Everafter (Kissed by an Angel) (12 page)

He sat down and reached across the table, taking her hand in his. “Okay, so let’s try your plan. Let’s find the evidence to pin Bryan’s murders on him and put Gregory in jail for life. Let’s help him write his own death sentence.”

He felt Ivy’s hand relax in his.

“Now you’re thinking!” Lacey said.

He was thinking that it was worth a try—but if Gregory took one step too close to Ivy, nothing would stop Tristan from killing him.

“IT’S A SECRET FORMULA,” WILL TOLD IVY ON
Wednesday evening, as he brushed barbecue sauce onto chicken thighs and wings.

“A secret that comes in a bottle,” Beth added, smiling. She was sitting sideways on the yard swing, filling up a notebook, her words spilling over in lines of various lengths—poetry.

Will grinned. “It’s what I add to the bottle’s ingredients that’s the secret.”

“Smells good,” Ivy replied, dropping a bundle of
silverware on the scrubbed wood table and anchoring a pile of napkins with a rock. “Where’s Kelsey going tonight?”

“To Wellfleet with Max and Bryan,” Beth said.

“You can’t watch over her every minute of the day,” Will added, as if guessing Ivy’s thoughts.

She nodded. As long as Kelsey was around other people, she’d be okay. But of course it was impossible to keep her and Bryan from being alone together.

Ivy turned back to the cottage to fetch a pitcher of iced tea. “Hey, Chase!” she called, catching sight of him coming down the path.

“Chase, how’s it going?” Will asked.

“Fine.” He barely looked at them. “I assume Dhanya’s inside.”

“Getting dressed,” Beth said. “It’s good to see you, Chase. I was really worried about you.”

“No reason to be.”

“There was enough reason to keep you overnight in the hospital,” Will observed. “What did they test you for?”

Chase gave him a cool stare. “The usual things when you strike your head on the edge of a boat. Max nearly killed us all.”

“Chase,” Ivy said quietly, “you were driving when the boat turned over. And afterward, when Max rescued you, you were barely conscious.”

Chase glanced away.

“Do you remember that?” she asked curiously.

“How can I, if I was unconscious? They said I had a seizure.”

“A seizure,” Ivy repeated. It made sense. Historians thought that many people who had been labeled “possessed by the devil” actually suffered from epilepsy. The explanation could just as easily work in reverse. And to someone like Chase, for whom control and mental superiority were everything, a physiological explanation would be more agreeable than the idea of a demon taking over his mind. “Well, that can be managed with medication.”

“I’m not taking it. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“Hey, Chase,” Dhanya said, opening the screen door. “Sorry—couldn’t decide what to wear.” Coming to stand next to him, she reached up and gently touched his face. “How are you?”

He pulled away from her as if he couldn’t stand someone touching his head. “Let’s go.”

Ivy watched as he and Dhanya walked toward the path to the parking lot. Dhanya tried to take his hand, but he let her fingers slip through his.

Will returned to his grilling. “What a jerk, blaming the accident on the guy who saved his life.”

“Go easy on him, Will,” Beth said. “He’s experienced something he can’t understand. And he’s so alone.”

Will grimaced. “If he stopped imagining himself
mentally superior to the rest of us, maybe he’d have some company.”

“His ego does make it harder for him than it has to be,” Ivy said. “Still, I feel bad for Chase. He’s really scared.”

Will met Ivy’s eyes. “So are the rest of us.”

“TOMORROW’S MY DAY OFF,” IVY SAID WHEN SHE
called Tristan that night.

“Hey, guess what?” he replied. “It’s my day off too. How about a date?”

“How about one away from the Cape—Providence.”

“Does this mean I have a hot date with Gemma?”

Ivy laughed. Tristan was referring to her disguise as an art student and classmate of Corinne’s.

“She can’t wait to see you!”

They set a pickup time and place, Ice House Pond, then Ivy slipped her phone in her pocket and sat down to work on the coffee table puzzle. For a while Dusty slept soundly on the sofa next to her, then yawned, stretched his tufted toes, and leaped to the floor with a heavy thump. Standing at the cottage door, he meowed, impatient to begin his twilight hunt.

When Ivy let out the Maine coon, she was surprised to see Max sitting in a lawn chair, drumming his fingers nervously on its flat wood arms. Hearing the screen door open, he turned.

“Hey, Max. Are you waiting for someone?”

“I’m getting my nerve up.”

“I’m sorry, Dhanya’s out.”

“I came to see you.”

Ivy tried to read his face in the shadows. Did he sense that something was different about Bryan? Maybe her questions at the party had made him remember something useful to her. “Come on in.”

After accepting her offer of a raspberry iced tea, he sat on the sofa, staring down at the puzzle. He propped his right foot on his left knee, then changed his mind and propped his left foot on his right knee.

“So what’s up?” Ivy asked, handing him the cold bottle, sitting on the chair at a right angle to him.

He played with the sole of his boat shoe. “We’re friends. At least, I think of you as a friend.”

“We are,” Ivy said, and waited.

“Friends should be honest with each other.”

Ivy nodded.

“I almost killed you.”

“What?!” she exclaimed.

“I almost killed you,” he repeated. “It was some miracle that I didn’t.”

Ivy stared at him. “Max, what happened on the boat wasn’t your fault.”

“No,” he said, “not that. Your car accident.”

Ivy blinked, stunned into silence.

“The night you and Beth came to my house to pick up Dhanya and Kelsey. I drove you off the road.”

“
You
did that?” Her voice cracked with emotion. “Why?”

He shook his head, as if he didn’t know what more to say, then rose and started pacing the room. “I didn’t
try
to do it. I tried
not
to hit you—that part I remember clearly. But I also remember my car going straight toward yours. So maybe I didn’t try until it was too late.

“I guess I was drunk. But the thing is, I don’t actually remember drinking. I remember that my party was getting out of hand, everyone boozing too much. I looked for Bryan, because he’s good at calming things down. He wasn’t around, so I left, just to drive around a while and get away from it all. On my way back, I guess I was driving too fast and—and it happened.”

He stopped his pacing and turned to look at her. It was nearly dark inside the cottage. Ivy reached and turned on the lamp. Max looked as confused as she felt.

“Why didn’t you slow down?” she asked. “Why didn’t you move over to the right side of the road?”

“I tried to. I mean, I
thought
I did. But I couldn’t control the car. I was pulling on the steering wheel as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t turn—it just wouldn’t! My car just kept going toward you, until you pulled sideways and flipped over.”

Ivy sat back against the chair cushion, thinking.

“After you did, I rushed away,” Max said. He sat down on the chair across from her and dropped his head for a moment. “I’m ashamed of myself. I should have stopped. It was close to my house, and I kept telling myself the kids at the party would hear the crash—they’d help you. I parked on the other side of the causeway, then ran back, got there the same time as the emergency vehicles. I was a coward.”

Ivy didn’t speak for a minute. The part of her that had grown fond of Max wanted to say it was no longer important; she and Beth were fine. But another part of her knew that Max had been as wrong as Bryan, abandoning his victims after a hit-and-run. Good people were also capable of doing very bad things.

“Max, I blame you for running, but for nothing else. I believe you tried to avoid my car. You aren’t the kind of person to deliberately hurt another. Besides,” she added, “for your own safety, you’d have turned your car aside.”

“But the thing is, I didn’t.”

Because Gregory wouldn’t let him
, Ivy thought. Gregory had already come into the world through the séance, and he saw his chance to kill her. He didn’t care if he killed Max as well. Max had fought for control of the wheel, but Gregory was stronger and had succeeded—except that Tristan then stepped in and kissed her.

She couldn’t imagine how to explain this to Max.
“Something was wrong with your car. There’s no way you would have deliberately done that.”

“I don’t want to make excuses, Ivy. I want to admit I did something terrible and have it over with.”

“Why didn’t you admit it then?” she asked curiously. “Maybe not right away, but a few days later?”

“The night of the party—two or three in the morning—Bryan came back. I told him what had happened. He said to wait, just wait, let everything calm down. Then, when we found out you and Beth were okay, he said a confession would only screw things up. My parents would get upset. The police would start investigating my parties and asking a lot of nosy questions.”

Like where Bryan was that night, Ivy thought.

“He said Dhanya would never want anything to do with me. So I put it off, and the longer I did, and the nicer you were to me, the harder it got.” He stood up and walked to the screen door, gazing out for a moment. “Then the boat trip happened.”

“What about it?”

“It was the same feeling as when I was driving toward you. When Chase grabbed the wheel and I couldn’t get back control, it was like it was happening all over again.”

Because it was
, Ivy thought. Gregory was in charge again. But Gregory had known that she was wearing a life vest. This time, Ivy realized, he wasn’t aiming for her, but
for a body of his own—the perfect body for him, a match made in hell.

“Last night,” Max went on, “I kept dreaming about your accident. When I woke up this morning, I knew I had to come clean.”

“Did you tell Bryan you were going to confess?” Ivy asked. “He’s staying at your house now, isn’t he?”

Max returned to the chair across from her. “I told him about the nightmare. I didn’t say that I was going to talk to you, because I knew I was cowardly enough to let him talk me out of it.”

“There’s no need to tell him now,” Ivy said. The less Gregory knew about Max’s affairs, the less power Gregory would have over him.

“Do you forgive me?”

She saw the dampness in the corners of his eyes. “Max, we all make mistakes—”

“And then act like we didn’t, even when someone could have died?” He looked away from her.

“We’re human. We make mistakes, and sometimes we’re afraid enough to cover them up.”

“Will you say it?” Max asked. “It would help me to hear you say it.”

She didn’t want to forgive something caused by Gregory.

“Otherwise I feel like I can’t get free of it,” Max
explained. “I guess that’s selfish, but I feel like I can’t—”

“I forgive you,” Ivy said, wondering if her heart could ever truly forgive Gregory. “I want to be free of it too.”

After Max left, Ivy sat staring at the puzzle, pushing pieces around, trying to make connections. She forced two pieces together, then had to undo them.

If Gregory was responsible for killing her, wasn’t Tristan justified in bringing her back to life? Hadn’t Tristan’s kiss of life set things right again? Right—according to whom? Right, if she was supposed to stay alive on this earth. Right, if their desire to be together in this world was the only thing that mattered.

Ivy wanted to believe that Tristan and Max were victims of Gregory’s evil, forced into doing the wrong thing. But Max’s situation had made clear in her mind an important distinction: While Max wasn’t the one who drove her off the road, he had made the wrong choice in how he responded to the accident. When he left her and Beth to die, Max had succumbed to a temptation created by Gregory. Like Max, Tristan had faced a great temptation created by Gregory. Now he was stripped of his angelic powers, and the temptation to protect her was even stronger. The truth was that each person was responsible for how he or she responded to a situation.

In her heart, Ivy knew that Tristan’s mission was to
save his fallen soul. She would do anything to help him—anything! But she feared that the best thing for Tristan was for her to stay out of his way. It was the hardest way to love.

THE MORNING MIST STILL CLUNG TO THE TREES SURROUNDING
Ice House Pond. Tristan hoped his borrowed clothes, faded jeans and a khaki T-shirt, helped him blend in. He hummed to himself as he walked, feeling as if he had been given a furlough from prison. A few minutes later, Ivy’s VW pulled up. He got in quickly and slid down in the seat. She squeezed his hand and continued driving: The sooner they got away from Orleans, the better. They didn’t talk until the car was speeding along the Mid-Cape Highway.

“I’m disappointed,” he said. “Where’s Gemma?”

Ivy grinned. “We’re meeting her at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the other side of the canal. She’s been looking forward to seeing you, too!”

“So who are we visiting this time?”

“Luke’s former landlady, Crystal Abbot. In one of the news articles, it said the police interviewed her, but people don’t always tell the police everything they know. She refused to talk to reporters. Maybe she’ll talk to
Luke
. It’s worth a try.”

“It’s worth it just to sit next to you,” Tristan said. With his arm outstretched, he dropped his head back against the headrest. Laying his wrist on her shoulder, he let his fingers nestle in her hair. “I wish we could drive like this straight across the country.”

Ivy didn’t reply. When he turned his head, he saw her biting her lip.

“We have today,” he said quietly. “It’s more than we once thought we’d have.”

During their stop at Dunkin’ Donuts, they started laughing again. Ivy emerged from the restroom wearing sheer leggings colored with hearts, roses, and skulls, and a pair of laced-up booties that ended in open-toed thongs. Over her tank top she wore her prize purchase from a Provincetown shop, a vest woven from ribbons and pieces of glass, the recycled mouths of beer bottles. Her usually gold eyelashes looked as if they’d been tarred.