The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  “Duley,” Eli said gently, “Spencer Pike didn’t commit suicide.”

  “Suicide? Oh, that’s right, now. That was a hostage thing up at the post office in the late fifties.” He rubbed his forehead. “Sometimes . . . sometimes it all just slides together up there.”

  “I understand.” Eli twirled his hat on his hand. Maybe this hadn’t been such a great idea.

  “The medical examiner, he wanted to do an autopsy on the baby.”

  At that, Eli’s head snapped up. “He did?”

  “Yeah. And Olivette—he was the detective-lieutenant at the time—wouldn’t let him dig up the grave. Said that you didn’t cause a man like Spencer Pike any more grief if you didn’t have to.”

  “So the baby was already buried when you got there?”

  “Uh-huh. Off in the woods a ways. Fresh dirt and even some flowers. Pike told us that the baby came stillborn, and it sent his wife over the edge. Said he buried the baby just to give her some peace of mind.”

  “Pike told me he buried his wife and his baby on the same day.”

  “Nope, I know that for a fact. I was at Cissy Pike’s funeral. Weren’t many of us—me and Olivette, and her father, and Pike, just enough to lower the coffin. It was a pretty big scandal at the time—he wasn’t up for the church ladies bringing casseroles, even though he could have used the help, with his girl gone. Buried Cissy right next to the grave where his baby already was.”

  “Did he tell you what took so long? To call the cops?” Eli asked.

  “Oh, he didn’t have to tell us. We could still smell the booze on him. Pretty much pickled himself the night before.” Duley looked toward the house. “I got three girls, you know, and I can’t even imagine what I’d have felt like if they’d been born dead. I figure Pike was trying to take the edge off. But he did such a good job of it he passed out . . . didn’t hear anyone coming in to take his wife, or trashing his house. And by the time he woke up half the morning was gone. He called us just before lunchtime, which was a good thing, because I had less in my stomach to toss up when I saw Cissy.”

  Cecelia’s body had been cut down hours before lunchtime, according to Wesley.

  Eli rolled this thought around his head like a marble. “Tell me about Gray Wolf.”

  “Shifty son of a bitch. He was a Gypsy, you know—what you’d call a Native American today. Lying, thieving, it all came easy to him. Everyone knew of him, and his family, and he’d only just got out of jail for killing someone else. Pike said he’d been harassing Cissy the past few weeks. Between the personal belongings of his we found at the crime scene, and the condition of the house—plus a big fat hole of time in his alibi—it made sense. And then, of course, when he vanished, it was like having our suspicions confirmed.”

  Eli scratched his head. “Yeah, I’m wondering how he did vanish.”

  A blush spread upward from the old man’s neck. “That, well . . . that would have been my fault. I was one week on the job, you know, and I thought I could bring him in and put the screws to him, and make myself a hero in the meantime. So I went out in the middle of the night like Columbus—”

  “Columbo?”

  “Yeah, him. I found Gray Wolf drinking at a bar and dragged him in for questioning. But Olivette, he chewed my ass out—said we didn’t have enough to hold the perp yet, and bringing him in for questioning was just gonna make him suspicious. We knocked him around a little, the way we used to do things, but he wouldn’t confess. Olivette set me to tailing him, watching his every move . . .” Duley looked out over the vista of the backyard. “And I lost him. He was there one minute, and the next one, you’d have thought he never existed at all.” He licked his lips and leaned forward to whisper. “I have my theory about what happened to him, mind you.”

  “Do you?” Eli came closer.

  “I think . . .” Duley cupped his spotted hand around Eli’s ear. “I think there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll helping Oswald out.” He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. “You get what I’m saying?”

  Eli sighed. “Perfectly.”

  When Ethan woke up, it was still light out. He slipped the blackout shade back and closed his eyes the way his uncle had taught him, trying to ferret out the activity in his house by sixth sense.

  His mother was working at the library, which suited him just fine, because she’d been a real pain in the neck to live with, lately. Everything Ethan did seemed to rub her the wrong way—from the way he left his dirty clothes inside out in the hamper, to the amount of time he spent surfing the Net. He would have gotten a complex about it, probably, if not for the fact that she’d been a total witch to Uncle Ross too—and for that matter, any telemarketer who had the misfortune of getting the Wakeman household on their calling list—and one neighbor kid who committed the cardinal sin of hitting a baseball into the garage window. “What is wrong with you?” Uncle Ross had even asked yesterday night, when they were all eating breakfast. And his mother had been so busy ignoring him that she burned her hand on the stove, burst into tears, and cried, “Do you see what you made me do?”

  She was screwed up, all right.

  Ethan swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He put on yesterday’s clothes, still on his floor (inside out, which actually was a pain, now that he had to do something about it). He opened the door quietly and crept down the hall to his uncle’s room. The door was locked, the way it had been since Uncle Ross had swiped his mom’s computer and holed up in there, probably breaking into the Pentagon or something. He was supposed to be baby-sitting, but then again, Ethan was supposed to be asleep.

  Downstairs, Ethan pulled on his jacket and hat and put sunscreen on his hands and face, because old habits died hard. Then he let himself out the side door, the one that didn’t squeak.

  The sun was a kiss on the back of his neck, and who knew that an afternoon could be so bright? Ethan picked up his skateboard and carried it under his arm. He walked down the driveway and turned right, then set his skateboard on the pavement and began to roll. A boy on a BMX bike rode past him, wearing a backward, upside-down visor. “Hey,” the kid said, as if Ethan was just like everyone else.

  “Hey,” he replied, stoked simply to be having a conversation.

  “That’s a bitchin’ board.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What’s with the winter clothes?”

  Ethan shrugged. “What’s with the stupid hat?”

  The boy spun his wheels. “I’m heading to the skate park. You want to come?”

  Ethan tried to keep his face as blank as he could, but it was hard, being this real. You didn’t truly exist in the world, he now understood, until you could get out and make it take notice of you. “Whatever,” he said indifferently, smiling beneath every inch of his skin. “I’ve got nothing better to do.”

  What if she’d kissed him?

  After three days now, that question had become unavoidable, caught like a thorn in Shelby’s mind. She relived in excruciating detail the moment where she and Eli had been too close in too tiny a space; what his skin had smelled like, how she had seen the smallest of scars beneath his right ear. She had lain in bed imagining how he’d gotten it: chicken pox, a fistfight over a girl, a fall on the sharp edge of a hockey skate.

  Frankie Martine. Shelby supposed when you looked like that, it didn’t matter if you had a boy’s name.

  She had told herself that, really, she wasn’t jealous. In the first place, she hardly knew Eli Rochert. In the second place, in Shelby’s limited experience, romantic love was selfish—linked to want and yearning. Maternal love was the other end of the scale—all about sacrifice. She had given herself entirely to Ethan; certainly there was nothing left to offer to anyone else. And yet, she wondered if love—as rare a commodity as gold—might not share the same properties, capable of being hammered so thin it might expand exponentially.

  Had Eli and Frankie Martine spent the past seventy-two hours together?

  Shelby sat at the reference des