Second Glance Read online

  Ross tilted his head. “You love her?”

  Eli nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”

  “If she moved to Burlington, would you move?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How about if she moved to Seattle?”

  Eli hesitated, and then felt something loosen in his chest. “You know, I would.”

  “How about if she moved somewhere even harder to get to?”

  “Like New Zealand? Yeah,” Eli said. “When someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.”

  “Well, what if the place she moved to was even harder to get to than New Zealand? A place you couldn’t get to by boat or by plane or even by fucking rocketship? What if she went somewhere and the only way you could follow was to put a bullet through your head or hang yourself from your closet rack or run your car in a closed garage? I did it because I loved someone up one side and down the other like that,” Ross said. “Not in spite of it.”

  He stood suddenly, and in the splash of sunlight Eli was temporarily blinded. “I’m going to see what the hell is keeping her,” Ross muttered, and went inside.

  Eli rested his head on his knees. Trained as a cop, he’d always thought of suicide as an escape—not something you might run toward. He thought of Shelby, and the way she’d stared at the autopsy photo of Lia Pike. Is that what happens when you hang yourself?

  Eli’s mouth went dry. He scrambled to his feet just as Ross burst through the doors. “Meredith,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  On the bus from Montpelier to Comtosook, Meredith had made up lives for the passengers. The teenager sleeping on the camel-hump of his backpack was a runaway setting off to find adventure in the veins of the mountains along the Appalachian Trail. The old man with a white handlebar mustache and a wrinkled seersucker suit was an alchemist who’d spent years seeing gold in everything his eyes lit upon. The twitchy young mother with an infant in her arms was not a mother at all, but a maid who’d stolen the baby out of her crib, and was spiriting her to Maryland.

  Ruby was not her grandmother; her grandmother had died in 1932. Meredith’s ancestors did not come from Acadia and France; they had been here all along. And her grandfather had not been some boy who’d broken Ruby’s heart and left her pregnant—the lie she’d been told all these years. Her grandfather had been a scientist, studying the way substandard traits passed from generation to generation, and trying to prevent it.

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  From the bus station in Comtosook, Meredith walked to Shelby’s house. And there, Shelby had told her the truth— from the horrifying results of her grandfather’s eugenics movement to the fact that Spencer Pike was alive, if not well, in a nursing home ten miles away. She gave Meredith all the details that her brother had conveniently left out: Cecelia Pike’s brutal death, Gray Wolf’s disappearance, Az’s confession just a week before. She knew now why the Abenaki were fighting so hard for that ragged piece of land. It was not about ancestry, and it was not about property. It was about trying to get back the essence of something that was irretrievably lost.

  Once, a heartbroken couple had come to Meredith’s office, asking her to help them conceive a daughter. They had three boys, but their baby daughter had died recently of SIDS. They wanted to know, before they went through with a pregnancy, that they’d be getting another little girl.

  Meredith had refused to accept them as patients. Not because she wouldn’t have been able to do what they asked, but because she didn’t think they’d be satisfied with the results. They wanted a replica of the child who had died, and science couldn’t offer that kind of miracle.

  Yet.

  Would her grandfather, in the same circumstance, have taken their case? Science was at the mercy of the people who created it. She was suddenly reminded of her conversation at the Starbucks with Ross. For all the greater good that genetic diagnosis and replacement therapy could do, there was still a line that had to be drawn—one which hadn’t been, yet, by the government or any ethics organization: who got to choose which traits were worth keeping, and which should be eliminated from the human genome? A scientist, of course. But a scientist like Meredith . . . or one like Spencer Pike?

  She looked down at the directions to the nursing home that Shelby had given her, along with the leave to borrow her car. Left at the light, another right, and she would be there. If Pike was alive, she didn’t understand why Ross and his detective friend hadn’t taken his blood for a paternity test— which, by definition, would have been scientifically simpler. Was it because they had wanted her to meet Az Thompson, whose sacrifice had been far greater than Meredith’s could ever be? Or was it because no one even wanted to lay eyes on a man who’d done as much damage as Spencer Pike?

  The nursing home was stately, an old winged Colonial flanked by oak trees and brick paths. Meredith walked up the stairs and into the lobby. Although the décor was pleasant and sunny, there was a stench in the room that seemed to seep from the cracks between the floor tiles. It was not the smell of death, but regret—sweeter, more pungent. It caught in the folds of Meredith’s clothes, and weeks from now, even after several washings, she would put on this blouse and pair of khakis and breathe it in.

  A nurse wearing a stethoscope with a dinosaur clinging to its thick rubber vein sat at a desk. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see someone.”

  She smiled. “You looked a little young to be checking in. Who is it?”

  “Spencer Pike.”

  The nurse furrowed her brow. “He’s not doing very well today . . .”

  “I’m . . . I’m a relative,” Meredith said.

  Nodding, the nurse gave her a pass to clip to her shirt and gave her directions down the hall. Spencer Pike’s room looked no different from anyone else’s—a row of hospital doors with cheery smile stickers pasted around the name of the resident inside. It reminded Meredith of nursery school, and for a moment she was grateful that her mother had not had to go through this regression before sliding into death. She pushed open the door.

  The shades were drawn, the lights off. A respirator rasped somewhere to her left, and all she could see were the most amorphous shapes. Stepping gingerly around the largest one, which must have been the bed, Meredith walked to the other side of the room and opened the curtains just a slit.

  Spencer Pike was frail and hairless, embryonic. A white sheet covering him only emphasized the bones of his spine. She walked toward the bed, expecting to feel resentment or outright hatred or even some sad kinship—but there was absolutely nothing. This man could have been a stranger.

  What made a family wasn’t blood, or genes, or what was passed down through either of them. You only had to look at Meredith and her mother and Ruby to see. You only had to look at Spencer Pike, dying alone, to know.

  He rolled in his morphine sleep, catching his arm on some of the clear tubing that connected to his upper torso and face. He’ll strangle himself, Meredith thought, and immediately on the heels of this: Would that be a bad thing? But she found herself reaching to untangle the lines.

  His hand came up slowly, grabbing her wrist. When Meredith looked down, she realized that he was awake and crying. He tried to speak, but the oxygen feed over his mouth made it impossible to understand what he was trying to say. She hesitated, and then pulled the clear funnel away from his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Spencer Pike said. “I am so sorry.”

  Meredith froze. “It’s all right,” she murmured, attempting to pull away.

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go yet.”

  She swallowed, then nodded. Drawing a chair closer to the bed, she sat down beside her grandfather.

  His breathing grew more erratic, and a wash of pain crossed his face. “Cissy,” Spencer Pike said, “will you wait for me?”

  Cissy. Cecelia. You look like someone I used to know. Meredith had forgotten the obvious—if she truly did look like her deceased grandmother, then