by Jodi Picoult
Rod shook his head. “I’m not from around here.”
He didn’t know what made him look in the rearview mirror after he got into the car. The man was still standing there, as if he did not understand what should happen next. Suddenly Rod’s cell phone began to ring. He dug in his breast pocket, flipped it open. “Van Vleet.”
“Angel Quarry,” said the woman at the other end, as if he’d been the one to call; as if that made any sense at all.
“Yeah, I’m coming,” Shelby muttered, as the raps on her front door grew louder. It was only 11 A.M. If this moron woke Ethan . . . She knotted her hair into a ponytail holder, tugged her pajamas to rights, and squinted against the sun as she opened the door. For a moment, backlit by the daylight, she didn’t recognize him.
“Shel?”
It had been two years since she’d seen Ross. They still looked alike—the same rangy build, the same intense pale gaze that people found it hard to break away from. But Ross had lost weight and let his hair grow long. And oh, the circles under his eyes—they were even darker than her own.
“I woke you up,” he apologized. “I could . . .”
“Come here,” Shelby finished, and she folded her baby brother into an embrace.
“Go back to sleep,” Ross urged, after Shelby had spent the better part of an hour fussing over him. “Ethan’s going to need you.”
“Ethan’s going to need you,” Shelby corrected. “Once he finds out you’re here, you might as well forget about getting any rest.” She set a stack of towels on the end of the guest room bed and hugged him. “It goes without saying that you stay as long as you like.” He buried his face in the curve of her shoulder and closed his eyes. Shelby smelled like his childhood.
Suddenly she drew back. “Oh, Ross,” she murmured, and slipped her hand beneath the collar of his shirt, pulling out the long chain that he kept hidden underneath. At the end hung a diamond solitaire, a falling star. Shelby’s fist closed around it.
Ross jerked away, and the chain snapped. He grabbed Shelby’s wrist and shook until she let go of the ring, until it was safe in his hand. “Don’t,” he warned, setting his jaw.
“It’s been—”
“Don’t you think I know how long it’s been? Don’t you think I know exactly?” Ross turned away. Why was it no one spoke of how kindness can cut just as clean as a knife?
When Shelby touched his arm, Ross didn’t respond. She didn’t force the issue. Just that one small contact, and then she backed her way out of the room.
Shelby was right—he ought to sleep—but he also knew that wouldn’t happen. Ross had grown used to insomnia; for years it had crawled under the covers with him, pressed the length of his body with just enough restless indecision to keep him watching the digital display of a clock until the numbers justified getting out of bed.
He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He held the ring so tightly in his hand that he could feel the prongs of the setting cutting into his skin. He would have to get something—string, a leather cord—so that he could wear it again. Wide awake, he focused his attention on the clock. He watched the numbers bleed into each other: 12:04; 12:05; 12:06. He counted the roses on the comforter cover. He tried to remember the words to “Waltzing Matilda.”
When he startled awake at 5:58, Ross could not believe it. He blinked, feeling better than he had in months. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and stood up, wondering if Shelby might have a spare toothbrush.
It was the absence of the slight weight against his chest that reminded him of the ring. Ross opened his fist and panicked. The diamond he’d fallen asleep clutching was nowhere in sight—not under the covers, not on the carpet, not even behind the bed, which Ross moved with frantic haste. I’ve lost her, Ross thought, staring blankly at what he’d awakened holding instead: a 1932 penny—smooth as a secret; still warm from the heat of his hand.
TWO
For an eight-year-old, Lucy Oliver knew quite a lot. She could list all the state capitals; she could explain how a thundercloud formed; she could spell RHYTHM forward and backward. She knew other things too, more important, non-school things. For example, she knew that her great-grandma had come home from the doctor a month ago with little white pills that she hid in the toe of an orthopedic sneaker in her closet. She knew that when grown-ups lowered their voices it meant you had to listen harder. She knew that even the smartest person in the world could be scared by what he or she didn’t understand.
Lucy also knew, with staunch conviction, that it was only a matter of time before one of them got her.
They changed form, from night to night. Sometimes they were the shifting shape of the patterns on her curtains. Sometimes they were the cold spot on the floor as Lucy raced across the wide wooden boards into bed. Sometimes they were a smell that made Lucy dream of leaves and dark and carcasses.
Tonight she was pretending that she was a turtle. Nothing could get into that hard shell; nothing at all. Not even the thing she was certain was breathing at this very second inside her closet. But even with her eyes wide open, Lucy could see the night changing. In some spots it got more pointed; in others it drew back . . . until she was staring into the see-through face of a woman so sad it made Lucy’s stomach hurt.
I will find you, the lady said, right inside Lucy’s own head.
She stifled a scream, because that would wake up her great-grandmother, and whipped the covers over her head. Her thin chest pumped like a piston; her breathing went damp. If this woman could find her, anywhere, then where would Lucy hide? Would her mother know she’d been snatched, just by the dent Lucy’s body left behind on the mattress?
She snaked one hand out far enough to grab the phone she’d placed on her nightstand and stamped the button that automatically dialed her mother’s lab. Lucy imagined an invisible line connecting her from this phone to the one her mother was holding, a wireless umbilicus, and was so grateful for the picture in her head that she couldn’t squeeze any words around it.
“Oh, Lucy,” her mother sighed into the silence. “What’s the matter now?”
“It’s the air,” Lucy whispered, hating her voice. It came out tiny and frantic, like the scramble of mice. “It’s too heavy.”
“Did you take your inhaler?”
Lucy had. She was old enough to know what to do when her asthma flared. But it wasn’t that kind of heavy. “It’s going to crush me.” There, it had gotten even worse. Lucy lay down beneath the weight of the night, trying to breathe in small puffs, so that the oxygen in the room would last longer.
“Honey.” Her mother spoke in a tone that made Lucy think of cold glass vials and mile-long white countertops. “You know air can’t change its weight, not inside your bedroom. This is all your imagination.”
“But . . .” Lucy hunched away from the closet, because she could feel the lady watching. “Mom, I’m not making it up.”
There was a beat that lasted the exact amount of time it took her mother to lose her temper. “Lucy. There are no such things as ghosts, or goblins, or demons, or . . . or air-crushing invisible beasts. Go to bed.”
Lucy held the receiver after the line went dead. When the metallic voice of the operator came on, asking her to hang up if she wanted to make another call, she buried the phone beneath her pillow. Her mother was right; she knew on some rational plane that nothing in her room was out to get her; that monsters didn’t hide in closets or under beds, that crying ladies didn’t appear out of nowhere. If the air was becoming as thick as pea soup, there was a perfectly logical explanation, one that could be explained by physics and chemistry.
But all the same, when Meredith Oliver came home hours later, she found her daughter sleeping in a tub lined with pillows and blankets; the bathroom lit bright as midday.
Ross watched his nephew defy gravity one more time, the skateboard rising on the air beneath his balanced feet. “That’s a fifty/fifty,” Ethan informed him, his cheeks flushed with exertion; his hairline damp beneath t
he scrolled brim of his baseball cap.
He pretended to try to lift up Ethan’s ankle. “You sure you haven’t got these tied on with fishing line?”
Ethan grinned and started for his ramp again, then turned around and rolled back. “Uncle Ross?” he said. “Having you here is totally the bomb.”
On the blanket beside Ross, Shelby plucked at the grass. “That’s about the highest endorsement you could receive.”
“I figured.” Ross lay back, resting his head on his hands. A shooting star streaked across his field of vision, painting with its silver tail. “He’s great, Shel.”
Her eyes followed Ethan. “I know.”
Ethan rattled down the wooden ramp. “Great enough to go ghost hunting with you?” he called over his shoulder.
“Who told you I go ghost hunting?”
“I have my sources.” Ethan spun the board, leaping off it at the same time, so that it seemed to rise into his hand. “I’m fast, see? And I don’t get tired at night . . . and I can be so quiet you wouldn’t even believe it . . .”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Ross laughed.
“No, I mean, really, Uncle Ross, why wouldn’t you take me?”
“Let’s see. Because your mother would skin me alive; and because I’m retired.”
“Retired?” The boy ran his tongue over the word. “Does that mean you’re, like, worn out from it?”
“I guess, in a way.”
Ethan seemed stunned by this. “Well, that totally sucks.”
“Ethan.” Shelby shook her head, a warning.
“Now you’re just like some normal relative,” the boy muttered.
Ross watched him skate off. “Was that an insult?”
Shelby ignored him, eyeing Ross carefully instead. “So you’re all right?”
“Fine.” He smiled at her. “Totally.”
“It’s just that I get worried, you know, when you don’t call. For six months.”
Ross shrugged. “I’ve been moving around a lot, with the Warburtons.”
“I didn’t know you’d stopped doing paranormal investigation.”
“I didn’t either, until I said it. But I’m sick of not seeing what I want to see.”
“There’s a difference between being a paleontologist and not finding what you’re after, and being a ghost hunter and not finding what you’re after,” Shelby said. “I mean, there are dinosaur bones out there, even if you aren’t lucky enough to dig them up. But ghosts . . . well, if they’re all over the place, how come no one’s proved it by now?”
“I’ve been in a room where the temperature drops by twenty degrees within a few seconds. I’ve taped church choirs singing in empty, locked rooms. I’ve seen faucets turn themselves on. But I’ve never seen a spirit appear in front of my eyes. Hell, for all I know any of those things could be explained away. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s elves, maybe it’s some technical genius three miles away making it happen by remote control.”
Shelby grinned. “Is this the same kid who believed in Santa until he was fifteen?”
“I was ten,” Ross corrected. “And you weren’t the one who set the trap on the roof and got proof.”
“You got a shingle.”
“With a hoof print on it.” Ross reached in his pocket for a cigarette, then looked at Ethan and changed his mind. “I should have quit a long time ago.”
“Smoking?”
“Ghost hunting.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Ross thought of Curtis Warburton: Half this business is telling people what they want to hear. He thought of Aimee’s lost engagement ring, which had vanished overnight, although he’d torn his room apart trying to find it. “Because things happened that I didn’t understand . . . and I thought that if I looked hard enough, I might be able to figure out why.”
“Maybe you should have gone into physics, then.”
Ross shrugged. “Science can’t explain everything.”
“You mean, like God?”
“Nothing that profound. What makes you walk past thirty thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you’ll never take your eyes off her again?”
“Love may not be rational, Ross, but it isn’t paranormal.”
Says who? Ross thought. “That’s not the point. It’s that even when you can’t see something right before your eyes, you can still feel it. And you’re willing to trust your senses in one case, so why not the other?” Getting to his feet, he brushed off his jeans. “You know, I’d go into these houses . . . and all I’d have to do is be willing to listen, and these people would just talk. Not just psychos, Shel . . . professors with Ph.D.s, and Fortune 500 CEOs. It’s like once you’ve seen a ghost, you’re part of the club, and you can’t wait to find someone else who doesn’t think you’re insane for admitting that what your parents told you wasn’t true.”
It’s what Ross had wanted to believe. He had met some psychics who claimed that they could barely turn around without crashing into a spirit. That ghosts were constantly trying to catch their attention. But now, he had his doubts. Now, he was starting to think that once you died, that was that.
“Even Ph.D.s and CEOs can be liars. Or crazy,” Shelby said.
“How about four-year-olds?” Ross turned to his sister. “What about the kid who comes up to his mom in the middle of the night and says there’s an old man in his bedroom who told him they have to leave the workshop so he can make a table? And then you go to the library and find out the house is built on a carpentry studio from two hundred years back?”
“That . . . happened?”
The four-year-old boy had eventually started hitting himself in the head to stop hearing the ghost’s voice; he’d scratched at his eyes so that he wouldn’t see it. “Well. I guess kids can go crazy, too. Point is, I’m through with it.” But Ross wondered whether he was trying to convince his sister, or himself.
Shelby patted his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, Ross, if anyone was going to be able to find concrete evidence of a ghost, I have no doubt it would have been you.”
Hesitating, he looked at her, then dug into his pocket. He extracted his wallet and pulled a photo from the liner.
“You’re going to tell me that looks like a mouth, and eyes.” She squinted. “And a hand.”
“I didn’t tell you anything. You told me.”
“So what is it?”
“Curtis Warburton would call it ectoplasm. When I took this picture, there was nothing on that lake . . . no fog, no breath, nothing. But this is what made it onto the negative. Film is sensitive enough to pick up light, heat, and magnetic energy . . . which are the same sources of energy spirits use to materialize.” Ross slipped the photo back into his wallet. “Then again, it could have been some crap they spilled at the photo lab.”
He did not say that at the time he took the photograph, the air suddenly grew so cold that all the hair on his arms and legs stood up. He did not say that for the rest of that day, his hands shook and his eyes could not seem to focus.
“There was no mist there when you took the picture?” Shelby clarified.
“Nope.”
She frowned. “If I saw that in some newspaper, I’d think it was doctored. But—”
“—but I’m your brother, so you have to trust me?”
Ethan roared to a stop in front of them. “There’s this rock quarry in town where a guy got murdered a really long time ago. Everyone says it’s haunted. We could go and—”
“No,” said Ross and Shelby, simultaneously.
“Jesus H.,” Ethan muttered, loping away again.
Ross looked over the horizon, the blue night starting to bleed. “Isn’t it time to go in?”
Shelby nodded and began to gather the remains of their picnic. “So what will you do now?”
“Track UFOs.” He looked at her. “Kidding.”
“You could baby-sit for me while I work. Although taking care of Ethan might be even sca
rier than your last gig.”
“Ghosts aren’t scary,” Ross said before he could remember to speak hypothetically. “They’re just people. Well, they used to be.”
Shelby paused in the middle of folding the blanket. “But you’ve never seen one.”
“No.”
“Even though you wanted to.”
Ross forced a smile. “Hey, I’ve never seen a ten-thousand-dollar bill, but I’ve always wanted to see one of those too.”
Retirement made sense. It was simply a matter of convincing himself. The truth was, in nine months, he had not found what he was looking for. He had not witnessed an apparition because there was nothing there.
But then again, he had a mind-boggling photograph burning a hole in his back pocket; a spirit that might have taken strength from heat or from light or even his camera batteries, so it could project itself and be seen. To Ross, that was perfectly logical. After all, Aimee had been the one who energized him. Without her, he was no better than a ghost himself, slipping through his own life, unseen.
“I ain’t bulldozing over him!” shouted the foreman on the job, his face shiny and florid as a plum. He glared down at Eli from the vantage point of the truck’s cab, arms crossed over the shelf of his belly.
“Mr. Champigny—”
“Winks.” The guy lying supine on the ground smiled gamely at Eli. “That’s what everyone calls me.”
Eli’s dog bounded out of nowhere and planted his front paws on Winks’s chest. “Down, Watson,” Eli ordered. “Mr. Champigny, I’m going to have to ask you to get up. The Redhook company has contractual permission to perform due diligence on this land.”
“He speakin’ English?” Winks called out to a group of picketers nearby.
“Can’t you arrest them?” Rod van Vleet asked.
“They haven’t made any trouble yet. This is civil disobedience, is all.” At least that’s what Eli’s orders were from Chief Follensbee, who didn’t want to stir up what could quickly escalate into an angry racial disagreement. Eli knew that the Abenaki wouldn’t press the issue, if they weren’t pressed themselves. All the same, he wasn’t much in the mood for this. He’d had to pick up Abbott Thule, the town drunk, from the Gas & Grocery and set him in a lockup to dry out. He needed to get Watson something to eat. He did not want to be screwing around now with a bunch of Indians with enough hubris between them to fill the bowl of Lake Champlain.