The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Daniel heard Laura’s intake of breath as Trixie nodded. “That’s it,” she whispered. “I didn’t do it, though. I thought I could—I wanted to make Jason jealous—but I couldn’t. Everyone went home after that, except for Jason and Moss and me and Zephyr, and that’s when we started playing poker. Moss took the picture of me, and Jason got mad at him, and that’s when it all goes blank. I know I was in the bathroom when he found me, but I can’t remember how we got to the living room. I can’t remember anything, really, until he was on top of me. I thought if I waited long enough, it would all come back. But it hasn’t.”

  The district attorney and the detective exchanged a glance. “Are you saying,” Marita clarified, “that you woke up to find him having intercourse with you?”

  Trixie nodded.

  “Do you remember any other details?”

  “I had a really bad headache. I thought maybe he’d slammed my head on the floor or something.”

  Bartholemew walked toward the district attorney. He stood behind her shoulder, flipping over the contents of the file until he reached a certain page and pointed. “The ER doc noted a seemingly dissociated mental state. And during her initial interview at the PD, she was unresponsive.”

  “Mike,” the district attorney said, “give me a break.”

  “If it’s true, it would turn this into gross sexual assault,” Bartholemew pressed. “And all of the inconsistencies in Trixie’s story would actually work to the prosecution’s advantage.”

  “We’d need proof. Date rape drugs stay in the bloodstream for only seventy-two hours, tops.”

  Bartholemew lifted a lab report out of the file folder. “Good thing you’ve got a sample, then, from six hours post.”

  Daniel was utterly lost. “What are you talking about?”

  The prosecutor turned. “Right now, this case is being tried as a juvenile sexually assaulting a juvenile. That changes, however, if the assault is committed either while Trixie was unconscious, or if she was given a substance that impaired her ability to appraise or control the sexual act. In that case, by law, Jason Underhill would have to be tried as an adult.”

  “Are you saying Trixie was drugged?” Daniel said.

  The district attorney fixed her gaze on Trixie. “Either that,” she replied, “or your daughter is trying to dig herself out of yet another hole.”

  • • •

  “Special K, Vitamin K, Kit Kat, Blind Squid, Cat Valium, Purple—it’s got a dozen names on the street,” Venice Prudhomme said, peeling off a pair of latex gloves and throwing them in the trash at Bartholemew’s feet. “Ketamine’s a nonbarbiturate, rapid-acting anesthetic used on both animals and humans—it’s also allegedly a sexual stimulant. Kids like it as a club drug because, molecularly, it’s very similar to angel dust—PCP. It produces a dissociative state, making them feel like their minds are separate from their bodies. We’re talking hallucinations . . . amnesia.”

  Mike had begged Venice to run the test at the state lab, in spite of a two-month backlog of cases. He’d promised, in return, a pair of club-level Bruins tickets. Venice was a single mom with a hockey-crazy son, a woman who didn’t get paid enough to spend $85 per ticket; he knew she wouldn’t be able to turn down the offer. Where he was going to actually get two club-level Bruins tickets on his own salary, though, remained to be seen.

  So far, Trixie had tested negative for GHB and Rohypnol, the two most common date rape drugs. At this point, Mike was close to conceding that Trixie had, again, duped them. He watched the computer screen, an incomprehensible run of numbers. “Who’s dealing ketamine in Bethel, Maine?” he asked rhetorically.

  “It’s fully legal when it’s Ketaset and sold to vets as a liquid. In that form, it’s easy to use as a date rape drug. It’s odorless and tasteless. You slip it into a girl’s drink, and she’s knocked out in less than a minute. For the next few hours, she’s numb and willing . . . and best of all, she won’t remember what happened.” As the computer spit out the last analysis, Venice scanned it. “You say your victim’s been lying to you?”

  “Enough to make me wish I was working for the defense,” Mike said.

  She pulled a highlighter from her towering nest of braids and ran a yellow line across a field of results—a positive flag for ketamine. “Keep your day job,” Venice replied. “Trixie Stone was telling the truth.”

  • • •

  There were not, as most people believed, a hundred different Eskimo words for snow. Boil down the roots of the Yup’ik language, and you’d only have fifteen: qanuk (snowflake), kanevvluk (fine snow), natquik (drifting snow), nevluk (clinging snow), qanikcaq (snow on the ground), muruaneq (soft, deep snow on the ground), qetrar (crust on top of snow), nutaryuk (fresh fallen snow), qanisqineq (snow floating on water), qengaruk (snowbank), utvak (snow block), navcaq (snow cornice), pirta (snowstorm), cellallir (blizzard), and pirrelvag (severely storming).

  When it came to snow, Daniel thought in Yup’ik. He’d look out the window and one of these words, or its derivatives, would pop into his mind ahead of the English. There were snows here in Maine, though, that didn’t have equivalent terms in Alaska. Like a nor’easter. Or the kind of snow that landed like goose down, during mud season. Or the ice storm that made the needles on the pines look like they were fashioned out of crystal.

  Times like those, Daniel’s mind would simply go blank. Like now: There had to be a term for the kind of storm that he knew was going to be the first real measurable snow of the season. The flakes were the size of a toddler’s fist and falling so fast that it seemed there was a rip in the seam of the gunmetal sky. It had snowed in October and November, but not like this. This was the sort of storm that would cause school superintendents to cancel afternoon basketball games, and create long lines at the Goodyear store; this was the kind of storm that made out-of-town drivers pull over on the highway and forced housewives to buy an extra gallon of milk.

  It was the kind of snow that came so fast, it caught you unaware. You hadn’t yet taken the shovels down from the attic where you’d put them last May; you didn’t get a chance to cover the trembling rhododendrons with their ridiculous wooden tepees.

  It was the kind of snow, Daniel realized, where you didn’t have time to put away the errant rake and the clippers you’d used to trim back the blackberry bushes, so you’d find yourself walking in circles, hoping you might trip over them before the blades rusted for good. But you never did. Instead, you were bound to lose the things you’d been careless with, and your punishment was not seeing them again until the spring.

  • • •

  Trixie couldn’t remember the last time she went out to play in the snow. When she was a kid, her father used to build a luge in the backyard that she’d slide down on a tube, but at some point it was no longer cool to look like a total spaz when she tipped over, and she’d traded her rubber-tread Sorels for fashionable stacked-heel boots.

  She couldn’t find her snow boots—they were buried under too much stuff in the closet. Instead, she borrowed her mother’s, still drying in the mudroom, now that her mom had canceled her afternoon lecture in the wake of the storm. Trixie wrapped a scarf around her neck and jammed a hat onto her head that said DRAMA QUEEN across the front in red script. She pulled on a pair of her father’s ski mittens and headed outside.

  It was what her mother used to call snowman snow—the kind damp enough to stick together. Trixie packed it into a ball. She started to roll it across the lawn like a bandage, leaving behind a long brown tongue of matted grass.

  After a while, she surveyed the damage. The yard looked like a crazy quilt, white stripes bordering triangles and squares made of lawn. Taking another handful of snow, Trixie began to roll a second snowball, and a third. A few minutes later, she was standing in the middle of them, wondering how they’d gotten so big so fast. There was no way she would be able to lift one onto the other. How had she managed to build a snowman when she was little? Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe someone else had always done it for