by Jodi Picoult
Jenna slaps down a twenty-dollar bill. “Well, try to pull it together for just a little bit longer,” she says. “At least long enough for me to hire you.”
I laugh. “Sweetheart, save your piggy-bank change. If your dog’s missing, put up flyers. If a guy dumped you for a hotter girl, stuff your bra and make him jealous. That advice, it’s all free, by the way, ’cause that’s how I roll.”
She doesn’t blink. “I’m hiring you to finish your job.”
“What?”
“You have to find my mother,” she says.
There is something I never told anyone about that case.
The days after the death at the New England sanctuary were, as you can imagine, a freaking PR nightmare—with Thomas Metcalf in a drugged stupor at a residential psychiatric treatment facility and his wife AWOL, the only caregiver left was Gideon. The sanctuary itself was bankrupt and in default, all the cracks in its foundation now laid bare to the public. No food was coming in for the elephants, no more hay. The property was going to be seized by the bank, but in order for that to happen its residents—all thirty-five thousand pounds of them—needed to be relocated.
It’s not easy to find a home for seven elephants, but Gideon had grown up in Tennessee and knew about a place in Hohenwald called The Elephant Sanctuary. They recognized this as an emergency and were willing to do whatever they could for the New Hampshire animals. They agreed to house the elephants in their quarantine barn until a new one could be built for them specifically.
That week a new case got thrown onto my desk—a babysitter, seventeen years old, who was responsible for a six-month-old’s brain damage. I immersed myself in trying to get the girl—a cheerleader with blond hair and a perfect white smile—to admit to shaking the infant. Which is why, on the day of Donny’s retirement party, I was still at my desk when the medical examiner’s report on Nevvie Ruehl came through.
I knew what it said already—that the caregiver’s death was accidental, caused by the trampling of an elephant. But I found myself scrolling through the text, reading the weight of the victim’s heart, brain, liver. On the last page was a list of the articles found with the body.
One of those items was a single strand of red hair.
I grabbed the report and ran downstairs, where Donny was wearing a party hat and blowing out the candles on a cake shaped like an eighteenth hole. “Donny,” I murmured, “we have to talk.”
“Now?”
I pulled him into the hallway. “Look.”
I shoved the ME’s report into his hand and watched him scan the results. “You dragged me out of my own going-away party to tell me what I already know? I’ve already told you, Virg. Put it to rest.”
“That hair,” I said. “The red one. That’s not the victim’s. She was blond. Which means that there could have been a struggle.”
“Or that someone reused a body bag.”
“I’m pretty sure that Alice Metcalf has red hair.”
“So do six million other people in the United States. And even if it does happen to belong to Alice Metcalf, so what? The two women knew each other; trace evidence would transfer due to their interactions. This would only prove that at some point, they were in proximity. That’s Forensics 101.”
He narrowed his eyes. “I’m going to give you a little advice. No detective wants to be in charge of a town that’s on edge. Two days ago most of Boone was shitting bricks about crazy rogue elephants that could kill them in their sleep. Now everyone’s finally settling down again, since the elephants are leaving. Alice Metcalf is probably in Miami, enrolling her kid in preschool under a fake name. If you start saying this case might not have been accidental but actually a murder, you’re going to create a fresh panic. When you hear hoofbeats, Virgil, chances are it’s a horse, not a zebra. People want cops who keep them safe from trouble—not cops who go looking for it where it doesn’t exist. You want to make detective? Stop being Superman, and be Mary Fucking Poppins instead.”
He patted me on the back and headed toward the room full of revelers.
“What did you mean?” I yelled after him. “When you said it wasn’t your call?”
Donny stopped in his tracks, looked into the crowd of celebrating coworkers, and then grabbed my arm and pulled me in the opposite direction, where there would be no chance of us being overheard. “Did you ever wonder why the press didn’t go apeshit over this? It’s New Fucking Hampshire. Nothing ever happens here. Anything that smells like potential homicide is usually as irresistible as crack. Unless,” he said quietly, “people far more powerful than you or me inform them to stop digging.”
Back then, I still believed in justice, in the system. “You’re telling me the chief’s okay with that?”
“It’s an election year, Virg. The governor can’t win a second term on a zero-crime platform if the public thinks there’s still a murderer wandering around Boone.” He sighed. “That governor is the same guy who increased the budget for public safety so you could get hired in the first place. So you could protect the community without having to choose between a cost-of-living raise and a Kevlar vest.” He looked directly at me. “Suddenly, doing the right thing isn’t so black and white, is it?”
I watched Donny walk away, but I never joined him at the party. Instead, I returned to my desk and worked the last page of the ME’s report free from its staple. Folding it into quarters, I slipped the page into the pocket of my jacket.
I put the rest of the ME’s report in the closed case file of Nevvie Ruehl and instead pored over the evidence I had for the shaken baby. Two days later, Donny officially retired, and I got the teenage cheerleader to confess.
The elephants, I heard, adapted well in Tennessee. The sanctuary land was sold—half to the state in conservation, and half to a developer. After all the debts were paid, the remaining funds were managed by a lawyer to pay for the residential care of Thomas Metcalf. His wife never came back to claim any of it.
Six months afterward, I was promoted to detective. The morning of the ceremony, I dressed in my one good suit and took, from my nightstand drawer, the folded page of the ME’s report. I tucked this into my breast pocket.
I needed to remind myself that I was no hero.
“She’s missing again?” I ask.
“What do you mean again?” Jenna answers. She sits down in the chair across from my desk and folds her legs, Indian-style.
That, at least, cuts through the fog in my brain. I stub my cigarette out in a stale cup of coffee. “Didn’t she run off with you?”
“I’m going to say no,” Jenna says, “since I haven’t seen her in ten years.”
“Wait.” I shake my head. “What?”
“You were one of the last people to see my mother alive,” Jenna explains. “You dropped her off at the hospital, and then when she disappeared you didn’t even do what any policeman with half a brain would do—go after her.”
“I had no reason to go after her. She signed herself out of the hospital. Adults do that every day—”
“She had a head injury—”
“The hospital wouldn’t have flagged it as long as they felt she was safe to be checking out, or else it would have been a HIPAA violation. Since they didn’t seem to have a problem with her leaving, and since we never heard otherwise, we assumed that she was okay and that she was running off with you.”
“Then how come you never charged her with kidnapping?”
I shrug. “Your father never officially reported her missing.”
“I guess he was too busy being electrocuted as part of his therapy.”
“If you weren’t with your mother, who’s been taking care of you all this time?”
“My grandmother.”
So that was where Alice had stashed the baby. “And why didn’t she report your mother’s disappearance?”
The girl’s cheeks flush. “I was too young to remember, but she says she went to the police station the week after my mom disappeared. I guess nothing ever came o
f it.”
Was that true? I couldn’t remember anyone formally lodging a missing persons complaint about Alice Metcalf. But then maybe the woman hadn’t seen me. Maybe she’d seen Donny instead. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Alice Metcalf’s mother had been dismissed when she asked for help, or if Donny had tossed the paperwork intentionally so that I wouldn’t stumble across it, because he knew I’d want to follow up and drag out the case.
“The point is,” Jenna says. “You should have tried to find her. And you didn’t. So you owe me now.”
“What makes you so sure she can be found?”
“She’s not dead.” Jenna looks me in the eye. “I think I’d know it. Feel it.”
If I had a Ben Franklin for every time I’d heard that from someone who was hoping for good news in a missing persons case only to have the remains turn up—well, I’d be drinking Macallan whiskey, not JD. But instead I say, “Is it possible she didn’t come back because she didn’t want to? A lot of people reinvent themselves.”
“Like you?” she asks, staring right at me. “Victor?”
“Okay, yeah,” I admit. “If your life sucks completely, sometimes it’s easier to start over.”
“My mom did not just decide to become someone else,” she insists. “She liked who she was. And she wouldn’t have left me behind.”
I did not know Alice Metcalf. But I know there are two ways to live: Jenna’s way, where you hang on to what you have in a death grip so you don’t lose it; or my way, where you walk away from everything and everyone that matters before they can leave you behind. Either way, you’re bound to be disappointed.
It’s possible that Alice knew her marriage was a mess, that it was only a matter of time before she screwed up her kid, too. Maybe, like me, she cut bait before her life got even worse.
I spear a hand through my hair. “Look, no one wants to hear that maybe she’s the reason her mother flew the coop. But my advice to you is to put this behind you. File it away in the drawer that’s saved for all the other crap that isn’t fair, like how the Kardashians are famous and how good-looking people get served faster at restaurants and how a kid who can’t skate to save his life winds up on the varsity hockey team because his dad is the coach.”
Jenna nods but says, “What if I told you I had proof that she didn’t leave of her own free will?”
You can give the detective shield back, but you can’t always get rid of the instincts. All the hair on my forearms stands up. “What do you mean?”
The kid reaches into her backpack and pulls out a wallet. A muddy, faded, cracked leather wallet that she hands to me. “I hired a psychic, and we found this.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I say, my hangover roaring back full force. “A psychic?”
“Well, before you say she’s a hack—she found something that your whole team of crime scene investigators never managed to find.” She watches me open the clasp of the wallet and sort through the credit cards and driver’s license. “It was up in a tree, on the sanctuary property,” Jenna says. “Close to where my mom was found unconscious—”
“How do you know where she was found unconscious?” I ask sharply.
“Serenity told me. The psychic?”
“Oh, well, good, because I thought maybe you had a less reliable source.”
“Anyway,” she continues, ignoring me, “it was buried under a lot of stuff—birds had been making nests up in there for a while.” She takes it out of my hands and slips from the cracked plastic photo insert the only picture still even remotely visible. It’s bleached and faded and wrinkled, but even I can see the gummy mouth of a smiling baby.
“That’s me,” Jenna says. “If you were going to run away from a child forever … wouldn’t you at least keep a picture?”
“I stopped trying to figure out why humans do what they do a long time ago. As for the wallet—it doesn’t prove anything. She could have dropped it while she was running.”
“And it magically flew up fifteen feet into a tree?” Jenna shakes her head. “Who put it up there? And why?”
Immediately I think: Gideon Cartwright.
I don’t have any reason to suspect the man; I have no idea why his name pops into my head. As far as I know he went to Tennessee with those elephants and lived there happily ever after.
Then again, it was Gideon who Alice allegedly confided in about her failed marriage. And it was Gideon whose mother-in-law was killed.
Which brings me to my next thought.
What if the death of Nevvie Ruehl had not been an accident, as Donny Boylan had pushed me to believe? What if Alice had been the one to kill Nevvie, had stashed her own wallet in the tree to make it look like she was the victim of foul play—and then run away before she could be named as a suspect?
I look across my desk at Jenna. Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart.
If I still had a conscience, I might feel a twinge about agreeing to help a kid find her mother, considering that it might involve pinning a homicide on the woman. But then again, I can play my cards close to my chest, and let the girl believe this is just about finding a missing person, not a possible murderer. Besides, maybe I’m doing her a favor. I know what loose ends can do to a soul. The sooner she knows the truth, whatever it is, the sooner she can get on with her future.
I hold out my hand. “Ms. Metcalf,” I say. “You’ve got yourself a private eye.”
ALICE
I have studied memory extensively, and the best analogy I’ve found to explain its mechanics is this: Think of the brain as the central office of your body. Every experience you have on any given day, then, is a folder being dropped on a desk to be filed away for future reference. The administrative assistant who comes in at night, while you’re asleep, to clear that logjam in her in-box is the part of the brain called the hippocampus.
The hippocampus takes all these folders and files them in places that make sense. This experience is a fight with your husband? Great, let’s put it with a few more of those from last year. This experience is a memory of a fireworks display? Cross-reference it with a Fourth of July party you attended a while back. She tries to place each memory where there are as many related incidents as possible, because that is what makes them easier to retrieve.
Sometimes, though, you simply cannot remember an experience. Let’s say you go to a baseball game, and someone tells you later that two rows behind you there was a woman sobbing in a yellow dress—but you have absolutely no recollection of her. There are only two scenarios in which this is possible. Either the incident was never dropped off for filing: You were focused instead on the batter and didn’t pay attention to the crying woman. Or the hippocampus screwed up and coded that memory in a place it should not be: That sad woman gets linked to your nursery school teacher, who also used to wear a yellow dress, which is a place you’d never find it.
You know how sometimes you have a dream about someone from your past who you barely remember and whose name you couldn’t recall if your life depended on it? It means that you accessed that path serendipitously, and found a bit of buried treasure.
Things you do routinely—things that get consolidated repeatedly by that hippocampus—form nice big connections. Taxi drivers in London have been proven to have very large hippocampi, because they have to process so much spatial information. We don’t know, however, if they are born with naturally large hippocampi, or if the organ grows as it is put to the test, like a muscle being exercised.
There are also some people who cannot forget. People with PTSD may have smaller hippocampi than ordinary people. Some scientists believe that corticoids—stress hormones—can atrophy the hippocampus and cause memory disruptions.
Elephants, on the other hand, have enlarged hippocampi. You hear, anecdotally, that an elephant never forgets, and I do believe this is true. Up in Kenya, at Amboseli, researchers have done playbacks of long-distance contact calls in an experiment that suggests adult female elephants can recognize more than a hundred i
ndividuals. When the calls were from a herd with which they had associated, the elephants being tested responded with their own contact calls. When the vocalizations were from an unfamiliar herd, they bunched and backed away.
There was one unusual response in this experiment. During its course, one of the older female elephants that had been recorded died. They played back her contact call three months after her death, and again at twenty-three months postmortem. In both instances, her family responded with their own contact calls and approached the speaker—which suggests not just processing or memory but abstract thought. Not only did the family of the lost elephant remember her voice, but for just a moment as they approached that speaker, I bet they hoped to find her.
As a female elephant gets older, her memory improves. After all, her family relies on her for information—she is the walking archive that makes the decisions for the herd: Is it dangerous here? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to drink? How are we going to find water? A matriarch might know migratory routes that have gone unused for the life span of the entire herd—including herself—yet somehow have been passed down and encoded into a recollection.
But my favorite story about elephant memory comes from Pilanesberg, where I did some of my doctoral work. In the nineties, to control the South African elephant population, there had been massive culling, in which park rangers shot adults within the herds and translocated the babies to places where there was a need for elephants. Unfortunately, the juveniles were traumatized and didn’t behave the way they were supposed to. In Pilanesberg, a group of translocated young elephants didn’t know how to function as a legitimate herd. They needed matriarchs, someone to guide them. And so an American trainer named Randall Moore brought to Pilanesberg two adult female elephants that, years ago, had been sent to the United States after being orphaned during a cull in the Kruger National Park.
The young elephants immediately took to Notch and Felicia—the names we gave these surrogate mothers. Two herds formed, and twelve years passed. And then, in a tragic accident, Felicia was bitten by a hippo. The bush vet needed to clean and dress the wound repeatedly while it healed, but he couldn’t anesthetize Felicia each time. You can only dart an elephant three times a month or the M99 drug builds up too much in its system. Felicia’s health was at risk, and if she died, her herd would find itself in jeopardy once again.