The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “No,” she whispered.

  He tilted his face so that their mouths came together, wide and sweet as the sea. Their kiss tasted of salt, and Katie knew there were tears on both of their cheeks, but she did not recall which of them had passed the sorrow to the other. She opened herself to Samuel as she had never done before, understanding that this was a debt he had come to collect.

  Then Samuel drew away from her and kissed her eyelids. He held her face between his hands and murmured, “I’ve sinned.”

  She raised her palms to cover his. “You haven’t,” she insisted.

  “Yes. Let me finish.” Samuel swallowed. “That baby. That baby, it wasn’t ours.” He gathered Katie closer, burying his face in her hair. “It wasn’t ours, Katie. But I have been wishing it was.”

  * * *

  “Have you ever touched one?”

  Adam looked up from the desk, smiling at the sight of Katie bent over one of his logbooks. “Yeah,” he said. “Well, sort of. You can’t grab them, you just sort of feel them come over you.”

  “Like a wind?”

  Adam set down his pen. “More like a shiver.”

  Katie nodded, and very seriously turned back to her reading. This was the second time she’d visited Jacob this week—an unprecedented occurrence, apparently—and she’d scheduled the visit on a day when she knew that Jacob was working at the college until the afternoon. When Adam sat down beside her, Katie smiled. “Tell me what it was like.”

  “I was at an old hotel in Nantucket. I woke up in the middle of the night and found a woman looking out the window. She was wearing an old-fashioned dress, and the air was filled with this perfume—a scent I’d never smelled before, or since. I sat up and asked who she was, but she didn’t answer. And then I realized that I could see the windowsill and the wooden mullions right through her body. She completely ignored me, then walked right past the window, through me. It felt . . . chilly. Made the hair rise on the back of my neck.”

  “Were you frightened?”

  “Not really. She didn’t seem to know I was there. The next morning, I asked the proprietor, who told me that the hotel had been the home of a sea captain that drowned. It was supposedly haunted by his widow, who was still waiting for her husband to come home.”

  “That’s so sad,” Katie said.

  “Most ghost stories are.”

  For a moment, Adam thought she was going to cry. He reached out and touched Katie’s head. “Her hair, it was like yours. Thick and straight and longer than I’d ever seen.” As she blushed, he sat back and crossed his arms over his bent knees. “Can I ask you a question now?”

  “All right.”

  “It’s not that I’m not incredibly flattered you’re so fascinated by my research . . . but you’re the last person I would have expected to find it interesting.”

  “Because I’m Plain, you mean?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  Katie touched her fingers to the words that Adam had typed out. “I know these ghosts,” she said. “I know what it’s like to move around in the world, but not really be a part of it. And I know what it’s like to have people stare right through you, and not believe what they are seeing.” Setting aside the book of research, Katie looked at Adam. “If I exist, why can’t they?”

  Adam had once interviewed an entire bus of tourists who’d seen a battlefield at Gettysburg erupt with a battalion of soldiers who were not there. He’d recorded on infrared cameras the colder pockets of energy that surrounded a ghost. He had heard ghosts move crates in attics, slam doors, ring phones. Yet for all the years he had been doing his doctoral research, he’d had to fight for credibility.

  Humbled, Adam reached for Katie’s hand. He squeezed it gently, and then raised it to his lips to kiss the inside of her wrist. “You are not a ghost,” he said.

  * * *

  George Callahan frowned at Lizzie’s plate. “Don’t you ever eat anything? You’re gonna blow over in a wind.”

  The detective took a bite of the bagel in front of her. “How come you’re only happy when everyone around you is devouring something?”

  “Must have something to do with being a lawyer.” He blotted his mouth with his napkin, then leaned back in his chair. “You’re going to need your energy today. You ever tried to get unsolicited information from the Amish?”

  Lizzie let her mind spiral back. “Once,” she said. “That case with Crazy Charlie Lapp.”

  “Oh, yeah—the schizophrenic kid who went off his meds and drove a stolen car down to Georgia. Well, take that case, and multiply the degree of difficulty by about a hundred.”

  “George, why don’t you let me do my job? I don’t tell you how to try cases.”

  “Sure you do. I just don’t listen.” He leaned forward, propping his elbows on the table. “Most neonaticides don’t even make it to trial—they get plea-bargained. If the mother does get convicted, it’s on a minimal charge. You know why that is?”

  “Because no one on a jury wants to believe a mother’s capable of killing her baby?”

  “In part. But more often because the prosecution can’t pin a motive on the crime, which makes it seem less like murder.”

  Lizzie stirred her coffee. “Ellie Hathaway might notice up an insanity defense.”

  “She hasn’t yet.” George shrugged. “Look. I think this case is going to blow big, because of the Amish angle. It’s a chance to make the county attorney’s office shine.”

  “It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this is an upcoming election year for you,” Lizzie said.

  George narrowed his eyes. “It has nothing to do with me. This wasn’t Mary coming into the barn to deliver the infant Jesus. Katie Fisher went there intending to have a baby, kill it, and hide it.” He smiled at the detective. “Go prove me right.”

  * * *

  Ellie, Sarah, and Katie were in the kitchen pickling cucumbers when the car drove into the front yard. “Oh,” Sarah said, moving the curtains aside for a better look. “It’s that detective coming around again.”

  Ellie’s hands froze in the middle of skinning a cucumber. “She’s here to question you all. Katie, go up to your room and don’t come back until I tell you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s the enemy, okay?” As Katie hurried upstairs, Ellie turned to Sarah. “You have to talk to her. Just tell her what you feel comfortable saying.”

  “You won’t be here?”

  “I’ll be keeping her away from Katie. That’s more important.”

  Sarah nodded just as there was a knock from outside. Waiting for Ellie to leave the room, she crossed the kitchen and opened the door.

  “Hello, Mrs. Fisher. I don’t know if you remember me. I’m—”

  “I remember you,” Sarah said. “Would you like to come in?”

  Lizzie nodded. “I’d like that very much. I’d also like to ask you a few questions.” She surveyed the kitchen, with the bottles sealing on the stove and the piles of cucumbers heaped upon the table. “Would that be all right?” When Sarah nodded stiffly, Lizzie took her notebook from her coat pocket. “Can you tell me a little about your daughter?”

  “Katie’s a good girl. She is humble and giving and kind and she serves the Lord.”

  Lizzie tapped her pencil against the paper, writing nothing at all. “She sounds like an angel, Mrs. Fisher.”

  “No, just a good, Plain girl.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  Sarah twisted her hands beneath her apron. “There have been a few, since Katie came into her running-around years. But the most serious has been Samuel. He works the farm with my husband.”

  “Yes, we’ve met. How serious is serious?”

  “It’s not for me to say,” Sarah ventured, smiling shyly. “That would be Katie’s private business. And if they were thinking of marriage, it would be up to Samuel to go to the Schtecklimann, the go-between who’d come and ask Katie what her wishes are.”

  Lizzie leaned forward. “So Katie doesn�