by Jodi Picoult
All this, in a building where there had not been electricity for twenty years.
Ross could smell death. It lingered in the halls, cloaked in the scent of ammonia and bed linens and chalky pills. It peeked at him from around the corner. He wondered if the residents who came through the nursing home’s door ever looked back, knowing they would not be leaving.
He had come here today, intent on throwing himself into research in the hopes that it might edge thoughts of Lia from his mind. In a week’s time he had not seen her; had not heard from her. Instead, he received an endless stream of calls from Rod van Vleet. Did Ross know that the Pike house was putting itself back together? That a cop had actually filed a report saying that all the lights had turned on inside—when there were no power lines?
Ross was a firm believer that you could not force circumstance. You could buckle your seat belt, but still crash the car. You could throw yourself in front of an oncoming train, but somehow survive. You could wait for years to find a ghost, and then have one sneak up on you when you were too busy falling in love with a woman to pay attention. To that end, he made the conscious decision to stop waiting for Lia. When he least expected her, that was when she would show up.
He had come to the nursing home unannounced because he didn’t know if Spencer Pike would agree to see him. And now that he sat across from the old man, Ross felt pity for him. The only animated part of Pike were his eyes, a blue that snapped smart as a flag. The rest of him was weathered, twisted like the roots of a tree forced to grow in too small a space.
“Screw the cinnamon raisin,” Spencer Pike said.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a lousy excuse for a bagel. You ask me, not that anyone has, damn it, a bagel isn’t supposed to be sweet. It’s like a sandwich, for the love of God. Does anyone put jelly on their ham and cheese?” He leaned forward. “You work for van Vleet; you can tell him I said so.”
“Technically I don’t work for the Redhook Group,” Ross said.
“You in insurance?”
“No.”
“A lawyer?”
“No.”
“You own a bagel chain?”
“Uh, no.”
Pike shrugged. “Well, two out of three. What do you want to know?”
“I understand that the land was originally your wife’s . . . that it transferred to you upon her death, because you didn’t have children.”
“That’s wrong.”
Ross looked up from his notepad. “That’s the information in her will.”
“Well, it’s still wrong. Cissy and I had a baby, but it was stillborn.”
“I’m sorry.”
Pike smoothed his hands over the blanket on his lap. “It was a long, long time ago.”
“The reason I’m here, Mr. Pike, is to see if you know the history of the land before you acquired it.”
“It was in my wife’s family. Passed down from mother to daughter for several generations.”
“Did the land ever belong to the Abenaki?”
Pike turned slowly. “The who?”
“The Native Americans who’ve been protesting the development of the property.”
“I know who they are!” Pike’s face grew red as a beet, and he began to cough. A nurse came over, gave Ross a dirty look, and spoke in low tones to Spencer Pike until his breathing had steadied. “They can’t give you any proof it’s a burial ground, can they?”
“Certain . . . circumstances,” Ross said carefully, “have led to the opinion that the property might be haunted.”
“Oh, it’s haunted all right. But not by any Indians. My wife died on that property,” Pike said, the words deep and ragged.
The stillborn; the untimely death of Cissy Pike; the possibility of a restless spirit—it was coming together for Ross. “In childbirth?”
Pike shook his head. “She was murdered. By an Abenaki.”
During her lunch break Shelby took a five-minute walk from the library to the Gas & Grocery, where she usually picked up a sandwich. But these days, thanks to the New York Times article, the little general store was swamped by reporters trying to get their own story of the land dispute that, quite literally, would not settle. She took one look at Abe Huppinworth, nictitating at her from the porch as he swept the ever-present array of rose petals, and abruptly turned in the other direction.
She found herself walking into the municipal building before she even realized where she was headed. Lottie, the town clerk, sat at her desk with a diet book. “I just don’t get it,” she said, glancing up. “They say eleven units, like I’m supposed to eat a condominium.”
Lottie, who had weighed well over two hundred and fifty pounds the whole time Shelby had been living in Comtosook, closed the book and picked up a celery stick. “You know who invented vegetables, Shelby? The devil.” She took a bite. “I ought to know better than to start a diet when I’m already in a bad mood.”
“Those reporters bugging you?”
“They’re in here sniffing around for God knows what. I finally ran off photocopies of the Pike property’s deed this morning, so I wouldn’t have to be interrupted.” She shook her head. “I imagine it’s worse for you.”
Shelby shrugged. “We unplug the phone.”
“I wish they would go away. I wish it would all go away. Myrt Clooney told me how Wally LaFleur’s parrot started singing Edith Piaf ballads, just like that. The coffeemaker, here at the office? We can’t get it to brew anything but lemonade.” She smiled suddenly at Shelby. “You didn’t come here to listen to a fat old lady moan. What can I do for you?”
Ten minutes later, under the pretense of finding a fact for a library patron, Shelby was sitting in the basement of the office, surrounded by boxes of town records. They were rubber-banded by year, but not in order—stacks of yellowed cards chronicling the births and deaths of Comtosook residents from 1877 to the present.
Ross had not asked for her help. Maybe that was why she was here—since their confrontation at the hospital he’d gone out of his way to avoid her, but with a politesse that felt like a knife being twisted: a note left on the counter saying he would be back between 4 and 5 A.M.; a gallon of milk set in the refrigerator to replace the one he had finished. The conversations they were not having had slipped under the carpeting, making it impossible to walk through the house without fear of tripping. Shelby wished she were brave enough to sit her baby brother down, to say, Can’t you see I’m only doing this out of love? She was too afraid, though, that he might say the same thing in return.
What she wanted for him was one lucky break to turn the tide and send him swimming back to her. But since she could not find the way to tell Ross that she was sorry for doubting him, she would hand him this information, in case it might be apology enough.
The box of deaths from 1930 had survived a flood in the late fifties, and many were so faded with watermarks that Shelby could not read the names of the deceased, much less anything else about their states of affairs. The bottom of the carton was lined with an old Town Annual Report, published along with a calendar for the year 1966. “Comtosook,” she read off the cover, “derives from the Abenaki word kôdtôzik, or ‘what is hidden,’ referring no doubt to the wealth of granite found in the depths of Angel Quarry.”
No doubt, Shelby thought.
She dug a little deeper and came up with the stack of deaths from 1932. These weren’t as badly stained, but the rubber band was so brittle it broke off in her hand. The cards spilled across her lap, smelling faintly of sulfur and pressed flowers. Shelby began to scan through them quickly. BERTEL-MAN, ADA. MONROE, RAWLENE. QUINCY, OLIVE.
Two cards were stuck together; Shelby noticed this at nearly the same time she realized that they both were labeled PIKE. The first was a death certificate for an unnamed stillborn infant, 37 weeks. Approximate time of death: 11:32 A.M. Glued onto the back of this was another death certificate, for Mrs. Spencer Pike. Time of death: 11:32 A.M.
Shelby shivered in spite of
the heat in the basement. It was not just that this woman, this Mrs. Spencer Pike, who had died when she was only eighteen, had never lived to hold her baby. It was not even that this baby had never drawn a single breath. It had to do with the fixative that had cemented these cards together for so many years. Shelby was no expert, but it could only be blood.
Ruby Weber did not like to admit it, but she was getting old. She told everyone she was seventy-seven, although she was really eighty-three. Her hips moved like rusty hinges, her eyes clouded up when she least expected. Worst of all, she fell asleep in the middle of sentences sometimes, nodding off like, well, an old lady. One of these days she would just fall asleep, she supposed, and forget to wake up.
Not until Lucy was taken care of, though. Ruby knew that the medicine was helping her great-granddaughter, but at a cost—Lucy’s nightmares had slinked down the hall to take up residence in Ruby’s own bedroom. Now, no matter where or when Ruby dozed, she found herself reliving the phone call that had ruined her life.
It had come on a rainy Monday, eight years ago. She’d picked up the receiver, thinking it was the pharmacy saying her arthritis medicine was in; or maybe her daughter Luxe ringing from the market to let her know she’d be a few minutes late. But the voice on the other end belonged to a ghost.
She was still sitting with the phone in her hand, shaking, when Luxe came in with the groceries. “You wouldn’t believe how long it took me to get through the checkout,” Luxe said. “You’d think people were stocking up for bomb shelters.” Then she looked more carefully at Ruby’s face. “Ma? What’s the matter?”
Ruby had reached out her hand, touched Luxe’s skin, smooth and warm as a stone. How did you go about telling someone you were not who they thought you were?
Now, Ruby felt hands on her shoulders, shaking her gently. “Granny. Granny.”
Ruby could not answer, her mind was still full of Luxe, who had fallen down clutching her chest when Ruby told her who had called; who Luxe really was; who Ruby wasn’t. She could still see Luxe’s face, waxen and still, through the ER doorway as the doctor came out to say that the cardiac arrest had been fatal. How stupid Ruby had been. She’d held Luxe’s heart in safekeeping all those years; to give it back, in retrospect, seemed foolish and irresponsible.
On the day her mother died, Meredith had been a graduate student in Boston. She arrived wild at the hospital, demanding a miracle. Ruby had nearly expected her to get one, for all her fury. Imagine: Luxe throwing back the sheet that covered her on the examination table, sitting up. Wonders like that, they had happened before. Ruby had seen it herself.
Ruby had never told Meredith what she’d told Luxe in the moments before her heart gave out. Now, though . . . with Lucy suffering . . . well, Meredith might understand the way love for a child could make a woman go crazy. “Merry,” Ruby said suddenly, wanting to tell her all of it. “Do you remember when your mother died?”
“Oh, Granny,” Meredith sighed. “Is that what you were dreaming about?”
Her cool hand on Ruby’s cheek: that was all it took for Ruby to understand she could not make the same mistake twice. She decided to put a tourniquet on the past for once and for all, until it just desiccated and disappeared. This was her life, now. Spencer Pike had never called again, and as far as she was concerned, he could go to hell.
The dog made him nervous. It lay about four feet away from Ross’s boot, a big puddle of skin completely relaxed except for its dark eyes, which had pinned Ross the moment he entered the detective’s office and hadn’t blinked since. “Mr. Wakeman,” said Detective Rochert. “Put yourself in my shoes for a minute. Some guy, a paranormal investigator, comes in off the street and tells me to reexamine a seventy-year-old unsolved murder. Who am I supposed to get statements from—a ghost? And even if I do get a perp, chances are he’s either dead or in his nineties. No prosecutor in Vermont is going to touch that case.”
Ross glanced at the dog, which bared its teeth. The detective snapped his fingers and the hound flopped onto the floor, boneless. “I would think that, given the property dispute, you might find the case more timely than you think. All I’m saying is that there’s a big difference between a woman dying in childbirth, and a woman being murdered. Maybe Spencer Pike is senile; maybe the town death records in 1932 were less than accurate. But then again, maybe that’s the missing piece that explains why the Abenaki feel they have a claim to the land.”
Eli leaned forward, his dark eyes suddenly hard as flint. “You came to me specifically because you know I’m half-Abenaki, didn’t you? You think I’m going to reopen this file just because I owe it to them.”
Ross shook his head, surprised at this outburst. “I came to you because you’re the only detective on duty,” he said.
That shut Rochert up, but only briefly. “Mr. Wakeman, I think you and I operate a little differently. Your work is all about hunches; mine is rooted in hard evidence.”
Ross had learned long ago not to try to convert the skeptics. The fact was, there were plenty of people who believed in ghosts, and once you’d had a paranormal experience, you joined the ranks. The cynics were necessary; they limited the number of frauds. Ross wouldn’t try to convince Eli Rochert that spirits existed, but he wouldn’t stand here and let the man slander his investigation, either. “Actually, my work is closer to yours than you’d think. Isn’t crime-scene linkage based on the idea that people always leave a part of themselves behind?”
“Forensics can dust for fingerprints. They can’t dust for . . .” His voice trailed off, and Ross watched Rochert frown, deep in thought. After a moment, he spoke again. “Even if this murder is solved seventy years after the fact, it’s not going to change anything. Pike’s wife is still dead. He still legally owns the land. And he still has the right to sell it.”
“That depends,” Ross said.
“On?”
“Who actually committed a murder that night.”
It was not surprising to Eli that the Comtosook Police Department had kept the file on an unsolved homicide investigation from so long ago. This stemmed not from any particular diligence in keeping track of loose ends, but rather from absolute incompetence in record keeping. Frankly, no one had ever thought to clean out the archive closet. He brushed a cobweb out of his hair and pulled the bulky carton out of the haphazard stack.
Chief Follensbee wouldn’t care what Eli did in his downtime. As he walked upstairs to his desk, he told himself that the reason he was doing this had nothing to do with what he’d experienced a few nights ago at the Pike property. Nor was it related to the nagging doubt that the woman in his recurring dreams kept coming back for a reason. He was reviewing this case because it had never been solved, and crime-scene techniques available today might be able to answer questions that had been asked and left unanswered in 1932.
Watson looked up when Eli came into the office, then decided he wasn’t quite worth the trouble of getting to his feet. He watched with disinterest as Eli emptied the contents of the crate onto his cleared desk. A manila folder, a stack of crime-scene photographs, a paper lunch sack, a cigar box, and a noose.
Eli pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his desk and picked up the rope. Nothing special about it; it looked like any industrial cable of twine you might find in the area even now. Whoever had investigated the case back then had been smart enough to leave the knot tied; after all these years it was still intact.
He picked up some of the crime-scene photos. One showed the young woman, lying down with the noose around her neck. Her chest and neck were scratched raw, not from the rope, but from the long rakes of fingernails—she’d tried to get free. Another was the porch of what seemed to be a shed. Eli squinted closer; there was a beam in the roof. Based on the puddle of what he assumed to be bodily fluids on the floorboards, that must have been where the body was hanged. A shot of the victim’s bare legs, badly bruised.
In the brown paper sack was a stained nightgown and a pair of women’s shoes. A small leather
pouch, strung on a snapped rawhide lace, and a poplar pipe with a serpentine bowl rested in the cigar box. Eli picked the pipe up in his hands and turned it over. His grandfather had carved one like this. He sniffed, smelling the sweet tobacco he associated with his childhood.
Setting it aside, Eli opened the police investigation report.
CASE NUMBER: 32-01
INVESTIGATING OFFICER: Detective F. Olivette
VICTIM’S NAME: Cecelia Pike (aka Mrs. Spencer Pike)
DATE OF BIRTH: 11-09-13
AGE: 18
ADDRESS: Otter Creek Pass, Comtosook, VT
TIME/DATE OF INCIDENT: 12 AM–9 AM,
September 19, 1932
LOCATION OF INCIDENT: Pike Property, Otter Creek
Pass, Comtosook, VT
INCIDENT:
On September 19th, 1932, at 09:28 hrs Professor Spencer Pike (DOB 05-13-06) called the Comtosook Police Department and reported the murder of his wife, Cecelia “Cissy” Pike. Professor Pike reported that his wife’s death had occurred at their residence sometime between 12 AM–9 AM. Detective Duley Wiggs and I responded to the Pike property to investigate the incident.
Upon arrival at the residence we were met by Professor Pike. He was noticeably distraught. He directed us to the icehouse where his wife’s body was found. The victim was lying on her back in front of the ice shed. I checked the victim for a pulse and found none. The body was cold to the touch. I then called for the coroner.
The victim was wearing a flowered dress and boots. A rope noose was around the victim’s neck. The victim’s chest and neck were scored with deep, bloody scratches. Numerous bruises were visible on the victim’s lower legs. The roof to the porch was constructed using large support beams. Initial inspection suggests that the victim had been hanged from one of these beams. Photographs were taken of the body and the scene.