begin to push him through the doorway. I have a hundred questions: Why are you doing this to him? How could you be so mistaken? But the one that comes out, even as my throat is closing tight as a sealed drum, surprises me. “Who is Bethany Matthews?”

  My father does not take his gaze off me. “You were,” he says.

  Eric

  I’m almost late to my meeting, thanks to the dump truck in front of me. Like a dozen other state vehicles in Wexton in March, it’s piled high with snow—heaps removed from the sidewalks and the parking lot of the post office and the banks pushed up at the edges of the gas station. When there is just no room for another storm’s bounty, the DOT guys shovel it up and cart it away. I used to picture them driving south toward Florida, until their load had completely melted, but the truth is, they simply take the trucks to a ravine at the edge of the Wexton Golf Course and empty them there. They make a pile of snow so formidable that even in June, when the temperature hits seventy-five degrees, you’ll find kids in shorts there, sledding.

  Here’s the amazing thing: It doesn’t flood. You’d think that a volume of precipitation that immense would, upon melting, have the capacity to sweep away a few cars or turn a state highway into a raging river, but by the time the snow is gone, the ground is mostly dry. Delia was in my science class the year we learned why: snow disappears. It’s one of those solids that can turn directly into a vapor without ever going through that intermediate liquid stage—part of the process of sublimation.

  Interestingly, it wasn’t until I started coming to these meetings that I learned the second meaning of that word: to take a base impulse and redirect its energy to an ethically higher aim.

  The truck makes a right onto an access road and I swerve around it, speeding up. I pass the deli that has changed hands three times in the last six months, the old country store that still sells penny candy I sometimes bring to Sophie, the poultry farm with its enormous shrink-wrapped hay bales stacked like giant marshmallows against the barn. Finally I swerve into the parking lot and hurry out of my car and inside.

  They haven’t started yet. People are still milling around the coffee and the cookies, talking in small pockets of forced kinship. There are men in business suits and women in sweatpants, elderly men and boys yet to grow a full beard. Some of them, I know, come from an hour away to be here. I approach a group of men who are talking about how the Bruins are doing their damnedest to lose a spot in the playoffs.

  The lights flicker and, at the front of the room, the leader asks us to take our seats. He calls the meeting to order and gives a few opening remarks. I find myself sitting next to a woman who is trying to unwrap a roll of LifeSavers without making any noise. When she sees me watching, she blushes and offers me one.

  Sour apple.

  I work on sucking the candy instead of biting it, but I’ve never been a patient man, and even as I imagine it getting thin as an O-ring I find myself crunching it between my teeth. Just then there is a pause in the flow of the meeting. I raise my hand, and the leader smiles at me.

  “I’m Eric,” I say, standing. “And I’m an alcoholic.”

  * * *

  When I graduated from law school, I had a choice of several employment options. I could have joined a prestigious Boston firm with clients who would have paid $250 an hour for my expertise; I could have taken a position with the public defender’s office in a variety of counties and done the humanitarian thing; I could have clerked with a State Supreme Court justice. Instead, I chose to come back to Wexton and hang a shingle of my own. It boiled down to this: I can’t stand being away from Delia.

  Ask any guy, and he can tell you the moment he realized that the woman standing next to him was the one he’d be spending his life with. For me, it was a little different: Delia had been standing next to me for so long, that it was her absence I couldn’t handle. We went to college five hundred miles apart, and when I’d call her dorm room and get her answering machine, I’d imagine all the other guys who were at that very second trying to steal her away. I’ll admit it: For as long as I could remember, I was the object of Delia’s affection, and the thought of having competition for the first time in my life put me over the edge. Going out for a beer became a way to keep myself from obsessing about her, but eventually, that one beer became six or ten.

  Drinking was in my blood, so to speak. We’ve all read the statistics about children of alcoholics. I would have sworn up and down, when I was a kid, that I’d never turn into the person my mother had been—and maybe I wouldn’t have, if I hadn’t missed Delia quite so much. Without her, there was a hole inside me, and I suppose that to fill it, I did what came naturally in the Talcott family.

  It’s funny. I started drinking heavily because I wanted to see that expression in Delia’s eyes when she looked only at me, and it’s the same reason I quit drinking. She isn’t just the person I’m going to spend the rest of my life with, she’s the reason I have one.

  This afternoon I am meeting a potential client who happens to be a crow. Blackie was wounded when he fell out of a nest, or so says Martin Schnurr, who rescued him. He nursed the bird back to health, and when it kept hanging around, fed it cold coffee and bits of doughnuts on his porch in Hanover. But when the crow chased a neighbor’s kids, the authorities got called. Turns out, crows are a federally regulated migratory species, and Mr. Schnurr doesn’t have the state and federal license to keep him.

  “He escaped from the place where the Department of Environmental Services was holding him,” Schnurr says proudly. “Found his way back, ten whole miles.”

  “As the crow flies, of course,” I say. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Schnurr?”

  “The DES is going to come after him again. I want a restraining order,” Schnurr says. “I’m willing to go to the Supreme Court, if I have to.”

  The likelihood of this case going to Washington is somewhere between nil and nevermore, but before I can explain this the door to the office bursts open and there is Delia, frantic and crying. My insides seize. I am imagining the very worst; I am thinking of Sophie. Without even a glance at the client, I pull Delia into the hall and try to shake the facts out of her.

  “My father’s been arrested,” she says. “You have to go, Eric. You have to.”

  I have no idea what Andrew might have done, and I do not ask. She believes I can fix this, and like always, that’s enough to make me think I can. “I’ll take care of it,” I say, when what I really mean is: I’ll take care of you.

  * * *

  We didn’t play inside my house. I made sure to get up early enough so that I was always the one knocking on Delia’s door, or Fitz’s. On the occasions that we settled at my place, I did my best to keep everyone outside, under the backyard deck or beneath the sloping saltbox roof o