Second Glance: A Novel

  He found Az Thompson on the banks of the Winooski at dawn, pulling up muskies. The old man's thin shoulders moved beneath the fabric of his shirt as he reeled and cast. "My grandfather caught a sturgeon in Lake Champlain," Eli said, coming up behind him.

  "They run in there," Az said.

  "You ever get one?"

  He shrugged.

  "My mother used to tell me how he had to tie it to his canoe and let it pull him around until it got tired out and he could get to the shallows and club it."

  "Patience is a hell of a lure," Az agreed.

  Eli watched him toss another fish into his pail. "I need your help. Turns out, Cecelia Pike was half-Abenaki."

  Poking over a small container of bait, Az hesitated for only a moment. "Abenaki," he repeated softly. "Do you think the dawn's just as beautiful to the people who aren't named for it?"

  Eli understood that the old man wasn't expecting an answer. "I know there should be some kind of--well, isn't there a ceremony? A place you can . . . move her and her daughter?"

  Az looked up. "What's going to happen to the property?"

  "I don't know," Eli admitted.

  The answer seemed to satisfy the old man. "I'll take care of them," he said.

  "Not those," Ross said to the clerk at the Gas & Grocery, a green-haired teen in overalls with so many piercings along her eyebrows and nostrils that he wondered if she took on water when she showered. "The Merits."

  He paid for the cigarettes, watching the girl make change. Ross tore open the package to light a smoke and inadvertently knocked his book of matches onto the floor. It landed near the shoe of the man waiting in line behind him, who bent down to pick it up. "Thanks," Ross said, and then the man straightened. "Curtis?"

  His former employer's lips thinned. "Ross."

  "What are you doing here?"

  "The same thing you are, I imagine. Looking for a ghost."

  Ross's knees went weak. Rod van Vleet had indeed found himself someone to get rid of a spirit . . . and Ross had been the one to give him the lead. "Curtis, listen--"

  "No, you listen, you son of a bitch. You signed a non-compete clause when you started working for us, and don't think I won't ride you all the way to court if you decide to show me up. You are an amateur, Ross. You have no idea how to run a show like this."

  The inside of Ross's mouth was as dry as dust. "This isn't a show."

  "It will be." Curtis jabbed a finger into Ross's chest. "I'm going to find that ghost, and I'm going to get rid of it, and the whole damn thing's going to win me my time slot." He shoved past Ross, thrust a dollar bill at the clerk, and took a stale bagel from a basket on the counter before slamming outside.

  "He's got issues, huh?" the clerk said, and she clicked her tongue ring against the ledge of her bottom teeth.

  "Yeah." Ross lit his cigarette, inhaled, and stepped onto the porch of the Gas & Grocery. It was so bright out he found himself squinting. From here, past the 1950s-style gas pumps and the antique Moxie sign, you could see the edge of the town green, with its requisite white church. You could just make out the hill that was the quarry and the valley that became Lake Champlain. This was the world Lia had known.

  He would need mirrors, and fishing line. Speakers, and batteries, and Shelby's laptop. If Curtis wanted to oust a ghost, he'd give him one.

  It just wouldn't be Lia.

  Duley Wiggs had been twenty years old and a policeman for eight days when Cecelia Pike was murdered. Now, he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's and living in the Northeast Kingdom with his daughter Geraldine. "Some days are better than others," she told Eli, standing at the sliding-glass door that opened out to the patio where Duley sat in a wheelchair. "And then some days he can't figure out what you do with a spoon."

  She looked, to Eli, like a teabag that had been used several times over, to the point where it had lost all flavor. "I appreciate your letting me talk to him."

  "You can talk as much as you want," Geraldine said, shrugging. "But he confuses everything. I'd take whatever he tells you with a grain of salt the size of Lot's pillar."

  Eli nodded and then followed her outside. "Daddy?" she said loudly, as if the old man was deaf too. "Daddy, there's a man here to see you. Detective Eli Rochert, from Comtosook. Remember when you used to live in Comtosook?"

  "You know, I used to live in Comtosook," Duley said. He smiled, his face cracking like porcelain. He shook Eli's hand.

  "Hey, Duley." Eli had worn his dress uniform, in the hopes of jogging the memories even more. "I have a few questions to ask you."

  "Miranda, why don't you leave us two men alone?" Duley said.

  "I'm Geraldine, Daddy." She sighed, and then retreated back to the house.

  Eli sat down. "I was wondering if you might remember any murder cases from your time on the job in Comtosook."

  "Murder? Oh, yeah, sure. We had a lot of murders. Well, no, it wasn't murders exactly. It was burglaries. Yes, I do recall those. A rash of them in the forties that turned out to be two teenagers, who fancied themselves to be Bonnie and Clyde."

  "But the murder cases . . ."

  "There was one," Duley said. "I don't suppose anyone could ever forget something like what happened to Cissy Pike. I knew her personally. We went to school together. She was younger than me by a couple of years. Pretty thing, and smart, too. Got it from her father. He was an astronaut."

  "He was a professor, Duley."

  "That's what I said!" The old man frowned, annoyed. "Listen, will you?"

  "Yes. Right. Sorry. So . . . you were talking about her murder . . ."

  "She was married to some bigwig at the university. Pike. Had a reputation around town for being a little holier-than-thou, if you get my meaning. But he treated Cissy like she was a queen. When we got there--to the house, after he called us--well, I'd never seen a grown man weeping like a baby." He shook his head. "And then to have him turn the gun on himself, right before our eyes . . ."

  "Duley," Eli said gently, "Spencer Pike didn't commit suicide."

  "Suicide? Oh, that's right, now. That was a hostage thing up at the post office in the late fifties." He rubbed his forehead. "Sometimes . . . sometimes it all just slides together up there."

  "I understand." Eli twirled his hat on his hand. Maybe this hadn't been such a great idea.

  "The medical examiner, he wanted to do an autopsy on the baby."

  At that, Eli's head snapped up. "He did?"

  "Yeah. And Olivette--he was the detective-lieutenant at the time--wouldn't let him dig up the grave. Said that you didn't cause a man like Spencer Pike any more grief if you didn't have to."

  "So the baby was already buried when you got there?"

  "Uh-huh. Off in the woods a ways. Fresh dirt and even some flowers. Pike told us that the baby came stillborn, and it sent his wife over the edge. Said he buried the baby just to give her some peace of mind."

  "Pike told me he buried his wife and his baby on the same day."

  "Nope, I know that for a fact. I was at Cissy Pike's funeral. Weren't many of us--me and Olivette, and her father, and Pike, just enough to lower the coffin. It was a pretty big scandal at the time--he wasn't up for the church ladies bringing casseroles, even though he could have used the help, with his girl gone. Buried Cissy right next to the grave where his baby already was."

  "Did he tell you what took so long? To call the cops?" Eli asked.

  "Oh, he didn't have to tell us. We could still smell the booze on him. Pretty much pickled himself the night before." Duley looked toward the house. "I got three girls, you know, and I can't even imagine what I'd have felt like if they'd been born dead. I figure Pike was trying to take the edge off. But he did such a good job of it he passed out . . . didn't hear anyone coming in to take his wife, or trashing his house. And by the time he woke up half the morning was gone. He called us just before lunchtime, which was a good thing, because I had less in my stomach to toss up when I saw Cissy."

  Cecelia's body had been cut down hours
before lunchtime, according to Wesley.

  Eli rolled this thought around his head like a marble. "Tell me about Gray Wolf."

  "Shifty son of a bitch. He was a Gypsy, you know--what you'd call a Native American today. Lying, thieving, it all came easy to him. Everyone knew of him, and his family, and he'd only just got out of jail for killing someone else. Pike said he'd been harassing Cissy the past few weeks. Between the personal belongings of his we found at the crime scene, and the condition of the house--plus a big fat hole of time in his alibi--it made sense. And then, of course, when he vanished, it was like having our suspicions confirmed."

  Eli scratched his head. "Yeah, I'm wondering how he did vanish."

  A blush spread upward from the old man's neck. "That, well . . . that would have been my fault. I was one week on the job, you know, and I thought I could bring him in and put the screws to him, and make myself a hero in the meantime. So I went out in the middle of the night like Columbus--"

  "Columbo?"

  "Yeah, him. I found Gray Wolf drinking at a bar and dragged him in for questioning. But Olivette, he chewed my ass out--said we didn't have enough to hold the perp yet, and bringing him in for questioning was just gonna make him suspicious. We knocked him around a little, the way we used to do things, but he wouldn't confess. Olivette set me to tailing him, watching his every move . . ." Duley looked out over the vista of the backyard. "And I lost him. He was there one minute, and the next one, you'd have thought he never existed at all." He licked his lips and leaned forward to whisper. "I have my theory about what happened to him, mind you."

  "Do you?" Eli came closer.

  "I think . . ." Duley cupped his spotted hand around Eli's ear. "I think there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll helping Oswald out." He leaned back and folded his arms across his chest. "You get what I'm saying?"

  Eli sighed. "Perfectly."

  When Ethan woke up, it was still light out. He slipped the blackout shade back and closed his eyes the way his uncle had taught him, trying to ferret out the activity in his house by sixth sense.

  His mother was working at the library, which suited him just fine, because she'd been a real pain in the neck to live with, lately. Everything Ethan did seemed to rub her the wrong way--from the way he left his dirty clothes inside out in the hamper, to the amount of time he spent surfing the Net. He would have gotten a complex about it, probably, if not for the fact that she'd been a total witch to Uncle Ross too-- and for that matter, any telemarketer who had the misfortune of getting the Wakeman household on their calling list--and one neighbor kid who committed the cardinal sin of hitting a baseball into the garage window. "What is wrong with you?" Uncle Ross had even asked yesterday night, when they were all eating breakfast. And his mother had been so busy ignoring him that she burned her hand on the stove, burst into tears, and cried, "Do you see what you made me do?"

  She was screwed up, all right.

  Ethan swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He put on yesterday's clothes, still on his floor (inside out, which actually was a pain, now that he had to do something about it). He opened the door quietly and crept down the hall to his uncle's room. The door was locked, the way it had been since Uncle Ross had swiped his mom's computer and holed up in there, probably breaking into the Pentagon or something. He was supposed to be baby-sitting, but then again, Ethan was supposed to be asleep.

  Downstairs, Ethan pulled on his jacket and hat and put sunscreen on his hands and face, because old habits died hard. Then he let himself out the side door, the one that didn't squeak.

  The sun was a kiss on the back of his neck, and who knew that an afternoon could be so bright? Ethan picked up his skateboard and carried it under his arm. He walked down the driveway and turned right, then set his skateboard on the pavement and began to roll. A boy on a BMX bike rode past him, wearing a backward, upside-down visor. "Hey," the kid said, as if Ethan was just like everyone else.

  "Hey," he replied, stoked simply to be having a conversation.

  "That's a bitchin' board."

  "Thanks."

  "What's with the winter clothes?"

  Ethan shrugged. "What's with the stupid hat?"

  The boy spun his wheels. "I'm heading to the skate park. You want to come?"

  Ethan tried to keep his face as blank as he could, but it was hard, being this real. You didn't truly exist in the world, he now understood, until you could get out and make it take notice of you. "Whatever," he said indifferently, smiling beneath every inch of his skin. "I've got nothing better to do."

  What if she'd kissed him?

  After three days now, that question had become unavoidable, caught like a thorn in Shelby's mind. She relived in excruciating detail the moment where she and Eli had been too close in too tiny a space; what his skin had smelled like, how she had seen the smallest of scars beneath his right ear. She had lain in bed imagining how he'd gotten it: chicken pox, a fistfight over a girl, a fall on the sharp edge of a hockey skate.

  Frankie Martine. Shelby supposed when you looked like that, it didn't matter if you had a boy's name.

  She had told herself that, really, she wasn't jealous. In the first place, she hardly knew Eli Rochert. In the second place, in Shelby's limited experience, romantic love was selfish-- linked to want and yearning. Maternal love was the other end of the scale--all about sacrifice. She had given herself entirely to Ethan; certainly there was nothing left to offer to anyone else. And yet, she wondered if love--as rare a commodity as gold--might not share the same properties, capable of being hammered so thin it might expand exponentially.

  Had Eli and Frankie Martine spent the past seventy-two hours together?

  Shelby sat at the reference desk, her hands poised over her computer keyboard, as if she expected a patron to come up any moment with a challenging inquiry. How do our lungs screen out carbon dioxide? How did the dinosaurs die? How many World Series have the Yankees won? She knew all the answers. She was just afraid to ask questions.

  But it was dinnertime, and the last visitor to the library had left two hours ago. Shelby had to stay until seven, although no one would come in. With a frustrated sigh, she set her head down on the desk. She could sit here forever, and neither Eli nor Watson would enter.

  So when the bell above the library door twinkled, Shelby snapped upright, hoping in spite of herself. "Oh, it's you," she said, watching the town clerk stagger in beneath the weight of a yellowed box nearly as large as herself--and that was saying something.

  "Well, that's a fine how-do-you-do!" Lottie huffed, wiping her dirty hands on her skirt.

  "It just . . . I was expecting someone else."

  "That gorgeous cop?" Lottie grinned. "I don't know as I've ever seen anything so delicious and calorie-free."

  Laughing, Shelby came around the desk and helped her haul the box onto the checkout counter. "Trust me, he's still bad for your blood pressure. What's this stuff?"

  "We had the boiler replaced yesterday--and found about thirty boxes of records no one even knew existed . . . which tells you how old that boiler was. Anyway, I know you were looking for things from the 1930s. I thought maybe you and your detective might want to sort through them." She raised a brow. "You could make a night of it."

  Shelby opened the top of the box, coughing as the dust flew. Inside were dozens of rolls of paper. "Blueprints?" She reached inside and began to unroll one, using two Hardy Boys mysteries to anchor the ends.

  PEDIGREE CHART of the WILKINS FAMILY

  Eugenics Survey of Vermont, 1927

  The key seemed to link alcoholics and cripples and sexual offenders and illegitimate children and criminals. Shelby peered closer at some of the symbols. In Institution for Feebleminded. Feebleminded. Suspected Feebleminded. Oddly, the records were curled into a clock-dial format, so that it seemed that all of these social ills were spreading with subsequent generations, and rooted to the two unfortunates in the center who'd married and procreated. A second chart, a bar graph, reorganized the fa
mily by "Social" and "Unsocial" individuals, according to the legend.

  Social: Those who seem to be desirable citizens--law-abiding, self-supporting, and doing some social work. Unsocial: insane and suicides. Undetermined: Those who, while not definitely showing either of the defects, do not seem to show any socially desirable tendencies, and those about whom too little is known to make any judgment possible. "Lottie," she said, "where did you find this?"

  She unrolled a second chart on top of the first. PEDIGREE OF A GYPSY FAMILY, THE DELACOURS. A handwritten message floated down to the floor. "Tell Harry--sex-deficiency seems to be holandric. Perhaps use charts in hearings for Sterilization Bill?" The stationery was printed at the top: Spencer A. Pike, Professor of Anthropology, UVM.

  The box was filled with more genealogies and correspondence and index cards written in a careful hand, which seemed to be case studies of the people who had figured into these pedigree wheels: Mariette, a sixteen-year-old girl at reform school, had a history of petty larceny, an inability to control her temper, an abnormal interest in sex, and a slovenly disposition. Oswald had dark skin and shifty eyes, had retained his tribe's roving tendency, and--as a result of an "illegal union," had produced seven subnormal children in as many years. Shelby pulled out the Fourth Annual Report of the Vermont Committee on Country Life. It fell open to a dog-eared page, an article cowritten by H. Beaumont and S. A. Pike. "Degenerate traits do not breed out," Shelby read aloud. "But they may be held at bay and diluted with a favorable choice of mate."

  "Eugenics," Lottie read, holding up another annual report. "What on earth is that?"

  "It's the science of improving hereditary qualities by controlling breeding."

  "Oh, you mean like they do for cattle."

  "Yes," Shelby said, "but these people did it to humans."

  Eli had gone off duty at nine, but years ago he'd made it a habit of doing a final check before he went home--sort of like tucking his town in for the night. Normally, when he felt like things were settled, he'd drive back to his place . . . but tonight, with Cecelia Pike's murder weighing on his mind, he just didn't feel like his work was finished.

  He drove aimlessly down the access road to the quarry, Watson at his side. Solving this case wasn't going to get him a citation. It wasn't going to bring Cissy Pike back to life. And no prosecutor was going to try a nonagenarian with advanced liver disease. So why did any of this matter?