Second Glance Read online

  “I understand their graves are on the land?”

  “Yes.”

  Eli tipped his head. “Not at the church cemetery? Years ago you were quite active in the Congregational assembly . . .”

  “My daughter was stillborn,” Pike said. “And my wife was dead. I . . . wasn’t ready to let them both go. I wanted them in a place where they could find me, and I could find them.” He turned away, but not before Eli noticed that he was crying.

  Nowhere in the original police report was there any mention of the infant’s body. Eli had read this and counted it up to sloppy police work—any self-respecting medical examiner would have conducted an autopsy. On the other hand, if an influential rich man called in to report his wife’s homicide, the last thing an officer was going to want to do was cause him any more suffering. If Pike said the baby had been stillborn, they would take his word for it.

  People see what they want to see, Eli knew, and police officers were no different. “You found her,” he repeated.

  “I was the one who cut her down. I knew enough to realize that you folks would want to see the way . . . it had been done. But I couldn’t stand to see her like that. It looked like . . .” His voice trailed off. “It looked like she was in pain.”

  “What about her father?”

  “Harry? He lived on the Hill. He was in Boston at a conference and came home immediately. Never was the same after Cissy was killed . . . drank himself to death two years later.”

  He was in Boston. Which ruled him out as a suspect. “Did you see a step stool anywhere?” Eli asked. “Something that your wife might have climbed up on by herself?”

  “My wife was murdered,” Pike corrected, his voice dry as flint. “If she committed suicide, then she must have flown up to the rafter—it was ten feet off the ground, and there was nothing for her to stand on to reach it.”

  Eli met the old man’s gaze dead on. “I’m just trying to understand what happened, Mr. Pike. With all of the controversy surrounding the sale of your land, we’ve had some new leads regarding Gray Wolf. As far as I’m concerned, this case wasn’t solved to my satisfaction.”

  “Mine either.”

  Eli waited, aware that silence could exert the strongest pressure, but Pike confessed nothing. A nurse approached, smiling. “Time for physical therapy.”

  Eli put his hand on the wheelchair. “Do you have any idea where Gray Wolf might have gone after that night?”

  Pike shook his head. “But if you’re looking for him now, Detective, you might as well start in hell.”

  Eli stood as the old man was wheeled out. He waited until the nurse turned the corner with the wheelchair, until the other residents seemed to have nodded their heads into the mush on their plates. Then he removed a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, opened up a Ziploc bag he’d taken from home, and plucked the old man’s water glass off his tray.

  In Comtosook, things started returning to normal. Clocks that had stopped running at the stroke of midnight weeks earlier began ticking again; the swings at the playground no longer moaned when a child sat down; butterflies that had gone gray bled with fresh color. Cautious mothers crept out of the house and let their toddlers play on the sidewalks. The glowing beetles that had infested the birch trees near the town offices vanished. Images that had slipped right off the paper in photo development shops now stuck fast, proof of change.

  But the local undertaker, who had grown accustomed to finding one perfect peony inside the mouths of his clients, still checked behind their lips and teeth out of habit. Abe Huppinworth swept the porch of the Gas & Grocery every morning although it was bare as a bone. Middle-aged businessmen who, of late, had overslept on the tails of dreams now woke to their alarm clocks and pulled the covers over their heads, as if finding fantasy might be that simple. And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

  Shelby barely made it out of the attorney’s office before running to the bushes and vomiting. Afterward, she wiped her mouth on a Kleenex and sank to the curb, berating herself. Having a will drawn up was perfectly normal, something any adult would do at a given point in her life, especially when she had a son.

  Except Shelby knew, for a fact, that the estate and its entirety that she had just signed away to Ethan would never be his.

  Shelby had gone into labor in the middle of a thunderstorm. Thomas drove to the hospital in their old convertible, the one with the top that got stuck when open and was stuck even then, so that on the highway ripped with contractions, she found herself being soaked. When they took her newborn and placed him on her chest, boneless and sticky as a tree frog, Shelby could not tear her eyes away. “Look,” she had said to Thomas, over and over. “Have you ever seen anything like him?”

  Ethan had been the most beautiful boy. Strong and dark-haired, with the fists of a fighter and eyes as pale as turquoise, he turned heads from the moment Shelby brought him home. “That,” people would say, stopping her on the street, “is a perfect baby.” Ethan’s defects, it turned out, were the ones you could not see.

  The first time he’d been badly burned by the sun, he was six weeks old. Thomas and Shelby had been living in New Hampshire at the time, near the shore, and drove out to the Plum Island Bird Sanctuary in October, when no one was on the beach. On this long, desolate stretch of sand, with seagulls stealing their crackers, they lay a sleeping Ethan down and kissed, their hands moving beneath each other’s sweaters and their hair going stiff with the salt in the air. “I feel like a high school kid,” Shelby said when Thomas unbuttoned her jeans and slipped his hand between her legs. And Thomas had laughed. “High school kids don’t own infant car seats,” he’d answered.

  Lost in each other, they hadn’t noticed the alarming mulberry of their baby’s skin, deepening under the eye of the sun. They did not realize that what they thought was a rash might actually be blisters. And late that night, when not even cool compresses could soothe a screaming Ethan, Shelby understood that this moment was only the beginning.

  The doctors had never been able to tell her whether it was her DNA or Thomas’s that carried this fatal flaw, but to Shelby, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. She assumed that Ethan’s condition was her fault, and because she had not prevented it, she would spend the rest of her life trying to make up for her shortcomings.

  Nobody could tell her how long Ethan had left. She asked the dermatologist at every visit, and each time he said that it depended on how much damage had been done to Ethan’s skin before his diagnosis—every minute he’d been outside and uncovered as a baby might have stripped days off his life. Shelby imagined cancers like jellyfish that slipped through the sea and sometimes rose to the surface—you knew they were there, and were dangerous, even if you could not see them at first sight.

  How on earth did you lower your baby’s body into the ground and then keep on living?

  Shelby buried her face in her hands. Her pocketbook strap fell to the side. In spite of this crisp new will tucked into her pocketbook, it was not Ethan who would sort through her china, her photographs, her old love letters. It was Shelby, who would fold small shirts into smaller squares to pack up to Goodwill, who would open the windows of his bedroom and let free the smell of him until anyone at all, and not this incredibly special boy, might have lived there.

  She heard the growling approach of a vehicle, but didn’t look up. In the first place, she was a mess. In the second, she had precious few places where she was allowed nervous breakdowns, and if she used a public street to do so it was no one else’s business. The windows of the car were open; she could hear the twang of a guitar on the radio.

  “Ms. Wakeman?” The tires rolled to a stop beside her. Shelby didn’t lift her head at first, until she heard panting. She glanced up out of curiosity, to find the most enormous dog she’d ever seen lolling its head out the window of a black truck. A hand pushed the skull