The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “What?” He could hear the bright blue edge of panic in Laura’s voice.

  “We’re in town . . . she was in the car waiting . . .” He was not making any sense, and he knew it.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the lot behind the grocery store.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  When the line went dead, Daniel slipped the phone into his coat pocket. Maybe Trixie would try to call him. He stood up and tried to replay the fight with Jason, but he could not dissect it: It could have been three minutes, it could have been thirty. Trixie might have run off at the first punch or after the last. He had been so single-minded about wanting to do harm that he’d lost sight of his daughter while she was still standing in front of him.

  “Please,” he whispered to a God he’d given up on years ago. “Please let her be all right.”

  Suddenly a movement in the distance caught his eye. He turned to see a shadow crossing behind the brush at the far end of the parking lot. Daniel stepped out of the circle of light thrown by the street-lamp and walked toward the spot where he’d seen the dark overlap itself. “Trixie,” he called. “Is that you?”

  • • •

  Jason Underhill stood with his hands braced on the wooden railing of the trestle bridge, trying to see if the river had completely iced over yet. His face hurt like hell from where Trixie’s father had beaten the crap out of him, his ribs throbbed, and he didn’t have any idea how he was going to explain his battered face in the morning without revealing that he’d broken the conditions of his bail and interacted with not one but two members of the Stone family.

  If they were going to try him as an adult, did that affect the rest? Once they found out that he’d approached Trixie, would he get sent to a real jail, instead of just some juvy facility?

  Maybe it didn’t matter, anyway. Bethel Academy didn’t want him to play next year. His hopes to go professional one day were as good as dead. And why? Because he’d been considerate that night at Zephyr Santorelli-Weinstein’s house and had gone back to make sure that Trixie was all right.

  Three weeks ago, he had been the number one ranked high school hockey player in the state of Maine. He had a 3.7 grade point average and a penchant for hat tricks, and even kids who didn’t know him pretended they did. He could have had his pick of high school girls and maybe even some from the local college, but he’d been stupid enough to fall for Trixie Stone: a human black hole who camouflaged herself as a girl with a heart so clear you might look at it and see yourself.

  He was seventeen, and his life was as good as over.

  Jason stared at the ice beneath the bridge. If his trial started before the spring came . . . If he lost . . . how long would it be before he saw the river running again?

  He leaned down, his elbows on the wooden railing, and pretended that he could see it now.

  • • •

  Daniel was sitting underneath the streetlamp when Laura came running up to him. “Did she come back?”

  “No,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “And she’s not answering, if she’s at the house.”

  “Okay,” Laura said, pacing in a tight circle. “Okay.”

  “It’s not okay. I got into a fight with Jason Underhill. He had his hands on her. And I . . . I. . . I snapped. I beat him up, Laura. Trixie saw every minute of it.” Daniel took a deep breath. “Maybe we should call Bartholemew.”

  Laura shook her head. “If you call the police, you have to tell them you were fighting with Jason,” she said flatly. “That’s assault, Daniel. People get arrested for it.”

  Daniel fell silent, thinking of his previous encounter with Jason—the one in the woods, with a knife. As far as he knew, the boy hadn’t said anything to anyone about it. But if it came out that Daniel had beaten him up, that other incident was bound to surface.

  And it wasn’t just assault—it qualified as kidnapping, too.

  He turned to Laura. “So what do we do?”

  She stepped closer, the light from the lamp falling over her shoulders like a cloak. “We find her ourselves,” she said.

  • • •

  Laura ran into the house, calling for Trixie, but there was no answer. Shaking, she walked into the dark kitchen, still wearing her coat. She turned on the tap and splashed cold water on her face.

  This couldn’t have happened.

  She and Daniel had plotted a strategy: He would search the streets for Trixie, while Laura went home in case she showed up. You need to calm down, she told herself. This is all going to work out.

  When the phone rang, she grabbed it. Trixie. But in the moment it took for her to bring the receiver to her ear, she had another thought—what if it was the police?

  Laura swallowed. “Hello?”

  “Mrs. Stone . . . this is Zephyr. Is Trixie there? I’ve got to talk to her.”

  “Zephyr,” she repeated. “No. Trixie’s not—Have you seen her tonight?”

  “Me? Um. No.”

  “Well.” Laura closed her eyes. “I’ll tell her you called,” she said. She hung up the phone, sat down at the kitchen table, and steeled herself to wait for whatever came next.

  • • •

  Every summer, traveling fairs came through Maine. They arrived in caravans that popped open to reveal the baseball throw, the ringtoss, the balloon darts. A massive white truck unfolded, like a sleeping deer getting to its feet, to turn into the Tilt-A-Whirl; another transformed into the Indiana Jones Adventure House. There were kiddie rides—hot-air balloons that never left the ground, giant frogs with pink plaster tongues that chased flies in small circles, a carousel fit for a princess. But the ride Trixie looked forward to, year after year, was the Dragon Coaster.

  The roller coaster had the enormous painted head of a Chinese New Year’s dragon, five cars, and then an arched tail with gold curlicues painted on it. It mutated from one of those folding trucks: a tight loop of steel track that swung into a waystation. The carney who ran the coaster had a long, thin ponytail and so many tattoos on his arms that you had to get close to see they weren’t just sleeves.

  Trixie always tried to get the first car, the one that put you behind the dragon’s mouth. For a kiddie ride, the roller coaster was surprisingly fast, and the front car was quicker than any other—you whipped harder around the corners. You lurched to a more jarring stop.

  The summer Trixie was eleven, she climbed into the front car as usual and realized something was wrong. She couldn’t pull the safety bar down over her knees. She had to turn sideways and jam herself along the side of the car. Trixie was convinced that this wasn’t the same roller coaster—that they’d gotten an upgrade and skimped on the proportions—but the carney said nothing had changed.

  He was lying. She knew this, because even as he said it, and pushed his ponytail out of the way, he was staring at the writing on her T-shirt: BETHEL FARM “A” SOFTBALL scrawled across her chest.

  Until that moment, Trixie had been looking forward to going to middle school and the privileges that came with it. She’d held the word adolescent on her tongue, enjoying the way it fizzed like a bath bomb. Until then, she hadn’t considered that there was a tradeoff, that she might not fit anymore in places where she’d been comfortable.

  The next summer, when Trixie was twelve, she got dropped off at the fair with Zephyr. Instead of going on the rides, they bought an onion blossom and trolled through the crowd to find kids they knew.

  Trixie was thinking about all this as she stood, shivering, in front of the Bank of Bethel. It was midnight, now, and the Winterfest was a memory. The police barriers blocking Main Street had been removed; the Christmas lights had been unplugged. The trash cans were stuffed with paper cups, plastic cider jugs, and broken candy canes.

  The bank had a large mirrored window that had always fascinated Trixie. These days, when she passed by, she’d check herself out, or look to see if anyone else was doing the same. But as a kid, the mirror had taken her by surprise. For years she kept the secret fr