Second Glance: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  He came to a stop at the railroad bridge, where the warning gate flashed as its arms lowered, slow as a ballerina. He emptied his mind of everything except inching his car forward until it broke the gate, until the Jeep sat as firm on the tracks as a sacrifice.

  The train pounded. The tracks began to sing a steel symphony. Ross gave himself up to dying, catching a single word between his teeth before impact: Finally.

  The sound was awesome, deafening. And yet it moved past him, growing Doppler-distant, until Ross raised the courage to open his eyes.

  His car was smoking from the hood, but still running. It hobbled unevenly, as if one tire was low on air. And it was pointed in the opposite direction, heading back from where he'd come.

  There was nothing for it: with tears in his eyes, Ross started to drive.

  Rod van Vleet wasn't going home without a signed contract. In the first place, Newton Redhook had left him responsible for securing the nineteen acres that comprised the Pike property. In the second place, it had taken over six hours to get to this nursing home in Nowhere, Vermont, and Rod had no plans to return here in the immediate future.

  "Mr. Pike," he said, smiling at the old man, who was plug-ugly enough to give Rod nightmares for a week. Hell, if Rod himself looked like that by age ninety-five, he was all for someone giving him a morphine nightcap and a bed six feet under. Spencer Pike's bald head was as spotted as a cantaloupe; his hands were twisted into knots; his body seemed to have taken up permanent position as a human comma. "As you can see here, the Redhook Group is prepared to put into escrow today a check made out to you for fifty thousand dollars, as a token of good faith pending the title search."

  The old man narrowed a milky eye. "What the hell do I care about money?"

  "Well. Maybe you could take a vacation. You and a nurse." Rod smiled at the woman standing behind Pike, her arms crossed.

  "Can't travel. Doctor's orders. Liver could just . . . give out."

  Rod smiled uncomfortably, thinking that an alcoholic who'd survived nearly a hundred years should just get on a plane to Fiji and the hell with the consequences. "Well."

  "You already said that. You senile?"

  "No, sir." Rod cleared his throat. "I understand this land was in your wife's family for several generations?"

  "Yes."

  "It's our belief, Mr. Pike, that the Redhook Group can contribute to the growth of Comtosook by developing your acreage in a way that boosts the town economy."

  "You want to build stores there."

  "Yes, sir, we do."

  "You gonna build a bagel shop?"

  Rod blinked, nonplussed. "I don't believe Mr. Redhook knows yet."

  "Build it. I like bagels."

  Rod pushed the check across the table again, this time with the contract. "I won't be able to build anything, Mr. Pike, until I get your signature here."

  Pike stared at him for a long moment, then reached out for a pen. Rod let out the breath he'd been holding. "The title is in your wife's name? Cecelia Pike?"

  "It was Cissy's."

  "And this . . . claim the Abenaki are championing . . . is there any validity to that?"

  Pike's knuckles went white from the pressure. "There's no Indian burial ground on that property." He glanced up at Rod. "I don't like you."

  "I'm getting that sense, sir."

  "The only reason I'm going to sign this is because I'd rather give that land up than watch it go to the state."

  Rod rolled up the signed contract and rapped it against the table. "Well!" he said again, and Pike raised one eyebrow. "We'll be doing our due diligence, and hopefully we'll finish this deal as soon as we can."

  "Before I die, you mean," Pike said dryly as Rod shrugged into his coat. "You don't want to stay for Charades? Or lunch . . . I hear we're having orange Jell-O." He laughed, the sound like a saw at Rod's back. "Mr. van Vleet . . . what will you do with the house?"

  Rod knew this was a touchy subject; it always was for the Redhook Group, which usually razed whatever existing properties existed on the land before building their own modern commercial facilities. "It's actually not in the best shape," Rod said carefully. "We may have to . . . make some adjustments. More room, you know, for your pizza place."

  "Bagels." Pike frowned. "So you're going to tear it down."

  "Unfortunately, yes."

  "Better that way," the old man said. "Too many ghosts."

  The only gas station in Comtosook was attached to the general store. Two pumps from the 1950s sat in the parking lot, and it took Rod a good five minutes to realize there simply was no credit card slot. He stuck the nozzle of the pump into his gas tank and pulled out his cell phone, hitting a preprogrammed number. "Angel Quarry," answered a female voice.

  Rod held the phone away from his ear and cut off the call. He must have dialed wrong; he had been trying to reach the home office to let Newton Redhook know the first hurdle had been cleared. Frowning, he punched the buttons on the keypad again.

  "Angel Quarry. May I help you?"

  Rod shook his head. "I'm trying to reach 617-569--"

  "Well, you got the wrong number." Click.

  Flummoxed, he stuffed the phone in his pocket and squeezed another gallon into his tank. Reaching for his wallet, he started toward the store to pay.

  A middle-aged man with carrot-red hair stood on the porch, sweeping what seemed to be rose petals from the floorboards. Rod glanced up at the sign on the building-- ABE'S GAS & GROCERY--and then back at the shopkeeper. "You must be Abe?"

  "You guessed that right."

  "Is there a pay phone around here?"

  Abe pointed to the corner of the porch, where a phone booth tilted against the railing, right beside an old drunk who seemed disinclined to move aside. Rod dialed his calling card number, feeling the shopkeeper's eyes on him the whole time. "Angel Quarry," he heard, a moment later.

  He slammed down the receiver and stared at it. Abe swept once, twice, three times, clearing a path between Rod and himself. "Problem?" he asked.

  "Must be something screwed up in the phone lines." Rod dug a twenty out of his wallet for the gas.

  "Must be. Or maybe what those Indians are saying's true--that if they don't get their land back, the whole town'll be cursed."

  Rod rolled his eyes. He was halfway back to the car by the time he recalled Spencer Pike's comment about ghosts. He turned around to ask Abe about that, but the man was gone. His broom rested against the splintered porch rail; with each breeze, the neat pile of flower petals scattered like wishes.

  Suddenly a car pulled up on the opposite side of the gas pumps. A man with shoulder-length brown hair and unsettling sea green eyes stepped out and stretched until his back popped. "Excuse me," he asked, "do you know the way to Shelby Wakeman's house?"

  Rod shook his head. "I'm not from around here."

  He didn't know what made him look in the rearview mirror after he got into the car. The man was still standing there, as if he did not understand what should happen next. Suddenly Rod's cell phone began to ring. He dug in his breast pocket, flipped it open. "Van Vleet."

  "Angel Quarry," said the woman at the other end, as if he'd been the one to call; as if that made any sense at all.

  "Yeah, I'm coming," Shelby muttered, as the raps on her front door grew louder. It was only 11 A.M. If this moron woke Ethan . . . She knotted her hair into a ponytail holder, tugged her pajamas to rights, and squinted against the sun as she opened the door. For a moment, backlit by the daylight, she didn't recognize him.

  "Shel?"

  It had been two years since she'd seen Ross. They still looked alike--the same rangy build, the same intense pale gaze that people found it hard to break away from. But Ross had lost weight and let his hair grow long. And oh, the circles under his eyes--they were even darker than her own.

  "I woke you up," he apologized. "I could . . ."

  "Come here," Shelby finished, and she folded her baby brother into an embrace.

  "Go back to sleep,"
Ross urged, after Shelby had spent the better part of an hour fussing over him. "Ethan's going to need you."

  "Ethan's going to need you," Shelby corrected. "Once he finds out you're here, you might as well forget about getting any rest." She set a stack of towels on the end of the guest room bed and hugged him. "It goes without saying that you stay as long as you like." He buried his face in the curve of her shoulder and closed his eyes. Shelby smelled like his childhood.

  Suddenly she drew back. "Oh, Ross," she murmured, and slipped her hand beneath the collar of his shirt, pulling out the long chain that he kept hidden underneath. At the end hung a diamond solitaire, a falling star. Shelby's fist closed around it.

  Ross jerked away, and the chain snapped. He grabbed Shelby's wrist and shook until she let go of the ring, until it was safe in his hand. "Don't," he warned, setting his jaw.

  "It's been--"

  "Don't you think I know how long it's been? Don't you think I know exactly?" Ross turned away. Why was it no one spoke of how kindness can cut just as clean as a knife?

  When Shelby touched his arm, Ross didn't respond. She didn't force the issue. Just that one small contact, and then she backed her way out of the room.

  Shelby was right--he ought to sleep--but he also knew that wouldn't happen. Ross had grown used to insomnia; for years it had crawled under the covers with him, pressed the length of his body with just enough restless indecision to keep him watching the digital display of a clock until the numbers justified getting out of bed.

  He lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He held the ring so tightly in his hand that he could feel the prongs of the setting cutting into his skin. He would have to get something--string, a leather cord--so that he could wear it again. Wide awake, he focused his attention on the clock. He watched the numbers bleed into each other: 12:04; 12:05; 12:06. He counted the roses on the comforter cover. He tried to remember the words to "Waltzing Matilda."

  When he startled awake at 5:58, Ross could not believe it. He blinked, feeling better than he had in months. He swung his feet over the side of the bed and stood up, wondering if Shelby might have a spare toothbrush.

  It was the absence of the slight weight against his chest that reminded him of the ring. Ross opened his fist and panicked. The diamond he'd fallen asleep clutching was nowhere in sight--not under the covers, not on the carpet, not even behind the bed, which Ross moved with frantic haste. I've lost her, Ross thought, staring blankly at what he'd awakened holding instead: a 1932 penny--smooth as a secret; still warm from the heat of his hand.

  TWO

  For an eight-year-old, Lucy Oliver knew quite a lot. She could list all the state capitals; she could explain how a thundercloud formed; she could spell RHYTHM forward and backward. She knew other things too, more important, non-school things. For example, she knew that her great-grandma had come home from the doctor a month ago with little white pills that she hid in the toe of an orthopedic sneaker in her closet. She knew that when grown-ups lowered their voices it meant you had to listen harder. She knew that even the smartest person in the world could be scared by what he or she didn't understand.

  Lucy also knew, with staunch conviction, that it was only a matter of time before one of them got her.

  They changed form, from night to night. Sometimes they were the shifting shape of the patterns on her curtains. Sometimes they were the cold spot on the floor as Lucy raced across the wide wooden boards into bed. Sometimes they were a smell that made Lucy dream of leaves and dark and carcasses.

  Tonight she was pretending that she was a turtle. Nothing could get into that hard shell; nothing at all. Not even the thing she was certain was breathing at this very second inside her closet. But even with her eyes wide open, Lucy could see the night changing. In some spots it got more pointed; in others it drew back . . . until she was staring into the see-through face of a woman so sad it made Lucy's stomach hurt.

  I will find you, the lady said, right inside Lucy's own head.

  She stifled a scream, because that would wake up her great-grandmother, and whipped the covers over her head. Her thin chest pumped like a piston; her breathing went damp. If this woman could find her, anywhere, then where would Lucy hide? Would her mother know she'd been snatched, just by the dent Lucy's body left behind on the mattress?

  She snaked one hand out far enough to grab the phone she'd placed on her nightstand and stamped the button that automatically dialed her mother's lab. Lucy imagined an invisible line connecting her from this phone to the one her mother was holding, a wireless umbilicus, and was so grateful for the picture in her head that she couldn't squeeze any words around it.

  "Oh, Lucy," her mother sighed into the silence. "What's the matter now?"

  "It's the air," Lucy whispered, hating her voice. It came out tiny and frantic, like the scramble of mice. "It's too heavy."

  "Did you take your inhaler?"

  Lucy had. She was old enough to know what to do when her asthma flared. But it wasn't that kind of heavy. "It's going to crush me." There, it had gotten even worse. Lucy lay down beneath the weight of the night, trying to breathe in small puffs, so that the oxygen in the room would last longer.

  "Honey." Her mother spoke in a tone that made Lucy think of cold glass vials and mile-long white countertops. "You know air can't change its weight, not inside your bedroom. This is all your imagination."

  "But . . ." Lucy hunched away from the closet, because she could feel the lady watching. "Mom, I'm not making it up."

  There was a beat that lasted the exact amount of time it took her mother to lose her temper. "Lucy. There are no such things as ghosts, or goblins, or demons, or . . . or air-crushing invisible beasts. Go to bed."

  Lucy held the receiver after the line went dead. When the metallic voice of the operator came on, asking her to hang up if she wanted to make another call, she buried the phone beneath her pillow. Her mother was right; she knew on some rational plane that nothing in her room was out to get her; that monsters didn't hide in closets or under beds, that crying ladies didn't appear out of nowhere. If the air was becoming as thick as pea soup, there was a perfectly logical explanation, one that could be explained by physics and chemistry.

  But all the same, when Meredith Oliver came home hours later, she found her daughter sleeping in a tub lined with pillows and blankets; the bathroom lit bright as midday.

  Ross watched his nephew defy gravity one more time, the skateboard rising on the air beneath his balanced feet. "That's a fifty/fifty," Ethan informed him, his cheeks flushed with exertion; his hairline damp beneath the scrolled brim of his baseball cap.

  He pretended to try to lift up Ethan's ankle. "You sure you haven't got these tied on with fishing line?"

  Ethan grinned and started for his ramp again, then turned around and rolled back. "Uncle Ross?" he said. "Having you here is totally the bomb."

  On the blanket beside Ross, Shelby plucked at the grass. "That's about the highest endorsement you could receive."

  "I figured." Ross lay back, resting his head on his hands. A shooting star streaked across his field of vision, painting with its silver tail. "He's great, Shel."

  Her eyes followed Ethan. "I know."

  Ethan rattled down the wooden ramp. "Great enough to go ghost hunting with you?" he called over his shoulder.

  "Who told you I go ghost hunting?"

  "I have my sources." Ethan spun the board, leaping off it at the same time, so that it seemed to rise into his hand. "I'm fast, see? And I don't get tired at night . . . and I can be so quiet you wouldn't even believe it . . ."

  "I'm sure I wouldn't," Ross laughed.

  "No, I mean, really, Uncle Ross, why wouldn't you take me?"

  "Let's see. Because your mother would skin me alive; and because I'm retired."

  "Retired?" The boy ran his tongue over the word. "Does that mean you're, like, worn out from it?"

  "I guess, in a way."

  Ethan seemed stunned by this. "Well, that totally su
cks."

  "Ethan." Shelby shook her head, a warning.

  "Now you're just like some normal relative," the boy muttered.

  Ross watched him skate off. "Was that an insult?"

  Shelby ignored him, eyeing Ross carefully instead. "So you're all right?"

  "Fine." He smiled at her. "Totally."

  "It's just that I get worried, you know, when you don't call. For six months."

  Ross shrugged. "I've been moving around a lot, with the Warburtons."

  "I didn't know you'd stopped doing paranormal investigation."

  "I didn't either, until I said it. But I'm sick of not seeing what I want to see."

  "There's a difference between being a paleontologist and not finding what you're after, and being a ghost hunter and not finding what you're after," Shelby said. "I mean, there are dinosaur bones out there, even if you aren't lucky enough to dig them up. But ghosts . . . well, if they're all over the place, how come no one's proved it by now?"

  "I've been in a room where the temperature drops by twenty degrees within a few seconds. I've taped church choirs singing in empty, locked rooms. I've seen faucets turn themselves on. But I've never seen a spirit appear in front of my eyes. Hell, for all I know any of those things could be explained away. Maybe it's God, maybe it's elves, maybe it's some technical genius three miles away making it happen by remote control."

  Shelby grinned. "Is this the same kid who believed in Santa until he was fifteen?"

  "I was ten," Ross corrected. "And you weren't the one who set the trap on the roof and got proof."

  "You got a shingle."

  "With a hoof print on it." Ross reached in his pocket for a cigarette, then looked at Ethan and changed his mind. "I should have quit a long time ago."

  "Smoking?"

  "Ghost hunting."

  "Why didn't you?"

  Ross thought of Curtis Warburton: Half this business is telling people what they want to hear. He thought of Aimee's lost engagement ring, which had vanished overnight, although he'd torn his room apart trying to find it. "Because things happened that I didn't understand . . . and I thought that if I looked hard enough, I might be able to figure out why."

  "Maybe you should have gone into physics, then."

  Ross shrugged. "Science can't explain everything."

  "You mean, like God?"

  "Nothing that profound. What makes you walk past thirty thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you'll never take your eyes off her again?"