The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  There were all sorts of stories that circulated about them: how Brady had given up football scholarships at colleges that didn’t have art programs for Haley; how Haley had gotten a tattoo of Brady’s initials in a place no one could see; how on their first date, he’d had rose petals spread on the passenger seat of his Honda. Josie, circulating in the same crowd as Haley, knew that most of this was bullshit. Haley herself had admitted, first, that it was a temporary tattoo, and second, that it wasn’t rose petals, but a bouquet of lilacs he’d stolen from a neighbor’s garden.

  “Josie?” Haley whispered now, from inside the room. “Is that you?”

  Josie felt her mother’s hand on her arm, restraining her. But then Haley’s parents, who were blocking a clear view of the bed, moved away.

  The right half of Haley’s face was swathed in bandages; her hair was shaved to the scalp above it. Her nose had been broken, and her one visible eye was completely bloodshot. Josie’s mother drew in her breath silently.

  She stepped inside and forced herself to smile.

  “Josie,” Haley said. “He killed them. Courtney and Maddie. And then he pointed the gun at me, but Brady stepped in front of it.” A tear streaked down the cheek that wasn’t bandaged. “You know how people are always saying they’d do that for you?”

  Josie started shaking. She wanted to ask Haley a hundred questions, but her teeth were chattering so hard that she couldn’t manage a single word. Haley grabbed on to her hand, and Josie startled. She wanted to pull away. She wanted to pretend she’d never seen Haley Weaver like this.

  “If I ask you something,” Haley said, “you’ll be honest, won’t you?”

  Josie nodded.

  “My face,” she whispered. “It’s ruined, isn’t it?”

  Josie looked Haley in the eye. “No,” she said. “It’s fine.”

  They both knew she wasn’t telling the truth.

  Josie said good-bye to Haley and her parents, grabbed on to her mother, and hurried even faster toward the elevators, even though every step felt like a thunderstorm behind her eyes. She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class—how a steel rod had pierced a man’s skull, and he opened up his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he’d never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.

  * * *

  By the time Patrick returned to Sterling High the next morning, the crimescene detectives had turned the halls of the school into an enormous spiderweb. Based on where the victims had been found, string was taped up—a burst of lines radiating from one spot where Peter Houghton had paused long enough to fire shots before moving on. The lines of string crossed each other at points: a grid of panic, a graph of chaos.

  He stood for a moment in the center of the commotion, watching the techs weave the string across the hallways and between banks of lockers and into doorways. He imagined what it would have been like to start running at the sound of the gunshots, to feel people pushing behind you like a tide, to know that you couldn’t move faster than a speeding bullet. To realize too late you were trapped, a spider’s prey.

  Patrick picked his way through the web, careful not to disturb the work of the techs. He would use what they did to corroborate the stories of the witnesses. All 1,026 of them.

  * * *

  The breakfast broadcast of the three local network news stations was devoted to that morning’s arraignment of Peter Houghton. Alex stood in front of the television in her bedroom, nursing her cup of coffee and staring at the backdrop behind the eager reporters: her former workplace, the district courthouse.

  She’d settled Josie in her bedroom to sleep the dark, dreamless sleep of the sedated. To be perfectly honest, Alex needed this time alone, too. Who would have guessed that a woman who’d become a master at putting on a public face would find it so emotionally exhausting to hold herself together in front of her daughter?

  She wanted to sit down and get drunk. She wanted to weep, her head buried in her hands, at her good fortune: her daughter was two doors away from her. Later, they would have breakfast together. How many parents in this town were waking up to realize this would never be true again?

  Alex shut off the television. She didn’t want to compromise her objectivity as the future judge on this case by listening to what the media had to say.

  She knew there would be critics—people who said that because her daughter went to Sterling High School, Alex should be removed from the case. If Josie had been shot, she would have quickly agreed. If Josie had even still been friendly with Peter Houghton, Alex would have recused herself. But as it stood, Alex’s judgment was compromised no more than that of any other justice who lived in the area, or who knew a child who attended the school, or who was the parent of a teenager. It happened all the time to North Country justices: someone you knew would inevitably wind up in your courtroom. When Alex was rotating as a district court judge, she’d faced defendants she’d known on a personal level: her mailman caught with pot in his car; a domestic disturbance between her mechanic and his wife. As long as the dispute didn’t involve Alex personally, it was perfectly legal—in fact, mandatory—for her to try the case. In those scenarios, you simply took yourself out of the equation. You became the judge and nothing more. The shooting, as Alex saw it, was the same set of circumstances, ratcheted up a notch. In fact, she’d argue that in a case with the massive media coverage this one had, it would take someone with a defense background—like Alex’s—to truly be impartial to the shooter. And the more she thought about it, the more firmly convinced Alex became that justice couldn’t be done without her involvement, the more ludicrous it seemed to suggest she was not the best judge for the job.

  She took another sip of her coffee and tiptoed from her bedroom to Josie’s. But the door stood wide open, and her daughter was not inside.

  “Josie?” Alex called, panicking. “Josie, are you all right?”

  “Down here,” Josie said, and Alex felt the knot inside her unravel again. She walked downstairs to find Josie sitting at the kitchen table.

  She was dressed in a skirt and tights and a black sweater. Her hair was still damp from a shower, and she had tried to cover the bandage on her forehead with a swath of bangs. She looked up at Alex. “Do I look all right?”

  “For what?” Alex asked, dumbfounded. She couldn’t be expecting to go to school, could she? The doctors had told Alex that Josie might never remember the shooting, but could she erase the fact that it had ever happened from her mind, too?

  “The arraignment,” Josie said.

  “Sweetheart, there is no way you’re going near that courthouse today.”

  “I have to.”

  “You’re not going,” Alex said flatly.

  Josie looked as if she were unraveling at the seams. “Why not?”

  Alex opened her mouth to answer, but couldn’t. This wasn’t logic; it was gut instinct: she didn’t want her daughter to relive this experience. “Because I said so,” she finally replied.

  “That’s not an answer,” Josie accused.

  “I know what the media will do if they see you at the courthouse today,” Alex said. “I know that nothing’s going to happen at that arraignment that’s going to be a surprise to anyone. And I know that I don’t want to let you out of my sight right now.”

  “Then come with me.”

  Alex shook her head. “I can’t, Josie,” she said softly. “This is going to be my case.” She watched Josie pale, and realized that until that moment, Josie hadn’t considered this. The trial, by default, would put an even thicker wall between them. As a judge, there would be information she couldn’t share with her daughter, confidences she couldn’t keep. While Josie was struggling to move past this tragedy, Alex would be knee-deep in it. Why had she put so much thought into judging this case, and so little into how it would affect her own daughter? Josie didn’t give a damn if her mother was a fair judge right now. She only wanted—needed—a mothe