by Jodi Picoult
It rocked Az to the core to realize that he and Spencer Pike had something in common after all: they would die alone, and their grief would die with them. He looked at the broken man in front of him who had ruined so many lives. “Help me die,” Pike breathed.
It would be so easy. A pillow, held down for thirty seconds. A hand covering the parched and bitter mouth. No one need ever know, and Az would have his biblical justice: a life for a life.
But it was what Pike wanted.
Az felt the bands around his heart break free. “No,” he said, and he walked out of the room without a second glance.
The Comtosook Police department had hired six part-timers to keep the media away from the site of the disinterment. Gathered around the open graves were Wesley Sneap, Eli, Az and several hand-picked Abenaki, and Ross. The stench of time rose from the earth, thick as cinnamon.
That should be me, Ross thought, at the moment Az murmured the same words aloud. The old man’s hand trembled as it reached toward the coffins. “Where will you take her?” Ross asked.
“To the top of a mountain, a sacred place. The Abenaki are always buried facing east.” Az looked up. “That way she can see what’s coming.”
Ross tried to swallow around the knot that had lodged in his throat. “Will you . . . will you show me where she is?”
“I can’t. You’re not Abenaki.”
Ross had known that would be the answer, but it did not keep tears from springing to his eyes. He nodded, pretended to kick at a stick beside his shoe. Suddenly he felt something being pressed into his hand. An envelope.
Inside was a faded clipping from the Burlington Free Press, the obituary of Cecelia Beaumont Pike. A picture of her sat off to the side. In it, she was smiling faintly, as if the photographer had told a joke she did not find funny but was too polite not to laugh just a little. “You keep it,” Az said.
“I couldn’t—”
“She’d want that.” Az tilted his head. “She told me she’d dreamed of you, you know.”
“She . . . what?”
“Of a man who looked like you look. Who had gadgets and things she didn’t recognize. You would come to her, when she was sleeping.” Az shrugged. “It’s not so strange, really. You can be haunted for years by someone you’ve never met.”
“You ready?” Eli asked gently, and the old man nodded.
Wesley Sneap helped Eli position a crowbar and crack open the lid of the larger coffin. Ross fell backward, and two of the Abenaki blanched. Eli peered into the pine box at the yellowed puzzle of long bones and joints in a bed of dirt and dust. Only one entire limb remained intact—the right arm, a continuous line from shoulder to elbow to wrist to hand, which lay on top of the sternum that once covered a heart.
He stood with his hands clasped, feeling his childhood unspool as Az started to speak a language that ran through his veins. Kchai phanem ta wdosa . . . the mother and daughter. Kchi Niwaskw . . . Great Spirit. Nosaka nia . . . follow me. Eli did not know if Cecelia Pike, or her baby, were in a place where they could hear this ceremony, but he hoped so.
“Olegwasi,” Az said. “Dream well.” Then he turned to face the others. “The Ojibway—the people I went to when I left here—they hold a ceremony when a baby is born.” He took a twist of tobacco from a canvas bag he’d carried into the gravesite and lit it on fire. “It’s so the Spirit World can recognize a child, and make a place for her when it’s her time to go. Today I want to give my granddaughter her name.”
Az looked around the circle of people, daring them to say that it might be too late after seventy years. “Lily,” he called, facing to the east.
Eli felt the response drawn from his throat. “Lily,” he repeated.
Az turned to the north. “Lily.”
“Lily.”
To the west, to the south, he offered up her name for safekeeping. By the time Az turned to Eli again, it was snowing. Eli touched the top of his head and brushed off a few flower petals. “Now,” Az said.
Just then the sky darkened, until it was the color of a bruise beneath the skin. Ross Wakeman turned in a circle, as if he were expecting something to materialize, and damned if Eli didn’t think that just might happen.
But just then Wesley jimmied open the smaller coffin, an apple crate, with a crowbar. Ill-preserved and eroded with time, the wooden box broke into pieces. The contents spilled, and Eli ran forward too late, thinking there might be something he could do.
A hush fell over the small group. The bones that fell out, twisted and brown, were a scramble of points and edges. But even Eli, who had no training in this kind of thing, realized that the skull was missing. “Uh . . . Wesley?”
The medical examiner creaked down to his knees, poking through the remains with a gloved hand. “The ribs and vertebrae are here,” he said, “but they’re too large to be from an infant. I don’t even think this is human.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
Wesley looked up at Eli. “Looks to me like a rib roast,” he said.
Years from now, Eli would know this was the moment he had truly forsworn red meat. He knelt beside the coffin and felt Az come up behind him. They all watched the sky split at a seam, letting forth a steady rain of rose petals that covered the ground, the grave, the bones inside the coffin. A rogue wind whipped between Eli’s legs, caught the petals in a funnel draft. They drifted down to the ground, spelling out initials: RW.
In her dreams, Ruby was reaching. Anticipation was a lion crouched on her chest, clawing at her collarbone. She woke with a start and tried to sit up, but that lion had her pinned to the mattress, and now that she tried, she couldn’t catch her breath, either.
Was Lucy crying?
No, this was a baby. The thin wail snaked under the door of Ruby’s bedroom, through the crack where the hall light shined through. Ruby struggled upright, but not before the lion on her chest took a vicious swipe.
She clutched the burn over her left breast and fell heavily to the floor. In the moment of clarity that sometimes comes with great pain, Ruby suddenly knew who that baby was. And she realized that in her dream, she had been reaching out for Cecelia Pike.
Ross drove in circles, and when he could not fool himself anymore he pulled onto the side of the road and got out of his car, lying on the hood and the windshield and smiling up at the sky. “RW,” he said aloud. “RW.”
He had seen it, clear as day, and whether anyone else had noticed hardly mattered—the flowers had taken the shape of his own initials. Ross let the sun wash over his face. The sky was printed blue on the backs of his eyelids and the clouds were a kaleidoscope—flat-bottomed giraffes and teapots and porcupines. It was possible to find all sorts of things, if you were in the mood to see them. Ross shifted to the right, so that half of the car’s hood was left empty. Room for someone to sit, should she choose to.
“What do you mean, the body was missing?” Shelby, sitting beside Ross on the porch, was incredulous. “There was a death certificate.”
From the end of the driveway, where Ethan had just executed a series of G-turns, he took a bow. “Ma! Did you see?”
Shelby clapped. “Eximious!” Then she turned to Ross. “Didn’t the medical examiner have to sign off on a body?”
“Who knows? Eli’s working from transcripts and testimonies and public records, but you can only construct so much of what actually happened. It’s like doing a puzzle when you’ve only got half the pieces.”
“He seems to know what he’s doing,” Shelby mused.
“Eli?” Ross took one look at his sister’s face. “Are we still talking about the murder, here, or do you have something else you want to share?”
She pulled her feet back as Ethan whizzed by, skating within inches of her toes. “He’s thorough, that’s all.”
“I’ll bet.”
Shelby gave him a withering look. “It doesn’t add up ratiocinatively. If the body of the baby was missing, then presumably, it was either buried somewhere else . . . or it was
never buried. Pike wouldn’t have buried it in a different grave, because if the medical examiner had insisted on digging up the baby to see it, he wouldn’t have been able to explain a rib roast. But then again, he doesn’t seem like the type to leave it on the doorstep of a church, either.”
“Why would you leave a dead body at a church?”
Shelby looked at him. “Who said the baby was dead?”
“Spencer Pike,” Ross replied, and then blinked. “Shit.”
“Exactly.”
“So if he lied . . . and the baby was alive . . . then maybe someone tried to save it. It would explain why they’d stick the rib roast in the coffin instead . . . they were trying to fool Pike into thinking that the baby had died.”
“Which Pike would probably have been more than willing to believe,” Shelby added. “What if the reason your ghost was haunting the property had nothing to do with the way she died? What if she came back to find her child?”
Ethan skated by, his eyes bright with constellations. He executed three 360s, missed the fourth, and fell down. Lying on the driveway, he laughed the deep-belly way only children can, bubbling up from the core. “I guess you’d come back for that,” Ross said.
“No,” Shelby answered. “I never would have left.”
It was too fine a setting for Spencer Pike. In his wheelchair, with a blanket on his lap and the white slats of the gazebo behind him, Eli wished for something more suitable—fire and brimstone, tar pits, a cell from the Middle Ages. This, after all, was a man who had gotten away with murder.
Eli leaned back against the railing of the nursing home’s gazebo, trying to keep his cool. Getting Pike to confess had become a personal mission. “How would you like it if you went in for a sponge bath,” he said evenly, “and came out with a vasectomy?”
“Can’t say it would cramp my style these days.”
“Unfortunately,” Eli said, “I doubt some of your sterilization victims would say the same.”
“Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, and you liberals swarmed all over us. But we were just like you. We were making the world a better place, too.”
“By keeping the poor and the different from multiplying. Very humane.”
“You have no idea. Their children were growing up without four walls to call a home. They had no moral direction. The ones we could save, we did. The others, well, it was for their own good.”
“Did you ever think to give them a second chance?”
“Of course. But they kept making the same mistakes again.”
“And you?” Eli said. “You’ve never made a mistake?”
Pike narrowed his eyes. “You want to tell me what that has to do with my property being developed?”
“Funny you should mention that, since your property isn’t going to be developed.” He handed Pike a copy of the injunction that had been given to Rod van Vleet.
“This is . . . this is ridiculous,” Pike sputtered. “My land’s no Indian burial ground.”
“Actually, it is.” Eli came a step closer. “Tell me, Spencer, did she fight you? Did she beg you to stop while you were putting that rope around her neck?”
“She was my wife.”
“And she was half-Abenaki,” Eli countered. “Which wasn’t going to reflect well on a card-carrying member of the American Eugenics Society, was it?”
He watched Pike’s face, the shock that unraveled across it. “You said that the last time you were here.”
“Because it’s true,” Eli said.
The old man shook his head, as if that might keep the fact from sinking in. “Cissy wasn’t . . . her hair, it was blond, and her skin was like milk . . .”
“And her father was not Harry Beaumont, but an Abenaki man named Gray Wolf.”
“Her father . . . ?”
“She had the bad luck to not be what you needed her to be, and you took care of that problem the way you took care of everything else that didn’t agree with you—by simply getting rid of it.” By now, Eli was leaning down over the old man. “Tell me the truth, Spencer. Tell me what you did.”
Pike closed his eyes, silent for so long Eli wondered if he’d suffered a stroke. “I thought she loved him,” he whispered. “I thought the child was his.”
“What did you do with the baby?”
The old man’s throat knotted, and his mouth worked soundlessly before the words burst free. “I killed it. I smothered it. Hid the body in the icehouse and told Cissy it had just died. I thought maybe, this way, we could start over. But I didn’t touch Cissy. I swear it, I loved her. I loved her.”
Eli thought of the apple crate in the ground, the one that had not held an infant. “What did you do with the baby’s body?”
“Buried it,” Spencer said. “The next morning, I found Cissy . . . and I buried the crate before I called the police. I had to, or they would have found out what I did.” He grabbed for Eli’s sleeve. “I did it because I loved her. All I wanted was—”
“A second chance?” Eli interrupted, unsympathetic. “The question is, did you make the same mistake again?”
The hardest part for Meredith was trying to keep from breaking down as she listened to the cardiologist who’d treated her grandmother after the heart attack. They stood in front of the hospital bed, where Ruby lay lit like a Christmas tree and strung with all manners of tubes and intravenous equipment. “She’s not out of the woods yet by any means,” the doctor said. “Reduced cerebral blood flow secondary to a myocardial infarction leads to ischemia . . . and delirium. I think it’s best to keep her here for a few days, just for monitoring.”
Meredith mumbled something—praise? thanks?—and sat down on the chair she’d pulled up to the bed. Outside this cardiac care room, a saint of a nurse had Lucy drawing Magic Marker faces on ballooned latex glove-puppets. Meredith rested her forehead on the synthetic blanket and held Ruby’s hand, which glowed at the forefinger with a pulse-oxygen monitor. “Don’t leave me,” she begged.
She felt the paper-thin skin of Ruby’s fingers twitch in her own. Meredith sat up, hopeful, to find her grandmother’s eyes wide open. “I’ll be fine in time for that dinner party,” Ruby said, her voice sliding into a French Canadian dialect.
Dinner party? Meredith frowned, and then remembered what the doctor had said about delirium.
“You take care of that baby.”
Lucy. “She wants you to get better too.”
Ruby’s eyes drifted shut. “I will,” she murmured. “I promise, Miz Pike.”
Shelby’s face bloomed the moment she realized it was Eli ringing the doorbell. “I’m glad you came by,” she said, stepping aside to let him in.
“I am too.”
“I had a wonderful time the other night.” Shelby thought of the way they had ended their date in Eli’s truck; how he had leaned over and asked if he could kiss her before Watson beat him to it; how incredible it felt to be held by someone, instead of doing the holding.
“Good. Since I came by to propose, and all.”
“To . . . what?”
Eli grinned. “I figured after your aversion to first dates, you might not be crazy about second ones either. So I thought maybe we’d just skip ahead.”
“Maybe we should jump to our silver anniversary,” Shelby said. “Play it safe.”
“All right by me,” Eli replied, and amazingly, Shelby thought he was only half-joking. She imagined sitting next to him, doing absolutely nothing, because they had spent years together doing it all and now could fill the spaces simply with each other’s company. She thought of what a bed would feel like when it was not empty on the other side.
“Can I get you something?” Shelby asked. “A cold drink?”
“Ross.”
Her face fell. “Oh. You came to talk to him.”
The uncomfortable moment was interrupted by the boisterous arrival of Watson, who pounced through the open door and between them. “I told you to stay in the truck,” Eli said, trying in vain to grab the dog’s collar.
>
“It’s okay.” Shelby watched the bloodhound begin to case her parlor and move into the living room. Watson stopped, turned toward Shelby, and gave an enthusiastic swipe of his tail—which managed to send a candy dish, a television remote, and several books off of the coffee table. Eli and Shelby both ran forward to pick up the mess. “I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be—”
“—He’s a pain in the ass, sometimes—”
“—No worse than a nine-year-old boy, believe me.”
As Shelby examined the crystal candy bowl for hairline fractures, Eli collected the books, which had splayed open on the carpet. One was a coffee table pictorial of Vermont. The other was a scrapbook. Curious, Eli flipped through the pages. “What’s this?”
Shelby read over his shoulder, her cheeks pink with embarrassment as Eli skimmed the stories she went back to time and time again. On the page he’d opened, there was an article about a six-year-old boy bitten by a shark off the coast of Florida. His leg had been severed and successfully reattached, but the blood loss had put him into a coma. After weeks of assuming the boy was brain-dead, he’d awakened just as good as new.
The most recent article involved a Canadian toddler who’d wandered out of his house and had fallen asleep in a six-foot drift of snow. “I remember this one,” Eli said. “He was pronounced dead, and brought to the hospital—”
“And the doctors gradually warmed him up and he came back to life.” Shelby took the scrapbook from him. “It’s stupid, I know, but I keep track. I clip stories where death turns out to not be . . . well, so final. Maybe one day someone will clip a story about Ethan for the same reason.”
Suddenly Ross came pounding down the stairs, his hair still wet from a shower. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said to Eli, as Watson did his best to leap into his arms. “How’d it go with Pike?”
But Eli was still riveted by the story of the Canadian toddler. “The doctor’s from McGill,” he said. “That’s right over the border in Montreal. The family must be nearby. Shelby, come with me?”