Second Glance Read online

  Q. Was there anything unusual about her that night?

  A. I don’t think so . . . no, wait. There was a moment where poor Cissy spilled a glass of wine. One of the help, a Gypsy boy, came over to assist but took liberties, touching Cissy’s person while trying to clean up the mess. Professor Pike, well, he quite rightly ripped the waiter up one side and down the other. [Pause] I don’t know the Gypsy boy’s name. But you all might want to find out.

  “Goddamn,” Eli said, when he heard the crash. He ran downstairs from the bathroom, half his face still lathered with shaving cream, to find Watson hiding under the coffee table. One quick look at the living room told him there either had been a recent B&E, or a 150-pound dog chasing something. The TV had been knocked off its stand, the pillows tossed from the couch, and one ladderback chair was now tipped over beside a broken window. Eli crouched down near the dog. “Give it up.” He held out his hand, and Watson sheepishly opened his mouth so that the mouse dropped into it.

  Eli tossed it out of the shattered window. “Well, this is great, Watson. We can open a McDonald’s drive-through in our very own home.” The dog’s ears flattened. “I suppose you’re going to tell me it wasn’t your fault. Oh, that’s right, you’re smarter than that. You’re not going to say anything at all.”

  The dog whined and snuffed his nose further into the carpet. Eli put the couch to rights, and then gently set the television back on its pedestal. This, at least, wasn’t smashed. Sighing, he walked to the window and moved the chair that had broken it. A rainbow of shattered glass lined the sill, but since the window had been broken from the inside, most of the shards had landed somewhere in the azalea bushes.

  Suddenly, he turned and charged up the stairs, this time with the dog at his heels. In his bedroom, Eli overturned a pile of folders on his nightstand until he found the manila envelope containing the crime-scene photos. The photographs taken after the Pike homicide were seventy years old, but they had been made with 4x5 negatives—still the best source around for excellent detail. Eli squinted at the shot taken inside Cissy Pike’s bedroom. The focal point of the picture was the bed, but the window was just behind. Something sparkled on the sill. What about the floor?

  Eli scratched his jaw, surprised to remember he was still covered with shaving cream. “When I finish, Watson,” he said, “we’re going for a drive.”

  Rod van Vleet put his face very close to Ross’s. “Let me get this straight,” he enunciated. “You actually found a ghost?”

  Ross nodded. “Isn’t that what you asked me to do?”

  “No!” Rod threw up his hands and walked away. “I asked you to come check out the property. I never actually expected you to find anything.” He sat down across from Ross in the narrow on-site trailer. “So what am I supposed to do now? Douse the place with Holy Water? Wait until my foreman’s head starts doing 360s?”

  “It’s not a demonic possession. Just a ghost.”

  “Oh, well, fabulous,” Rod said. “I’m glad you’ve cleared that up. And what do I do when it starts coming after my workers?”

  “That probably won’t happen. Curtis Warburton always said that ghosts tend to do their own thing.”

  “Then she should be willing to move somewhere else.”

  Ross shook his head. “According to Curtis, human spirits only leave if they want to. If they’re comfortable where they are, or emotionally tied to the place, or just stubborn, they don’t budge.”

  “Curtis said. According to Curtis. What do you think?”

  For a long moment, Ross was silent. “I don’t really know anymore,” he said finally.

  “Well, let me tell you what I think, then. If a judge happens to believe in this crap and thinks there’s a spirit floating around here, I lose my permit to build. That means one of us is going to have to disappear . . . and for a nominal fee, I’m sure I can count on both of you to do that.”

  The color drained from Ross’s face. “I can’t make her leave.”

  “Then I’ll find someone who can.”

  They stared at each other, and then, without another word, Ross slammed out of the trailer. Rod stood in the doorway and watched him go. The workers he passed didn’t even bat an eye. Then again, they were being paid to do a job—and minor setbacks like frozen ground in August, or shovel handles that split at the touch of a hand, or nails that simply would not burrow straight, were all just a path to fat overtime checks. So he had a ghost in his strip mall. So what? Maybe he could even capitalize on it. Launch a breakfast café called “Restaurant In Peace,” and sell boo-gels and scream cheese. When the press interviewed him, he’d deadpan and say the place was a great undertaking.

  Or maybe . . . he wouldn’t build a strip mall at all. New England was full of creepy old B&Bs stuffed to their dusty rafters with stories of hauntings. If he already had a ghost, why not build a hotel around it?

  After, of course, he had found someone to officially evict the thing.

  Just in case.

  Rod whipped his cell phone out of his pocket and dialed 411. “Angel Quarry,” a voice answered.

  He checked the number, then hung up and redialed. When the operator picked up on the other end, Rod exhaled. In truth, he’d been expecting the quarry again. “Yes,” he said. “I’m trying to find a Mr. Curtis Warburton.”

  The Forensic Lab in Montpelier prioritized cases depending on severity. Which meant that although evidence from a homicide that needed processing might be returned in just a day’s time, a simple burglary might not yield results for several weeks. Eli knew this well, which was why he was even now holding a conversation with Tuck Boorhies, a technician he’d worked with in the past. “A murder?” Tuck said. “In Comtosook?”

  “That’s right,” Eli said. He did not mention that the event had occurred seventy years ago.

  Tuck took the print from Eli. “Jeez. What’s with the black-and-white?”

  “Crime-scene photographer is a purist. How long is this going to take?”

  “How long are you going to stand there breathing down my neck?” Tuck answered, but he scanned the print into the computer programmed with Adobe Photoshop. “Now, what part do you want blown up?”

  Eli showed him on the screen, and the computer zoomed into the bedroom window and the wooden floor in front of it. The technician punched buttons, highlighting the contrast between light and dark. “What do you see?” Eli asked.

  “A floor.”

  “What do you see on the floor?”

  “Nothing,” Tuck said.

  Eli grinned. “That’s right.”

  Ten minutes later, he had a print of this enlargement, as well as some others, including a zoom taken from a photograph shot outside the house below Cecelia Pike’s window. There on the grass, near the feet of the ladder still propped against the house, were small winking chips that looked like broken glass. “There’s no glass inside,” Eli said to Watson, a half-hour later on the drive home, as the bloodhound panted beside him in the cab of the truck. “But there is glass outside. That means no one took her out; she broke out. But if she was being abducted, why would she have broken out?”

  Eli slowed as a car passed him. “She wasn’t abducted, that’s why. She was running away. Why else would you go out the window, instead of using the bedroom door? Because you don’t want someone to see you leaving. Or because you try going downstairs, and can’t, since the bedroom door and window have been locked by someone trying to keep you there.”

  He turned to the dog. “Next question: why was the downstairs of the house wrecked? Pike says on the police report that Gray Wolf entered the bedroom through the broken window. If that’s true, then he wouldn’t walk downstairs with the victim to make his escape—he’d go out the way he came. Which means that house must have been tossed by someone else.” He thought about staging this crime, and what it might accomplish. Then Eli put on his blinker, turning off at the exit. “All roads,” he said, “lead to Spencer Pike.”

  CORONER’S REPORT