Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  "Hey," Az pointed. "Pass the whiskey, will you?"

  Ross hefted the alcohol toward him, only to have Az toss the bottle into the quarry, where it shattered on broken rocks. "What the hell did you do that for?"

  "Your own good." Az got up slowly from his folding chair, tucked it beneath his arm. "Do me a favor, and keep an eye on this place for a few minutes, will you?"

  "Where are you going?"

  "Cigarette break," Az said.

  Ross watched him walk off along the perimeter of the quarry. "You don't smoke!" he yelled after the old man, but by then Az couldn't hear, or didn't want to. He stood up, hands in his pockets, and looked down at the remains of his bottle of Bushmill's. The glass sparkled like mica. "Shit," Ross said, and he kicked at a rock, sending it caroming over the lip into the canyon. Because it felt good, he did it again. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Az was still missing, and then lit a cigarette. He tossed it into the quarry, where it landed six inches away from a dynamite plug and fizzled black.

  He was tired of reliving his life, when he hadn't been so fond of it the first time around. Like Lia, he was trapped by his own past. The moment Aimee had died, so had Ross. And then when he found someone else to live for, it turned out she'd been dead for seventy years.

  He imagined that cigarette landing on the dynamite, the bursting explosion that would shake the earth and send him tumbling into the quarry. He pictured his body being consumed by fire, flames that ate at his clothes and peeled away the pain. Why me? Why was he connected to the deaths of not one, but two women? Was he some kind of supernatural link? A cosmic pawn? A lightning rod for lost souls? Or maybe he was being punished. In the aftermath of Aimee's death, he'd been hailed as a hero, when Ross knew all along he was exactly the opposite.

  As a child he'd read comic books, dazzled by the strength and the daring on pages cut into squares like a sidewalk, as if these superheroes were already walking a path toward greatness simply by appearing on the page. He had told Meredith he was invincible, but he was no Superman, no Captain Marvel. He was not even the sort of man that good things happened to. Meeting the girl of one's dreams, winning a scratch ticket, finding a ten-dollar bill on the street--these were experiences in someone else's daily existence. There was a point where the bad luck ended, and the bad choices began, and Ross could not see the fine distinction. He couldn't live a life worth saving, and he couldn't save a life worth living.

  Ross climbed onto the safety railing. He stood with his arms akimbo, his legs spread, a messiah or a target or both. He was swallowing glass with every breath; he was running on nails with every step. Jump, he thought, and you get to start over.

  He slipped, caught himself, and then laughed at his own caution. He balanced like a chair on the nose of a circus clown--something far too heavy and gravity-laden to defy the laws of nature for very long.

  Pitching forward, Ross managed to stop himself from falling over the fence. His Bogeyman Nights baseball cap went spinning, and landed on a stick of dynamite.

  The clown might drop that chair, but he'd always snatch it just before it smashed on the floor. After all, he had to come back and do the same act night after night. Ross stepped away from the fence, then took the prop that was his body and slouched toward home.

  Rod van Vleet had cashed his last paycheck at the only bar in Comtosook, a place that had taken pity on him in spite of his former association with the development property that had caused so much unquiet. Oliver Redhook himself had called to terminate his employment and to inform him that he expected the company car and the company cell phone back at their Massachusetts headquarters by Monday. "I could have sent a trained monkey to Vermont," Redhook had said on speakerphone. "But I made the grave mistake of sending you."

  In a truly Machiavellian twist of fate, the bartender was one of the Indians who had been banging a drum outside his company trailer for three weeks. Gracious winner, he'd given Rod three shots on the house before he started taking his money. Now on his eighth, Rod could barely get the nerve endings in his hand firing well enough to lift the drink, which seemed so small and slippery that he was about to ask the bartender for a magnifying glass to help locate it.

  "One more," he said, or he thought he said, he didn't quite think it was English.

  The bartender shook his head. "Can't, Mr. van Vleet. Not unless you call yourself a taxi."

  "I'm a taxi," Rod said.

  The bartender exchanged a glance with a woman beside Rod. She had long black hair and the shoulders of a linebacker, and at closer glance turned out to be a man. Rod downed the last of his drink. "Fine, then," he slurred. "I'll just take myself up and over to Burlington. Crash a frat party."

  "You do that," the bartender said. "But you might just crash your car first."

  Rod fished in his pocket and held up a set of keys on the first try. He stumbled and landed hard against the polished bar. "Would serve 'em right."

  The police lights whipped across the truck's windshield, casting Shelby's skin with a faint blue tinge. She pulled Eli's jacket closer around her shoulders, shivering although she wasn't cold. He'd taken care to park off to the side, so that she would not have to stare at the wreckage and the body that had been tossed onto the street, but her head kept turning and her eyes kept straining to make out the details of the catastrophe.

  "I'm sorry," he had said to her, when the radio went off in his truck en route to the restaurant. "I have to go."

  She understood, which was why she got out of the passenger door, now, her high heels slipping on the damp pavement. Outside the cocoon of the truck there was a rally of noise, from sirens to shouting cops to the subtle clicks of the crime-scene photographer. She edged closer to the circle of activity, fully expecting to look down and see Ross.

  She had not been present at his car accident, the one in which Aimee had been killed. But he had been the mission of rescuers like these; there had been a car overturned like that; the EMTs had strapped him to a gurney like the one whining over the pavement toward the victim right now.

  When the phone call came about her brother, she'd been breastfeeding Ethan. She'd almost let the machine pick it up, because it was so much trouble to juggle a drowsy baby and a telephone. Even now, she could not remember whether the officer who told her had been male or female. Only a few words remained, stuck like cement in her memory, blocks that she still tripped over every now and then: Ross, accident, serious, passenger, dead.

  Time stopped, and Ethan had rolled from her lap onto the cushions of the couch. Shelby had tried to picture Ross, battered and bleeding, but could only see him as a skinny fifth-grader with fire in his eyes, taking it upon himself to beat up the eleventh-grade soccer star who had broken Shelby's heart.

  Now, she pushed two uniformed policemen out of the way so that she could see better. The clothes were ripped, the face mangled, but Shelby could still make out the features of the businessman who'd been trying to develop the Pike property.

  A hand tugged at her elbow and yanked her backward. Eli stared at her, upset. "What are you doing out here?"

  "I . . . I had to see."

  "No one should have to see this. Rod van Vleet totaled his car. The only mystery is whether it burst into flames on impact, or if it was the alcohol fumes coming from the driver."

  "Is he going to be okay?"

  "Yeah, but he's got some bad breaks and burns." Eli had led her to the truck without Shelby even realizing it. He opened the door and tucked her inside. "Stay."

  "I'm not Watson."

  His eyes softened. "I know. Watson's used to this. You're not."

  As he turned to finish whatever it was he had to do, Shelby blurted out his name. Immediately, he turned. Even with the sentence on her lips, she did not know why she felt the need to tell Eli what was tunneling through her mind. "Ross almost died in a car crash," she said finally.

  Eli looked over his shoulder at the debris, the rising smoke. "Almost doesn't count," he said.

  Ethan had sto