Everlasting (25 page)

“The police should have figured it out!” Bryan answered quickly. “But you made yourself such an easy target, Luke.”

“Looks that way. Things are going to be different from now on.”

“Not a moment too soon,” said Bryan.

IT SMELLED AS IF IT HAD RAINED JUST ENOUGH TO
dampen the church’s stone lot and make the leaves of nearby trees glisten. The freshness of the evening air seemed to help Beth: She opened her eyes for several seconds, gazed at Will, who was carrying her, then rested her head against his shoulder. Ivy opened his car door, and he laid Beth gently in the back seat.

As he did, the amethyst necklace slipped out of her pocket.

“Ivy,” Will said, surprised. “Beth knew what she was doing! She had the amethyst with her so she could fight him.
Beth
was in control, not Gregory. She wanted to die.”

“No,” Ivy replied, and recounted what she and Beth had learned from Lacey about expelling demons from the world. “Beth was doing it to save me and anyone else Gregory might hurt through her.”

“Is he gone?”

Beth’s mouth moved as if she were trying to speak. Ivy leaned close. “Beth, open your eyes.”

She did, and Ivy gazed into irises that were a full, clear, luminous blue, eyes that made a perfect sky seem pale. “He’s gone.”

Beth nodded and smiled a little, still weak. “Gone.”

The police and ambulances had bypassed them for whatever was going on at the end of Wharf Lane. Ivy moved her car to another lot, then was picked up by Will. Beth had shut her eyes again, but the color had returned to her face and she seemed to be sleeping peacefully in the backseat.

“I think she’s going to be okay,” Ivy said.

“Even so,” Will replied, heading west on 6A, “I don’t think we should go back to the inn right away. There’s going to be a lot of questions.”

After discussing the simplest and most believable story,
Ivy called Bryan, who agreed it was best to keep the truth quiet and not call attention to Luke’s hiding place at the church; he offered to keep Luke hidden at the rink until Ivy could pick him up. Then she called the others, informing them that they had found Beth in “Hyannis Port” and that she needed some time away from the inn. “Sorry, what’s that, Chase? I can’t understand you—you’re breaking up, Chase. Talk soon,” Ivy said, and clicked off her phone.

Will smiled. “I know a nice place this time of day.”

By the time they reached the beach in Yarmouth Port, Beth was sitting up. With Will on one side of her and Ivy on the other, they linked arms and walked toward the bay. Like the beach near Alicia’s, the sand, now gold with the slanting sun, gave way to the salt marsh: tiny islands of brilliant green sea grass, set like puzzle pieces in the deepening blue of the bay. A long boardwalk stretched over the marshes. They strolled along the pathway, stopping from time to time to lean over the wood rails and point out the fiddler crabs and schools of tiny fish.

They spoke only of what was around them—imagining the bubble secrets of tiny bay creatures, enjoying the earthy smell of the marsh, gazing at the far shore, where a red hull glided past a shimmer of sand. They lived only in the present moment—not halfway between heaven and earth, Ivy thought, but halfway between land and sea—which was joy enough, because they were together again.

BEING WITH IVY BACK IN STONEHILL HAD MADE IT
even harder to be away from her now, which meant Tristan cared much less about his safety than Bryan did.

Bryan had unlocked for him a storeroom as far away from the rink as possible, then returned with a steak sub and fries twenty minutes later. “Look what I found in the back of my car. And it’s not even fuzzy.”

As they shared the food on a carton top, Bryan talked about life in River Gardens. “Does any of this sound familiar?”

“It sounds like somebody else’s life,” Tristan replied. Sometimes it was ridiculously easy to be honest.

“Luke, why don’t you let me help Ivy with the detective work? Gran will protect you, but Hank Tynan will blab—by now it’s probably all over the Gardens that you came back. And if you can’t remember people, you won’t know who you’re dealing with. Whoever wants to get you will be one step ahead. I think you should lay low.”

“It’s too late for that.”

Bryan shook his head. “You’re so freakin’ pigheaded! You should have lost your thick skull rather than the memories inside.”

Tristan laughed. “I wonder if I can still skate.”

“Don’t try it here. My uncle is lousy at faces, but he never forgets the skating style of a great player.”

Ivy called Bryan an hour later. When she picked up Tristan, Bryan handed him a care package, tossing it in the car after him, telling Ivy to “Gun it, babe,” at which she laughed and pulled carefully out of the rink’s driveway.

“So what’s the plan?” Tristan asked.

“We’re meeting Will and Beth in Yarmouth Port, then you and I will drive Beth back to Stonehill tonight and home tomorrow.”

“How is she doing?” Tristan asked.

“When I left, she looked much better—tired, but like the real Beth.”

Tristan could hear the relief in Ivy’s voice. “Did Lacey know what happened—whether Gregory has slipped into someone else’s mind?”

“Lacey? I haven’t seen her.”

“She was in the parking lot when Bryan and I left. I couldn’t talk to her, but I pointed to the tower. I thought she’d help you.”

“Maybe she saw we were doing okay, and moved on.”

Tristan nodded, but still looked puzzled.

“What’s in the bag?” Ivy asked.

Tristan reached in the back seat, rummaged through Bryan’s care package, and laughed. “Enough caffeine for an army, sports bars, fudge, chips—oh, geez—a bankroll.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll pay him back.”

It was twilight by the time they reached the small café where Beth and Will had eaten. They were sitting on a bench outside, talking, their faces lit softly by a ship’s lantern hanging from the café’s sign. For the moment they looked normal and happy, Tristan thought. Why couldn’t Beth, Will, Ivy, and he have normal lives? Did people living everyday lives have any idea how lucky they were and how fragile it all was? Two years ago, he didn’t.

But Will knew, at least now he did. Tristan could see it in Will’s face and in his hands—the way he held onto Ivy and Beth before they got into the car, the way his eyes lingered on Beth as if he feared he might never see her again.

She’ll come back safe, I promise you,
Tristan wanted to tell him, but now more than ever he knew he couldn’t make such rash promises.

They arrived at Ivy’s home a little after midnight. Beth had fallen asleep early in the trip, and Ivy and Tristan helped her upstairs to Ivy’s bed. Ivy wanted to stay close by, in case Beth had nightmares. Carrying blankets and pillows, Tristan and Ivy tiptoed up the stairs from her bedroom to camp out in the music room.

The crescent moon, rising early, had dropped low enough in the sky to look like a Christmas ornament hanging in the dormer window. Tristan watched Ivy’s hair catch the light as she laid down the bedding. She was humming a song from
Carousel
. He hummed with her.

Ivy glanced up at him, her eyes bright, looking as if she were trying to hold back laughter.

“It’s harmony,” he explained.

“Oh.”

He pulled her to her feet, laughing, then found himself close to crying. “Come on,” he said. “One last dance.”

BETH SLEPT LATE SATURDAY, AND IVY TOOK HER TIME
that afternoon, strolling and talking with her, making sure she was all right before driving her home to her parents. Later, after changing into “Gemma the art student,” Ivy headed to Providence with Tristan. Finding a dark limo
parked outside Corinne’s home and figuring it was Tynan’s company car, they circled the block every fifteen minutes, hoping he would leave. At eight o’clock, they got lucky. When they knocked on the door, Gran answered and said she was alone.

She was surprised to see them again so soon—and too smart to think that this was just a pleasant visit. They had sat down in the kitchen for five minutes, making small talk as she poured coffee and tea into her colorful mugs and opened a tin of lemon bars, when she said suddenly, “Oh, stop the bull. You’ve learned something. Out with it.”

Ivy and Tristan exchanged glances.

“We found an article online which mentioned a gold cufflink with an arrow on it,” Tristan said.

Ivy pulled from her purse a printed copy of the article.

Gran read it, and after a long delay looked up. “I told Corinne when she was just a little whip of a thing she’d better learn to play fair or she wouldn’t have no friends. And I told her when she was older if she wasn’t going to play fair, then she’d better play smart.” The old woman shook her head. “Didn’t listen.”

“Gran, we’d like to take the cufflink to the police,” Tristan said.

The old woman closed her eyes.

“Please.”

She got up and walked around the kitchen. “So where’d
she get the cufflink?” Gran asked. “How’d she hear about the hit-and-run? It happened in Massachusetts.”

“I don’t know,” Ivy answered. “Maybe just luck. Maybe the person took his or her car to Tony’s when she was photographing the place.”

“You think this is going to get you off the hook, Luke?” Gran asked. “People believe what they want to believe.”

“It’s my only chance.”

Gran sat down again, thinking. Tristan nibbled a lemon bar and Ivy sipped her tea, waiting.

“So,” Gran said at last, “we’d better search her room and see if we can find something more to give the police, a photograph of the car or a note.”

They searched for the next two and a half hours, going through every drawer, every shirt and pants pocket, every single piece of paper as well as boxes of photographic prints that Gran brought from her own room, finding nothing that seemed related to a hit-and-run accident. At Gran’s suggestion, they pulled the drawers all the way out of the bureaus and desk to look behind them, lifted the rug and stripped the bed, checking the mattress and box spring. They discovered nothing. Ivy remade the bed, turning down the spread as it had been before. Gran gazed down at it, then leaned over and pulled the spread back over the pillow, smoothing it gently with her hand. Corinne’s death had become real and final to the old woman.

Without speaking, Gran turned out the lights in the room and waited for them to follow her out. She closed the door behind them. Handing Tristan the cufflink, she said, “I’ll vouch that Corinne left this the night she died, and that I gave it to you tonight, but I fear for you, Luke. Gemma should take it to the police. You should stay hidden until they have a killer in custody. Are you listening to me?”

“I’m listening,” Tristan said, and handed Ivy the cufflink.

Gran walked them to the front door. Tristan hugged her good-bye.

“Thank you,” Ivy called back softly through the screen door. She wasn’t sure Gran heard her.

“It’s as senseless as her dying,” Gran said, gazing beyond Ivy, “an old woman like me living this long.”

Ivy and Tristan didn’t speak until they were beyond River Gardens. “I—I didn’t know what to say back to her.”

Tristan nodded. “Anything comforting would have seemed like a lie.”

Beyond Providence, on the long stretch of road that dropped down to New Bedford, then hugged the coast, traffic grew light. Ivy checked her rearview mirror and saw only two sets of headlights a distance behind her. Few people were driving to the Cape at eleven o’clock on a Saturday night.

She drove in silence, reviewing everything they had discovered in the last several days. At last she said, “I wish we could have found a photograph of a car with front damage.
With all those that Corinne took for her photo essay, there wasn’t a single one there, which tells me someone had a reason to scoop them up.”

“I’ve been thinking about that. One incriminating photo could be sent to a million places on the Internet, which means the person who is being blackmailed could never be sure he or she had gotten rid of all the electronic copies. And maybe, with software like Photoshop, a picture alone isn’t considered evidence. But a matching cufflink would be, especially a custom-made one, especially if the person who found it was still alive to testify where and when she found it.”

“Which is why Corinne is not.”

“Looks that way,” Tristan agreed. “Let me see it again.”

Ivy reached in her pocket. Tristan turned on the cabin light and studied the cufflink. Ivy blinked as a car passed them, its headlights catching in her side mirror, momentarily blinding her.

“This is a rounded kind of arrow,” Tristan observed, “not straight like a graphic symbol. It sure looks custom made.”

Ivy glanced in the rearview mirror. Just one set of headlights followed her now, the same set that tailed her when getting on the highway, she thought, then laughed at herself. How could she possibly tell in the dark?

“I think our only choice is to turn the cufflink over to the police as soon as possible,” Tristan went on. “I’m a little
worried about Gran’s safety. The police should give her some protection.”

“I’ll go to Rosemary Donovan, rather than the police in Providence. She’ll help us out.”

Tristan nodded.

“In the meantime, we need to figure out where to hide you. People must have heard the church bell ringing this afternoon, and they may have investigated that or the lightning strike. If we left anything behind—food wrappers, footprints—it’s not going to be safe for you anymore. What do you think—back to Bryan?”

“No. I know he wants to help, but the less people we involve the better.”

“Nickerson?”

“Home sweet home!” Tristan replied with a smile.

Ivy glanced in her mirror two more times, then flipped the switch to the night view as the car behind them drew closer.

“Something wrong?” Tristan asked.

“Uh, no, not anymore. He—or she—is finally passing us. What kind of car is that?” she asked as it went around them.

“A little black one,” Tristan replied, then laughed. “I’m not up on expensive sports cars.”

“I saw one just like it when we were leaving Providence.”