by Jodi Picoult
“I think it’s safe to say that you’re not alone in this house. In fact,” Curtis held out the penny Ross had given him, “I just found this.”
“Yes . . . sometimes there are coins lying around. I told Ross that.”
“Did you?”
Ross turned, frowning. But before he could ask Curtis why he was playing dumb, his boss started speaking again. “Ghosts can be mischievous that way. Especially the ghost of a child, for example.”
Ross felt the charge of the air as Eve O’Donnell lay her trust at Curtis’s feet. “I have to tell you,” Curtis said. “I’m getting some very strong sensations here. There’s a presence, but it’s someone you know, someone who knows you.” Curtis tipped his head to one side and furrowed his brow. “It’s a girl . . . I’m getting the sense it’s a girl, and I’m feeling a number . . . seven. Did you by any chance have a younger sister who passed?”
Ross found himself rooted to the floor. He had been trained to consider the fact that 85 percent of the cases they investigated were hoaxes perpetrated by people who either wanted to waste their time, or get on national TV, or prove that paranormal investigation was anything but a science. He couldn’t count how many times they’d found a speaker hidden in the moaning wall; fishing line wrapped around a quaking chandelier. But he’d never considered that the Warburtons might be putting on a show, too.
“It would be an additional charge, of course,” Curtis was saying, “but I wouldn’t rule out holding a séance.”
Ross’s head throbbed. “Curtis, could I speak to you privately?”
They put on their coats and went out, standing under the overhang of the garage as the rain poured down. “This better be good,” Curtis said. “You interrupted me as I was hooking her.”
“You don’t think there’s a ghost here. The only reason you know about her sister is because I told you.”
Curtis lit a cigarette; the tip glowed like a slitted eye. “So?”
“So . . . you can’t lie to that woman just to make a few bucks and get her reaction on camera.”
“All I’m doing is telling the O’Donnells what they want to hear. These people believe there’s a ghost in this house. They want to believe there’s a ghost in this house. Even if we’re not getting much activity tonight, that doesn’t mean a spirit isn’t laying low with visitors around.”
“This isn’t just a ghost,” Ross said, his voice shaking. “This was someone to her.”
“I didn’t peg you for such a purist. I figured after all these months, you’d know the routine.”
Ross did not consider himself to be particularly gullible. He’d seen and done enough in his life to always be on the lookout for what was real, because he so often felt like he wasn’t. “I know the routine. I just didn’t know it was all fake.”
Curtis whipped the cigarette to the ground. “I’m not a fake. The ghost of my grandfather appeared to me, Ross. I took a goddamned photo of him standing at the foot of my bed. You draw your own conclusions. Hell, remember that shot you got of a face rising out of the lake? You think I set that up? I wasn’t even in the same state you were in at the time.” Curtis took a deep breath, calming himself. “Look, I’m not taking the O’Donnells for a ride. I’m a businessman, Ross, and I know my clients.”
Ross couldn’t answer. For all he knew, Curtis had managed to slip the penny he’d found beneath the tripod, too. For all he knew, the past nine months of his life had been wasted. He was no better than the O’Donnells—he’d seen only what he wanted to believe.
Maybe she was psychic, because at that moment Maylene stepped outside. “Curtis? What’s going on?”
“It’s Ross. He’s trying to decide what road to take home—I-81, or the Moral High Ground.”
Ross stepped into the driving rain and started walking. Let them think what they wanted; they’d certainly encouraged Ross to do the same. He didn’t bother to return for his digital camera or his knapsack; these were things he could replace, unlike his composure, which he was fast in danger of losing. In his car he turned the heater on full blast, trying to get rid of the chill that wouldn’t let go. He drove a mile before he realized that his headlights weren’t on. Then he pulled off to the side of the road and took great, gulping breaths, trying to start his heart again.
Ross knew how to scientifically record paranormal phenomena and how to interpret the results. He had filmed lights zipping over graveyards; he had taped voices in empty basements; he had felt cold in spots where there could be no draft. For nine months, Ross had thought he’d found an entrance to the world where Aimee was . . . and it turned out to be a painted door drawn on a wall.
Damn it, he was running out of ideas.
Az Thompson awoke with his mouth full of stones, small and smooth as olive pits. He spat fifteen into the corrugated leather of his palm before he trusted himself to breathe without choking. He swung his legs over the side of the army cot. He tried to shake the certainty that if buried in the packed earth beneath his bare feet, these rocks would grow into some cancerous black thicket, like the ones covering the castle in that White Man’s fairy tale about a girl who couldn’t wake up without being kissed.
He didn’t mind camping out; for as long as he could remember he’d had one foot in nature and one foot in the yanqui world. Az stuck his head out the flap of the tent, where some of the others had already gathered for breakfast. Their signs—placards to be worn around the neck, and picket posters tacked onto wood—lay in a heap like ventriloquist’s dummies, harmless without some spirit behind them. “Haw,” he grunted, and walked toward the small campfire, knowing that a space would be made for him.
The others treated him the way they would if Abe Lincoln got up and walked out of that tent—with humility, and no small amount of awe, to find him alive after all this time. Az wasn’t as old as Abe, but he wasn’t off by much. He was 102 or 103—he’d stopped counting a while ago. Because he knew the dying language of his people, he was respected as a teacher. Still, his age alone made him a tribal elder, which would have been something, had the Abenaki been a federally recognized tribe.
Az heard the creak of every joint in his spine as he settled himself on a folding chair. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from beside the fire pit and peered at the land, a parcel located at the northwesterly intersection of Montgomery Road and Otter Creek Pass. At its crest sat the big white house, now an eyesore. It would be the first thing to go, Az knew, just like he knew everything about this property, from the surveyor’s measurements to the recorded number of the deed plan. He knew the spots where the ground froze first in the winter and the section where no vegetation ever managed to grow. He knew which window in the abandoned house had been broken by kids running wild; which side of the porch had fallen first; which floorboards on the stairs were rotted through.
He also knew the license plate numbers of every vehicle the Redhook Group had parked on the perimeter. Rumor had it that Newton Redhook wanted to build himself Comtosook’s first strip mall. On one of their burial sites.
“I’m telling you,” said Fat Charlie, “it’s El Niño.”
Winks shook his head. “It’s screwed up, is what it is. Ain’t normal to rain roses. That’s like a clock running backward, or well water turning to blood.”
Fat Charlie laughed. “Winks, you gotta switch back to Letterman. Those horror flicks are getting to you, man.”
Az looked around, noticing the light dusting of flower petals all over the ground. He rolled his tongue across the cavern of his mouth, tasting those stones again. “What do you think, Az?” Winks asked.
What he thought was that trying to explain rose petals falling from the sky was not only useless, but also futile, since the things that were going to happen had already been set into motion. What he thought was that rose petals were going to be the least of their problems. Az focused the binoculars on a bulldozer chugging slowly up the road. “I think you can’t dig in the ground,” he said aloud, “without unearthing something.”
This was how Ross proposed to Aimee: A year later he paid a cab driver to take them past Broadway and 112th en route to dinner at a restaurant. As instructed, the man pulled to the curb, and Ross opened the door and got down on one knee on the filthy pavement. He popped open the small ring box and stared into her electric eyes. “Marry me,” he said, and then he lost his balance and the diamond fell down a sewer grate.
Aimee’s mouth fell open. “Tell me,” she managed finally, “that didn’t just happen.”
Ross looked down the black grate, and at the empty box. He tossed it into the sewer, too. Then he pulled another ring, the real ring, from his pocket. “Give me a second chance,” he said.
Now, in a deserted parking lot, he tipped the bottle up to drink. Sometimes Ross wanted to scratch himself out of his skin, to see what was on the other side. He wanted to jump off bridges into seas of concrete. He wanted to scream until his throat bled; to run until his soles split open. At times like this, when failure was a tidal wave, his life became a finite line—the end of which, through some cosmic joke, he could not seem to reach.
Ross contemplated suicide the way some people made out shopping lists—methodically, with great attention given to detail. There were days when he was fine. And then there were other days when he took census counts of people who seemed happy, and those who seemed in pain. There were days when it made perfect sense to drink boiling water, or suffocate in the refrigerator, or walk naked into the snow until he simply lay down to sleep.
Ross had read of suicides, fascinated by the creativity—women who looped their long hair around their own necks to form a rope, men who mainlined mayonnaise, teenagers who swallowed firecrackers. But every time he came close to testing a beam for the weight it would hold, or drew a bead of blood with an X-Acto knife, he would think of the mess he’d leave behind.
He didn’t know what death held in store for him. But he knew that it wouldn’t be life, and that was good enough. He had not felt anything since the day Aimee had died. The day when, like an idiot, he had chosen to play the hero, first dragging his fiancée from the wreckage and then going back to rescue the driver of the other car moments before it burst into flames. By the time he’d returned to Aimee, she was already gone. She’d died, alone, while he was off being Superman.
Some hero he had turned out to be, saving the wrong person.
He threw the empty bottle onto the floor of his Jeep and put the car into gear, tearing out of the parking lot like a teenager. There were no cops around—there never were, when you needed them—and Ross accelerated, until he was doing more than eighty down the single-lane divided highway.
He came to a stop at the railroad bridge, where the warning gate flashed as its arms lowered, slow as a ballerina. He emptied his mind of everything except inching his car forward until it broke the gate, until the Jeep sat as firm on the tracks as a sacrifice.
The train pounded. The tracks began to sing a steel symphony. Ross gave himself up to dying, catching a single word between his teeth before impact: Finally.
The sound was awesome, deafening. And yet it moved past him, growing Doppler-distant, until Ross raised the courage to open his eyes.
His car was smoking from the hood, but still running. It hobbled unevenly, as if one tire was low on air. And it was pointed in the opposite direction, heading back from where he’d come.
There was nothing for it: with tears in his eyes, Ross started to drive.
Rod van Vleet wasn’t going home without a signed contract. In the first place, Newton Redhook had left him responsible for securing the nineteen acres that comprised the Pike property. In the second place, it had taken over six hours to get to this nursing home in Nowhere, Vermont, and Rod had no plans to return here in the immediate future.
“Mr. Pike,” he said, smiling at the old man, who was plug-ugly enough to give Rod nightmares for a week. Hell, if Rod himself looked like that by age ninety-five, he was all for someone giving him a morphine nightcap and a bed six feet under. Spencer Pike’s bald head was as spotted as a cantaloupe; his hands were twisted into knots; his body seemed to have taken up permanent position as a human comma. “As you can see here, the Redhook Group is prepared to put into escrow today a check made out to you for fifty thousand dollars, as a token of good faith pending the title search.”
The old man narrowed a milky eye. “What the hell do I care about money?”
“Well. Maybe you could take a vacation. You and a nurse.” Rod smiled at the woman standing behind Pike, her arms crossed.
“Can’t travel. Doctor’s orders. Liver could just . . . give out.”
Rod smiled uncomfortably, thinking that an alcoholic who’d survived nearly a hundred years should just get on a plane to Fiji and the hell with the consequences. “Well.”
“You already said that. You senile?”
“No, sir.” Rod cleared his throat. “I understand this land was in your wife’s family for several generations?”
“Yes.”
“It’s our belief, Mr. Pike, that the Redhook Group can contribute to the growth of Comtosook by developing your acreage in a way that boosts the town economy.”
“You want to build stores there.”
“Yes, sir, we do.”
“You gonna build a bagel shop?”
Rod blinked, nonplussed. “I don’t believe Mr. Redhook knows yet.”
“Build it. I like bagels.”
Rod pushed the check across the table again, this time with the contract. “I won’t be able to build anything, Mr. Pike, until I get your signature here.”
Pike stared at him for a long moment, then reached out for a pen. Rod let out the breath he’d been holding. “The title is in your wife’s name? Cecelia Pike?”
“It was Cissy’s.”
“And this . . . claim the Abenaki are championing . . . is there any validity to that?”
Pike’s knuckles went white from the pressure. “There’s no Indian burial ground on that property.” He glanced up at Rod. “I don’t like you.”
“I’m getting that sense, sir.”
“The only reason I’m going to sign this is because I’d rather give that land up than watch it go to the State.”
Rod rolled up the signed contract and rapped it against the table. “Well!” he said again, and Pike raised one eyebrow. “We’ll be doing our due diligence, and hopefully we’ll finish this deal as soon as we can.”
“Before I die, you mean,” Pike said dryly as Rod shrugged into his coat. “You don’t want to stay for Charades? Or lunch . . . I hear we’re having orange Jell-O.” He laughed, the sound like a saw at Rod’s back. “Mr. van Vleet . . . what will you do with the house?”
Rod knew this was a touchy subject; it always was for the Redhook Group, which usually razed whatever existing properties existed on the land before building their own modern commercial facilities. “It’s actually not in the best shape,” Rod said carefully. “We may have to . . . make some adjustments. More room, you know, for your pizza place.”
“Bagels.” Pike frowned. “So you’re going to tear it down.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Better that way,” the old man said. “Too many ghosts.”
The only gas station in Comtosook was attached to the general store. Two pumps from the 1950s sat in the parking lot, and it took Rod a good five minutes to realize there simply was no credit card slot. He stuck the nozzle of the pump into his gas tank and pulled out his
cell phone, hitting a preprogrammed number. “Angel Quarry,” answered a female voice.
Rod held the phone away from his ear and cut off the call. He must have dialed wrong; he had been trying to reach the home office to let Newton Redhook know the first hurdle had been cleared. Frowning, he punched the buttons on the keypad again.
“Angel Quarry. May I help you?”
Rod shook his head. “I’m trying to reach 617-569—”
“Well, you got the wrong number.” Click.
Flummoxed, he stuffed the phone in his pocket and squeezed another gallon into his tank. Reaching for his wallet, he started toward the store to pay.
A middle-aged man with carrot-red hair stood on the porch, sweeping what seemed to be rose petals from the floorboards. Rod glanced up at the sign on the building—ABE’S GAS & GROCERY—and then back at the shopkeeper. “You must be Abe?”
“You guessed that right.”
“Is there a pay phone around here?”
Abe pointed to the corner of the porch, where a phone booth tilted against the railing, right beside an old drunk who seemed disinclined to move aside. Rod dialed his calling card number, feeling the shopkeeper’s eyes on him the whole time. “Angel Quarry,” he heard, a moment later.
He slammed down the receiver and stared at it. Abe swept once, twice, three times, clearing a path between Rod and himself. “Problem?” he asked.
“Must be something screwed up in the phone lines.” Rod dug a twenty out of his wallet for the gas.
“Must be. Or maybe what those Indians are saying’s true—that if they don’t get their land back, the whole town’ll be cursed.”
Rod rolled his eyes. He was halfway back to the car by the time he recalled Spencer Pike’s comment about ghosts. He turned around to ask Abe about that, but the man was gone. His broom rested against the splintered porch rail; with each breeze, the neat pile of flower petals scattered like wishes.
Suddenly a car pulled up on the opposite side of the gas pumps. A man with shoulder-length brown hair and unsettling sea green eyes stepped out and stretched until his back popped. “Excuse me,” he asked, “do you know the way to Shelby Wakeman’s house?”