Second Glance (3 page)

The petals continued to fall, catching in her hair and Ethan’s. “Weird,” he breathed, and he sat down beside Shelby to witness a freak of nature.

“Pennies.” Curtis Warburton turned over the coin Ross had handed him. “Anything else?”

Ross shook his head. It had been three hours, and even with a raging storm outside providing a well of energy, the paranormal activity had been minimal at best. “I thought I saw a globule on the screen at one point, but it turned out to be a smoke alarm hung in the back of the attic.”

“Well, I haven’t felt a damn thing,” Curtis sighed. “We should have taken the case in Buffalo instead.”

Ross snapped some used film back into its canister and tucked it into his pocket. “The wife, Eve? She mentioned a little sister who died when she was seven.”

Curtis looked at him. “Interesting.”

The two men walked downstairs. Maylene sat on the living room couch in the dark with an infrared thermometer “You get anything?” Curtis asked.

“No. This house is about as active as a quadriplegic.”

“How is it going?” Eve O’Donnell interrupted. She stood at the doorway of the living room, her hand clutching the collar of her robe.

“I think it’s safe to say that you’re not alone in this house. In fact,” Curtis held out the penny Ross had given him, “I just found this.”

“Yes . . . sometimes there are coins lying around. I told Ross that.”

“Did you?”

Ross turned, frowning. But before he could ask Curtis why he was playing dumb, his boss started speaking again. “Ghosts can be mischievous that way. Especially the ghost of a child, for example.”

Ross felt the charge of the air as Eve O’Donnell lay her trust at Curtis’s feet. “I have to tell you,” Curtis said. “I’m getting some very strong sensations here. There’s a presence, but it’s someone you know, someone who knows you.” Curtis tipped his head to one side and furrowed his brow. “It’s a girl . . . I’m getting the sense it’s a girl, and I’m feeling a number . . .
seven
. Did you by any chance have a younger sister who passed?”

Ross found himself rooted to the floor. He had been trained to consider the fact that 85 percent of the cases they investigated were hoaxes perpetrated by people who either wanted to waste their time, or get on national TV, or prove that paranormal investigation was anything but a science. He couldn’t count how many times they’d found a speaker hidden in the moaning wall; fishing line wrapped around a quaking chandelier. But he’d never considered that the Warburtons might be putting on a show, too.

“It would be an additional charge, of course,” Curtis was saying, “but I wouldn’t rule out holding a séance.”

Ross’s head throbbed. “Curtis, could I speak to you privately?”

They put on their coats and went out, standing under the overhang of the garage as the rain poured down. “This better be good,” Curtis said. “You interrupted me as I was hooking her.”

“You don’t think there’s a ghost here. The only reason you know about her sister is because I told you.”

Curtis lit a cigarette; the tip glowed like a slitted eye. “So?”

“So . . . you can’t lie to that woman just to make a few bucks and get her reaction on camera.”

“All I’m doing is telling the O’Donnells what they want to hear. These people believe there’s a ghost in this house. They
want
to believe there’s a ghost in this house. Even if we’re not getting much activity tonight, that doesn’t mean a spirit isn’t laying low with visitors around.”

“This isn’t just a ghost,” Ross said, his voice shaking. “This was
someone
to her.”

“I didn’t peg you for such a purist. I figured after all these months, you’d know the routine.”

Ross did not consider himself to be particularly gullible. He’d seen and done enough in his life to always be on the lookout for what was real, because he so often felt like he
wasn’t
. “I know the routine. I just didn’t know it was all fake.”

Curtis whipped the cigarette to the ground. “I’m not a fake. The ghost of my grandfather appeared to me, Ross. I took a goddamned
photo
of him standing at the foot of my bed. You draw your own conclusions. Hell, remember that shot you got of a face rising out of the lake? You think I set that up? I wasn’t even in the same state you were in at the time.” Curtis took a deep breath, calming himself. “Look, I’m not taking the O’Donnells for a ride. I’m a businessman, Ross, and I know my clients.”

Ross couldn’t answer. For all he knew, Curtis had managed to slip the penny he’d found beneath the tripod, too. For all he knew, the past nine months of his life had been wasted. He was no better than the O’Donnells—he’d seen only what he wanted to believe.

Maybe she
was
psychic, because at that moment Maylene stepped outside. “Curtis? What’s going on?”

“It’s Ross. He’s trying to decide what road to take home— I-81, or the Moral High Ground.”

Ross stepped into the driving rain and started walking. Let them think what they wanted; they’d certainly encouraged Ross to do the same. He didn’t bother to return for his digital camera or his knapsack; these were things he could replace, unlike his composure, which he was fast in danger of losing. In his car he turned the heater on full blast, trying to get rid of the chill that wouldn’t let go. He drove a mile before he realized that his headlights weren’t on. Then he pulled off to the side of the road and took great, gulping breaths, trying to start his heart again.

Ross knew how to scientifically record paranormal phenomena and how to interpret the results. He had filmed lights zipping over graveyards; he had taped voices in empty basements; he had felt cold in spots where there could be no draft. For nine months, Ross had thought he’d found an entrance to the world where Aimee was . . . and it turned out to be a painted door drawn on a wall.

Damn it, he was running out of ideas.

Az Thompson awoke with his mouth full of stones, small and smooth as olive pits. He spat fifteen into the corrugated leather of his palm before he trusted himself to breathe without choking. He swung his legs over the side of the army cot. He tried to shake the certainty that if buried in the packed earth beneath his bare feet, these rocks would grow into some cancerous black thicket, like the ones covering the castle in that White Man’s fairy tale about a girl who couldn’t wake up without being kissed.

He didn’t mind camping out; for as long as he could remember he’d had one foot in nature and one foot in the
yanqui
world. Az stuck his head out the flap of the tent, where some of the others had already gathered for breakfast. Their signs—placards to be worn around the neck, and picket posters tacked onto wood—lay in a heap like ventriloquist’s dummies, harmless without some spirit behind them. “
Haw
,” he grunted, and walked toward the small campfire, knowing that a space would be made for him.

The others treated him the way they would if Abe Lincoln got up and walked out of that tent—with humility, and no small amount of awe, to find him alive after all this time. Az wasn’t as old as Abe, but he wasn’t off by much. He was 102 or 103—he’d stopped counting a while ago. Because he knew the dying language of his people, he was respected as a teacher. Still, his age alone made him a tribal elder, which would have been something, had the Abenaki been a federally recognized tribe.

Az heard the creak of every joint in his spine as he settled himself on a folding chair. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from beside the fire pit and peered at the land, a parcel located at the northwesterly intersection of Montgomery Road and Otter Creek Pass. At its crest sat the big white house, now an eyesore. It would be the first thing to go, Az knew, just like he knew everything about this property, from the surveyor’s measurements to the recorded number of the deed plan. He knew the spots where the ground froze first in the winter and the section where no vegetation ever managed to grow. He knew which window in the abandoned house had been broken by kids running wild; which side of the porch had fallen first; which floorboards on the stairs were rotted through.

He also knew the license plate numbers of every vehicle the Redhook Group had parked on the perimeter. Rumor had it that Newton Redhook wanted to build himself Comtosook’s first strip mall. On one of
their
burial sites.

“I’m telling you,” said Fat Charlie, “it’s El Niño.”

Winks shook his head. “It’s screwed up, is what it is. Ain’t normal to rain roses. That’s like a clock running backward, or well water turning to blood.”

Fat Charlie laughed. “Winks, you gotta switch back to Letterman. Those horror flicks are getting to you, man.”

Az looked around, noticing the light dusting of flower petals all over the ground. He rolled his tongue across the cavern of his mouth, tasting those stones again. “What do you think, Az?” Winks asked.

What he thought was that trying to explain rose petals falling from the sky was not only useless, but also futile, since the things that were going to happen had already been set into motion. What he thought was that rose petals were going to be the least of their problems. Az focused the binoculars on a bulldozer chugging slowly up the road. “I think you can’t dig in the ground,” he said aloud, “without unearthing something.”

This was how Ross had met Aimee: On the corner of Broadway and 112th, in the shadow of Columbia University, he had literally run into her, knocking all of her books into a murky brown puddle. She was a medical student studying for her anatomy final, and she nearly started hyperventilating at the sight of all her hard work being ruined. Sitting in the middle of the street in New York, she was also the most beautiful woman Ross had ever seen. “I’ll help you,” Ross promised, although he didn’t know a fibula from a phalanx. “Just give me a second chance.”

This was how Ross proposed to Aimee: A year later he paid a cab driver to take them past Broadway and 112th en route to dinner at a restaurant. As instructed, the man pulled to the curb, and Ross opened the door and got down on one knee on the filthy pavement. He popped open the small ring box and stared into her electric eyes. “Marry me,” he said, and then he lost his balance and the diamond fell down a sewer grate.

Aimee’s mouth fell open. “Tell me,” she managed finally, “that didn’t just happen.”

Ross looked down the black grate, and at the empty box. He tossed it into the sewer, too. Then he pulled another ring, the real ring, from his pocket. “Give me a second chance,” he said.

Now, in a deserted parking lot, he tipped the bottle up to drink. Sometimes Ross wanted to scratch himself out of his skin, to see what was on the other side. He wanted to jump off bridges into seas of concrete. He wanted to scream until his throat bled; to run until his soles split open. At times like this, when failure was a tidal wave, his life became a finite line—the end of which, through some cosmic joke, he could not seem to reach.

Ross contemplated suicide the way some people made out shopping lists—methodically, with great attention given to detail. There were days when he was fine. And then there were other days when he took census counts of people who seemed happy, and those who seemed in pain. There were days when it made perfect sense to drink boiling water, or suffocate in the refrigerator, or walk naked into the snow until he simply lay down to sleep.

Ross had read of suicides, fascinated by the creativity— women who looped their long hair around their own necks to form a rope, men who mainlined mayonnaise, teenagers who swallowed firecrackers. But every time he came close to testing a beam for the weight it would hold, or drew a bead of blood with an X-Acto knife, he would think of the mess he’d leave behind.

He didn’t know what death held in store for him. But he knew that it wouldn’t be life, and that was good enough. He had not felt anything since the day Aimee had died. The day when, like an idiot, he had chosen to play the hero, first dragging his fiancée from the wreckage and then going back to rescue the driver of the other car moments before it burst into flames. By the time he’d returned to Aimee, she was already gone. She’d died, alone, while he was off being Superman.

Some hero he had turned out to be, saving the wrong person.

He threw the empty bottle onto the floor of his Jeep and put the car into gear, tearing out of the parking lot like a teenager. There were no cops around—there never were, when you needed them—and Ross accelerated, until he was doing more than eighty down the single-lane divided highway.

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.