The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  On cue, the baby cried again.

  Spencer’s hand scrabbled over the covers to the call button beside his bed. A moment later, the night nurse came in. “Mr. Pike,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “The baby’s crying.”

  The nurse fussed behind him, turning pillows and raising the head of the bed. “There are no babies here, Mr. Pike, you know that. It was just a dream.” She patted the right angle that had once been his strong shoulder. “Now, you need to go back to sleep. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow. A meeting, remember?”

  Why, Spencer wondered, did she talk to him as if he were a child? And why did he react like one—sinking back beneath her gentle hands, letting her pull the covers up to his chest? A memory swelled at the base of Spencer’s throat, something that he could not quite pull to the front of the fog but that brought tears to his eyes. “Do you need some Naproxen?” the nurse asked kindly.

  Spencer shook his head. He had been a scientist, after all. And no laboratory had yet crafted the drug that could ease this ache.

  In person, Curtis Warburton was smaller than he seemed to be on television, but he lacked none of the magnetism that had made Bogeyman Nights the highest-rated show in its time slot. His black hair was shot, skunklike, with a white streak—one he’d possessed since a night nine years ago, when the ghost of his grandfather had appeared at the foot of his bed and led him into the field of paranormal investigation. His wife, Maylene, an elf of a woman whose psychic abilities were well known to the Los Angeles police, perched beside him, taking notes as Curtis posed questions to the owners of the house.

  “First was the kitchen,” murmured Eve O’Donnell, and her husband nodded. A retired couple, they’d bought this home on the lake as a summer retreat, and in their three months of tenancy had experienced supernatural phenomena at least twice a week. “About ten in the morning, I locked up all the doors, put on the alarm system, and went to the post office. When I came home, the alarm was still on . . . but inside, the kitchen cabinets were open, and every cereal box was on the table, spilled on its side. I called Harlan, thinking he’d come home and left behind a mess.”

  “I was at the Elks Club the whole time,” her husband interjected. “Never came home. No one did.”

  “And there’s the calliope music we heard coming from the attic at two in the morning. The minute we went upstairs, it stopped. Open the door to find a child’s toy piano, missing its batteries, sitting in the middle of the floor.”

  “We don’t own a toy piano,” Harlan added. “Much less a child.”

  “And when we put in the batteries, it didn’t even play that kind of music.” Eve hesitated. “Mr. Warburton, I hope you understand that we’re not the kind of people who . . . who believe in this sort of thing. It’s just . . . it’s just that if it’s not this, then I’m losing my mind.”

  “Mrs. O’Donnell, you’re not going crazy.” Curtis touched her hand with trademark sympathy. “By tomorrow morning we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on in your home.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure Ross was getting this on camera. Depending on what happened later, the O’Donnells might find themselves featured on Bogeyman Nights, and if so, this footage was critical. The Warburtons received over three hundred e-mails a day from people who believed their houses were haunted. Eighty-five percent of the claims turned out to be hoaxes or mice in the rafters. The rest—well, Ross had been working with them long enough to know that there were some things that simply could not be explained.

  “Have you experienced any spectral visions?” Curtis asked. “Temperature changes?”

  “Our bedroom will be hot as hell one minute, and then we’ll be shivering the next,” Harlan answered.

  “Are there any spots in the house in particular where you feel uncomfortable?”

  “The attic, definitely. The upstairs bathroom.”

  Curtis’s eyes swept from the hand-knotted Oriental rug to the antique vase on the mantel of the fireplace. “I have to warn you that finding a ghost can be a costly proposition.”

  As the Warburtons’ field researcher, Ross had been sent to libraries and newspaper archives to locate documents about the property—and hopefully the bonus information that a murder or a suicide might have occurred there. His inquiry had turned up nothing, but that never stopped Curtis. After all, a ghost could haunt a person as well as a place. History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one’s eyelids.

  “Whatever it takes,” Eve O’Donnell said. “This isn’t about money.”

  “Of course not.” Curtis smiled and slapped his palms on his knees. “Well, then. We’ve got some work to do.”

  That was Ross’s cue. During the investigation, he was responsible for setting up and monitoring the electromagnetic equipment, the digital video cameras, the infrared thermometer. He worked for minimum wage, in spite of the money that came in from the TV show and from cases like this one. Ross had begged the Warburtons for a job nine months ago after reading about them in the L.A. Times on Halloween. Unlike Curtis and Maylene, he had never seen a spirit—but he wanted to, badly. He was hoping that sensitivity to ghosts might be something you could catch from close contact, like chicken pox—and, like chicken pox, might be something that would mark you forever.

  “I thought I’d check the attic,” Ross said.

  He stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting for Eve O’Donnell to lead the way upstairs. “I feel foolish,” she confided, although Ross had not asked. “At my age, seeing Casper.”

  Ross smiled. “A ghost can shake you up a little, and make you think you’re nuts, but it’s not going to hurt you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’d hurt me.”

  “She?”

  Eve hesitated. “Harlan said I shouldn’t volunteer any information. That way if you see what we do, then we’d know.” She shivered, glanced up the narrow stairs. “My little sister died when I was seven. Sometimes I wonder . . . can a ghost find you, if she wants to?”

  Ross looked away. “I don’t know,” he said, wishing he could have offered her more—a concrete answer, a personal experience. His eyes lit on the small door at the top of the stairs. “Is that it?”

  She nodded, letting him pass in front of her to unlatch it. The video camera Ross had mounted outside watched them from the window, a cyclops. Eve hugged herself tightly. “Being here gives me the chills.”

  Ross moved some boxes, so that no shadows would be caught on tape that could be explained away. “Curtis says that’s how you know where to find them. You go with what your senses are telling you.” A wink on the floor caught his eye; kneeling, he picked up a handful of pennies. “Six cents.” He smiled. “Ironic.”

  “She does that sometimes.” Eve was edging toward the door, her arms wrapped around herself. “Leaves us change.”

  “The ghost?” Ross asked, turning, but Eve had already fled down the stairs.

  Taking a deep breath, he closed the door to the attic and shut the light, plunging the small room into blackness. He stepped off to the side where he would not be in range of the video camera, and activated it with a remote control. Then he fixed his attention on the darkness around him, letting it press in at his chest and the backs of his knees, as Curtis Warburton had taught him. Ross cracked open his senses until the lip of disbelief thinned, until the space around him bloomed. Maybe this is it, he thought. Maybe the coming of ghosts feels like a sob at the back of your throat.

  Somewhere off to the left was the sound of a footfall, and the unmistakable chime of coins striking the floor. Switching on a flashlight, Ross swung the beam until it illuminated his boot, and the three new pennies beside it. “Aimee?” he whispered to the empty air. “Is that you?”

  Comtosook, Vermont, was a town marked by boundaries: the dip where it slipped into Lake Champlain, the cliffs that bordered the granite quarry where half the residents worked, the invisible demarcation where the rolling Vermont countryside became, with one more ste