Second Glance Read online

  Ethan held it up to his face. You could only get a small spot in view—the tip of his nose, one eyebrow, a freckle. It was possible, this way, to believe that added together, the reflections might make up one very ordinary boy. It was possible, this way, to be someone altogether different.

  Eli woke with a start and sat up, gasping for air. The room was redolent with the scent of apples, so strong that he looked to the side of the bed to make sure there was not a cider press nearby. He rubbed his eyes, but could not seem to shake the image that danced before his face, no matter which way he turned: it was that woman again.

  He knew her voice, although he had never heard her speak. He knew that she had a scar underneath her left earlobe, that her mouth tasted of vanilla and misfortune.

  His mother had believed in the power of dreams. When Eli was a child, she’d told him a story of his grandfather, a holy man who had envisioned his own demise. He had gone to sleep and seen a mountain covered with snow, and at the very top, a hawk. The hawk reached into the drifts and pulled out a snake by its neck—pulled and kept pulling—and finally attached to the end of the reptile was the empty shell of a turtle. Shaken, it made the rattle of death. Three months later, at a ceremonial rite, a freak snowstorm stranded Eli’s grandfather and three other men at the top of a sacred mountain. The others found the men days afterward, frozen. Their bodies might never have been recovered, if not for the caw of a hawk who led the search party closer and closer.

  “When we’re awake,” Eli’s mother used to say, “we see what we need to see. When we’re asleep, we see what’s really there.”

  He used to wonder if his mother had ever dreamed of her marriage to a white man; of the diabetes slowly killing her. He wondered if she’d known that her only son would be more likely to cut off his own arm than subscribe to the Indian belief that dreams were more than some crazy neurons firing.

  The woman, the one who came to him in the dark—she had eyes the color of sea glass, a piece that Eli found once on a beach in Rhode Island, and that he kept on the windowsill of his bathroom.

  He pulled the covers up to his chin and settled down on his pillows again. Most likely, he was horny. He was dreaming up beauties because he wasn’t getting any honest action.

  Although, he admitted, as he drifted off again, if that was the case, it made more sense to picture her in a bikini, or better yet, naked in a sauna. Not like she’d been, fully clothed and crouched on a floor, weeping as she fit together what looked like the pieces of an impossible puzzle.

  The scream rang out, high and hysterical, as Meredith raced into Lucy’s bedroom. No, no, no, she thought. Things have been so normal.

  Her grandmother was already there, smoothing Lucy’s damp hair back from her forehead and murmuring that everything was all right. “She won’t stop,” Granny Ruby said, panicked. “It’s like she can’t even hear me.”

  Meredith clapped her hands on both sides of her daughter’s face and leaned closer. “Lucy, you listen to me. You are fine. There is nothing here that can hurt you. Do you understand?”

  Like a veil lifting, Lucy’s gaze sharpened, and she fell silent. As she realized where she was and what had happened she curled up in a fetal position and skittered closer to the head of the bed. “Can’t you see her?” Lucy whispered. “She’s right there.”

  She pointed to a spot between Meredith and Ruby, a spot where there was nothing at all. Then she burrowed underneath the covers. “She wants me to help her look.”

  “For what?” Meredith asked.

  But Lucy had gone somewhere inside herself, and she didn’t answer. Meredith’s chest hurt; her heart might have been a stone. “Granny,” she said, in a voice that was borrowed, “can you watch her?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Meredith walked into her own bedroom again. She picked up the telephone and the small business card she’d placed in her nightstand drawer. She waited for the appropriate series of beeps. And then she paged Dr. Calloway, a surrender.

  When Ross arrived at the Pike property at 11 P.M., Lia was waiting. “Am I late?” he asked casually, as if he’d expected to see her all along. As he set up his equipment he watched her from the corner of his eye. There was something different about her—a fragile determination that Ross didn’t want to jeopardize by bringing up the circumstances of how they’d last parted. So instead, he showed her the spots where the mounds had been two nights ago. He let her look at his new EMF field meter, which had arrived in the mail that afternoon. If she wanted to ghost hunt with him, then he’d let her. It was a starting point, and that was better than nothing at all.

  She ran her hand lightly over the video camera on its tripod, pointed off in the distance. “My father has a camera,” she said, “although his is a little bigger. Bulkier.”

  “This one’s digital.” Ross glanced up at the clearing. He was already getting strong sensations from that spot. “If we sit down and wait, maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “I . . . can stay?”

  “I figured that’s why you came.”

  Lia didn’t answer, but settled herself beside him on the frozen ground. Her apprehension pressed between them like a chaperone. Ross wondered what was fueling her fear—the possibility of seeing a ghost, or that her husband would come looking for her. “You okay?” he asked.

  She nodded. With the exception of a small flashlight, they were sitting in total darkness. Lia sat with her arms wrapped over her knees, her skirt smoothed to her ankles. She glanced at the EMF meter, its needle stable. “So this compass,” she said, “it goes off if a ghost is here?”

  “Technically, it goes off when a ghost is materializing. It’s the transition between states that disrupts an electromagnetic field.”

  She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “If the spirit is invisible, and then suddenly starts to look solid—or vice versa—we’ll hear crackling.”

  They fell into a companionable silence full of questions neither one wanted to be first to ask. At some point Ross stopped attending to potential paranormal activity and started to listen instead for the sound of Lia’s breathing falling between the spaces of his own. He grew acutely aware of the distance between his shoulder and hers. If he shrugged, he would touch her. Hell, if he inhaled deeply.

  It had been nearly a decade since Ross felt this—a physical awareness so intense it seemed to require all of his attention, a fleeting prayer for something beyond his control—earthquake, tsunami—that might naturally close the space between them. He had been looking for the ghost of a woman for so long, it was unsettling to find himself fascinated by one sitting right beside him. But Lia was married, and Aimee was the one he really wanted.

  What if the strange tug he felt around Lia was not the need to save her, but the possibility that she might be able to save him? What if he was not supposed to find a ghost in Comtosook . . . but rather, this woman?

  Aimee is gone. Lia is here . . .

  The rogue thought stumbled into the front of his mind, upsetting him so greatly he found himself physically going in the opposite direction, scooting out of the yellow round of the flashlight and away from Lia. “Did something happen?” she asked, breathless.

  No, Ross thought, thank God. He got to his feet and began to walk around the clearing.

  “You feel something?”

  “No,” Ross answered. Yes.

  She stood up, walking into the shadows. “I do,” Lia murmured. “Like everything’s getting . . . sharper. Harder.”

  As she moved past Ross, he could feel a breeze. The light edge of her skirt grazed his hand, and before he could stop himself, he grabbed for it, only to have it slip through his fingers like wind.

  His heart was too large in his chest, and it was beating out of rhythm. Ross, who had not let his love die when his lover did, was suddenly distracted by something as mundane as the dimple on a woman’s knee.

  He told himself that he had built a world with Aimee; that she had known him better than anyone had