by Jodi Picoult
The area was examined for evidence. A leather pouch, strung on a length of rawhide, was found on the porch to the left rear of the body. Upon inspection it was noted that the rawhide thong was snapped. The pouch was found to contain some type of herbal matter. Underneath the porch a poplar-serpentine pipe was located. It was noted that no means by which the victim might have reached the beam herself was found at the scene.
Professor Pike reported that he married Cecelia in 1931. He confirmed his occupation as an instructor of anthropology at the University of Vermont. He stated that Mrs. Pike was nine months pregnant and had gone into labor on the evening of September 18th. According to Professor Pike, his wife was assisted by their house girl, and gave birth to a stillborn female infant at 11 PM. He stated that Mrs. Pike was both depressed and exhausted after giving birth. According to Professor Pike, his wife went to bed near midnight. Reportedly, this was the last time that Mrs. Pike was seen alive.
Professor Pike reported that after his wife retired for the evening he went to his study and had a few drinks. He estimated that he consumed six scotch on the rocks. He reported that he fell asleep in his chair in the study and did not awaken until approximately 9 AM. Reportedly at that time Professor Pike went to check on his wife and found her bedroom empty, and the window broken. Professor Pike stated that he then canvassed the property for his wife, before locating her hanging from the beam on the porch of the ice shed. Professor Pike reported that he used a knife to cut his wife down from the beam.
The recovered pipe and pouch were shown to Professor Pike. He recognized them as the property of an Abenaki man named Gray Wolf. He stated that he had to forcibly evict Gray Wolf from his property on September 18th at noon. Professor Pike stated that he had seen Gray Wolf in the company of his wife, harassing her. Professor Pike reported that he knew the man to be an itinerant who was recently released from prison after serving time for a murder conviction in Burlington. Professor Pike stated that he confronted Gray Wolf and insisted that he leave their property. Reportedly, Gray Wolf had to be thrown off the premises.
Professor Pike also could not account for the whereabouts of his house girl, who was not present when he woke up at 9 AM. Her possessions, however, were still in the house. Her room showed no signs of struggle. Professor Pike reported that the house girl, fourteen, could not have physically been strong enough to harm his wife. He reported that her weak constitution may have caused her to run off upon finding his wife hanging, and that he was not surprised.
The coroner, Dr. J. E. DuBois, arrived at 10 AM and inspected the victim’s body. His initial findings suggest death by asphyxiation, consistent with hanging.
Eli leafed through several other pages. Descriptions of the house, of various items in Cissy Pike’s bedroom. Signs of forced entry and struggle. The coroner’s report. A set of inked prints, taken postmortem from the victim. An interview with Pike, and another with Gray Wolf, who had voluntarily come to the station for questioning. A statement by the men who served as Gray Wolf’s alibi for the night. A warrant for the arrest of Gray Wolf, secured from a judge a day later, which had never been carried out because Gray Wolf had simply disappeared.
Eli glanced at the rope, at the nightgown, at the pipe. At the very least, he could send these out for DNA analysis, to see if Gray Wolf had left any record of his actions behind.
Eli absently stroked Watson’s head. It was possible that Gray Wolf had left town because he knew he was going to be convicted, again, of murder. But it was also possible that Gray Wolf had never been found because he’d been on the Otter Creek Pass property the whole time, six feet under—courtesy of Spencer Pike.
Which would mean, ironically, that it was an Indian burial ground.
As Ross watched heat lightning connect the stars like a dot-to-dot puzzle, he thought about the first time he’d died. He really could not remember much of it, except for that instant he’d looked up at the broken sky, seen his opportunity, and had spread his arms wide in welcome. If pressed, he could recall the burning smell that was his hair; the stiffness of his limbs as the current coursed through him. He would have liked to be able to tell of crossing to the other side, of that bright white light, but if these things had happened he knew nothing of it.
The sky ripped again, a jagged tear that stayed visible for moments after the strike of lightning was gone. This time, it was followed by the tumble of thunder. On his forehead, Ross felt the first drop.
There were certain universal rules to outdoor paranormal investigation, based on temperature and weather conditions. You didn’t want to find yourself taking spectral photos of what turned out to be the frost of your own breath; for the same reason, rain and falling snow were to be avoided at all costs. Ross had blatantly ignored these rules from time to time because electrical storms provided so much atmospheric energy that spirits could materialize much more easily than normal. The Warburtons had once been called down by the State of Connecticut after a lightning storm, because a municipal truck had struck a woman running across a highway. Although there had been six eyewitnesses to the accident, and a large dent remained in the fender of the truck, the lady who’d been hit had simply vanished. It was the energy in the air, Curtis had reasoned, that made this spirit so solid she could literally leave her mark.
Ross had been set up in his little clearing since suppertime, hoping that his discussions with Spencer Pike and Eli Rochert might help him conjure whatever was haunting this land, but the rain was going to thwart his plans. He whipped off his jacket and wrapped it around the video camera for protection. A wide line of lightning swaggered out of the sky and touched down just a few feet away, making the wet ground hiss.
The last thing he wanted to do was leave; it was only eight o’clock and it had been hard enough sneaking onto the land. He’d had to go through the woods, since media vans were parked along the front edge of the property. Reporters had multiplied like roaches since the New York Times had broken the story about the Comtosook acreage, and avoiding them was becoming more and more challenging for Ross. Packing up for the night meant hauling his equipment back the way he had come, this time in the middle of a deluge.
Ross strapped his camera bag over his shoulder and tucked his flashlight into the pocket of his cargo shorts, then ducked his head and began to walk into the woods. The frozen ground, now wet, slipped beneath his feet. When he crashed into a person hurrying just as hard into the woods as he was hurrying out of it, Ross swore under his breath. He didn’t have to give up his cover. He’d say he was a reporter too; who would know, with his camera?
He raised his face, an excuse on his lips, and found himself staring at Lia.
What Eli had noticed, lately, was that certain dog food smelled like meat. Even though it wasn’t—he knew, because he’d read the ingredients on the can—they processed it in such a way that all you had to do was stick your face close like a feed horse and you conjured up images of chops and steaks, roasts and flame-broiled burgers. Watson looked happy enough, eating so greedily his ears kept falling into the bowl. Maybe Eli could call up Blue Seal and find out what kind of gravy they used. Maybe he could pour it over his damn tofu.
The phone rang, and he reached for the receiver. “Eli,” said a female voice. “What are you doing home on a Saturday night?”
He smiled. “What are you doing at work, Frankie?”
Frankie Martine was a DNA researcher, and an old friend. He’d met her at a Twin States Forensics Conference, where she’d beat him playing Quarters. She lived in Maine, now, and although Eli had said numerous times he was going to visit her, he hadn’t actually done it until two days ago, when he’d personally brought her the evidence from the Pike murder. It was his only option, really—his own boss would never condone spending taxpayer money on DNA tests that were going to go nowhere, and Frankie had agreed to do it as a personal favor.
“The reason I’m at work is because my so-called friends keep me chained to my lab,” she said. “How quickly we forget.”
Eli sat down. “Got anything good for me?”
“Depends on your definition. I managed to get DNA off the saliva that was on the pipe. I also lifted DNA off the rope, from skin cells. It seemed to be a mixture of two distinct profiles. The first, taken from the loop, belonged to a female— your victim, I’m assuming. The second came from the end of the rope and belonged to a male.”
“Bingo.”
“Not quite,” Frankie corrected. “The DNA belonged to a guy other than the one whose saliva is on that pipe.”
Eli’s mind spun: assuming the pipe belonged to Gray Wolf, and if Gray Wolf had hanged Cissy Pike, shouldn’t his DNA be on the rope? If it wasn’t, was that enough to vindicate him? And if it wasn’t his DNA on the rope with the victim’s . . . whose was it? The investigating cop’s? Spencer Pike’s?
“Eli, Eli.” Frankie’s voice sliced through his reverie. “I can hear the gears going.”
“Sorry.” He shook his head to clear it. “What about the medicine pouch?”
“The what?”
“The little leather thingy.”
“Oh, that,” Frankie said. “I keep getting the wrong results. Something is getting screwed up in the testing, I think.”
“How do you know they’re the wrong results, if you don’t have any answers yet?”
“They’re just weird, that’s all.”
Eli frowned. “Weird like: it’s alien DNA . . . or weird like: you can’t get results because it’s so goddamned old?”
“Weird like: leave me alone so I can give you a report.”
“When?” Eli demanded.
“Two minutes later than it would have been if you’d let me get off the phone.”
“Thanks, Frankie.”
“Don’t thank me,” she said. “By the time I’m done, you may not want to.”
Ethan poked his head into the bathroom, where his mother was taking a bubble bath. “Come on in,” she said, and he crept inside, studiously keeping his eyes on the tile floor. She was covered with bubbles from neck to toe, but still. This was his mother . . . and that word, along with naked, felt weird jammed together.
“Eth,” she said, laughing, “I’m perfectly decent.”
He risked a glance: she was. Her face was the only body part rising above the froth of foam. “I couldn’t get this open,” Ethan said, thrusting a jar of peanut butter toward her.
“Ah.” His mother took it, twisted, handed it back. The sides of the jar were soapy now. “What are you up to?”
“Making ants-on-a-log. For during the movie.” They’d rented something lame and Disneyfied; Ethan was hoping he could convince his mother to watch Die Hard II instead, which was on one of the cable stations. He glanced up at the window, streaked with rain. “It bites that we can’t go outside.”
“Ethan.”
“Well, it still bites, even if I’m not supposed to say that.”
When the doorbell rang, they both jumped. It wasn’t just that someone shouldn’t be dropping by at nine-thirty on a Saturday night. It was that nobody dropped by, ever. Ethan watched his mother’s face go as white as the bubbles surrounding her. “Something happened to Ross,” she whispered, and she lurched upright in the tub.
Ethan turned away before he had to see, well, her. She shrugged into her robe and wrapped a blue towel around her hair, then hurried down the stairs.
He could have followed her. The celery and raisins were on the counter, waiting. But instead Ethan found his mind frozen on the one piece of his mother he had glimpsed before he turned away—a foot rising from the suds.
He had no idea why, but seeing that . . . it reminded him of the night he’d gone ghost hunting with his uncle.
In his wildest imaginings, Eli could not have ever pictured himself collaborating with a paranormal investigator. In his opinion, evidence was something that could be held in your hand, not in your head. But Frankie’s call tonight had changed everything. The alleged murderer’s DNA had not been on the rope—yet someone else’s DNA had been. Neither of these circumstances alone was damning or absolving . . . but taken in context, they might be. Eli needed to speak to someone who could fill in some of the historical blanks. That someone was Ross Wakeman.
He stood on the porch, the rain pounding the metal roof overhead, and rang the doorbell a second time. Wakeman had left his phone number and address behind, “just in case,” he had told Eli, “you change your mind about reopening that case.” Eli’s keen eye had already noticed the skateboard propped up against the wall, and the pair of yellow garden clogs next to them. It surprised Eli; he had good instincts, and Ross Wakeman hadn’t struck him as a family man. He knew that someone was home; the car was in the driveway and across a lighted window upstairs, Eli had seen a moving silhouette. He rapped hard on the door. “Hello?”
There was the systematic click of locks being undone. A flash of blue crossed the sidelight window; a terry-cloth sleeve. The door swung open, and an apprehensive voice addressed him. “Can I help you?”
But Eli could not respond. He could not do anything but stare, speechless, at the woman who’d been in his dreams.
Ethan dipped his hand into the bubbles and blew them gently. He had smelled something like this when the lights had gone out in the haunted house. He got up from where he was sitting and turned out the light, pitching the bathroom into darkness. Now, with the scent of flowers all around, and the humidity pressing in, it was just like it had been that night.
His uncle had asked him if he’d seen anything, and Ethan had said no, he was hiding. But he’d peeked out once, and there had been something. A movement in the dark. At first he had thought it was his uncle again, coming back, but that had not been the case. Ethan had found himself straining to see the profile in front of him, thin as fishing line. A face, or maybe not a face, he couldn’t quite hold onto it then or now.
There was only one thing Ethan was certain of, one point that stuck like a knife thrown to its mark: that flower smell had been there, and then it had gone. Whatever it had been had followed Uncle Ross outside, instead of the other way around.
A streak of lightning broke the spell. “You came back,” Ross said, not noticing that Lia’s eyes were red and raw, that she was shaking her head. She had returned to him, and for this small miracle alone, he would do what it took to keep her there. He was certain, in that moment, that he could face down a hundred reporters. He could take on her husband. He could stop the thunder, if necessary.
“I came to say good-bye,” Lia answered.
Ross fielded the words like a blow. He could not explain to himself why he felt the way he did around this woman; why his skin hummed in her presence and the tips of his fingers went cold. He’d believed, on some level, that Lia had felt this too. For years, he had been looking for the answer to Aimee’s death; only recently had he learned that he’d been asking the wrong question.
Before you could grab onto something else, you had to let go.
“No.” The rain matted Ross’s hair and ran down his face. He did not know how to make Lia understand that a parting was a joint decision, that a person could not leave you, if you were not willing to release them. So instead, he reached for her.
Ross held her face between his hands and kissed her. He tasted doubt on her tongue and pain on the roof of her mouth. He swallowed these, and drank again. Consumed, she had no choice but to see how empty he was inside, and how, sip by sip, she filled him.
The storm whipped stronger, sparks arcing blue and thunder drumming beneath their feet. Lia broke away from him, her eyes wide and wet. “Wait,” Ross said, but she turned and started to run through the woods.
He followed her like a hunter, eyes marking the flashes of white from her collar. She raced across the slick, snowy clearing where Ross had done most of his research, darting between mounds of dirt that had sprung up from nowhere once again. She disappeared between a fissure of trees.
Ross had not been on this part of the property before, at least not th
at he could remember. His lungs were too tight, every breath a pinch, but he did not stop running. Lia had turned onto a narrow path, one overgrown with young pines and frozen scrub brush. Thorns caught at Ross’s shoelaces and scraped up his calves, and then suddenly, miraculously, gave way. Beneath his feet the ground had thawed, a small patch covered with dozens of trampled white roses.
Lia glanced down at them too, but she didn’t stop. And Ross, who had not taken his eyes off her, watched her legs pass directly through two stone markers, the same ones he smacked into a moment later with his boot, sending him sprawling face-first into the mud.
Winded and dazed, he struggled to his knees. It took another flash of lightning for him to be able to make out the names on the gravestones. LILY PIKE, SEPTEMBER 19, 1932. And on the larger one: CECILIA BEAUMONT PIKE, NOVEMBER 9, 1913–SEPTEMBER 19, 1932.
Ross glanced up to find Lia staring at the graves, too. Slowly, she reached out to touch the smaller stone, and her hand moved right through it. She looked at Ross, stunned.
Cissy Pike. Cecilia. Lia.
Ross had been told of ghosts who did not know they were ghosts. He’d met paranormal investigators who had been bitten, hit, slapped, and shoved by spirits. He had always assumed that the first ghost he saw would be transparent, a storybook specter, but when there was enough energy to warrant it, ghosts could seem as solid as anyone.
Ross, an insomniac, had slept like a baby after seeing Lia. He’d shivered in her presence. It had been physical attraction, in the most elemental sense: what he’d felt was a spirit, stealing his heat.
“Ross,” Lia said, and he heard the word in his mind, unspoken. “Ross?” Over the gravestone, her gravestone, she extended her hand.
Even as he reached for her, he knew this would only bring him pain. Lia’s fingers sent chills up his arm. Her features grew transparent. Ross wiped the rain from his eyes and forced himself to watch, so that this time he would know the very moment he’d been left behind.
