The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  —Excerpt from a letter dated February 1, 1934, from Henry H. Goddard to H. F. Perkins, in response to financial assistance requests, ESV papers, Public Records Office, Middlesex, VT

  The hardest part is breaking the glass. To do it soundlessly is nearly impossible; I have to wrap the chair in the blanket from the bed and hope that the fabric will muffle some of the sound. I pick the window closest to the ladder that Gray Wolf, and then Spencer, used to fix the roof. After that, it is almost too easy. To shimmy down to the ground level, to sneak beneath the light in Spencer’s study window, to see by the midnight moon.

  We have so many acres, and she could be anywhere.

  I check beneath the shrubs that line the front porch, under the porch itself, around the pile of firewood to the east. In back of the house, I move through the forest, walking in circles, in patterns, until finally I sit down on the ground and let myself cry.

  It’s devastating, Spencer will tell Dr. DuBois when he gets here. I found her digging in the dirt. No, it’s not the first time she sleepwalked . . . but this is the first time she could not snap out of it. I wonder if, at private mental institutions, they tie patients to benches or drown them, like they did at Waterbury.

  But is it crazy to search when you know there is something to find?

  I look back at the house. There is no light in Ruby’s bedroom, no silhouette in Spencer’s study. I close my eyes and think of whales and dolphins, bouncing sound off the bottom of the ocean.

  When I blink again, the wall of the icehouse rises out of the black of the night. One sliver seems darker than the others—someone has left the door ajar again. I stand up, reeled by an invisible line into the chilled belly of the shed.

  The soles of my boots slip on the sawdust. Luminous blocks of ice sit shoulder to shoulder, a glowing row of giant’s teeth. There are Ruby’s roasts, for the dinner party we will not have. And on a cutting block sits an old apple crate, with the top set off to the side.

  Inside is the smallest, stillest doll I have ever seen.

  “No. No. Oh, no.” I grip the rough edge of the crate, tiny coffin, and look down at the face of my baby.

  Her eyelashes are as long as my pinky nail. Her cheeks are a pale, milky blue. Her fist, impossibly small, is curled tight as a snail. With one finger I touch her dimpled jaw, her embryo ear. “Lily,” I whisper. “Lily Delacour Pike.”

  In this frozen nursery, I lift my daughter from her cradle. I wrap her blanket tighter, to keep her warm. I rock her against my breast, so that she can hear my heart break.

  Spencer cannot take her away from me. To do that, I would have to agree to let go.

  Awani Kia, I think. In this other world, they will ask her who she is. “You tell them about your grandma, and your grandpa, who built a bridge out of love,” I say against her skin. “You tell them about your father, who thought he was doing the right thing. And you tell them about me.” I kiss her, letting my lips rest for a moment. “You tell them I’m coming.”

  Then I put my daughter back in her crib and press my fist against my mouth to hold in all the sorrow. I will spend forever wondering if Spencer told me the truth, or only half. If Lily stopped breathing in his arms, or if he made sure of it. Maybe one day he will explain: I only did it because I loved you.

  “Me too,” I say aloud.

  Soon Spencer will wake and come looking for me. And I will make him pay for this. There are ways to show the authorities what really happened. I will do what it takes, even if it kills me.

  There isn’t much time. So I reach into the crate again, where my baby’s face fits in the palm of my hand. Her nose and her chin push up against it, a memory to carry. “Sleep well,” I tell her, and I move to the doorway of the icehouse.

  I think of Madame Soliat at the Fourth of July, with her wolf dog and her tent. I think of her shaking out her many-colored coat on the banks of the lake where she lived for a summer. Don’t be afraid, she told me. Among other things.

  I do not need a fortune-teller anymore. I know what comes next.

  PART THREE

  2001

  The dead continue to converse with the living.

  —THOMAS HARDY

  EIGHT

  On nights that Az Thompson didn’t work at the quarry, he spent hours cleaving through the barnacled facts that cluttered his head. Live a century, and you know a lot of things: how to navigate by starlight, what to say to a grieving widow, where bear hide in the winter. Under all this flotsam you could scrape down to the barest truths—that, for example, it was not blood you passed down to your children, but courage. That you might find love in the most unlikely places—under stones in the shallows of the river, at the bottom of a bowl of shelled peas. That even when you least expected it, you could go on.

  Doctors called it insomnia, but Az knew better. He didn’t go to sleep because then he didn’t have to wake up and wonder why he hadn’t died overnight. He’d read of Egyptian kings and Ponce de León and Tithonus, who had tried so hard to live forever. But what good was eternity, when you outlived everyone you loved? When you watched your body fall apart piece by piece, like a rusting automobile, even though your mind could snap like lightning? These fools with their elixirs and their golden tombs . . . he would shake his head and think, Be careful what you wish for.

  Az was tired at the cellular level, but he didn’t lie down on his cot. Instead he watched the raindrops charge the roof of his tent like an old-time picture show. In another four hours, the sun would rise, and he would still be here.

  Suddenly, he heard a cry. It seemed to come simultaneously from both the distant forest and inside Az himself, an ache more than a sound. He wondered if it were possible to throw one’s emotion so that it spoke back to you, a ventriloquism of pain.

  There—the sound, again.

  It wasn’t thunder. It was too deep for a child, too guttural for a woman. No, this was the requiem of a man who had lost so much he could no longer find himself. Someone like . . . well, himself.

  Az sighed. He didn’t believe in a lot of mystical bullshit—that was the province of New Age wanna-be Indians, in his opinion—but he also knew that your past could return in a number of disguises, from the shrill whistle of an owl to the eyes of a stranger that followed you down the street. And he knew better than anyone that turning your back on your own history only made it that much easier to be blindsided.

  Then again, it could just be some guy who’d tripped in the dark and hurt himself.

  Either way, Az thought wearily, he was going to have to go see.

  Ross sat on the floor of the tent with Az Thompson’s Hudson Bay blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His pants and shirt were thick with mud. His wet hair dripped into his eyes as he sipped the instant coffee the old man had made with a battery-powered immersion heater. He could not seem to stop shaking, although this had nothing to do with the dampness that soaked through to his core. No, that was due to a woman who smelled of roses. A woman who—say it, he demanded silently—he had fallen in love with. A woman who was not alive.

  “You all right?” Az asked.

  You look like you’ve seen a ghost.

  Ross couldn’t answer. He bent his head to the mug and took a swallow of coffee that burned his throat. It brought tears to his eyes.

  He had watched as her skin went translucent, as the trees grew more solid than Lia herself. He had seen the shock on her face when she looked down at the gravestone and saw her own name. She hadn’t been aware, any more than Ross had. Ross, who had studied the paranormal, who understood that a demon carried a rotten stench and that a poltergeist drew its energy from a teenage girl, had not known the simple fact that a ghost could kiss you back.

  Ghosts were not the norm. They were the ones who, for one reason or another, still had one foot in this world and could not seem to shake it free. Ross had heard Curtis Warburton speak of ghosts who return to avenge their own demise, and ghosts who came back because they’d forgotten to pay the electric bill. Ross reme