Second Glance Read online

“Funny you should mention that, since your property isn’t going to be developed.” He handed Pike a copy of the injunction that had been given to Rod van Vleet.

  “This is . . . this is ridiculous,” Pike sputtered. “My land’s no Indian burial ground.”

  “Actually, it is.” Eli came a step closer. “Tell me, Spencer, did she fight you? Did she beg you to stop while you were putting that rope around her neck?”

  “She was my wife.”

  “And she was half-Abenaki,” Eli countered. “Which wasn’t going to reflect well on a card-carrying member of the American Eugenics Society, was it?”

  He watched Pike’s face, the shock that unraveled across it. “You said that the last time you were here.”

  “Because it’s true,” Eli said.

  The old man shook his head, as if that might keep the fact from sinking in. “Cissy wasn’t . . . her hair, it was blond, and her skin was like milk . . .”

  “And her father was not Harry Beaumont, but an Abenaki man named Gray Wolf.”

  “Her father . . . ?”

  “She had the bad luck to not be what you needed her to be, and you took care of that problem the way you took care of everything else that didn’t agree with you—by simply getting rid of it.” By now, Eli was leaning down over the old man. “Tell me the truth, Spencer. Tell me what you did.”

  Pike closed his eyes, silent for so long Eli wondered if he’d suffered a stroke. “I thought she loved him,” he whispered. “I thought the child was his.”

  “What did you do with the baby?”

  The old man’s throat knotted, and his mouth worked soundlessly before the words burst free. “I killed it. I smothered it. Hid the body in the icehouse and told Cissy it had just died. I thought maybe, this way, we could start over. But I didn’t touch Cissy. I swear it, I loved her. I loved her.”

  Eli thought of the apple crate in the ground, the one that had not held an infant. “What did you do with the baby’s body?”

  “Buried it,” Spencer said. “The next morning, I found Cissy . . . and I buried the crate before I called the police. I had to, or they would have found out what I did.” He grabbed for Eli’s sleeve. “I did it because I loved her. All I wanted was—”

  “A second chance?” Eli interrupted, unsympathetic. “The question is, did you make the same mistake again?”

  The hardest part for Meredith was trying to keep from breaking down as she listened to the cardiologist who’d treated her grandmother after the heart attack. They stood in front of the hospital bed, where Ruby lay lit like a Christmas tree and strung with all manners of tubes and intravenous equipment. “She’s not out of the woods yet by any means,” the doctor said. “Reduced cerebral blood flow secondary to a myocardial infarction leads to ischemia . . . and delirium. I think it’s best to keep her here for a few days, just for monitoring.”

  Meredith mumbled something—praise? thanks?—and sat down on the chair she’d pulled up to the bed. Outside this cardiac care room, a saint of a nurse had Lucy drawing Magic Marker faces on ballooned latex glove-puppets. Meredith rested her forehead on the synthetic blanket and held Ruby’s hand, which glowed at the forefinger with a pulse-oxygen monitor. “Don’t leave me,” she begged.

  She felt the paper-thin skin of Ruby’s fingers twitch in her own. Meredith sat up, hopeful, to find her grandmother’s eyes wide open. “I’ll be fine in time for that dinner party,” Ruby said, her voice sliding into a French Canadian dialect.

  Dinner party? Meredith frowned, and then remembered what the doctor had said about delirium.

  “You take care of that baby.”

  Lucy. “She wants you to get better too.”

  Ruby’s eyes drifted shut. “I will,” she murmured. “I promise, Miz Pike.”

  Shelby’s face bloomed the moment she realized it was Eli ringing the doorbell. “I’m glad you came by,” she said, stepping aside to let him in.

  “I am too.”

  “I had a wonderful time the other night.” Shelby thought of the way they had ended their date in Eli’s truck; how he had leaned over and asked if he could kiss her before Watson beat him to it; how incredible it felt to be held by someone, instead of doing the holding.

  “Good. Since I came by to propose, and all.”

  “To . . . what?”

  Eli grinned. “I figured after your aversion to first dates, you might not be crazy about second ones either. So I thought maybe we’d just skip ahead.”

  “Maybe we should jump to our silver anniversary,” Shelby said. “Play it safe.”

  “All right by me,” Eli replied, and amazingly, Shelby thought he was only half-joking. She imagined sitting next to him, doing absolutely nothing, because they had spent years together doing it all and now could fill the spaces simply with each other’s company. She thought of what a bed would feel like when it was not empty on the other side.

  “Can I get you something?” Shelby asked. “A cold drink?”

  “Ross.”

  Her face fell. “Oh. You came to talk to him.”

  The uncomfortable moment was interrupted by the boisterous arrival of Watson, who pounced through the open door and between them. “I told you to stay in the truck,” Eli said, trying in vain to grab the dog’s collar.

  “It’s okay.” Shelby watched the bloodhound begin to case her parlor and move into the living room. Watson stopped, turned toward Shelby, and gave an enthusiastic swipe of his tail—which managed to send a candy dish, a television remote, and several books off of the coffee table. Eli and Shelby both ran forward to pick up the mess. “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t be—”

  “—He’s a pain in the ass, sometimes—”

  “—No worse than a nine-year-old boy, believe me.”

  As Shelby examined the crystal candy bowl for hairline fractures, Eli collected the books, which had splayed open on the carpet. One was a coffee table pictorial of Vermont. The other was a scrapbook. Curious, Eli flipped through the pages. “What’s this?”

  Shelby read over his shoulder, her cheeks pink with embarrassment as Eli skimmed the stories she went back to time and time again. On the page he’d opened, there was an article about a six-year-old boy bitten by a shark off the coast of Florida. His leg had been severed and successfully reattached, but the blood loss had put him into a coma. After weeks of assuming the boy was brain-dead, he’d awakened just as good as new.

  The most recent article involved a Canadian toddler who’d wandered out of his house and had fallen asleep in a six-foot drift of snow. “I remember this one,” Eli said. “He was pronounced dead, and brought to the hospital—”

  “And the doctors gradually warmed him up and he came back to life.” Shelby took the scrapbook from him. “It’s stupid, I know, but I keep track. I clip stories where death turns out to not be . . . well, so final. Maybe one day someone will clip a story about Ethan for the same reason.”

  Suddenly Ross came pounding down the stairs, his hair still wet from a shower. “I thought I heard your voice,” he said to Eli, as Watson did his best to leap into his arms. “How’d it go with Pike?”

  But Eli was still riveted by the story of the Canadian toddler. “The doctor’s from McGill,” he said. “That’s right over the border in Montreal. The family must be nearby. Shelby, come with me?”

  She did not consider Ethan, or her job, or her brother. She didn’t consider the logistics of staying overnight with a man she’d gone out with only once. And she didn’t wonder why, spontaneously, Eli seemed as interested in near-death experiences as she was. All Shelby knew was that when you are given the chance to meet a miracle, you do not think twice.

  From the Burlington Free Press:

  Burlington, VT — Dr. Thomas Smalley, president of the University of Vermont, announced plans to rename the Beaumont Biology Library and the Pike Museum of Anthropological History. “The University of Vermont wants to make clear that the ideas espoused by these professors during Vermont’s eugenics studies