Leaving Time: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  The night was coming violently, clouds screaming with crimson throats. It would get cold and dark soon; if we were going to stay and wait, we would need lanterns, floodlights, blankets. I had no doubt this was Thomas’s plan; it was what I would have done—what I had done when I was observing transition in the wild—not from captivity to sanctuary, but at birth or death.

  “Gideon,” Thomas began, about to issue instructions, when there was a rustle at the tree line.

  I had been surprised hundreds of times by elephants that traveled soundlessly and swiftly in the bush; I should not have been as startled as I was by the appearance of Hester. She moved almost too quickly for an animal of her size, light on her feet and excited by this big, foreign metal object in her enclosure. Thomas had told me that the elephants became animated if a bulldozer was brought in to do excavation or landscape work; they were curious about things bigger than themselves.

  Hester began to cross back and forth in front of the trailer ramp. She rumbled, a hello. This went on for about ten seconds. When she didn’t get a response, it evolved into a short roar.

  From inside the trailer came a rumble.

  I felt Thomas’s hand reach for mine.

  Maura gingerly walked down the ramp, her body in silhouette, pausing halfway. Hester stopped moving back and forth. Her rumbles escalated into a roar, a trumpet, and then a rumble—the same cacophonous joy I’d heard when elephants that had been separated from their herd were reunited.

  Hester lifted her head and flapped her ears rapidly. Maura urinated and began to secrete from her temporal glands. She inched her trunk toward Hester but still would not come fully down that ramp. Both elephants continued to rumble as Hester put her front two feet onto the ramp and turned her head until her torn ear was close enough for Maura to touch. Then Hester lifted her front left foot, presented it to Maura. It was as if she was telling her life story. Look at how I was hurt. Look at how I survived.

  Watching this, I started to cry. I felt Thomas’s arm come around me as Hester finally curled her trunk around Maura’s. She let go, backing off the ramp, as Maura tentatively followed. “Imagine being part of a traveling circus,” Thomas said, his voice tight. “That’s the last time she’ll ever have to walk out of a trailer.”

  The two elephants swayed in tandem, moving toward the tree line. They were so close that they seemed to be one giant mythical creature, and as the night puckered close around them, I struggled to distinguish the elephants from the thicket where they vanished.

  “Well, Maura,” Nevvie murmured. “Welcome to your forever home.”

  There were a lot of explanations I could give for the decision I made at that moment: that the elephants in this sanctuary needed me more than the elephants in the wild did; that I was starting to think the work I had built my scholarship around was not limited by geographic borders; that the man holding my hand, like me, had been brought to tears by the arrival of a rescued elephant. But none of these were the reason.

  When I first went to Botswana, I had been chasing knowledge, fame, a way to contribute to my field. But now, as my circumstances had changed, my reasons for being in that game reserve had, too. Lately my arms hadn’t been outstretched to embrace my work. They’d been pushing away thoughts that scared the hell out of me. I wasn’t running toward my future anymore. I was running away from everything else.

  A forever home. I wanted that. I wanted that for my baby.

  It was so dark now that—like the elephants—I couldn’t see and had to find my way with my other senses. So I framed his face with my hands, breathed in the scent of him, touched my forehead to his. “Thomas,” I whispered. “I have something to tell you.”

  VIRGIL

  What tipped me off was that stupid pebble.

  The minute Thomas Metcalf saw it, he went ballistic. Okay, granted, he wasn’t exactly the gold standard for sanity, but the minute he focused on that necklace there was a clarity in his eyes that had not been there when we first walked into the room.

  Rage often brings out the real person.

  Now, sitting in my office, I pop yet another Tums into my mouth—I think this is my tenth, not that I’m really counting—because I can’t seem to get rid of the fizzy pressure in my chest. I’ve chalked it up to heartburn from that crap we ate for lunch from the hot dog cart. But there’s a tiny, fleeting thought that maybe this isn’t a gastric issue at all. Maybe it’s just pure, unadulterated intuition. A nervous hunch. Which I have not felt in a very, very long time.

  My office is covered with evidence. In front of each box taken from the PD there are several paper bags tipped onto their sides, with the contents carefully arranged in a semicircle beneath them: a flowchart of crime, a felonious family tree. I am careful where I step, making sure that I don’t crush a brittle leaf with a black spot of blood on it or overlook a small paper packet with a fiber inside.

  I’m thankful for my own inefficiency, at that moment. Our evidence room was full of material that could have or should have been returned to its owners but never was—either because the investigating officer never told the property officer the items could be destroyed or returned, or because the property officer wasn’t involved in the investigations and wouldn’t have known that information on his own. After Nevvie Ruehl’s death was ruled accidental, my partner had retired and I had either forgotten or subconsciously decided not to tell Ralph to remove the boxes. Maybe on some level I wondered whether Gideon might file a civil suit against the sanctuary. Or maybe on some level I wondered about Gideon’s role that night. Whatever the reason, I’d known that I’d need to comb through these boxes again.

  It’s true that, if you want to get technical, I’ve been fired from this case. Except that Jenna Metcalf is a thirteen-year-old kid who probably changed her mind six times this morning before she decided on a breakfast cereal. She threw words at me like handfuls of mud, and now that they’ve dried, I can brush them off.

  It’s true, too, that I’m not sure if the death of Nevvie Ruehl was caused by Thomas or his wife, Alice. I suppose Gideon can’t be ruled out, either, now. If he was sleeping with Alice, his mother-in-law might not have been all too happy. I just don’t believe the death was a trampling, even if I signed off on that ten years ago. But if I’m going to figure out who the murderer is, first I need proof that this was a murder.

  Thanks to Tallulah and the lab, I know that Alice Metcalf’s hair was found on the victim. But did she find Nevvie’s body after the trampling and leave that hair behind before she ran? Or was she the reason there was a body in the first place? Could the hair transfer have been innocent, as Jenna wanted to believe—two women who brushed by each other in the office earlier that morning, neither one knowing that by the end of the day one of them would be dead?

  Alice is, of course, the key. If I could find her, I’d have my answers. What I know about her is that she ran away. People who run away either have something they’re trying to reach or something they’re trying to avoid. I’m just not sure, in this case, which one it was. But either way—why not take her daughter with her?

  I hate saying that Serenity might be right about anything, but it would be considerably easier if Nevvie Ruehl were around to tell me what happened that night. “Dead men don’t talk,” I mutter out loud.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Abigail, my landlady, scares the shit out of me. All of a sudden she’s standing in the doorway, frowning at the paraphernalia strewn around the office.

  “Fuck, Abby, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “Must you use that word?”

  “Fuck?” I repeat. “I don’t know what you’ve got against it. It can be a verb, an adjective, a noun—it’s very versatile.” I smile broadly at her.

  She sniffs at the detritus on the floor. “I’ll remind you that each tenant is responsible for his own refuse collection.”

  “This isn’t trash. It’s work.”

  Abigail’s eyes narrow. “It looks like a crystal moth lab.�
��

  “First of all, it’s meth—”

  Her hands flutter at her throat. “I knew it …”

  “No!” I say. “Just trust me, okay? This looks nothing like a crystal meth lab. This is all evidence, from a case.”

  Abigail puts her hands on her hips. “You’ve already used that excuse.”

  I blink at her. And then I remember—one time, when I’d been on a bender not long ago and had been wallowing in my own stink for a full week without leaving the office, Abigail had come to investigate. When she walked in, I was passed out cold on my desk, and the place looked like a bomb had gone off. I told her I’d been up working all night and must have dozed off. I told her that the litter on the floor was physical evidence collected by the major crimes unit.

  Although, really, when was the last time you saw the MCU gather empty bags of microwave popcorn and old Playboys?

  “Have you been drinking, Victor?”

  “No,” I say, and with no small sense of wonder I realize that the thought has not even crossed my mind in the past two days. I don’t want a drink. I don’t need one. Jenna Metcalf hasn’t just ignited a spark of purpose in me. She’s managed to dry me out, cold turkey, the way three rehab centers couldn’t.

  Abigail takes a step forward, until she is balanced between the bags of evidence and only inches away from me. She leans up on her toes as if she’s going in for a kiss, but she sniffs at my breath instead. “Well,” she says. “Will wonders never cease.” She retraces her careful steps until she is at the threshold again. “You’re incorrect, you know. Dead men can talk. My late husband and I have a code, like that escape artist, the Jewish one—”

  “Houdini?”

  “That’s right. He’s going to leave me a message, which only I can interpret, if he finds a way back from the beyond.”

  “You believe in that crap, Abby? Never would have guessed.” I look up at her. “How long’s he been gone?”

  “Twenty-two years.”

  “Let me guess. You two have discussions all the time.”

  She hesitates. “I would have evicted you years ago, if not for him.”

  “He told you to cut me a break?”

  “Well, not exactly,” Abigail replies. “But he was a Victor, too.” She pulls the door shut behind her.

  “Good thing she doesn’t realize my name’s Virgil,” I mutter, and I crouch down beside one unopened paper bag.

  Inside are the red polo shirt and cargo shorts that Nevvie Ruehl was wearing when she died. The same uniform that Gideon Cartwright had been wearing that night, and Thomas Metcalf.

  Abby is right: Actually dead men—and women—can talk.

  I pick up an old newspaper from a stack behind my desk and spread it out over the blotter. Then I carefully pull the red shirt and the shorts out of the bag and lay them down flat. There are stains on the fabric—blood and mud, I imagine. There are bits that are completely shredded, too, the result of the trampling. I take a magnifying glass from my desk drawer and start investigating each ragged rip. I look at the edges, trying to determine if there is any way to tell if the cut was made by a blade rather than by stretching and tearing. I do this for an hour, losing track of the holes that I have already examined.

  It isn’t until my third pass on the shirt that I see a tear I have not noticed before. Namely because it isn’t the fabric that was rent in two. It is a gap along a seam, as if the stitching has just unraveled where the shoulder meets the left sleeve. It is only a few centimeters in diameter, the sort of rip made when something is caught, rather than torn.

  Looped in the stitched hem is the crescent moon of a fingernail.

  I flash through the image in my head: a struggle, someone grabbing on to the front of Nevvie’s shirt.

  The lab can tell us if this fingernail matched the mtDNA of Alice. And if it doesn’t, we can get a sample from Thomas. And if it matches neither of them, maybe it belonged to Gideon Cartwright.

  I place the fingernail in an envelope. Carefully I fold the clothing and put it back into the bag. It’s then that I notice another envelope, this one with a smaller paper packet inside, as well as photos of a preserved fingerprint. The small piece of paper had been soaked with ninhydrin, leaving behind those telltale purple fingerprint ridges. These had been matched to Nevvie Ruehl’s left thumbprint, as taken by the medical examiner in the morgue. No surprise there; a receipt found in her shorts pocket would likely have her fingerprints on it.

  I take the small square paper out of the envelope. By now the chemical has faded, a light lavender. I can try to get the lab to process it again, to check for additional prints, but at this point they will probably be inconclusive.

  It isn’t until I slip the paper back inside the envelope that I realize what it is. GORDON’S WHOLESALE, it reads. And the date and time, the morning before Nevvie Ruehl died. I didn’t know which caregiver had picked up the produce orders. But maybe the employees at the wholesale outfit would remember the employees from the sanctuary.

  If Thomas was what Alice Metcalf had been running from, maybe all I need to do to find her is locate what she’d been running to.

  Alice Metcalf had seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. Had Gideon Cartwright gone with her?

  I didn’t really mean to call Serenity. It just sort of happened.

  One minute I was holding the phone, and the next, she was picking up on the other end. I swear, I don’t even remember dialing, and I hadn’t had a single drop to drink.

  What I wanted to ask when I heard her voice was: Have you heard from Jenna?

  I don’t know why I was even concerned. I should have let her stomp off like a kid throwing a tantrum and said good riddance.

  Instead, I couldn’t sleep at all last night.

  I think that’s because the minute Jenna first stepped into my office, with that voice that haunted my dreams, she ripped off a Band-Aid so fast that I started to bleed again. Jenna may be right about one thing—this is my fault, because I was too stupid to stand up to Donny Boylan ten years ago when he wanted to bury an inconsistency in the evidence. But she’s wrong about another—this isn’t about her, finding her mother. It’s about me, finding my way.

  The thing is, I don’t have a great track record with that.

  So there I was, holding the phone, and before I knew it, I was asking Serenity Jones, the so-called lapsed psychic, to come with me on a fact-finding mission to Gordon’s Wholesale Produce Market. It wasn’t until after she agreed, with game-show-contestant enthusiasm, to pick me up and be my de facto partner that I understood why she was the one I’d reached out to. It wasn’t that I thought she would actually be helpful in my investigation. It was because Serenity knew how it felt not to be able to live with yourself if you didn’t right what you had done wrong.

  Now, an hour later, we’re in her little sardine can of a car, driving to the edge of Boone, where Gordon’s Wholesale has been in existence for as long as I can remember. It is the kind of place that sells mangoes in the dead of winter, when the whole world is dying for a mango and the only place growing them is Chile or Paraguay. Their summertime strawberries are the size of a newborn’s head.

  I go to turn on the radio, just because I don’t know what to say, and find a little paper elephant folded and tucked into the corner.

  “She made that,” Serenity says, and she doesn’t have to say Jenna’s name for me to understand.

  The paper slips out of my fingers, like a Chinese football. It arcs in a perfect loop into Serenity’s massive purple purse, which gapes open on the console between us like Mary Poppins’s carpetbag. “You heard from her yet today?”

  “No.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Because it’s eight A.M. and she’s a teenager.”

  I squirm in the passenger seat. “You don’t think it was because I was an asshole yesterday?”

  “After ten or eleven A.M., it will be. But right now I think it’s because she’s sleeping like any other kid d
uring summer vacation.”

  Serenity flexes her hands on the steering wheel, and I find myself staring—not for the first time—at the furry cover she has stretched over it. It’s blue, and has googly eyes and white fangs. It looks a little like the Cookie Monster, if the Cookie Monster had swallowed a steering wheel. “What the hell is that thing?” I ask.

  “Bruce,” Serenity answers, as if it’s a stupid question.

  “You named your steering wheel?”

  “Honey, the longest relationship I’ve ever had is with this car. Given that your closest companion has the first name of Jack and the last name of Daniel’s, I don’t think you’re in a position to judge.” She smiles sunnily at me. “Damn, I’ve missed this.”

  “Bickering?”

  “No, police work. It’s like we’re Cagney and Lacey, except you’re better looking than Tyne Daly.”

  “I’m not touching that one,” I mutter.

  “You know, in spite of what you think, what you and I do isn’t all that different.”

  I burst out laughing. “Yeah, except for that desire for measurable scientific evidence thing that I have.”

  She ignores me. “Think about it: We both know what questions to ask. We both know what questions not to ask. We are fluent in body language. We live and breathe intuition.”

  I shake my head. There’s no way what I do could be compared to what she does. “There’s nothing paranormal about my job. I don’t get a vision, I focus on what’s right in front of me. Detectives are observers. I see a person who can’t look me in the eye and I try to figure out whether it’s grief or shame. I pay attention to what makes someone cry. I listen, even when no one’s speaking words,” I say. “Did it ever occur to you that there is no such thing as clairvoyant? That maybe psychics are just really good at detective work?”