The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  A middle-aged Latina lunch lady, wearing a hair net that crawled over her forehead like a spiderweb, inched out from behind a rack of prepackaged bags of salad mix. Her hands were raised; she was shivering. “No me tire,” she sobbed.

  Patrick lowered his weapon and took off his jacket, sliding it over the woman’s shoulders. “It’s over,” he soothed, although he knew this was not really true. For him, for Peter Houghton, for all of Sterling . . . it was only just beginning.

  * * *

  “Let me get this straight, Mrs. Calloway,” Alex said. “You are charged with driving recklessly and causing serious bodily injury while reaching down to aid a fish?”

  The defendant, a fifty-four-year-old woman sporting a bad perm and an even worse pantsuit, nodded. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”

  Alex leaned her elbows on the bench. “I’ve got to hear this.”

  The woman looked at her attorney. “Mrs. Calloway was coming home from the pet store with a silver arowana,” the lawyer said.

  “That’s a fifty-five-dollar tropical fish, Judge,” the defendant interjected.

  “The plastic bag rolled off the passenger seat and popped. Mrs. Calloway reached down for the fish and that’s when . . . the unfortunate incident occurred.”

  “By unfortunate incident,” Alex clarified, looking at her file, “you mean hitting a pedestrian.”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Alex turned to the defendant. “How’s the fish?”

  Mrs. Calloway smiled. “Wonderful,” she said. “I named it Crash.”

  From the corner of her eye, Alex saw a bailiff enter the courtroom and whisper to the clerk, who looked at Alex and nodded. He scrawled something on a piece of paper, and the bailiff walked it up to the bench.

  Shots fired at Sterling High, she read.

  Alex went still as stone. Josie. “Court’s adjourned,” she whispered, and then she ran.

  * * *

  John Eberhard gritted his teeth and concentrated on moving just one more inch forward. He could not see, with all the blood running down his face, and his left side was completely useless. He couldn’t hear, either—his ears still rang with the blast of the gun. Still, he had managed to crawl from the upstairs hallway where Peter Houghton had shot him into an art supply room.

  He thought about the practices where Coach made them skate from goal line to goal line, faster and then faster still, until the players were gasping for breath and spitting onto the ice. He thought about how, when you felt you had nothing left to give, you’d find just one iota more. He dragged himself another foot, digging his elbow against the floor.

  When John reached the metal shelving that held clay and paint and beads and wire, he tried to push himself upright, but a blinding pain speared his head. Minutes later—or was it hours?—he regained consciousness. He didn’t know if it was safe to check outside the closet yet. He was flat on his back, and something cold was drifting across his face. Wind. Coming through a crack in the seal of the window.

  A window.

  John thought of Courtney Ignatio: how she’d been sitting across from him at the cafeteria table when the glass wall behind her burst; how suddenly there had been a flower blooming in the middle of her chest, bright as a poppy. He thought of how a hundred screams, all at once, had braided into a rope of sound. He remembered teachers poking their heads out of their classrooms like gophers, and the looks on their faces when they heard the shots.

  John pulled himself up on the shelves, one-handed, fighting the black buzz that told him he was going to faint again. By the time he was upright, leaning against the metal frame, he was shuddering. His vision was so blurred that when he took a can of paint and hurled it, he had to choose between two windows.

  The glass shattered. Jackknifed on the ledge, he could see fire trucks and ambulances. Reporters and parents pushing at police tape. Clusters of sobbing students. Broken bodies, spaced like railroad ties on the snow. EMTs bringing out more of them.

  Help, John Eberhard tried to scream, but he couldn’t form the word. He couldn’t form any words—not Look, not Stop, not even his own name.

  “Hey,” someone called. “There’s a kid up there!”

  Sobbing by now, John tried to wave, but his arm wouldn’t work.

  People were starting to point. “Stay put,” a fireman yelled, and John tried to nod. But his body no longer belonged to him, and before he realized what had happened, that small movement pitched him out the window to land on the concrete two stories below.

  * * *

  Diana Leven, who had left her job as an assistant attorney general in Boston two years ago to join a department that was a little kinder and gentler, walked into the Sterling High gym and stopped beside the body of a boy who had fallen directly on the three-point line after being shot in the neck. The shoes of the crime scene techs squeaked on the shellacked floor as they took photographs and picked up shell casings, zipping them into plastic evidence bags. Directing them was Patrick Ducharme.

  Diana looked around at the sheer volume of evidence—clothing, guns, blood spatter, spent rounds, dropped bookbags, lost sneakers—and realized that she was not the only one with a massive job ahead of her. “What do you know so far?”

  “We think it’s a sole shooter. He’s in custody,” Patrick said. “We don’t know for sure whether anyone else was involved. The building’s secure.”

  “How many dead?”

  “Ten confirmed.”

  Diana nodded. “Wounded?”

  “Don’t know yet. We’ve got every ambulance in northern New Hampshire here.”

  “What can I do?”

  Patrick turned to her. “Put on a show and get rid of the cameras.”

  She started to walk off, but Patrick grabbed her arm. “You want me to talk to him?”

  “The shooter?”

  Patrick nodded.

  “It may be the only chance we have to get to him before he has a lawyer. If you think you can get away from here, do it.” Diana hurried out of the gymnasium and downstairs, careful to skirt the work of the policemen and the medics. The minute she walked outside, the media attached themselves to her, their questions stinging like bees. How many victims? What are the names of the dead? Who is the shooter?

  Why?

  Diana took a deep breath and smoothed her dark hair back from her face. This was her least favorite part of the job—being the spokeswoman on camera. Although more vans would arrive as the day went on, right now it was only local New Hampshire media—affiliates for CBS and ABC and FOX. She might as well enjoy the hometown advantage while she could. “My name is Diana Leven, and I’m with the attorney general’s office. We can’t release any information now because there’s an investigation still pending, but we promise to give you details as soon as we can. What I can tell you right now is that this morning, there was a school shooting at Sterling High. It’s unclear as to who the perpetrator or perpetrators were. One person has been remanded into custody. There are no formal charges yet.”

  A reporter pushed her way to the front of the pack. “How many kids are dead?”

  “We don’t have that information yet.”

  “How many were hit?”

  “We don’t have that information yet,” Diana repeated. “We’ll keep you posted.”

  “When are charges going to be filed?” another journalist shouted.

  “What can you tell the parents who want to know if their kids are okay?”

  Diana pressed her mouth into a firm line and prepared to run the gauntlet. “Thank you very much,” she said, not an answer at all.

  * * *

  Lacy had to park six blocks away from the school; that’s how crowded it had become. She took off at a dead run, holding the blankets that the local radio announcers had urged people to bring for the shock victims. I’ve already lost one son, she thought. I can’t lose another.

  The last conversation she had had with Peter had been an argument. It was before he went to bed the previous night,