29.

62 mm M AT T L A M I N AT I O N

JODI PICOULT
Alice Metcalf was a devoted mother, loving wife and
accomplished scientist who studied grief among elephants.
Yet it’s been a decade since she disappeared under mysterious
circumstances, leaving behind her small daughter, husband,
and the animals to which she devoted her life. All signs
point to abandonment—or worse.
Still Jenna—now thirteen years old and truly orphaned by
a father maddened by grief—steadfastly refuses to believe
in her mother’s desertion. So she decides to approach the
two people who might still be able to help her find Alice:
a disgraced psychic named Serenity Jones, and Virgil
Stanhope, the cynical detective who first investigated her
mother’s disappearance and the strange, possibly linked
death of one of her mother’s coworkers. Nothing will replace
Together these three lonely souls will discover truths a mother’s love
destined to forever change their lives. Deeply moving and
suspenseful, Leaving Time is a radiant exploration of the
enduring love between mothers and daughters.

JODI PICOULT is the author of over twenty novels. Her

most recent, The Storyteller, Lone Wolf and Sing You Home,
have all been number one on the Australian and New
Zealand fiction bestseller lists. Jodi lives in New Hampshire
with her husband and three children.

Read more about Jodi on her website:

www.jodipicoult.com.au

Cover design: Alissa Dinallo

Cover photograph: © Steve Peet/Trevillion Images
Author photograph: Adam Bouska
The number one international bestseller
FICTION
Bh2433M-ReadingCopies.indd iii 2/04/14 1:22 PM
 First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2014 by Allen & Unwin
First published in the United States in 2014 by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random
House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House company, New York
Copyright © Jodi Picoult 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter
or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational
institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body
that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia)
under the Act.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgement is given for permission to reprint ‘The Elephant’ from
Natural History by Dan Chiasson, copyright © 2005 by Dan Chiasson. Used by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Allen & Unwin
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Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available

from the National Library of Australia
www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74331 721 1 (pb)
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Internal design by Susan Turner

Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

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FSC® promotes environmentally responsible,
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C009448
management of the world’s forests.

Bh2433M-ReadingCopies.indd iv 28/07/14 9:52 AM

 P ro l o g u e

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 J e n na
f

S ome people used to believe that there was an elephant grave-

yard—­a place that sick and old elephants would travel to to die.
They’d slip away from their herds and would lumber across the dusty
landscape, like the titans we read about in seventh grade in Greek
Mythology. Legend said the spot was in Saudi Arabia; that it was the
source of a supernatural force; that it contained a book of spells to
bring about world peace.
Explorers who went in search of the graveyard would follow
dying elephants for weeks, only to realize they’d been led in circles.
Some of these voyagers disappeared completely. Some could not re-
member what they had seen, and not a single explorer who claimed to
have found the graveyard could ever locate it again.
Here’s why: The elephant graveyard is a myth.
True, researchers have found groups of elephants that died in the
same vicinity, many over a short period of time. My mother, Alice,
would have said there’s a perfectly logical reason for a mass burial site:
a group of elephants who died all at once due to lack of food or water;
a slaughter by ivory hunters. It’s even possible that the strong winds in
Africa could blow a scattering of bones into a concentrated pile. Jenna,
she would have told me, there’s an explanation for everything you see.
There is plenty of information about elephants and death that is
not fable but instead cold, hard science. My mother would have been

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 4 JODI PICOULT

able to tell me that, too. We would have sat, shoulder to shoulder,

beneath the massive oak where Maura liked to shade herself, watch-
ing the elephant pick up acorns with her trunk and pitch them. My
mother would rate each toss like an Olympic judge. 8.5 . . . 7.9. Ooh!
A perfect 10.
Maybe I would have listened. But maybe, too, I would have just
closed my eyes. Maybe I would have tried to memorize the smell of
bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the way she absentmindedly braided
my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of green grass.
Maybe the whole time I would have been wishing there really was
an elephant graveyard, except not just for elephants. Because then I’d
be able to find her.

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 Alice
7

W hen I was nine—­before I grew up and became a scientist—­I

thought I knew everything, or at least I wanted to know ev-
erything, and in my mind there was no difference between the two. At
that age, I was obsessed with animals. I knew that a group of tigers was
called a streak. I knew that dolphins were carnivores. I knew that gi-
raffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were a
thousand times more powerful than the same weight of human mus-
cle. I knew that white polar bears had black skin beneath their fur, and
that jellyfish had no brains. I knew all these facts from the Time-­Life
monthly animal fact cards that I had received as a birthday gift from
my pseudo-stepfather, who had moved out a year ago and now lived
in San Francisco with his best friend, Frank, who my mother called
“the other woman” when she thought I wasn’t listening.
Every month new cards arrived in the mail, and then one day, in
October 1977, the best card of all arrived: the one about elephants. I
cannot tell you why they were my favorite animals. Maybe it was my
bedroom, with its green shag jungle carpet and the wallpaper border
of cartoon pachyderms dancing across the walls. Maybe it was the fact
that the first movie I’d ever seen, as a toddler, was Dumbo. Maybe it
was because the silk lining inside my mother’s fur coat, the one she
had inherited from her own mother, was made from an Indian sari
and printed with elephants.

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 6 JODI PICOULT

From that Time-­Life card, I learned the basics about elephants.

They were the largest land animals on the planet, sometimes weigh-
ing more than six tons. They ate three to four hundred pounds of
food each day. They had the longest pregnancy of any land mammal—­
twenty-­two months. They lived in breeding herds, led by a female
matriarch, often the oldest member of the group. She was the one
who decided where the group went every day, when they took a rest,
where they ate, and where they drank. Babies were raised and pro-
tected by all the female relatives in the herd, and traveled with them,
but when males were about thirteen years old, they left—­sometimes
preferring to wander on their own and sometimes gathering with
other males in a bull group.
But those were facts that everyone knew. I, on the other hand, be-
came obsessed and dug a little deeper, trying to find out everything I
could at the school library and from my teachers and books. So I also
could tell you that elephants got sunburned, which is why they would
toss dirt on their backs and roll in the mud. Their closest living rela-
tive was the rock hyrax, a tiny, furry thing that looked like a guinea
pig. I knew that just like a human baby sucks its thumb to calm itself
down, an elephant calf might sometimes suck its trunk. I knew that in
1916, in Erwin, Tennessee, an elephant named Mary was tried and
hanged for murder.
In retrospect I am sure my mother got tired of hearing about el-
ephants. Maybe that is why, one Saturday morning, she woke me be-
fore the sun came up and told me we were going on an adventure.
There were no zoos near where we lived in Connecticut, but the For-
est Park Zoo in Springfield, Massachusetts, had a real, live elephant—­
and we were going to see her.
To say I was excited would be an understatement. I peppered my
mother with elephant jokes for hours:
What’s beautiful, gray, and wears glass slippers? Cinderelephant.
Why are elephants wrinkled? They don’t fit on the ironing board.
How do you get down from an elephant? You don’t. You get down from
a goose.

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 LEAVING TIME 7

Why do elephants have trunks? Because they’d look funny with glove
compartments.
When we got to the zoo, I raced along the paths until I found
myself standing in front of Morganetta the elephant.
Who looked nothing like what I had imagined.
This was not the majestic animal featured on my Time-­Life card,
or in the books I had studied. For one thing, she was chained to a
giant concrete block in the center of her enclosure, so that she couldn’t
walk very far in any direction. There were sores on her hind legs from
the shackles. She was missing one eye, and she wouldn’t look at me
with the other. I was just another person who had come to stare at her,
in her prison.
My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged down
a zookeeper, who said that Morganetta had once been in local pa-
rades, and had done stunts like competing against undergrads in a
tug-­o’-­war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten unpredictable
and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visitors with her trunk
if they came too close to her cage. She had broken a caregiver’s wrist.
I started to cry.
My mother bundled me back to the car for the four-­hour drive
home, although we had only been at the zoo for ten minutes.
“Can’t we help her?” I asked.
This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After a
trip to the library, I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote to the
mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, asking him to give Morganetta
more space, and more freedom.
He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response to The Boston
Globe, which published it, and then a reporter called to do a story on
the nine-­year-­old who had convinced the mayor to move Morganetta
into the much larger buffalo enclosure at the zoo. I was given a special
Concerned Citizen award at my elementary school assembly. I was
invited back to the zoo for the grand opening to cut the red ribbon
with the mayor. Flashbulbs went off in my face, blinding me, as Mor-
ganetta roamed behind us. This time, she looked at me with her good

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 8 JODI PICOULT

eye. And I knew, I just knew, she was still miserable. The things that
had happened to her—­the chains and the shackles, the cage and the
beatings, maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken out
of Africa—­all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and it
took up all the extra space.
For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make life
better for Morganetta. In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s resi-
dent polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved to the
Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It had a pool,
and toys, and two older elephants.
If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the mayor
that just sticking elephants in proximity with others does not mean
they will form friendships. Elephants are as unique in their personali-
ties as humans are, and just as you would not assume that two random
humans would become close friends, you should not assume that two
elephants will bond simply because they are both elephants. Mor-
ganetta continued to spiral deeper into depression, losing weight and
deteriorating. Approximately one year after she arrived in L.A., she
was found dead in the bottom of the enclosure’s pool.
The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to
make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem
the tide with a sieve.
The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no
matter how much we want it . . . some stories just don’t have a happy
ending.

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 Pa rt I

How to explain my heroic courtesy? I feel

that my body was inflated by a mischievous boy.
Once I was the size of a falcon, the size of a lion,
once I was not the elephant I find I am.
My pelt sags, and my master scolds me for a botched
trick. I practiced it all night in my tent, so I was
somewhat sleepy. People connect me with sadness
and, often, rationality. Randall Jarrell compared me
to Wallace Stevens, the American poet. I can see it
in the lumbering tercets, but in my mind
I am more like Eliot, a man of Europe, a man
of cultivation. Anyone so ceremonious suffers
breakdowns. I do not like the spectacular experiments
with balance, the high-­wire act and cones.
We elephants are images of humility, as when we
undertake our melancholy migrations to die.
Did you know, though, that elephants were taught
to write the Greek alphabet with their hooves?
Worn out by suffering, we lie on our great backs,
tossing grass up to heaven—­as a distraction, not a prayer.
That’s not humility you see on our long final journeys:
it’s procrastination. It hurts my heavy body to lie down.

—Dan Chiasson, “The Elephant”

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 J e n na
f

W hen it comes to memory, I’m kind of a pro. I may only be

thirteen, but I’ve studied it the way other kids my age devour
fashion magazines. There’s the kind of memory you have about the
world, like knowing that stoves are hot and that if you don’t wear shoes
outside in the winter you’ll get frostbite. There’s the kind you get from
your senses—­that staring at the sun makes you squint and that worms
aren’t the best choice of meal. There are the dates you can recall from
history class and spew back on your final exam, because they matter (or
so I’m told) in the grand scheme of the universe. And there are per-
sonal details you remember, like the high spikes on a graph of your
own life, which matter to nobody but yourself. Last year at school, my
science teacher let me do a whole independent study on memory.
Most of my teachers let me do independent studies, because they
know I get bored in class and, frankly, I think they’re a little scared that
I know more than they do and they don’t want to have to admit it.
My first memory is white at the edges, like a photo taken with too
bright a flash. My mother is holding spun sugar on a cone, cotton
candy. She raises her finger to her lips—­This is our secret—­and then
tears off a tiny piece. When she touches it to my lips, the sugar dis-
solves. My tongue curls around her finger and sucks hard. Iswidi, she
tells me. Sweet. This is not my bottle; it’s not a taste I know, but it’s a

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 12 JODI PICOULT

good one. Then she leans down and kisses my forehead. Uswidi, she
says. Sweetheart.
I can’t be more than nine months old.
This is pretty amazing, really, because most kids trace their first
memories to somewhere between the ages of two and five. That doesn’t
mean that babies are little amnesiacs—­they have memories long before
they have language but, weirdly, can’t access them once they start talk-
ing. Maybe the reason I remember the cotton candy episode is because
my mother was speaking Xhosa, which isn’t our language but one she
picked up when she was working on her doctorate in South Africa. Or
maybe the reason I have this random memory is as a trade-­off my brain
made—­because I can’t remember what I desperately wish I could: de-
tails of the night my mother disappeared.
My mother was a scientist, and for a span of time, she even studied
memory. It was part of her work on post-traumatic stress and ­elephants.
You know the old adage that elephants never forget? Well, it’s fact. I
could give you all my mother’s data, if you want the proof. I’ve practi-
cally got it memorized, no pun intended. Her official published find-
ings were that memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative
moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the
brain. But there’s a fine line between a negative moment and a trau-
matic one. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get
forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they turn
into the big, bleak, white nothing I get in my head when I try to focus
on that night.
Here’s what I know:

1. I was three.
2. My mother was found on the sanctuary property, uncon-
scious, about a mile south of a dead body. This was in the
police reports. She was taken to the hospital.
3. I am not mentioned in the police reports. Afterward, my
grandmother took me to stay at her place, because my father
was frantically dealing with a dead elephant caregiver and a
wife who had been knocked out cold.

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 LEAVING TIME 13

4. Sometime before dawn, my mother regained conscious-

ness and vanished from the hospital without any staff seeing
her go.
5. I never saw her again.

Sometimes I think of my life as two train cars hitched together at

the moment of my mom’s disappearance—­but when I try to see how
they connect there’s a jarring on the track that jerks my head back
around. I know that I used to be a girl whose hair was strawberry
blond, who ran around like a wild thing while my mother took endless
notes about the elephants. Now I’m a kid who is too serious for her
age and too smart for her own good. And yet as impressive as I am
with scientific statistics, I fail miserably when it comes to real-­life
facts, like knowing that Wanelo is a website and not a hot new band.
If eighth grade is a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the human
adolescent (and to my mother, it certainly would have been), then
reciting fifty named elephant herds in the Tuli Block of Botswana
cannot compete with identifying all the members of One Direction.
It’s not like I don’t fit in at school because I’m the only kid without
a mother. There are lots of kids missing parents, or kids who don’t
talk about their parents, or kids whose parents are now living with
new spouses and new kids. Still, I don’t really have friends at school. I
sit at the lunch table on the far end, eating whatever my grandmoth-
er’s packed me, while the cool girls—­who, I swear to God, call them-
selves the Icicles—­chatter about how they are going to grow up and
work for OPI and make up nail-­polish color names based on famous
movies: Magent-­lemen Prefer Blondes; A Fuchsia Good Men. Maybe
I’ve tried to join the conversation once or twice, but when I do, they
usually look at me as if they’ve smelled something bad coming from
my direction, their little button noses wrinkled, and then go back to
whatever they were talking about. I can’t say I’m devastated by the
way I’m ignored. I guess I have more important things on my mind.
The memories on the other side of my mother’s disappearance
are just as spotty. I can tell you about my new bedroom at my grand-
ma’s place, which had a big-­girl bed—­my first. There was a little

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 14 JODI PICOULT

woven basket on the nightstand, which was inexplicably filled with

pink packets of Sweet’N Low, although there was no coffeemaker
around. Every night, even before I could count, I’d peek inside to
make sure they were still there. I still do.
I can tell you about visiting my father, at the beginning. The halls
at Hartwick House smelled like ammonia and pee, and even when my
grandma urged me to talk to him and I climbed up on the bed, shiver-
ing at the thought of being so close to someone I recognized and
didn’t know at all, he didn’t speak or move. I can describe how tears
leaked out of his eyes as if it were a natural and expected phenome-
non, the way a cold can of soda sweats on a summer day.
I remember the nightmares I had, which weren’t really night-
mares, but just me being awakened from a dead sleep by Maura’s loud
trumpeting. Even after my grandma came running into my room and
explained to me that the matriarch elephant lived hundreds of miles
away now, in a new sanctuary in Tennessee, I had this nagging sense
that Maura was trying to tell me something, and that if I only spoke
her language as well as my mother had, I’d understand.
All I have left of my mother is her research. I pore over her jour-
nals, because I know one day the words will rearrange themselves on
a page and point me toward her. She taught me, even in absentia, that
all good science starts with a hypothesis, which is just a hunch dressed
up in fancy vocabulary. And my hunch is this: She would never have
left me behind, not willingly.
If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to prove it.

When I wake up, Gertie is draped over my feet, a giant dog rug. She
twitches, running after something she can only see in her dreams.
I know what that feels like.
I try to get out of bed without waking her, but she jumps up and
barks at the closed door of my bedroom.
“Relax,” I say, sinking my fingers into the thick fur at the ruff of
her neck. She licks my cheek but doesn’t relax at all. She keeps her

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 LEAVING TIME 15

eyes fixed on the bedroom door, as if she can see what’s on the other
side.
Which, given what I have planned for the day, is pretty ironic.
Gertie leaps off the bed, her wagging tail pounding the wall. I
open the door and let her scramble downstairs, where my grand-
mother will let her out and feed her and start to cook breakfast for me.
Gertie came to my grandmother’s house a year after I did. Before
that, she had lived at the sanctuary and she was best friends with an
elephant named Syrah. She’d spend every day at Syrah’s side; and
when Gertie got sick Syrah even stood guard over her, gently rubbing
her with her trunk. It was not the first story of a dog and an elephant
bonding, but it was a legendary one, written up in children’s books
and featured on the news. A famous photographer even shot a calen-
dar of unlikely animal friendships and made Gertie Ms. July. So when
Syrah was sent away after the sanctuary closed, Gertie was just as
abandoned as I was. For months, no one knew what had happened to
her. And then one day, when my grandmother answered the doorbell,
there was an animal rescue officer asking if we knew this dog, which
had been found in our neighborhood. She still had her collar, with her
name embroidered on it. Gertie was skinny and flea-­bitten, but she
started licking my face. My grandmother let Gertie stay, probably
because she thought it would help me adjust.
If we’re going to be honest here—­I have to tell you it didn’t work.
I’ve always been a loner, and I’ve never really felt like I belong here.
I’m like one of those women who read Jane Austen obsessively and
still hope that Mr. Darcy might show up at the door. Or the Civil War
reenactors, who growl at each other on battlefields now spotted with
baseball fields and park benches. I’m the princess in an ivory tower,
except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.
I did have one friend at school, once, who sort of understood.
Chatham Clarke was the only person I ever told about my mother and
how I was going to find her. Chatham lived with her aunt, because her
mother was a drug addict and in jail; and she had never met her father.
“It’s noble,” Chatham told me. “How much you want to see your

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 16 JODI PICOULT

mother.” When I asked her what that meant, she told me about how
once her aunt had taken her to the prison where her mom was serving
her term; how she’d dressed up in a frilly skirt and those shoes that
look like black mirrors. But her mother was gray and lifeless, her eyes
dead and her teeth rotted out from the meth, and Chatham said that
even though her mother said she wished she could give her a hug, she
had never been so happy for something as she was for that wall of
plastic between them in the visiting booth. She’d never gone back
again.
Chatham was useful in a lot of ways—­she took me to buy my first
bra, because my grandmother hadn’t thought to cover up a nonexis-
tent bosom and (as Chatham said) no one over the age of ten who has
to change in a school locker room should let the girls go free. She
passed me notes in English class, crude stick-­figure drawings of our
teacher, who used too much self-­tanner and smelled like cats. She
linked arms with me as we walked down the hall, and every wildlife
researcher will tell you that when it comes to survival in a hostile en-
vironment, a pack of two is infinitely safer than a pack of one.
One morning Chatham stopped coming to school. When I called
her house no one answered. I biked over there to find a For Sale sign.
I didn’t believe that she’d leave without any word, especially since she
knew that was what had freaked me out so much about my mom’s
disappearance, but it got harder and harder to defend her to myself as
a week went by, and then two. When I started skipping homework
assignments and failing tests, which wasn’t my style at all, I was sum-
moned to the school counselor’s office. Ms. Sugarman was a thousand
years old and had puppets in her office, so that kids who were too
traumatized to say the word vagina could, I guess, put on a Punch and
Judy show about where they’d been inappropriately touched. Any-
way, I didn’t think Ms. Sugarman could guide me out of a paper bag,
much less through a broken friendship. When she asked me what I
thought had happened to Chatham, I said I assumed she had been
raptured. That I was Left Behind.
Wouldn’t be the first time.
Ms. Sugarman didn’t call me back into her office again, and if I

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 LEAVING TIME 17

was considered the oddball in school before, I was completely off-­the-­

charts weird now.
My grandmother was puzzled by Chatham’s vanishing act. “With-
out telling you?” she said at dinner. “That’s not how you treat a friend.”
I didn’t know how to explain to her that the whole time Chatham was
my partner in crime, I was anticipating this. When someone leaves
you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting
close enough to people to let them become important to you, because
then you don’t notice when they drop out of your world. I know that
sounds incredibly depressing for a thirteen-­year-­old, but it beats being
forced to accept that the common denominator must be you.
I may not be able to change my future, but I’m sure as hell going
to try to figure out my past.
So I have a morning ritual. Some people have coffee and read the
paper; some people check Facebook; others straight-­iron their hair
or do a hundred sit-­ups. Me, I pull on my clothes and then go to
my computer. I spend a lot of time on the Internet, mostly at
www.NamUs.gov, the official Department of Justice website for miss-
ing and unidentified persons. I check the Unidentified Persons data-
base quickly, to make sure that no medical examiners have entered
new information about a deceased woman Jane Doe. Then I check the
Unclaimed Persons database, running through any additions to the
list of people who have died but have no next of kin. Finally, I log in to
the Missing Persons database and go right to my mom’s entry.
Status: Missing
First name: Alice
Middle name: Kingston
Last name: Metcalf
Nickname/Alias: None
Date LKA: July 16, 2004, 11:45 p.m.
Age LKA: 36
Age now: 46
Race: White
Sex: Female
Height: 65 inches

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 18 JODI PICOULT

Weight: 125
City: Boone
State: NH
Circumstances: Alice Metcalf was a naturalist and researcher at the
New England Elephant Sanctuary. She was found unconscious the evening
of July 16, 2004, at approximately 10:00 p.m., one mile south of the body of
a female sanctuary employee who had been trampled by an elephant. After
being admitted to Mercy United Hospital in Boone Heights, NH, Alice re-
gained consciousness at approximately 11:00 p.m. She was last seen by a
nurse checking her vitals at 11:45 p.m.
Nothing’s changed on the profile. I know, because I am the one
who wrote it.
There’s another page about my mother’s hair color (red) and eye
color (green); about whether she had any scars or deformities or tat-
toos or artificial limbs that could be used to identify her (no). There’s
a page that lists the clothing she was wearing when she disappeared,
but I had to leave that blank, because I don’t know. There’s an empty
page about possible transportation methods and another about dental
records and one for her DNA sample. There’s a picture of her, too,
that I scanned from the only photo in the house my grandma hasn’t
squirreled away in the attic—­a close-­up of my mother holding me in
her arms, in front of Maura the elephant.
Then there’s a page for the police contacts. One of them, Donny
Boylan, retired and moved to Florida and has Alzheimer’s (you’d be
amazed at what you can learn from Google). The other, Virgil Stan-
hope, was last listed in a police newsletter for being promoted to de-
tective at a ceremony on October 13, 2004. I know, from my digital
sleuthing, that he is no longer employed by the Boone Police Depart-
ment. Aside from that, it appears he has disappeared off the face of the
earth.
It’s not nearly as uncommon as you think.
There are entire families whose homes were abandoned with
television sets blaring, kettles boiling, toys strewn across the floor;
families whose vans were found in empty parking lots or sunk in local
ponds, and yet no bodies were ever located. There are college girls

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 LEAVING TIME 19

who went missing after they wrote their numbers down on napkins
for men at bars. There are grandfathers who wandered into the woods
and were never heard from again. There are babies who were kissed
good night in their cribs, and gone before the light of morning. There
are mothers who wrote out grocery lists, got in their cars, but never
came home from the Stop & Shop.
“Jenna!” My grandmother’s voice interrupts me. “I’m not run-
ning a restaurant!”
I shut down my computer and head out of my bedroom. On sec-
ond thought, I reach into my lingerie drawer and pull a delicate blue
scarf out of its recesses. It doesn’t work at all with my jean shorts and
tank top, but I loop it around my neck, hurry downstairs, and climb
onto one of the counter stools.
“It’s not like I have nothing better to do than wait on you hand
and foot,” my grandmother says, her back to me as she flips a pancake
in the skillet.
My grandmother is not the TV grandmother, a cuddly, white-­
haired cherub. She works as a meter maid for the local parking en-
forcement office, and I can count on one hand the number of times
I’ve seen her smile.
I wish I could talk to her about my mom. I mean, she has all the
memories I don’t—­because she lived with my mother for eighteen
years, while I, on the other hand, had a measly three. I wish I had the
kind of grandmother who showed me pictures of my missing mom
when I was little, or baked a cake on her birthday, instead of just en-
couraging me to seal my feelings inside a little box.
Don’t get me wrong—­I love my grandmother. She comes to hear
me sing in school chorus concerts, and she cooks vegetarian for me
even though she likes meat; she lets me watch R-­rated movies because
(as she says) there’s nothing in them I won’t see in the halls between
classes. I love my grandmother. She just isn’t my mom.
The lie I’ve told my grandma today is that I’m babysitting for the
son of one of my favorite teachers—­ Mr. Allen, who taught me
seventh-­grade math. The kid’s name is Carter, but I call him Birth
Control, because he’s the best argument ever against procreation.

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 20 JODI PICOULT

He’s the least attractive infant I’ve ever met. His head is enormous,
and when he looks at me, I’m pretty sure he can read my mind.
My grandmother pivots, pancakes balanced on a spatula, and
freezes when she sees the scarf around my neck. True, it doesn’t match,
but that’s not why her mouth pinches tight. She shakes her head in
silent judgment and smacks the spatula against my plate as she sets
down the food.
“I felt like accessorizing,” I lie.
My grandmother doesn’t talk about my mother. If I’m empty in-
side because she vanished, then Grandma’s full to bursting with anger.
She can’t forgive my mother for leaving—­if that’s what happened—­
and she can’t accept the alternative—­that my mother can’t come back,
because she’s dead.
“Carter,” my grandmother says, smoothly peeling back the con-
versation one layer. “Is that the baby who looks like an eggplant?”
“Not all of him. Just his forehead,” I clarify. “Last time I sat for
him, he screamed for three hours straight.”
“Bring earplugs,” my grandmother suggests. “Will you be home
for dinner?”
“I’m not sure. But I’ll see you later.”
I tell her that every time she leaves. I tell her, because it’s what we
both need to hear. My grandmother puts the frying pan in the sink
and picks up her purse. “Make sure you let Gertie out before you go,”
she instructs, and she’s careful not to look at me or my mother’s scarf
as she passes.

I started actively searching for my mother when I was eleven. Before

that, I missed her, but I didn’t know what to do about it. My grand-
mother didn’t want to go there, and my father—­as far as I knew—­had
never reported my mother missing, because he was catatonic in a psy-
chiatric hospital when it happened. I bugged him about it a few times,
but since that usually triggered new meltdowns, I stopped bringing
it up.
Then, one day at the dentist’s office, I read an article in People

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 LEAVING TIME 21

magazine about a kid who was sixteen who got his mother’s unsolved
murder case reopened, and how the killer was brought to justice. I
started to think that what I lacked in money and resources I could
make up for in sheer determination, and that very afternoon, I de-
cided to try. True, it could be a dead end, but no one else had suc-
ceeded in finding my mom. Then again, no one had looked as hard as
I planned to look, either.
Mostly, I was dismissed or pitied by the people I approached. The
Boone Police Department refused to help me, because (a) I was a minor
working without my guardian’s consent; (b) my mother’s trail was stone
cold ten years later; and (c) as far as they were convinced, the related
murder case had been solved—­it had been ruled an accidental death.
The New England Elephant Sanctuary, of course, was completely dis-
banded, and the one person who could tell me more about what had
happened to that caregiver who died—­namely, my dad—­wasn’t even
able to accurately give his own name or the day of the week, much less
details about the incident that caused his psychotic break.
So I decided that I would take matters into my own hands. I tried
to hire a private detective but learned quickly they don’t do work pro
bono, like some lawyers. That was when I started babysitting teach-
ers’ kids, with a plan to have enough money saved by the end of this
summer to at least get someone interested. Then I started the process
of becoming my own best investigator.
Almost every online search engine to find missing people costs
money and requires a credit card, neither of which I had. But I did
manage to find a how-­to book, So You Want to Be a PI?, at a church
rummage sale, and I spent several days memorizing the information
in one chapter: “Finding Those Who Are Lost.”
According to the book, there are three types of Missing People:

1. People who are not really missing but have lives and
friends that don’t include you. Old boyfriends and the college
roommate you lost touch with—­they’re in this category.
2. People who are not really missing but don’t want to be
found. Deadbeat dads and mob witnesses, for example.

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 22 JODI PICOULT

3. Everyone else. Like runaways and the kids on milk cartons

who are stolen away by psychos in white vans with no win-
dows.

The whole reason PIs can find someone is that lots of people
know exactly where the Missing Person is. You just aren’t one of them.
You need to find someone who is.
People who disappear have their reasons. They might have com-
mitted insurance fraud or be hiding from the cops. They might have
decided to start over. They might be up to their eyeballs in debt. They
might have a secret they want no one to find out. According to So You
Want to Be a PI?, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Does
this person want to be found?
I have to admit, I don’t know if I want to hear the answer to that.
If my mother walked away willingly, then maybe all it would take is
knowing I’m still searching—­knowing that, after a decade, I haven’t
forgotten her—­to make her come back to me. I sometimes think it
would be easier for me to learn that my mother died ten years ago
than to hear that she lived and chose not to return.
The book said that finding those who are lost is like doing a word
jumble. You have all the clues, and you’re trying to unscramble them
to make an address. Data collection is the weapon of the private inves-
tigator, and facts are your friends. Name, birth date, social security
number. Schools attended. Military service dates, employment his-
tory, known friends and relatives. The farther you cast your net, the
more likely you are to catch someone who has had a conversation
with the Missing Person about where he wished they could go on
vacation, or what his dream job might be.
What do you do with these facts? Well, you start by using them
to rule things out. The very first Web search I did, at age eleven, was
to go to the Social Security Death Index database and search its index
for my mother’s name.
She was not listed as deceased, but that doesn’t tell me enough.
She could be alive, or she could be living under a different identity.
She could be dead and unidentified, a Jane Doe.

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 LEAVING TIME 23

She was not on Facebook or Twitter, or Classmates.com, or the

alumni network of Vassar, her college. Then again, my mother was
always so absorbed in her work and her elephants, I don’t imagine she
would have had much time for those distractions.
There were 367 Alice Metcalfs in online phone directories. I
called two or three a week, so my grandmother wouldn’t freak out
when she saw the long-­distance charges on the phone bill. I left a lot
of messages. There was one very sweet old lady in Montana who
wanted to pray for my mom, and another woman who worked as a
producer at an L.A. news station who promised to bring the story to
her boss as a human-­interest piece, but none of the people I called
were my mother.
The book had other suggestions, too: searching prison databases,
trademark applications, even the genealogy records of the Church of
Jesus Christ of Latter-­day Saints. When I tried those, I didn’t get any
results. When I Googled “Alice Metcalf,” I got too many—­more than
1.6 million. So I narrowed it down by searching for “Alice Kingston
Metcalf Elephant Grief,” and got a listing of all her scholarly research,
most of it done prior to 2004.
On the sixteenth page of the Google search, however, was an ar-
ticle in an online psychology blog about the grieving process of ani-
mals. Three paragraphs into it, Alice Metcalf was quoted as saying,
“It’s egotistical to think that humans have a monopoly on grief. There
is considerable evidence that elephants mourn the loss of those they
love.” This was a tiny sound bite, unremarkable in many ways, some-
thing she’d said a hundred times before in other journals and schol-
arly papers.
But this blog entry was dated 2006.
Two years after she disappeared.
Although I’ve searched the Internet for a year, I have not found
any other proof of my mother’s existence. I don’t know if the date on
the online article was a typo, if they were quoting my mother from
years earlier, or if my mother—­apparently alive and well in 2006—­is
still alive and well.
I just know I found it, and that’s a start.

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 24 JODI PICOULT

•••

In the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, I haven’t limited my search

to the suggestions in So You Want to Be a PI? I posted on missing per-
sons Listservs. I once volunteered at a carnival to be a hypnotist’s
subject in front of a crowd of people eating corn dogs and blooming
onions, hoping he’d release the memories jammed inside me, but all
he told me was that, in a past life, I was a scullery maid at a duke’s
palace. I went to a free seminar on dream lucidity at the library, figur-
ing I could transfer some of those skills to my stubborn locked mind,
yet it turned out to be all about journaling and not much else.
Today, for the first time, I’m going to a psychic.
There are a few reasons I haven’t been before. First, I didn’t have
enough money. Second, I didn’t have any idea where to find a repu-
table one. Third, it wasn’t very scientific, and if my mother, in absen-
tia, had taught me anything, it was to believe cold, hard facts and data.
But then two days ago, when I was restacking my mother’s notebooks,
a bookmark fell out of one.
It wasn’t a bookmark, really. It was a dollar, origami-­folded in the
shape of an elephant.
All of a sudden, I could remember my mother with her hands fly-
ing over a bill, creasing and folding, flipping and reversing, until I
stopped my toddler crying and stared, riveted, by the tiny toy she had
made me.
I had touched the little elephant as if I expected it to disappear in
a puff of smoke. And then my eye fell on the open page of the journal,
a paragraph that suddenly stuck out like it was written in neon:

I always get the funniest expressions from colleagues

when I tell them that the best scientists understand that 2–­3
percent of whatever it is they are studying is simply not quan-
tifiable—­it may be magic or aliens or random variance, none
of which can be truly ruled out. If we are to be honest as sci-
entists . . . we must admit there may be a few things that we
are not supposed to know.

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 LEAVING TIME 25

I took that as a sign.

Everyone else on the planet would rather look at a folded master-
piece than the original flat piece of paper, but not me. Me, I had to
start from the beginning. So I spent hours gingerly unfolding my
mother’s handiwork, pretending I could still feel the heat of her fin-
gertips on the bill. I went step by step, as if I were performing surgery,
until I could refold the dollar the way she had; until I had a small herd
of six new tiny green elephants marching across my desk. I kept test-
ing myself all day, too, to make sure I had not forgotten, and every
time I succeeded I flushed with pride. I fell asleep that night picturing
a dramatic, movie-­of-­the-­week moment when I finally found my
missing mother and she didn’t know it was me, until I fashioned a dol-
lar bill into an elephant in front of her eyes. And then she hugged me.
And did not let go.

You’d be surprised at how many psychics are listed in the local yellow
pages. New Age Spirit Guides, Psychic Advice from Laurel, Pagan
Priestess Tarot Readings, Readings by Kate Kimmel, The Phoenix
Rising—­Advice on Love, Wealth, Prosperity.
Second Sight by Serenity, Cumberland Street, Boone.
Serenity didn’t have a big ad or a 1-­800 number or a last name,
but she was within biking distance of my house, and she was the
only one who promised to do a reading for the bargain price of ten
dollars.
Cumberland Street is in a part of town that my grandmother al-
ways tells me to stay away from. It’s basically an alley with a bankrupt
convenience store that’s been boarded up, and a hole-­in-­the-­wall bar.
Two wooden placards sit on the sidewalk, one advertising two-­dollar
shots before 5:00 p.m. and another, which reads: tarot, $10, 14r.
What is 14R? An age requirement? A bra size?
I’m nervous about leaving my bike on the street, since I don’t
have a lock for it—­I never have to lock it up at school or on Main
Street or anywhere else I normally go—­so I haul it into the corridor
to the left of the bar entrance and drag it up the stairs, which smell

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 26 JODI PICOULT

like beer and sweat. At the top is a small foyer. One door is labeled
14R and has a sign on the front: readings by serenity.
The foyer walls are covered with peeling velveteen wallpaper.
Yellow stains bloom on the ceiling, and it smells like too much pot-
pourri. There’s a rickety side table propped up on a phone book for
balance. On it is a china dish filled with business cards: serenity
jones, p­ sychic.
There’s not much room for me and a bike in the little foyer. I
jostle it in a stilted half circle, trying to lean it against the wall.
I can hear the muffled voices of two women on the other side of
the interior door. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to knock, to tell Seren-
ity I’m here. Then I realize that if she is any good at her job, she must
already know.
Just in case, though, I cough. Loudly.
With the bike frame balanced against my hip, I press my ear
against the door.
You’re troubled by a very big decision.
There is a gasp, a second voice. How did you know?
You have serious doubts that what you decide is going to be the right path.
The other voice, again: It’s been so hard, without Bert.
He’s here now. And he wants you to know that you can trust your heart.
There is a pause. That doesn’t sound like Bert.
Of course not. That was someone else who’s watching over you.
Auntie Louise?
Yes! She says you were always her favorite.
I can’t help it; I snort. Way to recover, Serenity, I think.
Maybe she’s heard me laugh, because there’s no more conversa-
tion coming from the other side of the door. I lean closer to listen
more carefully, and knock the bike off balance. Stumbling to keep my
footing, I trip over my mother’s scarf, which has unraveled. The
bicycle—­and I—­crash into the little table, and the bowl falls off and
shatters.
The door is yanked open, and I look up from where I’m crouched
in the pretzel of bike frame, trying to gather the pieces. “What’s going
on out here?”

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 LEAVING TIME 27

Serenity Jones is tall, with a swirl of pink cotton-­candy hair piled

high on her head. Her lipstick matches her coiffure. I have this weird
feeling that I’ve met her before. “Are you Serenity?”
“Who’s asking?”
“Shouldn’t you know?”
“I’m prescient, not omniscient. If I were omniscient this would be
Park Avenue and I’d be squirreling my dividends away in the Cay-
mans.” Her voice sounds overused, like a couch with its springs
busted. Then she notices the broken bits of china in my hand. “Are
you kidding me? That was my grandmother’s scrying bowl!”
I have no idea what a scrying bowl is. I just know I’m in deep
trouble. “I’m sorry. It was an accident . . .”
“Do you have any idea how old this is? It’s a family heirloom!
Thank Baby Jesus my mother isn’t alive to see this.” She grabs for the
pieces, fitting the edges together as if they might magically stick.
“I could try to fix it—­”
“Unless you’re a magician, I don’t see that happening. My mother
and my granny are both rolling in their graves, all because you don’t
have the sense God gave a weasel.”
“If it was so precious, why did you just leave it sitting around in
your entryway?”
“Why did you bring a bicycle into a room the size of a closet?”
“I thought it would get stolen if I left it in the hall,” I say, getting
to my feet. “Look, I’ll pay for your bowl.”
“Sugar, your Girl Scout cookie money can’t cover the cost of an
antique from 1858.”
“I’m not selling Girl Scout cookies,” I tell her. “I’m here for a
reading.”
That stops her in her tracks. “I don’t do kids.”
Don’t or won’t? “I’m older than I look.” This is a fact. Everyone
assumes I’m still in fifth grade, instead of eighth.
The woman who was inside having a reading suddenly is framed
in the doorway, too. “Serenity? Are you all right?”
Serenity stumbles, tripping over the frame of my bike. “I’m fine.”
She smiles tightly at me. “I can’t help you.”

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 28 JODI PICOULT

“I beg your pardon?” the client says.

“Not you, Mrs. Langham,” Serenity answers, and then she mut-
ters to me: “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the cops and press
charges.”
Maybe Mrs. Langham doesn’t want a psychic who’s mean to kids;
maybe she just doesn’t want to be around when the police come. For
whatever reason, she looks at Serenity as if she is about to say some-
thing, but then edges past us both and bolts down the flight of stairs.
“Oh great,” Serenity mutters. “Now you owe me for a priceless
heirloom and the ten bucks I just lost.”
“I’ll pay double,” I blurt out. I have sixty-­eight dollars. It’s every
penny I’ve made this year from babysitting, and I’m saving it for a
private eye. I’m not convinced Serenity is the real deal. But I’d be
willing to part with twenty dollars to find out.
Her eyes glint when she hears that. “For you,” she says, “I’ll make
an age exception.” She opens the door wider, revealing a normal liv-
ing room, with a couch and a coffee table and a television set. It looks
like my grandmother’s house, which is a little disappointing. Nothing
about this screams psychic. “You got a problem?” she asks.
“I guess I was kind of expecting a crystal ball and a beaded cur-
tain.”
“You have to pay extra for those.”
I look at her, because I’m not sure if she’s kidding. She sits down
heavily on the couch and gestures at a chair. “What’s your name?”
“Jenna Metcalf.”
“All right, Jenna,” she says and sighs. “Let’s get this over with.”
She hands me a ledger and asks me to put down my name, address,
and phone number.
“How come?”
“Just in case I need to communicate with you afterward. If a spirit
has a message, or whatnot.”
I bet more likely it’s to send me emails advertising 20 percent off
my next reading, but I take the leather-­bound book and sign in. My
palms are sweating. Now that the moment’s here, I’m having second
thoughts. The worst-­case scenario is that Serenity Jones turns out to

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 LEAVING TIME 29

be a hack, another dead end when it comes to the mystery of my

mother.
No. The worst-­case scenario is that Serenity Jones turns out to be
a talented psychic, and I learn one of two things: that my mother will-
ingly abandoned me, or that my mother’s dead.
She takes the tarot deck and begins to shuffle it. “What I’m about
to tell you during this reading might not make sense right now. But
remember the information, because one day, you might hear some-
thing and realize what the spirits were trying to tell you today.” She
says this the same way flight attendants tell you how to buckle and
release the latch on your seat belt. Then she hands the deck to me, to
cut into three piles. “So what do you want to know? Who’s got a crush
on you? If you’re going to get an A in English? Where you should
apply to college?”
“I don’t care about any of that.” I hand the deck back, unbroken.
“My mother disappeared ten years ago,” I say, “and I want you to help
me find her.”

There is one passage in my mother’s field research journals that I

know by heart. Sometimes, when I am bored in class, I even write it
in my own notebook, trying to replicate the loops of her handwriting.
It’s from her time in Botswana, when she was a postdoc studying
elephant grief in the Tuli Block, and she recorded the death of an el-
ephant in the wild. This happened to be the calf of a fifteen-­year-­old
female named Kagiso. Kagiso had given birth just after dawn, and the
calf was either born dead or died very shortly afterward. This was not,
according to my mother’s notes, unusual for an elephant having her
first calf. What was strange was how Kagiso reacted.

TUESDAY
0945 Kagiso standing beside calf in broad sunlight, in open clearing. Strokes
its head and lifts its trunk. No movement from calf since 0635.
1152 Kagiso threatens Aviwe and Cokisa when the other females come to
investigate body of calf.

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 30 JODI PICOULT

1515 Kagiso continues to stand over body. Touches calf with her trunk. Tries
to lift it.

WEDNESDAY
0636 Worried about Kagiso, who has not been to watering hole.
1042 Kagiso kicks brush over body of calf. Breaks off branches to use as
cover.
1546 Brutally hot. Kagiso goes to watering hole and returns to remain in
vicinity of calf.

THURSDAY
0656 Three lionesses approach; begin to drag off calf ’s carcass. Kagiso charges;
they run east. Kagiso stands over body of calf, bellowing.
0820 Still bellowing.
1113 Kagiso remains standing over dead calf.
2102 Three lions feed on calf carcass. Kagiso nowhere in sight.

At the bottom of the page, my mother had written this:

Kagiso abandons body of her calf after keeping vigil for three days.
There is much documented research about how an elephant calf under the age
of two will not survive if it’s orphaned.
There’s nothing written, yet, about what happens to the mother who loses her
baby.

My mother did not know at the time she wrote this that she was
already pregnant with me.

“I don’t do missing people,” Serenity says, in a voice that doesn’t allow

even a sliver of but.
“You don’t do kids,” I say, ticking one of my fingers. “You don’t do
missing people. What exactly do you do?”
She narrows her eyes. “You want energy alignment? No problem.
Tarot? Step right up. Communicating with someone who’s passed?

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 LEAVING TIME 31

I’m your girl.” She leans forward, so I understand, in no uncertain

terms, that I’ve hit a brick wall. “But I do not do missing people.”
“You’re a psychic.”
“Different psychics have different gifts,” she says. “Precognition,
aura reading, channeling spirits, telepathy. Just because I’ve been
given a taste doesn’t mean I get the whole smorgasbord.”
“She vanished ten years ago,” I continue, as if Serenity hasn’t spo-
ken. I wonder if I should tell her about the trampling, or the fact that
my mother was brought to the hospital, and decide not to. I don’t
want to feed her the answers. “I was only three.”
“Most missing people disappear because they want to,” Serenity
says.
“But not all,” I reply. “She didn’t leave me. I know it.” I hesitate,
unwinding my mother’s scarf and pushing it toward her. “This be-
longed to her. Maybe that would help . . . ?”
Serenity doesn’t touch it. “I never said I couldn’t find her. I said I
wouldn’t.”
In all the ways I’ve imagined this meeting going down, this was
not one of them. “Why?” I ask, stunned. “Why wouldn’t you want to
help me, if you can?”
“Because I am not Mother Freaking Teresa!” she snaps. Her face
turns tomato red; I wonder if she’s seen her own imminent death by
high blood pressure. “Excuse me,” she says, and she disappears down
a hallway. A moment later, I hear a faucet running.
She’s gone for five minutes. Ten. I get up and start wandering
around the living room. Arranged on the fireplace mantel are pictures
of Serenity with George and Barbara Bush, with Cher, with the guy
from Zoolander. It makes no sense to me. Why would someone who
hobnobs with celebrities be hawking ten-­dollar tarot readings in East
Nowhere, New Hampshire?
When I hear the toilet flush I race back to the couch and sit down
again, as if I’ve been there the whole time. Serenity returns, com-
posed. Her pink bangs are damp, as if she’s splashed water on her face.
“I’m not going to charge you for my time today,” she says, and I snort.

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 32 JODI PICOULT

“I’m truly sorry to hear about your mother. Maybe someone else can
tell you what you want to hear.”
“Like who?”
“I have no idea. It’s not like we all hang out at the Paranormal
Café on Wednesday nights.” She moves to the door, holding it wide
open, my cue to leave. “If I hear of anyone who does that sort of thing,
I’ll be in touch.”
I suspect this is a flat-­out lie, spoken to get me the hell out of her
living room. I step into the foyer and wrangle my bike upright. “If you
won’t find her for me,” I say, “can you at least tell me if she’s dead?”
I can’t believe I’ve asked that until the words are hanging between
us, like curtains that keep us from seeing each other clearly. For a
second I think about grabbing my bike and running out the door be-
fore I have to hear the answer.
Serenity shudders as if I’ve hit her with a Taser. “She’s not.”
As she closes the door in my face, I wonder if this is a flat-­out lie,
too.

Instead of going back home, I bike past the outskirts of Boone, three
miles down a dirt road, to the entrance of the Stark Nature Preserve,
named after the Revolutionary War general who coined the state
motto, “Live Free or Die.” But ten years ago, before it was the Stark
Nature Preserve, it was the New England Elephant Sanctuary, which
had been founded by my father, Thomas Metcalf. Back then, it
sprawled over two thousand acres, with a two-­hundred-­acre perime-
ter between the sanctuary and the nearest residential home. Now,
more than half the acreage has become a strip mall, a Costco, and a
housing development. The rest is kept in conservation by the state.
I park my bike and walk for twenty minutes, passing the birch for-
est and the lake, overgrown and weedy now, where the elephants
would come daily for water. Finally, I reach my favorite spot, under a
massive oak with arms twisted like a witch. Although most of the
woodlands are blanketed with moss and ferns this time of the year, the
ground under this tree has always been carpeted with bright purple

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 LEAVING TIME 33

mushrooms. It looks like the kind of place fairies would live, if they
were real.
They’re called Laccaria amethystina. I looked them up online. It
seemed like something my mother would have done, if she’d seen
them.
I sit down in the middle of the mushrooms. You’d think I’d crush
the heads, but they give way to my weight. I stroke the underside of
one, with its ridged accordion pleats. It feels like velvet and muscle at
the same time, just like the tip of an elephant’s trunk.
This was the spot where Maura had buried her calf, the only ele-
phant ever born at the sanctuary. I was too young to remember it, but
I’ve read about it in my mother’s journals. Maura arrived at the sanc-
tuary already pregnant, although the zoo that had shipped her off
didn’t know it at the time. She delivered nearly fifteen months after
her arrival, and the calf was stillborn. Maura carried him to the spot
beneath the oak and covered him with pine needles and branches.
The next spring, the most beautiful violet mushrooms exploded there,
where the calf’s remains had eventually been formally buried by the
sanctuary staff.
I take my cell phone out of my pocket. The only good thing about
selling off half the sanctuary property is that now there is a huge cel-
lular tower not too far away, and service is probably better here than
in all the rest of New Hampshire. I open a browser and type: “Seren-
ity Jones Psychic.”
The first thing I read is her Wikipedia entry. Serenity Jones (b.
November 1, 1966) is an American psychic and medium. She appeared
multiple times on Good Morning America, and had her own television
show, Serenity!, where she did cold readings of the audience and also one-­on-­
one readings with individuals, but specialized in missing persons cases.
Missing persons cases? Are you kidding me?
She worked with various police departments and the FBI and claimed a
success rate of 88 percent. However, her failed prediction about the kidnapped
son of Senator John McCoy was widely reported in the media and led the
family to press charges. Jones has not been in the public eye since 2007.
Is it possible that a famous medium—­even a disgraced one—­had

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 34 JODI PICOULT

dropped off the face of the earth and resurfaced a decade later near
Boone, New Hampshire? Absolutely. If anyone was ever looking for
a place to keep a low profile, it was in my hometown, where the most
exciting thing to happen all year is the July Fourth Cow Plop Bingo
tournament.
I scan a list of her public predictions.
In 1999, Jones told Thea Katanopoulis that her son Adam, who had
been missing for seven years, was alive. In 2001 Adam was located, working
on a merchant marine ship off the coast of Africa.
Jones accurately predicted the acquittal of O. J. Simpson and the great
quake of 1989.
In 1998, Jones said the next presidential election would be postponed.
Although the election itself in 2000 was not delayed, the official results were
not reported for 36 days.
In 1998, Jones told the mother of missing college student Kerry Rashid
that her daughter had been stabbed and DNA evidence would exonerate the
man eventually convicted of the crime. In 2004, Orlando Ickes was freed as
a result of the Innocence Project and his former roommate indicted for the
crime instead.
In 2001, Jones told police that Chandra Levy’s body would be found in
a heavily wooded area on a slope. It was located the following year in Rock
Creek Park, Maryland, on a steep incline. She also predicted that Thomas
Quintanos IV, a NYC firefighter presumed dead after 9/11, was alive, and
he was indeed pulled from the rubble five days after the attack on the World
Trade Center.
On her television show in 2001, Jones led police on camera to the Pen-
sacola, Florida, home of mail carrier Earlen O’Doule, locating a secret locked
room in his basement and the presumed-­dead Justine Fawker, who had been
abducted eight years earlier at age 11.
On her television show in November 2003, Jones told Senator John
McCoy and his wife that their abducted son was still alive and could be found
at a bus terminal in Ocala, Florida. The boy’s remains were located there,
decomposing.
From there on, things had gone downhill for Serenity Jones.

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 LEAVING TIME 35

In December 2003, Jones told the widow of a Navy SEAL she would
give birth to a healthy boy. The woman miscarried fourteen days later.
In January 2004, Jones told Yolanda Rawls of Orem, Utah, that her
missing five-­year-­old daughter, Velvet, had been brainwashed and was being
raised by a Mormon family, touching off a wave of protests in Salt Lake City.
Six months later Yolanda’s boyfriend confessed to the girl’s murder and led
police to a shallow grave near the local dump.
In February 2004, Jones predicted that Jimmy Hoffa’s remains would
be discovered in the cement walls of a bomb cellar built by the Rockefeller
family in Woodstock, Vermont. This proved incorrect.
In March 2004, Jones stated that Audrey Seiler, a University of
Wisconsin–­Madison student who went missing, was the victim of a serial
killer and that a knife would be found with evidence on it. Seiler was found
to have staged her own kidnapping in an attempt to get her boyfriend’s at-
tention.
In May 2007, she predicted that Madeleine McCann, who had disap-
peared while on vacation with her parents in Portugal, would be found by
August. The case remains unsolved.
She hasn’t made any public psychic predictions since that. From
what I can see, she went missing.
No wonder she doesn’t do kids.
Okay, she made one colossal public mistake in the McCoy case,
but in her defense, she had been half right: They did find the missing
boy. He just wasn’t alive. It was bad luck that, after having a string of
successes, her first failure involved a superfamous politician.
There are pictures of Serenity at the Grammys with Snoop Dogg
and at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner with George W.
Bush. There’s another photo of her in US Weekly’s Fashion Police sec-
tion wearing a dress with two giant silk rosettes sewn over her boobs.
I click on my YouTube app and type in Serenity’s name and the
senator’s. A video loads, showing Serenity on a television show set,
with her ice cream swirl of hair, wearing a pink pantsuit just a few
shades darker. Across from her on a purple couch is Senator McCoy,
a guy with a jaw that could be used to measure right angles and a per-

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 36 JODI PICOULT

fect glint of silver at his temples. His wife sits beside him, clutching
his hand.
I’m not really into politics, but we studied Senator McCoy in
school as an example of political failure. He’d been groomed for a
presidential run, hanging out with the Kennedys in Hyannisport and
giving a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. But
then his seven-­year-­old son was abducted from his private school’s
playground.
In the clip, Serenity leans toward the politician. “Senator McCoy,”
she says, “I have had a vision.”
Cut to a gospel choir on the set. “A vision!” they sing out, like
musical punctuation.
“A vision of your little boy . . .” Serenity pauses. “Alive and well.”
The senator’s wife collapses into her husband’s arms and sobs.
I wonder if she picked Senator McCoy on purpose; if she really
had a vision of the kid, or just wanted the media hype to surround her,
too.
The video jumps to the bus terminal in Ocala. There is Serenity,
accompanying the McCoys into the building, heading in a zombie
trance to a bunch of lockers near the men’s room. There’s Senator
McCoy’s wife, crying, “Henry?” as Serenity tells a policeman to open
locker number 341. There’s the stained suitcase, which is hauled out
by the cop, as everyone else reels backward from the stench of the
body inside.
For a moment, the camera tumbles and the video goes sideways.
Then the cameraman pulls his shit together, in time to catch Serenity
throwing up, Ginny McCoy fainting dead away, and Senator McCoy,
the Democratic Party golden boy, yelling at him to stop filming, and
punching him when he doesn’t.
Serenity Jones hadn’t just fallen from grace—­she’d crashed and
burned. The McCoys sued Serenity, who eventually settled. Senator
McCoy was subsequently arrested twice on DUI convictions, re-
signed from the Senate, and went somewhere to treat his “exhaus-
tion.” His wife died a year later from an overdose of sleeping pills.
And Serenity quietly, quickly, became invisible.

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 LEAVING TIME 37

The woman who’d royally screwed up with the McCoys was the
same woman who’d also found dozens of kids who had disappeared.
She was also the Serenity Jones who now resided in the seediest part
of town and who was starved for cash. But had she lost her ability to
find missing people . . . or had she always been faking it? Was she
once actually psychic—­or just lucky?
For all I know, paranormal talent is like riding a bike. For all I
know, it comes back, if you just give it a try.
So in spite of the fact that I am pretty sure Serenity Jones does not
ever want to see me on her doorstep again, I also know that finding
my mother is exactly the sort of training wheels she needs.

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 Also by Jodi Picoult

The Storyteller
Lone Wolf
Sing You Home
House Rules
Change of Heart
Nineteen Minutes
The Tenth Circle
Vanishing Acts
My Sister’s Keeper
Second Glance
Perfect Match
Salem Falls
Plain Truth
Keeping Faith
The Pact
Mercy
Picture Perfect
Harvesting the Heart
Songs of the Humpback Whale

For Young Adults

Between the Lines

And for the Stage

Over the Moon: An Original Musical for Teens

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