The Jodi Picoult Collection #2

by Jodi Picoult

Thinking of Aimee this afternoon had made him want to try, one last time, no matter that he’d told Shelby he’d hung up his paranormal shingle. So from Lake Champlain he’d gone to Burlington, to a discount electronics store, where he bought a new infrared video camera. When Shelby put dinner on the table, he told her he had a date that night.

  “Really?” She’d smiled so brightly it hurt Ross just to look. “Who is it?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Ross,” Shelby answered, “this is exactly what you need.”

  He hated that he’d lied to his sister. He hated the way she had reached into the window of his car before he left to straighten the collar of his shirt, how she told him the door would be open whenever he got home.

  Now, while his sister wondered which eligible female he was meeting, Ross balanced his flashlight on an outcropping of rock, so that he could set up the tripod for the video camera. “I am not going to see anything,” Ross murmured as he peered through the viewfinder. He hesitated, then swore.

  He was retired.

  He didn’t believe in ghosts, not anymore.

  But what if this was the time that something materialized? What if he walked away now, without finding out for sure? If Ethan was right—if someone had been murdered at the quarry—there was an excellent chance that a restless spirit was hanging around. The ones who didn’t go on to heaven or whatever came next were the ones who had unfinished business left—people who had died violently, or committed suicide without communicating a message. Sometimes they stayed because they didn’t want to leave someone they loved.

  Ross knew that if luck was on his side when he ran the camera, he might get some zipping lights, maybe a globule or two. He might catch some EVPs—electronic voice phenomena. And if there was any evidence at all that something paranormal existed in this quarry, there was a chance Aimee was somewhere, too.

  Going by his senses, Ross pointed the video to a spot in the quarry that his eyes kept coming back to, although he had no idea if in fact that was where a murder had occurred. He loaded a fresh tape and checked the battery, then sat back to wait.

  Suddenly he was blinded by a beacon. “I can explain,” he began.

  Whatever Ross was going to say, however, died on his lips as he found himself face-to-face with an ancient man wearing a vintage security guard’s uniform; a man who held so much of the world in his eyes that Ross was certain he was looking at a ghost.

  “Who are you?” the man whispered to Az. He was gawking like he’d never seen anyone native before, and frankly, that pissed Az off.

  “You’re trespassing,” Az said.

  “This used to be your land?”

  Sweet Jesus, and they talked about Indians being hooked on peyote. Granted, Az was old, and he was rigged out in a security guard’s uniform he’d owned for twenty-five years now, but still . . . The guy looked normal enough—maybe even had a little Abenaki blood, what with that long, dark hair. It was enough to make Az feel pity for him, anyway. “Look, tell you what. You pack up whatever it is you’re doing and get out, and I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”

  The man nodded, and then lunged forward in an attempt to touch him. Startled, Az drew away and pulled his billy club.

  “Please! I just . . . I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  Christ. Az was going to miss the whole seventh inning, at this rate.

  “Do you live here?”

  “No, and I don’t have a teepee either, if that’s next on the list.” Az grabbed his arm. “Now shut that thing off and—”

  “You can touch me . . .?”

  “I can beat the crap out of you, too, if you keep this up,” Az said. “The Red Sox are tied with the Yankees, though, so it’s going to be fast.”

  The intruder—well, he faded—that was the only word for it. It was the same thing Az had seen over and over sitting at the deathbed of a friend; that light that made a person what he was, suddenly snuffing out. “The Red Sox,” the man murmured. “Then you’re not a ghost.”

  “I may be old, but I’m sure as hell not dead.”

  “I thought you were . . .” He shook his head, then extended his hand. “I’m Ross Wakeman.”

  “You’re crazy, is what you are.”

  “That too, I guess.” Ross ran a hand through his hair. “I’m a paranormal researcher. Well, I was one, anyway.”

  Az shrugged. “You ever find anything?”

  Ross paused. “Is there something here to find?”

  “Never seen nothing myself. Not here, anyway.”

  “But you have, other places?”

  Az avoided the question. “You can’t stay. Private property.”

  Ross busied himself cleaning up his equipment, taking his sweet time, from the looks of it. “I heard there was a murder here years ago.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “You know anything about it?”

  Az looked into the pit of the quarry. “It happened before I was a security guard.”

  “Right.” Ross lifted the camera bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Sorry about . . . the mistaken identity thing.”

  “It’s nothing.” Az started to escort the younger man out. As Ross reached his car, Az curled his hand around the cast-iron gate. “Mr. Wakeman,” he called. “Those spirits you’re looking for? You aren’t far off.”

  He went back to the security booth, leaving Ross to wonder if that was a promise or a threat.

  Over the next few weeks, the residents of Comtosook came to believe in the unexpected. Mothers would awaken with their throats so full of tears they could not call out to their children. Businessmen catching their reflections in a pane of glass were suddenly unable to recognize their own faces. Young lovers, parked at the Point and twined together like the strands of a rope, whispered desperate vows of passion only to realize their words had come out as bubbles, and burst just as quickly.

  Shelby Wakeman found ladybugs swarming all the north-facing windows of her house. Rod van Vleet could drive no more than a quarter of a mile in his company car before the scent of berries burst from the air-conditioning vents, making the interior of the Taurus as cloying and thick as jam. Spencer Pike slipped his hand beneath his pillow and discovered three sky-blue robin’s eggs.

  Ethan, who knew better, found himself stealing glimpses of the sun.

  Droves of cats escaped from their homes and walked down to the river to bathe. The level of water in Lake Champlain rose and fell twice a day, as if there were a tide. Roses burst free of their trellises to grow in wild, tangled thickets. Nothing at the dinner table tasted quite right.

  And in spite of the temperate August climate, the disputed land on Otter Creek Pass froze solid, so that excavation became a physical impossibility as well as a philosophical one.

  “What do you make of it?” Winks Smiling Fox asked, grunting as he moved the drum a few feet to the left. Where they’d been sitting, the ground beneath their feet was icy. Yet over here, there were dandelions growing.

  There were documented cases of ground freezes occurring during a New England summer. In 1794, the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted a frost in July as a result of a typographical error, which then unexpectedly came true when Mount Vesuvius erupted and the dust it sent into the atmosphere caused a miniature nuclear winter. Every few years, a blueberry frost would move through Vermont, dragging temperatures below freezing and drying the fruit on the bushes. And yet in all these instances, the damage was done town-wide, not just on one small patch of land.

  “You remember the stories about Azeban?” Winks said. “The ones from when we were kids? That’s what I keep thinking of.”

  “Azeban?” said Fat Charlie. “The trickster?”

  “Uh-huh.” Winks nodded. “Remember how he’d set a trap for someone else as some big joke and get caught up in it himself? Like when he went to stamp out the fire Fox was sleeping near, and wound up watching his own tail get burned.”

  “Wouldn’t mind a little fire here, actua
lly, now . . .”

  “No, Charlie,” said Az, coming up from behind. “Winks means that if you set out to do bad things to others, bad things are gonna come back to you.”

  He watched his friends take their seats again and pick up their drumsticks. This was how they passed the time, braiding their voices into one long, strong cord of sound. With the exception of the song they sang in their all-but-forgotten native tongue, there was no other way to know that this group of men was Abenaki. They’d learned well from the lessons of the past century, their ancestors intermarrying in the hopes of disappearing beneath white surnames and Caucasian traits. Winks had blond hair; Fat Charlie’s skin was pale as an Irishman’s.

  “You think there’s something more to it than that?” Winks asked. “I mean, some strange stuff’s been going on.”

  He did not have to explain; in addition to the frozen ground, the owner of a trucking company was using a shop vac to clear out the nooks and crannies of his excavators, which had become clogged with cicadas.

  “In town, they’re saying if the Indians don’t drive Redhook off the land, the ghosts will,” Fat Charlie added.

  “If my grave was being rolled by a bulldozer, I’d be pretty pissed off. Come back and rattle some chains, henh.” Winks snorted. “You see that state archaeologist guy? He says an ‘Our Father’ under his breath every time he thinks no one’s listening. Even if there’s no such thing as ghosts, it’s scaring the crap out of them.”

  “No such thing? The spirit of my great-great-uncle came to me during a sweat last year,” Fat Charlie said. “You’ve seen ’em too, right, Az?”

  “There’s a difference between the spirits that have gone on, and the ones that can’t leave,” Az said. He picked up a knife and began to whittle a branch to a point. “Where I used to live, there was a girl whose parents told her she couldn’t marry the boy she loved. So she hanged herself from a beech tree on top of a hill. Her boyfriend went up to the same tree after she was buried, and hanged himself too. And if an Indian gets hanged, his spirit can’t go to the sky—it gets trapped behind, in the body.” He tested the point of his spear. “After they died, two blue lights used to come over the hill at night.”

  Winks leaned forward, elbows balanced on his knees. “Anyone ever get close to them?”

  The old man ran the knife down the branch again. Behind him, he could sense Rod van Vleet, doing everything in his power to pretend he was not listening. “Nobody,” Az said, “was stupid enough to try.”

  “Ethan?”

  From his vantage point beneath the blackout shades, Ethan froze at the sound of his mother’s voice. He whipped his body back so that it wasn’t pressed against the warm glass windowpane and slid his sunglasses between the crack where his bed met the wall. “Hey,” he said, as she opened the bedroom door.

  Her hawk’s eyes took in the rumpled comforter, the hat on Ethan’s head, the drawn curtains. She approached him, narrowed her gaze, and tugged down the sleeve of his shirt where a quarter-inch strip of skin showed above his wrist. “I’m going to work,” his mother said. “You ought to be asleep by now.”

  “I’m not tired,” Ethan complained. It struck him, though, that his mother must be exhausted. To stay up with him all night, and to work part-time during the day at the library? “Mom,” he asked, “are you tired?”

  “All the time,” she answered, and kissed him good-bye.

  He waited until he heard her footsteps echoing on the tile floor of the kitchen. Words were traded like playing cards between his mother and Uncle Ross about how late Ethan should be allowed to stay up and what to do in case of emergency. Ethan dug along the side of his bed until he found the silver wraparound sunglasses. He settled his cap more firmly on his brow. Then he lifted the edge of the blackout shade and curled like a kitten on the windowsill. Within minutes, burns rose beneath the chalk of his skin, small spots dotted his face, but Ethan didn’t care. He’d scar, if that’s what it took to prove he’d been a part of this world.

  The scientists from CRREL, the Army Corps of Engineers, who had taken a van from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Comtosook and spent the day extracting soil samples with drills made to delve through ground frozen solid as stone, spoke to Rod van Vleet only peripherally. They had come out of academic curiosity and talked of the impact of thaw distribution on vehicle mobility . . . but did not explain how or why this had occurred here and now.

  The fellow who arrived from the Scott Polar Research Institute said it looked like permafrost, a climate-dependent phenomenon that occurred when the ground temperature remained below freezing for two or more years—which was not the case on Otter Creek Pass. He spoke of pore ice, segregated ice, and pingos, and reminded Rod that at one point, Burlington and its environs had been glacial.

  A Danish team phoned to ask if sudden freezing of the property had affected the chemistry of the atmosphere, and would Rod consider selling in the name of research?

  Yet for all of the combined wisdom that these scientists brought to the table, none could explain the odd cravings they developed the moment they crossed into Comtosook—for banana chips and candied violets and the soft skin of homemade puddings. They could not comment on the way loneliness perched on the telephone lines like a crow, except to point out that this was normal in regions where cold seeped so deep it was physically impossible to reach out to anyone else.

  By the time they returned to their labs and academic towers, took out their samples, and dusted away the layer of flower petals from the test tubes and Cold Paks, these quirks had been forgotten. They already knew what the residents of Comtosook were just now learning: that the world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sorts of entities might thrive.

  The Comtosook Public Library did not get many visitors, which was a blessing given the size of the building. Tiny rooms were strung together like pearls, far more suited to a small country inn than a repository for literature. The most crowded it got was Thursday mornings, when up to thirty preschoolers would sprawl on their bellies in the two small enclaves that made up the juvenile section, for story time. The children’s librarian had to run back and forth between the rooms with an open book, so that all the kids could see.

  There were bookshelves at angles, bookshelves stuck in the middle of the floor, bookshelves turned on their sides if necessary—whatever it took to accommodate a large number of volumes in an inadequate run of space. The reference librarian—Shelby, on weekday mornings—needed to know the Dewey Decimal system and various computer search engines, as well as how to navigate the library to find the fruits of these labors. But for the most part, Shelby was free to do whatever she liked during her work hours, and what she liked to do was chew words.

  Shelby loved them the way epicureans loved food—each syllable was something to be rolled on the tongue, swallowed, and wholly appreciated. Sometimes she would sit with the dictionary cracked open and read with all the breathless impatience another patron might save for a thriller. Griseous: mottled. Kloof: a ravine. Nidicolous: Reared for a time in a nest.

  She imagined receiving a phone call one day—Meredith Vieira, on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, or a radio disc jockey offering a fortune if she only knew the definition of one bizarre word. “Pilose?” she would repeat, and then pretend she did not know it, for the sheer suspense. “Covered with soft hair.”

  She was smart enough, after four years of college and another two of graduate school, to know that she used language like shore dwellers used sandbags: to create a buffer zone between herself and the rest of the world. She also knew that she could learn every last word in the dictionary and still not be able to explain why her life had turned out the way it had.

  She was worried about Ethan; she was worried about Ross. She was so busy, in fact, taking care of the immediate world that it kept her from dwelling on the fact that there never seemed to be anyone around who bothered to worry ab
out her.

  The library was empty, a result of regular patrons being too uneasy these days to venture out into a town that changed before their very eyes. To Shelby, the recent eccentricities amounted to sweeping petals off the steps of the library; she wasn’t worried about an impending Armageddon or global warming or the coming of phantoms, as conversation at the town diner suggested. To a woman who had built a home on a footing of abnormality, recent events were nothing to get excited about.

  When the door creaked open, Shelby glanced up. A man she had never seen before entered, dressed in a suit too expensive to have come from any store within a fifty-mile radius. However, there was something . . . off. His tie listed to the left and his skin was nearly as white as Ethan’s. He glanced from the oddly sloped floor to the jutting angles of the wall to the stacks of encyclopedias kittering up the wall. “This is the library?”

  “Yes. Can I help you?”

  His gaze circled like a bird, finally coming to rest on Shelby. “Can you even find anything in here?”

  Rhabdomancy, Shelby thought. Divination by wands. “That depends. What are you looking for?”

  “Indian burial grounds. What happened to them, in the past, when someone built over them. Legal precedent. That sort of thing.”

  “You must be one of the developers,” Shelby said. She led him to a spot at the rear of the library, where a microfiche was tucked behind a low shelf of cookbooks. “There was a dispute just a year ago in Swanton. You might want to try there first.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember the outcome, would you?”

  “The state bought the property.”

  “Oh, great. Terrific.” He exhaled heavily and sprawled backward in the chair. “Was that Swanton land cursed too?”

  “Excuse me?”

  For a moment, he seemed too frustrated to speak. “Those Indians, what do they do . . . conjure up all their dead ancestors whenever they need them? Whatever it takes, right, to get us Massholes out of town?”

  Shelby worried her nail between her teeth.