Second Glance (51 page)

Eli had, again, bent the truth. He explained to Holessandro that he was a detective in Vermont, that there was an open investigation into a baby’s death, one that shared characteristics with young Alex’s situation. He’d wanted to know if there was some regenerative process caused by extreme cold—one that might explain why a baby who had been smothered might suddenly come back to life after being stuck in an icehouse. He didn’t tell the doctor that all this had happened in 1932.

Holessandro bit the tail off a sardine. “Smothering,” he explained, “would cause asphyxiation . . . and make a person hypoxic. Now, if you’re an adult, that means you’d breathe more—hyperventilate. Infants, though—their bodies are physiologically quite different from ours, and for them hypoxia inhibits breathing. So if a baby was smothered, it might stop breathing for several minutes . . . and then would autoresuscitate.”

“You mean it wouldn’t stay dead?”

“When you stop the part of a baby’s brain that’s responsible for normal breathing, another part of the brain takes over . . . which makes the infant gasp a few times. The purpose is to get some oxygen in there to jump-start the heart and lungs again.” He smiled. “It’s actually very hard to kill an infant.”

“But whoever was doing the suffocating—surely he’d have noticed an infant gasping for air.”

“That depends on how quickly he left. It happened in an icehouse, you said?”

Eli shrugged. “Yeah.”

Holessandro shook his head. “And I thought Canadians were provincial. Well, the icehouse adds another twist to it. Say the baby was asphyxiated . . . and then gasped . . .
and
was stuck in a cold environment. In that case, what happened to Alexandre would start to happen to the infant. The skin would cool, which in turn would cool the blood flow, which cools the brain, which causes the hypothalamus to lower the metabolic rate to basal levels. Perhaps even more so—the younger the child, the more potent the reflex that makes bodily systems shut down that way.”

“So the baby would look dead, but wouldn’t
be
dead?”

“Exactly. It’s like energy-saver on a computer . . . the screen shuts off but you haven’t lost your data. Likewise, as the blood flow was directed only to essential organs, the baby’s skin would get blue and cold. It wouldn’t be breathing visibly; its pulse would be indistinguishable. Like Alex.”

“How long could an infant live like that?”

“It can’t,” Holessandro said flatly. “Scientifically, according to textbooks, it doesn’t happen. But the rules of biology aren’t like the rules of physics, and as we’ve seen with Alex—sometimes it does.” He popped the last of the sardines in his mouth. “So did your baby live?”

“My baby?”

“The infant. The one from this case.”

“Oh, right,” Eli said. “We don’t know, actually.”

“Well, if it did, someone or something must have come along to warm it up. That’s the only way to come out of that hibernation, so to speak.
Especially
an infant—neonates can’t shiver, so they can’t warm themselves up.”

Who had been there that night to warm the baby? Spencer Pike, for one . . . who’d confessed to killing the infant. Why admit to murder—a more serious crime—if instead he’d squirreled the baby away somewhere, alive? It was possible that Cecelia Pike had managed to hide her child in the hours before her death. Maybe Az Thompson had even taken it, and knew more than he was letting on.

But if that infant
had
come back to life . . . where the hell was she now?

“Hope this helps you find some answers,” Holessandro said.

“Definitely,” Eli replied. But he could not shake the feeling that he had not yet asked the right question.

“We’re good to go,” Ross said, as he handed Ethan a vase filled with popcorn, then flopped into the beach chair beside him. They were sitting on the driveway at midnight, watching a video that his uncle had rigged to project on the white doors of the garage. It was some shoot-’em-up flick, R-rated and so full of dead guys and bullets that Ethan figured his mother would have a cow if she found out, which of course made it all the better.

“What’s with the vase?” Ethan asked.

“We ran out of clean bowls.” Ross grinned as the opening credits started to roll. “Is this, or is this not every bit as good as a drive-in?”

Ethan nodded. “The only thing that’s missing is a girl in the backseat.”

His uncle choked on a piece of popcorn. “Jesus, Ethan. Aren’t you a little young to be thinking about that?”

“Well, that depends. On account of most guys get into that stuff when they’re fourteen or fifteen, and I’ll be dead by then.”

Ross turned, so that the movie played over his cheek and brow, distorting his face. “Ethan, you don’t know that for sure.”

“That guys have sex when they’re fourteen?” Ethan said, deliberately misunderstanding. “How old were you when you had sex for the first time?”

“I wasn’t nine and a half.”

“What’s it like?”

On the screen, two cops were shooting at a bad guy in a convertible. The convertible rolled on an embankment and burst into flames. Ethan knew that the stuntman who’d done that scene had gotten out of the fire and walked away in his flame-retardant suit, perfectly okay. People died all the time in movies and then got right back up and did it again, like it was some kind of joke.

He could see that his uncle was trying to edit whatever he had decided to say, but he also knew that Ross would tell him the truth. Unlike his mother, who only wanted to keep him a kid as long as possible, Uncle Ross understood exactly how much you needed to cram into the measure of a life before you checked out. “It’s pretty amazing,” Ross answered. “It feels like coming home.”

Somehow, that description just didn’t do it for Ethan. He thought he might hear words like
round
and
wet
and
burst
, dialogue from the Playboy Channel that came through the speakers on the TV even though the picture was scrambled. He wondered if his mother, in Canada, was doing things that were round and wet and bursting with that guy Eli, who made her glow every time he came over. That detective was all she thought of these days. He remembered how he had been talking to her while she was making pancakes a few nights ago, about this wicked cool pogo stick he’d seen advertised on TV that not only counted how many times you jumped but egged you on and called you by your name. “It sounds great,” his mother had said.

“Maybe I could get it for my birthday,” Ethan suggested, and she had turned to him, all confused.

“Get what?”

“The pogo stick?”

“What pogo stick?” she’d asked, and then she’d shook her head and flipped the pancakes again, when they were already done cooking anyway.

Uncle Ross still seemed to be coming up with his explanation. “I think when you sleep with someone, you take a part of her with you. Not just the physical stuff—cells and all that. But part of what makes her
her
.”

Everyone had someone, Ethan thought. Everyone but him. “Maybe I could just kiss a girl, so that every now and then she’d think of me. You know,
Oh, that was the kid I kissed who
had that disease and died
.”

“Ethan, you’re not—”

“Uncle Ross,” he said wearily. “Don’t you lie to me too.”

Most of the time, the truth that he was going to die sat in his stomach like something that would not digest—a stone, a ball of wire. He understood that he’d drawn the short end of the stick genetically, that an early death was not an option, but a fact. He did not want to find Jesus, or make out a will, or do any of the things people did when they knew they were going to pass away. He just wanted to
live
.

In the movie, someone got his arm cut off with a chain saw.

Ethan reached for his uncle’s hand. He pushed up the sleeve of his sweater, to the spot where a scar swam beneath the surface of his wrist. “Why?” he whispered.

“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.