Second Glance Read online

  A scream rolled inside her. Ross had just left her a suicide note.

  Ross sat in his car, looking at the neat line of Japanese maples and listening to the language of birds and thinking that it was fitting for everything to come to an end at a spot like this. He took a deep breath, aware that what he was about to do would change the lives of many people other than himself. But then, how couldn’t he do it?

  He’d driven around Comtosook for a few hours, until he’d come to a decision and had gotten everything he needed to make it happen. He could say he was doing this for Lia, but it wouldn’t be the truth. Ross was doing it for himself, to prove that there was something—at last—at which he could succeed.

  He reached along the passenger seat, picked up the piece of paper that had Ruby Weber’s address scrawled across it, and then got out of the car.

  The mailbox said WEBER/OLIVER, and Ross found himself wondering if this woman might have a male companion, or for that matter, a female one. He walked up the brick path to the front door and rang the bell.

  “They’re not home.”

  Ross turned to see a neighbor watering the adjacent lawn with a sprinkler. “Do you know where they went?” he asked. “I’m sort of dropping in unannounced . . .”

  “Are you family?”

  Ross thought of Lia. “Yes.”

  The neighbor came closer. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said sympathetically, “but Ruby’s in the hospital.”

  Ross wandered the hospital’s administrative floors until he reached an office that had a secretary absent on a coffee break and a doctor’s extra lab coat hanging on a coat hook just inside the door. Costumed, he moved with purpose to the cardiac care unit and asked for Ruby Weber’s chart, which he scrutinized for a few minutes, memorizing her age, her condition, and the room into which she’d been put. When he got there, however, a woman was sitting with Ruby on the edge of the bed.

  Not wishing for an audience, Ross busied himself in the hallway until the woman left the room, holding a little girl by the hand. As they headed away from him, Ross slipped inside. “Mrs. Weber,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

  She had battleship-gray hair and eyes as blue as the center of a flame. Her skin, so finely wrinkled, reminded Ross of rice paper. “Well, that would be a novelty. Being that all your friends seem to want to poke and prod me and take my blood.”

  Ross tugged his arms from the sleeves of his coat, folded it, and set it on a chair. “That’s because I’m not a doctor.”

  He watched her face as she struggled with the decision to push the nurse’s call button and have him evicted . . . or to simply hear him out. After a very long moment, Ruby hiked herself up on her pillows. “Are you a patient? You look like you’re in pain.”

  “I am.”

  “What hurts?”

  Ross thought about how to answer this. “Everything.” He took a step forward. “I want to talk to you about 1932.”

  “I knew it was coming,” she murmured. “That heart attack was the warning.”

  “You were there. You know what happened to Lia.”

  She turned her head in profile, and Ross was struck by how noble she looked. This woman, whose ancestors had been prominently featured in one of Spencer Pike’s degenerate family genealogies, could have been the prototype for a queen, the face on the bow of a ship, the figurehead on a golden coin. “There are some things that shouldn’t be talked about,” Ruby said.

  Well, he couldn’t be blamed for trying. With a sigh, Ross picked up the borrowed lab coat and started to walk away.

  “Then there are some things that shouldn’t have been kept secret in the first place.” She looked at Ross. “Who wants to know?”

  He thought about explaining the development, and the Abenaki protest, and Eli’s investigation. But in the end, he simply said, “Me.”

  “I worked for Spencer Pike. I was fourteen. Cissy Pike was only eighteen, you know—her husband, he was eight years older than she was. That night they’d fought, and she started in having her baby, even though it was three weeks early. Tiniest little girl you ever saw. When the baby died, Miz Pike went a little crazy. Her husband locked her in her room, and I was so scared I just picked up what I could and left.” She pleated the blanket between her hands. “I heard afterward that she had been killed that night.”

  “Did you see her body?” Ross pressed. “Did you see the baby’s?”

  Ruby opened and closed her mouth, as if trying to reshape her words. Color rose to her face, and one of the monitors began to beep more fervently.

  The door swung open. “Granny? What’s that noise? Are you all right?”

  Ross turned, an explanation on his lips. And found himself staring into the face of Lia Beaumont Pike.

  ELEVEN

  “Who the hell are you?” Lia said to Ross, or not-Lia, or whoever she was. She didn’t wait for an answer, though, before she stuck her head back out of the door and screamed for a nurse. Suddenly the room was crowded with hospital personnel, jockeying for position in front of Ruby’s bed and assuring themselves that she was not going into cardiac arrest again. Lia turned her attention to the medical team, soaking up their technical jargon like a sponge. She stood rigidly until the monitor began to sway to its simple rhythm again, the crisis passed. Only then did she let her shoulders relax, her hands loosen from fists.

  Ross slid out of the room, unnoticed. It wasn’t Lia. He knew this, because she didn’t recognize him. There were subtler differences too—this woman’s hair was longer, and curlier, more honey-colored than wheat. She had a little girl with her; there were fine lines of age bracketing her mouth. But those remarkable brown eyes were the same, and the sorrow in them.

  She was too young to be Lia Pike’s daughter. But she was too much of a dead ringer for Lia to be anything but a direct relation.

  The whitewashed nurses and doctors began to file out, a string of pearls. Ross peeked back inside the room. “He’s an old friend,” Ross heard, before the door swung shut and cleaved the conversation in two.

  This much he knew: Ruby Weber was a liar. She was not an old friend of his.

  And she had not left the Pikes without taking that baby.

  Shelby learned that you cannot put out an APB on someone until they have been lost for twenty-four hours; that there are five major routes out of Burlington by car; that if you leave from the airport, you can get to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, or Albany.

  And that 2,100 people are reported missing, daily.

  Her brother being one of them.

  She had not let go of his note, not since finding it five hours ago. The ink now tattooed the palm of her hand like hieroglyphs, a diary of loss. Eli had come at her call, and had promised to personally search every inch of Comtosook, and lean hard on the cops in Burlington. But Shelby knew that if Ross did not want to be found, he would simply make himself invisible.

  Once when they were in high school, a football jock had killed himself by jumping off the edge of a gorge. The news had been all over the papers; guidance counselors had set up shop in the hallways of school; memorials of flowers and teddy bears decorated the site. Ross had wanted to go see where it happened. “Jesus,” he’d said, over the raging water and the broken rocks. “If you’re going to do it that way, you’re pretty sure.”

  “How would you do it?” she had asked, with a morbid curiosity that, now, she could not believe they’d ever discussed. She also could not remember, although she’d tried so hard her head throbbed, how Ross had answered. Would he use pills, or a gun, or a knife? Would he lock himself in an anonymous motel room, jump from a train bridge, do it in his car?

  When Ross had been in the hospital after the last suicide attempt, she had gone to visit him. Since he was doped up on medication, Shelby was certain he did not remember their conversation. “Try living on dry land,” Ross had said, “when you are a fish.”

  The phone rang, and Shelby flew from Ross’s