The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “Calling the police,” she said.

  He crossed in two strides and took the receiver from her hand, hung up the phone. “Don’t.”

  “Daniel—”

  “Laura, I know why she ran away. I was accused of murder when I was eighteen, and I took off, too.”

  At this confession, Laura completely lost her train of thought. How could you live with a man for fifteen years, feel him move inside you, have his child, and not know something as fundamental about him as this?

  He sat down at Trixie’s desk. “I was still living in Alaska. The victim was my best friend, Cane.”

  “Did you . . . did you do it?”

  Daniel hesitated. “Not the way they thought I did.”

  Laura stared at him. She thought of Trixie, God knows where right now, on the run for a crime she could not have committed. “If you weren’t guilty . . . then why—”

  “Because Cane was still dead.”

  In Daniel’s eyes, Laura could suddenly see the most surprising things: the blood of a thousand salmon slit throat to tail, the blueveined crack of ice so thick it made the bottoms of your feet hurt, the profile of a raven sitting on a roof. In Daniel’s eyes she understood something she hadn’t been willing to admit to herself before: In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, he understood their daughter better than she did.

  He shifted, hitting the computer mouse with his elbow. The screen hummed to life, revealing several open windows: Google, iTunes, Sephora.com, and the heartbreaking rapesurvivor.com, full of poetry by girls like Trixie. But MapQuest? When Trixie wasn’t even old enough to drive?

  Laura leaned over Daniel’s shoulder to grasp the mouse. FIND IT! the site promised. There were empty boxes to fill in: address, city, state, zip code. And at the bottom, in bright blue: We are having trouble finding a route for your location.

  “Oh, Christ,” Daniel said. “I know where she is.”

  • • •

  Trixie’s father used to take her out into the woods and teach her how to read the world so that she’d always know where she was going. He’d quiz her on the identification of trees: the fairy-tale spray of needles on a hemlock, the narrow grooves of an ash, the paper-wrapped birch, the gnarled arms of a sugar maple. One day, when they were examining a tree with barbed wire running through the middle of its trunk—how long do you think that took?—Trixie’s eye had been caught by something in the forest: sun glinting off metal.

  The abandoned car sat behind an oak tree that had been split by lightning. Two of the windows had been broken; some animal had made its home in the tufted stuffing of the backseat. A vine had grown from the bottom of the forest floor through the window, wrapping around the steering wheel.

  Where do you think the driver is? Trixie had asked.

  I don’t know, her father replied. But he’s been gone for a long time.

  He said that the person who’d left the car behind most likely didn’t want to bother with having it towed away. But that didn’t keep Trixie from making up more extravagant explanations: The man had suffered a head wound and started walking, only to wander up a mountain and die of exposure, and even now the bones were bleaching south of her backyard. The man was on the run from the Mob and had eluded hit men in a car chase. The man had wandered into town with amnesia and spent the next ten years completely unaware of who he used to be.

  Trixie was dreaming of the abandoned car when someone slammed the door of the bathroom stall beside her. She woke up with a start and glanced down at her watch—surely if you left this stuff in your hair too long it would fall out by the roots or turn purple or something. She heard the flush of the toilet, running water, and then the busy slice of life as the door opened. When it fell quiet again, she crept out of the stall and rinsed her hair in the sink.

  There were streaks on her forehead and her neck, but her hair—her red hair, the hair that had inspired her father to call her his chili pepper when she was only a baby—was now the color of a thicket’s thorns, of a rosebush past recovery.

  As she stuffed the ruined sweatshirt into the bottom of the trash can, a mother came in with two little boys. Trixie held her breath, but the woman didn’t look twice at her. Maybe it was really that easy. She walked out of the bathroom, past a new Santa who’d come on duty, toward the parking lot. She thought of the man who’d left his car in the woods: Maybe he had staged his own death. Maybe he’d done it for the sole purpose of starting over.

  • • •

  If a teenager wants to disappear, chances are he or she will succeed. It was why runaways were so difficult to track—until they were rounded up in a drug or prostitution ring. Most teens who vanished did so for independence, or to get away from abuse. Unlike an adult, however, who could be traced by a paper trail of ATM withdrawals and rental car agreements and airline passenger lists, a kid was more likely to pay in cash, to hitchhike, to go unnoticed by bystanders.

  For the second time in an hour, Bartholemew pulled into the neighborhood where the Stones lived. Trixie Stone was officially registered now as a missing person, not a fugitive from justice. That couldn’t happen, not even if all signs pointed to the fact that the reason she’d left was because she knew she was about to be charged with murder.

  In the American legal system, you could not use a suspect’s disappearance as probable cause. Later on, during a trial, a prosecutor might hold up Trixie’s flight as proof of guilt, but there was never going to be a trial if Bartholemew couldn’t convince a judge to swear out a warrant for Trixie Stone’s arrest—so that at the moment she was located, she could be taken into custody.

  The problem was, had Trixie not fled, he wouldn’t be arresting her yet. Christ, just two days ago, Bartholemew had been convinced that Daniel Stone was the perp . . . until the physical evidence started to prove otherwise. Prove, though, was a dubious term. He had a boot print that matched Trixie’s footwear—and that of thousands of other town residents. He had blood on the victim that belonged to a female, which ruled out only half the population. He had a hair the same general color as Trixie’s—a hair with a root on it full of uncontaminated DNA, but no known sample of Trixie’s to compare it to and no imminent means of getting one.

  Any defense attorney would be able to drive a Hummer through the holes in that investigation. Bartholemew needed to physically find Trixie Stone, so that he could specifically link her to Jason Underhill’s murder.

  He knocked on the Stones’ front door. Again, no one answered, but this time, when Bartholemew tried the knob, it was locked. He cupped his hands around the glass window and peered into the mudroom.

  Daniel Stone’s coat and boots were gone.

  He walked halfway around the attached garage to a tiny window and peered inside. Laura Stone’s Honda, which hadn’t been here two hours ago, was parked in one bay. Daniel Stone’s pickup was gone.

  Bartholemew smacked his hand against the exterior wall of the house and swore. He couldn’t prove that Daniel and Laura Stone had gone off to find Trixie before the cops did, but he would have bet money on it. When your child is missing, you don’t go grocery shopping. You sit tight and wait for the word that she’s being brought safely home.

  Bartholemew pinched the bridge of his nose and tried to think. Maybe this was a blessing in disguise. After all, the Stones had a better chance of finding Trixie than he did. And it would be far easier for Bartholemew to track two adults than their fourteen-year-old daughter.

  And in the meantime? Well, he could get a warrant to search the house, but it wouldn’t do him any good. No lab worth its salt would accept a toothbrush from Trixie’s bathroom as a viable known sample of DNA. What he needed was the girl herself and a lab-sanctioned sample of her blood.

  Which, in that instant, Bartholemew realized he already had—sitting in a sealed rape kit, evidence for a trial that wasn’t going to happen.

  • • •

  In eighth grade, as part of health class, Trixie had had to take care of an egg. Each student was gi
ven one, with the understanding that it had to remain intact for a week, could not ever be left alone, and had to be “fed” every three hours. This was supposed to be some big contraceptive deterrent: a way for kids to realize how having a baby was way harder than it looked.

  Trixie took the assignment seriously. She named her egg Benedict and fashioned a little carrier for it that she wore around her neck. She paid her English teacher fifty cents to babysit the egg while she was in gym class; she took it to the movies with Zephyr. She held it in the palm of her hand during classes and got used to the feel of it, the shape, the weight.

  Even now, she couldn’t tell you how the egg had gotten that hair-line fracture. Trixie first noticed it on the way to school one morning. Her father had shrugged off the F she received—he said it was a stupid assignment, that a kid was nothing like an egg. Yet Trixie had wondered if his benevolence had something to do with the fact that in real life, he would have failed too: how else to explain the difference between what he thought Trixie was up to and what she actually was doing?

  Now, she inched up the wrist of her coat and looked at the loose net of scars. It was her hairline crack, she supposed, and it was only a matter of time before she completely went to pieces.

  “Humpty freaking Dumpty,” she said out loud.

  A toddler bouncing on his mother’s lap next to Trixie clapped his hands. “Dumpty!” he yelled. “Fall!” He lurched himself backward so fast that Trixie was sure that he’d smash his head on the floor of the bus station.

  His mother grabbed him before that happened. “Trevor. Cut it out, will you?” Then she turned to Trixie. “He’s a big fan of the Egg Man.”

  The woman was really just a girl. Maybe she was a few years older than Trixie, but not by much. She wore a ratty blue scarf wrapped around her neck and an army surplus coat. From the number of bags around them, it looked like they were making a permanent move—but then again, for all Trixie knew, this was how people with kids had to travel. “I don’t get nursery rhymes,” the girl said. “I mean, why would all the king’s horses and all the king’s men try to put an egg back together anyway?”

  “What’s the egg doing on the wall in the first place?” Trixie said.

  “Exactly. I think Mother Goose was on crack.” She smiled at Trixie. “Where are you headed?”

  “Canada.”

  “We’re going to Boston.” She let the boy wriggle off her lap.

  Trixie wanted to ask the girl if the baby was hers. If she’d had him by accident. If, even after you make what everyone considers to be the biggest mistake of your life, you stop thinking it’s a mistake and maybe see it as the best thing that ever could have happened.

  “Ew, Trev, is that you?” The girl grabbed the baby around the waist and hauled him toward her face, rump first. She grimaced at the collection of duffels littering their feet. “Would you mind watching my stuff while I do a toxic waste removal?”

  As she stood up, she banged the diaper bag against her open backpack, spilling its contents all over the floor. “Oh, shit . . .”

  “I’ll get it,” Trixie said as the girl headed for the restroom with Trevor. She started jamming items back into the diaper bag: plastic keys that played a Disney song, an orange, a four-pack of crayons. A tampon with the wrapper half off, a hair scrunchie. Something that might, at one time, have been a cookie. A wallet.

  Trixie hesitated. She told herself she was only going to peek at the girl’s name, because she didn’t want to ask and run the risk of striking up a conversation.

  A Vermont driver’s license looked nothing like one from Maine. In the first place, there wasn’t a photograph. The one time Zephyr had convinced Trixie to go to a bar, she’d used a Vermont license as fake ID. “Five foot six is close enough,” Zephyr said, although Trixie was four inches shorter. Brown eyes, it read, when she had blue.

  Fawn Abernathy lived at 34 First Street in Shelburne, Vermont. She was nineteen years old. She was the same exact height as Trixie, and Trixie took that as an omen.

  She left Fawn her ATM card and half of the cash. But she slipped the American Express card and the license into her pocket. Then Trixie hurried out of the Vermont Transit Bus terminal and threw herself into the first cab at the side of the curb. “Where to?” the driver asked.

  Trixie looked out the window. “The airport,” she said.

  • • •

  “I wouldn’t be asking if it wasn’t an emergency,” Bartholemew begged. He glanced around Venice Prudhomme’s office, piled high with files and computer printouts and transcripts from court testimony.

  She sighed, not bothering to look up from her microscope. “Mike, for you, it’s always an emergency.”

  “Please. I’ve got a hair with a root on it that was found on the dead kid’s body, and I have Trixie’s blood preserved all nice and neat in her rape kit. If the DNA matches, that’s all I need to get a warrant for her arrest.”

  “No,” Venice said.

  “I know you’ve got a backlog and—”

  “That’s not why,” she interrupted, glancing at Bartholemew. “There’s no way I’m opening up a sealed rape kit.”

  “Why? Trixie Stone consented to having her blood drawn for it already.”

  “As a victim,” Venice pointed out. “Not to prove she committed a crime.”

  “You’ve got to stop watching Law and Order.”

  “Maybe you ought to start.”

  Bartholemew scowled. “I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” Venice said, bending over her scope again. “At least not until a judge says so.”

  • • •

  Summer on the tundra was dreamlike. Since the sun stayed out until two A.M., people didn’t sleep much in Akiak. Kids would cluster around bootleg booze and weed if they could get it, or leave behind the skins of their candy bars and spilled cans of pop if they couldn’t. Younger children splashed in the foggy green water of the Kuskokwim, even though by August they would still lose feeling in their ankles after only a few moments of submersion. Every year, in one of the Yup’ik villages, someone would drown; it was too cold for anyone to stay in the water long enough to learn how to swim.

  The year Daniel was eight, he spent July walking barefoot along the banks of the Kuskokwim. A wall of alders and willows lined one side of the river, on the other, sod sloughed into the water from a ten-foot-high embankment. Mosquitoes beaded on the planes of his face every time he stopped moving; sometimes they’d fly into his ears, loud as a bush plane. Daniel would watch the fat backs of king salmon rise like miniature sharks in the center of the river. The men in the village were off in their aluminum fishing boats, the ones that had been sleeping on the shore like beached whales all winter. Yup’ik fish camps dotted the bank: single-celled cities made of whitewalled tents, or knobby poles nailed together and covered with blue tarps that flapped like the aprons of flustered old women. On plywood tables, the women cut kings and reds into strips, then hung them on the racks to dry as they called out to their children: Kaigtuten-qaa? Are you hungry? Qinucetaanrilgu kinguqliin! Don’t try to provoke your little brother!

  He picked up a crusted twig, a fan belt, and a binder clip before he saw it—a pitted peak jutting out of the silt. It couldn’t be . . . could it? It took a trained eye to look past the soaked driftwood to pick out an ivory tusk or a fossilized bone, but it had happened, Daniel knew. Other kids in school—the ones who teased him because he was kass’aq, who laughed when he didn’t know how to shoot a ptarmigan or couldn’t find his way back from the bush on a snow-go—had found mastodon teeth along the banks of the river.

  Crouching, Daniel dug around the base, even as the river rushed into the hole and buried his progress. It was an honest-to-God tusk, right here, under his hands. He imagined it reaching past the water table, bigger even than the one on display in Bethel.

  Two ravens watched him from the bank, chattering a play-by-play commentary as Daniel pulled and heaved. Mammoth tusks co
uld be ten or twelve feet long; they might weigh a couple hundred pounds. Maybe it wasn’t even a mammoth but a quugaarpak. The Yupiit told stories of the huge creature that lived under the ground and came out only at night. If it was caught above the ground when the sun was up—even the slightest part of it—its entire body would turn into bone and ivory.

  Daniel spent hours trying to extricate the tusk, but it was stuck too firm and wedged too deep. He would have to leave it and bring back reinforcements. He marked his site, trampling tall reeds and leaving a hummock of stones piled onto the bank to flag the spot where the tusk would be waiting.

  The next day, Daniel returned with a shovel and a block of wood. He had a vague plan of building a dam to stave off the flow of water while he dug his tusk out of the silt. He passed the same people working at fish camp, and the bend where the alder trees had fallen off the bank right into the water, the two ravens cackling—but when he came to the spot where he’d found the tusk yesterday, it was gone.

  It’s said that you can’t step into the same river twice. Maybe that was the problem, or maybe the current was so strong it had swept away the pile of rocks Daniel had left as a marker. Maybe it was, as the Yup’ik kids said, that Daniel was too white to do what they could do as naturally as breathing: find history with their own two hands.

  It was not until Daniel reached the village again that he realized the ravens had followed him home. Everyone knew that if one bird landed on your roof, it meant company. A tiding of ravens, though, meant something else entirely: that loneliness would be your lot, that there was no hope of changing your course.

  • • •

  Marita Soorenstad looked up the minute Bartholemew entered her office. “Do you remember a guy named David Fleming?” she asked.

  He sank down into the chair across from her. “Should I?”

  “In 1991, he raped and attempted to kill a fifteen-year-old girl who was riding her bike home from school. Then he went and killed someone in another county, and there was a Supreme Court case about whether or not the DNA sample taken for the first case could be used as evidence in the next case.”