The Jodi Picoult Collection #2

by Jodi Picoult

  Pike clutched his chest and scrambled to grab at the armrests, but missed and fell forward, landing on the floor. The activities coordinator cried out and came running from the front of the room. Two burly interns headed toward them. Eli leaned down beside Pike. “How does it feel, not being able to fight back?” he whispered.

  In the melee that followed, Pike battled the staff trying to help him, shouting obscenities and scratching a nurse deep enough to draw blood. Pandemonium broke out in the activities room, with some patients egging Pike on, others weeping, and two coming to blows over who had called Bingo first. Eli slipped out of the room unnoticed. He walked down the main hall of the rest home and out the front door, whistling.

  Maylene Warburton moved a crystal an eighth of an inch to the right and lifted her face to the sky with expectation. A moment later, she swore and turned to her husband. “Curtis, I can’t conjure anything with him standing here. The negativity is keeping all the spirits away.”

  From his spot on a folding camping chair, Rod van Vleet exploded. “It’s been four hours, and Wakeman didn’t seem to have this much difficulty. Did you ever think maybe it’s you?”

  “You see what I mean?” Maylene cried.

  “Cut!” Curtis called, and he clapped the cameraman on his shoulder as he walked into the clearing of the Pike property. “Johannes, take five.” He smiled at his wife, placating, and pulled her toward Rod. “If we aren’t all on the same page here, it’s no wonder the spirits won’t come.”

  “Spirit,” Rod clarified. “Getting rid of one is enough.”

  He was beginning to believe his original premise—namely, that all paranormal investigators were nutcases and that ghosts were about as real as the Tooth Fairy. The Warburtons had seemed a natural choice, since Ross Wakeman had touted Curtis as a mentor and since Bogeyman Nights was one of the better-known supernatural shows on cable. Plus, Curtis had asked to bring a camera, and to interview Rod on film. Who could resist that kind of PR?

  But after a lot of hoo-ha and posturing and some grand ceremony that involved Warburton’s so-called psychic wife sticking rocks all over the place, no ghost had appeared. There had been no chains dragged, no bumps in the night, not even a faint moan. The EMF meter that had been set in stationary position beside a rock—after everyone had removed their watches and phones and everything else that might affect the magnetic field there—remained inactive. Next, Curtis Warburton would tell him that sometimes it took several sittings for a spirit to warm up to an investigator.

  “You know,” Curtis said, “sometimes, we need to spend a few consecutive nights in order for the ghost to feel comfortable enough to show itself.”

  Rod rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Well. The fact of the matter is, maybe it decided to up and leave without any help from—”

  Whatever he had been about to say was interrupted by a flash of light that originated from nowhere and seemed to bounce around, skimming the toes of Rod’s loafers before growing brighter.

  “Johannes,” Curtis yelled. “Get your ass back here!”

  The light was so bright now that Rod could see his shadow, as if it were daylight. Speechless, he squatted down toward the ground.

  His shadow didn’t.

  “Oh my God,” Rod whimpered. “Oh, holy shit.”

  The black mass moved across the field of light and raised its arms. Overhead, pale pink globules of light began to rise into the night. A breeze rolled over the clearing, plunging it into darkness again, and scenting the air with a lady’s perfume.

  “By any chance,” Maylene asked, “is your ghost a woman?”

  Rod’s insides had begun to quake. “It’s her. It’s the wife that was killed.”

  “This isn’t your place anymore,” Curtis said loudly. “This isn’t your time.”

  The only warning he had was a rustle of leaves overhead, as a heavy limb from the tree beside him came crashing down, narrowly missing his head, and crushing the cameraman’s knapsack. “Goddamn,” breathed Johannes.

  “You need to go to the light,” Curtis urged.

  Rod felt something stir in his hands, and suddenly the jacket he was holding flew out of his arms and flung itself into the middle of the clearing, as if it had been possessed. “Hey!” he cried, standing abruptly. “It took my coat!”

  “I think she’s trying to convey how she feels about you taking over her land,” Curtis explained.

  Rod turned in a frantic circle. “It’s my land!”

  “Curtis, the temperature’s dropping.” Maylene waved a digital thermometer in the air. “And look at this.” On the ground, their EMF meter was blinking wildly. A thick white fog spilled from the sky, concentrating itself into the clearing.

  “Keep filming, Johannes,” Curtis whispered, and then more loudly. “You can’t live here anymore. You can cross to the other side. Show us a sign of departure!”

  The mist dissipated, and Rod glanced down to find the ground covered with rose petals. He knelt and picked one up, rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger, and looking up at the clear sky.

  At the sound of a click, all three of them jumped. “Sorry,” Johannes said. “That’s the end of the tape.”

  “Well. I think we both got what we need,” Curtis said, smiling at Rod.

  He stood up, looking around. “You mean that’s it? She’s gone now?”

  “It’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  Rod nodded. “But what keeps her from coming back?”

  “Once she finds her way to the other side, there’s no reason for it. Unless, of course, your check bounces.” Curtis grinned at his own joke, then began to gather the equipment his production crew had brought. Maylene repacked her crystals in a small silk pouch.

  Rod handed Curtis Warburton an envelope with his prearranged fee, and followed him out toward the front of the property, where their cars were parked. “So . . . that’s it? I can build on it now?”

  “You could have built on it before,” Curtis said. “But now you won’t have a roommate.”

  “Curtis.” Maylene reached out the passenger-side window of their van. “Can we please get out of Mayberry and find a Starbucks?”

  “Coming.” He shook Rod’s hand. “Do me a favor, will you? When you see Ross Wakeman again, tell him what happened tonight.” He got into the van, waving as he drove down Otter Creek Pass.

  The van passed another vehicle on its way, and Rod squinted into the headlights until they switched off. A sheriff’s car, its motor still humming, sat a few feet away from him. “Mr. van Vleet?” the deputy said.

  “Yes?” Rod’s heart began to pound. Was it illegal to evict a ghost?

  “This is for you.”

  He slit open the sealed envelope from the county court, read the contents, and swore under his breath.

  Now that he’d gotten rid of his ghost, Rod was being evicted too.

  As Ethan rappelled down the trunk of the tree, Ross caught him by the waist. “Easy,” he said. “You don’t want to break anything.”

  He had waited to reveal himself for a full hour after he’d heard Rod van Vleet drive away, just in case. Ross reached up and stretched out the kinks in his body as Ethan swung his feet onto solid ground. “Got it all,” he promised, patting the backpack he wore. Several of the half-filled helium balloons—their globules—were tangled around his waist, floating at half-mast. “I didn’t leave anything up there.”

  The scent, the globules, the roses, the fog—these were all things Ross had seen when Lia had first come, organic signs of a spirit. Except this time, they’d been handmade. “You got the projector? The wires? And all of the mirrors?”

  “I even took the fishing line.” Ethan grinned widely. “Did you see that dude’s face when his jacket went flying?”

  “I told you not to try that. What if he’d moved, and gotten a hook in his palm?” Ross glanced around at the equipment he and Ethan had set up before the Warburtons’ arrival tonight. There was a sweet irony to perpetrating a hoax upon the man who ha
d built a career of doing just that—but Ross had known all along that the odds of pulling this off were in his favor. In the first place, Warburton wanted to look like a success, so he wouldn’t have been hunting for anything fishy. Add to that the darkness, and the fact that the haunted area was outside rather than in the confines of a room—and it had been simple enough for Ross to jerry-rig mirrors and lights and balloons.

  “I couldn’t breathe from the dry ice,” Ethan said, still animated. He watched Ross bend down to sweep up rose petals shaken loose from Shelby’s pillowcases. “If you get those dirty, my mom will kill you.”

  “She’s already going to murder me for using up a bottle of her perfume,” Ross pointed out. He headed toward a small patch of white petals that he had missed.

  “The coolest thing was the thermometer. How’d you get the temperature to drop?” Ethan asked.

  Ross hefted the Styrofoam-packed dry ice onto his shoulder and started walking through the woods, to the spot where he’d hidden his car. “That wasn’t me,” he admitted. “I think we just got lucky.”

  He had wondered, too, while he was sitting in the uppermost branches of a tree and watching the ground show below, at the stroke of good fortune that had caused the air to cool at just that moment. It was certainly something that could be explained meteorologically, from a sudden wind to a swift weather front moving through. But the EMF meter reading was another story. Ross had held that very EMF meter in his hand; it was sensitive enough to pick up the presence of a person on the other side of a wall, or the approach of a thunderstorm.

  He had made certain that he and Ethan would be too far away to trigger the EMF with their equipment . . . yet it had still signaled. There had been no approaching physical body to set it off, no inclement weather. Chalk it up to a glitch in the system, a battery failure, a mistake.

  Or, Ross thought, a wish blossoming, maybe not.

  Eli stood beside the chief of police, decked out in dress regalia because the chief knew a photo-op when he saw one, and squinted as the camera flashes went off in his face. He wasn’t watching the main event, however—Chief Follingsbee giving Az Thompson the court order from a district judge that officially halted development on the Pike property, pending the removal of Abenaki remains from the site. Instead, Eli scanned the faces of the crowd—people he had known all his life who suddenly looked entirely different.

  Winks, for example, had a drinking problem and a wife who’d left him for one of the students she’d taught English to at the high school. But today he was smiling to beat the band, this triumph made sweeter by the fact that he’d had so many runs of hard luck. Old Charlie Rope had come out for this, and had his granddaughter balanced on his shoulders. “You watch,” Eli heard the old man say, bouncing her lightly. “This is something we need to remember.”

  Even stoic Az Thompson, the unofficial Abenaki spokesman, seemed moved by the occasion. This was a victory, and there had been few. Every time the Abenaki had mustered the effort to purchase lands, or win fishing rights, they were defeated on the grounds that they had not been federally recognized as a tribe and therefore had no rights to speak of. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, to be a tribe an indigenous group needed to show a continuous cultural history for hundreds of years.

  For the Abenaki, there was a gaping hole that began in the 1930s.

  Eli had always assumed that this was due to the Abenaki’s seeming lack of organization, or drive, or both. But now he wondered if they’d been put in a catch-22 of their own making. As Shelby had said the night before—to keep from being targeted by the eugenicists in the thirties, the Abenaki had intermarried and taken on white names and jobs. They’d moved out of state and blended in with other existing tribes. They’d hid their own traditions behind closed doors, to keep from losing them forever. And now, they were being punished for it.

  Eli watched some of the Abenaki drift back to the big drum they’d carried in for the occasion. Their voices, deep and urgent, plaited together in the most unlikely melody. Indian songs did not follow a set course; they were more like rivers, which went where they needed to. Eli could remember summers on the banks of the lake with his mother’s family; how this music would seep through the crack in the tent at nighttime, how it would carry him to sleep.

  This song, it was their history. Like the rest of Abenaki memoir, it was oral—written words, like that paper that Az was holding now, meant nothing until they created a legend, told by Charlie Rope’s granddaughter to her own children. Eli wondered how many of these men and women remembered what had happened in Comtosook under the direction of Spencer Pike. The very fact that there had been such a conspicuous silence about it was meaningful—it had not been passed down, for some reason. This story, Eli realized, was all the more important for what had not been said.

  “This,” said a voice at his shoulder, “is an outrage.” Rod van Vleet looked ready to spit as he stood on the fringe of the media that was immortalizing this moment. “This is my land, and frankly I don’t care if it’s owned by retarded bald eagles in wheelchairs—I paid for it, fair and square.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get your money back,” Eli said, although he wasn’t sure of this at all. “The last thing they’d want to be accused of is being a bunch of Indian givers.”

  Van Vleet narrowed his eyes, not at all appreciative of Eli’s joke. He pushed his way through the knot of reporters and took his contract from Spencer Pike out of his pocket. “The hell with you,” he said.

  He tore up the paper and tossed the pieces into the air. They fluttered down, light as feathers. When they landed, Eli noticed one small root poking through the dirt. It looked to be a crocus. At some point, apparently, that frozen ground had begun its thaw. Who else knew what lay hidden?

  Eli put his hands in his pockets and walked toward the group of Abenaki who were singing. Words rose from his throat, refrains he had forgotten he ever knew. And even people miles away in Swanton and Morrisville, who had been listening to the song of the wind without even realizing it, suddenly stopped mowing their lawns and wiping down their kitchen counters, somehow aware that the melody had changed.

  The transformations were gradual, but because they had been expecting them this time, people in Comtosook took notice. When Scotch tape failed to stick, they smiled knowingly. When the melons in the Gas & Grocery grew so ripe that the smell of summer rolled onto the sidewalk like fog, everyone understood. They found four-leaf clovers in their wallets, pressed between the largest bills; they heard bobcats sobbing in the hills; they found their pillows too soft at night—all things that could have been chalked up to any number of causes, but that instead were attributed to their ghost.

  And so it was that when Ross came outside onto Shelby’s porch and saw what he did, he thought twice. It could have been squirrels; it could have been a neighbor kid’s prank. Or it could have been something else entirely that had meticulously arranged seventeen tiny stones in the shape of a heart.

  This was not his mother. Ethan watched the imposter getting ready for her date from his nest on the bed, humming as she snapped on her holiday earrings, using that goop girls wiped on their eyelashes if they were in the habit of wearing makeup, putting perfume on in places that made no sense—the backs of her knees, the pucker of her belly button.

  “Are you two going to hook up?” Ethan asked.

  “Hook up?”

  “Yeah, you know. Do it.”

  His mother, in the process of slipping into a high-heeled shoe, stumbled. “What kind of a question is that?”

  He thought for a minute. “A smart one.”

  “Well,” she said. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Ethan began to pick at the knotting on the quilt. “If I were you, I’d do it. But only if he lets you shoot off his gun once or twice.”

  His mother got that look, the one where she did a really bad job of trying not to smile. “I’ll tell him you suggested that.”

  Ethan considered what he knew of making ou
t—it seemed to him about as gross as some girl spitting into a glass, and then giving it to him to drink. “Then again, it might not be worth it.”

  She tugged at his cap, so that it twisted around backward. “Get back to me on that when you’re older.”

  “I’m never going to kiss any girls.” Ethan watched her stand up, check herself out in the mirror. He had to admit, she looked . . . pretty. And something about that made him feel like the room was spinning.

  “Trust me . . . it’s irrefragable. One day you’re going to want to do that more than anything else in the world.”

  “And who,” Ethan said, “is going to want to do that with me?”

  His mother paused, then came to sit beside him on the bed. She touched his face as if it were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, instead of the chalk-white mask of a monster. “Many, many smart women,” she answered, looking into his eyes. “We may have to beat them off with a stick.”

  “As if,” Ethan answered, ducking away, when what he really meant was: I hope I’m here to see it.

  She hugged him, and for some reason, he let her, although he’d given up that kind of lovey-dovey stuff a year ago. Her eyes were bright with a world that did not include Ethan. And because it was going to be that way sooner or later, he found the strength to let her go.

  In the dark of his room at Shelby’s, Ross was kissed awake. He felt the soft pressure of a mouth against his, the sigh that breathed into his own lungs, and he raised his arms from the cocoon of covers to pull this moment tight against him before it could bleed into the next. He reached out, and found himself grabbing at nothing.

  He knocked over the alarm clock and flicked on the lamp, suddenly alert. Sitting up, he confirmed what he already knew: he was alone in his bedroom, the door locked just the way he’d left it the night before. And his bed was now spotted with hundreds of rose petals.

  “Where are you?” He jumped to his feet in only his boxers, yanking the covers off with one good tug. He lifted the mattress and threw it onto the floor. He shoved at the footboard, sliding the bed away from the wall. Frustrated and breathing hard, he sank to the carpet and buried his face in his hands. Just once, Ross thought, I would like to be the kind of guy who gets lucky. Just once I’d like someone to live for.