Second Glance (55 page)

She did not know anything about this man who caused her mind to spin, except that he had a nephew with XP, knew her grandmother, and made the seam of her pulse lose a stitch every time he smiled. “I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “I’ve completely monopolized this conversation.”

“No. I wanted to know about you.”

“I want to know about you too,” Meredith admitted.

“Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid.” Ross took out a pack of cigarettes, lighting up.

She waved away a cloud of smoke. “Those things will kill you.”

“I wish.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t die,” Ross admitted.

In spite of herself, Meredith grinned. “Unless I take out my kryptonite necklace, you mean?”

“No, really. I’ve been hit by bullets, thrown from a car crash, fried by lightning, and every time I come away without a scratch.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’ve got the doctor bills to prove it.”

Meredith was stunned for a moment. “That’s a pretty remarkable gift.”

“Not when you want to save someone other than yourself,” Ross said.

“Your nephew.”

“Among other people.”

She leaned forward, drawn by the flicker of pain at the back of his eyes. “The person you said I look like?”

He didn’t answer—he didn’t seem capable of answering at that point. Meredith wondered what it would feel like to have a man so enamored of her that even after her death, he might still carry a torch. He might look for her face in the faces of others. The Starbucks worker approached their table. “You can’t smoke in here.”

Ross turned to him. “I guess self-immolation is out of the question, then.”

The kid blinked. “Dude, whatever perverted stuff you do on your own time is your own business.”

Meredith covered her laugh with a cough. “Maybe we ought to go.” She hesitated. “I’ve really enjoyed being with you. I think the last time I told that to a guy and meant it, I was making mud pies in the nursery school sandbox.”

“And you didn’t even get your hands dirty tonight.”

“Imagine.” Meredith looked up at him shyly. “Are you in town for a while? Maybe we could, you know, get together. For a whole meal this time. Or just the appetizer, if you want to work up to that.”

“I can’t.”

Immediately her eyes flew to his left hand. Bare. “You’re gay,” she said.

“It’s not that.”

The old reflex kicked in—she had been at this juncture of an evening before, where she was found unattractive or lacking in some other way. Meredith felt herself separating by degrees. “Yes. Right.” She briskly held out her hand. “Well, it was very nice to meet you.”

He took her hand with reverence, turning it over between his own for a long moment, as if she were made of the finest crystal instead of ordinary flesh and blood. “Meredith,” Ross said quietly, “I like you. I like you a lot. But there’s someone else.”

The woman, the one Meredith looked like. She ducked her head. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize you two were still—”

She felt something being pressed into her hand. A newspaper clipping, yellowed and faded, but it was still possible to see the face of the woman in the center. A face that was a mirror of Meredith’s.
Lia Beaumont Pike
, said the caption.
1914–1932.

“This was your biological grandmother,” Ross said. “And I’m in love with her.”

It was a war, Ross realized, and Meredith was losing. She stood with her arms crossed tight, her back straight, her eyes the color of anger. Ross and Ruby, on the couch, took turns fielding her outrage and tossing it back, in the hopes that she would start to believe what they were trying to say.

“When I told your mother that she was not my child, not even named Luxe, but
really
Lily Pike,” Ruby said, “she had a heart attack and died. Can you blame me for not wanting to bring it up again?”

“Yes!” Meredith exploded. “You don’t hide something like that from a person!”

“You do if it saves their life,” Ross pointed out.

She turned to him, lashing out like a wounded bear. “Explain something to me. How could you possibly have known a woman who died before you were born?”

“I met her at work.”

“Work. What do you do for a living, raise the dead?”

Ross exchanged a glance with Ruby. “I don’t raise them. I just sort of find them.”

“Great. You hunt for ghosts, when you’re not getting hit by lightning and managing to stay alive. Ruby, I don’t know how this guy walked in and convinced you the way he did, but he’s crazy. Wacko. I think—”

“I think you’d better listen to him, Meredith,” Ruby interrupted. “He’s telling you the truth.”

“The
truth
. So now you believe in ghosts, too? Fine, then. Conjure this grandmother of mine. If she floats in here and tells me the same thing, I’ll believe you.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Ross explained.

“How convenient.”

The corners of Ruby’s mouth turned down. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

“Then what would you like me to do? Thank him for coming here to tell me my entire life has been a lie?”

“It hasn’t been a lie,” Ross said. “It just . . . hasn’t been what you thought it was.” He walked toward Meredith. “You are the direct descendant of Lia Pike. And that means you own a really nice piece of real estate in Comtosook, Vermont.”

He wished he could tell her that from this property, you could see mountains so green it made your eyes hurt, and that the air smelled cleaner than anything you could ever imagine. He wished he could show her the spot where he’d fallen in love with Lia.

“I don’t need real estate in Vermont,” Meredith said.

“Well, there are a boatload of Abenaki Indians who do, who’ve been fighting to keep the land from being developed.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“No, but if you own the land, you get to decide what’s done with it.”

“Ah, see, now we’re getting somewhere. You’re an Indian-rights activist.”

“I’m—”

“And naturally, if you can convince me I’m part-Abenaki, I’m supposed to side with my relatives. Am I the only person here who can see what’s right in front of her eyes? Look at me.” Meredith yanked her hair out of its neat bun. “I’m blond. I’m pale. Do I look like I have even a drop of Native American blood in me?”

“No, but neither did Lia. Listen, you’re a scientist,” Ross argued. “Your great-grandfather, Az Thompson, is still alive. Let us run a DNA test to prove it to you.”

“And then what?”

Ross looked at Ruby, and then back. “Then it’s up to you.”

Meredith narrowed her eyes. “What do you get out of this, exactly? Some kickback from the Abenaki? A book deal?”

“Nothing.” Ross glanced at the table, at Lia’s obituary. “I just want to help her.”

Suddenly he was aware of small hands pushing at his knee, moving him out of the way. Lucy—Meredith’s little girl, who was supposed to be asleep—had been eavesdropping. “Lucy!” Ruby said. “What are you doing up?”

“Go back to your room,” Meredith ordered.

But Lucy pointed to Lia’s moon eyes, to the white bow of her cheek. “She lost her baby.”

He felt everything inside him freeze.

“Lucy.” Meredith squatted down. “I don’t know how much you overheard, but—”

“
Let her talk
,” Ross murmured.

“She tells me every time.” Lucy hesitated. “She told me you were coming.”

Ross’s voice was tight, stretched, like the flight of a bird. “Who?”

“That lady,” Lucy said, pointing to Lia’s photograph. “She’s the one I see in the middle of the night.”

Eli hadn’t realized what a pit he lived in until he saw it through Shelby’s eyes. “It’s not much,” he’d warned, throwing open the door, and looking with dismay at the scarred wooden floors and the dormitory-quality couch, hiding its shabbiness under a floral sheet that had seen better days itself. A stack of dishes waited in the sink, as it had for the past week; a pile of mismatched shoes walked over themselves at the side of the door. “I, uh, didn’t know you were coming,” Eli apologized.

“Wow!” Ethan pushed past them. “Can I have a place like this one day?” Without waiting for an answer, he followed Watson upstairs, and suddenly there was a squeal of delight.

Eli glanced at the ceiling. “He must have found the shooting range.”

“You have a
shooting range
?”

“Kidding,” Eli said. “But I do have a PS2.”

“Aha. Is Watson addicted to Gran Turismo?”

“Of course not. He doesn’t have a thumb to work the joystick.” Eli led her into the kitchen, setting down the bag of groceries with which, Shelby had promised, she would make him a culinary feast.

So what if it was three in the morning?

Shelby immediately began to bustle around his knot of a kitchen, setting vegetables in the sink to be washed and organizing the rest of the groceries for refrigeration or oven cooking. Now that her brother had called to say he wasn’t lying in a ditch somewhere, she was a different person. She’d explained how she’d once interrupted Ross in the middle of a suicide attempt—a facet of his personality that had come as a surprise to Eli. Sure, the guy was a little gloomy, but he hadn’t seen him on the verge of taking his own life. Or maybe he hadn’t wanted to see him that way.

So Ross was off in Maryland looking for Ruby Weber, and Eli was having dinner cooked for him by a beautiful woman. All in all, he thought he was getting the better end of the deal. “You know, we could get a frozen pizza.”

“But then I wouldn’t be able to impress you.”

“You already have.” Eli suddenly remembered how, before his ex-wife had taken everything with her, she’d had a designer into the house, who’d encouraged her to build a room around a certain piece—a rug, a table, a chandelier. He’d thought at the time it was the stupidest advice he’d ever heard, but now Eli understood. He would have happily built a room around Shelby. A house. A life.

He watched her line up peppers on his sideboard—just the smallest splashes of color, and already his kitchen looked a hundred percent better. She turned, a Styrofoam tray of chicken in her hand. “Let’s put this in the fridge,” she said, in the instant before Eli leaped up and flattened himself against the door.

“All right,” Shelby said slowly. “You’d rather get salmonella?”

“No.” Eli reached behind his back and plucked a photo from beneath its magnet. Then he stepped away and opened the refrigerator door.

By then, though, Shelby could have cared less about the chicken. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the picture in his palm.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing, nothing? Or nothing, like an old girlfriend?” In a move that any police academy instructor would have found impressive, she stuffed the chicken into his hand, extricated the photograph, and screamed.

Eli took it from her and tried very hard not to say
I told
you so
.

“I hope that’s not an old girlfriend,” Shelby said weakly.

He glanced down at the shot of Cecelia Pike hanging from a beam on the icehouse porch. Her face was aubergine, her tongue protruding, her eyes bloodshot and bugged. “Sorry,” Eli murmured. “Like I said, I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Because then you would have taken the cadaver photos off the fridge? Good lord, Eli, what is that doing up there in the first place?”

“To make me remember. I do it every time I’m thick in the middle of a case.”

Ethan flew into the kitchen. “You know what Eli’s got?”

“A twisted work ethic?” Shelby said.

“No, a PlayStation.” He turned to Eli. “I would totally kill for one of those.”

“Knock yourself out,” Eli said, and Ethan left as swiftly as he’d arrived.

Shelby had taken to slicing mushrooms. Eli sat down, watching the way the muscles shifted beneath her thin T-shirt as she cut and diced. “Is that really what happens to you when you hang yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I guess I should feel grateful with Ross, there was only all that blood.” She looked up for a second. “No, actually, I’m not grateful about any of it.”

“First rule of being a homicide detective: Death isn’t pretty.
Ever
.”

He watched her hand still over the cutting board, and realized that he’d put his foot in his mouth. “Shelby—”

“How come when we really, really want something, we say we’d
kill
for it, or we’d
die
to have it?”

“I suppose because it’s the ultimate tradeoff.”

Shelby began to mix the ingredients for a salad dressing. “It is. Tropologically. As in:
I’d die to keep my son alive.
”

Not sure what to say, Eli looked down at the picture on the countertop. Cecelia Pike had been killed, and somehow or other, her child had been spared. But if it was a murder, he didn’t know who was to blame. The evidence told him it wasn’t Gray Wolf, and his gut told him it wasn’t Spencer Pike. Ruby Weber, if she’d been there that night, wouldn’t have had the strength to hoist Cissy’s noose up over the beam of the icehouse porch. And yet you could see right there on the bottom of the photo, the long crooked mark in the wet sawdust that came from the dragging of something—a heel or a boot?—during a struggle.

He certainly hoped Ross would come home with his pockets full of missing puzzle pieces.

“Taste this,” Shelby said, and before he could even shake his mind back to the present she pressed her mouth against his.

Along with the sweetness, there was something bitter. Tart. Oily.

Did disappointment have a flavor?

She drew back. “Wait, don’t tell me. You prefer French.”

“I don’t like any dressing at all,” Eli said.

“Huh. I never would have figured you for a salad purist.”

Eli smiled. He drew her close, so that the confetti of peppers in her soft palms spilled between them and the photograph fluttered to the kitchen floor, forgotten. “Were we talking about salad?” he asked.

It was
Temezôwas
, the time of the Cutter Moon, and that was enough to make Az nervous. A season that was all about things coming to an end . . . coupled with the milk-blind eye of the full moon—well, it just wasn’t a good time to be laying charges to blast granite at Angel Quarry, is all. No matter that the actual detonation would happen at 5
A.M.
, when no one else was present . . . Az patrolled the perimeter, knowing something was bound to go wrong, wondering when it would happen.