The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Rod shook his head. “I’m not from around here.”

  He didn’t know what made him look in the rearview mirror after he got into the car. The man was still standing there, as if he did not understand what should happen next. Suddenly Rod’s cell phone began to ring. He dug in his breast pocket, flipped it open. “Van Vleet.”

  “Angel Quarry,” said the woman at the other end, as if he’d been the one to call; as if that made any sense at all.

  “Yeah, I’m coming,” Shelby muttered, as the raps on her front door grew louder. It was only 11 A.M. If this moron woke Ethan . . . She knotted her hair into a ponytail holder, tugged her pajamas to rights, and squinted against the sun as she opened the door. For a moment, backlit by the daylight, she didn’t recognize him.

  “Shel?”

  It had been two years since she’d seen Ross. They still looked alike—the same rangy build, the same intense pale gaze that people found it hard to break away from. But Ross had lost weight and let his hair grow long. And oh, the circles under his eyes—they were even darker than her own.

  “I woke you up,” he apologized. “I could . . .”

  “Come here,” Shelby finished, and she folded her baby brother into an embrace.

  “Go back to sleep,” Ross urged, after Shelby had spent the better part of an hour fussing over him. “Ethan’s going to need you.”

  “Ethan’s going to need you,” Shelby corrected. “Once he finds out you’re here, you might as well forget about getting any rest.” She set a stack of towels on the end of the guest room bed and hugged him. “It goes without saying that you stay as long as you like.” He buried his face in the curve of her shoulder and closed his eyes. Shelby smelled like his childhood.

  Suddenly she drew back. “Oh, Ross,” she murmured, and slipped her hand beneath the collar of his shirt, pulling out the long chain that he kept hidden underneath. At the end hung a diamond solitaire, a falling star. Shelby’s fist closed around it.

  Ross jerked away, and the chain snapped. He grabbed Shelby’s wrist and shook until she let go of the ring, until it was safe in his hand. “Don’t,” he warned, setting his jaw.

  “It’s been—”

  “Don’t you think I know how long it’s been? Don’t you think I know exactly?” Ross turned away. Why was it no one spoke of how kindness can cut just as clean as a knife?

  When Shelby touched his arm, Ross didn’t respond. She didn’t force the issue. Just that one small contact, and then she backed her way out of the room.

  Shelby was right—he ought to sleep—but he also knew that wouldn’t happen. Ross had grown used to insomnia; for years it had crawled under the covers with him, pressed the length of his body with just enough restless indecision to keep him watching the digital display of a clock until the numbers justified getting out of bed.

  He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He held the ring so tightly in his hand that he could feel the prongs of the setting cutting into his skin. He would have to get something—string, a leather cord—so that he could wear it again. Wide awake, he focused his attention on the clock. He watched the numbers bleed into each other: 12:04; 12:05; 12:06. He counted the roses on the comforter cover. He tried to remember the words to “Waltzing Matilda.”

  When he startled awake at 5:58, Ross could not believe it. He blinked, feeling better than he had in months. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and stood up, wondering if Shelby might have a spare toothbrush.

  It was the absence of the slight weight against his chest that reminded him of the ring. Ross opened his fist and panicked. The diamond he’d fallen asleep clutching was nowhere in sight—not under the covers, not on the carpet, not even behind the bed, which Ross moved with frantic haste. I’ve lost her, Ross thought, staring blankly at what he’d awakened holding instead: a 1932 penny—smooth as a secret; still warm from the heat of his hand.

  TWO

  For an eight-year-old, Lucy Oliver knew quite a lot. She could list all the state capitals; she could explain how a thundercloud formed; she could spell RHYTHM forward and backward. She knew other things too, more important, non-school things. For example, she knew that her great-grandma had come home from the doctor a month ago with little white pills that she hid in the toe of an orthopedic sneaker in her closet. She knew that when grown-ups lowered their voices it meant you had to listen harder. She knew that even the smartest person in the world could be scared by what he or she didn’t understand.

  Lucy also knew, with staunch conviction, that it was only a matter of time before one of them got her.

  They changed form, from night to night. Sometimes they were the shifting shape of the patterns on her curtains. Sometimes they were the cold spot on the floor as Lucy raced across the wide wooden boards into bed. Sometimes they were a smell that made Lucy dream of leaves and dark and carcasses.

  Tonight she was pretending that she was a turtle. Nothing could get into that hard shell; nothing at all. Not even the thing she was certain was breathing at this very second inside her closet. But even with her eyes wide open, Lucy could see the night changing. In some spots it got more pointed; in others it drew back . . . until she was staring into the see-through face of a woman so sad it made Lucy’s stomach hurt.

  I will find you, the lady said, right inside Lucy’s own head.

  She stifled a scream, because that would wake up her great-grandmother, and whipped the covers over her head. Her thin chest pumped like a piston; her breathing went damp. If this woman could find her, anywhere, then where would Lucy hide? Would her mother know she’d been snatched, just by the dent Lucy’s body left behind on the mattress?

  She snaked one hand out far enough to grab the phone she’d placed on her nightstand and stamped the button that automatically dialed her mother’s lab. Lucy imagined an invisible line connecting her from this phone to the one her mother was holding, a wireless umbilicus, and was so grateful for the picture in her head that she couldn’t squeeze any words around it.

  “Oh, Lucy,” her mother sighed into the silence. “What’s the matter now?”

  “It’s the air,” Lucy whispered, hating her voice. It came out tiny and frantic, like the scramble of mice. “It’s too heavy.”

  “Did you take your inhaler?”

  Lucy had. She was old enough to know what to do when her asthma flared. But it wasn’t that kind of heavy. “It’s going to crush me.” There, it had gotten even worse. Lucy lay down beneath the weight of the night, trying to breathe in small puffs, so that the oxygen in the room would last longer.

  “Honey.” Her mother spoke in a tone that made Lucy think of cold glass vials and mile-long white countertops. “You know air can’t change its weight, not inside your bedroom. This is all your imagination.”

  “But . . .” Lucy hunched away from the closet, because she could feel the lady watching. “Mom, I’m not making it up.”

  There was a beat that lasted the exact amount of time it took her mother to lose her temper. “Lucy. There are no such things as ghosts, or goblins, or demons, or . . . or air-crushing invisible beasts. Go to bed.”

  Lucy held the receiver after the line went dead. When the metallic voice of the operator came on, asking her to hang up if she wanted to make another call, she buried the phone beneath her pillow. Her mother was right; she knew on some rational plane that nothing in her room was out to get her; that monsters didn’t hide in closets or under beds, that crying ladies didn’t appear out of nowhere. If the air was becoming as thick as pea soup, there was a perfectly logical explanation, one that could be explained by physics and chemistry.

  But all the same, when Meredith Oliver came home hours later, she found her daughter sleeping in a tub lined with pillows and blankets; the bathroom lit bright as midday.

  Ross watched his nephew defy gravity one more time, the skateboard rising on the air beneath his balanced feet. “That’s a fifty/fifty,” Ethan informed him, his cheeks flushed with exertion; his hairline damp beneath t