The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  His hand came up slowly, grabbing her wrist. When Meredith looked down, she realized that he was awake and crying. He tried to speak, but the oxygen feed over his mouth made it impossible to understand what he was trying to say. She hesitated, and then pulled the clear funnel away from his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Spencer Pike said. “I am so sorry.”

  Meredith froze. “It’s all right,” she murmured, attempting to pull away.

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go yet.”

  She swallowed, then nodded. Drawing a chair closer to the bed, she sat down beside her grandfather.

  His breathing grew more erratic, and a wash of pain crossed his face. “Cissy,” Spencer Pike said, “will you wait for me?”

  Cissy. Cecelia. You look like someone I used to know. Meredith had forgotten the obvious—if she truly did look like her deceased grandmother, then this man would be the person most inclined to take notice.

  “Yes, Spencer,” she replied evenly. “For as long as it takes.”

  He lay back after that, falling into an uneasy sleep. Meredith kept her promise. She sat with her grandfather as his lungs rattled and pumped. She sat until the symphony of machines that had been playing a swan song became a single note in her head. She sat until the nurses came to give Spencer Pike his next dose of morphine; until they convinced Meredith that it was all right for her to leave him now, because he’d passed away.

  Tuck Boorhies was cranky, and deservedly so. He’d been paged from a golf game by Eli, and told to be at the Montpelier lab in an hour and a half. If he didn’t show up, Eli promised to arrive with a warrant for his arrest for the obstruction of justice.

  He was all bluster, Tuck knew that, but something in Eli’s voice—as though he were on the edge of the cliff and about to look over the rim—made him even more curious to know what was up than to find out if he’d finish his game under par. Eli had been pacing at the door when he arrived, and herded Tuck into his photography lab to enlarge another one of those prints from the murder. This one, though, zoomed in on the feet. Tuck had pumped up the contrast on Adobe Photoshop, and damn if there weren’t footprints on the damp sawdust that seemed to match some of the other prints, a woman’s. But even more interesting was the long drag mark through the shavings.

  He looked up from the lab stool where he was sitting, at the ready with an instant camera. “What are we doing again?” he asked Eli, who was rigging a Hefty trash bag to a hook in the ceiling of the borrowed room. Inside the bag was about three-quarters of a pint of water. On the ground was a load of sawdust Eli had secured from the nearest horse barn.

  “According to Wesley Sneap, a human urinary tract system can hold about four hundred millileters of fluid, max,” Eli said.

  “Which is important because . . .” Tuck raised one eyebrow.

  “Just give me a hand here, will you?” He climbed onto a free stool, motioning to Tuck to shoulder the weight of the water bag while he made a sturdy knot at the hook above. “He said that at the moment of death, there’s a loss of nerve stimulation to the anal and urethral sphincters, causing incontinence.”

  “Good to know.”

  Eli kicked some of the shavings around under the garbage bag, then stepped back to observe. “Okay, Tuck,” he said. “Pop my bladder.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My bladder.” Eli pointed overhead.

  Tuck had learned that you didn’t upset guys who got to carry a gun as part of their paycheck. “Whatever,” he murmured, and he pierced the Hefty bag with his pen.

  They both watched the trickle and stream of water, matting down the sawdust. It covered their footprints, blurring the edges. When the bag was empty, the sawdust that had been stained wet beneath it was about the size of a manhole cover. “Shoot that for me, will you, Tuck?” Eli asked, as he walked out the door of the lab.

  Tuck glanced at Eli’s holster, lying on its side on one of the examination tables, and then down at his Polaroid camera. Shrugging, he took a few photos.

  As they rainbowed up, Eli came inside again, hauling a wooden crate. “So?”

  “So it looks like a puddle. What did you expect?”

  Eli took the photograph out of Tuck’s hand and stared at it, then placed it beside the print Tuck had just enlarged. “Is it just me, or do those puddles not match?”

  They didn’t. The darkened spot of wet sawdust in the new Polaroid was nearly twice as small as the one in the black-and-white enhancement. Before Tuck could respond, however, Eli cracked open the wooden crate and grunted as he hoisted out a two-foot by one-foot block of ice. He carried this to the sawdust, tipped it so that it was vertical, and shoved it into the center of the puddle, creating a long, familiar drag mark in the sawdust. Then he pulled up a stool beside Tuck’s, and took a folded New York Times crossword puzzle out of his back pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Tuck asked.

  “Four across.”

  “No.” He waved at the setup in the middle of the room. “Over there.”

  Eli followed his gaze. “I’m waiting,” he replied.

  Ethan was tying his sneakers when he heard the scream. He ran down the hall, to the room where Lucy and her mother were staying, and pushed open the door.

  She was sitting up on the cot, shaking like crazy. “Lucy?” Ethan said, creeping closer. “You okay?” He looked around the room. Her mother was nowhere to be found. Well, it was only midnight. Maybe she hadn’t gone to bed yet. “Can you breathe?”

  She nodded, and hands relaxed their death grip on the blanket. “Did I wake you?”

  “Nah, I was getting up anyway.” Ethan scuffed his sneaker on the carpet. “Where’s your mom?”

  She looked around, as if just noticing that her mother wasn’t there. “I don’t know. Your mother tucked me in.”

  Ethan grinned. “You see one mother, you’ve seen them all.”

  She smiled, but just a little. Ethan tried to remember what his mom did for him when he had nightmares. “Milk,” he announced. “You want me to get you some?”

  “Why would I want milk?”

  “I don’t know. If you stick it in the microwave it’s supposed to make you go back to sleep. That’s what my mother says if I freak out when I’m sleeping.”

  “I bet you never freak out.”

  “Sure I do. Everyone has nightmares.”

  “What are yours about?”

  “Getting stuck in the sun,” Ethan said flatly. “How about yours?”

  “Ghosts,” Lucy whispered.

  They stood in the still of the house for a moment, which suddenly seemed cavernous. All in all, Ethan knew, it felt better just then to be standing there with someone. “Well, I’m not scared of ghosts.”

  “I’m not scared of the sun,” Lucy answered.

  He should have told her more. Ross beat himself up mentally once again, certain that he was responsible for Meredith’s disappearance. She’d been gone now for hours, not even putting a call in to make sure Lucy was all right. Maybe she just needed time to think.

  Maybe she didn’t want to think at all.

  He smacked his head lightly against the trunk of the tree on which he was leaning. What he would have liked, now, was five minutes in the past. Five minutes to talk to Meredith Oliver and make her see that he understood what it was like to wake up and realize your life had turned out different from the one you once imagined you’d be living.

  Regret hung from the hem of everyone’s lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some time or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thing humans had in common.

  Taken this way, Ross didn’t feel quite so alone. Trapped in the whirlpool of what might have been, you might not be able to drag yourself out—but you could be saved by someone else who reac