The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Two cards were stuck together; Shelby noticed this at nearly the same time she realized that they both were labeled PIKE. The first was a death certificate for an unnamed stillborn infant, 37 weeks. Approximate time of death: 11:32 A.M. Glued onto the back of this was another death certificate, for Mrs. Spencer Pike. Time of death: 11:32 A.M.

  Shelby shivered in spite of the heat in the basement. It was not just that this woman, this Mrs. Spencer Pike, who had died when she was only eighteen, had never lived to hold her baby. It was not even that this baby had never drawn a single breath. It had to do with the fixative that had cemented these cards together for so many years. Shelby was no expert, but it could only be blood.

  Ruby Weber did not like to admit it, but she was getting old. She told everyone she was seventy-seven, although she was really eighty-three. Her hips moved like rusty hinges, her eyes clouded up when she least expected. Worst of all, she fell asleep in the middle of sentences sometimes, nodding off like, well, an old lady. One of these days she would just fall asleep, she supposed, and forget to wake up.

  Not until Lucy was taken care of, though. Ruby knew that the medicine was helping her great-granddaughter, but at a cost—Lucy’s nightmares had slinked down the hall to take up residence in Ruby’s own bedroom. Now, no matter where or when Ruby dozed, she found herself reliving the phone call that had ruined her life.

  It had come on a rainy Monday, eight years ago. She’d picked up the receiver, thinking it was the pharmacy saying her arthritis medicine was in; or maybe her daughter Luxe ringing from the market to let her know she’d be a few minutes late. But the voice on the other end belonged to a ghost.

  She was still sitting with the phone in her hand, shaking, when Luxe came in with the groceries. “You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get through the checkout,” Luxe said. “You’d think people were stocking up for bomb shelters.” Then she looked more carefully at Ruby’s face. “Ma? What’s the matter?”

  Ruby had reached out her hand, touched Luxe’s skin, smooth and warm as a stone. How did you go about telling someone you were not who they thought you were?

  Now, Ruby felt hands on her shoulders, shaking her gently. “Granny. Granny.”

  Ruby could not answer, her mind was still full of Luxe, who had fallen down clutching her chest when Ruby told her who had called; who Luxe really was; who Ruby wasn’t. She could still see Luxe’s face, waxen and still, through the ER doorway as the doctor came out to say that the cardiac arrest had been fatal. How stupid Ruby had been. She’d held Luxe’s heart in safekeeping all those years; to give it back, in retrospect, seemed foolish and irresponsible.

  On the day her mother died, Meredith had been a graduate student in Boston. She arrived wild at the hospital, demanding a miracle. Ruby had nearly expected her to get one, for all her fury. Imagine: Luxe throwing back the sheet that covered her on the examination table, sitting up. Wonders like that, they had happened before. Ruby had seen it herself.

  Ruby had never told Meredith what she’d told Luxe in the moments before her heart gave out. Now, though . . . with Lucy suffering . . . well, Meredith might understand the way love for a child could make a woman go crazy. “Merry,” Ruby said suddenly, wanting to tell her all of it. “Do you remember when your mother died?”

  “Oh, Granny,” Meredith sighed. “Is that what you were dreaming about?”

  Her cool hand on Ruby’s cheek: that was all it took for Ruby to understand she could not make the same mistake twice. She decided to put a tourniquet on the past for once and for all, until it just desiccated and disappeared. This was her life, now. Spencer Pike had never called again, and as far as she was concerned, he could go to hell.

  The dog made him nervous. It lay about four feet away from Ross’s boot, a big puddle of skin completely relaxed except for its dark eyes, which had pinned Ross the moment he entered the detective’s office and hadn’t blinked since. “Mr. Wakeman,” said Detective Rochert. “Put yourself in my shoes for a minute. Some guy, a paranormal investigator, comes in off the street and tells me to reexamine a seventy-year-old unsolved murder. Who am I supposed to get statements from—a ghost? And even if I do get a perp, chances are he’s either dead or in his nineties. No prosecutor in Vermont is going to touch that case.”

  Ross glanced at the dog, which bared its teeth. The detective snapped his fingers and the hound flopped onto the floor, boneless. “I would think that, given the property dispute, you might find the case more timely than you think. All I’m saying is that there’s a big difference between a woman dying in childbirth, and a woman being murdered. Maybe Spencer Pike is senile; maybe the town death records in 1932 were less than accurate. But then again, maybe that’s the missing piece that explains why the Abenaki feel they have a claim to the land.”

  Eli leaned forward, his dark eyes suddenly hard as flint. “You came to me specifically because you know I’m half-Abenaki, didn’t you? You think I’m going to reopen this file just because I owe it to them.”

  Ross shook his head, surprised at this outburst. “I came to you because you’re the only detective on duty,” he said.

  That shut Rochert up, but only briefly. “Mr. Wakeman, I think you and I operate a little differently. Your work is all about hunches; mine is rooted in hard evidence.”

  Ross had learned long ago not to try to convert the skeptics. The fact was, there were plenty of people who believed in ghosts, and once you’d had a paranormal experience, you joined the ranks. The cynics were necessary; they limited the number of frauds. Ross wouldn’t try to convince Eli Rochert that spirits existed, but he wouldn’t stand here and let the man slander his investigation, either. “Actually, my work is closer to yours than you’d think. Isn’t crime-scene linkage based on the idea that people always leave a part of themselves behind?”

  “Forensics can dust for fingerprints. They can’t dust for . . .” His voice trailed off, and Ross watched Rochert frown, deep in thought. After a moment, he spoke again. “Even if this murder is solved seventy years after the fact, it’s not going to change anything. Pike’s wife is still dead. He still legally owns the land. And he still has the right to sell it.”

  “That depends,” Ross said.

  “On?”

  “Who actually committed a murder that night.”

  It was not surprising to Eli that the Comtosook Police Department had kept the file on an unsolved homicide investigation from so long ago. This stemmed not from any particular diligence in keeping track of loose ends, but rather from absolute incompetence in record keeping. Frankly, no one had ever thought to clean out the archive closet. He brushed a cobweb out of his hair and pulled the bulky carton out of the haphazard stack.

  Chief Follensbee wouldn’t care what Eli did in his downtime. As he walked upstairs to his desk, he told himself that the reason he was doing this had nothing to do with what he’d experienced a few nights ago at the Pike property. Nor was it related to the nagging doubt that the woman in his recurring dreams kept coming back for a reason. He was reviewing this case because it had never been solved, and crime-scene techniques available today might be able to answer questions that had been asked and left unanswered in 1932.

  Watson looked up when Eli came into the office, then decided he wasn’t quite worth the trouble of getting to his feet. He watched with disinterest as Eli emptied the contents of the crate onto his cleared desk. A manila folder, a stack of crime-scene photographs, a paper lunch sack, a cigar box, and a noose.

  Eli pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his desk and picked up the rope. Nothing special about it; it looked like any industrial cable of twine you might find in the area even now. Whoever had investigated the case back then had been smart enough to leave the knot tied; after all these years it was still intact.

  He picked up some of the crime-scene photos. One showed the young woman, lying down with the noose around her neck. Her chest and neck were scratched raw, not from the rope, but from the long rakes of fingernails—she’d t