The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Belatedly, he became aware of Shelby taking in his ruined clothes and wet hair. She must have called the police because she was worried about him—something his sister would definitely do. “It looks worse than it is,” Ross said, thinking that if she could see how scarred he was on the inside she’d be horrified. “But I’m fine. You can call off the search party.”

  At that, Eli Rochert stepped forward. “Actually,” he said, “I came here asking you to join it.”

  Ross wanted to be in his bedroom at Shelby’s place, with the lights off and a bottle of Jameson’s at his side, as he carved Lia’s name into his arm with the tongue of a knife. Maybe he would bleed, maybe it would hurt—although Ross would bet on neither of these. He knew what no one else seemed to be able to figure out—he was already dead; his body just hadn’t caught up to the rest of him.

  Sitting in the interrogation room at the Comtosook Police Department with Eli Rochert and his behemoth dog, he supposed, offered torture of a different sort. Scattered across the conference table were evidentiary pictures of Lia’s body after the hanging, boots she had worn, even the dress that she’d been wearing when she appeared to him. Seeing each of these was a cut deeper than any Ross could have made himself.

  “You, uh, said when we last met that you had started to investigate the history of Cecelia Pike’s death,” Eli said.

  “Lia,” Ross murmured. “She likes to be called Lia.”

  The cop resisted rolling his eyes, but just barely. Well, fuck him, Ross thought. I don’t want to be here either.

  “You . . . saw her, then?” Eli asked.

  “You’re not going to believe me if I say I did, so why are you even asking?”

  “Look. I’m not crazy about consulting a psychic—”

  “I’m not a psychic,” Ross interrupted. “Sensitive, maybe.”

  “Jeez, no matter what you’re doing in this state, it always comes back to Civil Unions.”

  “Not that kind of sensitive.” Ross couldn’t stand it anymore; he turned over one gruesome autopsy photo of Lia so that it was no longer visible. “The kind of person who’s receptive to spirits. This one, in particular.”

  Eli hesitated before speaking. “Mr. Wakeman, a week ago, you begged me to reopen a seventy-year-old case. Against my better judgment, I did. And I’m interested enough to keep digging, even though it’s something I have to do on my own time, instead of the department’s.” He flattened his hands on the table. “You indicated there might be foul play involving Spencer Pike. What made you say that?”

  “The Abenaki claim to the land. Pike’s absolute fit when I brought it up. And the fact that there was a ghost at all—from everything I’ve been taught, ghosts only come back for a reason. I assumed that if there was a ghost on the property, it was a Native American—maybe even the one accused of murder. But the one I found turned out to be Lia.” He turned away. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.”

  “It may not have been a waste,” Eli said. “According to what you just told me, if Lia Pike came back as a ghost, then something about her death probably didn’t sit right.”

  Her face flashed in front of Ross’s eyes, and he got to his feet, intent on leaving before he fell apart in front of this cop. “Being murdered when you’re eighteen usually doesn’t sit right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Officer Rochert . . .”

  “Can I show you something, before you go?” Eli handed Ross a piece of paper, one he recognized as a crime-scene report dated from the 1930s. “Pike says Gray Wolf hanged her. According to the officers on the scene, there was sign of a struggle. There are photos of the porch where the body was found hanging, photos of footprints, photos of a broken window in the master bedroom. I’ve got DNA matching the victim’s blood, plus DNA from two different males who were also placed at the scene.”

  Ross swallowed around the brick in his throat. “Sounds like you’re well on your way to proving Pike right.”

  Eli continued as if Ross had not spoken at all. “But there’s also evidence that doesn’t add up. Things that make me wonder if you aren’t right about Spencer Pike getting rid of Gray Wolf. And possibly his own wife.”

  “Listen.” The room was swimming in front of Ross. “I can’t talk about this right now.”

  “I don’t want you to talk. I want you to help.”

  Ross looked up. “I’m not a detective.”

  “No,” Eli agreed quietly. “But you apparently know how to find things the rest of us can’t see.”

  SEARCH INVENTORY: Pike Homicide, Sept. 19, 1932

  SEIZED FROM THE ICEHOUSE PORCH:

  Noose, cut

  Leather pouch

  Pipe

  Photographs: sawdust on porch w/footprints, body cut down

  SEIZED FROM VICTIM:

  Boots

  Dress

  Underwear/sanitary napkin

  Photographs: autopsy

  SEIZED FROM MASTER BEDROOM:

  Photographs: broken glass window

  Photographs: interior of house—ransacked

  List of names—dinner party following week

  Sheets, pillows, coverlet, nightgown—stained

  Swaddling blankets

  Metal basin

  By the time Ross got home, it was daybreak. He walked inside, thanking a God he no longer believed in that Shelby did not seem to be around. Making a beeline upstairs, he shut the door of his room behind him, crawled into bed fully clothed, and finally let himself go to pieces.

  Most of the time when Ross thought about his life, he imagined living it alone. The very concept of a family did not appear to be in the cards for him. He was not commitment-shy, or unattractive, or too free-spirited to settle; but whenever he tried to give his heart away, he found himself holding it out to a person who was no longer there.

  There were women. The waitress in Duluth who took him home with the extra beef stew one night; the soccer mom who had never been told by her businessman husband that she was worthy of more than that life; the scarred breast-cancer survivor who had to be reminded how beautiful she still was. But these were women who needed him for a night or two, who dropped him the moment they saw how much Ross needed them. After all, who could love someone like him—a man who sometimes could not get out of bed even though he had not slept for weeks, a man who had tried to kill himself so many times that he believed he was invincible, a man who could not even love himself?

  Ross pulled a pillow over his head. He wanted a woman who would feel about him the way he felt about her—as if she’d been missing something until they met, willing to give up everything to follow him from one world to another, certain that every disastrous second she’d spent alone had only been leading up to this moment.

  He wanted a woman who did not exist.

  There was a knock on his door, which Ross ignored. Maybe Shelby would think he was asleep. He ducked further beneath the covers.

  “Hey.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hand resting gently on the blanket covering his shoulder. “I know you’re not asleep.”

  He tugged down the blanket. “How?”

  “Because you never sleep.”

  “There’s always a first time,” Ross said.

  He watched Shelby pleat the edge of the sheet into a fan, then let it fall apart. “What did the police want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He came all the way here, and took you all the way to the station, for nothing?”

  “Leave me alone, Shelby. If you want to be a mother, go practice on your son.”

  “My son isn’t the one who’s crying.”

  Ross touched his fingers to his cheeks—Christ, he hadn’t even noticed. “I can’t do this now.”

  “Ross, talk to me . . .”

  He fell onto his back, his arm covering his eyes. “Shel, look. I haven’t found out that I have six weeks to live, unfortunately. I didn’t commit a felony. I just had a really shitty night that made me remember why it’s no use falling in love. So go back to your room or t