Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  He had tried to find Shelby first, or Ethan, but they had been released. Lucy had gone with them. Yet when Ross tried to call her house, there had been no answer, and the message machine had been turned off. He would have called Eli, but he could not seem to remember his home phone number, if he'd ever known it in the first place. The neurologist who had examined Ross after his head contusions had been stitched up said his memory might be like that--full of gaps and spots that might or might not come back. For example, he had no recollection of what he'd been doing before he found Meredith frantically searching for the kids at Shelby's. He could not remember how he'd gotten the fine white spiderweb scars on his wrists.

  What he did recall was Lia's face, something he would have died to see again--and had, apparently. He could conjure her, and Aimee, as if they were close enough to stand two feet in front of him. Ross knew that he could have stayed back there--wherever that had been, exactly. But even more than he had wanted to hold Aimee in his arms, to follow Lia wherever she led him . . . he wanted to be with his sister. His nephew. Maybe Meredith.

  Ross had spent so many years searching for something, he'd never realized that what you found might not be as important as the act of trying to find it. A life wasn't defined by the moment you died, but all the others you'd spent living.

  As he watched, a tear tracked down Meredith's cheek. Her eyes opened just a crack, and she focused on Ross. "Lucy," she whispered.

  "She's fine."

  As her surroundings dovetailed into her memories, Meredith startled. She cried out at the pain in her leg and the touch of Ross's hands to settle her. "You're a ghost."

  He smiled at that. "Not anymore."

  "The dynamite--it exploded in your hand. I saw you," she said. And then added, more softly: "They told me . . . you'd died." She tried to struggle upright again, and as she jogged her leg, her eyes rolled back in agony.

  "Stay still." He stared at her face, at the hairline scar he'd never noticed. "You broke the leg you broke before in your car accident. In six places. The fibula and tibia were crushed; they operated and put a pin in." Ross assumed that Meredith would think the doctors had told him of her condition, but she surprised him with her acuity.

  "I never told you," she said warily, "that I was in a car accident."

  He sat down on the edge of the bed. "You were driving a green Honda and wearing a black dress," Ross said quietly. You cut yourself . . . here." He touched the spot on her forehead. "They never found your shoes."

  "You're not going to tell me you're psychic, too," Meredith said weakly.

  "No," Ross replied. "I'm going to tell you I was there."

  He stared at her, unblinking, until the part of memory buried so deep it's never more than a flicker fanned a flame, until her eyes widened just a fraction. "Twice," she said, her voice groggy, as she reached for his hand. Her lids drifted shut. "Superman."

  He waited until Meredith's breathing evened out, and then his fingers tightened around hers. "Maybe," he conceded.

  Ethan swung his legs on the bench outside the hospital, waiting for Lucy to get caught. She was walking in the drizzling rain along the top edge of a five-foot brick wall behind the range of vision of a security guard. When she reached the end she did a little hop, like one of those gymnastics wizards on a balance beam, and then leaped off to land behind the guard and scare ten years off the poor guy's life.

  He whipped around, and Lucy gave him that sweet Shirley Temple smile that cleared her every time.

  In the past month, she'd become a daredevil. She was forever climbing onto roofs and hanging her head out of the windows of moving cars and renting the biggest chain-saw gore-fests from the video store. Ethan knew it was his fault; he'd created a monster. The shrink that they both had to go to, for something called post-traumatic-stress-disorder therapy, said it was a reaction to a near death experience. Ethan, of course, knew better.

  He pulled down the sleeves of his long-sleeved shirt and tugged the brim of his baseball cap lower. He didn't feel like a mutant in front of the hospital, because other people came and went with all kinds of tubes and bags attached. Besides, he wasn't even the biggest freak in his household anymore. That honor belonged to Uncle Ross, who had been declared clinically dead and lived to tell about it.

  He was fine, or so he'd told everyone from Oprah to Larry King to the Reverend Billy Graham, via a live feed to his hospital room. He was being released today after a month's observation--not for his sake, really, but for all the doctors who came to poke at him and try to figure out what had made him come back to life. Meredith was being released too. His mom and Eli had gone inside to wheel them out.

  Ethan had visited his uncle a bunch of times while he was in the hospital. He'd coached him to the point where he could almost win one poker hand out of five. And he'd spent a lot of time just talking to him, because even if Ethan didn't want to let himself get his hopes up, you couldn't help but wonder if that kind of luck was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, or something that might be passed down to, say, other generations.

  The last time he'd come to visit, his uncle had let him eat all the green Jell-O and noodle soup, and had brought him to Meredith's room. She told Ethan that even though his DNA couldn't repair itself, some scientist in New York had invented a cream that could repair the DNA damage already done. And people in her own lab were working on gene replacement therapy, which might cure XP permanently.

  Who was Ethan to say a miracle couldn't strike twice? It ran in the family, after all.

  "Hey, check that out." Lucy dug an elbow into his side and pointed. "That's weird."

  It was a double rainbow, one tucked beneath the bend of the other. But you could only see the left half of it, curving to the midpoint of the sky before melting into muddy blue.

  The right side of the rainbow wasn't missing, Ethan knew, even if he and Lucy couldn't see it. It wasn't wishful thinking, or magic, but a simple law of nature. After all, once you know that part of something exists, it stands to reason that the rest of it is somewhere out there, too.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Believing in ghosts is a bit like being pregnant--you either are, or you aren't, and there's no in between. So when I set out to create Ross Wakeman, I knew I needed to find people who not only believed, but could explain to me why. It was my good fortune to become acquainted with the Atlantic Paranormal Society--in particular, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, who took me out ghost hunting and convinced me that there is more to this world than meets the eye, and Andy Thompson, who explained what it's like to be a sensitive. What they taught me was so fascinating that I just may have to write another ghost story, if only so that I have a good reason to tag along again.

  As promised: a nod to the Women Who Luv Books ladies who ardently helped me find my title: Lori Maurillo Thompson, Sherry Fritzsche, Sandy Langley, Joyce Doherty, Laurie Barrows, Connie Picker, Sara Reynolds, Nancy Martin, Claudia Kari, Pamela Leigh, Suzi Sabolis, Linda Shelby, Carol Pizzi, Diane Meyers, Karen Sokoloff, and MJ Marcks.

  Thanks to my usual tribe of professionals: Dr. Elizabeth Martin, Lisa Schiermeier, Dr. David Toub, Dr. Tia Horner, and two specialists--Dr. Aidan Curran and Dr. Daniel Collison; to my legal sources, Jennifer Sternick, Andrea Greene Goldman, Alan Williams, and Allegra Lubrano; and to my law enforcement guru, Detective-Lieutenant Frank Moran. Rhode Island State Police Detective Claire Demarais gets a special nod, for teaching me Forensics 101. Sindy Follensbee, thanks for transcribing so fast, and with a smile. Rebecca Picoult translated French for me tres vite and came to Mass MOCA with me; Jane Picoult, Steve Ives, and JoAnn Mapson all read drafts of this book and kept me from getting lazy. Aimee Mann put Ross's pain to music for me, and helped inspire me to translate it to fiction. To my agent, Laura Gross, I want to offer my gratitude for an entire decade of service, and hopefully a good thirty or forty years more. Thanks to Laura Mullen and Camille McDuffie, the matchmakers who take my books and find me an adoring public. And I'd like to thank everyone at Atria Books fo