Second Glance

by Jodi Picoult

  “No need.”

  Ross shook his head. “I . . . well, a lot happened just before you got to me. I found my ghost.”

  “I heard.”

  “You don’t seem surprised.”

  “I wasn’t the one who needed convincing,” Az said.

  “Eli Rochert said you’re going to do some kind of ceremony?”

  “Friday, at dawn. You coming?”

  Ross could not speak for a moment. Eli had explained that the ritual would be a private one, limited to the officials needed to dig up the remains and the Abenaki spiritual leaders. He was not an official, and he was not Abenaki; therefore, he had no illusions about being invited. He had even told himself that seeing the remains of this woman who’d come alive only for him would be like losing her all over again.

  Yet there was a part of him that wanted so badly to be present. Because if Lia’s body was being put to rest, chances were that her spirit would come to bear witness. And if she saw Ross, maybe this time she would not leave.

  “I’ll be there,” Ross said quietly.

  Az crossed his arms over his chest. “What they should be doing, instead of digging up this grave, is burying Spencer Pike alive.”

  Ross looked hard at Az. Az, who had protested the development of the Pike property before there was any concrete proof. Az, who was old enough to have heard about Spencer Pike’s crusade for sterilization. Eli had told him that the old man had moved to Comtosook in the seventies, and that he’d come from the Midwest. But Shelby had said that in the 1930s some of the Abenaki had migrated to escape what was happening in Vermont—joining up with the Ojibway in Michigan and Minnesota and Wisconsin. They had taken their stories. And Az would have listened.

  “How much,” Ross asked, “did you know?”

  Az shrugged. “Enough.”

  “You didn’t tell anyone. You could have walked right up to Eli and told him about Spencer Pike and eugenics.”

  “Why bring up something that hurts so much, if it’s not going to change anything?”

  “But it does. It keeps it from happening again.”

  Az raised a brow. “Do you really believe that?”

  Ross started to nod, but then realized he would be lying. The truth was, history repeated itself on a daily basis; mistakes were made over and over. People were haunted by what they had done, and by what they hadn’t had time to do. “Gray Wolf,” he said suddenly. “You know what happened to him, don’t you?”

  The old man stared up at the yellow eye of the moon. “Where I used to live, every few years, there would be rumors about people seeing him. In line at the bank, or sitting in the back of a bus, or dealing in a casino.”

  “Like Elvis.” Ross smiled. He should have known better. Reality sometimes morphed into legend, but the equation never went the other way. “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter, really. The guy’s probably dead by now.”

  “I’m 102,” Az said softly, “but who’s counting.”

  TEN

  “I killed her.” Az pressed the small wad of gauze to the spot on his arm where blood had just been drawn and looked calmly at the detective sitting across from him in the examination room.

  Eli didn’t even blink. “The evidence doesn’t suggest that.”

  “Far as I know, there’s still a warrant out for me.”

  Ross put down the tongue depressor that he’d dressed with a cotton ball hairdo, a makeshift puppet. After confessing his identity, Az had agreed to meet with Eli. Ross half expected him to skip town again—but he’d been waiting on the steps of the police station when Ross had arrived. He’d allowed Eli to fingerprint him, and even Ross could see those telltale arches, the same ones that had been on Gray Wolf’s fingerprint card from the State Prison. And when Eli had gone one step further and asked Az for a blood sample for DNA typing, the old man was the one who suggested they do it right away.

  But why confess after seventy years?

  “I killed her,” Az repeated. “I found a girl who grew up like royalty, and explained she wasn’t a princess after all. It doesn’t matter if I wound that rope around her neck, if I was even there that night. She wouldn’t have died if I hadn’t told her she was my daughter.”

  “You must have realized that finding out the truth wouldn’t be easy for her,” Eli said.

  “I wasn’t thinking of the choices she’d have to make. I just wanted to get to know her, because she was what I’d be leaving behind in this world. Only it didn’t work out that way.”

  “Did you tell Pike, too?”

  “No.”

  “Do you think Lia told him?”

  “I think she was afraid to,” Az said. “He’d locked her up the week before. She had been suicidal—and he said he wanted to keep an eye on her, keep her from hurting herself. In Spencer Pike’s mind, announcing you were a Gypsy was just as self-destructive.” “Why didn’t you take her out of there?” Ross accused. “You could have saved her.” And yet, he knew that even if Az Thompson had spirited Lia off to Canada to have her child, she still would not be his. She would be an old woman. The only reason he had ever met her at all was because she had died when she did.

  “Her husband beat me up and threw me out. By the time I came back for her, the place was a murder scene . . . and Spencer Pike was telling the cops I’d done it. The reason I’ve lived so long is that it’s my punishment. I met her, but then had to spend the rest of my life without her.”

  Ross stared, surprised to hear Az voice the very same pain that he felt.

  Eli shook his head. “I remember when you moved here, Az. I was a kid. You came back to Comtosook, knowing that you could still be arrested for something you didn’t do?”

  “I came back because I promised someone I loved that I would.” Az pulled the Band-Aid from the crook of his elbow, where only the tiniest dot indicated the question of his identity. “You ask me, that’s all it takes.”

  It turned out that sneaking into a rest home wasn’t very difficult if you happened to be the same age as most of its patrons. He moved through the halls like the ghost he nearly was, squinting at the names on the doors until he found the one he wanted.

  Inside, Spencer Pike lay twisted in his sheets, his face as white as the belly of a whale, his IV hooked up to a patient-controlled analgesia pump. His thumb pressed hard on a nurse’s call button, and his breath came in small shallow pants. “I need more morphine!”

  The answer was tinny, distant. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pike. You can’t have any more tonight.”

  With a roar of pain, he threw the PCA button down. He lay on his side, his features twisted with agony. Even after the other man slipped out of the shadows, it took a few moments for Pike to focus on his face. And then, there was no sign of recognition. “Who are you?” he gasped.

  There was no right way to answer. In his life, he had been so many different people: John Delacour, Gray Wolf, Az Thompson. He had been called an Indian, a Gypsy, a murderer, a miracle. Yet the only identity he had ever wanted was the one that had been denied him—Lily’s husband, Lia’s father.

  Maybe Spencer Pike was delirious from the narcotics or the haze of his illness; maybe he saw courage in Az’s eyes and mistook it for understanding. But something made him reach across the six inches of physical space and miles of distance between them to grasp Az’s hand. “Please,” he begged. “Help me.”

  It rocked Az to the core to realize that he and Spencer Pike had something in common after all: they would die alone, and their grief would die with them. He looked at the broken man in front of him who had ruined so many lives. “Help me die,” Pike breathed.

  It would be so easy. A pillow, held down for thirty seconds. A hand covering the parched and bitter mouth. No one need ever know, and Az would have his biblical justice: a life for a life.

  But it was what Pike wanted.

  Az felt the bands around his heart break free. “No,” he said, and he walked out of the room without a second glance.

  The Comtosook Police Depa
rtment had hired six part-timers to keep the media away from the site of the disinterment. Gathered around the open graves were Wesley Sneap, Eli, Az and several hand-picked Abenaki, and Ross. The stench of time rose from the earth, thick as cinnamon.

  That should be me, Ross thought, at the moment Az murmured the same words aloud. The old man’s hand trembled as it reached toward the coffins. “Where will you take her?” Ross asked.

  “To the top of a mountain, a sacred place. The Abenaki are always buried facing east.” Az looked up. “That way she can see what’s coming.”

  Ross tried to swallow around the knot that had lodged in his throat. “Will you . . . will you show me where she is?”

  “I can’t. You’re not Abenaki.”

  Ross had known that would be the answer, but it did not keep tears from springing to his eyes. He nodded, pretended to kick at a stick beside his shoe. Suddenly he felt something being pressed into his hand. An envelope.

  Inside was a faded clipping from the Burlington Free Press, the obituary of Cecelia Beaumont Pike. A picture of her sat off to the side. In it, she was smiling faintly, as if the photographer had told a joke she did not find funny but was too polite not to laugh just a little. “You keep it,” Az said.

  “I couldn’t—”

  “She’d want that.” Az tilted his head. “She told me she’d dreamed of you, you know.”

  “She . . . what?”

  “Of a man who looked like you look. Who had gadgets and things she didn’t recognize. You would come to her, when she was sleeping.” Az shrugged. “It’s not so strange, really. You can be haunted for years by someone you’ve never met.”

  “You ready?” Eli asked gently, and the old man nodded.

  Wesley Sneap helped Eli position a crowbar and crack open the lid of the larger coffin. Ross fell backward, and two of the Abenaki blanched. Eli peered into the pine box at the yellowed puzzle of long bones and joints in a bed of dirt and dust. Only one entire limb remained intact—the right arm, a continuous line from shoulder to elbow to wrist to hand, which lay on top of the sternum that once covered a heart.

  He stood with his hands clasped, feeling his childhood unspool as Az started to speak a language that ran through his veins. Kchai phanem ta wdosa . . . the mother and daughter. Kchi Niwaskw . . . Great Spirit. Nosaka nia . . . follow me. Eli did not know if Cecelia Pike, or her baby, were in a place where they could hear this ceremony, but he hoped so.

  “Olegwasi,” Az said. “Dream well.” Then he turned to face the others. “The Ojibway—the people I went to when I left here—they hold a ceremony when a baby is born.” He took a twist of tobacco from a canvas bag he’d carried into the gravesite and lit it on fire. “It’s so the Spirit World can recognize a child, and make a place for her when it’s her time to go. Today I want to give my granddaughter her name.”

  Az looked around the circle of people, daring them to say that it might be too late after seventy years. “Lily,” he called, facing to the east.

  Eli felt the response drawn from his throat. “Lily,” he repeated.

  Az turned to the north. “Lily.”

  “Lily.”

  To the west, to the south, he offered up her name for safekeeping. By the time Az turned to Eli again, it was snowing. Eli touched the top of his head and brushed off a few flower petals. “Now,” Az said.

  Just then the sky darkened, until it was the color of a bruise beneath the skin. Ross Wakeman turned in a circle, as if he were expecting something to materialize, and damned if Eli didn’t think that just might happen.

  But just then Wesley jimmied open the smaller coffin, an apple crate, with a crowbar. Ill-preserved and eroded with time, the wooden box broke into pieces. The contents spilled, and Eli ran forward too late, thinking there might be something he could do.

  A hush fell over the small group. The bones that fell out, twisted and brown, were a scramble of points and edges. But even Eli, who had no training in this kind of thing, realized that the skull was missing. “Uh . . . Wesley?”

  The medical examiner creaked down to his knees, poking through the remains with a gloved hand. “The ribs and vertebrae are here,” he said, “but they’re too large to be from an infant. I don’t even think this is human.”

  “Then what the hell is it?”

  Wesley looked up at Eli. “Looks to me like a rib roast,” he said.

  Years from now, Eli would know this was the moment he had truly forsworn red meat. He knelt beside the coffin and felt Az come up behind him. They all watched the sky split at a seam, letting forth a steady rain of rose petals that covered the ground, the grave, the bones inside the coffin. A rogue wind whipped between Eli’s legs, caught the petals in a funnel draft. They drifted down to the ground, spelling out initials: RW.

  In her dreams, Ruby was reaching. Anticipation was a lion crouched on her chest, clawing at her collarbone. She woke with a start and tried to sit up, but that lion had her pinned to the mattress, and now that she tried, she couldn’t catch her breath, either.

  Was Lucy crying?

  No, this was a baby. The thin wail snaked under the door of Ruby’s bedroom, through the crack where the hall light shined through. Ruby struggled upright, but not before the lion on her chest took a vicious swipe.

  She clutched the burn over her left breast and fell heavily to the floor. In the moment of clarity that sometimes comes with great pain, Ruby suddenly knew who that baby was. And she realized that in her dream, she had been reaching out for Cecelia Pike.

  Ross drove in circles, and when he could not fool himself anymore he pulled onto the side of the road and got out of his car, laying on the hood and the windshield and smiling up at the sky. “RW,” he said aloud. “RW.”

  He had seen it, clear as day, and whether anyone else had noticed hardly mattered—the flowers had taken the shape of his own initials. Ross let the sun wash over his face. The sky was printed blue on the backs of his eyelids and the clouds were a kaleidoscope—flat-bottomed giraffes and teapots and porcupines. It was possible to find all sorts of things, if you were in the mood to see them. Ross shifted to the right, so that half of the car’s hood was left empty. Room for someone to sit, should she choose to.

  “What do you mean, the body was missing?” Shelby, sitting beside Ross on the porch, was incredulous. “There was a death certificate.”

  From the end of the driveway, where Ethan had just executed a series of G-turns, he took a bow. “Ma! Did you see?”

  Shelby clapped. “Eximious!” Then she turned to Ross. “Didn’t the medical examiner have to sign off on a body?”

  “Who knows? Eli’s working from transcripts and testimonies and public records, but you can only construct so much of what actually happened. It’s like doing a puzzle when you’ve only got half the pieces.”

  “He seems to know what he’s doing,” Shelby mused.

  “Eli?” Ross took one look at his sister’s face. “Are we still talking about the murder, here, or do you have something else you want to share?”

  She pulled her feet back as Ethan whizzed by, skating within inches of her toes. “He’s thorough, that’s all.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Shelby gave him a withering look. “It doesn’t add up ratiocinatively. If the body of the baby was missing, then presumably, it was either buried somewhere else . . . or it was never buried. Pike wouldn’t have buried it in a different grave, because if the medical examiner had insisted on digging up the baby to see it, he wouldn’t have been able to explain a rib roast. But then again, he doesn’t seem like the type to leave it on the doorstep of a church, either.”

  “Why would you leave a dead body at a church?”

  Shelby looked at him. “Who said the baby was dead?”

  “Spencer Pike,” Ross replied, and then blinked. “Shit.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So if he lied . . . and the baby was alive . . . then maybe someone tried to save it. It would explain why they’d stick the rib roast in
the coffin instead . . . they were trying to fool Pike into thinking that the baby had died.”

  “Which Pike would probably have been more than willing to believe,” Shelby added. “What if the reason your ghost was haunting the property had nothing to do with the way she died? What if she came back to find her child?”

  Ethan skated by, his eyes bright with constellations. He executed three 360s, missed the fourth, and fell down. Lying on the driveway, he laughed the deep-belly way only children can, bubbling up from the core. “I guess you’d come back for that,” Ross said.

  “No,” Shelby answered. “I never would have left.”

  It was too fine a setting for Spencer Pike. In his wheelchair, with a blanket on his lap and the white slats of the gazebo behind him, Eli wished for something more suitable—fire and brimstone, tar pits, a cell from the Middle Ages. This, after all, was a man who had gotten away with murder.

  Eli leaned back against the railing of the nursing home’s gazebo, trying to keep his cool. Getting Pike to confess had become a personal mission. “How would you like it if you went in for a sponge bath,” he said evenly, “and came out with a vasectomy?”

  “Can’t say it would cramp my style these days.”

  “Unfortunately,” Eli said, “I doubt some of your sterilization victims would say the same.”

  “Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, and you liberals swarmed all over us. But we were just like you. We were making the world a better place, too.”

  “By keeping the poor and the different from multiplying. Very humane.”

  “You have no idea. Their children were growing up without four walls to call a home. They had no moral direction. The ones we could save, we did. The others, well, it was for their own good.”

  “Did you ever think to give them a second chance?”

  “Of course. But they kept making the same mistakes again.”

  “And you?” Eli said. “You’ve never made a mistake?”

  Pike narrowed his eyes. “You want to tell me what that has to do with my property being developed?”