The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  One that she hadn’t kept.

  Meredith knew the science behind conception; she understood what parents could and could not pass along to their children. But she could not help wondering if, somehow, the intangibles bled through by osmosis. If she’d wanted a baby from the moment she’d found out—instead of wishing, in the darkest part of the night, that she’d miscarry—would Lucy have been more secure? She loved her daughter now; she could not imagine a life without her in it. But if she was going to be brutally honest with herself, eight years ago, she could have easily gone the other way.

  Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.

  Oh, Lucy, she thought, if I could do it over again. She would work less, and take her daughter mountain climbing instead. She would teach her a martial art. She would admit that she did not know all the answers, and what’s more, might not ever be able to find them.

  With a sigh, Meredith turned back to the scope. Two days from now this embryo would be implanted in its mother’s womb. The irony didn’t escape her—she, who had not wanted a baby yet wound up with one, was often the last hope of parents who wanted a baby more than anything but couldn’t conceive. This child would not have cystic fibrosis, but that didn’t mean it might not contract meningitis. You never knew what you were going to get. Close a door, and you’d still feel a breeze through the window.

  Neither Castleton Road nor West Oren Street turned out to be anywhere near the Pike property, but that didn’t keep Ross from plotting the routes on a map he’d bought at the gas station and finding the houses. However, Lia Beaumont did not live at either the sleepy Victorian whose picket fence badly needed painting, or the log home guarded by the German shepherd named Armageddon. It was possible that she lived at the unlisted address, but he would ask her that the next time he saw her.

  If he saw her.

  Ross had eaten all his meals at the town diner, and he’d been on a vigil at the property for the past two nights, but Lia Beaumont had not materialized. He’d seen Az Thompson skulking around again, two raccoons having sex, and several times, his video equipment had picked up the most remarkable globules—large as a basketball and pearly white, streaking across the screen.

  He would have liked to show these to Lia.

  Ross wanted to ask her if she thought her mother would wait to be found, no matter how many years it took. He wanted to ask her if she loved her husband the way he loved Aimee. He wanted to know what differences between them could seem just as irreconcilable as death.

  He was worried, too, that maybe her husband had found out that she’d met Ross at the diner, and had punished her. He didn’t know what that would entail. Physical abuse? Psychological? It was possible, too, that the reason she’d disappeared was because Lia—who had admitted to cutting her arms to feel something, anything—had simply decided that the surest way to find her mother was to turn herself into a ghost.

  Ross found himself reading the obituaries, and sighing with relief when she wasn’t mentioned. He began to make ridiculous bargains with himself: If I can hold my breath for three full minutes, she will come tonight. If I make this light before it turns red, she will be there.

  Some nights at the Pike property were more active than others. There were wild temperature swings and tiny flashes of blue light between the branches of trees, and the smell of hemlock occasionally seemed thick enough to choke. Twice, Ross had heard the hinged cry of an infant.

  The third night, he was sitting at the edge of the clearing where he’d targeted his investigation, the night wrapped as tight as a straitjacket, when the stone fell out of the sky. It was approximately the size of a dinner plate and nearly as flat, and dropped from a high enough velocity to crack against his shin. “Shit!” Ross yelped, jumping to his feet. Pain throbbed up his leg and a welt rose below his knee. Peering up the nearest tree with his flashlight, he could see nothing. He was in no shape to climb. So he took that same rock and slammed it hard enough against the trunk to make it shake. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who’s there?”

  He expected an animal—a bear cub, or some kind of mutant squirrel—but there was nothing. He snapped off a branch and then used it to beat at the others. He kept at this for a while, not because he really thought he was going to find anything, but because he wanted some measure of revenge. It was only when he stopped, exhausted, that he heard the digging.

  It was faint, like a woodchuck scratching a hole in a garden. Ross limped toward the far side of the clearing, the sound growing stronger. His flashlight illuminated about thirty small mounds, arranged in no particular order.

  Different archaeological experts and excavation teams had razed parts of the property, yet this particular spot had been intact when Ross arrived at dusk that evening. Now, enough earth had been dug out of each hole to make a small pile, although when Ross bent down and tried to dig a little deeper with a stick, the ground was just as frigid and snowy as it had been for days.

  Ross had never actually seen a primitive burial ground, but he imagined it looked something like this.

  He drew his digital camera from his pocket and took pictures from several angles. Then he bent to the tiny LCD display to see what the photos looked like. But in every single picture, the ground was perfectly flat, covered with a layer of undisturbed ice. Confounded, Ross shined the flashlight down on the same patch of land. There were no mounds of dirt, where minutes ago there had been many.

  “I know what I saw.” Ross stomped around the small space, but there was no give to the ground; it was still frozen solid.

  Had he imagined all of it? He bent down and rolled up the leg of his pants—no, the welt was even bigger now, and a vivid shade of purple. That stone had fallen. That sound had been digging. Those heaps had been there.

  Another reason to miss Lia: had she come tonight, and seen this, Ross would not have thought he was crazy.

  That week the Winooski River slowed its flow, leaving fish swimming in circles and washing up on the banks in confusion. Families with satellite television systems found their programming now completely in Norwegian, the mouths of the actors not quite matching up to the words, like old Godzilla movies. At the Comtosook IGA, all four electronic cash registers—newly purchased from an industrial catalog and recently arrived—began to add wrong, so that grapes might ring up at $45 per bunch and cantaloupes cost a penny a pound, while mousetraps and fish sticks were perfectly free. The people who dared to talk of these things found they lost their train of thought right in the middle of a sentence, and would find instead the sweet taste of sugar on their tongue, or the bitter tang of chicory, depending on what they had been about to say.

  It sucked going to the dermatologist.

  Not only did it remind Ethan of what a freak he was, it also meant he had to stay up all day long, because the doctor’s office hours were during the time he usually slept. And after whatever procedure had been done, he had the added fun of seeing his mother’s smile crack like a hard-boiled egg; she was trying that desperately to look at him as if he were perfectly normal.

  Today he’d had three precancerous growths removed from his face. The doctor had taken a cotton swab and stuck it into a cup of liquid nitrogen, then held it to Ethan’s forehead and nose. It stung enough to make tears come to his eyes, and it itched, now.

  His mother pulled into the driveway. Uncle Ross was out—the car was gone. Ethan could have unfastened his own seat belt but he waited until his mother came around the passenger side and did it for him. “You okay?” she asked quietly, and he nodded and got out of the car. He slipped his hand into hers as they walked up the porch, something he had not done for months, because when you have less time than everyone else it means you have to make yourself grow up faster.

  In his bedroom, he pulled off his clothes like taffy. He dragged his pajamas over his head and then glanced in the mirror. The blisters hadn’t formed yet—that would be tomorrow. But his face was already a globe, shifting blotchy continents where the growths had