by Jodi Picoult
It was an established fact of the universe that Meredith was never going to meet a decent man. At work, she was too smart, and therefore too intimidating. Blind dates didn’t prove any more successful. The last one she’d been on was with an actor her grandmother had met in the park, who’d arrived at the restaurant dressed as Hamlet. To leave or not to leave, Meredith had thought, that was the question. Since that debacle, her grandmother had presented her with the phone numbers of a mortician, a vet, and a chiropractor, but Meredith had conveniently lost each one. “I want a grandchild before I die,” Ruby said, on schedule, every two to three months.
“You have one,” Meredith would remind her.
“One with a father,” Ruby would clarify.
Meredith had finally caved in, when Ruby told her that this one spent his free time doing volunteer work with senior citizens. So now, Meredith was sitting across from Michael DesJardins, trying to convince herself that this wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed.
He was drooling. All right, so it had to do with dental surgery he’d had that day, but it wasn’t particularly appetizing for Meredith. “So,” he slurred, “you work in a lab? What do you do . . . feed all the mice and stuff?”
“I do PGD. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis.”
“I’m in the catering business.”
“Oh?” Meredith folded her hands in front of her, watching him butter an entire slice of bread and stuff it in his mouth. On the bright side, it did mop up his excess saliva. “Are you a chef?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
She’d always harbored the fantasy of a man whisking her to a cozy apartment, where a fabulous gourmet meal had been prepared for her enjoyment. “I guess being in a restaurant feels like work, then.”
“This is a cut above my place, actually . . . you ever go into the Wendy’s on Sixteenth Street?”
Meredith was saved from responding when the waiter approached with their entrées. Michael began to cut his entire steak into little quarter-inch cubes. It made her think of the meals they served in mental institutions.
She smoothed down her napkin and looked down at her chipolata sausage, nestled on a bed of polenta. The silver lining, she told herself, is that I’m going to get a good meal out of this.
Michael pointed to her dinner with his knife and laughed. “Looks like a Great Dane did his business there.” A line of drool dribbled down his chin.
I will stand up and excuse myself to go to the bathroom, Meredith thought. And then I just won’t come back.
But if she did that, Granny Ruby would accuse her of deliberately ruining another date. So Meredith began to think of ways to make Michael want to leave of his own volition. She would ask for crayons and start to color on the fancy linens. She would sculpt with her polenta. She would lick her plate and offer to lick his. She would communicate only in mime, or Pig Latin.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” Michael said. “Are you ovulating?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s just that these days, when I look in the mirror, I see Daddy.” He grinned and pointed to his forehead, as if the word had been tattooed there.
Meredith wished for many things in that moment: her grandmother’s head on a pike, patience, lesbian tendencies. Volunteer work with senior citizens, she remembered. She stared at Michael’s plate. “Are you going to eat that?”
“The steak?”
“No, the bone. I wanted to bring it home to my grandmother.” Meredith leaned closer. “She’s in her seventies, practically dead, and it’s cheaper than feeding her.”
Michael choked on his sip of water. Then, recovering, he raised his hand and signaled for the waiter for the check. “You’re finished, aren’t you?”
Meredith folded her napkin on the table. “Oh, yes.”
Ethan now knew what fear felt like: your forehead, being pressed in from all sides, although there was nothing around you. All the hairs on the back of your neck, rising one by one like dominoes in reverse. Your legs going to water, and shaking so hard you had to sit or fall.
“It wasn’t like I was afraid,” Ethan insisted for the hundredth time since yelling out for his uncle the night before. “I mean, it was just weird, you know? To be in the dark all of a sudden?”
Ross sat beside him in the living room, his infrared video equipment hooked into the TV. The picture was grainy and dark, the edges crackling. Plus, since it had been mounted on a tripod, it was boring as all get out. Ethan didn’t know what on earth was interesting about staring at a wall for three hours of tape. In spite of the fact that this was apparently a Very Important Element of paranormal investigation, he could not keep from yawning.
That was something else Uncle Ross had taught him: When you’re in the presence of ghosts, they wear you out.
His uncle was being cool, especially since—well, if he wanted to be honest, Ethan had to admit he’d freaked out when the flashlight went dead and the video camera just shut itself off. The camera, it turned out, had only run to the end of its tape. The flashlight’s batteries were shot.
Now, his mom frowned at the picture on the TV. “Am I missing something?”
“Not yet.” Ross turned to Ethan. “You know what I think? I think it was in the room with you.”
Ethan couldn’t help it; he shivered. Could a ghost hitchhike home with you? Could you catch one, like a cold or the measles? He felt his mother’s arms come around him and he leaned back, lock to key. “I . . . I thought you went outside because you saw something there.”
“No, that turned out to be someone.” Suddenly Ross hit the pause button on the remote. “See those?”
“Fireflies?” Shelby said.
“When was the last time you saw so many fireflies moving around it looked like a snowstorm?” He rewound the tape and pumped up the volume, so that his voice and Ethan’s could be heard again. “This is where I leave,” Ross narrated. His footsteps, on tape, thudded lighter and lighter as he made his way downstairs. “See? Those lights show up just after I go.”
Then the camera went black.
Ross rolled his shoulders until the bones popped. “I think whatever it is came into the room with Ethan when I was outside. Those sparks on the tape—that was energy changing form. And that would explain why the flashlight went out. Ghosts need energy to materialize and move around; this one was using the double A’s in the Maglite.” He watched Ethan stifle another yawn. “And, apparently, whatever force keeps Ethan going.”
But Ethan had been alone in that room, and he hadn’t seen anything. Or had he?
A bathtub. A foot, rising from the bubbles.
The picture rose from the still blue of his mind, then sank to the bottom before he could grab hold. Each of Ethan’s eyelids, by now, easily weighed ten pounds. He heard his mother’s voice, an underwater current. “What are you going to tell the development company?”
But Ethan did not hear his uncle’s answer. He was already dreaming of a beach, of sand so hot it felt sharp as a knife beneath his jitter-bug feet.
Shelby knew that some librarians felt the human brain was like a microfiche file, impossibly tiny images and words on transparent leaves, arranged page by page for a person’s viewing pleasure. But every time she saw those miniature dossiers, she thought that if any part of the body were similarly cataloged, it would be the heart. She imagined autopsies, the organ sliced thin. One sliver would chronicle the way you had cherished a child; one would record the feelings you had for parents and siblings. Another, scarlet, might be etched with moments of passion; angels embracing on the head of a pin. And for those who were lucky, the thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.
Desiderate: to long for.
“Do you need any help?”
Shelby pushed her reading glasses up her nose and turned to the pockmarked clerk of the probate court. “No, thanks. I can
do this in my sleep.” To illustrate, she pulled out the base of the microfiche machine and deftly switched transparencies, so that she could view the next page of the will.
It was Ross who’d made the request for her investigative services—and because he so infrequently asked for help, she agreed. He had wanted her to find out how long the land had been in the Pike family, if there was any record of a Native American settlement on it. Shelby had driven to the municipal building, which housed the police station and the district court, as well as the probate department and the town offices. What she learned was that the property had only belonged to Pike since the 1930s.
There was no record of any Native American ever living there.
Shelby had taken it upon herself to discover how Spencer Pike got the deed to the land. It had not been a real-estate transaction, to her surprise, but rather an inheritance. From his deceased wife.
Shelby hadn’t made a will of her own. It wasn’t like she had all that much, actually—not that Ethan would be left as a tatterdemalian if she was hit by a car on her way out of the court building, but then again, she wasn’t Ivana Trump either. However, the reason she hadn’t bothered to go to a lawyer to have one drawn up had less to do with her assets than her benefactors. Every other parent in the universe left their worldly goods to their children. But what if you knew for a fact that you were going to outlive your son?
I, Mrs. Spencer T. Pike of Comtosook, Vermont, make this my last will, hereby revoking all previous wills and codicils made by me.
Shelby frowned at the date—it had been signed in 1931. The lettering of her signature was delicate and spiderlike. She had signed the will that way too—Mrs. Spencer T. Pike—as if before her marriage she had not existed at all. Shelby had to wade through the legalese, but the intent was fairly straightforward: Mrs. Spencer T. Pike had left everything to her husband. Almost.
I give and devise all of my tangible personal property, including but not limited to my furniture, furnishing, jewelry and automobiles, to my husband, Spencer Pike. I give and devise the real property owned by me located at the crossing of Otter Creek Pass and Montgomery Road, in Comtosook, Chittenden County, State of Vermont, to my issue resulting to my marriage from Spencer Pike, to be held in trust by my executor for those issue until they each reach the age of 21. Such real property shall be held by those issue as joint tenants. If Spencer Pike and I shall have produced no living issue at the time of my death, I give and devise the aforesaid real property to my husband, Spencer Pike.
There was nothing in the will about how a woman with so little sense of self had wound up owning the property in the first place. Nothing about how her husband had been affected by her untimely death; whether he had ever looked at the property that was now his and thought that he would trade every square inch if it brought her back.
Shelby loved words, but she would be the first to tell you they had a habit of letting you down. Most of the time, the words that were not written were the ones you needed most.
She slipped the microfiche out of the machine, slid it into its protective dust jacket, handed it to the clerk, and left the probate office. But she had no sooner stepped off the curb outside than a police cruiser screamed into the circular driveway of the municipal building; coming to a stop so close that Shelby found her hand outstretched, as if that might keep the car from striking her. The cop who got out muttered an apology, but he wasn’t even looking at her as he hurried into the police station.
Shelby shook the whole way to her own car. Promised herself that she would have a will drawn up by the end of the week.
Eli was late. He rushed into the lobby of the station and stuck his head into the dispatch cubicle. “They’re looking for you,” the sergeant said.
“Tell me something I don’t know. Where are they?”
“In the conference room. With the chief.”
Groaning, Eli walked down the hall to find Chief Follensbee sitting with two teenage boys. “Ah, Detective Rochert. Mr. Madigan and Mr. Quinn, here, said that you specifically told them to meet you here at ten-thirty to take down their statements. And yet here it is, past eleven.”
“I’m sorry, Chief,” Eli said, hanging his head. “I got, uh, hung up.” Actually, he’d overslept. After spending most of last night awake, he’d drifted off shortly before dawn. He had been dreaming of the woman who smelled of apples, the same one he’d dreamed of before. Was it any wonder he’d ignored his alarm?
Then, he’d been driving past the Pike property and was stopped by two girls riding their bikes. There was a lady wandering around Montgomery Road, they had said, looking lost. Last year, an elderly woman with Alzheimer’s had driven off in her car and had been found dead of hypothermia two days later in a supermarket parking lot—for that reason alone, Eli had backtracked to the spot the kids had indicated. But whoever they had seen was gone by then, and Eli was more than twenty minutes late.
He sat down across from Jimmy Madigan and Knott Quinn. They lolled in their chairs in their metalhead T-shirts, torn jeans, black boots. High school dropouts, they were kids who floated on the fringe of society. For them to have willingly walked into a police station, they must have had quite a scare. “So you boys say you saw something on the Pike property?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy said. “Three nights ago. We went for a dare, you know, because of what people say is going on there. And that’s when we saw the thing.”
“The thing?”
Jimmy looked at his friend. “We both saw it. It was, like, taller than both of us together. And it had these fangs . . .”
“Teeth,” Knott agreed. “All jaggedy, like a hunting knife.”
“And did this creature speak to you?”
The boys glanced at each other. “See, that’s the weird thing. It looked like it was gonna kill us, you know, but when it opened that mouth it cried like a baby.”
“Cried? Like, tears?”
Knott shook his head. “No, it wailed. Waa, waa.”
“And then it just disappeared,” Jimmy added. “Like smoke.”
“Smoke,” Eli repeated. “Smoke. Interesting.”
“Dude, I know you think we’re making this up, but we’re not. Knott and I both saw it. I mean, that’s gotta count for something.”
“Oh, I believe you saw it. Speaking of seeing things, you guys ever see these?” Eli pulled a small Ziploc bag filled with shriveled mushrooms from his breast pocket.
Knott’s face went white. “Um, truffles?”
“Yeah, truffles,” Eli said. “Is that what you’re growing at home, Knott? Because that’s not what one of Jimmy’s customers told me.”
“What the fuck, man? I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jimmy said.
“Great.” Eli slid two pieces of paper onto the table. “Then you won’t mind when we search your rooms. Because when we find nothing, I won’t be able to charge you with possession with intent to distribute.” He leaned forward, arms folded. “Maybe there is a ghost at the Pike property, and maybe there isn’t. But getting high before you go looking just might stack the odds.”
Tonight, Ross had brought equipment—not only the video camera but also one that took digital stills, as well as a thermal scanner—all ordered over the Internet on Shelby’s credit card, a fact he hadn’t yet broken to his sister. Ethan would have gotten a kick out of the gadgets, but he was home—Shelby’s permissiveness apparently had reached its limit. It was shortly after eleven, about a half-hour before the ghost had appeared to Ethan last time. Ross hunkered down to wait. What he wanted, pure and simple, was to be as fortunate as his nephew had been.
He had set up his tools in a clearing behind the house, one that afforded him a good view of the backyard. Rod van Vleet had succeeded in razing half the house. That meant a spirit would move elsewhere—and there were nineteen acres of land to cover. The fact that Ross happened to start at the same spot where he’d met Lia Beaumont nights ago was, he told himself, just a coincidence.
For a while Ro
ss listened to cricket sonatas and the courting of frogs. There were stars at his neck, tiny bites, and the moon pressed into the small of his back. He had no idea what time it was when he heard footsteps near the house. He glanced at his thermal scanner, but the temperature hadn’t dropped enough to warrant the arrival of a spirit. Yet a moment later, as a figure stepped into his line of vision, his heart began to race.
The security guard from the quarry was not wearing his uniform, but Ross recognized him immediately; there just were not that many centegenarian Native Americans wandering around Comtosook. He was holding what seemed to be a white rose. “You?” Az said, frowning.
Ross shrugged. “I tend to go where the spirit takes me.”
The Indian snorted. “So this time it took you right to working for those leeches.”
“I’m in business for myself,” Ross corrected. “They aren’t paying me a dime.”
The old man seemed to find this admirable, although he continued to scowl. “You’re looking for ghosts again?”
“Yes.”
“What would you do if you came across one?”
“A ghost? I don’t know. I’ve never found one.”
“You think these developers have a plan?”
Ross pictured van Vleet. “I imagine they’ll want me to try to get rid of it.”
Az’s mouth tightened. “Yeah, round them all up and stick them on the Rez. You move them far enough, it’s easy to believe they never existed here at all. Squatters’ rights, they don’t mean a damn, do they?”
Ross didn’t answer. He didn’t know if the old man was expecting one, and he was afraid that whatever he said, it would be the wrong response. “You live around here?” he asked, changing the subject.
Az pointed to a campsite, barely visible across the road. “I come here, sometimes, at night. Senior citizens don’t sleep much,” he said dryly. “Why waste time doing something I’m going to be doing forever, soon enough?” Az started to move away, then turned back at the edge of the clearing. “If you find a ghost, you know, you won’t get rid of it. No matter what Rod van Vleet wants.”
