"The difference between us is that you're a hero, Ethan, and I'm a coward." Ross pulled his arm away and rolled down the sleeve. "I will personally make sure you kiss a girl before you die, if I have to hire one," he said, and he wasn't joking, and that made Ethan feel like crying.
There was a hail of bullets on the soundtrack. Ethan sifted his fingers through the popcorn, which rustled like autumn. "Do you feel like you want to die right now?" he asked.
Ross shook his head. "No."
"Me neither," Ethan said, and he turned his face up to the screen.
Eli had always been the kind of cop who couldn't sleep well while a case was still at loose ends. Add to this a healthy dose of sexual frustration, and it was no wonder that he found himself walking around the edge of the parking lot of the motel shortly after a rainstorm at midnight. Watson lay just beyond an empty spot, his head on his paws, his eyes following Eli as he paced on the muddy ground.
Shelby was asleep. At least, he figured she was asleep. She'd kissed him good night so thoroughly he could still feel the imprint of her breasts and hips against him, hours later. Then she'd closed the motel room door in his face. It was a punishment of sorts, he was sure, a look at what he was missing by virtue of taking it slow.
He wondered what she slept in. Silky nightgowns? Flannel pajamas?
Nothing?
Why was he taking it slow, anyway? She'd all but told him flat out that she was interested, and ready. If he went inside and knocked on her door, she might answer it wearing only a sheet. Eli had no doubt that if anything could get his mind off this murder case, it was making love to Shelby Wakeman.
But the last woman he'd felt so much for in so little time had been his wife. He'd married her within months of their first meeting, certain that her love for him ran as deep as a trench in the Atlantic, too. And she had left him for another guy.
Eli wasn't going to let that happen to him again. And the easiest way to keep from getting burned was to keep a safe distance from anything that looked like a potential fire.
"Milk."
Eli turned to find Shelby standing a few feet away in a tank top and a pair of drawstring pants printed with cherries. She came closer, barefoot, on the wet earth. The sight of her narrow feet alone made Eli start to sweat. "What?"
"Milk. Warm. It'd do the trick." She smiled at him. "You can't sleep, right?"
She didn't know the half of it.
"It's what I do when my biorhythms are all screwed up-- you know, from being awake during the night with Ethan, and then having to go to bed in bright daylight."
Eli heard nothing in that sentence except the words "go to bed." He nodded at her and wondered if his whole hand would be able to span the flat plane between her hips. Her tank top rode up in the front, exposing the thinnest line of skin, and Eli felt himself stop breathing.
Hypoxia, he thought.
Eli stared down at the ground, fighting for composure. One of Shelby's footprints, delicate and full-bottomed, had landed by chance right across one of his--bigger, broader. It was the most erotic thing he'd ever seen.
Jesus, he was a basket case.
The hell with it, Eli thought, moving across the muddy stretch toward her. He could have her in bed in less than three minutes, and he'd deal with the consequences later. He stepped over Watson, over the double footprint that had gotten him hot and bothered in the first place--and he stopped short.
Double footprints, like the ones that had been photographed at the crime scene after Cecelia Pike's murder. The first time Eli had noticed that, he'd used it to blow holes in the theory that Gray Wolf had been there to hang Cecelia. It stood to reason, too, that if Cissy had been abducted from her bedroom after childbirth, she would not have been wearing boots to leave a tread behind. She, like Shelby, would have come right from bed.
Pike's shoes had been predominant . . . after all, he'd cut the body down. But there had been one print where the woman's sole had been stamped down on top of the man's, like the footprints that he and Shelby had just made--the woman's smaller foot superimposed across the man's larger one, the step made after the man had made his.
Dead women don't walk away.
"I know where to find the baby," Eli said.
Ross believed in past lives. Moreover, he believed that the person you fell in love with in each life was the same person you fell in love with in the life before, and the one before that. Sometimes, you might miss her--she'd be reborn in the post-World War I generation, and you wouldn't come back until the fifties. Sometimes, your paths would cross and you wouldn't recognize each other. Get it right--that is: fall madly, truly, deeply--and perhaps there'd be an eternity carved out solely for the two of you.
What if Lia Pike had been the one for Ross? If she'd been killed before she could find him, and then had come back as Aimee . . . only to die accidentally after falling in love with him? What if she was haunting him now because there was no other way to connect?
What if the reason he thought about killing himself so much was not depression, or chemical imbalance, or borderline personality disorder, or the dozen other labels shrinks had slapped on him . . . but only a means of ending this life so that he could start another one with the woman he was supposed to be with?
He stared down at the obituary in his hand, the one that Az Thompson had given him days ago. By now, Lia's body was where it belonged. The rest of her, though, was waiting for him. She'd even said so, with his initials.
"Ross!"
Shelby's voice rose like smoke from downstairs. He folded the picture of Lia again and tucked it into his pocket, then came into the living room to find Eli Rochert and his sister beaming, that behemoth dog between them.
"Where's Ethan?" Shelby asked.
Ross looked at the clock. He didn't wear a watch--why bother, when he couldn't seem to speed up his time on earth anyway--and hadn't really noticed that nearly all the night had passed. "I guess he's still skating out back."
"I'll check." Shelby started through the kitchen, then turned to Eli. "Go ahead. Tell him."
"Tell me what?" Ross said.
Eli sank onto the couch and spilled a mess of papers on the cushion beside him. "Pike smothers the infant, or at least he thinks he does. He leaves it in the icehouse while he breaks the news to his wife. It autoresuscitates--"
"It what?"
"Just trust me on this. It starts breathing again, but then it sort of goes into standby mode since its body is so cold. It looks dead, but it's not."
Ross sank down. "Okay," he said, listening more closely.
"Cecelia Pike wants to see her newborn's body. She breaks out of the bedroom he's locked her in, and finds the baby in the icehouse, where it's cold and blue and looking pretty damn dead. She picks it up and cries over it . . . which is how Pike finds her. He goes off the deep end--here she is mourning for what he thinks is her lover's child--and hangs her. But the baby's not dead." He tosses a photograph at Ross, a grainy study of footprints. "Someone walked on that sawdust after Pike did, someone who was wearing boots that were awfully similar to the ones taken off Cecelia Pike's feet-- a girl named Ruby."
"Ruby?"
"Yeah. She was the housekeeper, some kid who lived with them. When I met with Duley Wiggs, that old cop, he mentioned it--although I didn't realize it at the time. Said that Pike wasn't up for a big funeral celebration at his house, with his girl gone. I thought he was talking about Cissy . . . but now I realize he meant the hired help."
"Why hasn't anyone mentioned her?"
"Because she was a servant, and servants are supposed to be invisible. And because she disappeared that night. Pike wouldn't tell me about her, because she probably knows that he killed his wife."
"So if Ruby took the baby and disappeared that night--"
"The baby might still be alive. In her seventies, and about to inherit a nice tract of land," Eli finished. "Plus, Ruby might be able to fill in the blanks. I did a little digging on the Internet. A woman named Ruby Weber was b
orn in the Northeast Kingdom, moved to Comtosook with her family in 1925, and disappeared from Vermont records in 1932. Now she lives at 45 Thistlehill Lane in Gaithersburg, Maryland."
Ross could not seem to force the woman's name out of his throat. Ruby Weber. RW. Lia had not been trying to tell everyone gathered at her grave that she loved him. She had only been pointing Eli and the others in the right direction.
When Meredith had been about Lucy's age, her dog had been run over by a truck. Her mother had taken Blue to the vet to be put down, and instead of crying, Meredith had thrown herself into the art of prestidigitation. She made quarters vanish, red rubber balls slip out of sight, small paper bouquets of flowers disappear--before retrieving them magically from her ears, the cookie jar, the silverware drawer. She put on these shows for Ruby, who saw right through her. "Honey," she had said to Meredith, "there are some things you just can't bring back, no matter what."
Years later, Meredith knew she was lucky to have reached the age of thirty-five and still have her grandmother around. After all, she had experienced firsthand her mother's premature demise, and she knew how loss could eat away at you like a termite, tiny and insidious until your heart was nothing but dust.
She thought of death like the seam of a hem: each time you lost someone close, it unraveled a little. You could still go along with your life, but you'd forever be tripping over something you previously took for granted. If Ruby passed away, there would be no one but Meredith and Lucy. There had never been aunts and uncles and cousins; no family reunion or gala Christmas dinner. They had had each other, which had been enough.
"You are not allowed to die," Meredith said, matter-of-fact. She squeezed her grandmother's hand. "You are not allowed to die until I say so."
She nearly jumped out of her seat as Ruby squeezed right back. Looking down, she saw her grandmother's open eyes-- and even better, the yellow heat of recognition in them.
"Meredith," Ruby answered, her voice faint and thready, "who said anything about dying?"
After Eli left and Ethan went to bed, Ross holed himself up in his room. Shelby knocked on the door to bring him some food, which he turned away. She tried an hour later, hoping to just sit and talk, but he came to the door in his underwear, and said he really didn't feel up to company.
She hated herself for doing it, but when there was no sound of movement from inside the room, Shelby jimmied the lock, checked Ross to make sure he was only asleep, and slipped his razor into her pocket.
She slept fitfully that night, dreaming in black-and-white about walking on a ground so hot it burned the soles of her feet. When she woke up, it was nine in the morning, she had a skull-splitting headache, and someone was playing a radio too loud.
Determined, she stomped down the hall toward Ethan's room first, certain that he was to blame. But he was fast asleep, curled under the blankets and completely oblivious to the racket that was coming from down the hall. Shelby moved along to Ross's room, and knocked on the door. "Ross," she yelled, "turn that thing down!"
But the music did not stop. She pushed on the door, and found it unlocked. The radio blared on, a preset alarm.
The bed was made, the dresser clear, and Ross's small duffel missing.
On the pillow was a piece of paper.
Shel, she read, I'm sorry for leaving this way. But then, if I ever did do something right, I wouldn't be the brother you know.
A scream rolled inside her. Ross had just left her a suicide note.
Ross sat in his car, looking at the neat line of Japanese maples and listening to the language of birds and thinking that it was fitting for everything to come to an end at a spot like this. He took a deep breath, aware that what he was about to do would change the lives of many people other than himself. But then, how couldn't he do it?
He'd driven around Comtosook for a few hours, until he'd come to a decision and had gotten everything he needed to make it happen. He could say he was doing this for Lia, but it wouldn't be the truth. Ross was doing it for himself, to prove that there was something--at last--at which he could succeed.
He reached along the passenger seat, picked up the piece of paper that had Ruby Weber's address scrawled across it, and then got out of the car.
The mailbox said WEBER/OLIVER, and Ross found himself wondering if this woman might have a male companion, or for that matter, a female one. He walked up the brick path to the front door and rang the bell.
"They're not home."
Ross turned to see a neighbor watering the adjacent lawn with a sprinkler. "Do you know where they went?" he asked. "I'm sort of dropping in unannounced . . ."
"Are you family?"
Ross thought of Lia. "Yes."
The neighbor came closer. "I don't know how to tell you this," she said sympathetically, "but Ruby's in the hospital."
Ross wandered the hospital's administrative floors until he reached an office that had a secretary absent on a coffee break and a doctor's extra lab coat hanging on a coat hook just inside the door. Costumed, he moved with purpose to the cardiac care unit and asked for Ruby Weber's chart, which he scrutinized for a few minutes, memorizing her age, her condition, and the room into which she'd been put. When he got there, however, a woman was sitting with Ruby on the edge of the bed.
Not wishing for an audience, Ross busied himself in the hallway until the woman left the room, holding a little girl by the hand. As they headed away from him, Ross slipped inside. "Mrs. Weber," he said, "I'd like to talk to you."
She had battleship-gray hair and eyes as blue as the center of a flame. Her skin, so finely wrinkled, reminded Ross of rice paper. "Well, that would be a novelty. Being that all your friends seem to want to poke and prod me and take my blood."
Ross tugged his arms from the sleeves of his coat, folded it, and set it on a chair. "That's because I'm not a doctor."
He watched her face as she struggled with the decision to push the nurse's call button and have him evicted . . . or to simply hear him out. After a very long moment, Ruby hiked herself up on her pillows. "Are you a patient? You look like you're in pain."
"I am."
"What hurts?"
Ross thought about how to answer this. "Everything." He took a step forward. "I want to talk to you about 1932."
"I knew it was coming," she murmured. "That heart attack was the warning."
"You were there. You know what happened to Lia."
She turned her head in profile, and Ross was struck by how noble she looked. This woman, whose ancestors had been prominently featured in one of Spencer Pike's degenerate family genealogies, could have been the prototype for a queen, the face on the bow of a ship, the figurehead on a golden coin. "There are some things that shouldn't be talked about," Ruby said.
Well, he couldn't be blamed for trying. With a sigh, Ross picked up the borrowed lab coat and started to walk away.
"Then there are some things that shouldn't have been kept secret in the first place." She looked at Ross. "Who wants to know?"
He thought about explaining the development, and the Abenaki protest, and Eli's investigation. But in the end, he simply said, "Me."
"I worked for Spencer Pike. I was fourteen. Cissy Pike was only eighteen, you know--her husband, he was eight years older than she was. That night they'd fought, and she started in having her baby, even though it was three weeks early. Tiniest little girl you ever saw. When the baby died, Miz Pike went a little crazy. Her husband locked her in her room, and I was so scared I just picked up what I could and left." She pleated the blanket between her hands. "I heard afterward that she had been killed that night."
"Did you see her body?" Ross pressed. "Did you see the baby's?"
Ruby opened and closed her mouth, as if trying to reshape her words. Color rose to her face, and one of the monitors began to beep more fervently.
The door swung open. "Granny? What's that noise? Are you all right?"
Ross turned, an explanation on his lips. And found himself staring into the fac
e of Lia Beaumont Pike.
ELEVEN
"Who the hell are you?" Lia said to Ross, or not-Lia, or whoever she was. She didn't wait for an answer, though, before she stuck her head back out of the door and screamed for a nurse. Suddenly the room was crowded with hospital personnel, jockeying for position in front of Ruby's bed and assuring themselves that she was not going into cardiac arrest again. Lia turned her attention to the medical team, soaking up their technical jargon like a sponge. She stood rigidly until the monitor began to sway to its simple rhythm again, the crisis passed. Only then did she let her shoulders relax, her hands loosen from fists.
Ross slid out of the room, unnoticed. It wasn't Lia. He knew this, because she didn't recognize him. There were subtler differences too--this woman's hair was longer, and curlier, more honey-colored than wheat. She had a little girl with her; there were fine lines of age bracketing her mouth. But those remarkable brown eyes were the same, and the sorrow in them.
She was too young to be Lia Pike's daughter. But she was too much of a dead ringer for Lia to be anything but a direct relation.
The whitewashed nurses and doctors began to file out, a string of pearls. Ross peeked back inside the room. "He's an old friend," Ross heard, before the door swung shut and cleaved the conversation in two.
This much he knew: Ruby Weber was a liar. She was not an old friend of his.
And she had not left the Pikes without taking that baby.
Shelby learned that you cannot put out an APB on someone until they have been lost for twenty-four hours; that there are five major routes out of Burlington by car; that if you leave from the airport, you can get to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, or Albany.
And that 2,100 people are reported missing, daily.
Her brother being one of them.
She had not let go of his note, not since finding it five hours ago. The ink now tattooed the palm of her hand like hieroglyphs, a diary of loss. Eli had come at her call, and had promised to personally search every inch of Comtosook, and lean hard on the cops in Burlington. But Shelby knew that if Ross did not want to be found, he would simply make himself invisible.
Once when they were in high school, a football jock had killed himself by jumping off the edge of a gorge. The news had been all over the papers; guidance counselors had set up shop in the hallways of school; memorials of flowers and teddy bears decorated the site. Ross had wanted to go see where it happened. "Jesus," he'd said, over the raging water and the broken rocks. "If you're going to do it that way, you're pretty sure."