Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  PRAISE FOR JODI PICOULT

  'Picoult is a writer of high energy and conviction . . .

  she forges a finely honed, commanding and cathartic drama.'

  --Booklist 'Picoult writes with a fine touch, a sharp eye for detail, and a firm

  grasp of the delicacy and complexity of human relationships.'

  --The Boston Globe 'The novelist displays an almost uncanny ability to enter the

  skins of her troubled young protagonists.'

  --New York Times

  'Picoult has the true storyteller's ability to evoke a world on the

  page and pull the reader into it.'

  --The Women's Review of Books 'Engrossing . . . The Pact is compelling reading, right up to

  the stunning courtroom conclusion.'

  --People

  '[Keeping Faith] makes you wonder about God. And that is

  a rare moment, indeed, in modern fiction.'

  --USA Today

  '[Plain Truth] reads like a cross between the Harrison Ford

  movie Witness and Scott Turow's novel Presumed Innocent, with

  a dose of television's The Practice thrown in.'

  --Arizona Republic 'Part thriller, part courtroom drama and part family portrait,

  Perfect Match is an intriguing "what if ".'

  --Sydney Morning Herald

  By Jodi Picoult

  Songs of the Humpback Whale

  Harvesting the Heart

  Picture Perfect

  Mercy

  The Pact

  Keeping Faith

  Plain Truth

  Salem Falls

  Perfect Match

  Second Glance

  My Sister's Keeper

  Vanishing Acts

  The Tenth Circle

  Nineteen Minutes

  Change of Heart

  Handle with Care

  JODI

  PICOULT

  Second Glance

  This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2009

  First published in Australia in 2003

  First published in the United States in 2003 by Atria Books, a division of Simon &

  Schuster, Inc.

  Copyright (c) Jodi Picoult 2003

  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 Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.librariesaustralia.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74175 804 7

  Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Sammy, who is both a reader and a writer.

  I love you to the moon and back.

  XOXO, Mom

  What if you slept?

  And what if in your sleep, you dreamed?

  And what if in your dream, you went to heaven

  and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?

  And what if, when you woke, you had the flower

  in your hand?

  Ah! What then?

  --SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

  Contents

  PART ONE 2001

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  PART TWO 1932

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART THREE 2001

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PART ONE

  2001

  True love is like ghosts, which everybody

  talks about and few have seen.

  --FRANCOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIM 76

  ONE

  Ross Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third.

  He fell asleep at the wheel and drove his car off a bridge into a lake--that was the second time--and was found on the shore by rescuers. When his half-sunken Honda was recovered, the doors were all locked, and the tempered glass windows were shattered like spider-webs, but still intact. No one could figure out how he'd gotten out of the car in the first place, much less survived a crash without even a scratch.

  The third time, Ross was mugged in New York City. The thief took his wallet and beat him up, and then shot him in the back and left him for dead. The bullet--fired close enough to have shattered his scapula and punctured a lung--didn't. Instead it miraculously stopped at the bone, a small nugget of lead that Ross now used as a keychain.

  The first time was years ago, when Ross had found himself in the middle of an electrical storm. The lightning, a beautiful blue charge, had staggered out of the sky and gone straight for his heart. The doctors told him that he had been legally dead for seven minutes. They reasoned that the current could not have struck Ross directly, because 50,000 amperes of current in his chest cavity would have boiled the moisture in his cells and quite literally made him explode. Instead, the lightning had hit nearby and created an induced current in his own body, one still strong enough to disturb his cardiac rhythm. The doctors said he was one hell of a lucky man.

  They were wrong.

  Now, as Ross walked up the pitched wet roof of the O'Donnells' Oswego home in the dark, he did not even bother with caution. The wind coming off Lake Ontario was cold even in August, and whipped his long hair into his eyes as he maneuvered around the gabled window. The rain bit at the back of his neck as he worked the clamps onto the flashing and positioned the waterproof video camera so that it was pointing into the attic.

  His boots slipped, dislodging some of the old shingles. On the ground, beneath an umbrella, O'Donnell squinted up at him. "Be careful," the man called out. Ross also heard the words he did not say: We've got enough ghosts.

  But nothing would happen to him. He would not trip; he wouldn't fall. It was why he volunteered for the riskiest tasks; why he put himself into danger again and again. It was why he'd tried bungee jumping and rock climbing and crack cocaine. He waved down to Mr. O'Donnell, indicating that he'd heard. But just as Ross knew that in eight hours, the sun would come up--just as he knew that he'd have to go through the motions for another day--he also knew he couldn't die, in spite of the fact that it was what he wanted, more than anything.

  The baby woke Spencer Pike, and he struggled to a sitting position. In spite of the nightlights kept in every room at the Shady Pines Nursing Home--nearly enough combined wattage, he imagined, to illuminate all of Burlington, Vermont--Spencer couldn't see past the foot of his bed. He couldn't see anything these days, thanks to the cataracts; although sometimes he'd get up to take a leak, and in the mirror, as he passed by, he would catch a glimpse of someone watching him--someone whose brow was not spotted and yellow; someone whose skin was not sighing off his bones. But then the young man Spencer had once been would disappear, leaving him to stare at the crumbs that were left of his life.

&