The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Guenther and Patrick looked at each other. The principal did not just identify the bodies; he also gave a little one-or two-sentence eulogy each time. Patrick supposed that the man couldn’t help himself—unlike Patrick and Guenther, he wasn’t used to dealing with tragedy in the course of his normal occupation.

  Patrick had tried to retrace Peter’s footsteps, from the front hallway to the cafeteria (Victims 1 and 2: Courtney Ignatio and Maddie Shaw), to the stairwell outside it (Victim 3: Whit Obermeyer), to the boys’ bathroom (Victim 4: Topher McPhee), through another hallway (Victim 5: Grace Murtaugh), into the girls’ bathroom (Victim 6: Kaitlyn Harvey). Now, as he led the team upstairs, he took a left into the first classroom, trailing a smeared line of blood to a spot near the chalkboard where the body of the only adult victim lay . . . and beside him, a young man with his hand pressed tight over the bullet wound in the man’s belly. “Ben?” McAllister said. “What are you still doing here?”

  Patrick turned to the boy. “You’re not an EMT?”

  “I . . . no . . .”

  “You told me you were an EMT!”

  “I said I’d had medical training!”

  “Ben’s an Eagle Scout,” the principal said.

  “I couldn’t leave Mr. McCabe. I . . . applied pressure, and it’s working, see? The blood’s stopped.”

  Guenther gently removed the boy’s bloody hand from his teacher’s stomach. “That’s because he’s gone, son.”

  Ben’s face crumpled. “But I . . . I . . .”

  “You did the best you could,” Guenther assured him.

  Patrick turned to the principal. “Why don’t you take Ben outside . . . maybe let one of the doctors take a look at him?” Shock, he mouthed over the boy’s head.

  As they left the classroom, Ben grasped the principal’s sleeve, leaving a bright red handprint behind. “Jesus,” Patrick said, running a hand down his face.

  Guenther stood up. “Come on. Let’s just get this over with.”

  They walked toward the gymnasium, where Guenther certified the deaths of two more students—a black boy and a white one—and then into the locker room where Patrick had ultimately cornered Peter Houghton. Guenther examined the body of the boy Patrick had seen earlier, the kid in the hockey jersey whose cap had been blown off his head by a bullet. Meanwhile, Patrick walked into the abutting shower room and glanced out the window. The reporters were still there, but most of the wounded had been dealt with. There was only one waiting ambulance, instead of seven.

  It had started to rain. By the next morning, the bloodstains on the pavement outside the school would be pale; this day might never have happened.

  “This is interesting,” Guenther said.

  Patrick closed the window against the weather. “Why? Is he deader than the rest of them?”

  “Yeah. He’s the only victim that’s been shot twice. Once in the gut, once in the head.” Guenther looked at him. “How many guns did you find on the shooter?”

  “One in his hand, one on the floor here, two in his backpack.”

  “Nothing like a little backup plan.”

  “Tell me about it,” Patrick said. “Can you tell which bullet was fired first?”

  “No. My educated guess, though, would be the one in the belly . . . since it was the slug to the brain that killed him.” Guenther knelt beside the body. “Maybe he hated this kid most of all.”

  The door of the locker room flew open, revealing a street cop soaked by the sudden downpour. “Captain?” he said. “We just found the makings of another pipe bomb in Peter Houghton’s car.”

  * * *

  When Josie was younger, Alex had a recurring nightmare about being on a plane when it went into a nosedive. She could feel the spin of gravity, the pressure that held her back in her chair; she saw purses and coats and carry-on luggage burst out of the overhead compartments to fall into the aisle. I have to get to my cell phone, Alex had thought, intent on leaving Josie a message on the answering machine that she could carry around forever, digital proof that Alex loved her and was thinking of her at the end. But even after Alex had grabbed her phone from her purse and turned it on, it took too long. She’d hit the ground when the phone was still searching for a signal.

  She’d awaken shaking and sweaty, even as she dismissed the dream: she rarely traveled apart from Josie; she certainly didn’t take flights for her job. She’d throw back the covers and head to the bathroom and splash water on her face, but it didn’t stop her from thinking: I was too late.

  Now, as she sat in the quiet dark of a hospital room where her daughter was sleeping off the effects of a sedative given to her by the admitting doctor, Alex felt the same way.

  This is what Alex had managed to learn: Josie had fainted during the shooting. She had a cut on her forehead decorated with a butterfly bandage, and a mild concussion. The doctors wanted to keep her overnight for observation, to be safe.

  Safe had a whole new definition now.

  Alex had also learned, from the unending news coverage, the names of the dead. One of whom was Matthew Royston.

  Matt.

  What if Josie had been with her boyfriend when he was shot?

  Josie had been unconscious the whole time Alex had been here. She was small and still under the faded hospital sheets; the tie at the neck of her hospital johnny had come unraveled. From time to time, her right hand twitched. Alex reached out now and grasped it. Wake up, she thought. Prove to me you’re okay.

  What if Alex hadn’t been late to work that morning? Might she have stayed at the kitchen table with Josie, talking about the things she imagined mothers and daughters discussed but that she never seemed to have the time to? What if she’d taken a better look at Josie when she hurried downstairs, told her to go back to bed and get some rest?

  What if she’d taken Josie on a spur-of-the-moment trip to Punta Cana, San Diego, Fiji—all the places Alex dream-surfed on her computer in chambers and thought about visiting, but never did?

  What if she’d been a prescient enough mother to keep her daughter home from school today?

  There were, of course, hundreds of other parents who’d made the same honest mistake she had. But that was shallow comfort to Alex: none of their children were Josie. None of them, surely, had as much to lose as she did.

  When this is over, Alex promised silently, we will go to the rain forest, or the pyramids, or a beach as white as bone. We will eat grapes from the vine, we will swim with sea turtles, we will walk miles on cobblestone streets. We will laugh and talk and confess. We will.

  At the same time, a small voice in her head was scheduling this paradise. After, it said. Because first, this trial will come to your courtroom.

  It was true: a case like this would be fast-tracked to the docket. Alex was the superior court judge for Grafton County, and would be for the next eight months. Although Josie had been at the scene of the crime, she wasn’t technically a victim of the shooter. Had Josie been wounded, Alex would have automatically been removed from the case. But as it stood, there was no legal conflict in Alex’s sitting as judge, as long as she could separate her personal feelings as the mother of a high school student from her professional feelings as a justice. This would be her first big trial as a superior court judge, the one that set a tone for the rest of her tenure on the bench.

  Not that she was really thinking about that now.

  Suddenly, Josie stirred. Alex watched consciousness pour into her, reach a high-water mark. “Where am I?”

  Alex combed her fingers through her daughter’s hair. “In the hospital.”

  “Why?”

  Her hand stilled. “Do you remember anything about today?”

  “Matt came over before school,” Josie said, and then she pushed herself upright. “Was there, like, a car accident?”

  Alex hesitated, unsure of what she was supposed to say. Wasn’t Josie better off not knowing the truth? What if this was the way her mind was protecting her from whatever she’d witnessed?