Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  "The difference between us is that you're a hero, Ethan, and I'm a coward." Ross pulled his arm away and rolled down the sleeve. "I will personally make sure you kiss a girl before you die, if I have to hire one," he said, and he wasn't joking, and that made Ethan feel like crying.

  There was a hail of bullets on the soundtrack. Ethan sifted his fingers through the popcorn, which rustled like autumn. "Do you feel like you want to die right now?" he asked.

  Ross shook his head. "No."

  "Me neither," Ethan said, and he turned his face up to the screen.

  Eli had always been the kind of cop who couldn't sleep well while a case was still at loose ends. Add to this a healthy dose of sexual frustration, and it was no wonder that he found himself walking around the edge of the parking lot of the motel shortly after a rainstorm at midnight. Watson lay just beyond an empty spot, his head on his paws, his eyes following Eli as he paced on the muddy ground.

  Shelby was asleep. At least, he figured she was asleep. She'd kissed him good night so thoroughly he could still feel the imprint of her breasts and hips against him, hours later. Then she'd closed the motel room door in his face. It was a punishment of sorts, he was sure, a look at what he was missing by virtue of taking it slow.

  He wondered what she slept in. Silky nightgowns? Flannel pajamas?

  Nothing?

  Why was he taking it slow, anyway? She'd all but told him flat out that she was interested, and ready. If he went inside and knocked on her door, she might answer it wearing only a sheet. Eli had no doubt that if anything could get his mind off this murder case, it was making love to Shelby Wakeman.

  But the last woman he'd felt so much for in so little time had been his wife. He'd married her within months of their first meeting, certain that her love for him ran as deep as a trench in the Atlantic, too. And she had left him for another guy.

  Eli wasn't going to let that happen to him again. And the easiest way to keep from getting burned was to keep a safe distance from anything that looked like a potential fire.

  "Milk."

  Eli turned to find Shelby standing a few feet away in a tank top and a pair of drawstring pants printed with cherries. She came closer, barefoot, on the wet earth. The sight of her narrow feet alone made Eli start to sweat. "What?"

  "Milk. Warm. It'd do the trick." She smiled at him. "You can't sleep, right?"

  She didn't know the half of it.

  "It's what I do when my biorhythms are all screwed up-- you know, from being awake during the night with Ethan, and then having to go to bed in bright daylight."

  Eli heard nothing in that sentence except the words "go to bed." He nodded at her and wondered if his whole hand would be able to span the flat plane between her hips. Her tank top rode up in the front, exposing the thinnest line of skin, and Eli felt himself stop breathing.

  Hypoxia, he thought.

  Eli stared down at the ground, fighting for composure. One of Shelby's footprints, delicate and full-bottomed, had landed by chance right across one of his--bigger, broader. It was the most erotic thing he'd ever seen.

  Jesus, he was a basket case.

  The hell with it, Eli thought, moving across the muddy stretch toward her. He could have her in bed in less than three minutes, and he'd deal with the consequences later. He stepped over Watson, over the double footprint that had gotten him hot and bothered in the first place--and he stopped short.

  Double footprints, like the ones that had been photographed at the crime scene after Cecelia Pike's murder. The first time Eli had noticed that, he'd used it to blow holes in the theory that Gray Wolf had been there to hang Cecelia. It stood to reason, too, that if Cissy had been abducted from her bedroom after childbirth, she would not have been wearing boots to leave a tread behind. She, like Shelby, would have come right from bed.

  Pike's shoes had been predominant . . . after all, he'd cut the body down. But there had been one print where the woman's sole had been stamped down on top of the man's, like the footprints that he and Shelby had just made--the woman's smaller foot superimposed across the man's larger one, the step made after the man had made his.

  Dead women don't walk away.

  "I know where to find the baby," Eli said.

  Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her--she'd be reborn in the post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right--that is: fall madly, truly, deeply--and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.

  What if Lia Pike had been the one for Ross? If she'd been killed before she could find him, and then had come back as Aimee . . . only to die accidentally after falling in love with him? What if she was haunting him now because there was no other way to connect?

  What if the reason he thought about killing himself so much was not depression, or chemical imbalance, or borderline personality disorder, or the dozen other labels shrinks had slapped on him . . . but only a means of ending this life so that he could start another one with the woman he was supposed to be with?

  He stared down at the obituary in his hand, the one that Az Thompson had given him days ago. By now, Lia's body was where it belonged. The rest of her, though, was waiting for him. She'd even said so, with his initials.

  "Ross!"

  Shelby's voice rose like smoke from downstairs. He folded the picture of Lia again and tucked it into his pocket, then came into the living room to find Eli Rochert and his sister beaming, that behemoth dog between them.

  "Where's Ethan?" Shelby asked.

  Ross looked at the clock. He didn't wear a watch--why bother, when he couldn't seem to speed up his time on earth anyway--and hadn't really noticed that nearly all the night had passed. "I guess he's still skating out back."

  "I'll check." Shelby started through the kitchen, then turned to Eli. "Go ahead. Tell him."

  "Tell me what?" Ross said.

  Eli sank onto the couch and spilled a mess of papers on the cushion beside him. "Pike smothers the infant, or at least he thinks he does. He leaves it in the icehouse while he breaks the news to his wife. It autoresuscitates--"

  "It what?"

  "Just trust me on this. It starts breathing again, but then it sort of goes into standby mode since its body is so cold. It looks dead, but it's not."

  Ross sank down. "Okay," he said, listening more closely.

  "Cecelia Pike wants to see her newborn's body. She breaks out of the bedroom he's locked her in, and finds the baby in the icehouse, where it's cold and blue and looking pretty damn dead. She picks it up and cries over it . . . which is how Pike finds her. He goes off the deep end--here she is mourning for what he thinks is her lover's child--and hangs her. But the baby's not dead." He tosses a photograph at Ross, a grainy study of footprints. "Someone walked on that sawdust after Pike did, someone who was wearing boots that were awfully similar to the ones taken off Cecelia Pike's feet-- a girl named Ruby."

  "Ruby?"

  "Yeah. She was the housekeeper, some kid who lived with them. When I met with Duley Wiggs, that old cop, he mentioned it--although I didn't realize it at the time. Said that Pike wasn't up for a big funeral celebration at his house, with his girl gone. I thought he was talking about Cissy . . . but now I realize he meant the hired help."

  "Why hasn't anyone mentioned her?"

  "Because she was a servant, and servants are supposed to be invisible. And because she disappeared that night. Pike wouldn't tell me about her, because she probably knows that he killed his wife."

  "So if Ruby took the baby and disappeared that night--"

  "The baby might still be alive. In her seventies, and about to inherit a nice tract of land," Eli finished. "Plus, Ruby might be able to fill in the blanks. I did a little digging on the Internet. A woman named Ruby Weber was b