The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Then I notice that Ruby is wearing my hand-me-down shoes. She steps into the closet to hang up the dress—the closet she has cleaned up since my morning séance—and walks toward the bed. Sliding her hand beneath the pillow she hands me back the biography of Mr. Houdini that she has hidden on my behalf.

  It is her way of telling me that my secret is safe from Spencer. Our eyes meet. “Thank you,” I murmur.

  “Do you believe it, Miz Pike?” Ruby whispers fiercely. “Do you think someone can come back from the other side?”

  I squeeze her hand and nod. After all, I am living proof.

  In our study of the pedigrees of families who have been an expense to the state and towns, we have found quite a number having French and Indian ancestry with sometimes a mixture of Negro.

  —H. F. Perkins, “Project #1” ESV Archive, “Projects—Old,” 1926

  Oxbury is a tiny town on the banks of Lake Champlain that, for the purposes of protecting the innocent, has been rechristened Fleetville in Abigail Alcott’s reports. “Tracing the pedigree of this particular family,” Abigail tells me as we walk toward the Gypsy camp, “must have been as all-encompassing as tracing the lineage of the frogs in the river.”

  After the field workers had identified the families to be studied, they’d gone through the records at Waterbury, as well as the State Prison, the Vermont Industrial School, and the State School for the Feebleminded in Brandon, to see which family members had been placed where. Interviews with teachers, ministers, neighbors and even distant relatives who’d managed to elevate themselves above the delinquent behavior of their kin, all rounded out a history of the family’s ill fortune, which was compiled in a final report.

  Abigail has allowed me to read her notes from several visits to the area: the Delacours are a mixture of French Canadian and Indian blood, descended from two first cousins who married in the Roman Catholic Church and produced seventeen children, ten of which were feebleminded and three who had no sense of what Abigail called “sex decency.” Subsequent generations bred alcoholics, criminals, and paupers. Members of several families lived together in one small shack. During the past six years relatives had moved from Hinesburg to Cornwall to Burlington to Weybridge to Plattsburgh, but continued to return to Fleetville during the summers, where they sold the crafts they’d made during the winter and fished for a livelihood. Their main defect, as a group, was feeblemindedness, but their close association with criminality, dependency, and nomadic habits could not be overlooked.

  In Abigail’s papers, the Delacours are called the Moutons—the name, she tells me, of her pet poodle. It is the policy of the social workers to keep the identities of those investigated protected from the public. “You wouldn’t believe how easy it is to get information,” Abigail says. “Go into any town and start asking questions. Every place has a family that’s an Oh, them.”

  It seems to me that if everyone knows these people, anyway, pseudonyms are beside the point.

  As we walk down toward the lake, I remember something my father taught me—the closer a person lives to the water, the less successful they are. “Look at the River Rats,” he’d say, “and then look at me.” His home, that is, high on the Hill in Burlington, as far away from the lake as one could get.

  As Abigail approaches, it is easy to see she’s been here before. Barefoot children run to her and reach into the pockets of her skirt for hard candy. A teenage boy carving a wooden paddle gives her a shy smile. “Do they know?” I ask quietly. “Why we’re here, I mean?”

  She holds her smile in place. “They know I’m interested in their lives. People who look like me usually aren’t. And that’s exactly why they talk.”

  At one shanty, we stop, and Abigail raps on the support pole in lieu of a proper knocker. “Jeanne is expecting us,” she says, and sure enough, the flap that serves as a door lifts open. A small woman not much older than Abigail hesitantly waves us inside, inviting us to sit down at a table that has been cleared.

  The small home is a single room. A bucket near the door is filled with fresh water, and a stack of dirty plates and cups sits precariously balanced on the counter. But there is a sense that the place has been tidied for us, and that is the first note Abigail writes on her pad. “Jeanne,” she says, offering a smile that does not reach her eyes. “I’m so happy to meet you. This is Mrs. Pike.”

  Jeanne’s eyes don’t rise above my abdomen. “Your first?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a child, too,” Jeanne says intensely. “A boy.”

  “Yes,” Abigail replies. “Your Aunt Louisa told me quite a lot about Norman.”

  “Oho,” Jeanne answers, bobbing her head. “He was her favorite. She used to take him out when she went looking for plants in the woods—juniper and black spruce and bloodroot.” Over Abigail’s shoulder I see the words she is writing on her pad. Bobbed hair—skirt fastened with safety pins. Stockings are rolled below the knee. Seems distracted.

  “Jeanne’s son is in the Brandon School for the Feebleminded,” Abigail explains to me. “Louisa said you received a letter from him, Jeanne.”

  This, at least, seems to brighten her up. As she hurries off to find it for us, Abigail leans closer. “The state was instrumental in having the boy taken away. When the social workers came, they found him sitting here, eating raw meat. Raw meat!”

  A moment later Jeanne returns, proudly holding up the letter. “How old is Norman now?” Abigail asks.

  “He’ll be ten this October.”

  “Why don’t you read me what he wrote?”

  Jeanne falters, but only for a moment. She begins to stumble through the boy’s convoluted handwriting, correcting herself as she goes along. Illiterate, Abigail writes. Mother and son. To Jeanne, she says, “Well, he sounds like quite the scholar!”

  Jeanne’s eyes soften, thinking she has found a friend in Abigail. “Missus Alcott, you work for the state . . . can you ask them when Norman will be brought back home?”

  Suddenly I see why this woman has been so anxious to invite a stranger into her home. She wants to get as much information out of Abigail as Abigail is trying to get out of her. “If you’ll excuse me,” I say, “I’m just going to get some air.”

  I walk along, letting my boots sink into the soft mud. Boys play a game with a ball made of rags, the right angles of their bony arms rising against the blue of the sky as they reach for a neat catch. If I am to help Abigail, I should be asking questions. I should be learning as much about this family as I can.

  An old woman sits with a pipe in her mouth at the entrance to a tent, her hands flying over a stack of reeds that begin to take the shape of a long-necked basket. I start to approach her with a smile on my face, only to have her raise her head. Although she doesn’t speak or move a muscle, the look in her eyes is enough to make me change direction. Instead, I head toward a man who stands with his back to me, fishing. He casts and reels in with timing and grace, as if he is part of an elaborate dance. He wears trousers held up with suspenders, and his black hair reaches halfway down his back, making me sorry to have cut my own short in a fashionable bob.

  Show interest in what they are doing; this was Abigail’s first rule. “Hello.” I walk all the way down to the water, and still he does not turn around. “I see you’re fishing.”

  Brilliant, Lia, I think. And will you next tell him he’s a Gypsy?

  He turns around and unhooks a foot-long fish from a green-and-black plug. I realize this is the man I saw watching me at the Independence Day celebration. His eyes widen, and move over my face as if he has never seen someone like me before. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe Gypsies mingle with us as infrequently as we mingle with them.

  Uncomfortable, I look down into the basket at his feet. It is full of writhing fish: smallmouth bass, which I recognize, and large needle-nosed speckled ones that I don’t. “Hello,” I say again, determined to put him at ease. “I’m Cissy Pike.” I hold out my hand.

  For a long moment he stares at it. The