Mad Honey: A Novel by Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan Read Free Book Online

help the pounding in my head. But I get distracted by the big butcher block with knives sitting right there on the countertop. How very, very sharp a knife is.
    The doorbell rings. For a second I just stand there, listening to the quiet. Then, there’s a knock that echoes the throb in my head. Whoever has come to visit is not going away.

OLIVIA2
    DECEMBER 7, 2018
    Three hours after
    The police department is an unremarkable square building hunkered on the edge of town, the kind of place you do not notice unless you need it, which in Adams means filing a complaint because your neighbor cut down a tree over your property line, or reporting a pothole that bottomed out your car, or taking the Boy Scouts on a tour of the facility. I remember once asking my father what the officers did all day, since crime was basically nonexistent up here. “Only the crimes you can see, ” he said cryptically, and it wasn’t until years later, when I was married, that I understood what he had meant.
    I pull into the tiny visitor parking lot so fast that my truck straddles the two spots. I realize that I have literally run out of my house without taking a purse, my license, anything. Inside, there is a wall of Plexiglas with an officer and a dispatch operator sitting behind it. To my left is a locked door. Behind it, somewhere, is my son.
    “I don’t have any ID but I’m Asher Fields’s mother; he doesn’t have the same last name as me because I’m divorced, and he called to say he’s being questioned—”
    “Whoa.” The officer holds up a hand and speaks through a tinny speaker. “Take a breath.”
    I do. “My son is here,” I begin, and the locked door to my left opens.
    “I’ve got her, Mac,” a voice says.
    Lieutenant Newcomb is the sole detective in the small AdamsPD, but long before that he was Mike and he took me to my junior prom. I knew, when I came back here, that he had never left; our paths had crossed a few times—at a sidewalk market where I was selling honey and he was on security detail; at town Christmas tree lightings; once when I spun out on black ice and my truck hit a guardrail. There’s gray in his black hair now, and lines at the corners of his eyes, but superimposed over this man is a flicker of a boy in a pale blue tuxedo, chasing a runaway hubcap on the shoulder of the road while I waited and twisted a corsage on my wrist.
    “Asher—”
    “—is fine,” Mike interrupts. He holds the door to the interior of the station open, so that I can walk through. “But he’s pretty worked up.”
    “He said that Lily was…” I can’t even shape my mouth around the word.
    “She was taken to the hospital. I haven’t heard anything else, yet. I’m hoping Asher might help us figure out what happened.”
    “Was he there?”
    “He was found holding her body.”
    Body .
    Mike stops walking, and I do, too. “He asked me to call you, and I didn’t think it could hurt.”
    Asher isn’t a minor, so they didn’t have to wait for me before taking his statement. I realize Mike is doing me a favor—maybe because we have a history, maybe because Asher is so upset. On the phone with me, Asher’s voice had been a saw, serrated with shock. “Thank you,” I say.
    He leads me to a room with a closed door and turns to me. “You should prepare yourself,” Mike says. “It’s not his blood.”
    With that, he opens the door.
    Asher is huddled in a plastic chair, his tall body curved like a question mark, one knee restlessly bobbing. When he looks up, I see his shirt, streaked red. His eyes are swollen and raw. “Mom?” he says, in a voice so small that I swell forward, folding him into my arms, cocooning him with my body, as if I could turn back time.
----
    —
    ASHER IS FIDGETING, frustrated. Every time there is a noise in the hall, his head swivels hopefully to the doorway, as if he expects someone to walk in with the information that everything is fine, that Lily is all right. A foot away, on the table, is