"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 Temezowas, 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.
The sky was unsettled tonight, fingers of pink stretching through the stars like a dawn that couldn't wait. And it was hot--so hot that you could hear the fisher cats singing to each other, and the heads of dandelions bursting into seed. Az turned the corner at the north edge of the quarry, where the majority of the charges had been wedged into drilled cores of the rock. There were bags of ammonium nitrate explosive down there, sticks of dynamite, blasting caps and non-electric priming cord. Delay devices would be run by a computer to detonate the charges in sequence, until seventeen thousand pounds of rock had been moved. This was to be a two-step process--half the quarry would blast at dawn tomorrow, the other half a few days from now, then the miners would go in and harvest the slabs for commercial sale. Az had dreamed of rubble, of smoke, of boils and scars; Armageddon induced by the flip of a switch. He'd gone so far as to tell his boss to wait a week, and the younger man had laughed. "You stick to the night watch, Chief," he'd said. "And leave the decisions to me."
It came as no surprise, then, when Az spotted an intruder. "Hey," he yelled, but the man kept walking. Az jogged a little--the best he could do, given the condition of his hips-- and found himself breathing hard a foot away from Comtosook's most notorious drunk.
Abbott Thule had outlived most of the people who'd made a habit out of shaking their heads to find him passed out on the porch of the Gas & Grocery, or on one memorable occasion, sleeping buck naked under the only traffic light on Main Street. He came from a long line of previous drunks, most of whom had not been blessed with an ironclad liver like himself. A mixed-blood Indian, he'd had four wives, two at one time, in a nasty little episode that occurred around 1985. If Abbott had ever held down a job, Az didn't know about it. "For God's sake, Abbott, you could have gotten yourself killed." Az took the octogenarian by the arm and turned him around.
"I come to talk to you. About some stuff I heard."
Az didn't have time to baby-sit a drunk. "Why don't you go on down to Winks and see if he'll give you a cot for the night, henh? I'm supposed to be working here."
Abbott stopped walking. "When I was a kid, my mom got put in a hospital. Not the one where your body was sick, but your
head. There was a lady, I don't remember her name, but she came and said that there was something un-Christian about having two kids by two different fathers, and never getting hitched. So they took my mother off, and me and my sister, God rest her soul, we got sent off too, to different reform schools." He took a deep breath. "The thing is . . . the thing is, Az, I had myself four lady wives. But I got no kids, and it wasn't for want of trying, you know? And I wonder . . ." He looked up, his eyes swimming with tears. "Did they do something to me there I can't remember?"
In Abbott's gaze, Az saw the steel flash of a knife. He felt hands pinning down his thighs; he bit down against the pressure of a hypodermic in his scrotum. Excavating the memory was like field surgery all over again--so much pain, and not nearly enough anesthetic.
"Abbott." Az put his hand on the other man's shoulder. "Let's get you a cup of coffee."
They headed toward the quarry office, where a fresh pot of French roast was dripping. Az had been wrong, after all. This was the disruption he'd felt in the air, the devastation that was coming. Not with the blast of dynamite, but slowly, like those dried dandelions. In small waves, people would remember. In growing numbers, their sorrow would carpet the earth.
Meredith knew the moment that Ross's car crossed the city line into Comtosook, because suddenly the windshield was covered with gypsy moths, their wings beating in unison like a single heart. He swiped the wipers, scattering them, but not before Meredith caught Lucy hiding under her sweatshirt in the backseat.
Ruby had been left in the able hands of Tajmalla, who took it as a personal affront that Meredith had even hesitated to leave her grandmother--or whatever she was--in the health aide's care. For the most part, the ride north had been unremarkable, silence punctuated only by traffic updates on the radio.
Meredith did not speak to Ross. She used all the energy conversation would have taken and built a barrier instead, so that whatever he tossed at her in Vermont would bounce right back off and enable her to return to her home and her job. And like all good walls, with the fortification in place, she was concentrating so much on the enemy that she did not need to remember the moments she'd been a traitor to herself.
For one night, at that Starbucks, she had watched the smoke of his cigarette curl like the letters of the alphabet and believed it was a secret message. She had smelled vanilla on his skin and grown dizzy. She had drunk from his coffee cup when he'd gone to the bathroom, the spot where his lips had touched, so that when she finally tasted him for real--when, not if--her senses would remember.
She had made a fool of herself.
After all of the disastrous dates she'd been on, after all of the professional men she had met and judged to be as intriguing possibilities--it turned out that a guy she would never have noticed made her feel like no one else ever had. At first glance, Ross Wakeman was a nobody. Until you looked again and saw his humor, his charm, his vulnerability.
And his complete intoxication with another woman, a dead one at that.
"So," Meredith said aloud. "This is it?"
Ross nodded. "Comtosook."
As they drove, Meredith began to notice things. The trees, for example, seemed to play a tune like a harp when the wind sang through their branches. Children playing hopscotch hung a fraction of a second too long in midair. And Doubt, in the shape of a hitchhiker, crawled into her lap to ride shotgun.
They pulled off the main road and headed down a dirt path. But instead of stopping at one of the few houses they passed, Ross drove to the end, a crossroads, and parked the car in front of absolutely nothing. "Where are we?" she asked.
It was nearly dark by now, the sky looking like the shined skin of an eggplant and the loons coming out to call to their true loves. Meredith followed Ross into the woods.
She was a scientist, she told herself, and thus naturally curious.
With Lucy plastered to her side, Meredith stepped over roots and rocks and what seemed to be construction debris. Suddenly the forest opened up into a flat plane with wrecking tape cordoning off a wide, bald spot. "This is where you live?"
Ross muttered something that sounded like I wish.
In that instant Meredith realized where she was. "Oh, for God's sake," she sighed, and she reached for Lucy's hand to tug her back to the waiting car.
She hadn't gone two steps before Ross spun her around. "You," he said, his eyes wild, "will stay."
Meredith had been wrong before. Until this, until now, she had not understood that Ross Wakeman truly was insane.
He was also bigger than she was, and stronger, and alone in the dark with her and Lucy. So Meredith folded her arms across her chest and tried to convey bravery. She waited for Casper or Jacob Marley's ghost or the moment that Ross grasped, like her, that there was nobody here to be seen.
Lucy's knees were knocking so hard Meredith could literally hear them. "Shh," she soothed. "This is all about nothing."
Hearing her, Ross turned slowly. The stark desolation in his eyes made her mouth go dry. What if someone loved her as hard as that? "I . . . I'm sorry," she murmured.
Ross stormed out of the woods along the path they'd entered. Meredith reached for Lucy and followed. She reasoned that this should not have come as a surprise. I'm not Lia, Meredith told herself. I'm not.
Shelby was pulling her shirt over her head when all the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She ran to the window just in time to see the headlights cut off on a car. "Ross," she whispered, and then she whooped with delight and raced down the stairs still in her pajama bottoms to welcome her brother.
On the driveway, she threw her arms around him. "Thank God you're home."
He smiled. "I'm going to have to go away more often."
Over his shoulder, Shelby noticed a woman getting out of the car. A little girl. "Shel," Ross said, stepping back, "I want you to meet Lia Pike's granddaughter."
"That remains to be seen," said the woman, but she held out her hand for Shelby to shake. "Meredith Oliver. And my daughter, Lucy. I'm very sorry to impose on you this late at night . . ."
"Oh, no. We're just getting up," Shelby replied. "Come on in, and I'll get you two settled."
Ross walked in ahead of them, moving stiffly, like someone with a bum ankle or a bad hip--although Shelby knew it was nothing physical that pained him. She wondered if it was worse to have Ross pining for something he could not have, or to have him find it and realize it was not the panacea he'd imagined.
"I'm beat," Ross muttered, and headed up the stairs.
It was difficult to say who was more stunned at this breach of hospitality, Shelby or Meredith. Recovering, Shelby bent down to Lucy. "My son is out in the backyard, through that door. I think he's probably a year or two older than you, if you want to go say hi."
Lucy cemented herself even closer to Meredith. "Go on," Meredith urged, peeling her daughter off.
The girl walked away like she was headed to an execution.
"Lucy has a hard time in new situations," Meredith explained.
Shelby was left with a woman who clearly had about the same level of desire to be there as her child. "Could I, um, interest you in a cup of coffee?" As she poured for both of them, Shelby studied Meredith over the edge of the carafe. Honey-blond hair, chestnut eyes . . . she looked familiar, although for the life of her, Shelby couldn't say why.
Meredith stood in front of the kitchen window, watching her daughter acclimate. Relaxing by degrees, she took a seat. "I take it you believe in ghosts, too?" she asked.
"I believe in my brother."
Chagrined, Meredith looked away. "It's just that Ross dropped out of nowhere, you understand, to tell me I had to come to Vermont."
A flicker of lost opportunity crossed her face. Shelby heard too, how the word Ross slipped off her tongue, like a sweet butterscotch candy passed between a kissing couple. She wondered if Meredith had noticed.
Shelby pushed a small pitcher of cream and another of sugar cubes toward her. "Sometimes it's hard to be convinced
of something until you see it right before your eyes."
"Exactly," Meredith agreed. "A hundred years ago, no one would have held that something microscopic was responsible for the height or skin color or intelligence of a person--but now look at what we believe."
Then maybe a hundred years from now, we will all be able to see ghosts, Shelby thought. But instead she said politely, "Is that what you do? Work with DNA?"
"No, actually I do PGD. That's preimp--"
"I know what it stands for," Shelby said. "I actually once--"
She broke off, dropping the spoon she was holding so that it splattered in her coffee. She could see, in her photographic memory, the entry on her calendar, circled in red marker: Dr. Oliver, geneticist. The appointment that had been canceled, because Dr. Oliver had been having an abortion. Her head turned to the window, to the two small figures in the yard. "You didn't get rid of the baby," she whispered.
Meredith tilted her head. "I'm sorry?"
"Don't be," Shelby said, smiling widely, and she topped off Meredith's cup.
Lucy didn't want to be in this creepy backyard in the middle of the creepy night in this creepy town. Owls seemed to be at cross-corners and the night was a black bowl pressing down on her. Plus, whatever kid that lady had been talking about wasn't here; Lucy had the whole creepy place to herself.
She walked around the little yard, trailing her hands over the evidence that a child did exist, somewhere. A baseball bat, leaning against the fence. A Razor scooter folded neatly next to a gardening stool. The garden itself was covered with hawk moths that hovered like fairies over plants that bloomed in the dead of night. Lucy leaned closer to read some of the names on the stakes. Angel's Trumpet, Moonflower, Aquamarine. Just whispering them made her feel like she was walking underwater.
She took another step and her foot sent a skateboard flying. Lucy watched it skid across the driveway and crash into a pole with a hanging citronella lantern. A voice crawled inside her head. Hey, she heard. What do you think you're doing?
Spirits always talked that way to her, like there were radio speakers in her brain. So when she spun around, her heart racing, Lucy already expected the white face floating in front of her. She swallowed hard. "Are you a ghost?" she asked.
What the hell kind of question was that? "Not yet," Ethan said, and he grabbed his skateboard from the little priss who had invaded his backyard. He proceeded to do the most bitchin' kickflip he could, just to knock her socks off. Ghost. Like he needed reminding.