The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Her mother’s mouth opened and closed, like a fish out of water. Did I make you uncomfortable? Josie thought, the words rising like welts in her mind. Welcome to the club.

  “You want a cup of coffee?” the detective said, and then he shook his head. “Or a Coke. I don’t know, do kids your age drink coffee yet, or am I dangling a vice right in front of you because I’m too stupid to know better?”

  “I like coffee,” Josie said. She avoided her mother’s gaze as Detective Ducharme led her into the inner sanctum of the police station.

  They went into a conference room and the detective poured her a mug of coffee. “Milk? Sugar?”

  “Sugar,” Josie said. She took two packets from the bowl and added them to the mug. Then she glanced around—at the Formica table, the fluorescent lights, the normalness of the room.

  “What?”

  “What what?” Josie said.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I was just thinking that this doesn’t look like the kind of place where you’d beat a confession out of someone.”

  “Depends on whether you’ve got one to be beaten out of you,” the detective said. When Josie blanched, he laughed. “I’m just joking. Honestly, the only time I beat confessions out of people is when I’m playing a cop on TV.”

  “You play a cop on TV?”

  He sighed. “Never mind.” He reached over to a tape recorder in the center of the table. “I’m going to record this, just like before . . . mostly because I’m too dumb to remember it all correctly.” The detective pressed the button and sat down across from Josie. “Do people tell you all the time that you look like your mom?”

  “Um, never.” She tilted her head. “Is that what you brought me down to ask me?”

  He smiled. “No.”

  “I don’t look like her, anyway.”

  “Sure you do. It’s your eyes.”

  Josie looked down at the table. “Mine are a totally different color than hers.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the color,” the detective said. “Josie, tell me again what you saw the day of the shootings at Sterling High.”

  Underneath the table, Josie gripped her hands together. She dug the nails of one hand into the palm of the other, so that something hurt more than the words he was making her say. “I had a science test. I’d studied really late for it, and I was thinking about it when I woke up in the morning. That’s all I know. I already told you, I can’t even remember being in school that day.”

  “Do you remember what made you pass out in the locker room?”

  Josie closed her eyes. She could picture the locker room—the tile floor, the gray lockers, the orphan sock stuffed in a corner of the shower. And then, everything went red as anger. Red as blood.

  “No,” Josie said, but tears had cut her voice into lace. “I don’t even know why thinking about it makes me cry.” She hated being seen like this; she hated being like this; most of all she hated not knowing when it would happen: a shift of the wind, a turn of the tide. Josie took the tissue the detective offered. “Please,” she whispered, “can I just go now?”

  There was a moment of hesitation, and Josie could feel the weight of the detective’s pity falling over her like a net, one that only held on to her words, while the rest—the shame, the anger, the fear—seeped right through. “Sure, Josie,” he said. “You can go.”

  * * *

  Alex was pretending to read the Town of Sterling Annual Report when Josie suddenly burst out of the secured door into the police station’s waiting area. She was crying hard, and Patrick Ducharme was nowhere in sight. I’ll kill him, Alex thought rationally, calmly, after I take care of my daughter.

  “Josie,” she said, as Josie ran past her out of the building, toward the parking lot. Alex hurried after her, finally catching up to Josie in front of their car. She wrapped her arms around Josie’s waist and felt her buckle. “Leave me alone,” Josie sobbed.

  “Josie, honey, what did he say to you? Talk to me.”

  “I can’t talk to you! You don’t understand. None of you understand.” Josie backed away. “The people who do, they’re all dead.”

  Alex hesitated, unsure of the right move. She could fold Josie tighter into an embrace and let her cry. Or she could make her see that no matter how upset she was, it was something she had the resources to handle. Sort of like an Allen charge, Alex realized—the instruction a judge would give to a jury that wasn’t getting anywhere in its deliberations, which basically reminded them of their duty as American citizens, and assured them that they could and would come to a consensus.

  It had always worked for her in court.

  “I know this is hard, Josie, but you’re stronger than you think, and—”

  Josie shoved her hard, breaking away. “Stop talking to me like that!”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m some fucking witness or lawyer you’re trying to impress!”

  “Your Honor. Sorry to interrupt.”

  Alex wheeled around to find Patrick Ducharme standing two feet behind them, listening to every single word. Her cheeks reddened; this was exactly the kind of behavior you didn’t put on public display when you were a judge. He’d probably go back into the police station and send out a mass email to the entire force: Guess what I just overheard.

  “Your daughter,” he said. “She forgot her sweatshirt.”

  Pink and hooded, it was folded neatly over his arm. He handed it to Josie. But then, instead of backing away, he put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry, Josie,” he said, meeting her gaze as if they were the only two people in this world. “We’re going to make this okay.”

  Alex expected Josie to snap at him, too, but instead Josie went calm under his touch. She nodded, as if she believed this for the first time since the shooting had occurred.

  Alex felt something rise inside her—relief, she realized, that her daughter had finally reached out for the slightest bit of hope. And regret, bitter as any almond, because she had not been the one to put the peace back into her daughter’s face.

  Josie wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt. “You all right?” Ducharme asked.

  “I guess.”

  “Good.” The detective nodded in Alex’s direction. “Judge.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured, as he turned and started back to the police station.

  Alex heard the slam of the car door as Josie slipped into the passenger seat, but she watched Patrick Ducharme until he disappeared from sight. I wish it had been me, Alex thought, and she deliberately kept herself from filling in the rest of that sentence.

  * * *

  Like Peter, Derek Markowitz was a computer whiz. Like Peter, he hadn’t been blessed with muscles and height or, for that matter, any gifts of puberty. He had hair that stuck up in small tufts, as if it had been planted. He wore his shirt tucked into his pants at all times, and he had never been popular.

  Unlike Peter, he hadn’t gone to school one day and killed ten people.

  Selena sat at the Markowitzes’ kitchen table, while Dee Dee Markowitz watched her like a hawk. She was there to interview Derek in the hope that he could be a witness for the defense—but to be perfectly honest, the information Derek had given her so far made him a much better candidate for the prosecution.

  “What if it’s all my fault?” Derek was saying. “I mean, I’m the only one who was given a clue. If I’d been listening harder, maybe I could have stopped him. I could have told someone else. But instead, I figured he was joking around.”

  “I don’t think anyone would have done any differently in your situation,” Selena said gently, and she meant it. “The Peter you knew wasn’t the one who went to the school that day.”

  “Yeah,” Derek said, and he nodded to himself.

  “Are you about finished?” Dee Dee asked, stepping forward. “Derek’s got a violin lesson.”

  “Almost, Mrs. Markowitz. I just wanted to ask Derek about the Peter he did know. How’d you two meet?�
�

  “We were both on a soccer team together in sixth grade,” Derek said, “and we both sucked.”

  “Derek!”

  “Sorry, Mom, but it’s true.” He glanced up at Selena. “Then again, none of those jocks could write HTML code if their lives depended on it.”

  Selena smiled. “Yeah, well, count me in the ranks of the technologically impaired. So you two got to be friends while you were on the team?”

  “We hung out on the bench, because we were never put in to play,” Derek said. “But no, we weren’t really friends until after that, when he stopped hanging out with Josie.”

  Selena fumbled her pen. “Josie?”

  “Yeah, Josie Cormier. She goes to the school, too.”

  “And she’s Peter’s friend?”

  “She used to be, like, the only kid he ever hung around with,” Derek explained, “but then she became one of the cool kids, and she ditched him.” He looked at Selena. “Peter didn’t care, really. He said she’d turned into a bitch.”

  “Derek!”

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said. “But again, it’s true.”

  “Would you excuse me?” Selena asked.

  She walked out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, where she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and dialed home. “It’s me,” she said when Jordan answered, and then she hesitated. “Why is it so quiet?”

  “Sam’s asleep.”

  “You didn’t pop in another Wiggles video just to get your discovery read, did you?”

  “Did you call specifically to accuse me of lousy parenting?”

  “No,” Selena said. “I called to tell you that Peter and Josie used to be best friends.”

  * * *

  In maximum security, Peter was allowed only one real visitor a week, but certain people didn’t count. For example, your lawyer could come and see you as many times as necessary. And—here’s the crazy thing—so could reporters. All Peter had to do was sign a little release that said he was willingly making the choice to speak to the media, and Elena Battista was allowed to meet him.

  She was hot. Peter noticed that right away. Instead of wearing some shapeless oversized sweater, she had dressed in a tight blouse with buttons. If he leaned forward, he could even see cleavage.

  She had long, thick curly hair and doe-brown eyes, and Peter found it really hard to believe that she had ever been teased by anyone in high school. But she was sitting in front of him, that much was true, and she could barely look him in the eyes. “I can’t believe this,” she said, her toes coming right up to the red line that separated them. “I can’t believe I’m actually meeting you.”

  Peter pretended he heard this all the time. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s cool that you drove up here.”

  “Oh, God, that was the least I could do,” Elena said. Peter thought of stories he’d heard, of groupies who’d written to inmates and eventually married them in a prison ceremony. He thought of the correctional officer who’d brought Elena in, and wondered if he was telling everyone else that Peter Houghton had some hot girl visiting him.

  “You don’t mind if I take notes, do you?” Elena asked. “For my paper?”

  “That’s cool.”

  He watched her pull out a pencil and hold the cap in her mouth while she opened her notebook to a fresh page. “So, like I told you, I’m writing about the effects of bullying.”

  “How come?”

  “Well, there were times when I was in high school that I thought I’d rather just kill myself than go back to class the next day, because it would be easier. I figured if I was thinking it, there had to be other people thinking it, too . . . and that’s where I came up with the idea.” She leaned forward—cleavage alert—and met Peter’s eyes. “I’m hoping I can get it published in a psychology journal or something.”

  “That would be cool.” He winced; God, how many times was he going to use the word cool? He probably sounded like a total retard.

  “So, maybe you could start by telling me how often it used to happen. The bullying, I mean.”

  “Every day, I guess.”

  “What sorts of things did they do?”

  “The usual,” Peter said. “Stuffing me into a locker, throwing my books out the bus window.” He gave her a litany he’d already given Jordan a thousand times: memories of being elbowed on his way up a staircase, moments where his glasses were ripped off and crushed, slurs pitched like fastballs.

  Elena’s eyes melted. “That must have been so hard for you.”

  Peter didn’t know what to say. He wanted her to stay interested in his story, but not if it meant that she thought he was a total wimp. He shrugged, hoping that was a good enough response.

  She stopped writing. “Peter, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Even if it’s kind of off topic?”

  Peter nodded.

  “Did you plan to kill them?”

  She was leaning forward again, her lips parted, as if whatever Peter was about to say was some wafer, a communion host that she’d been waiting for her whole life. Peter could hear the footsteps of a guard walking past the doorway behind him, could practically taste Elena’s breath through the receiver. He wanted to give her the right answer—sound dangerous enough for her to be intrigued, to want to come back.

  He smiled, in a way that he hoped was sort of seductive. “Let’s just say it needed to stop,” Peter answered.

  * * *

  The magazines in Jordan’s dentist’s office had the shelf life of plutonium. They were so old that the celebrity bride on the cover now had two babies named for biblical characters, or pieces of fruit; that the president listed as Man of the Year had already left office. To that end, when he stumbled upon the latest issue of Time while awaiting his appointment for a filling, Jordan felt like he’d hit the mother lode.

  HIGH SCHOOL: THE NEWEST FRONT LINE FOR BATTLE? the cover read, and there was a still image of Sterling High from a chopper, kids still streaming out of all the building’s orifices. He absently leafed toward the article and its subsections, not expecting to see anything he didn’t already know or hadn’t already seen in the papers, but one piece caught his eye. “Inside the Mind of a Killer,” he read, and he saw the much-used school picture of Peter from his eighth-grade yearbook.

  Then he started to read.

  “Goddamn,” he said, and he got to his feet, starting for the door.

  “Mr. McAfee,” the secretary said, “the dentist is ready for you.”

  “I’ll have to reschedule—”

  “Well, you can’t take our magazine . . .”

  “Add it to my bill,” Jordan snapped, and he hurried downstairs to his car. His cell phone rang just as he turned the key in the ignition—he completely expected it to be Diana Leven, gloating over her good fortune—but instead, it was Selena.

  “Hey, are you done at the dentist? I need you to swing by CVS and grab some diapers on the way home. I ran out.”

  “I’m not coming home. I’ve got bigger problems right now.”

  “Honey,” Selena said, “there are no bigger problems.”

  “I’ll explain later,” Jordan said, and he turned off his phone, so that even if Diana called, she wouldn’t be able to reach him.

  He got to the jail in twenty-six minutes—a personal record—and stormed into the entryway. There, he plastered the magazine up to the plastic that separated him from the CO who was signing him in. “I need to bring this in when I see my client,” Jordan said.

  “Well, I’m sorry,” the officer said, “but you can’t take in anything that’s got staples.”

  Frustrated, Jordan balanced the magazine against his leg and ripped out the binding staples. “Fine. Can I see my client now?”

  He was brought to the same conference room he always used at the jail, and he paced while he waited for Peter to arrive. When he did, Jordan slammed the magazine down on the table, open to the article. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  Peter’s
mouth dropped open. “She . . . she never mentioned that she wrote for Time!” He scanned the pages. “I can’t believe it,” he murmured.

  Jordan could feel all the blood in his body rushing to his head. Surely, this was how people had strokes. “Do you have any idea how serious the charges against you are? How awful your case is? How much evidence there is against you?” He smacked an open hand on the article. “Do you really think that this makes you look at all sympathetic?”

  Peter scowled. “Well, thanks for the lecture. Maybe if you’d been here to deliver it a few weeks ago we wouldn’t be having this discussion at all.”

  “Oh, that’s priceless,” Jordan said. “I don’t come by often enough, so you decide to get back at me by talking to the media?”

  “She wasn’t the media. She was my friend.”

  “Guess what,” Jordan said. “You don’t get to have any friends.”

  “So what else is new?” Peter shot back.

  Jordan opened his mouth to yell at Peter again, but couldn’t. The truth of the statement struck him, as he remembered Selena’s interview earlier this week with Derek Markowitz. Peter’s buddies deserted him, or betrayed him, or spilled his secrets for a circulation of millions.

  If he really wanted to do his job right, he couldn’t just be an attorney to Peter. He had to be his confidant, and to date, all he’d done was string the kid along, just like everyone else in his life.

  Jordan sat down next to Peter. “Look,” he said quietly. “You can’t do anything like this again. If anyone contacts you at all, for any reason, you need to tell me. And in return, I’ll come to see you more often than I have been. Okay?”

  Peter shrugged his agreement. For a long moment they both sat beside each other, silent, unsure of what came next.

  “So now what?” Peter asked. “Do I have to talk about Joey again? Or prep for that psychiatric interview?”

  Jordan hesitated. The only reason he’d come to see Peter was to tear into him for talking to a reporter; if not for that, he wouldn’t have come to the jail at all. And he supposed he could ask Peter to recount his childhood or his school history or his feelings about being bullied, but somehow, that didn’t seem right either. “Actually, I need some advice,” he said. “My wife got me this computer game last Christmas, Agents of Stealth? The thing is, I can’t make it past the first level without getting wiped out.”