Second Glance Read online

  “Abbott.” Az put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”

  They headed toward the quarry office, where a fresh pot of French roast was dripping. Az had been wrong, after all. This was the disruption he’d felt in the air, the devastation that was coming. Not with the blast of dynamite, but slowly, like those dried dandelions. In small waves, people would remember. In growing numbers, their sorrow would carpet the earth.

  Meredith knew the moment that Ross’s car crossed the city line into Comtosook, because suddenly the windshield was covered with gypsy moths, their wings beating in unison like a single heart. He swiped the wipers, scattering them, but not before Meredith caught Lucy hiding under her sweatshirt in the backseat.

  Ruby had been left in the able hands of Tajmalla, who took it as a personal affront that Meredith had even hesitated to leave her grandmother—or whatever she was—in the health aide’s care. For the most part, the ride north had been unremarkable, silence punctuated only by traffic updates on the radio.

  Meredith did not speak to Ross. She used all the energy conversation would have taken and built a barrier instead, so that whatever he tossed at her in Vermont would bounce right back off and enable her to return to her home and her job. And like all good walls, with the fortification in place, she was concentrating so much on the enemy that she did not need to remember the moments she’d been a traitor to herself.

  For one night, at that Starbucks, she had watched the smoke of his cigarette curl like the letters of the alphabet and believed it was a secret message. She had smelled vanilla on his skin and grown dizzy. She had drunk from his coffee cup when he’d gone to the bathroom, the spot where his lips had touched, so that when she finally tasted him for real—when, not if—her senses would remember.

  She had made a fool of herself.

  After all of the disastrous dates she’d been on, after all of the professional men she had met and judged to be as intriguing possibilities—it turned out that a guy she would never have noticed made her feel like no one else ever had. At first glance, Ross Wakeman was a nobody. Until you looked again and saw his humor, his charm, his vulnerability.

  And his complete intoxication with another woman, a dead one at that.

  “So,” Meredith said aloud. “This is it?”

  Ross nodded. “Comtosook.”

  As they drove, Meredith began to notice things. The trees, for example, seemed to play a tune like a harp when the wind sang through their branches. Children playing hopscotch hung a fraction of a second too long in midair. And Doubt, in the shape of a hitchhiker, crawled into her lap to ride shotgun.

  They pulled off the main road and headed down a dirt path. But instead of stopping at one of the few houses they passed, Ross drove to the end, a crossroads, and parked the car in front of absolutely nothing. “Where are we?” she asked.

  It was nearly dark by now, the sky looking like the shined skin of an eggplant and the loons coming out to call to their true loves. Meredith followed Ross into the woods.

  She was a scientist, she told herself, and thus naturally curious.

  With Lucy plastered to her side, Meredith stepped over roots and rocks and what seemed to be construction debris. Suddenly the forest opened up into a flat plane with wrecking tape cordoning off a wide, bald spot. “This is where you live?”

  Ross muttered something that sounded like I wish.

  In that instant Meredith realized where she was. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighed, and she reached for Lucy’s hand to tug her back to the waiting car.

  She hadn’t gone two steps before Ross spun her around. “You,” he said, his eyes wild, “will stay.”

  Meredith had been wrong before. Until this, until now, she had not understood that Ross Wakeman truly was insane.

  He was also bigger than she was, and stronger, and alone in the dark with her and Lucy. So Meredith folded her arms across her chest and tried to convey bravery. She waited for Casper or Jacob Marley’s ghost or the moment that Ross grasped, like her, that there was nobody here to be seen.

  Lucy’s knees were knocking so hard Meredith could literally hear them. “Shh,” she soothed. “This is all about nothing.”

  Hearing her, Ross turned slowly. The stark desolation in his eyes made her mouth go dry. What if someone loved her as hard as that? “I . . . I’m sorry,” she murmured.

  Ross stormed out of the woods along the path they’d entered. Meredith reached for Lucy and followed. She reasoned that this should not have come as a surprise. I’m not Lia, Meredith told herself. I’m not.

  Shelby was pulling her shirt over her head when all the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She ran to the window just in time to see the headlights cut off on a car. “Ross,” she whispered, and then she whooped with delight and raced down the stairs still in her pajama bottoms to welcome her brother.

  On the driveway, she threw her arms around him. “Thank God you’re home.”

  He smiled. “I’m going to have to go away more often.”

  Over his shoulder, Shelby noticed a woman getting out of the car. A little girl. “Shel,” Ross said, stepping back, “I want you to meet Lia Pike’s granddaughter.”

  “That remains to be seen,” said the woman, but she held out her hand for Shelby to shake. “Meredith Oliver. And my daughter, Lucy. I’m very sorry to impose on you this late at night . . .”

  “Oh, no. We’re just getting up,” Shelby replied. “Come on in, and I’ll get you two settled.”

  Ross walked in ahead of them, moving stiffly, like someone with a bum ankle or a bad hip—although Shelby knew it was nothing physical that pained him. She wondered if it was worse to have Ross pining for something he could not have, or to have him find it and realize it was not the panacea he’d imagined.

  “I’m beat,” Ross muttered, and headed up the stairs.

  It was difficult to say who was more stunned at this breach of hospitality, Shelby or Meredith. Recovering, Shelby bent down to Lucy. “My son is out in the backyard, through that door. I think he’s probably a year or two older than you, if you want to go say hi.”

  Lucy cemented herself even closer to Meredith. “Go on,” Meredith urged, peeling her daughter off.

  The girl walked away like she was headed to an execution.

  “Lucy has a hard time in new situations,” Meredith explained.

  Shelby was left with a woman who clearly had about the same level of desire to be there as her child. “Could I, um, interest you in a cup of coffee?” As she poured for both of them, Shelby studied Meredith over the edge of the carafe. Honey-blond hair, chestnut eyes . . . she looked familiar, although for the life of her, Shelby couldn’t say why.

  Meredith stood in front of the kitchen window, watching her daughter acclimate. Relaxing by degrees, she took a seat. “I take it you believe in ghosts, too?” she asked.

  “I believe in my brother.”

  Chagrined, Meredith looked away. “It’s just that Ross dropped out of nowhere, you understand, to tell me I had to come to Vermont.”

  A flicker of lost opportunity crossed her face. Shelby heard too, how the word Ross slipped off her tongue, like a sweet butterscotch candy passed between a kissing couple. She wondered if Meredith had noticed.

  Shelby pushed a small pitcher of cream and another of sugar cubes toward her. “Sometimes it’s hard to be convinced of something until you see it right before your eyes.”

  “Exactly,” Meredith agreed. “A hundred years ago, no one would have held that something microscopic was responsible for the height or skin color or intelligence of a person—but now look at what we believe.”

  Then maybe a hundred years from now, we will all be able to see ghosts, Shelby thought. But instead she said politely, “Is that what you do? Work with DNA?”

  “No, actually I do PGD. That’s preimp—”

  “I know what it stands for,” Shelby said. “I actually once—”

  She broke off, dropping th