The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Daniel had just put the finishing touches on the devil’s face when he heard a car pull into the driveway. From the window of his office, he watched Detective Bartholemew get out of his Taurus. He had known it was coming to this, hadn’t he? He had known it the minute he’d walked into that parking lot and found Jason Underhill with Trixie.

  Daniel opened up the front door before the detective could knock. “Well,” Bartholemew said. “That’s what I call service.”

  Daniel tried to channel the easy repartee of social intercourse, but it was like he was fresh out of the village again, bombarded by sensations he didn’t understand: colors and sights and speech he’d never seen or heard before. “What can I do for you?” he asked finally.

  “I was wondering if we could talk for a minute,” Bartholemew said.

  No, Daniel thought. But he led the detective inside to the living room and offered him a seat.

  “Where’s the rest of the family?”

  “Laura’s teaching,” Daniel said. “Trixie’s upstairs with a friend.”

  “How’d she take the news about Jason Underhill?”

  Was there a right answer to that question? Daniel found himself replaying possible responses in his head before he balanced them on his tongue. “She was pretty upset. I think she feels partially responsible.”

  “What about you, Mr. Stone?” the detective asked.

  He thought about the conversation he’d had with Laura just that morning. “I wanted him to be punished for what he did,” Daniel said. “But I never wished him dead.”

  The detective stared at him for a long minute. “Is that so?”

  There was a thump overhead; Daniel glanced up. Trixie and Zephyr had been upstairs for about an hour. When Daniel had last checked on them, they were reading magazines and eating Goldfish crackers.

  “Did you see Jason Friday night?” Detective Bartholemew asked.

  “Why?”

  “We’re just trying to piece together the approximate time of the suicide.”

  Daniel’s mind spiraled backward. Had Jason said something to the cops about the incident in the woods? Had the guy who’d driven by the parking lot during their fistfight gotten a good look at Daniel? Had there been other witnesses?

  “No, I didn’t see Jason,” Daniel lied.

  “Huh. I could have sworn I saw you in town.”

  “Maybe you did. I took Trixie to the minimart to get some cheese. We were making a pizza for dinner.”

  “About when was that?”

  The detective pulled a pad and pencil out of his pocket; it momentarily stopped Daniel cold. “Seven,” he said. “Maybe seven-thirty. We just drove to the store and then we left.”

  “What about your wife?”

  “Laura? She was working at the college, and then she came home.”

  Bartholemew made a note on his pad. “So none of you ran into Jason?”

  Daniel shook his head.

  Bartholemew put his pad back into his breast pocket. “Well,” he said, “then that’s that.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t help you,” Daniel answered, standing up.

  The detective stood too. “You must be relieved. Obviously your daughter won’t have to testify as a witness now.”

  Daniel didn’t know how to respond. Just because the rape case wouldn’t proceed didn’t mean that Trixie’s slate would be wiped clean as well. Maybe she wouldn’t testify, but she wouldn’t get back to who she used to be, either.

  Bartholemew headed toward the front door. “It was pretty crazy in town Friday night, with the Winterfest and all,” he said. “Did you get what you wanted?”

  Daniel went still. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The cheese. For your pizza.”

  He forced a smile. “It turned out perfect,” Daniel said.

  • • •

  When Zephyr left a little while later, Trixie offered to walk her out. She stood on the driveway, shivering, not having bothered with a coat. The sound of Zephyr’s heels faded, and then Trixie couldn’t even see her anymore. She was about to head back inside when a voice spoke from behind. “It’s good to have someone watching over you, isn’t it?”

  Trixie whirled around to find Detective Bartholemew standing in the front yard. He looked like he was freezing, like he’d been waiting for a while. “You scared me,” she said.

  The detective nodded down the block. “I see you and your friend are on speaking terms again.”

  “Yeah. It’s nice.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “Did you, um, come to talk to my dad?”

  “I already did that. I was sort of hoping to talk to you.”

  Trixie glanced at the window upstairs, glowing yellow, where she knew her father was still working. She wished he was here with her right now. He’d know what to say. And what not to.

  You had to talk to a policeman if he wanted to talk to you, didn’t you? If you said no, he’d immediately know there was something wrong.

  “Okay,” Trixie said, “but could we go inside?”

  It was weird, leading the detective into their mudroom. She felt like he was boring holes in the back of her shirt with his eyes, like he knew something about Trixie she didn’t know about herself yet.

  “How are you feeling?” Detective Bartholemew asked.

  Trixie instinctively pulled her sleeves lower, concealing the fresh cuts she’d made in the shower. “I’m okay.”

  Detective Bartholemew sat down on a teak bench. “What happened to Jason . . . don’t blame yourself.”

  Tears sprang into her throat, dark and bitter.

  “You know, you remind me a little of my daughter,” the detective said. He smiled at Trixie, then shook his head. “Being here . . . it didn’t come easy to her, either.”

  Trixie ducked her head. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  She pictured Jason’s ghost: blued by the moon, bloody and distant. “Did it hurt? How he died?”

  “No. It was fast.”

  He was lying—Trixie knew it. She hadn’t realized that a policeman might lie. He didn’t say anything else for such a long time that Trixie looked up at him, and that’s when she realized he was waiting for her to do just that. “Is there something you want to tell me, Trixie? About Friday night?”

  Once, Trixie had been in the car when her father ran over a squirrel. It came out of nowhere, and the instant before impact Trixie had seen the animal look at them with the understanding that there was nowhere left to go. “What about Friday night?”

  “Something happened between your father and Jason, didn’t it.”

  “No.”

  The detective sighed. “Trixie, we already know about the fight.”

  Had her father told him? Trixie glanced up at the ceiling, wishing she were Superman, with X-ray vision, or able to communicate telepathically like Professor Xavier from the X-Men. She wanted to know what her father had said; she wanted to know what she should say. “Jason started it,” she explained, and once she began, the words tumbled out of her. “He grabbed me. My father pulled him away. They fought with each other.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Jason ran away . . . and we went home.” She hesitated. “Were we the last people to see him . . . you know . . . alive?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  It was possible that this was why Jason kept coming back to her now. Because if Trixie could still see him, then maybe he wouldn’t be gone. She looked up at Bartholemew. “My father was just protecting me. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah,” the detective said. “Yeah, I do.”

  Trixie waited for him to say something else, but Bartholemew seemed to be in a different place, staring at the bricks on the floor of the mudroom. “Are we . . . done?”

  Detective Bartholemew nodded. “Yes. Thanks, Trixie. I’ll let myself out.”

  Trixie didn’t know what else there was to say, so she opened the door that led into the house and closed it behi
nd her, leaving the detective alone in the mudroom. She was halfway upstairs when Bartholemew reached for her father’s boot, stamped the sole on an ink pad he’d taken from his pocket, and pressed it firmly onto a piece of blank white paper.

  • • •

  The medical examiner called while Bartholemew was waiting for his order at the drive-through window of a Burger King. “Merry Christmas,” Anjali said when he answered his cell phone.

  “You’re about a week early,” Bartholemew said.

  The girl in the window blinked at him. “Ketchupmustardsaltorpepper?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “I haven’t even told you what I’ve got yet,” Anjali said.

  “I hope it’s a big fat evidentiary link to murder.”

  In the window of the drive-through, the girl adjusted her paper hat. “That’s five thirty-three.”

  “Where are you?” Anjali said.

  Bartholemew opened his wallet and took out a twenty. “Clogging my arteries.”

  “We started to clean off the body,” the medical examiner explained. “The dirt on the victim’s hand? Turns out it’s not dirt after all. It’s blood.”

  “So he scraped his hand, trying to hold on?”

  The girl at the counter leaned closer and snapped the bill out of his fingers.

  “I can ABO type a dried stain at the lab, and this was O positive. Jason was B positive.” She let that sink in. “It was blood, Mike, but not Jason Underhill’s.”

  Bartholemew’s mind started to race: If they had the murderer’s blood, they could link a suspect to the crime. It would be easy enough to get a DNA sample from Daniel Stone when he was least expecting it—saliva taken from an envelope he’d sealed or from the rim of a soda can tossed into the trash.

  Stone’s boot print hadn’t been a match, but Bartholemew didn’t see that as any particular deterrent to an arrest. There had been hundreds of folks in town Friday night; the question wasn’t who had walked across the bridge, but who hadn’t. Blood evidence, on the other hand, could be damning. Bartholemew pictured Daniel Stone on the icy bridge, going after Jason Underhill. He imagined Jason trying to hold him off. He thought back to his conversation with Daniel, the Band-Aid covering the knuckles of his right hand.

  “I’m on my way,” Bartholemew told Anjali.

  “Hey,” the Burger King girl said. “What about your food?”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said, pulling out of the pickup line.

  “Don’t you want change?” the girl called.

  All the time, Mike thought, but he didn’t answer.

  • • •

  “Daddy,” Trixie asked, as she was elbow-deep in the sink washing dishes, “what were you like as a kid?”

  Her father did not glance up from the kitchen table he was wiping with a sponge. “Nothing like you are,” he said. “Thank God.”

  Trixie knew her father didn’t like to talk about growing up in Alaska, but she was starting to think that she needed to hear about it. She had been under the impression that her dad was of the typical suburban genus and species: the kind of guy who mowed his lawn every Saturday and read the sports section before the others, the type of father who was gentle enough to hold a monarch butterfly between his cupped palms so that Trixie could count the black spots on its wings. But that easygoing man would never have been capable of punching Jason repeatedly, even as Jason was bleeding and begging him to stop. That man had never been so consumed by fury that it twisted his features, made him unfamiliar.

  Trixie decided the answer must be in the part of her father’s life that he never wanted to share. Maybe Daniel Stone had been a whole different person, one who vanished just as Trixie arrived. She wondered if this was true of every parent: if, prior to having children, they all used to be someone else.

  “What do you mean?” she asked. “Why am I so different from you?”

  “It was a compliment. I was a pain in the ass at your age.”

  “How?” Trixie asked.

  She could see him weighing his words for an example he was willing to offer out loud. “Well, for one thing, I ran away a lot.”

  Trixie had run away once, when she was little. She’d walked around the block twice and finally settled in the cool blue shadow beneath a hedgerow in her own backyard. Her father found her there less than an hour later. She expected him to get angry, but instead, he’d crawled underneath the bushes and sat beside her. He plucked a dozen of the red berries he was always telling her never to eat and mashed them in the palm of his hand. Then he’d painted a rose on her cheek and let her draw stripes across his own. He’d stayed there with her until the sun started to go down and then told her if she was still planning on running away, she might want to get a move on—even though they both knew that by that point, Trixie wasn’t going anywhere.

  “When I was twelve,” her father said, “I stole a boat and decided to head down to Quinhagak. There aren’t any roads leading to the tundra—you come and go by plane or boat. It was October, getting really cold, the end of fishing season. The boat motor quit working, and I started drifting into the Bering Sea. I had no food, only a few matches, and a little bit of gas—when all of a sudden I saw land. It was Nunivak Island, and if I missed it, the next stop was Russia.”

  Trixie raised a brow. “You are totally making this up.”

  “Swear to God. I paddled like crazy. And just when I realized I had a shot at reaching shore, I saw the breakers. If I made it to the island, the boat was going to get smashed. I duct-taped the gas tank to myself, so that when the boat busted up, I’d float.”

  This sounded like some extravagant survival flashback Trixie’s father would write for one of his comic book characters—she’d read dozens. All this time, she had assumed they were the products of his imagination. After all, those daring deeds hardly matched the father she’d grown up with. But what if he was the superhero? What if the world her father created daily—full of unbelievable feats and derring-do and harsh survival—wasn’t something he’d dreamed up but someplace he’d actually lived?

  She tried to imagine her father bobbing in the world’s roughest, coldest sea, struggling to make it to shore. She tried to picture that boy and then imagine him fully grown, a few nights ago, pummeling Jason. “What happened?” Trixie asked.

  “A Fish and Game guy who was taking one last look for the year spotted the fire I made after I washed up on the island and rescued me,” her father said. “I ran away one or two times each year after that, but I never managed to get very far. It’s like a black hole: People who go to the Alaskan bush disappear from the face of the earth.”

  “Why did you want to leave so badly?”

  Her father came up to the sink and wrung out the sponge. “There was nothing there for me.”

  “Then you weren’t really running away,” Trixie said. “You were running toward.”

  Her father, though, had stopped listening. He reached over to turn off the water in the sink and grasped her elbows, turning the insides of her arms up to the light.

  She’d forgotten about the Band-Aids, which had peeled off in the soapy water. She’d forgotten to not hike up her sleeves. In addition to the gash at her wrist, which had webbed itself with healing skin, her father could see the new cuts she’d made in the shower, the ones that climbed her forearm like a ladder.

  “Baby,” her father whispered, “what did you do?”

  Trixie’s cheeks burned. The only person who knew about her cutting was Janice the rape counselor, who’d been ordered out of the house by Trixie’s father a week ago. Trixie had been grateful for that one small cosmic favor: With Janice out of the picture, her secret could stay one. “It’s not what you think. I wasn’t trying to kill myself again. It just . . . it’s just . . .” She glanced down at the floor. “It’s how I run away.”

  When she finally gathered the courage to look up again, the expression on her father’s face nearly broke her. The monster she’d seen in the parking lot the other night was gon
e, replaced by the parent she’d trusted her whole life. Ashamed, she tried to pull away from his hold, but he wouldn’t let her. He waited until she tired herself out with her thrashing, the way he used to when she was a toddler. Then he wrapped his arms so tight around Trixie she could barely breathe. That was all it took: She began to cry like she had that morning in the shower, when she had heard about Jason.

  “I’m sorry,” Trixie sobbed into her father’s shirt. “I’m really sorry.”

  They stood together in the kitchen for what felt like hours, with soap bubbles rising around them and dishes as white as bones drying on the wire rack. It was possible, Trixie supposed, that everyone had two faces: Some of us just did a better job of hiding it than others.

  Trixie imagined her father jumping into water so cold it stole his breath. She pictured him watching his boat break to pieces around him. She bet that if he’d been asked—even when he was sitting on that island, soaking wet and freezing—he’d tell you he would have done it all over again.

  Maybe she was more like her father than he thought.

  • • •

  The secret recipe for Sorrow Pie had been passed down from Laura’s great-grandmother to her grandmother to her mother, and although she had no actual recollection of the transfer of information to herself, by the time she was eleven she knew the ingredients by heart, knew the careful procedure to make sure the crust didn’t burn and the carrots didn’t dissolve in the broth, and knew exactly how many bites it would take before the heaviness weighing on the diner’s heart disappeared. Laura knew that the shopping list in and of itself was nothing extraordinary: a chicken, four potatoes, leeks more white than green, pearl onions and whipping cream, bay leaves and basil. What made Sorrow Pie a force to be reckoned with was the way you might find the unlikely in any spoonful—a burst of cinnamon mixed with common pepper, lemon peel and vinegar sobering the crust—not to mention the ritual of preparation, which required the cook to back into the cupboard for her ingredients, to cut shortening only with the left hand, and, of course, to season the mixture with a tear of her own.