Second Glance
PRAISE FOR JODI PICOULT
‘Picoult is a writer of high energy and conviction . . .
she forges a finely honed, commanding and cathartic drama.’
—
Booklist
‘Picoult writes with a fine touch, a sharp eye for detail, and a firm
grasp of the delicacy and complexity of human relationships.’
—
The Boston Globe
‘The novelist displays an almost uncanny ability to enter the
skins of her troubled young protagonists.’
—
New York Times
‘Picoult has the true storyteller’s ability to evoke a world on the
page and pull the reader into it.’
—
The Women’s Review of Books
‘Engrossing . . .
The Pact
is compelling reading, right up to
the stunning courtroom conclusion.’
—
People
‘[
Keeping Faith
] makes you wonder about God. And that is
a rare moment, indeed, in modern fiction.’
—
USA Today
‘[
Plain Truth
] reads like a cross between the Harrison Ford
movie W
itness
and Scott Turow’s novel
Presumed Innocent
, with
a dose of television’s
The Practice
thrown in.’
—
Arizona Republic
‘Part thriller, part courtroom drama and part family portrait,
Perfect Match
is an intriguing “what if ”.’
—
Sydney Morning Herald
By Jodi Picoult
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Harvesting the Heart
Picture Perfect
Mercy
The Pact
Keeping Faith
Plain Truth
Salem Falls
Perfect Match
Second Glance
My Sister’s Keeper
Vanishing Acts
The Tenth Circle
Nineteen Minutes
Change of Heart
Handle with Care
JODI
PICOULT
Second Glance
This edition first published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2009
First published in Australia in 2003
First published in the United States in 2003 by Atria Books, a division of Simon &
Schuster, Inc.
Copyright © Jodi Picoult 2003
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian
Copyright Act 1968
(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
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Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia
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ISBN 978 1 74175 804 7
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sammy, who is both a reader
and
a writer.
I love you to the moon and back.
XOXO, Mom
What if you slept?
And what if in your sleep, you dreamed?
And what if in your dream, you went to heaven
and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?
And what if, when you woke, you had the flower
in your hand?
Ah! What then?
—S
AMUEL
T
AYLOR
C
OLERIDGE
Contents
True love is like ghosts, which everybody
talks about and few have seen.
—F
RANÇOIS, DUC DE LA
R
OCHEFOUCAULD,
M
AXIM
76
R
oss Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third.
He fell asleep at the wheel and drove his car off a bridge into a lake—that was the second time—and was found on the shore by rescuers. When his half-sunken Honda was recovered, the doors were all locked, and the tempered glass windows were shattered like spider-webs, but still intact. No one could figure out how he’d gotten out of the car in the first place, much less survived a crash without even a scratch.
The third time, Ross was mugged in New York City. The thief took his wallet and beat him up, and then shot him in the back and left him for dead. The bullet—fired close enough to have shattered his scapula and punctured a lung—didn’t. Instead it miraculously stopped at the bone, a small nugget of lead that Ross now used as a keychain.
The first time was years ago, when Ross had found himself in the middle of an electrical storm. The lightning, a beautiful blue charge, had staggered out of the sky and gone straight for his heart. The doctors told him that he had been legally dead for seven minutes. They reasoned that the current could not have struck Ross directly, because 50,000 amperes of current in his chest cavity would have boiled the moisture in his cells and quite literally made him explode. Instead, the lightning had hit nearby and created an induced current in his own body, one still strong enough to disturb his cardiac rhythm. The doctors said he was one hell of a lucky man.
They were wrong.
Now, as Ross walked up the pitched wet roof of the O’Donnells’ Oswego home in the dark, he did not even bother with caution. The wind coming off Lake Ontario was cold even in August, and whipped his long hair into his eyes as he maneuvered around the gabled window. The rain bit at the back of his neck as he worked the clamps onto the flashing and positioned the waterproof video camera so that it was pointing into the attic.
His boots slipped, dislodging some of the old shingles. On the ground, beneath an umbrella, O’Donnell squinted up at him. “Be careful,” the man called out. Ross also heard the words he did not say:
We’ve got enough ghosts
.
But nothing would happen to him. He would not trip; he wouldn’t fall. It was why he volunteered for the riskiest tasks; why he put himself into danger again and again. It was why he’d tried bungee jumping and rock climbing and crack cocaine. He waved down to Mr. O’Donnell, indicating that he’d heard. But just as Ross knew that in eight hours, the sun would come up—just as he knew that he’d have to go through the motions for another day—he also knew he couldn’t die, in spite of the fact that it was what he wanted, more than anything.
The baby woke Spencer Pike, and he struggled to a sitting position. In spite of the nightlights kept in every room at the Shady Pines Nursing Home—nearly enough combined wattage, he imagined, to illuminate all of Burlington, Vermont—Spencer couldn’t see past the foot of his bed. He couldn’t see anything these days, thanks to the cataracts; although sometimes he’d get up to take a leak, and in the mirror, as he passed by, he would catch a glimpse of someone watching him—someone whose brow was not spotted and yellow; someone whose skin was not sighing off his bones. But then the young man Spencer had once been would disappear, leaving him to stare at the crumbs that were left of his life.
His ears, though, were sharp. Unlike the other sorry old morons in this place, Spencer had never needed a hearing aid. Hell, he heard things that he didn’t even care to.
On cue, the baby cried again.
Spencer’s hand scrabbled over the covers to the call button beside his bed. A moment later, the night nurse came in. “Mr. Pike,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“The baby’s crying.”
The nurse fussed behind him, turning pillows and raising the head of the bed. “There are no babies here, Mr. Pike, you know that. It was just a dream.” She patted the right angle that had once been his strong shoulder. “Now, you need to go back to sleep. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow. A meeting, remember?”
Why, Spencer wondered, did she talk to him as if he were a child? And why did he react like one—sinking back beneath her gentle hands, letting her pull the covers up to his chest? A memory swelled at the base of Spencer’s throat, something that he could not quite pull to the front of the fog but that brought tears to his eyes. “Do you need some Naproxen?” the nurse asked kindly.
Spencer shook his head. He had been a scientist, after all. And no laboratory had yet crafted the drug that could ease this ache.
In person, Curtis Warburton was smaller than he seemed to be on television, but he lacked none of the magnetism that had made
Bogeyman Nights
the highest-rated show in its time slot. His black hair was shot, skunklike, with a white streak—one he’d possessed since a night nine years ago, when the ghost of his grandfather had appeared at the foot of his bed and led him into the field of paranormal investigation. His wife, Maylene, an elf of a woman whose psychic abilities were well known to the Los Angeles police, perched beside him, taking notes as Curtis posed questions to the owners of the house.
“First was the kitchen,” murmured Eve O’Donnell, and her husband nodded. A retired couple, they’d bought this home on the lake as a summer retreat, and in their three months of tenancy had experienced supernatural phenomena at least twice a week. “About ten in the morning, I locked up all the doors, put on the alarm system, and went to the post office. When I came home, the alarm was still on . . . but inside, the kitchen cabinets were open, and every cereal box was on the table, spilled on its side. I called Harlan, thinking he’d come home and left behind a mess.”
“I was at the Elks Club the whole time,” her husband interjected. “Never came home. No one did.”
“And there’s the calliope music we heard coming from the attic at two in the morning. The minute we went upstairs, it stopped. Open the door to find a child’s toy piano, missing its batteries, sitting in the middle of the floor.”
“We don’t own a toy piano,” Harlan added. “Much less a child.”
“And when we put in the batteries, it didn’t even play that kind of music.” Eve hesitated. “Mr. Warburton, I hope you understand that we’re not the kind of people who . . . who believe in this sort of thing. It’s just . . . it’s just that if it’s not
this
, then I’m losing my mind.”