The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  The thing that most people didn’t understand, if they weren’t in his line of work, was that a rape victim and a victim of a fatal accident were both gone, forever. The difference was that the rape victim still had to go through the motions of being alive.

  He climbed the stairs over the smoothie bar to the interim apartment he’d rented after the divorce, the one he swore he’d live in for only six months but that had turned out to be his home for six years. It wasn’t furnished—the less appealing it was, the easier Mike figured it would be to get motivated to leave it—but he had a futon that he usually left open as a bed, and a beanbag chair and a TV that he left running 24/7 so that Ernestine would have something to listen to when he was at work.

  “Ernie?” he called out as soon as his keys turned in the lock. “I’m back.”

  She wasn’t on the futon, where he’d left her when the call came in this morning. Mike stripped off his tie and walked toward the bathroom. He drew back the shower curtain to find the potbellied pig asleep in the bottom of the tub. “Miss me?” he asked.

  The pig opened one eye and grunted.

  “You know, the only reason I came home was to take you for a walk,” Mike said, but the pig had fallen back asleep.

  He had a warrant in his pocket—Trixie’s statement, plus the presence of semen, was enough probable cause to arrest Jason Underhill. He even knew where the kid was, just like everyone in the town who was following the high school hockey team’s stellar exploits. But he had to come home first to let Ernie out. At least that’s what he’d told himself.

  Do you have any kids? Daniel Stone had asked.

  Mike turned off the television and sat in silence for a few moments. Then he went to the one closet in the apartment and pulled down a cardboard box.

  Inside the box was a pillow from Mike’s daughter’s bed, one that he’d stuffed into an enormous plastic evidence bag. He broke the ziplocked seal and inhaled deeply. It hardly smelled like her anymore at all, in spite of the great care he had taken.

  Suddenly, Ernestine came running. She skidded across the floor, scrambling over to the futon where Mike sat. Her snout went into the plastic bag with the pillow, and Mike wondered if she could scent something he couldn’t. The pig looked up at Mike.

  “I know,” he said. “I miss her, too.”

  • • •

  Daniel sat in the kitchen with a bottle of sherry in front of him. He hated sherry, but it was the only liquid with alcoholic content in this house right now. He had already burned through half the bottle, and it was a large one, something Laura liked to use when she made stir-fry chicken. He didn’t feel drunk, though. He only felt like a failure.

  Fatherhood was the entire foundation Daniel had reinvented himself upon. When he thought about being a parent, he saw a baby’s hand spread like a star on his chest. He saw the tightness between the kite and the spool of string that held it. Finding out that he’d fallen short of his responsibility for protecting his daughter made him wonder how he’d gone so long fooling himself into believing he had truly changed.

  The part of himself that he’d thought he’d exorcised turned out to have been only lying in the shallow grave where old personalities went to be discarded. With the sherry lighting his way, Daniel could see that now. He could feel anger building like steam.

  The new Daniel, the father Daniel, had answered the detective’s questions and trusted the police to do what they were supposed to, because that was the best way to ensure the safety of his child. But the old Daniel . . . well, he never would have trusted anyone else to complete a job that rightfully belonged to him. He would have fought back in revenge, kicking and screaming.

  In fact, he often had.

  Daniel stood up and shrugged on his jacket just as Laura walked into the kitchen. She took one look at the bottle of sherry on the table, and then at him. “You don’t drink.”

  Daniel stared at her. “Didn’t,” he corrected.

  “Where are you going?”

  He didn’t answer her. He didn’t owe her an explanation. He didn’t owe anyone anything. This was not about payment, it was about payback.

  Daniel opened the door and hurried out to his truck. Jason Underhill would be at the town rink, right now, getting dressed for the Saturday afternoon game.

  • • •

  Because Trixie asked, Laura waited for her to fall asleep. She came downstairs in time to see Daniel leave, and he didn’t have to tell her where he was headed. Even worse, Laura wasn’t sure she would have stopped him.

  Biblical justice was antiquated, or so she had been taught. You couldn’t hack off the hand of a thief; you couldn’t stone a murderer to death. A more advanced society took care of its justice in a courtroom—something Laura had advocated until about five hours ago. A trial might be more civilized, but emotionally, it couldn’t possibly pack as much satisfaction.

  She tried to imagine what Daniel might do if he found Jason, but she couldn’t. It had been so long since Daniel had been anything but quiet and mild-mannered that she had completely forgotten the shadow that had once clung to him, so dark and unpredictable that she’d had to come closer for a second glance. Laura felt the same way she had last Christmas when she’d hung one of Trixie’s baby shoes on the tree as an ornament: wistful, aware that her daughter had once been tiny enough to fit into this slipper but unable to hold that picture in her head along with the one in front of her eyes—a teenage Trixie dancing around the balsam in her bare feet, stringing white lights in her wake.

  She tried to sit down with a book, but she reread the same page four times. She turned on the television but could not find the humor in any canned jokes.

  A moment later, she found herself at the computer, Googling the word rape.

  There were 10,900,000 hits, and immediately that made Laura feel better. Strength in numbers: She was not the only mother who’d felt this way; Trixie was not the only victim. The Web sites rooted this godawful word, and all the suffocating aftershocks that hung from it like Spanish moss.

  She started clicking: One out of every six American women has been the victim of an attempted or a completed rape in her lifetime, adding up to 17.7 million people.

  Sixty-six percent of rape victims know their assailant. Forty-eight percent are raped by a friend.

  Twenty percent of rapes take place at the home of a friend, neighbor, or relative.

  More than half occur within a mile of the victim’s home.

  Eighty percent of rape victims are under age thirty. Girls between ages sixteen and nineteen are four times more likely than the general population to be victims of sexual assault.

  Sixty-one percent of rapes are not reported to the police. If a rape is reported, there’s a 50.8 percent chance that an arrest will be made. If an arrest is made, there’s an 80 percent chance of prosecution. If there’s a prosecution, there’s a 58 percent chance of felony conviction. If there’s a felony conviction, there’s a 69 percent chance that the rapist will actually spend time in jail. Of the 39 percent of rapes that are reported to police, then, there’s only a 16.3 percent chance that the rapist will wind up in prison. If you factor in all the unreported rapes, 94 percent of rapists walk free.

  Laura stared at the screen, at the cursor blinking on one of the multiple percent signs. Trixie was one of these numbers now, one of these percents. She wondered how it was that she’d never truly studied this statistical symbol before: a figure split in two, a pair of empty circles on either side.

  • • •

  Daniel had to park far away from the entrance to the municipal rink, which wasn’t surprising on a Saturday afternoon. High school hockey games in Bethel, Maine, drew the same kind of crowds high school football did in Midwestern communities. There were girls standing in the lobby, fixing their lipstick in the reflection of the plate-glass windows, and toddlers weaving through the denim forest of grown-up legs. The grizzled man who sold hot dogs and nachos and Swiss Miss cocoa had taken up residence behind the kitchen