Second Glance Read online

  Ethan rolled over on his bed as his uncle opened the door to his bedroom. “You still up?” Ross asked.

  He had been staring out the window, watching the sun come up. As always, a thick pane of glass was protecting him. He knew he’d totally lucked out; if Eli Rochert had decided to be honest and if his mother hadn’t come home with that box of old papers, he’d have been reamed up one side and down another for sneaking away.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” Ethan sighed. “And it’s not like I wanted you to get in trouble too.” He picked at a stitch on the quilt that covered his bed, a lame blue thing with babyish trucks on its hem. Didn’t anyone except him realize that he was growing up? “It’s just that she doesn’t get it. Not like you would.”

  Ross sat down on the bed, and put the laptop he’d been carrying on the floor. “Why me?”

  With shining eyes, Ethan turned to his uncle. “Because you’ve skydived, and played chicken with a train, and fought back when someone pulled a knife on you. All those stories you tell me about things you’ve done. Sometimes I wake up and think I want to run until there’s nowhere left to go, and that if I don’t do it I might as well just croak right here and now.”

  Ross shook his head. “When I do those things, it’s not for the thrill. It’s because sometimes I get so down that I need to feel something, anything. And since a pinprick isn’t cutting it, I’ve got to try a meat cleaver.”

  “I know,” Ethan breathed. “And that rocks.”

  “The thing is, Eth, I’d give anything to be sitting on a bed in a house that was safe, knowing that on the other side of the wall was someone who would rather die than think of me being hurt.” He pulled at the same stitch on the quilt that Ethan had toyed with, and unraveled one appliquéd truck. “Don’t try so hard to be me,” Ross said, “when all I’m trying to be is someone else.”

  Suddenly Ethan felt like a sock was stuck in his throat, and those stupid tears were coming. “I just want to be normal,” he said.

  “Yeah, well . . . if it weren’t for you and me, normal people would have nothing to measure themselves against.”

  Ethan hiccuped on a laugh. “I guess we’d better stick together.”

  “That’s good,” Ross answered, opening the laptop so that Ethan could see the screen. “Because I’m counting on your help.”

  By the time Eli got home from Shelby’s house, and this new package of nightmares, it was after three in the morning. The blasting at the quarry started at five, but he managed to get back to sleep with a pillow over his head. So when his doorbell rang at 6:30 A.M., he seriously considered taking his piece and shooting in that general direction, just to make the caller go away. Then he weighed the time he’d be stripped of his shield, and the ridiculous amount of paperwork he’d have to file for the simple discharge of a bullet, and dragged himself out of bed in his boxer shorts.

  Frankie exploded into the apartment the minute he unlocked the door. “Wait’ll you hear this,” she said, making her way into the kitchen, where she held up the empty coffeepot and tsked. “I tested that nightgown at the state lab for you.”

  “Frankie—”

  “You know that stuff you thought was the victim’s blood?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, it wasn’t. Don’t you keep your coffee in the freezer, Eli, like the rest of the modern world?” She turned around, holding the coffee-pot aloft. “You’re wearing your underpants, for God’s sake.”

  “Underwear. Grown men don’t wear underpants.”

  “Grown men usually get dressed before they answer the door.”

  “Frankie,” Eli sighed, “I’ve had about three hours of sleep. Don’t screw with me.”

  She unearthed the coffee, which was—of all places—in a box with his black shoe polish on top of the fridge, and began to measure it out. “It’s meconium.”

  “No, I think it’s Colombian.”

  “The stain, you jerk. On the nightgown.”

  Eli yawned and scratched his chest. He was too tired, at this point, to even care about covering himself for Frankie, who was far more interested in whatever her tests had yielded than his body anyway. “So what’s meconium? Something radioactive? You’re not gonna tell me aliens hanged her, are you?”

  “It’s feces. Baby poop.”

  “Yeah, well, we already know she gave birth that night. So what.”

  The coffeemaker sputtered, and Frankie found two mismatched mugs. “You told me the woman gave birth to a dead baby. Dead babies don’t pass stools.”

  Her last sentence cut through Eli’s senses, and he swam out of his fog. “Hang on—”

  “Hello,” Frankie said. “That baby was alive.”

  Today was Bingo Day, and although Eli had absolutely no intention of playing, some well-meaning staffer at the nursing home had plunked a card in front of him. “B-11,” said the activities coordinator, a large woman in a jumpsuit that made her look like a prize-winning pumpkin. “B-11!”

  He saw Spencer Pike before the old man saw him, and approached the intern who was wheeling him into the room before he reached the table. “I can take care of this,” Eli said, taking the handles of the chair and repositioning Pike in a corner, away from the grainy speakers of the Bingo caller.

  Eli was unprepared for the way hate spread through him viscerally. This was the man who had tried to erase his family. This man once thought he had the right to decide what kind of life was worth living. This man had played God.

  Eli had cringed when he’d read the 1932 police reports, where brutality was the order of the day and Miranda wasn’t even a gleam in some detective’s eye. But cruelty came easily, it turned out, when you had so much anger swimming in you that you risked floating away on the tide.

  “Go away,” Spencer Pike said distinctly.

  Eli leaned closer, pinning Pike’s shoulders to the back of his chair. “You lied to me, Spencer.”

  “I don’t even know who you are.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. Your brain’s just fine. I bet you remember everything you did in your life. I bet you even remember their names.”

  “Whose names?”

  “O-75,” the activities coordinator chirped. “Do we have a Bingo?”

  “You thought you were so smart, telling the cops you’d only just cut down your wife’s body. But you’d cut it down hours before you called them.”

  A vein throbbed in the old man’s temple. “This is ridiculous.”

  “Is it? I mean, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even alive. So how could I possibly know?” Eli paused. “You ever heard about forensics, Spencer? You know how many things a dead body can tell us these days? Like when she was killed. How it was done. Who was stupid enough to leave clues behind.”

  Spencer pushed at him ineffectively. “Get away from me.”

  “Who’d you kill first, Spencer? The baby, or your wife?”

  “Nurse!”

  “It must have made you crazy to know that you’d married one. That your child was one.”

  Pike’s face had gone white. “One what?”

  “Gypsy,” Eli said.

  Almost immediately, Pike struggled halfway out of his chair. His skin darkened, and his watery eyes fixed on Eli. “You . . . you . . .” he wheezed.

  “I-20. Anyone?”

  Pike clutched his chest and scrambled to grab at the armrests, but missed and fell forward, landing on the floor. The activities coordinator cried out and came running from the front of the room. Two burly interns headed toward them. Eli leaned down beside Pike. “How does it feel, not being able to fight back?” he whispered.

  In the melee that followed, Pike battled the staff trying to help him, shouting obscenities and scratching a nurse deep enough to draw blood. Pandemonium broke out in the activities room, with some patients egging Pike on, others weeping, and two coming to blows over who had called Bingo first. Eli slipped out of the room unnoticed. He walked down the main hall of the rest home and out the front door, whistl