Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  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 in his life. But the truth was, Aimee would not recognize Ross now. Grief had changed him, from the pitch of his voice to the way he carried himself down a busy street. Aimee had understood what made Ross happy.

  But Lia seemed to understand what had crushed him.

  There was suddenly, quite clearly, the cry of an infant. "Did you hear that?" Lia whispered, and she reached for Ross, her hand closing over his wrist.

  He had heard it. But he realized that Lia was no longer focused on the distant sound. She picked up the flashlight, shined it square on the scars on Ross's arm. "Oh . . ." Lia said, and the light clattered to the ground, pitching them both into darkness.

  Although he could not see Lia, Ross knew she was feeling beneath her sleeves for her own old wounds. "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "You didn't ask." Ross reached into his pocket and lit a cigarette, bringing her face back from the shadows.

  "When?" she said simply.

  "A while ago. Back when I didn't think there was anything left for me in this world." He met her gaze, then took the glowing cigarette and pressed it to the flesh inside his arm, daring her to feel sorry for him. "I still don't."

  To his surprise, Lia didn't try to stop him. She waited until he tossed away the butt, until there was an angry, blistered burn on his skin. "I didn't come here tonight to look for a ghost," Lia admitted. "I came because when I'm with you, I'm not sitting at home and wondering if I should use a knife or pills or poison." All the fine hairs on his arms stood up as she pressed her lips to his ear. "Ross," she whispered, "tell me what's on the other side."

  Ross had felt like this once before--dizzy and agonized and bursting from every cell. Afterward, when he'd awakened, three doctors said he'd been struck by lightning. He brought his hand up to Lia's jaw. If you can see me so clearly, he thought, then I must be real.

  A few feet away, the EMF meter began to crackle. The static came slowly at first, eventually growing so loud Ross could hear it over the blind swell of his mind. Ross had never experienced a response this strong--something significant was coming. And it made perfect sense: the spirit was using the energy that had sparked between Ross and Lia to materialize.

  Ross scrambled away, grabbing for the EMF and squinting in an effort to see the readings. "The light," he called to Lia.

  But a moment later, his shoe connected with the flashlight. The meter was already waning again, the crackles subsiding. It was the most significant proof of a spirit he'd ever witnessed, yet Ross didn't think he'd care at this moment if the ghost walked right up to him and introduced itself. He needed to find Lia, to see what was written on her face.

  Ross turned on the flashlight and swung the beam, but she was gone.

  It would not be the first time Ross had seen a person run away during a paranormal investigation. Yet Lia's fear had nothing to do with the coming of ghosts. What had scared her was the same thing that had scared Ross--what, even now, kept him shaking: the knowledge that for the second time in his life, he wanted someone he could not have.

  FOUR

  In Comtosook, residents began adapting to a world they could no longer take for granted. Umbrellas were carried in knapsacks and purses, to ward off rain that fell red as blood and dried into a layer of fine red dust. China dishes shattered at the stroke of noon, no matter how carefully they were wrapped. Mothers woke their children, so that they could see the roses bloom at midnight.

  After a while, hems on pants began to unravel and words would not stay still on the pages of books. Water never boiled. People in town found they'd wake up without a history-- walking out to get the morning paper, they would trip over their own memories, unraveled like bandages across the sidewalk. Women opened their dryers to find their whites had turned to feathers. Meat spoiled in the freezer. The color blue looked completely wrong.

  Some attributed the events to global warming, or personal bad luck. But when Abe Huppinworth walked into the Gas & Grocery only to find every single item balanced backward and upside down on the shelves, he wondered aloud if that Indian ghost on Otter Creek Pass didn't have something to do with it. And the three customers who had been shopping at the time told their neighbors, and before evening fell the inhabitants of Comtosook were all speculating on whether or not it might not just be best to leave that piece of land alone.

  There was a large part of Rod van Vleet that didn't want to hear what Ross Wakeman had to say. If there was a ghost-- ridiculous as it seemed--what was Rod supposed to do about it? The house had been demolished; the crews were moving the wreckage into Dumpsters. The Redhook Group was going to build, no matter how many locals' signatures and petitions crossed his desk. Maybe Rod would need to call in a priest to exorcise the damn bagel shop that was to be eventually built here, and maybe he wouldn't. The point was that the ghost was negotiable; the development was not.

  And yet, Rod really wanted to know if he was displacing a spirit. If the reason his meals all tasted of sawdust, if the reason his toothbrush went missing every night, had anything to do with his current occupation.

  "These things . . ." Rod pointed to the TV screen, where a grainy image of a forest at nighttime was scored by blue lines and floating balls of light. "These things are supposed to be a ghost?" He relaxed inside. Whatever he had been expecting, this was not it. A few sparks and bubbles couldn't hurt anyone. They certainly wouldn't run off potential business.

  Ross Wakeman was a charlatan; plain and simple. He'd seen an opportunity to grab a little attention for himself, and he had climbed right aboard Rod's bandwagon to do it.

  "That's not a spirit in and of itself," Wakeman explained. "That's a spirit's effect on the equipment. I've had flashlights cut out on me on the property, and this sort of interference recording, and very strong readings on machines that measure magnetic fields."

  "Mumbo-jumbo," Rod said. "There's nothing concrete."

  "Just because something defies measurement doesn't mean it's not here." Wakeman shrugged. "Consider the difference between property value and actual worth."

  "Ah, but you can measure property value. It's how much people are willing to pay to acquire something."

  "You can measure a ghost, too, by what people are willing to believe."

  Suddenly the door to the construction trailer burst open. Van Vleet turned away to find three angry equipment operators storming closer, their excavators as dormant as sleeping dinosaurs.

  One, the ringleader, poked van Vleet in the chest. "We quit."

  "You can't quit. You haven't finished the job."

  "Screw the job." He removed his hard hat and tossed it at van Vleet, a gauntlet. "They're driving us crazy."

  "What is?"

  "The flies." Another worker stepped forward, continuing to speak in a thick French Canadian accent. "They come right into the ears, and they whisper." With his hands he made small, spinning circles by the sides of his head. "Tsee-tsee. Tsee-tsee."

  "And when you go to bat them away," the first worker added, "there's nothing there."

  The third worker, still silent, crossed himself.

  Ross coughed, and van Vleet glared at him. "I'm sure it's nothing," he assured them. "A trick of the wind. Maybe a virus."

  "Then it's freakin' contagious, because those Abenaki out front heard it too. And the old one, he spelled the word we heard. C-H-I-J-I-S. It means baby, in his language."

  "Of course he's going to tell you that!" van Vleet cried. "He wants you to leave. He wants you to be so scared you do just what you're doing now--get of