The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  Addie crouched down beside his chair. “Daddy,” she whispered.

  Roy blinked. “My girl.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “I need you to do me a favor. The diner, it’s too busy for me to take care of. I need you—”

  “Oh, Addie. Don’t.”

  “Just the register. You won’t ever have to go into the kitchen.”

  “You don’t need me to work the register. You just want to keep tabs on me.”

  Addie flushed. “That’s not true.”

  “It’s all right.” He covered her hand with his own and squeezed. “Every now and then it’s nice to know that someone cares where I am.”

  Addie opened her mouth to say the things she should have said years ago to her father, all those months after her mother’s death when she was too busy keeping the diner afloat to notice that Roy was drowning, but the telephone interrupted her. Delilah was on the other end. “Get down here,” the cook said. “Your bad day? It just got worse.”

  “Did you say something?” The cab driver’s eyes met Jack’s in the rearview mirror.

  “No.”

  “This look familiar yet?”

  Jack had lied to the driver—what was one more lie in a long string of others?—confessing that he couldn’t remember the name of the town he was headed toward but that Route 10 ran right through its middle. He would recognize it, he said, as soon as Main Street came into view.

  Now, forty minutes later, he glanced out the window. They were driving through a village, small but well-heeled, with a New England steepled white church and women in riding boots darting into stores to run their errands. It reminded him too much of the prep-school town of Loyal, and he shook his head. “Not this one,” he said.

  What he needed was a place where he could disappear for a while—a place where he could figure out how to start all over again. Teaching—well, that was out of the question now. But it was also all he’d ever done. He’d worked at Westonbrook for four years . . . an awfully big hole to omit in a job interview for any related field. And even a McDonald’s manager could ask him if he’d ever been convicted of a crime.

  Lulled by the motion of the taxi, he dozed off. He dreamed of an inmate he’d worked with on farm duty. Aldo’s girlfriend would commute to Haverhill and leave treasures in the cornfield for him: whiskey, pot, instant coffee. Once, she set herself up naked on a blanket, waiting for Aldo to come over on the tractor. “Drive slow,” Aldo would say, when they went out to harvest. “You never know what you’re going to find.”

  “Salem Falls coming up,” the cab driver announced, waking him.

  A hand-lettered blue placard announced the name of the town and proclaimed it home of Duncan Pharmaceuticals. The town was built outward from a central green, crowned by a memorial statue that listed badly to the left, as if it had been rammed from the side. A bank, a general store, and a town office building were dotted along the green—all neatly painted, walks shoveled clear of snow. Standing incongruously at the corner was a junked railroad car. Jack did a double take, and as the cab turned to follow the one-way road around the green, he realized it was a diner.

  In the window was a small sign.

  “Stop,” Jack said. “This is the place.”

  Harlan Pettigrew sat at the counter, nursing a bowl of stew. A napkin was tucked over his bow tie, to prevent staining. His eyes darted around the diner, lighting on the clock.

  Addie pushed through the swinging doors. “Mr. Pettigrew,” she began.

  The man blotted his mouth with his napkin and got to his feet. “It’s about time.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you first. You see, we’ve been having a little trouble with some of our appliances.”

  Pettigrew’s brows drew together. “I see.”

  Suddenly the door opened. A man in a rumpled sports jacket walked in, looking cold and lost. His shoes were completely inappropriate for the season and left small puddles of melting snow on the linoleum floor. When he spotted her pink apron, he started toward her. “Excuse me—is the owner in?”

  His voice made Addie think of coffee, deep and dark and rich, with a texture that slid between her senses. “That would be me.”

  “Oh.” He seemed surprised by this. “Okay. Well. I, um, I’m here because—”

  A wide smile spread over Addie’s face. “Because I called you!” She shook his hand, trying not to notice how the man froze in shock. “I was just telling Mr. Pettigrew, here, from the board of health, that the repairman was on his way to fix our refrigerator and dishwasher. They’re right through here.”

  She began to tug the stranger into the kitchen, with Pettigrew in their wake. “Just a moment,” the inspector said, frowning. “You don’t look like an appliance repairman.”

  Addie tensed. The man probably thought she was insane. Well, hell. So did the rest of Salem Falls.

  The woman was insane. And God, she’d touched him. She’d reached right out and grabbed his hand, as if that were normal for him, as if it had been eight minutes rather than eight months since a woman’s skin had come in contact with his own.

  If she was covering something up from the board of health, then the diner was probably violating a code. He started to back away, but then the woman bowed her head.

  It was that, the giving in, that ruined him.

  The part in her dark hair was crooked and pink as a newborn’s skin. Jack almost reached out one finger and touched it but stuffed his hands in his pockets instead. He knew better than anyone that you could not trust a woman who said she was telling the truth.

  But what if you knew, from the start, that she was lying?

  Jack cleared his throat. “I came as quickly as I could, ma’am,” he said, then glanced at Pettigrew. “I was paged from my aunt’s birthday party and didn’t stop home to get my uniform. Where are the broken appliances?”

  The kitchen looked remarkably similar to the one at the jail. Jack nodded to a sequoia of a woman standing behind the grill and tried desperately to remember any technical trivia he could about dishwashers. He opened the two rolled doors, slid out the tray, and peered inside. “Could be the pump . . . or the water inlet valve.”

  For the first time, he looked directly at the owner of the diner. She was small and delicate in build, no taller than his collarbone, but had muscles in her arms built, he imagined, by many a hard day’s labor. Her brown hair was yanked into a knot at the back of her head and held in place by a pencil, and her eyes were the unlikely color of peridot—a stone, Jack recalled, the ancient Hawaiians believed to be the tears shed by the volcano goddess. Those eyes, now, seemed absolutely stunned. “I didn’t bring my toolbox, but I can have this fixed by . . .” He pretended to do the math, trying to catch the woman’s eye. Tomorrow, she mouthed.

  “Tomorrow,” Jack announced. “Now what’s the problem with the fridge?”

  Pettigrew looked from the owner of the diner to Jack, and then back again. “There’s no point in checking out the rest of the kitchen when I have to return anyway,” he said. “I’ll come by next week to do my inspection.” With a curt nod, he let himself out.

  The owner of the diner launched herself across the line, embracing the cook and whooping with delight. Radiant, she turned to Jack and extended her hand . . . but this time, he moved out of the way before she could touch him. “I’m Addie Peabody, and this is Delilah Piggett. We’re so grateful to you. You certainly sounded authentic.” Suddenly, she paused, an idea dawning. “You don’t actually know how to fix appliances, do you?”

  “No. That was just some stuff I heard in the last place I worked.” He saw his opening and leaped. “I was on my way in to ask about the HELP WANTED sign.”

  The cook beamed. “You’re hired.”

  “Delilah, who died and left you king?” She smiled at Jack. “You’re hired.”

  “Do you mind if I ask what the job is?”

  “Yes. I mean, no, I don’t mind. We’re in the market for a dishwasher.”

  A