The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Wiping her hand across her mouth, Trixie took a deep breath and started to walk.

  • • •

  “She’s gone,” Daniel Stone said, frantic.

  Bartholemew’s eyes narrowed. “Gone?”

  He followed Stone upstairs and stood in the doorway of Trixie’s room, which looked as if a bomb had cut a swath through its middle. “I don’t know where she is,” Stone said, his voice breaking. “I don’t know when she left.”

  It took Bartholemew less than a second to determine that this wasn’t a lie. In the first place, Stone had been out of his sight for less than a minute, hardly long enough to tip off his daughter that she was under suspicion. In the second place, Daniel Stone seemed just as surprised as Bartholemew was to find Trixie missing, and he was skating the knife edge of panic.

  For only a heartbeat, Bartholemew let himself wonder why a teenage girl who had nothing to hide would suddenly disappear. But in the next breath, he remembered what it felt like to discover that your daughter was not where you’d thought she was, and he switched gears. “When did you last see her?”

  “Before she went to take a nap . . . about three-thirty?”

  The detective took a notepad out of his pocket. “What was she wearing?”

  “I’m not sure. She probably changed after the funeral.”

  “Have you got a recent photo?”

  Bartholemew followed Stone downstairs again, watching him run a finger along the vertebrae of books on a living room shelf, finally pulling down an eighth-grade yearbook from Bethel Middle School. He turned pages until they fell open to the S’s. A folio of snapshots—a 5-by-7 and some wallet-sized—spilled out. “We never got around to framing them,” Stone murmured.

  In the photographs, Trixie’s smiling face repeated like an Andy Warhol print. The girl in the picture had long red hair held back with clips. Her smile was just a little too wide, and a tooth in front was crooked. The girl in that picture had never been raped. Maybe she had never even been kissed.

  Bartholemew had to pry the pictures of Trixie from her father’s hand. Both men were painfully aware that Stone was struggling not to break down. The tears you shed over a child were not the same as any others. They burned your throat and your corneas. They left you blind.

  Daniel Stone stared at him. “She didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Sit tight,” Bartholemew replied, aware that it was not an answer. “I’ll find her.”

  • • •

  The last lecture Laura gave before Christmas vacation was about the half-life of transgression. “Are there any sins Dante left out?” Laura asked. “Or any really bad modern-day behaviors that weren’t around in the year 1300?”

  One girl nodded. “Drug addiction. There’s, like, no bolgia for crackheads.”

  “It’s the same as gluttony,” a second student said. “Addiction’s addiction. It doesn’t matter what the substance is.”

  “Cannibalism?”

  “Nope, Dante’s got that in there,” Laura said. “Count Uggolino. He lumps it in with bestiality.”

  “Driving to endanger?”

  “Filippo drives his horses recklessly. Early Italian road rage.” Laura glanced around the silent hall. “Maybe the question we need to ask isn’t whether there’s any fresh twenty-first-century sin . . . but whether the people who define sin have changed, because of the times.”

  “Well, the world’s completely different,” a student pointed out.

  “Sure, but look at how it’s still the same. Avarice, cowardice, depravity, a need to control other people—these have all been around forever. Maybe nowadays a pedophile will start a kiddie-porn site instead of flashing in the subway tunnels, or a murderer will choose to use an electric chain saw to kill, instead of his bare hands . . . Technology helps us be more creative in the way we sin, but it doesn’t mean that the basic sin is different.”

  A boy shook his head. “Seems like there ought to be a whole different circle for someone like Jeffrey Dahmer, you know?”

  “Or the people who come up with reality TV shows,” someone else interjected, and the class laughed.

  “It’s sort of interesting,” Laura said, “to think that Dante wouldn’t have put Jeffrey Dahmer as deep in hell as he would Macbeth. Why is that?”

  “Because the skivviest thing you can do is be disloyal to someone. Macbeth killed his own king, man. That would be like Eminem taking down Dr. Dre.”

  The student was, at a literal level, correct. In the Inferno, sins of passion and despair weren’t nearly as damning as sins of treachery. Sinners in the upper circles of hell were guilty of indulging their own appetites, but without malice toward others. Sinners in the middle levels of hell had committed acts of violence toward themselves or others. The deepest level of hell, though, was reserved for fraud—what Dante felt was the worst sin of all. There was betrayal to family—those who killed kin. There was betrayal to country—for the double agents and spies of the world. There was betrayal to benefactor—Judas, Brutus, Cassius, and Lucifer, all of whom had turned against their mentors.

  “Does Dante’s hierarchy still work?” Laura asked. “Or do you think that in our world, the order of the damned should be shaken up?”

  “I think it’s worse to keep someone’s head in your freezer than to sell national security secrets to the Chinese,” a girl said, “but that’s just me.”

  Another student shook her head. “I don’t get why being unfaithful to your king is worse than being unfaithful to your husband. If you have an affair, you wind up only in the second level of hell. That’s, like, getting off easy.”

  “Nice choice of words,” the kid beside her joked.

  “It’s about intention,” a student added. “Like manslaughter versus murder. It’s almost as if you do something in the heat of the moment, Dante excuses you. But if you’ve got this whole premeditated scheme going on, you’re in deep trouble.”

  In that moment, although she’d been a professor for this particular course—even this particular class topic—for a decade, Laura realized that there was a sin that Dante had left out, one that belonged in the very deepest pit of hell. If the worst sin of all was betraying others, then what about people who lied to themselves?

  There should have been a tenth circle, a tiny spot the size of the head of a pin, with room for infinite masses. It would be overcrowded with professors who hid in ivy-covered towers instead of facing their broken families. With little girls who had grown up overnight. With husbands who didn’t speak of their past but instead poured it out onto a blank white page. With women who pretended they could be the wife of one and the lover of another and keep the two selves distinct. With anyone who told himself he was living the perfect life, despite all evidence to the contrary.

  A voice swam toward her. “Professor Stone? Are you okay?”

  Laura focused on the girl in the front row who’d asked the question. “No,” she said quietly. “I’m not. You can all . . . you can all go home a little early for vacation.”

  As the students disbanded, delighted with this windfall, Laura gathered her briefcase and her coat. She walked to the parking lot, got into her car, and began to drive.

  The women who wrote “Annie’s Mailbox” were wrong, Laura realized. Just because you didn’t speak the facts out loud didn’t erase their existence. Silence was just a quieter way to lie.

  She knew where she was headed, but before she got there, her cell phone rang. “It’s Trixie,” Daniel said, and suddenly what he had to say was far more important than what she did.

  • • •

  Santa’s Village in Jefferson, New Hampshire, was full of lies. There were transplanted reindeer languishing in a fake barn and phony elves hammering in a workshop and a counterfeit Santa sitting on a throne with a bazillion kids lined up to tell him what they wanted on the big day. There were parents pretending this was totally real, even the animatronic Rudolph. And then there was Trixie herself, trying to act like she was normal, when in fact