Second Glance Read online

  Oh, God, I cannot lose her twice.

  She will hear my voice, even though I cannot speak aloud. She will find me across a savannah; she will swim to me in the deepest pool.

  I make my baby the promise my own father made to me, before he had a chance to know me: I will find you.

  As she disappeared before his eyes again, Ross realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a long, silent rush. Curtis Warburton would have said that what he’d witnessed was a residual haunting, a repetition of a significant event played over and over like a video loop. Curtis would have said that the spirit wasn’t even there, just the energy that it had left behind. However, Ross, who had watched firsthand, knew this was not the case. This had been no imprint, no impression made in time. Lia’s ghost had come back again, trying to find something.

  But she hadn’t been searching for her baby, and she hadn’t been looking for Ross. It was not until after the vision dissipated that he realized why she had returned: on the other side of the clearing, her face striped with shock and disbelief, was Meredith Oliver, who also had seen and heard everything Lia needed to say.

  TWELVE

  For ten minutes, Meredith sat in silence, while the night closed like a fist around her. Her insides had gone to water, and Meredith knew she would not be capable of moving, thinking, breathing anytime soon. She was suddenly aware that this universe—big as it seemed—was still too small to contain possibilities beyond her own imagination.

  Like a ghost.

  Could insanity come on so quickly, like the flu . . . or a flipped circuit breaker? Her mind could not even process the vision. It was like being told that the sun would not appear in the morning: Meredith’s balance of reality had been tipped over, a skyscraper that turned out to be only a house of cards.

  Yet this had not been smoke and mirrors; this was not some lunatic’s rant. Meredith had seen a ghost with her own eyes. A woman who had vanished just as quickly as she’d come. A woman who looked exactly like her.

  Meredith thought of all the times she had told Lucy there were no such things as ghosts. Everything she had believed was now cast into doubt—if she had been mistaken about this, after all, what else had she gotten wrong? Maybe the sky was not really blue, maybe science did not hold all the answers, maybe she was not happy with her life. She could be certain of only one fact: the world she’d awakened in this morning was very different from the one she was living in now.

  She found herself leaning down to touch the ground, certain that it too might not be as solid as she expected. She shivered again, and felt something being draped over her shoulders. Until that moment, when Ross put his coat around her, she hadn’t truly registered that someone was sitting beside her.

  Turning, she tried to find her voice. “Did that . . . did that happen?”

  “I think so.” Ross seemed just as shaken as she was. Meredith looked at him carefully. She had not truly believed what he’d told her—about ghost hunting, about her grandmother. People who believed in that sort of thing were a little crazy . . . yet now she seemed to be standing squarely among their ranks. She tried to remember what other things Ross had said—comments she’d summarily dismissed that she now had to reevaluate.

  “She looked like me,” Meredith stated the obvious.

  “I know.”

  “But . . . but . . .” There were no words in this new place.

  She felt Ross’s hand find her own, his long hair brush over her cheek as he leaned close. He was crying. “I know,” he repeated, when what he was really saying was that he didn’t.

  She had not believed in ghosts, but she believed in pain. And she certainly understood what it felt like to be alone, when you didn’t want to be. These emotions were so real that they transcended the impossible, gave her a hook to grab onto. Meredith’s mind spiraled back to the frantic search, the fear, the suicide. “Is that how it happened?” Meredith asked. “Did she . . . kill herself?”

  “I guess so.” His voice was raw with grief.

  “Isn’t there something we can do?”

  “It already happened,” Ross said. “She’s already gone.”

  The ghost had stared directly at Meredith. And it had been like gazing into a mirror—not just because of the physical resemblance, but because the expression in Lia Pike’s eyes was something that Meredith saw when she looked at herself. Meredith might not have been able to grasp the concept that the line between life and death was drawn in invisible ink, but she understood what it was like to be a mother who wanted nothing more than to protect her child.

  Motherhood was elemental, cellular. You could feel a child inside of you, even after you gave birth; share blood and tissue for that long and you become part of each other. And if that child died—as an embryo, as a newborn, as a thirteen-year-old with XP—a part of you would die too. All Lia had done, after looking into the still face of her baby, was hasten the process.

  “She was following her daughter,” Meredith said.

  Even if she knew that the human body disintegrated to become organic matter, on some level Meredith had hoped that her mother existed in some form, in some place with windows on the world where she could watch over Meredith and Ruby and Lucy. This had been Lia Pike’s hope, too . . . but she’d never quite gotten there. If she made it to that place, after all these years, would her child even recognize her?

  Meredith turned to Ross. “Do you think in the end they’ll find each other?”

  He didn’t answer; he couldn’t. His face was buried in his hands, and he was sobbing hard. It was a sorrow that sprung as deep and black as a well; a sorrow that Meredith had seen minutes before on Lia Pike’s face when she believed her daughter was truly gone.

  “Ross,” she said, and in that moment she remembered something he had said to her once, something she had discounted that she now knew to be true: You could imagine yourself in love with someone who was not real. With great care she reached out to touch his arm, to let him know that this time, if he were falling, she would hold him upright. But he shook her off, and as he did, twisted his wrist enough for her to see a scar, a lightning bolt where his skin should have been smooth.

  “They’ll find each other,” he said, looking away from her. “They will.”

  “The baby wasn’t dead,” Eli explained, “but she thought it was, and that was reason enough to hang herself.” He moved around Shelby’s kitchen, helping himself to a glass of water as he relayed what he’d discovered. “She dragged a good-size block of ice through the sawdust and onto the porch, as a stepstool to reach the rafter. But by the time Pike found her in the morning, the ice had melted, and the hanging looked more like a murder than a suicide. After seventy years, I just officially signed off on the case.” He shook his head. “Jesus. We might be a little on the slow side, but never let it be said that the Comtosook detective squad isn’t on the ball.”

  As he passed Shelby at the kitchen table, he touched her shoulder. “And that isn’t even the whole of it,” Eli said, sitting down across from her. “Spencer Pike died last night.”

  He kept talking, but Shelby did not hear a thing. She was concentrating on the way her shoulder felt when Eli’s hand had drifted away, as if there were something missing.

  In that moment a track switched in her mind, and Shelby could no longer imagine a time she had not known Eli Rochert. He had written himself onto every previous page of her life and only now in its edited version did she realize how great the ellipsis had been.

  Oh, shit, she thought, I love him.

  Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse—breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn’t wanted one either. It was called falling in love for a reason—because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

  She had been in love before, with her ex-husband—she knew what it was like to have your heart speed up at the sound of a man’s voice on the phone, and to fe