by Jodi Picoult
“I understand their graves are on the land?”
“Yes.”
Eli tipped his head. “Not at the church cemetery? Years ago you were quite active in the Congregational assembly . . .”
“My daughter was stillborn,” Pike said. “And my wife was dead. I . . . wasn’t ready to let them both go. I wanted them in a place where they could find me, and I could find them.” He turned away, but not before Eli noticed that he was crying.
Nowhere in the original police report was there any mention of the infant’s body. Eli had read this and counted it up to sloppy police work—any self-respecting medical examiner would have conducted an autopsy. On the other hand, if an influential rich man called in to report his wife’s homicide, the last thing an officer was going to want to do was cause him any more suffering. If Pike said the baby had been stillborn, they would take his word for it.
People see what they want to see, Eli knew, and police officers were no different. “You found her,” he repeated.
“I was the one who cut her down. I knew enough to realize that you folks would want to see the way . . . it had been done. But I couldn’t stand to see her like that. It looked like . . .” His voice trailed off. “It looked like she was in pain.”
“What about her father?”
“Harry? He lived on the Hill. He was in Boston at a conference and came home immediately. Never was the same after Cissy was killed . . . drank himself to death two years later.”
He was in Boston. Which ruled him out as a suspect. “Did you see a step stool anywhere?” Eli asked. “Something that your wife might have climbed up on by herself?”
“My wife was murdered,” Pike corrected, his voice dry as flint. “If she committed suicide, then she must have flown up to the rafter—it was ten feet off the ground, and there was nothing for her to stand on to reach it.”
Eli met the old man’s gaze dead on. “I’m just trying to understand what happened, Mr. Pike. With all of the controversy surrounding the sale of your land, we’ve had some new leads regarding Gray Wolf. As far as I’m concerned, this case wasn’t solved to my satisfaction.”
“Mine either.”
Eli waited, aware that silence could exert the strongest pressure, but Pike confessed nothing. A nurse approached, smiling. “Time for physical therapy.”
Eli put his hand on the wheelchair. “Do you have any idea where Gray Wolf might have gone after that night?”
Pike shook his head. “But if you’re looking for him now, Detective, you might as well start in hell.”
Eli stood as the old man was wheeled out. He waited until the nurse turned the corner with the wheelchair, until the other residents seemed to have nodded their heads into the mush on their plates. Then he removed a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, opened up a Ziploc bag he’d taken from home, and plucked the old man’s water glass off his tray.
In Comtosook, things started returning to normal. Clocks that had stopped running at the stroke of midnight weeks earlier began ticking again; the swings at the playground no longer moaned when a child sat down; butterflies that had gone gray bled with fresh color. Cautious mothers crept out of the house and let their toddlers play on the sidewalks. The glowing beetles that had infested the birch trees near the town offices vanished. Images that had slipped right off the paper in photo development shops now stuck fast, proof of change.
But the local undertaker, who had grown accustomed to finding one perfect peony inside the mouths of his clients, still checked behind their lips and teeth out of habit. Abe Huppinworth swept the porch of the Gas & Grocery every morning although it was bare as a bone. Middle-aged businessmen who, of late, had overslept on the tails of dreams now woke to their alarm clocks and pulled the covers over their heads, as if finding fantasy might be that simple. And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.
Shelby barely made it out of the attorney’s office before running to the bushes and vomiting. Afterward, she wiped her mouth on a Kleenex and sank to the curb, berating herself. Having a will drawn up was perfectly normal, something any adult would do at a given point in her life, especially when she had a son.
Except Shelby knew, for a fact, that the estate and its entirety that she had just signed away to Ethan would never be his.
Shelby had gone into labor in the middle of a thunderstorm. Thomas drove to the hospital in their old convertible, the one with the top that got stuck when open and was stuck even then, so that on the highway ripped with contractions, she found herself being soaked. When they took her newborn and placed him on her chest, boneless and sticky as a tree frog, Shelby could not tear her eyes away. “Look,” she had said to Thomas, over and over. “Have you ever seen anything like him?”
Ethan had been the most beautiful boy. Strong and dark-haired, with the fists of a fighter and eyes as pale as turquoise, he turned heads from the moment Shelby brought him home. “That,” people would say, stopping her on the street, “is a perfect baby.” Ethan’s defects, it turned out, were the ones you could not see.
The first time he’d been badly burned by the sun, he was six weeks old. Thomas and Shelby had been living in New Hampshire at the time, near the shore, and drove out to the Plum Island Bird Sanctuary in October, when no one was on the beach. On this long, desolate stretch of sand, with seagulls stealing their crackers, they lay a sleeping Ethan down and kissed, their hands moving beneath each other’s sweaters and their hair going stiff with the salt in the air. “I feel like a high school kid,” Shelby said when Thomas unbuttoned her jeans and slipped his hand between her legs. And Thomas had laughed. “High school kids don’t own infant car seats,” he’d answered.
Lost in each other, they hadn’t noticed the alarming mulberry of their baby’s skin, deepening under the eye of the sun. They did not realize that what they thought was a rash might actually be blisters. And late that night, when not even cool compresses could soothe a screaming Ethan, Shelby understood that this moment was only the beginning.
The doctors had never been able to tell her whether it was her DNA or Thomas’s that carried this fatal flaw, but to Shelby, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She assumed that Ethan’s condition was her fault, and because she had not prevented it, she would spend the rest of her life trying to make up for her shortcomings.
Nobody could tell her how long Ethan had left. She asked the dermatologist at every visit, and each time he said that it depended on how much damage had been done to Ethan’s skin before his diagnosis—every minute he’d been outside and uncovered as a baby might have stripped days off his life. Shelby imagined cancers like jellyfish that slipped through the sea and sometimes rose to the surface—you knew they were there, and were dangerous, even if you could not see them at first sight.
How on earth did you lower your baby’s body into the ground and then keep on living?
Shelby buried her face in her hands. Her pocketbook strap fell to the side. In spite of this crisp new will tucked into her pocketbook, it was not Ethan who would sort through her china, her photographs, her old love letters. It was Shelby, who would fold small shirts into smaller squares to pack up to Goodwill, who would open the windows of his bedroom and let free the smell of him until anyone at all, and not this incredibly special boy, might have lived there.
She heard the growling approach of a vehicle, but didn’t look up. In the first place, she was a mess. In the second, she had precious few places where she was allowed nervous breakdowns, and if she used a public street to do so it was no one else’s business. The windows of the car were open; she could hear the twang of a guitar on the radio.
“Ms. Wakeman?” The tires rolled to a stop beside her. Shelby didn’t lift her head at first, until she heard panting. She glanced up out of curiosity, to find the most enormous dog she’d ever seen lolling its head out the window of a black truck. A hand pushed the skull
to the side, revealing the cop who had come to her house last night.
Eli. That was his name.
She swiped at her cheeks, trying to minimize the damage. “Uh, hello.”
She could feel him staring at her. Was this what it felt like for Ethan in sunlight—all this incredible heat rushing to the surface of her skin? To her surprise, though, the policeman didn’t mention the obvious—that a crazy woman was sitting on the curb, bawling. He said, “Watson is on his way to get a cup of coffee.”
“Watson?”
Eli touched the crown of the dog’s head. “Watson.”
Shelby felt her mouth curve into a smile as she stood. “The dog drinks coffee?”
Covering the dog’s floppy ears, ostensibly to keep him from hearing, Eli confided, “He’s trying to stunt his growth.”
At that, a laugh burst out of her. It hung before Shelby, obscene as a belch, and she held her hand to her chest, stunned to realize that she could produce such a sound.
“Watson would be honored if you’d join us.”
Shelby tentatively put her hands on the open frame of the window. “Watson should learn to speak for himself.”
Reaching around the dog, Eli pulled the passenger door handle, so that it swung open in front of Shelby; a red carpet, a beginning. “What can I tell you,” Eli grinned. “He’s shy.”
Ross took a long drag of his cigarette and tossed the butt into the bushes edging the porch. It turned out that being present at the moment you lost someone you loved didn’t make it any easier. It turned out that being numb on the outside didn’t keep you from bleeding internally.
Ross no longer knew what to believe. Could he love Lia, and still love Aimee? Could Aimee have come back, as Lia had, but chosen not to? And if that was the case . . . was the connection he’d thought to be so strong between them not anything special at all?
If he let his mind trip down this road, it negated everything he’d done for the past ten years. Ross had chased after his fiancée—first by courting his own death, later by investigating the paranormal. Yet maybe a relationship he’d chalked up to fate had only been a matter of coincidence. Maybe he’d met Aimee, had loved Aimee, had lost her—simply so that at some point later in his life he would be ghost hunting, and would meet Lia.
But Rod van Vleet was going to get rid of Lia’s ghost. Maybe not the first time he got some hack to try—maybe not even the second—but eventually, there was a good chance that Lia, wherever she was now, would leave. After all, what did she have to stay for, now that she knew who . . . and what . . . she was?
If finding a ghost had taken Ross several years, he imagined that locating a specific one who didn’t want to be found would take him several lifetimes.
Why not end this one, then, and start the next?
He stared at the cigarette burn he’d made on his flesh weeks ago. Just a few inches farther down his arm was the scar that reminded him how close he’d come, once, to dying. It wouldn’t be hard to do it again. There were pills as bright as marbles in Shelby’s bathrooms. There was a Swiss Army knife in Ethan’s nightstand drawer. He had canvassed the house weeks ago, a traveler making sure he knew the quickest path of exit in case of emergency.
Except, Ross knew, he wouldn’t pass easily to the other side. He’d become a ghost, held to this world by the pain he’d have caused his sister, by what he didn’t do for Lia.
Maybe he would help Eli Rochert after all. Maybe then, if Lia was somewhere where she could see him, she would have reason to stay . . . no matter what van Vleet did to make her go.
Frustrated, he jammed his hands into his shorts, and felt his fingers brush something. From each pocket he withdrew a bright copper penny, dated 1932, so shiny it might have been minted that morning. He had a vision of himself in a coffin, these pennies on his eyes, payment for crossing the River Styx. Would Lia be waiting? Would Aimee?
“What are those?”
Lost in his thoughts, Ross was startled by the sound of his nephew’s voice. “What are you doing up?”
Ethan was wrapped in clothing from head to toe, even though the porch was protected from sunlight. “I don’t know. You don’t sleep, either, do you?” Ethan approached, looking at the pennies. “Those and a dollar’ll get you a cup of coffee.”
“When did kids turn so cynical?”
“When the world started going to crap,” Ethan answered. “We’re Generation Z.”
Ross raised his brows. “What comes after that?”
“I guess they just start over again.” He sat down on the porch swing and set it rocking, as Ross lit another cigarette. “Can I have one?”
“What do you think?” Ross shook his head. The very things that branded him such a failure in the eyes of society made him seem positively cool to boys Ethan’s age.
“Mom says you shouldn’t smoke around me.”
“Then don’t tell her.”
“I won’t.” He grinned. “Besides, dying of lung cancer instead would be a surprise.”
Ross leaned against the porch railing. He was exhausted; he couldn’t sleep if he tried; and now he had to make polite conversation with a nine-year-old when he really wanted to go into hibernation or stick his head in a gas oven or both.
“I heard you and that cop talking about a ghost last night.”
“You weren’t supposed to be listening.”
Ethan shrugged. “I guess there really is a place you go to . . . afterward,” he said. “What do you think it’s like there?”
A small ache winced across Ross’s breastbone at the realization that Ethan wasn’t asking out of curiosity, but preparation. He remembered the first time he’d held Ethan as an infant, how he had looked into his blue-black eyes and thought, I already know you. “I don’t know, bud. I’m not expecting harps and angels.”
“Maybe it’s different for everyone,” Ethan suggested. “Like, I’d have a half-pipe and get to be out in the sun all the time. Enough awesome stuff so that I totally forget about what it used to be like down here. What would you want?”
What sort of world order would let a kid like Ethan die— a kid with his whole life in front of him—yet keep Ross alive and miserable, although there was nothing left for him and never would be? This world, which he would throw away in a heartbeat, was something rare and precious to people who could not afford to take it for granted.
Purgatory, he thought, was just a synonym for tomorrow.
Ross sat down on the porch swing and slipped an arm around Ethan’s narrow shoulders. “What I’d want,” he said, “is to come visit.”
Like Lia had.
“I can’t believe it.” Shelby stood on the porch at the Gas & Grocery and watched Eli’s bloodhound lap tepid coffee from a borrowed bowl.
“Well, this is easy. It’s when he starts getting the urge for sweetmeats and escargots that it gets to be a drag.”
Watson seemed to have an excess of skin. It fell over his forehead in a roll that nearly obliterated his eyes. He glanced up at Shelby and poked his snout into her stomach. “Watson!” Eli scolded.
“It’s all right.” Shelby rubbed behind the dog’s ears. “He just thinks I’m esculent.”
“Would that be a good thing?”
“It means edible.”
“Smart dog,” Eli murmured, lifting his own cup of coffee to his mouth and swallowing his words.
They were distracted by a station wagon, crunching on the gravel and rolling to a stop. A handsome man with a white streak in his hair and a woman dressed as flamboyantly as a tzigane stepped out of the car. “For the love of God,” the woman said. “Haven’t these towns ever heard of Ralph’s?”
“Relax, Maylene. All I need is a Sterno and matches. They must stock them for the folks who don’t have electricity yet.”
Shelby took a combative step forward. She couldn’t stand city folk who came to Comtosook expecting archetypal Vermonters to wear overalls and go barefoot, or possess only seven teeth, or raise Holsteins in their living rooms. “
Excuse me,” she began, but Eli grabbed her hand and every single word flew out of her head.
“She wanted to say that you’ll find the Sternos on the third aisle on the right,” he finished smoothly. The couple nodded at them, surprised, no doubt, to find someone in town with an IQ in the double digits, and entered the general store. “That’s Curtis Warburton,” Eli said, the moment they were out of sight. “He hosts a paranormal cable show about hauntings.”
“I know. My brother worked for him.” Shelby hesitated. “But that doesn’t make him any less of a moron.”
“A famous moron, though. And one who probably came to Comtosook for a reason. Watson!” The dog raised his massive head. “Go keep tabs on them.”
To Shelby’s amazement, Watson padded into the store. “Do I pay taxes for his salary?”
“He comes cheap. A good steak every now and then.”
“He can’t possibly tell you what the Warburtons do in there . . .”
“Of course not,” Eli said. “But how else was I going to get a minute alone with you?”
Shelby felt the blush start at her throat and spread upward. She took another sip from her coffee cup, and realized it was empty. “I should walk back home. Ethan’s there with Ross, and you, uh, probably have a lot to do with the Pike case . . .”
“Your brother told you?” Shelby nodded. “Then you also know it’s not a priority for the department.”
His eyes did not leave her face. Even when Shelby tried to turn away, he pulled her back, a moon beholden to gravity. “What does that mean?”
Eli smiled slowly. “That I’ve got all the time in the world.”
WITNESS STATEMENT
Date: September 19, 1932
Time: 11:36 PM
INTERVIEW OF: John “Gray Wolf” Delacour
INTERVIEW BY: Officer Duley Wiggs and Detective F.
Olivette of the Comtosook Police Department
LOCATION: Comtosook PD
SUBJECT:
1. Q. Can you state your name for the record, and your date of birth?
