The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  It was dark outside, there were trolling monsters and witches—plenty of reasons, in short, that a kid might get cold feet. Trix, he had asked, what are you scared of?

  How are you going to know who I am, she finally said, if I don’t look like me?

  Laura’s head was bent over her folded hands, and her lips were moving. She didn’t go to church anymore, but she’d been raised Catholic. Daniel had never been particularly religious. Growing up, he and his mother hadn’t gone to church, although most of their neighbors had. The Yupiit got Christianity from the Moravian church, and it had stuck fast. For an Eskimo, it wasn’t inconsistent to believe both that Jesus was his Savior, and that a seal’s soul lived in its bladder until a hunter returned it to the sea.

  Laura brushed Trixie’s hair off her face. “Dante believed God punished suicides by trapping the person’s spirit in a tree trunk. On Judgment Day, they were the only sinners who didn’t get their souls back, because they tried to get rid of them once before.”

  Daniel knew this, actually. It was one of the few points of Laura’s research that intrigued him. It had always struck him as ironic that in the Yup’ik villages, where there was such an epidemic of teen suicide, there weren’t any trees.

  Just then, Trixie stirred. Daniel watched her as the unfamiliar room came into focus. Her eyes widened, hopeful, and then dimmed with disappointment as she realized that in spite of her best intentions, she was still here.

  Laura crawled onto the bed, holding Trixie tight. She was whispering to Trixie, words that Daniel wished came as easily to him. But he didn’t have Laura’s facility with language; he could not keep Trixie safe with promises. All he’d ever been able to do was repaint the world for her, until it became a place she wanted to be.

  Daniel stayed long enough to watch Trixie reach for Laura, grab on with a sure, strong hold. Then he slipped out of the hospital room, moving past nurses and orderlies and patients who were too blind to witness the metamorphosis happening before their eyes.

  • • •

  This is what Daniel bought:

  Work gloves and a roll of duct tape.

  A pack of rags.

  Matches.

  A fisherman’s fillet knife.

  He drove thirty miles away, to a different town, and he paid in cash.

  He was determined that there would be no evidence left behind. It would be his word against Daniel’s, and as Daniel was learning, that meant a victim would not win.

  • • •

  Jason found that the only time of day his mind was truly occupied was during hockey practice. He simply gave himself over to the game, cutting hard and skating fast and stick-handling with surety and grace. It was this simple: If you were giving a hundred percent at hockey, you didn’t have room left for anything else—such as obsessing over the rumor going around school that Trixie Stone had tried to kill herself.

  He’d been getting ready for practice in the locker room when he heard, and he started to shake so violently that he’d gone into a bathroom stall to sit down. A girl he’d cared for—a girl he’d slept with—had nearly died. It freaked him out to imagine Trixie laughing as her long hair fell over her face, and then the next minute to picture that face six feet underground and crawling with worms.

  By the time he’d regained his composure, Moss was in the locker room, lacing up his skates. It had been Moss who, as a joke, had hacked into the computer system at the school and sent out the photo he’d taken of Trixie during the poker game. Jason had been totally furious, but he couldn’t say that out loud to the kids who high-fived him and told him that they were on his side. His own attorney had even said Jason couldn’t have asked for a better stroke of evidentiary luck. But what if that prank had been the one to put Trixie over the edge? He was already being blamed for something he didn’t do. Would he have been blamed for her death?

  “You are surely the most unlucky bastard on this planet,” Moss had said, giving voice to the other thought in Jason’s head. Had Trixie succeeded, then he’d have been off the hook.

  Now practice was over, and with it came the casual conversation that would—inevitably—turn to Trixie. Jason hurried off the ice and pulled off the gladiator layers of his equipment. He was the first player out of the rink, the first player to his car. He slid into the driver’s seat and turned the ignition, then rested his head on the wheel for a second. Trixie. “Jesus,” he murmured.

  Jason felt the blade of the knife on his Adam’s apple before he heard the voice at his ear. “Close enough,” Daniel Stone said. “Start praying.”

  • • •

  Daniel made Jason drive to a bog near the river. He’d driven past once or twice and knew that local hunters liked it for deer and moose, and that their cars stayed well hidden while they were out in their stands. Daniel liked it especially because the evergreens marched thick to the edge of the water and had created enough cover to keep snow from blanketing the ground, which meant that their footsteps would be lost in the marsh instead of preserved.

  He held the boy at knifepoint, backing Jason up against a pine tree until he was kneeling, securing his arms and ankles behind him with duct tape so that he was effectively trussed. The whole time, Daniel kept thinking of what Laura had said about Dante—of Trixie’s soul trapped in that tree, with Jason’s body wrapped around it. That image was all he needed to give him the strength to subdue a seventeen-year-old athlete when Jason started fighting back.

  Jason struggled, pulling on the tape until his wrists and ankles were raw, while Daniel built a campfire. Finally, the boy sagged against the trunk and let his head fall forward. “What are you going to do to me?”

  Daniel took his knife and slipped it under the hem of Jason’s T-shirt. He dragged it up to the boy’s throat in one long line, cutting the fabric in half. “This,” he said.

  Daniel systematically shredded Jason’s clothing, until the kid was naked and shivering. He tossed the strips of fabric and denim into the flames.

  By then, Jason’s teeth were chattering. “How am I supposed to get home?”

  “What makes you think I’m going to let you?”

  Jason swallowed hard, his eyes on the knife Daniel still held in his hand. “How is she?” he whispered.

  Daniel felt the granite gate of restraint burst inside him. How could this bastard think he had the right to ask after Trixie? Leaning down, Daniel pressed the blade against Jason’s testicles. “Do you want to know what it’s like to bleed out? Do you really want to know how she felt?”

  “Please,” Jason begged, going pale. “Oh, Jesus, don’t.”

  Daniel pushed the slightest bit, until a line of blood welled up at the crease of Jason’s groin.

  “I didn’t do anything to her, I swear it,” Jason cried, trying to twist away from Daniel’s hand. “I didn’t. Stop. God. Please stop.”

  Daniel set his face an inch away from Jason’s. “Why should I? You didn’t.”

  In that moment between reason and rage, Trixie slipped into both of their minds. It was all Jason needed to break down, sobbing; it was all Daniel needed to remember himself. He looked down at his hand, holding the knife. He blinked at Jason. Then he shook his head to clear it.

  Daniel was not in the bush anymore, and this was no village corporation store he was robbing for booze or cash. He was a husband, he was a father. Instead of having something to prove, he had everything to lose.

  Lifting the blade, Daniel staggered to his feet. He hurled the knife the hundred feet it would take to land in the middle of the river and then walked back to Jason, who was fighting for breath. He took the boy’s car keys from his own pocket and wrapped them tight in the only morsel of mercy he had left. These, he wedged into Jason’s hand, still bound by duct tape.

  It was not compassion that led to Daniel’s change of heart, and it was not kindness. It was realizing that, against all odds, he had something in common with Jason Underhill. Like Daniel, Jason had learned the hard way that we are never the people we thi