The Jodi Picoult Collection #2

by Jodi Picoult

  On cue, the baby cried again.

  Spencer’s hand scrabbled over the covers to the call button beside his bed. A moment later, the night nurse came in. “Mr. Pike,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  “The baby’s crying.”

  The nurse fussed behind him, turning pillows and raising the head of the bed. “There are no babies here, Mr. Pike, you know that. It was just a dream.” She patted the right angle that had once been his strong shoulder. “Now, you need to go back to sleep. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow. A meeting, remember?”

  Why, Spencer wondered, did she talk to him as if he were a child? And why did he react like one—sinking back beneath her gentle hands, letting her pull the covers up to his chest? A memory swelled at the base of Spencer’s throat, something that he could not quite pull to the front of the fog but that brought tears to his eyes. “Do you need some Naproxen?” the nurse asked kindly.

  Spencer shook his head. He had been a scientist, after all. And no laboratory had yet crafted the drug that could ease this ache.

  In person, Curtis Warburton was smaller than he seemed to be on television, but he lacked none of the magnetism that had made Bogeyman Nights the highest-rated show in its time slot. His black hair was shot, skunklike, with a white streak—one he’d possessed since a night nine years ago, when the ghost of his grandfather had appeared at the foot of his bed and led him into the field of paranormal investigation. His wife, Maylene, an elf of a woman whose psychic abilities were well known to the Los Angeles police, perched beside him, taking notes as Curtis posed questions to the owners of the house.

  “First was the kitchen,” murmured Eve O’Donnell, and her husband nodded. A retired couple, they’d bought this home on the lake as a summer retreat, and in their three months of tenancy had experienced supernatural phenomena at least twice a week. “About ten in the morning, I locked up all the doors, put on the alarm system, and went to the post office. When I came home, the alarm was still on . . . but inside, the kitchen cabinets were open, and every cereal box was on the table, spilled on its side. I called Harlan, thinking he’d come home and left behind a mess.”

  “I was at the Elks Club the whole time,” her husband interjected. “Never came home. No one did.”

  “And there’s the calliope music we heard coming from the attic at two in the morning. The minute we went upstairs, it stopped. Open the door to find a child’s toy piano, missing its batteries, sitting in the middle of the floor.”

  “We don’t own a toy piano,” Harlan added. “Much less a child.”

  “And when we put in the batteries, it didn’t even play that kind of music.” Eve hesitated. “Mr. Warburton, I hope you understand that we’re not the kind of people who . . . who believe in this sort of thing. It’s just . . . it’s just that if it’s not this, then I’m losing my mind.”

  “Mrs. O’Donnell, you’re not going crazy.” Curtis touched her hand with trademark sympathy. “By tomorrow morning we’ll have a better idea of what’s going on in your home.” He looked over his shoulder to make sure Ross was getting this on camera. Depending on what happened later, the O’Donnells might find themselves featured on Bogeyman Nights, and if so, this footage was critical. The Warburtons received over three hundred e-mails a day from people who believed their houses were haunted. Eighty-five percent of the claims turned out to be hoaxes or mice in the rafters. The rest—well, Ross had been working with them long enough to know that there were some things that simply could not be explained.

  “Have you experienced any spectral visions?” Curtis asked. “Temperature changes?”

  “Our bedroom will be hot as hell one minute, and then we’ll be shivering the next,” Harlan answered.

  “Are there any spots in the house in particular where you feel uncomfortable?”

  “The attic, definitely. The upstairs bathroom.”

  Curtis’s eyes swept from the hand-knotted Oriental rug to the antique vase on the mantel of the fireplace. “I have to warn you that finding a ghost can be a costly proposition.”

  As the Warburtons’ field researcher, Ross had been sent to libraries and newspaper archives to locate documents about the property—and hopefully the bonus information that a murder or a suicide might have occurred there. His inquiry had turned up nothing, but that never stopped Curtis. After all, a ghost could haunt a person as well as a place. History could hover, like a faint perfume or a memory stamped on the back of one’s eyelids.

  “Whatever it takes,” Eve O’Donnell said. “This isn’t about money.”

  “Of course not.” Curtis smiled and slapped his palms on his knees. “Well, then. We’ve got some work to do.”

  That was Ross’s cue. During the investigation, he was responsible for setting up and monitoring the electromagnetic equipment, the digital video cameras, the infrared thermometer. He worked for minimum wage, in spite of the money that came in from the TV show and from cases like this one. Ross had begged the Warburtons for a job nine months ago after reading about them in the L.A. Times on Halloween. Unlike Curtis and Maylene, he had never seen a spirit—but he wanted to, badly. He was hoping that sensitivity to ghosts might be something you could catch from close contact, like chicken pox—and, like chicken pox, might be something that would mark you forever.

  “I thought I’d check the attic,” Ross said.

  He stood in the doorway for a moment, waiting for Eve O’Donnell to lead the way upstairs. “I feel foolish,” she confided, although Ross had not asked. “At my age, seeing Casper.”

  Ross smiled. “A ghost can shake you up a little, and make you think you’re nuts, but it’s not going to hurt you.”

  “Oh, I don’t think she’d hurt me.”

  “She?”

  Eve hesitated. “Harlan said I shouldn’t volunteer any information. That way if you see what we do, then we’d know.” She shivered, glanced up the narrow stairs. “My little sister died when I was seven. Sometimes I wonder . . . can a ghost find you, if she wants to?”

  Ross looked away. “I don’t know,” he said, wishing he could have offered her more—a concrete answer, a personal experience. His eyes lit on the small door at the top of the stairs. “Is that it?”

  She nodded, letting him pass in front of her to unlatch it. The video camera Ross had mounted outside watched them from the window, a cyclops. Eve hugged herself tightly. “Being here gives me the chills.”

  Ross moved some boxes, so that no shadows would be caught on tape that could be explained away. “Curtis says that’s how you know where to find them. You go with what your senses are telling you.” A wink on the floor caught his eye; kneeling, he picked up a handful of pennies. “Six cents.” He smiled. “Ironic.”

  “She does that sometimes.” Eve was edging toward the door, her arms wrapped around herself. “Leaves us change.”

  “The ghost?” Ross asked, turning, but Eve had already fled down the stairs.

  Taking a deep breath, he closed the door to the attic and shut the light, plunging the small room into blackness. He stepped off to the side where he would not be in range of the video camera, and activated it with a remote control. Then he fixed his attention on the darkness around him, letting it press in at his chest and the backs of his knees, as Curtis Warburton had taught him. Ross cracked open his senses until the lip of disbelief thinned, until the space around him bloomed. Maybe this is it, he thought. Maybe the coming of ghosts feels like a sob at the back of your throat.

  Somewhere off to the left was the sound of a footfall, and the unmistakable chime of coins striking the floor. Switching on a flashlight, Ross swung the beam until it illuminated his boot, and the three new pennies beside it. “Aimee?” he whispered to the empty air. “Is that you?”

  Comtosook, Vermont, was a town marked by boundaries: the dip where it slipped into Lake Champlain, the cliffs that bordered the granite quarry where half the residents worked, the invisible demarcation where the rolling Vermont countryside became, with one more ste
p, the city of Burlington. On the Congregational church in the center of town hung a plaque from Vermont Life magazine, dated 1994, the year that Comtosook was lauded as the most picture-perfect hamlet in the state. And it was—there were days Eli Rochert looked at the leaves turning, rubies and amber and emeralds, and he simply had to stop for a moment and catch his breath.

  But whatever Comtosook was to tourists, it was Eli’s home. It had been, forever. He imagined it always would be. Of course, as one of the two full-time police officers in the town, he understood that what the tourists saw was an illusion. Eli had learned long ago that you can stare right at something and not see what lies beneath the surface.

  He drove along Cemetery Road, his usual patrol haunt on nights such as this, when the moon was as beaded and yellow as a hawk’s eye. Although the windows were rolled down, there wasn’t much of a breeze; and Eli’s short black hair was damp at the nape of his neck. Even Watson, his bloodhound, was panting in the seat beside him.

  Old headstones listed like tired foot soldiers. In the left corner of the cemetery, near the beech tree, was Comtosook’s oddest gravestone. WINNIE SPARKS, it read. BORN 1835. DIED 1901. DIED 1911. Legend had it that the irritable old woman’s funeral procession had been en route to the cemetery when the horses reared and her coffin fell out of the wagon. As it popped open, Winnie sat up and climbed out, spitting mad. Ten years later when she died—again—her long-suffering husband hammered 150 nails to seal the lid of the coffin, just as a precaution.

  Whether it was true or not didn’t much matter to Eli. But the local teens seemed to think that Winnie’s inability to stay dead was good enough reason to bring six-packs and pot to the cemetery. Eli unfolded his long body from the truck. “You coming?” he said to the dog, which flopped down on the seat in response. Shaking his head, Eli slipped through the cemetery until he reached Winnie’s grave, where four kids too wasted to hear his footsteps were huddled around the blue-fingered flame of a Sterno burner.

  “Boo,” Eli said flatly.

  “It’s the cops!”

  “Damn!” There was a scuffle of sneakers, the ping of bottles clinking together as the teens scrambled to get away. Eli could have had them at any moment, of course; he chose to let them off this time. He turned the beam of his flashlight onto the last of the retreating figures, then swung it down toward the mess. They left behind a faint cloud of sweet smoke and two perfectly good unopened bottles of Rolling Rock that Eli could make use of when he went off duty.

  Bending down, he pulled a dandelion from the base of Winnie’s headstone. As if the motion had dislodged it, a word rolled into his mind: chibaiak . . . ghosts. His grandmother’s language, which burned on Eli’s tongue like a peppermint. “No such thing,” he said aloud, and walked back to the car to see what else this night might hold in store.

  Shelby Wakeman had awakened exhausted after a full day’s sleep. She’d been having that dream again, the one where Ethan was standing beside her in an airport, and then she turned around to find that he’d disappeared. Frantic, she’d run from terminal to terminal looking for him, until at last she flew out a door onto the tarmac and found her nine-year-old standing in the path of an incoming jet.

  It terrified her, no matter how often Shelby told herself that this would never happen—she’d never be in an airport with Ethan in the middle of the day, much less lose sight of him. But what frightened her most was that image of her son standing with his arms outstretched, his buttermilk face lifted up to the sun.

  “Earth to Mom . . . hello?”

  “Sorry.” Shelby smiled. “Just daydreaming.”

  Ethan finished rinsing his plate and setting it into the dishwasher. “Do you think it’s still daydreaming if you do it at night?” Before she could answer, he grabbed his skateboard, as much an appendage as any of his limbs. “Meet you out there?”

  She nodded, and watched Ethan explode into the front yard. No matter how many times she told him to be quiet—at 4 A.M., most people were asleep, not racing around on skateboards—Ethan usually forgot, and Shelby usually didn’t have the heart to remind him.

  Ethan had XP, xeroderma pigmentosum, an incredibly rare inherited disease that left him extremely sensitive to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. In the world, there were only a thousand known cases of XP. If you had it, you had it from birth, and you had it forever.

  Shelby had first noticed something was wrong when Ethan was six weeks old, but it took a year of testing before he was diagnosed with XP. Ultraviolet light, the doctors explained, causes damage to human DNA. Most people can automatically repair that damage . . . but XP patients can’t. Eventually the damage affects cell division, which leads to cancer. Ethan, they said, might live to reach his teens.

  But Shelby figured if sunlight was going to kill her son, all she needed to do was to make it infinitely dark. She stayed in days. She read Ethan bedtime books by candlelight. She covered the windows of her house with towels and curtains that her husband would rip down every night when he came home from work. “No one,” he’d said, “is allergic to the goddamned sun.”

  By the time they were divorced, Shelby had learned about light. She knew that there was more to fear than just the outdoors. Grocery stores and doctors’ offices had fluorescent fixtures, which were ultraviolet. Sunblock became as common as hand cream, applied inside the house as well as out. Ethan had twenty-two hats, and he donned them with the same casual routine that other children put on their underwear.

  Tonight he was wearing one that said I’M WITH STUPID. The brim was curled tight as a snail, a shape Ethan cultivated by hooking the lip of the hat beneath the adjustable band in the back. When Shelby saw the caps being stored that way, she thought of swans tucking their heads beneath a wing; of the tiny bound feet of the Chinese.

  She finished cleaning up the kitchen and then settled herself with a book on the edge of the driveway. Her long, dark hair was braided into submission, thick as a fist, and she was still hot—how on earth could Ethan race around like that? He ran his skateboard up a homemade wooden ramp and did an Ollie kickflip. “Mom! Mom? Did you see that? It was just like Tony Hawk.”

  “I know it,” Shelby agreed.

  “So don’t you think that it would be totally sweet if we—”

  “We are not going to build a half-pipe in the driveway, Ethan.”

  “But—”

  “Jeez. Whatever.” And he was gone again in a rumble of wheels.

  Inside, Shelby smiled. She loved the attitude that seemed to be creeping into Ethan’s personality, like a puppeteer throwing words into his mouth. She loved the way he turned on Late Night with Conan O’Brien when he thought she was somewhere else in the house, to try to catch all the innuendoes. It made him . . . well, so normal. If not for the fact that the moon was riding shotgun overhead, and that Ethan’s face was so pale the veins beneath his skin glowed like roads she knew by heart—if not for these small things, Shelby could almost believe her world was just like any other single mother’s.

  Ethan executed a shifty pivot, and then a Casper big spin. There was a time, Shelby realized, when she couldn’t have distinguished a helipop from a G-turn. There was also a time Shelby would have looked at Ethan and herself and felt pity. But Shelby could hardly remember what her existence had been like before this illness was flung over them like a fishing net; and truth be told, any life she’d lived before Ethan could not have been much of a life at all.

  He skidded to a stop in front of her. “I’m starving.”

  “You just ate!”

  Ethan blinked at her, as if that were any kind of excuse. Shelby sighed. “You can go in and have a snack if you want, but it’s looking pink already.”

  Ethan turned toward the sunrise, a claw hooked over the horizon. “Let me watch from out here,” he begged. “Just once.”

  “Ethan—”

  “I know.” His voice dipped down at the edges. “Three more hardflips.”

  “One.”

  “Two.” Without wai
ting for agreement—she would concede, and they both knew it—Ethan sped off again. Shelby cracked open her novel, the words registering like cars on a freight train—a stream without any individual characteristics. She had just turned the page when she realized Ethan’s skateboard was no longer moving.

  He held it balanced against his leg, the graphic of the superhero Wolverine spotted white. “Mom?” he asked. “Is it snowing?”

  It did, quite often, in Vermont. But not in August. A white swirl tipped toward her book and caught in the wedge of the spine; but it was not a snowflake after all. She lifted the petal to her nose, and sniffed. Roses.

  Shelby had heard of strange weather patterns that caused frogs to evaporate and rain down over the seas; she’d once seen a hailstorm of locusts. But this . . . ?

  The petals continued to fall, catching in her hair and Ethan’s. “Weird,” he breathed, and he sat down beside Shelby to witness a freak of nature.

  “Pennies.” Curtis Warburton turned over the coin Ross had handed him. “Anything else?”

  Ross shook his head. It had been three hours, and even with a raging storm outside providing a well of energy, the paranormal activity had been minimal at best. “I thought I saw a globule on the screen at one point, but it turned out to be a smoke alarm hung in the back of the attic.”

  “Well, I haven’t felt a damn thing,” Curtis sighed. “We should have taken the case in Buffalo instead.”

  Ross snapped some used film back into its canister and tucked it into his pocket. “The wife, Eve? She mentioned a little sister who died when she was seven.”

  Curtis looked at him. “Interesting.”

  The two men walked downstairs. Maylene sat on the living room couch in the dark with an infrared thermometer. “You get anything?” Curtis asked.

  “No. This house is about as active as a quadriplegic.”

  “How is it going?” Eve O’Donnell interrupted. She stood at the doorway of the living room, her hand clutching the collar of her robe.