Second Glance Read online

  “I am help.” He searched for something—anything—that might help him budge the rock. “I’m going to try to lift this.”

  She was shivering, a combination of pain and panic. “Go back.”

  Ross tried to get his weight underneath the rock, but it wouldn’t move. In the distance a sounding horn blared, the warning of another round of explosions. He looked around frantically, trying to locate the dynamite or blasting cap. His eyes landed on Meredith, and the truth that stretched between them.

  He couldn’t help her.

  He leaned down and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Shh,” he whispered, and a charge shuddered somewhere to the left.

  “Ross, go. Please.” She began to cry harder. “I need to know that you got out of here safe.”

  He forced a crooked smile onto his face. “How many times do I have to tell you? I can’t die.”

  She reached for his hand, and the small movement unsettled the rocks beneath them. Ross lost his footing, going down hard on one knee beside Meredith’s head. At the same time, they both noticed the small red tube about three feet beyond them.

  Ross leaped over the rock that pinned Meredith and reached the stick of dynamite. He grabbed it in his fist and started running, sprinting on serrated granite, on broken stone, deeper into the quarry. Nothing mattered in that moment except getting as far away from Meredith as possible before the computers lit it off.

  The charge swelled in his palm. In the instant before he let go of it, before an explosion hotter than a hundred suns razed the very spot where he stood, Ross had one moment where everything was crystal clear. He had saved Meredith, he had saved everyone. Maybe now, he had even made up for the rest of his life. The force of the blast knocked him head over heels and his skull struck hard against a ragged rock. And just as he considered that he might finally have found something worth living for, Ross discovered that he was not invincible after all.

  By the time Eli and Shelby arrived, the first ambulances had already left. The quarry was crawling with uniformed policemen borrowed from other towns, who were roping off the site. Another detective was interviewing the owners of Angel Quarry, who had arrived hastily, in the company of their corporate lawyer. No one knew where Az Thompson—the night watchman—had gone; his absence made him the easiest scapegoat for blame.

  Eli hurried over to a paramedic. “The kids. Where are the kids?”

  “They’re all right. Cuts, bruises. The ambulance already went off to the hospital.”

  He felt Shelby sag beside him, and he put his arm around her to keep her upright. Leaning close, he murmured words into her ear, comments that made no sense at all but were meant to give her a lifeline to hold onto.

  “Can we go?” Shelby said. “Now? To the hospital?”

  But before he could answer, a commotion at the guardrail drew his attention. Three rescue workers gently lifted a stretcher over the edge. Strapped onto it, battered and bloody, was Meredith.

  “Oh my God,” Shelby breathed, as she watched an unconscious Meredith being loaded into a waiting ambulance. Shelby seemed to notice, for the first time, Ross’s car. Shelby grabbed a paramedic by the jacket. “Where’s my brother. Where is my brother?” When the man didn’t answer, she refused to let go. “Ross Wakeman,” she demanded. “He’s here somewhere.”

  A silence fell. No one would answer her, and that was response enough. “No,” Shelby cried, falling to her knees, as Eli’s arms came around her. “No!”

  “He’s at the hospital,” Eli said firmly. Then he turned to one of the EMTs. “Right?”

  “Yeah, he’s at the hospital.”

  “See?” Eli helped Shelby stand, and carefully walked her to the truck. “We’ll go and find Ethan. And Ross.”

  “Okay.” Shelby nodded through her tears. “Okay.”

  Eli closed the door. The paramedic touched his shoulder as he walked around to the driver’s side. “Uh, Detective. About that guy . . .”

  “He’s at the hospital,” Eli repeated.

  “Yeah, but that was only a formality,” the paramedic said. “He was dead before we even got to him.”

  Ross was driving, and Aimee was in the passenger seat. “Denmark,” he said.

  She thought for a moment. “Kyrgyzstan.”

  He couldn’t take his eyes off her, as if he had not seen her in ages, although he knew this could not possibly be true . . . they never spent more than seventy-two hours apart, and that only when Aimee was pulling the graveyard shift at the hospital. Ross found himself cutting glances away from the road to look at the curve of her jaw, the color of her eyes, the spot where her French braid fell against her back. “New York,” he murmured.

  Aimee rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Ross, another K?”

  “You have fifteen years of education; you can play a round of Geography.”

  “Kalamazoo, then.”

  He grinned and looked out the windshield. The car was moving quickly, and it was pouring outside, but he could swear that he’d seen someone he recognized walking along the edge of the highway—his old kindergarten teacher. She was wearing a yellow jumper Ross still recalled and her hair was in tight white pincurls. He looked again in the rearview mirror, but she was gone. “Oshkosh,” Ross replied.

  Aimee crossed her legs on the seat. She had taken off her shoes—she never liked to travel with shoes on. “Heaven.”

  “Heaven isn’t a place.”

  “Of course it is,” Aimee argued.

  Ross raised a brow. “And you know this for a fact.” He looked into his side mirror and nearly swerved: behind him on the opposite side of the road was his mother. She was wearing a sweater with little pearls around the top, one he remembered because as a child he’d sit in her lap and roll them between his fingers. She smiled at him, and waved.

  His mother had been dead since 1996. His kindergarten teacher had been dead even longer than that. And Kyrgyzstan had still been in the U.S.S.R. when Aimee had died.

  Heaven isn’t a place.

  Suddenly they curved around a bend and saw a tractor-trailer coming at them, in their lane. “Ross!” Aimee cried out, and he jerked the steering wheel to the left, into the oncoming lane, noticing too late that a tiny car that had been hidden by the bulk of the truck was speeding toward them.

  There was glass exploding inward, and the horrible screech of tires on a wet road, and the sudden, shocking impact of steel striking steel. Ross found himself sprawled outside the overturned car. The tractor-trailer had wobbled off to the side of the road with its driver thrown onto the horn so that the wail would not let up. Ross ratcheted open the passenger door, reached inside, and unbuckled Aimee.

  Her shoulder was cut and blood stained her shirt, but her face, it was heart-shaped and smooth-skinned and stunning. Her French braid had unraveled, the impact loosening whatever she’d used to secure the bottom. It fanned over her chest like a silk shawl. “Aimee,” he murmured. “God.”

  He sat down and pulled her into his lap, crying as the full force of his memories hit him in the gut. He brushed her hair away from her face, as the rain matted it together. “I won’t let you go. I won’t leave.”

  Aimee blinked at him. “Ross,” she said, looking past his shoulder. “You have to.”

  In all of these years he had not recalled those words, that directive from Aimee that freed him from the blame of not being by her side when she died. He closed his arms more tightly around her and bent forward, but suddenly there was someone standing behind him, trying to get him to stand up just as hard as he was trying to stay.

  He turned, furious, and found himself staring at Lia.

  With Aimee in his arms, and Lia behind him, Ross went absolutely still. This was hell, a nightmare played out in his mind. Both women needed him; each held a half of his heart. Which one do I go to? he thought, And which one do I lose?

  Lia tugged him upright, toward the other passenger car that had crashed and now lay sideways against a highway barrier. Ross tried to break away fr