Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  "How do you know they're the wrong results, if you don't have any answers yet?"

  "They're just weird, that's all."

  Eli frowned. "Weird like: it's alien DNA . . . or weird like: you can't get results because it's so goddamned old?"

  "Weird like: leave me alone so I can give you a report."

  "When?" Eli demanded.

  "Two minutes later than it would have been if you'd let me get off the phone."

  "Thanks, Frankie."

  "Don't thank me," she said. "By the time I'm done, you may not want to."

  Ethan poked his head into the bathroom, where his mother was taking a bubble bath. "Come on in," she said, and he crept inside, studiously keeping his eyes on the tile floor. She was covered with bubbles from neck to toe, but still. This was his mother . . . and that word, along with naked, felt weird jammed together.

  "Eth," she said, laughing, "I'm perfectly decent."

  He risked a glance: she was. Her face was the only body part rising above the froth of foam. "I couldn't get this open," Ethan said, thrusting a jar of peanut butter toward her.

  "Ah." His mother took it, twisted, handed it back. The sides of the jar were soapy now. "What are you up to?"

  "Making ants-on-a-log. For during the movie." They'd rented something lame and Disneyfied; Ethan was hoping he could convince his mother to watch Die Hard II instead, which was on one of the cable stations. He glanced up at the window, streaked with rain. "It bites that we can't go outside."

  "Ethan."

  "Well, it still bites, even if I'm not supposed to say that."

  When the doorbell rang, they both jumped. It wasn't just that someone shouldn't be dropping by at nine-thirty on a Saturday night. It was that nobody dropped by, ever. Ethan watched his mother's face go as white as the bubbles surrounding her. "Something happened to Ross," she whispered, and she lurched upright in the tub.

  Ethan turned away before he had to see, well, her. She shrugged into her robe and wrapped a blue towel around her hair, then hurried down the stairs.

  He could have followed her. The celery and raisins were on the counter, waiting. But instead Ethan found his mind frozen on the one piece of his mother he had glimpsed before he turned away--a foot rising from the suds.

  He had no idea why, but seeing that . . . it reminded him of the night he'd gone ghost hunting with his uncle.

  In his wildest imaginings, Eli could not have ever pictured himself collaborating with a paranormal investigator. In his opinion, evidence was something that could be held in your hand, not in your head. But Frankie's call tonight had changed everything. The alleged murderer's DNA had not been on the rope--yet someone else's DNA had been. Neither of these circumstances alone was damning or absolving . . . but taken in context, they might be. Eli needed to speak to someone who could fill in some of the historical blanks. That someone was Ross Wakeman.

  He stood on the porch, the rain pounding the metal roof overhead, and rang the doorbell a second time. Wakeman had left his phone number and address behind, "just in case," he had told Eli, "you change your mind about reopening that case." Eli's keen eye had already noticed the skateboard propped up against the wall, and the pair of yellow garden clogs next to them. It surprised Eli; he had good instincts, and Ross Wakeman hadn't struck him as a family man. He knew that someone was home; the car was in the driveway and across a lighted window upstairs, Eli had seen a moving silhouette. He rapped hard on the door. "Hello?"

  There was the systematic click of locks being undone. A flash of blue crossed the sidelight window; a terry-cloth sleeve. The door swung open, and an apprehensive voice addressed him. "Can I help you?"

  But Eli could not respond. He could not do anything but stare, speechless, at the woman who'd been in his dreams.

  Ethan dipped his hand into the bubbles and blew them gently. He had smelled something like this when the lights had gone out in the haunted house. He got up from where he was sitting and turned out the light, pitching the bathroom into darkness. Now, with the scent of flowers all around, and the humidity pressing in, it was just like it had been that night.

  His uncle had asked him if he'd seen anything, and Ethan had said no, he was hiding. But he'd peeked out once, and there had been something. A movement in the dark. At first he had thought it was his uncle again, coming back, but that had not been the case. Ethan had found himself straining to see the profile in front of him, thin as fishing line. A face, or maybe not a face, he couldn't quite hold onto it then or now.

  There was only one thing Ethan was certain of, one point that stuck like a knife thrown to its mark: that flower smell had been there, and then it had gone. Whatever it had been had followed Uncle Ross outside, instead of the other way around.

  A streak of lightning broke the spell. "You came back," Ross said, not noticing that Lia's eyes were red and raw, that she was shaking her head. She had returned to him, and for this small miracle alone, he would do what it took to keep her there. He was certain, in that moment, that he could face down a hundred reporters. He could take on her husband. He could stop the thunder, if necessary.

  "I came to say good-bye," Lia answered.

  Ross fielded the words like a blow. He could not explain to himself why he felt the way he did around this woman; why his skin hummed in her presence and the tips of his fingers went cold. He'd believed, on some level, that Lia had felt this too. For years, he had been looking for the answer to Aimee's death; only recently had he learned that he'd been asking the wrong question.

  Before you could grab onto something else, you had to let go.

  "No." The rain matted Ross's hair and ran down his face. He did not know how to make Lia understand that a parting was a joint decision, that a person could not leave you, if you were not willing to release them. So instead, he reached for her.

  Ross held her face between his hands and kissed her. He tasted doubt on her tongue and pain on the roof of her mouth. He swallowed these, and drank again. Consumed, she had no choice but to see how empty he was inside, and how, sip by sip, she filled him.

  The storm whipped stronger, sparks arcing blue and thunder drumming beneath their feet. Lia broke away from him, her eyes wide and wet. "Wait," Ross said, but she turned and started to run through the woods.

  He followed her like a hunter, eyes marking the flashes of white from her collar. She raced across the slick, snowy clearing where Ross had done most of his research, darting between mounds of dirt that had sprung up from nowhere once again. She disappeared between a fissure of trees.

  Ross had not been on this part of the property before, at least not that he could remember. His lungs were too tight, every breath a pinch, but he did not stop running. Lia had turned onto a narrow path, one overgrown with young pines and frozen scrub brush. Thorns caught at Ross's shoelaces and scraped up his calves, and then suddenly, miraculously, gave way. Beneath his feet the ground had thawed, a small patch covered with dozens of trampled white roses.

  Lia glanced down at them too, but she didn't stop. And Ross, who had not taken his eyes off her, watched her legs pass directly through two stone markers, the same ones he smacked into a moment later with his boot, sending him sprawling face-first into the mud.

  Winded and dazed, he struggled to his knees. It took another flash of lightning for him to be able to make out the names on the gravestones. LILY PIKE, SEPTEMBER 19, 1932. And on the larger one: CECILIA BEAUMONT PIKE, NOVEMBER 9, 1913-SEPTEMBER 19, 1932.

  Ross glanced up to find Lia staring at the graves, too. Slowly, she reached out to touch the smaller stone, and her hand moved right through it. She looked at Ross, stunned.

  Cissy Pike. Cecilia. Lia.

  Ross had been told of ghosts who did not know they were ghosts. He'd met paranormal investigators who had been bitten, hit, slapped, and shoved by spirits. He had always assumed that the first ghost he saw would be transparent, a storybook specter, but when there was enough energy to warrant it, ghosts could seem as solid as anyone.