Second Glance Read Online Free PDF Page B

the night, trying to breathe in small puffs, so that the oxygen in the room would last longer.
    “Honey.” Her mother spoke in a tone that made Lucy think of cold glass vials and mile-long white countertops. “You know air can’t change its weight, not inside your bedroom. This is all your imagination.”
    “But . . .” Lucy hunched away from the closet, because she could feel the lady watching. “Mom, I’m not making it up.”
    There was a beat that lasted the exact amount of time it took her mother to lose her temper. “Lucy. There are no such things as ghosts, or goblins, or demons, or . . . or air-crushing invisible beasts. Go to bed .”
    Lucy held the receiver after the line went dead. When the metallic voice of the operator came on, asking her to hang up if she wanted to make another call, she buried the phone beneath her pillow. Her mother was right; she knew on some rational plane that nothing in her room was out to get her; that monsters didn’t hide in closets or under beds, that crying ladies didn’t appear out of nowhere. If the air was becoming as thick as pea soup, there was a perfectly logical explanation, one that could be explained by physics and chemistry.
    But all the same, when Meredith Oliver came home hours later, she found her daughter sleeping in a tub lined with pillows and blankets; the bathroom lit bright as midday.
    Ross watched his nephew defy gravity one more time, the skateboard rising on the air beneath his balanced feet. “That’s a fifty/fifty,” Ethan informed him, his cheeks flushed with exertion; his hairline damp beneath the scrolled brim of his baseball cap.
    He pretended to try to lift up Ethan’s ankle. “You sure you haven’t got these tied on with fishing line?”
    Ethan grinned and started for his ramp again, then turned around and rolled back. “Uncle Ross?” he said. “Having you here is totally the bomb.”
    On the blanket beside Ross, Shelby plucked at the grass. “That’s about the highest endorsement you could receive.”
    “I figured.” Ross lay back, resting his head on his hands. A shooting star streaked across his field of vision, painting with its silver tail. “He’s great, Shel.”
    Her eyes followed Ethan. “I know.”
    Ethan rattled down the wooden ramp. “Great enough to go ghost hunting with you?” he called over his shoulder.
    “Who told you I go ghost hunting?”
    “I have my sources.” Ethan spun the board, leaping off it at the same time, so that it seemed to rise into his hand. “I’m fast, see? And I don’t get tired at night . . . and I can be so quiet you wouldn’t even believe it . . .”
    “I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Ross laughed.
    “No, I mean, really, Uncle Ross, why wouldn’t you take me?”
    “Let’s see. Because your mother would skin me alive; and because I’m retired.”
    “Retired?” The boy ran his tongue over the word. “Does that mean you’re, like, worn out from it?”
    “I guess, in a way.”
    Ethan seemed stunned by this. “Well, that totally sucks .”
    “ Ethan .” Shelby shook her head, a warning.
    “Now you’re just like some normal relative,” the boy muttered.
    Ross watched him skate off. “Was that an insult?”
    Shelby ignored him, eyeing Ross carefully instead. “So you’re all right?”
    “Fine.” He smiled at her. “ Totally .”
    “It’s just that I get worried, you know, when you don’t call. For six months.”
    Ross shrugged. “I’ve been moving around a lot, with the Warburtons.”
    “I didn’t know you’d stopped doing paranormal investigation.”
    “I didn’t either, until I said it. But I’m sick of not seeing what I want to see.”
    “There’s a difference between being a paleontologist and not finding what you’re after, and being a ghost hunter and not finding what you’re after,” Shelby said. “I mean, there are dinosaur bones out there, even if you aren’t lucky enough to dig them up. But ghosts . . . well, if they’re all over the place,