Second Glance Read online

“That depends on how quickly he left. It happened in an icehouse, you said?”

  Eli shrugged. “Yeah.”

  Holessandro shook his head. “And I thought Canadians were provincial. Well, the icehouse adds another twist to it. Say the baby was asphyxiated . . . and then gasped . . . and was stuck in a cold environment. In that case, what happened to Alexandre would start to happen to the infant. The skin would cool, which in turn would cool the blood flow, which cools the brain, which causes the hypothalamus to lower the metabolic rate to basal levels. Perhaps even more so—the younger the child, the more potent the reflex that makes bodily systems shut down that way.”

  “So the baby would look dead, but wouldn’t be dead?”

  “Exactly. It’s like energy-saver on a computer . . . the screen shuts off but you haven’t lost your data. Likewise, as the blood flow was directed only to essential organs, the baby’s skin would get blue and cold. It wouldn’t be breathing visibly; its pulse would be indistinguishable. Like Alex.”

  “How long could an infant live like that?”

  “It can’t,” Holessandro said flatly. “Scientifically, according to textbooks, it doesn’t happen. But the rules of biology aren’t like the rules of physics, and as we’ve seen with Alex—sometimes it does.” He popped the last of the sardines in his mouth. “So did your baby live?”

  “My baby?”

  “The infant. The one from this case.”

  “Oh, right,” Eli said. “We don’t know, actually.”

  “Well, if it did, someone or something must have come along to warm it up. That’s the only way to come out of that hibernation, so to speak. Especially an infant—neonates can’t shiver, so they can’t warm themselves up.”

  Who had been there that night to warm the baby? Spencer Pike, for one . . . who’d confessed to killing the infant. Why admit to murder—a more serious crime—if instead he’d squirreled the baby away somewhere, alive? It was possible that Cecelia Pike had managed to hide her child in the hours before her death. Maybe Az Thompson had even taken it, and knew more than he was letting on.

  But if that infant had come back to life . . . where the hell was she now?

  “Hope this helps you find some answers,” Holessandro said.

  “Definitely,” Eli replied. But he could not shake the feeling that he had not yet asked the right question.

  “We’re good to go,” Ross said, as he handed Ethan a vase filled with popcorn, then flopped into the beach chair beside him. They were sitting on the driveway at midnight, watching a video that his uncle had rigged to project on the white doors of the garage. It was some shoot-’em-up flick, R-rated and so full of dead guys and bullets that Ethan figured his mother would have a cow if she found out, which of course made it all the better.

  “What’s with the vase?” Ethan asked.

  “We ran out of clean bowls.” Ross grinned as the opening credits started to roll. “Is this, or is this not every bit as good as a drive-in?”

  Ethan nodded. “The only thing that’s missing is a girl in the backseat.”

  His uncle choked on a piece of popcorn. “Jesus, Ethan. Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about that?”

  “Well, that depends. On account of most guys get into that stuff when they’re fourteen or fifteen, and I’ll be dead by then.”

  Ross turned, so that the movie played over his cheek and brow, distorting his face. “Ethan, you don’t know that for sure.”

  “That guys have sex when they’re fourteen?” Ethan said, deliberately misunderstanding. “How old were you when you had sex for the first time?”

  “I wasn’t nine and a half.”

  “What’s it like?”

  On the screen, two cops were shooting at a bad guy in a convertible. The convertible rolled on an embankment and burst into flames. Ethan knew that the stuntman who’d done that scene had gotten out of the fire and walked away in his flame-retardant suit, perfectly okay. People died all the time in movies and then got right back up and did it again, like it was some kind of joke.

  He could see that his uncle was trying to edit whatever he had decided to say, but he also knew that Ross would tell him the truth. Unlike his mother, who only wanted to keep him a kid as long as possible, Uncle Ross understood exactly how much you needed to cram into the measure of a life before you checked out. “It’s pretty amazing,” Ross answered. “It feels like coming home.”

  Somehow, that description just didn’t do it for Ethan. He thought he might hear words like round and wet and burst, dialogue from the Playboy Channel that came through the speakers on the TV even though the picture was scrambled. He wondered if his mother, in Canada, was doing things that were round and wet and bursting with that guy Eli, who made her glow every time he came over. That detective was all she thought of these days. He remembered how he had been talking to her while she was making pancakes a few nights ago, about this wicked cool pogo stick he’d seen advertised on TV that not only counted how many times you jumped but egged you on and called you by your name. “It sounds great,” his mother had said.

  “Maybe I could get it for my birthday,” Ethan suggested, and she had turned to him, all confused.

  “Get what?”

  “The pogo stick?”

  “What pogo stick?” she’d asked, and then she’d shook her head and flipped the pancakes again, when they were already done cooking anyway.

  Uncle Ross still seemed to be coming up with his explanation. “I think when you sleep with someone, you take a part of her with you. Not just the physical stuff—cells and all that. But part of what makes her her.”

  Everyone had someone, Ethan thought. Everyone but him. “Maybe I could just kiss a girl, so that every now and then she’d think of me. You know, Oh, that was the kid I kissed who had that disease and died.”

  “Ethan, you’re not—”

  “Uncle Ross,” he said wearily. “Don’t you lie to me too.”

  Most of the time, the truth that he was going to die sat in his stomach like something that would not digest—a stone, a ball of wire. He understood that he’d drawn the short end of the stick genetically, that an early death was not an option, but a fact. He did not want to find Jesus, or make out a will, or do any of the things people did when they knew they were going to pass away. He just wanted to live.

  In the movie, someone got his arm cut off with a chain saw.

  Ethan reached for his uncle’s hand. He pushed up the sleeve of his sweater, to the spot where a scar swam beneath the surface of his wrist. “Why?” he whispered.

  “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