The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “Calling the police,” she said.

  He crossed in two strides and took the receiver from her hand, hung up the phone. “Don’t.”

  “Daniel—”

  “Laura, I know why she ran away. I was accused of murder when I was eighteen, and I took off, too.”

  At this confession, Laura completely lost her train of thought. How could you live with a man for fifteen years, feel him move inside you, have his child, and not know something as fundamental about him as this?

  He sat down at Trixie’s desk. “I was still living in Alaska. The victim was my best friend, Cane.”

  “Did you . . . did you do it?”

  Daniel hesitated. “Not the way they thought I did.”

  Laura stared at him. She thought of Trixie, God knows where right now, on the run for a crime she could not have committed. “If you weren’t guilty . . . then why—”

  “Because Cane was still dead.”

  In Daniel’s eyes, Laura could suddenly see the most surprising things: the blood of a thousand salmon slit throat to tail, the blueveined crack of ice so thick it made the bottoms of your feet hurt, the profile of a raven sitting on a roof. In Daniel’s eyes she understood something she hadn’t been willing to admit to herself before: In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he understood their daughter better than she did.

  He shifted, hitting the computer mouse with his elbow. The screen hummed to life, revealing several open windows: Google, iTunes, Sephora.com, and the heartbreaking rapesurvivor.com, full of poetry by girls like Trixie. But MapQuest? When Trixie wasn’t even old enough to drive?

  Laura leaned over Daniel’s shoulder to grasp the mouse. FIND IT! the site promised. There were empty boxes to fill in: address, city, state, zip code. And at the bottom, in bright blue: We are having trouble finding a route for your location.

  “Oh, Christ,” Daniel said. “I know where she is.”

  • • •

  Trixie’s father used to take her out into the woods and teach her how to read the world so that she’d always know where she was going. He’d quiz her on the identification of trees: the fairy-tale spray of needles on a hemlock, the narrow grooves of an ash, the paper-wrapped birch, the gnarled arms of a sugar maple. One day, when they were examining a tree with barbed wire running through the middle of its trunk—how long do you think that took?—Trixie’s eye had been caught by something in the forest: sun glinting off metal.

  The abandoned car sat behind an oak tree that had been split by lightning. Two of the windows had been broken; some animal had made its home in the tufted stuffing of the backseat. A vine had grown from the bottom of the forest floor through the window, wrapping around the steering wheel.

  Where do you think the driver is? Trixie had asked.

  I don’t know, her father replied. But he’s been gone for a long time.

  He said that the person who’d left the car behind most likely didn’t want to bother with having it towed away. But that didn’t keep Trixie from making up more extravagant explanations: The man had suffered a head wound and started walking, only to wander up a mountain and die of exposure, and even now the bones were bleaching south of her backyard. The man was on the run from the Mob and had eluded hit men in a car chase. The man had wandered into town with amnesia and spent the next ten years completely unaware of who he used to be.

  Trixie was dreaming of the abandoned car when someone slammed the door of the bathroom stall beside her. She woke up with a start and glanced down at her watch—surely if you left this stuff in your hair too long it would fall out by the roots or turn purple or something. She heard the flush of the toilet, running water, and then the busy slice of life as the door opened. When it fell quiet again, she crept out of the stall and rinsed her hair in the sink.

  There were streaks on her forehead and her neck, but her hair—her red hair, the hair that had inspired her father to call her his chili pepper when she was only a baby—was now the color of a thicket’s thorns, of a rosebush past recovery.

  As she stuffed the ruined sweatshirt into the bottom of the trash can, a mother came in with two little boys. Trixie held her breath, but the woman didn’t look twice at her. Maybe it was really that easy. She walked out of the bathroom, past a new Santa who’d come on duty, toward the parking lot. She thought of the man who’d left his car in the woods: Maybe he had staged his own death. Maybe he’d done it for the sole purpose of starting over.

  • • •

  If a teenager wants to disappear, chances are he or she will succeed. It was why runaways were so difficult to track—until they were rounded up in a drug or prostitution ring. Most teens who vanished did so for independence, or to get away from abuse. Unlike an adult, however, who could be traced by a paper trail of ATM withdrawals and rental car agreements and airline passenger lists, a kid was more likely to pay in cash, to hitchhike, to go unnoticed by bystanders.

  For the second time in an hour, Bartholemew pulled into the neighborhood where the Stones lived. Trixie Stone was officially registered now as a missing person, not a fugitive from justice. That couldn’t happen, not even if all signs pointed to the fact that the reason she’d left was because she knew she was about to be charged with murder.

  In the American legal system, you could not use a suspect’s disappearance as probable cause. Later on, during a trial, a prosecutor might hold up Trixie’s flight as proof of guilt, but there was never going to be a trial if Bartholemew couldn’t convince a judge to swear out a warrant for Trixie Stone’s arrest—so that at the moment she was located, she could be taken into custody.

  The problem was, had Trixie not fled, he wouldn’t be arresting her yet. Christ, just two days ago, Bartholemew had been convinced that Daniel Stone was the perp . . . until the physical evidence started to prove otherwise. Prove, though, was a dubious term. He had a boot print that matched Trixie’s footwear—and that of thousands of other town residents. He had blood on the victim that belonged to a female, which ruled out only half the population. He had a hair the same general color as Trixie’s—a hair with a root on it full of uncontaminated DNA, but no known sample of Trixie’s to compare it to and no imminent means of getting one.

  Any defense attorney would be able to drive a Hummer through the holes in that investigation. Bartholemew needed to physically find Trixie Stone, so that he could specifically link her to Jason Underhill’s murder.

  He knocked on the Stones’ front door. Again, no one answered, but this time, when Bartholemew tried the knob, it was locked. He cupped his hands around the glass window and peered into the mudroom.

  Daniel Stone’s coat and boots were gone.

  He walked halfway around the attached garage to a tiny window and peered inside. Laura Stone’s Honda, which hadn’t been here two hours ago, was parked in one bay. Daniel Stone’s pickup was gone.

  Bartholemew smacked his hand against the exterior wall of the house and swore. He couldn’t prove that Daniel and Laura Stone had gone off to find Trixie before the cops did, but he would have bet money on it. When your child is missing, you don’t go grocery shopping. You sit tight and wait for the word that she’s being brought safely home.

  Bartholemew pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to think. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. After all, the Stones had a better chance of finding Trixie than he did. And it would be far easier for Bartholemew to track two adults than their fourteen-year-old daughter.

  And in the meantime? Well, he could get a warrant to search the house, but it wouldn’t do him any good. No lab worth its salt would accept a toothbrush from Trixie’s bathroom as a viable known sample of DNA. What he needed was the girl herself and a lab-sanctioned sample of her blood.

  Which, in that instant, Bartholemew realized he already had—sitting in a sealed rape kit, evidence for a trial that wasn’t going to happen.

  • • •

  In eighth grade, as part of health class, Trixie had had to take care of an egg. Each student was gi