The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Come and get me, Ross thought.

  He walked back down the stairs, examining the kitchen, the pantry, the cellar, and the living room. A small study with double doors still had a wing chair in it, a shredded hunk of leather where a family of mice had made its nest. Old newspapers littered the floor on this level, and the walls were smeared with what seemed to be axle grease.

  “Uncle Ross? Is Aimee a ghost?”

  He felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, and it had nothing to do with the paranormal—only true, human shock. “I don’t know, Ethan.” He shoved aside the image of Aimee that rose to his mind, like a mermaid surfacing from the otherworld of the ocean. “Dying . . . well, I think it’s like taking a bus. Most people, they enjoy the ride and go on to whatever comes next. But some people get off before that last stop.”

  “Maybe she got off to see you.”

  “Maybe,” Ross said. He turned away, intent on heading up the stairs before he embarrassed himself in front of his nephew.

  “Why do you think the ghost that lives here got off the bus?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if—”

  “Ethan,” Ross interrupted. “Ssh.” He turned in a circle, trying to catch onto the minnow of a thought that swam through his mind, too quicksilver to show itself clearly. Trying to focus, he leaned over the railing to frown at the filth littering the base of the stairs, at the quiet twitching of rodents. He glanced at a hornet’s nest in the corner.

  Other organic detritus netted the hall—spider filaments and dust mites, moss and mold—the thriving scars of negligence and damp weather. Ross walked into the bedroom that looked out onto the rear of the property. There, the wooden planking was black with dirt, and strewn with broken pottery and candy bar wrappers. But the ceiling was as bare as if it had been swept clean that morning. Not a single cobweb, no fungus, no insects. In spite of the condition of the rest of the residence, no living organism had taken root in this room for some time.

  Ross turned to his nephew. “This,” he said, “is where we’ll set up.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” said Lucy’s camp counselor, a girl so young she might have passed for a child herself. She hurried Meredith down a path toward the supply shed, inside which Lucy had locked herself forty-five minutes ago. “One minute she was playing dodgeball, and the next minute she ran away screaming.”

  One of Meredith’s heels caught on a rock and nearly sent her pitching forward. Did she have Lucy’s medicine? If she was scared, so scared she couldn’t be coaxed out of the dark, she was probably having an asthma attack. “We called home right away,” the counselor said. “Your mother said she can’t drive.”

  “My grandmother,” Meredith corrected absently. In her late seventies, Ruby was smart as a tack, but she no longer felt comfortable behind a wheel. She’d called Meredith at the lab. An emergency, she’d said.

  They had reached a small wooden building at the edge of the woods. “Lucy?” Meredith rattled the handle. “Lucy, you open this door right now!” She banged against it with her fist, twice. On the third strike it swung forward on its hinges, and Meredith crawled inside.

  The stale heat hit first. A net bag filled with rubber kickballs to form an oversized molecule blocked her from getting to Lucy, who was wheezing hard behind a tower of orange safety cones and badminton racquets. Her daughter clutched a train of purple satin to her chest, the remnant of a costume from an old summer musical. She was crying.

  “Here,” Meredith said, handing over the Albuterol, which Lucy dutifully corked into her mouth and sucked in. She had learned long ago that no matter how difficult it was to see your child struggling for air, you could not breathe for her. Her first instinct was to drag Lucy out of this musty closet, for the sake of her asthma; but something told Meredith that not attending to Lucy’s fears first might be equally damaging. So she slid an arm around her daughter’s shoulders. “How come it’s even called Dodge ball?” she mused, as if it were perfectly normal to be holding a conversation here. “I mean, why not Jeep ball or Lexus ball or even Chevrolet ball?”

  “You’re supposed to move out of the way.” This, from the side of Meredith’s shoulder, where Lucy had buried herself. “That’s what the dodge is for.”

  “Ah.” She nodded slowly. “I probably knew that, once.”

  Lucy’s chest was still swelling like a bellows. “It wasn’t the game,” she confessed. “I saw something.”

  “Something?”

  “Something . . . hanging. In the tree. From a rope.”

  “Like a tire swing?”

  Lucy shook her head. “Like a lady.”

  Meredith forced herself to stay calm. “Will you show me?”

  They stumbled outside past Lucy’s counselor, past the arts-and-crafts pavilion, over the narrow bridge at the mouth of the stream to the athletic fields. A new group of campers, all older than Lucy, was playing dodgeball.

  “Where?” Meredith asked. Lucy pointed to a grove of trees on her left. Firmly grasping her daughter’s hand, Meredith marched to the base of the tree and glanced up. “No rope,” she said quietly. “Nothing.”

  “It was there.” Frustration roughened Lucy’s voice. “It was.”

  “Luce. I believe you saw something. I just think that somewhere between your retina and your cerebrum, things got a little screwed up. There’s a perfectly good explanation, one that has nothing to do with a woman hanging from a tree. For example, maybe the sun got in your eyes.”

  “Maybe,” Lucy repeated, without a shred of conviction.

  “Maybe it was a branch that the wind moved for a second.”

  Lucy shrugged.

  Suddenly Meredith toed off her heels and handed her lab coat to Lucy. “Hold this,” she said, and she started to climb the tree.

  She didn’t get that far—she was wearing a skirt, after all, and was in her stocking feet—but managed to reach an overhead branch, where she perched like an outsized squirrel. By now, all the campers in the field were watching, and even Lucy had a tiny smile on her face. “Nope,” Meredith said loudly, willing to play the fool so that at lunchtime and during swimming and on the bus ride home, campers would be talking about the crazy woman in the oak tree instead of the frightened kid who’d run away screaming. “Luce, the coast is perfectly clear . . . oh . . . oh!” With a calculated tumble that would have done Ringling Brothers proud, Meredith fell out of the tree, landing in a squat, and then rolling to the side until she came to rest a few yards away.

  She was filthy and scraped and her hair had fallen out of its barrette, but Lucy put her hands on either side of Meredith’s face. “It might have been the sun in my eyes,” Lucy whispered.

  Meredith folded her daughter into her arms. “That’s my brave girl,” she said, fully aware that neither of them believed a single word they’d said.

  Eli Rochert did not want to wake up. He knew this as well as he knew the perfume that seemed to surround him in his dreams, a curious blend of apples and rainwater; as well as he recognized the pitch of a woman’s voice, floating like a note that had never existed on any musical scale. He had only gone to bed two hours ago, having pulled a double shift to keep the Indians and the developers from coming to blows. But the telephone would not stop ringing, and finally he reached out from the cocoon of his bedclothes and snatched the receiver. “What?” he growled.

  “I’m looking for Mrs. Rochert. Is she available?”

  “No.”

  “Can you tell me when she might return?”

  Never, thought Eli, with a pang beneath his ribs that, even after all this time, surprised him. He hung up the phone without answering, then rolled onto his belly, only to find Watson hogging the pillow. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Eli muttered, shoving the dog’s muzzle away. From within the folds of his face, Watson blinked, then snuffled right back down where he’d been.

  “I should have never let you sleep on the bed,” Eli said aloud, his back pressed along the broad spine of