Picture Perfect

Picture Perfect Read Free

Book: Picture Perfect Read Free
Author: Jodi Picoult
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know where she was supposed to go. “Think,” she commanded herself. She put a hand to her forehead and felt the slip of her own blood.
    â€œJesus,” she said. Her hand was trembling. She felt for a tissue in the pocket of her jacket, a worn bomber jacket she couldn’t remember buying, and came up instead with a tube of Blistex and $2.24 in change. She stepped back toward the graveyard and looked behind the headstones for a pocketbook, a knapsack, a clue.
    â€œI was mugged,” she said, wiping her brow with her sleeve. “I must have been mugged.” She ran to the door of the rectory and banged, but it was locked. She moved to the gate again, planning to go to the closest police station and tell them what had happened. She would give her address and she would call…
    Who would she call?
    She stared at a bus sighing at the corner stop. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know the closest police station.
    She didn’t even know her own name.
    Chewing on a fingernail, she stepped back inside the gate, where she felt safer. She knelt beside the grave she’d been lying upon and rested her forehead against the cool headstone. Maybe the priest would be back soon, she thought. Maybe someone would come by and offer to help her. Maybe she’d just stay right there.
    Her head began to throb, a drumbeat that threatened to split her in two. She sank to the ground and lay back against the gravestone again, pulling her jacket close to ward off the chill of the earth.
    She would wait.
    She opened her eyes, hoping for answers, but all she could see were clouds that covered the sky like a bruise.
    Â 
    T HERE WASN ’ T ENOUGH LAND IN C ALIFORNIA .
    He could feel it, beating like a hammer at the base of his throat, this claustrophobia born of the hissing asphalt under his tires and the condos pressed so close they left no room to breathe. So he kept driving west to find the ocean, hopefully before it got dark. He had never seen it. There had only been pictures, and accounts from his mother and his father.
    He remembered stories his father had told him, stories he hadn’t believed at the time, of Indians jailed in the 1800s who died overnight because they couldn’t stand the confinement.
    He thought of the statistics from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which said that sixty-six percent of Indians who left the reservations returned, unable to live in the cities. Of course, he was not entirely Sioux. But he was not entirely white, either.
    He smelled it before he saw it. The wind carried him the salt from the waves. He parked the rusted secondhand pickup on the shoulder of the road and ran down the sloping dune. He did not stop running until his sneakers were submerged, until water stained the thighs of his jeans like tears.
    A gull screamed.
    William Flying Horse stood with his arms outstretched, his eyes fixed on the Pacific Ocean but seeing, instead, the brindled plains and rolling Dakota hills that he would not call home.
    Â 
    O N THE P INE R IDGE R ESERVATION IN S OUTH D AKOTA , R OUTE 18 took you into town, and if you wanted to get anywhere else you navigated by natural landmarks or long-abandoned vehicles, since there weren’t many other roads. But it had been three days since he’d moved to Los Angeles and Will had yet to get his bearings.
    He was renting a little row house in Reseda, which was close enough to the LAPD to eliminate the need for a long commute, and far enough away for him to feel like he wasn’t attached to his job. He didn’t have to report to work until tomorrow—the paperwork for the position had been done through the mail—and he had planned to use this time to find his way around L.A.
    Will slammed his fist onto the steering wheel. Where the hell was he? He groped along the front seat, looking for the map he’d tossed away minutes before. He squinted at the tiny red roads, but the overhead light in the pickup had been

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