Second Glance Read online

  Mrs. De la Corria sank down in her chair again, still breathless. “The girl?” she asked softly.

  “The third embryo tested is, in fact, a carrier. I’m sorry,” Meredith replied.

  Carlos squeezed his wife’s hand. “Well, then,” he said optimistically. “It looks like we’ll be having twin boys.”

  There were plenty of obstacles still to overcome, and there was every chance that the embryos wouldn’t succeed—but Meredith had done her part of the job. From here, other doctors at Generra took over with the implantation. Meredith accepted the De la Corrias’ gratitude and then scanned her appointment sheet. Two more consultations, and then she had the afternoon to work in her lab.

  She slipped on her reading glasses—she kept them in a pocket, too vain for overt display—and pulled the pen that anchored her curls into some semblance of a knot. Her honey-gold hair tumbled around her shoulders in a tangle, the mess it always was, as if it were God’s joke to give Meredith Oliver, the control freak, hair that had seemed to have a mind of its own. She scrubbed her hands down her face, rubbed bloodshot brown eyes. “Tonight,” she told herself out loud, “I will not let myself work. I will go home, and take a hot bath, and read Lucy something other than an article from the Journal of Theriogenology.”

  She wondered if saying it, instead of just thinking it, made it any more likely to happen.

  “Dr. Oliver?” A knock on the door, followed by her secretary. “The De la Corrias signed this release.”

  Without looking, Meredith knew what it was—permission for Generra to discard their third, female embryo. “They should wait until after implantation. There’s a chance that the in vitro won’t take, and then . . .”

  Her voice drifted off. And then, it would make no difference. The De la Corrias would rather be childless than utilize this damaged embryo. The baby would not be hemophiliac herself . . . in all likelihood she’d be a perfectly healthy girl with her mother’s shining hair and her father’s chestnut eyes. But she had the potential to pass the illness to her own male children one day, and given that, her parents would rather she never be born.

  Meredith signed off on the release and set it to one side of her desk. “The Albertsons are here,” said the secretary.

  “Give me a minute.”

  As soon as the door closed, Meredith picked up the phone and dialed home. She imagined her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, two braids curling down her back like replicas of the human genome, as she practiced her Us and Vs for handwriting homework. Ula unrolled uneven umbrellas. Lucy lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Hey, Noodle.”

  “Mom! Where are you?”

  “On Jupiter. Where are you?”

  “In the Calamari Desert.”

  Meredith smiled. “That might be Kalahari.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon.”

  There was a beat of silence. “Before it gets dark?”

  Meredith closed her eyes. “I’ll be back for dinner,” she promised. “Tell Granny Ruby. And no more Oreos until I get home.”

  Lucy sucked in a breath. “How did you know I was—”

  “Because I’m the mom. Love you.” Meredith hung up, then twisted her hair onto the top of her head. She scrabbled through her drawer for a rubber band, but could only come up with a few paper clips, which worked about as well as bobby pins. Her glance fell on the release the De la Corrias had signed. On impulse, Meredith slipped the form into the lower drawer of her desk. She would lose it, temporarily. Just in case.

  She pushed the button of her intercom and a moment later the door swung open, revealing the Albertsons. They looked beaten and drained, like most of the other couples who came through her office for the first time. Meredith held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Oliver. I’ve reviewed your case. And,” she said briskly, “I can help.”

  Az knew that if push came to shove, he wouldn’t be able to chase a squirrel out of Angel Quarry, much less give full pursuit to an armed intruder. The owners kept him on as a security guard out of kindness, or pity, or maybe because he only bothered to pick up half his paychecks, not having much use for them in the long run. Luckily, there was only one access road into the quarry, not that Az paid much attention to it. He sat in the small illuminated booth at the quarry office, where three closed-circuit televisions monitored activity at different locations, and kept his eye instead on the fourth monitor, tuned to the Red Sox.

  “Ha,” Az snorted at the batter. “They pay you eleven million bucks a year for that?”

  The quarry was one of Vermont’s granite mines, veins of rock etched into the cliffs like the deep lines of Az’s face. A long time ago, they’d drilled the charges by hand, blasted, and milled the stone for export. These days, it was mostly computerized. Working alone at night, he never saw another soul . . . for all he knew, it was like that at peak hours too. Az sometimes wondered if he was the only human employed there.

  In the thirty years he’d been working at the quarry, he had filed only two security reports. One involved an electrical storm that set off an explosion intended to detonate the following day. The second was about a suicidal man, who scaled the protective wall and tried to jump off one of the cliffs into the jagged rubble at the base. The fool broke both legs, recovered, and started a dot-com business.

  Az liked working at night, and he liked working alone. If he was quiet when he made his rounds, he could hear buds burst; he could smell the turn of the seasons. On occasion he would lie on his back, his hands propping up his head, and watch the stars reconfigure themselves into the constellations of his life—an angry bull of frustration, the imbalanced scales of justice, the twin loves he’d lost ages ago.

  He wondered what was going on at Otter Creek Pass. In the week Rod van Vleet had been on the site, the Abenaki protest had intensified, and the public had noticed. It helped that Thule Abbott, the town drunk, had awakened one morning with all his straight hair gone curly, and he’d spent a day in the church getting a dose of Jesus and blaming the ghosts for his misfortune. Rumors flew through Comtosook like the occasional dusting of rose petals, which fell like pollen on the cars parked at the Dairy Twirl and clogged the drains in the outdoor showers at the town pool.

  If Rod van Vleet had half a brain, he’d roll his construction equipment in during the night, when most of the Indians were snoring in their tents a distance away. Good thing the frontman for the Redhook Group was a fool. Given the habitual disorganization of the Abenaki protest, it put them on equal footing.

  A small firefly winked past Az’s left eye. Then he realized it wasn’t a June bug at all, but a small bobbing light on the pitch-dark screen of one of the satellite TVs, the one that viewed the mine’s northern wall and most active stripping site. A flush of heat ran down between Az’s shoulders—it took a moment for him to recognize excitement for what it was. Jamming his hat on his head, he struck off toward the spot where the light had been. The years fell away with each footstep, until he was once again straight and strong as an oak that punched the sky, until he was needed.

  Ross didn’t know whom he blamed more: Ethan, for planting this seed in his mind; or himself, for bothering to listen. Angel Quarry is haunted, his nephew had said, everyone says so. He walked softly along the narrow path until he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. This, then, was where he would set up. He didn’t dare use his flashlight yet—something he’d learned early from the Warburtons. Authorities usually left ghost hunters alone, but trespassing was trespassing. If you were exploring a graveyard, you learned to back in with your headlights off, so that you could make a quick escape. Likewise, if you were creeping through private property in the middle of the night, you did everything possible to keep from calling attention to yourself.

  Thinking of Aimee this afternoon had made him want to try, one last time, no matter that he’d told Shelby he’d hung up his paranormal shingle. So from Lake Champlain he’d gone to Burlington, to a discount electronics store, where