The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  His mind wandered further back, to the moment he had noticed his beautiful Lily, the first afternoon he’d been working for her father. He’d come in from the fields to get another basket for the berries, and saw her—silver-haired and white-skinned, dancing on the porch to a song she was humming under her breath. She held her arms in place around an imaginary mate, waltzing. She didn’t know anyone was watching, and that alone took Az’s breath away. She needs a partner, Az thought, and that was the beginning.

  He wondered if Meredith had talked to Winks yet about the land. He wondered if she’d come back to Comtosook, like she said. He didn’t know her well enough to read her. Sometimes in the fluid moments before he dropped off to sleep he confused her in his mind with Lia. They looked alike, certainly, but it went deeper than that. He would not speak for his daughter, but he thought Lia would be proud.

  When he had strapped the last of the files to himself and used up all of the silver tape, Az walked into the water. Cold even in August, it numbed his ankles. He felt the files at his hips starting to soak. The papers were sponges, anchoring him to the muddy bottom.

  Az took a deep breath just before his head went under. He moved along the floor of the lake, kicking up snails and stones and forgotten treasure. He let the air bubble out of his lungs and lay down on his back, sunken by the weight of the history he had strapped to himself, and he waited for the morning to come.

  “I’m sorry,” Eli said to Shelby for the thirtieth time, as he opened the door of his house and greeted a lonely Watson.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  They had not only missed their dinner reservation in the aftermath of the car crash, they had completely missed serving hours at the restaurant. Now 2 A.M., there wasn’t even a McDonald’s that was open for a bite to eat. Eli tossed his keys into a bowl on the kitchen counter that held three molting bananas. “I’m a pretty awful date,” he muttered, opening the fridge. “I can’t even cook you something. Unless you like bread and mustard.” He scrutinized the loaf. “Make that penicillin and mustard.”

  Suddenly Shelby’s arms circled him from behind. “Eli,” she said, “I’m not even all that hungry.”

  “No?” He straightened, turned toward her.

  She tugged loose his tie. Then she stepped out of her high heels. Barefoot like that, she seemed so small and delicate that it reminded Eli of a snowflake; one blink and it might melt away into nothing. “No,” she said. “But I am a little hot.”

  You’re telling me, Eli thought, and then she turned around and lifted her hair off her neck. “Unzip me?”

  He inched the little metal tag down, and with every opened tooth Eli could feel his nerves fray. Shelby’s skin was the whitest, smoothest expanse he’d ever seen. A little farther, and the hooks of her black bra came into view.

  He stepped away. There was just so much a guy could take. “Maybe, uh, you should go find something to change into,” he suggested.

  “Oh, damn,” Shelby said, not contrite at all. “I didn’t bring anything.” She reached up behind her, finished unraveling the last six inches of zipper, and let the dress fall to the floor so that she stood before him like a mirage of flesh and blood and lace. With a smile, she turned and headed up the stairs, Watson at her heels.

  Eli did not have to think twice. He pulled his pager and cell phone from his belt and turned them off, took the receiver of his home phone off the hook. This was all against departmental procedure, but one tragedy a night was enough. And to be honest, he didn’t much care if the world was coming to end, as long as he was moving inside Shelby when it happened.

  Meredith finished reading every catalog that had come to Shelby’s house in the past month and realized something was very wrong—namely, that she’d finished reading every catalog that had come to Shelby’s house in the past month. Her daughter, who seemed to have an internal radar that blipped whenever Meredith managed to sit down for a second, usually commandeered those smidgens of private time to ask questions that could not wait, like what made lips look pink or why they weren’t allowed to have a dog. But Lucy hadn’t bothered her at all tonight. Neither had Ethan. And mathematically, it stood to reason that a household with two children under the age of ten should generate twice the interruptions.

  She put aside the Pottery Barn catalog and called upstairs. No answer, but they had been playing a computer game with the door closed. Meredith jogged up the stairs and rattled the locked doorknob. “Ethan?” she called out. “How are you guys doing in there?”

  When there was still no answer, she felt the first wave of alarm. She grabbed a wire coat hanger from her own bedroom closet and straightened the neck, poking it into the simple lock device on the doorknob. It swung unlatched and Meredith stepped inside Ethan’s room to find a typical messy boy’s haven—nothing missing, except two children.

  The window was open.

  She raced downstairs to the list of emergency numbers beside the phone, the ones that Meredith had told Shelby she’d never need.

  As Ross walked into the kitchen, Meredith slammed down the telephone and turned, tears running down her face. “The restaurant’s closed and Eli’s pager and his cell phone, they’re supposed to be on but they aren’t, and the police won’t tell me anything even though his number’s unlisted and—”

  The blue funk he’d ridden in on dissipated immediately. “What happened?”

  “The kids,” Meredith said. “They’re missing.”

  “For how long?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I went upstairs just now and they weren’t there.”

  “And you can’t reach Shelby and Eli?” She shook her head. “Okay. I’ll go find them.”

  “You can’t. You don’t know where they are.”

  “Yes I do. Stay here, in case they call, or Shelby comes home.” But he knew as he headed out the door that Meredith was only a step behind him.

  Who knew there were so many shades of black? Being under the moonless sky was no different from hiding beneath a blanket, and the bowl of the quarry, a big circle of nothing just past the toes of Lucy’s sneakers, was a little bit darker than the night itself. One step, one mistake, and you’d go falling. Only by squinting could she see Ethan, who suddenly let go of the guardrail and disappeared before her eyes.

  Her breath solidified, a block in her throat. She would have screamed, but what would Ethan think if she was afraid of simply getting to the ghosts, not just the ghosts themselves? Then his head popped up near her ankles. “Are you waiting for an invitation?” he asked, and she realized he was holding fast to a ladder that led into the pit of the quarry.

  Ethan said there was a ghost here, a quarry supervisor who’d been killed by some crazy guy. He said seeing the spirit was a sure thing. He’d told her they might have to avoid a guard, but she and Ethan seemed to be the only ones around. Maybe that was luck, maybe it meant it was okay to be there. At any rate, Lucy started to climb down. Huge pillars of stone reared up around her, seeming to move in the lack of light. The soles of her sneakers skidded down a slope of granite, and she wound up in a heap on a pile of rubble. “You okay?” Ethan called. He probably turned around too, but it was too dark to see him.

  She realized that this was what life was like for Ethan all the time.

  They crawled through crevasses so narrow Lucy had to hold her breath, up columns of rock where their only foothold was hope, underneath listing piers and over great craggy tablets. They balanced on thin needles of stone, toppled like a giant’s game of pick-up sticks. Every now and then their forward motion would dislodge some careful equilibrium, and the granite would crumble with a roar and a flurry of dust. “You all right?” Ethan’s voice would float back to her, and then they would keep going.

  Lucy’s hands and shins were scraped over and over, and she had one really bad cut that she was afraid to even look at. She smacked into Ethan’s back and realized that they had reached the other side of the quarry, across from the ladder. “We’ll hang out there