Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  "Her husband beat me up and threw me out. By the time I came back for her, the place was a murder scene . . . and Spencer Pike was telling the cops I'd done it. The reason I've lived so long is that it's my punishment. I met her, but then had to spend the rest of my life without her."

  Ross stared, surprised to hear Az voice the very same pain that he felt.

  Eli shook his head. "I remember when you moved here, Az. I was a kid. You came back to Comtosook, knowing that you could still be arrested for something you didn't do?"

  "I came back because I promised someone I loved that I would." Az pulled the Band-Aid from the crook of his elbow, where only the tiniest dot indicated the question of his identity. "You ask me, that's all it takes."

  It turned out that sneaking into a rest home wasn't very difficult if you happened to be the same age as most of its patrons. He moved through the halls like the ghost he nearly was, squinting at the names on the doors until he found the one he wanted.

  Inside, Spencer Pike lay twisted in his sheets, his face as white as the belly of a whale, his IV hooked up to a patient-controlled analgesia pump. His thumb pressed hard on a nurse's call button, and his breath came in small shallow pants. "I need more morphine!"

  The answer was tinny, distant. "I'm sorry, Mr. Pike. You can't have any more tonight."

  With a roar of pain, he threw the PCA button down. He lay on his side, his features twisted with agony. Even after the other man slipped out of the shadows, it took a few moments for Pike to focus on his face. And then, there was no sign of recognition. "Who are you?" he gasped.

  There was no right way to answer. In his life, he had been so many different people: John Delacour, Gray Wolf, Az Thompson. He had been called an Indian, a Gypsy, a murderer, a miracle. Yet the only identity he had ever wanted was the one that had been denied him--Lily's husband, Lia's father.

  Maybe Spencer Pike was delirious from the narcotics or the haze of his illness; maybe he saw courage in Az's eyes and mistook it for understanding. But something made him reach across the six inches of physical space and miles of distance between them to grasp Az's hand. "Please," he begged. "Help me."

  It rocked Az to the core to realize that he and Spencer Pike had something in common after all: they would die alone, and their grief would die with them. He looked at the broken man in front of him who had ruined so many lives. "Help me die," Pike breathed.

  It would be so easy. A pillow, held down for thirty seconds. A hand covering the parched and bitter mouth. No one need ever know, and Az would have his biblical justice: a life for a life.

  But it was what Pike wanted.

  Az felt the bands around his heart break free. "No," he said, and he walked out of the room without a second glance.

  The Comtosook Police Department had hired six part-timers to keep the media away from the site of the disinterment. Gathered around the open graves were Wesley Sneap, Eli, Az and several hand-picked Abenaki, and Ross. The stench of time rose from the earth, thick as cinnamon.

  That should be me, Ross thought, at the moment Az murmured the same words aloud. The old man's hand trembled as it reached toward the coffins. "Where will you take her?" Ross asked.

  "To the top of a mountain, a sacred place. The Abenaki are always buried facing east." Az looked up. "That way she can see what's coming."

  Ross tried to swallow around the knot that had lodged in his throat. "Will you . . . will you show me where she is?"

  "I can't. You're not Abenaki."

  Ross had known that would be the answer, but it did not keep tears from springing to his eyes. He nodded, pretended to kick at a stick beside his shoe. Suddenly he felt something being pressed into his hand. An envelope.

  Inside was a faded clipping from the Burlington Free Press, the obituary of Cecelia Beaumont Pike. A picture of her sat off to the side. In it, she was smiling faintly, as if the photographer had told a joke she did not find funny but was too polite not to laugh just a little. "You keep it," Az said.

  "I couldn't--"

  "She'd want that." Az tilted his head. "She told me she'd dreamed of you, you know."

  "She . . . what?"

  "Of a man who looked like you look. Who had gadgets and things she didn't recognize. You would come to her, when she was sleeping." Az shrugged. "It's not so strange, really. You can be haunted for years by someone you've never met."

  "You ready?" Eli asked gently, and the old man nodded.

  Wesley Sneap helped Eli position a crowbar and crack open the lid of the larger coffin. Ross fell backward, and two of the Abenaki blanched. Eli peered into the pine box at the yellowed puzzle of long bones and joints in a bed of dirt and dust. Only one entire limb remained intact--the right arm, a continuous line from shoulder to elbow to wrist to hand, which lay on top of the sternum that once covered a heart.

  He stood with his hands clasped, feeling his childhood unspool as Az started to speak a language that ran through his veins. Kchai phanem ta wdosa . . . the mother and daughter. Kchi Niwaskw . . . Great Spirit. Nosaka nia . . . follow me. Eli did not know if Cecelia Pike, or her baby, were in a place where they could hear this ceremony, but he hoped so.

  "Olegwasi," Az said. "Dream well." Then he turned to face the others. "The Ojibway--the people I went to when I left here--they hold a ceremony when a baby is born." He took a twist of tobacco from a canvas bag he'd carried into the gravesite and lit it on fire. "It's so the Spirit World can recognize a child, and make a place for her when it's her time to go. Today I want to give my granddaughter her name."

  Az looked around the circle of people, daring them to say that it might be too late after seventy years. "Lily," he called, facing to the east.

  Eli felt the response drawn from his throat. "Lily," he repeated.

  Az turned to the north. "Lily."

  "Lily."

  To the west, to the south, he offered up her name for safekeeping. By the time Az turned to Eli again, it was snowing. Eli touched the top of his head and brushed off a few flower petals. "Now," Az said.

  Just then the sky darkened, until it was the color of a bruise beneath the skin. Ross Wakeman turned in a circle, as if he were expecting something to materialize, and damned if Eli didn't think that just might happen.

  But just then Wesley jimmied open the smaller coffin, an apple crate, with a crowbar. Ill-preserved and eroded with time, the wooden box broke into pieces. The contents spilled, and Eli ran forward too late, thinking there might be something he could do.

  A hush fell over the small group. The bones that fell out, twisted and brown, were a scramble of points and edges. But even Eli, who had no training in this kind of thing, realized that the skull was missing. "Uh . . . Wesley?"

  The medical examiner creaked down to his knees, poking through the remains with a gloved hand. "The ribs and vertebrae are here," he said, "but they're too large to be from an infant. I don't even think this is human."

  "Then what the hell is it?"

  Wesley looked up at Eli. "Looks to me like a rib roast," he said.

  Years from now, Eli would know this was the moment he had truly forsworn red meat. He knelt beside the coffin and felt Az come up behind him. They all watched the sky split at a seam, letting forth a steady rain of rose petals that covered the ground, the grave, the bones inside the coffin. A rogue wind whipped between Eli's legs, caught the petals in a funnel draft. They drifted down to the ground, spelling out initials: RW.

  In her dreams, Ruby was reaching. Anticipation was a lion crouched on her chest, clawing at her collarbone. She woke with a start and tried to sit up, but that lion had her pinned to the mattress, and now that she tried, she couldn't catch her breath, either.

  Was Lucy crying?

  No, this was a baby. The thin wail snaked under the door of Ruby's bedroom, through the crack where the hall light shined through. Ruby struggled upright, but not before the lion on her chest took a vicious swipe.

  She clutched the burn over her left breast and fell heavily to the floo