The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “Find anything?”

  “A wallet and a cell phone. There could be more, but the snow’s pretty deep.” Jerry glanced up from his collection of blood on the body. “You see the kid play in the exhibition game last night in town?”

  “I was on duty.”

  “I heard he was hammered . . . and that he was still a hell of a player.” Jerry shook his head. “Damn shame, if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t,” Bartholemew said, and he stood up. He had already been to the Underhill house, to bring them the news of their son’s death. Greta Underhill had opened the door, looked at his face, and burst into tears. Her husband had been only superficially composed. He thanked Bartholemew for bringing the information and said he’d like to see Jason now. Then he’d walked outside into the snow, without a coat, barefoot.

  Bartholemew’s own boss had brought him the news about Holly. He’d known that the worst had happened when he saw the chief of police standing on his porch in the middle of the night. He remembered demanding to be driven to the scene, where he stood at the guardrail her car had smashed through. He remembered, too, going to identify Holly’s body in the hospital morgue. Bartholemew had pulled aside the sheet to see the tracks on her arms, the ones he’d been blind to as a parent. He’d put his hand over Holly’s heart, just to make sure.

  The Underhills wanted to see Jason; they’d be given that privilege before the autopsy began. In this sense, accidents, suicides, and murders were all the same—any death that occurred without someone there to witness it was automatically brought to the medical examiner for a determination of cause. It wasn’t police procedure as much as human nature. We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn’t really an answer to that question.

  • • •

  The Monday after Jason Underhill’s suicide, two psychologists were called to the high school to help students who needed to grieve. The hockey team took to wearing black armbands and won three straight, vowing to take the state title in homage to their fallen team-mate. One entire page of the Portland paper’s sports section was devoted to a memorial of Jason’s athletic achievements.

  That same day, Laura went out for groceries. She moved aimlessly through the store, picking up things like ugli fruit and bags of pitted prunes, slivered almonds, and balls of buffalo mozzarella. Somewhere in her purse she knew she had a list—ordinary items like bread and milk and dishwashing detergent—but there was a part of her that felt normal things didn’t apply anymore and therefore there was no point in buying them. Eventually, she found herself in front of the freezer section, the door open and the cold spilling over the toes of her boots. There must have been a hundred different ice cream flavors. How could you pick, knowing that you’d have to go home and live with the choice you’d made?

  She was reading the ingredients on a peach sorbet when she heard two women talking one aisle over, hidden by the freezers. “What a tragedy,” one said. “That boy was going places.”

  “I heard that Greta Underhill can’t get out of bed,” the second woman added. “My pastor was told by her pastor that she might not even make it to the funeral.”

  A week ago, in spite of the rape accusations, Jason had still been a hero to most of this town. But now death had swelled him to mythic proportions.

  Laura curled her hands around the front bar of her grocery cart. She navigated around the corner, until she was face to face with the women who’d been talking. “Do you know who I am?” The ladies glanced at each other, shook their heads. “I’m the mother of the girl Jason Underhill raped.”

  She said it for the shock value. She said it on the off chance that these ladies might, out of sudden shame, apologize. But neither of them said a word.

  Laura guided her shopping cart around the corner and toward an empty checkout line. The cashier had a skunk-streak of blue hair and a ring through her bottom lip. Laura reached into the basket and held up a box of plastic knives—when had she taken those off a shelf? “You know,” she said to the cashier, “I actually don’t need those.”

  “No biggie. We can reshelve them.”

  Six packets of powdered hollandaise sauce, suntan lotion, and wart remover medicine. “Actually,” Laura said, “I’m going to pass on these, too.”

  She emptied the rest of her shopping cart: bacon bits and baby food and Thai coconut milk; a sippy cup and hair elastics and two pounds of green jalapeños; the peach sorbet. She stared at the items on the conveyor belt as if she were seeing them for the first time. “I don’t want any of this,” Laura said, surprised, as if it were anyone’s fault but her own.

  • • •

  Dr. Anjali Mukherjee spent most of her time in the morgue, not just because she was the county medical examiner but also because when she ventured abovestairs at the hospital, she was continually mistaken for a med student or, worse, a candy striper. She was five feet tall, with the small, delicate features of a child, but Mike Bartholemew had seen her elbow-deep in a Y-shaped incision, determining the cause of death of the person who lay on her examination table.

  “The subject had a blood alcohol level of point one two,” Anjali said, as she rifled through a series of X-rays and headed toward the light box on the wall.

  Legal intoxication was .10; that meant Jason Underhill was considerably trashed when he went over the railing of the bridge. At least he wasn’t driving, Bartholemew thought. At least he only killed himself.

  “There,” the medical examiner said, pointing at an X-ray. “What do you see?”

  “A foot?”

  “That’s why they pay you the big bucks. Come over here for a second.” Anjali cleared off a lab table and patted it. “Climb up.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “Climb up, Bartholemew.”

  Grudgingly, he stood on top of the table. He glanced down at the top of Anjali’s head. “And I’m doing this why?”

  “Jump.”

  Bartholemew hopped a little.

  “I meant jump off.”

  He swung his arms, then went airborne, landing in a crouch. “Goddamn, I still can’t fly.”

  “You landed on your feet,” Anjali said. “Like most people who jump. When we see suicides like this, the X-rays show heel fractures and vertical compressions of the spine, which aren’t present on this victim.”

  “Are you telling me he didn’t fall?”

  “No, he fell. There’s contrecoup damage to the brain that suggests acceleration. When someone lands on the back of the skull, you’ll see injury to the front of the brain, because it continues to fall after the skull stops and hits it hard.”

  “Maybe he jumped and landed on his head,” Bartholemew suggested.

  “Interestingly, I didn’t see the types of fractures associated with that either. Let me show you what I did find, though.” Anjali handed him two photographs, both of Jason Underhill’s face. They were identical, except for the black eye and bruising along the temple and jaw of the second one.

  “You been beating up the subjects, Angie?”

  “That only works premortem,” Anjali replied. “I took these ten hours apart. When you brought him in, he didn’t have bruises . . . except for a subtle hemorrhage in the facial area that could have been caused by the fall. But he was lying on that side of his face when found, and the pooling of the blood might have obscured the contusions. When he was brought to the morgue and placed sunny-side up, the blood redistributed.” She removed the X-ray they’d been examining. “When I was doing an FP fellowship, we had a Jane Doe come in with no apparent external trauma, except for a slight hemorrhage in the strap muscles of the neck. By the time the autopsy was over, there were two obvious handprints on her throat.”

  “Couldn’t he have banged himself up when he fell?”

  “I thought you’d say that. Take a look at this.” Anjali slid another X-ray onto the light box.

  Bartholemew whistled softly. “That’s his face, huh?”

  “It was.”

  He pointed to a crac
k along the temple of the skull. “That looks like a fracture.”

  “That’s where he landed,” Anjali said. “But look closer.”

  Bartholemew squinted. On the cheekbone and the jaw were smaller, fainter fault lines.

  “In the case of a blow and a subsequent fall, the fracture lines caused by the fall are blocked by those caused by the initial blow. An injury to the head caused by a fall is usually found around the level of the brim of a hat. However, a hard punch to the face usually hits below that.”

  The fracture at Underhill’s temple radiated out toward the eye socket and the cheekbone but stopped abruptly at one of these hair-line cracks.

  “The subject also had extravasation of red blood cells on tissues around his jaw and ribs.”

  “Which means what?”

  “It’s a bruise that didn’t get to happen. Meaning there was trauma to that tissue, but before that blood could break down and go black and blue, the subject died.”

  “So maybe he was in a fight before he decided to jump,” Bartholemew said, his mind running fast with possibilities.

  “You might also be interested in this.” Anjali passed him a microscopic slide with tiny filings on it. “We dug them out of the subject’s fingertips.”

  “What are they?”

  “Splinters consistent with the railing of the bridge. There were some wood slivers caught in the tails of his jacket, too.” Anjali glanced at Bartholemew. “I don’t think this kid killed himself by jumping off a bridge,” she said. “I think he was pushed.”

  • • •

  When Daniel heard sobbing, he immediately assumed it was Trixie. In the days since they’d heard the news about Jason, she would dissolve without any provocation—at the dinner table, while brushing her teeth, staring at a commercial on television. She was so firmly entrenched in memory that Daniel didn’t know how to pry her loose and bring her back to the real world.

  Sometimes he held her. Sometimes he just sat down next to her. He never tried to stop her tears; he didn’t think he had that right. He just wanted her to know that he was there if she needed him.

  This time, when the crying began, Daniel followed the sound upstairs. But instead of finding Trixie sobbing, he turned into his own bedroom to find his wife sitting on the floor, hugging a knot of clean laundry against her. “Laura?”

  She turned at the sound of her name, wiping her cheeks. “I’m sorry. . . it’s wrong, I know . . . but I keep thinking about him.”

  Him. Daniel’s heart turned over. How long would it be until he could hear a sentence like that and not feel as if he’d been punched?

  “It’s just . . .” She wiped her eyes. “It’s just that he was someone’s child, too.”

  Jason. The immediate relief Daniel felt to know that Laura wasn’t crying over the nameless man she’d slept with evaporated as he realized that she was crying, instead, for someone who didn’t merit that kind of mercy.

  “I’ve been so lucky, Daniel,” Laura said. “What if Trixie had died last week? What if . . . what if you’d told me to move out?”

  Daniel reached out to tuck Laura’s hair behind her ear. Maybe you had to come close to losing something before you could remember its value. Maybe it would be like that for the two of them. “I would never have let you go.”

  Laura shuddered, as if his words had sent a shock through her. “Daniel, I—”

  “You don’t need to cry for us,” he said, squeezing her shoulder, “because we’re all going to be fine.”

  He felt Laura nod against him.

  “And you don’t have to cry for Jason,” Daniel said. “Because Jason deserves to be dead.”

  He hadn’t spoken the words aloud, the ones he’d been thinking ever since Laura had taken that phone call days before. But this was exactly the sort of world he drew: one where actions had consequences, where revenge and retribution were the heartbeat of a story. Jason had hurt Trixie; therefore, Jason deserved to be punished.

  Laura drew back and stared at him, wide-eyed.

  “What?” Daniel said, defiant. “Are you shocked that I would think that?”

  She was quiet for a moment. “No,” Laura admitted. “Just that you said it out loud.”

  • • •

  The minute Bartholemew entered the digital photo of the footprints on the bridge into his software program and compared it to an inking of Jason’s boot, he got a match. However, there was another footprint with a tread on the sole that was different from Jason’s, possibly from their suspect’s shoe.

  With a sigh, Bartholemew turned off his computer screen and took out the bag of evidence collected from the crime scene. He rummaged for the cell phone that Jerry had found near the victim. A Motorola, identical to the one Bartholemew carried—up here in Maine, you just didn’t have all the cellular options available in a big city. Jason had probably bought it from the same store where he’d bought his. The same sales rep had probably programmed it for him.

  Bartholemew started punching buttons. There were no messages, text or voice. But there was a memo.

  He hit the shortcut button, *8, and suddenly the sound of a fight filled the room. There were punches being landed, and grunts and moans. He heard Jason’s voice, pleas that broke off at their edges. And another familiar voice: If you ever, ever come near my daughter again, I will kill you.

  Bartholemew stood up, grabbed his coat, and headed out to find Daniel Stone.

  • • •

  “What do you think happens when you die?” Zephyr asked.

  Trixie was lying on her stomach on her bed, flipping through the pages of Allure magazine and looking at purses and shoes that she would never be able to afford. She didn’t get purses, anyway. She didn’t want to ever be the kind of person who couldn’t carry what she needed in her back pocket. “You decompose,” Trixie said, and she turned to the next ad.

  “That is so totally disgusting,” Zephyr said. “I wonder how long it takes.”

  Trixie had wondered that too, but she wasn’t going to admit it to Zephyr. Every night since his death, Jason had visited her in her bedroom in the darkest part of the night. Sometimes he just stared until she woke up; sometimes he talked to her. Finally he left by blasting through her middle.

  She knew that he hadn’t been buried yet, and maybe that was why he kept coming. Maybe once his body began to break down inside its coffin, he wouldn’t show up at the foot of her bed.

  Since Trixie had returned from the hospital, it had been like old times—Zephyr would come over after school and tell her everything she was missing: the catfight between two cheerleaders who liked the same guy, the substitute teacher in French who couldn’t speak a single word of the language, the sophomore who got hospitalized for anorexia. Zephyr had also been her source of information about how Bethel High was processing Jason’s death. The guidance counselors had led an assembly about teen depression; the principal had gotten on the PA during homeroom announcements to have a moment of memorial silence; Jason’s locker had become a shrine, decorated with notes and stickers and Beanie Babies. It was, Trixie realized, as if Jason had grown larger than life after his death, as if it was going to be even harder now for her to avoid him.

  Zephyr rolled over. “Do you think it hurts to die?”

  Not as much as it hurts to live, Trixie thought.

  “Do you think we go somewhere . . . after?” Zephyr asked.

  Trixie closed her magazine. “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder if it’s like it is here. If there are popular dead people and geeky dead people. You know.”

  That sounded like high school, and the way Trixie figured it, that was more likely to be hell. “I guess it’s different for different people,” she said. “Like, if you died, there’d be an endless supply of Sephora makeup. For Jason, it’s one big hockey rink.”

  “But do people ever cross over? Do the hockey players ever get to hang out with the people who eat only chocolate? Or the ones who play Nintendo twenty-four/seven?”

>   “Maybe there are dances or something,” Trixie said. “Or a bulletin board, so you know what everyone else is up to, and you can join in if you want and blow it off if you don’t.”

  “I bet when you eat chocolate in heaven it’s no big deal,” Zephyr said. “If you can have it whenever you want it, it probably doesn’t taste as good.” She shrugged. “I bet they all watch us down here, because they know we’ve got it better than them and we’re too stupid to realize it.” She glanced sideways at Trixie. “Guess what I heard.”

  “What?”

  “His whole head was bashed in.”

  Trixie felt her stomach turn over. “That’s just a rumor.”

  “It’s totally not. Marcia Breen’s brother’s girlfriend is a nurse, and she saw Jason being brought into the hospital.” She popped a bubble with her gum. “I hope that if he went to heaven, he got a big old bandage or plastic surgery or something.”

  “What makes you think he’s going to heaven?” Trixie asked.

  Zephyr froze. “I didn’t mean . . . I just . . .” Her gaze slid toward Trixie. “Trix, are you truly glad he’s dead?”

  Trixie stared at her hands in her lap. For a moment, they looked like they belonged to someone else—still, pale, too heavy for the rest of her. She forced herself to open her magazine again, and she pretended she was engrossed in an ad about tampons so that she didn’t have to give Zephyr a reply. Maybe after reading for a while, they would both forget what Zephyr had asked. Maybe after a while, Trixie wouldn’t be afraid of her answer.

  • • •

  According to Dante, the deeper you got into hell, the colder it was. When Daniel imagined hell, he saw the vast white wasteland of the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta where he’d grown up. Standing on the frozen river, you might see smoke rising in the distance. A Yup’ik Eskimo would know it was open water, steaming where it hit the frigid air, but a trick of the light could make you believe otherwise. You might think you see the breath of the devil.

  When Daniel drew the ninth circle of hell, it was a world of planes and angles, a synchronicity of white lines, a land made of ice. It was a place where the greater effort you made to escape, the more deeply entrenched you were.