The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Trixie closed her eyes. She had lost her virginity in a field of lupine behind the ice rink, where the Zamboni shavings were dumped, an artificial winter smack in the middle of the September flowers. Jason had borrowed the key from the rinkmaster and taken her skating after the rink was closed for the day. He’d laced up her skates and told her to close her eyes. Then he’d reached for her hands, skating backward so fast she felt like she was falling to earth. We’re writing in cursive, he told her as he pulled in a straight line. Can you read it? Then he looped the breadth of the rink, skated a circle, a right angle, a tinier loop, finishing with a curl. I LOVE O? Trixie had recited, and Jason had laughed. Close enough, he’d said. Later, in that field, with the pile of snow hiding them from sight, Jason had again been moving at lightning speed, and Trixie could not quite keep up. When he pushed inside her, she turned her head to watch the lupine tremble on their shivering stems, so that he wouldn’t realize he’d hurt her.

  “In the past few days, you who are Jason’s family and friends have been struggling with the questions that surround his death. You are feeling a fraction of the pain, maybe, that Jason felt in those last, dark hours. You might be reliving the last time you spoke to him. You might be wondering, Is there anything I should have said or done that I didn’t? That might have made a difference?”

  Trixie suddenly saw Jason holding her down on Zephyr’s white living room carpet. If she’d been brave enough to peek that night, would she have seen the bruises blooming on his jaw, the smile rotting off his face?

  “Into your hands, O Savior, we commend your servant Jason Underhill. We pray for you to recognize this child of yours . . .”

  His breath fell onto her lips, but he tasted of worms. His fingers bit so hard into her wrists that she looked down and saw only his bones, as the flesh peeled away from him.

  “Receive him into your never-ending mercy. Grant him everlasting peace, and eternal life in your light.”

  Trixie tried to swim back to the minister’s words. She craved light, too, but all she could see were the black and blue stripes of the nights when Jason came to haunt her. Or maybe she was seeing the nights when she had gone to him willingly. It was all mixed up now. She couldn’t separate the real Jason from the ghost; she couldn’t untangle what she’d wanted from what she didn’t.

  Maybe it had always been like that.

  The scream started so deep inside of her that she thought it was just a resonance, like a tuning fork that could not stop trembling. Trixie didn’t realize that the sound spilled through her seams, over-flowing, bearing Jason’s coffin like a tide and sweeping it off its stanchions. She didn’t know that she’d fallen to her knees, and that every single eye in the congregation was on her, as it had been before the service began. And she didn’t trust herself to believe that the savior the minister had been summoning had reached through the very roof of the church and carried her outside where she could breathe again—not until she found the courage to open her eyes and found herself safe and away, cradled in her father’s arms.

  • • •

  Trixie’s boot prints matched. Unfortunately, they were Sorels, which accounted for a large portion of all winter footwear sold in the state of Maine. They had no telltale crack of the sole, or a tack stuck into the rubber, to prove without any considerable doubt that it was Trixie’s particular boot that had been on that bridge the night Jason Underhill had died, as opposed to anyone else who wore a size seven and happened to favor the same footwear.

  As a rape victim, she had the motive to be a suspect. But a boot print alone—one that hundreds of townspeople shared—wouldn’t be enough probable cause to convince a judge to swear out a warrant for Trixie’s arrest.

  “Ernie, get out of there,” Bartholemew said, scolding the potbellied pig he’d brought out for a walk. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t wholly professional to bring a pig to a crime scene, but he’d been working round the clock and couldn’t leave Ernestine at home alone any longer. He figured as long as he kept her away from the area that had been cordoned off by the techs, it was all right.

  “Not near the water,” Bartholemew called. The pig glanced at him and scooted down the riverbank. “Fine,” he said. “Go drown. See if I care.”

  But all the same, Bartholemew leaned over the railing of the bridge to watch the pig walk along the edge of the river. The spot where Jason’s body had broken the ice was frozen again, more translucent than the rest. A fluorescent orange flag stapled to a stake marked the northern edge of the crime scene.

  Laura Stone’s alibi had checked out: Phone records put her at the college, and then back at her residence. But several witnesses had noticed both Daniel and Trixie Stone at the Winterfest. One driver had even seen them both, in a parking lot, with Jason Underhill.

  Trixie could have murdered Jason, in spite of the size difference between them. Jason had been drunk, and a well-placed shove might have tumbled him over the bridge. It wouldn’t account for Jason’s bruised and fractured face, but Bartholemew didn’t hold Trixie responsible for that. Most likely, it had gone down this way: Jason saw Trixie in town and started to talk to her, but Daniel Stone stumbled onto their encounter. He beat the guy to a pulp, Jason ran off, and Trixie followed him to the bridge.

  Bartholemew had believed, initially, that Daniel had lied about not seeing Jason in town that night, and that Trixie had told him about the fight to cover for her father. But what if it had been the other way around? What if Trixie had told the truth, and Daniel—knowing that his daughter had been in contact with Jason already that night—had lied to protect her?

  Suddenly Ernestine began to root, her snout burrowing. God only knew what she’d found—the most she’d ever turned up was a dead mouse that had crawled under the foundation of his garage. He watched with mild interest as she created a pile of dirty snow behind her.

  Then something winked at him.

  Bartholemew slid down the steep grade of the riverbank, slipped on a plastic glove from his pocket, and pulled a man’s wristwatch out of the snow behind Ernestine.

  It was an Eddie Bauer watch with a royal blue face and a woven canvas band. The buckle was missing. Bartholemew squinted up at the bridge, trying to imagine the trajectory and the distance from there to here. Could Jason’s arm have struck the railing and snapped the buckle? The medical examiner had found splinters in the boy’s fingers—had he lost his watch while he was desperately trying to hang on?

  He took out his cell phone and dialed the medical examiner’s number. “It’s Bartholemew,” he said when Anjali answered. “Did Jason Underhill wear a watch?”

  “He wasn’t brought in wearing one.”

  “I just found one at the crime scene. Is there any way to tell if it’s his?”

  “Hang on.” Bartholemew heard her rummage through papers. “I’ve got the autopsy photos here. On the left wrist, there’s a band of skin that’s a bit lighter than the rest of his arm’s skin tone. Why don’t you see if the parents recognize it?”

  “That’s my next stop,” Bartholemew said. “Thanks.” As he hung up and started to slide the watch into a plastic evidence bag, he noticed something he hadn’t seen at first—a hair had gotten caught around the little knob used to set the time.

  It was about an inch long, and coarse. There seemed to be a root attached, as if it had been yanked out.

  Mike thought of Jason’s all-American good looks, of his dark hair and blue eyes. He held the watch up against the white canvas of his own dress shirt sleeve for comparison. In such stark relief, the hair was as red as a sunset, as red as shame, as red as any other hair on Trixie Stone’s head.

  • • •

  “Twice in one week?” Daniel said, opening the door to find Detective Bartholemew standing on the porch again. “I must have won the lottery.”

  Daniel was still wearing his button-down shirt from the funeral, although he’d stripped off the tie and left it noosed around one of the kitchen chairs. He could feel the detective surveyin