“I can’t leave Ivy.”
“Sure you can.”
“Not when she’s in danger.”
Lacey shook her head in disgust. “Well, then, you have what might be called an eternal problem.”
“Meaning?”
“Who do you think is producing this film? I doubt Number One Director is amused by the changes you made in the script.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You broke the rules, Tristan. When Ivy was in that car accident, you played God. Dead chicks are supposed to stay dead. You gave Ivy the kiss of life.”
“But I wasn’t trying to save her. I wasn’t trying to restore her life. I just wanted to hold her again.”
“Pitiful.”
“I wanted to—to touch her face one more time. All I wanted was one last kiss—”
“Absolutely pitiful.”
But Lacey’s voice quavered as she attempted to dish out scorn, and when she turned away from Tristan, he caught her by the arm. “You don’t really believe that, do you? You understand, Lacey, I know you do. Because you loved someone too—I remember now. Just before I left, you said—”
She pulled her arm away from him. “The difference between you and me is that I’ve come to my senses since then.”
He studied her, the way she kept her face averted. “Angels shouldn’t lie,” he said.
She swung around. “That’s good, coming from someone whose angelic powers are gone. Don’t you get it, Tristan? You’re fallen! You’re not materializing like I am—you’re lugging around a ninety-eight point six. You’re a fallen angel.”
Tristan inhaled sharply. So he hadn’t come back with a mission to save Ivy from Gregory? Despite the fact he had lost his powers, he’d assumed that deep down he was the same Tristan who had walked into the Light, not someone sent back in punishment. He leaned against the trunk of a tree, slowly lowering himself to a crouch, thinking.
“I’m telling you, this is your last chance,” Lacey said.
He looked up. “Last chance to do what?”
Meeting his eyes, her certainty faded. “I—I’m not sure. But you died once. I think this time you’re playing for eternity.”
With his fingers Tristan stirred the leaves and needles on the ground next to him. In the height of summer, when everything was green and alive, twisted leaves and brown needles still lay on the forest floor, death and life mixed together by the continual cycle of the seasons. Did humans and angels travel in a circle or a straight line into eternity? He didn’t know, and he didn’t understand his own nature, half dead, half alive. The only thing he knew was that he loved Ivy.
“Lacey, would you carry a message to Ivy?”
“Did you hear anything I just said?”
“Yes.”
“You’re wearing me out, Tristan. In more ways than one,” she added, lifting her hands. Her skin was translucent. “I can stay materialized a little bit longer each time, but . . .”
He watched her fade. “Lacey, you okay?”
The purple shimmer circled a tree and peeked out at him, as if playing hide-and-seek.
He smiled. “Would you do something for me so Ivy knows I’m still here?”
“Something like what?” she grumbled.
“Leave a shiny penny on her pillow, or drop one in her hand—anywhere she’ll notice it and know it’s for her. The day I found the bright penny in the pond, I remembered the first time I kissed her—the afternoon she dove for a penny in the school pool. All the memories started coming back then. Give her a shiny penny. She’ll know what it means.”
Lacey’s purple mist moved in a slender twist up through the trees. “It’s a good thing I’m tired out, Tristan,” she said, her voice growing fainter with the distance, “or I’d smack you upside the head.”
Five
“MAX!” IVY EXCLAIMED. “I DIDN’T HEAR YOU COME IN.”
After finding the broken glass in her shoe and deciding she would talk to Will, Ivy had stayed upstairs, composing herself, figuring out exactly what she should say. When she descended to the kitchen, she was surprised to see Max standing in front of an open cupboard.
“I was filling Dhanya’s water bottle and getting myself something to drink,” he explained, holding up a drinking glass. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Chill, she told herself. She hadn’t heard him because she had been preoccupied—or because he hadn’t wanted to bother her and was trying to be quiet—not because he was sneaking around. “There’s raspberry iced tea in the fridge and some lemonade packets in the cupboard next to that one.”
“Can I fix you something?” he asked.
The first time Max had come over for a barbecue, he had hung around Dhanya, expecting her to wait on him. Ivy wondered if Dhanya had noticed his new manners. “No, but thanks.”
He glanced curiously at the shoe she carried. Before he could ask why she was carrying just one, Ivy hurried toward the back door.
“Ivy,” he called.
She turned around.
“My house is big. Come to the party with Kelsey and Dhanya—if you get tired of it, you can hang out in the library or something. There are lots of rooms where you can go and lock the door. I’ve left my own parties at times,” he added with a smile and shrug.
“Thanks. Probably not tonight, but I’ll keep that in mind.”
Exiting through the back door, Ivy walked through the trees surrounding the rear of the cottage, not emerging into the open until she reached the renovated barn. Two of the barn’s guest suites faced the garden and the inn, and the third faced the small wooded area that buffered the inn from Cockle Shell Road. Will’s room, a lean-to that had been added to the barn, had the least scenic view, a shed used for storage.
As she approached the lean-to, Ivy heard two voices. She hesitated, then crept forward till she stood directly beneath Will’s window. Beth was talking.
“Don’t you see how much Ivy has changed?”
“Everybody changes,” Will replied. “Maybe Suzanne was the only one who could admit it to herself, when she went off to Italy. The three of us were hoping things would stay the same till we got to college, but we were growing apart faster than we realized.”
“No. It’s more than that. There’s something wrong with Ivy. When she met Luke, she turned against you, Will. And now she’s turning against me.”
“How do you mean?”
“She—she blames me for Gregory’s return.”
Ivy bit her lip, wanting to argue.
“She says I was the one who invited him in on the night of the séance.”
I never said that! Ivy protested silently. All of us were to blame. She rested her shoulder against the rough-planked wall. Why was Beth saying this?
Ivy heard a chair scrape back, then the springs on the bed creak. Other than Will’s desk chair, the bed was the only place to sit in his art-crammed room.
“Beth, when I was trying to warn Ivy about Luke, I told her about Suzanne’s e-mail and how Suzanne was feeling haunted by Gregory and having dreams the way you were. I thought Ivy needed to be scared into thinking sense. I wanted her to see that she was blindly trusting another guy who didn’t deserve it, the same way she had trusted Gregory. But this idea that Gregory has actually come back. . . . It’s a little far-fetched.”
“Last year you believed that Tristan came back.”
“I heard Tristan. I saw his glow. There were signs.”
“I have a sign,” Beth replied.
“You do?”
“Open your hand,” she told him.
There was a long pause. Ivy leaned forward, straining to hear.
“Glass.” Will spoke the word softly. “Broken glass.”
“She put it in my shoe.”
Ivy drew back, caught off guard, the shoe in her own hand spilling a piece of glass on the grass next to the barn.
“Ivy? I can’t believe it,” Will said.
“Gregory made her do it. I’m scared, Will. I kee
p thinking about last year, when Gregory left glass for Ivy to step on. He’s come back. Why else would she do this to me?”
“Ivy?!”
“She hasn’t been herself since she met Luke,” Beth insisted. “It was like he cast some kind of spell on her.”
Ivy heard Will walking back and forth in the room. “Where were your shoes when you found this?” he asked.
“In the bathroom.”
“So maybe someone broke a drinking glass and cleaned it up but didn’t realize that fragments had fallen into your shoe.”
Beth didn’t respond right away. “You’re loyal, Will,” she said at last, “and I admire that. After all Ivy has done to you, you’re still loyal to her.”
Ivy heard paper crumpling and knew Will was destroying something he had drawn.
“I’m just trying to make sense of things,” he said.
“Or trying to convince yourself that Ivy is the person you’ve never stopped loving.”
Ivy swallowed hard, feeling afresh the pain she had inflicted on Will and herself. Would there ever be an opportunity to do right by Will? How could she ask him to listen and believe her one more time?
“I love her, too,” Beth went on, “but I can see she’s pulled away from both of us. I can’t trust her anymore.”
Ivy leaned against the barn wall, her mind reeling. Had Gregory put the glass shards in both of their shoes, trying to drive a wedge between them as he had once driven a wedge between her and Suzanne? As an angel, Tristan had learned to materialize his fingers. Could demons develop the same powers?
Or was Gregory influencing Beth’s mind, getting her to speak for him, beating Ivy to the punch when it came to telling Will about the glass? Now that Beth had suggested that Ivy, under Gregory’s influence, was playing games with her, it would be nearly impossible for Ivy to persuade Will that, in fact, Gregory was inside Beth.
No matter how Gregory did it, Ivy thought, as she walked back to the cottage, he’d won this round. He’d succeeded in turning her best friends against her.
Six
THE SCAR, SLICING ACROSS TRISTAN’S THROAT JUST beneath his jaw, was mostly covered by his beard now. His bruises were gone. Last night, he had spent hours hacking at his thick, wavy hair with a fishing knife stolen from a campsite. The ragged remains could barely be seen under a baseball cap he’d found on a path around Flax Pond. He wore a faded Red Sox T-shirt taken from a camp clothesline and looked like a lot of other guys on Cape Cod; still, as Tristan got in line at the hospital cafeteria, he felt as if the word WANTED was blazoned across his chest.
Yesterday, after Lacey had gone, Tristan had done a lot of thinking about the person who had beaten up the “ninety-eight point six” he was carrying around. Luke McKenna had a history, and until Tristan knew the details of that deadly night—as well as what had occurred before—he was a sitting duck.
As far as Tristan knew, the person Luke had fought hadn’t reported it to the police. Why? Perhaps Luke’s opponent was also wanted by the law. Or maybe his opponent had died, and Luke had two murders on his head. Perhaps they had been on a boat, and Luke had thrown the victim over, tied to a weight so he would never be found.
What were Luke and this unknown opponent fighting over—money, power? Perhaps someone who loved Corinne, Luke’s ex, was taking revenge for her murder. There were too many possibilities and too few facts. Tristan couldn’t ask the police for the details of the night he was brought, unconscious, to the hospital. There was only one person he could risk approaching: Andy, the nurse who had taken care of him.
The smell of clam chowder and French fries made Tristan’s mouth water, but, careful with his money, he bought only a cup of coffee. Picking up a newspaper someone had left behind, he sat with his back to a bright spread of windows, aware that it would be hard for someone looking into the light to see his face. Sometimes it bothered him how many tricks he had learned while trying to stay under the radar.
He wondered how long he could camp out at the cafeteria without being noticed. Andy might not be working today, but Tristan couldn’t risk going to his floor to find out. So he waited, pretending to read, pretending to sip his coffee, looking over the edge of his cup, checking out the people who came into the cafeteria. He envied them, workers who were tired and hungry, but luckier than they would ever realize, able to eat with friends and go where they wanted without looking over their shoulders.
At last, forty-five minutes later, Andy walked in with two women, all of them in nurses’ scrubs. Tristan was surprised by the lump in his throat when he saw the sandy-haired, squarely built nurse. Despite the comically short robe Andy had lent him, Tristan hadn’t realized how stocky he was. When Tristan came to the hospital he had been as helpless and scared as a baby, scared to the point of nastiness, and had trusted no one except Andy. He owed the nurse big time.
Andy glanced around the room, looking for a free table. He paused for a moment when he caught Tristan looking at him. Tristan quickly lifted up his newspaper, feeling like a detective in a corny movie.
Would Andy talk to him? Would he call the police? Even if Andy hadn’t read one of the newspapers that were everywhere in a hospital, someone must have said to him, “Hey, remember that patient you took care of? The one who skipped out on you? He’s wanted for murder.”
It took just fifteen minutes for the nurses to finish their lunch, but it seemed like an eternity to Tristan. When the three of them carried their trays to the drop-off station, Tristan stood up and followed, quietly calling Andy’s name.
The nurse turned and gazed at Tristan with the same quick, assessing look he had worn when Tristan was his patient.
“Sorry,” said Tristan, “but I had to ditch the robe.”
Andy’s eyes widened, then he turned to his companions, who had started toward the hall. “I’ll see you upstairs,” he called to them. When they had moved on, he turned back. “Guy?” he asked, using the name Tristan had been given when he didn’t know his identity.
Tristan nodded.
“Jesus! What are you doing here? Tempting fate?”
“I have to talk to you. Can you sit—just for a minute—please?” Tristan gestured to the table where he had left his coffee. Andy followed him.
For a moment they sat quietly, Andy taking the seat against the window, Tristan facing away from the crowd in the cafeteria.
“You look well,” Andy said in a low voice.
“I owe you my life.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“I’m not. I—”
“You do owe me the robe I gave you so you wouldn’t moon the other patients in your hospital gown.”
Tristan laughed a little, and Andy smiled, his tan face lighting up, his expression younger than the weathered lines around his eyes. Then he glanced around. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, but you’d better cut to the chase. Hospitals are full of nosy people. Why are you here?”
“I need information. When I came in, what was my medical condition?”
“I didn’t see you until you were brought up to my floor.”
“But you must have read the reports from the ER.”
Andy nodded. “You’d swallowed a lot of saltwater. Because you were so confused when you regained consciousness, we thought there was brain trauma, but the scans showed nothing. Have you gotten back your memory?”
Tristan shook his head. “No. I can’t recall anything from the life of a guy named Luke.”
Andy studied him curiously, perhaps because of the way Tristan had phrased it. But Tristan didn’t see how he could add that the guy named Luke wasn’t him—not without the nurse recommending he reconsider seeing the hospital psychiatrist.
“You don’t remember . . . anything?” Andy asked slowly.
“You mean like committing murder? No.”
“Your blood alcohol level was elevated,” the nurse said. “Everyone has a different threshold for inebriation, depending on their physical makeup and their history of drinking, but I
remember being surprised your number wasn’t much higher. You were unconscious for a long time. You had lost blood, but not an excessive amount—the knife wound wasn’t as deep as it appeared. You could have been knocked out by a blow to the head, but as I said, there were no signs of a serious blow. Despite the seawater you swallowed, there were no signs of oxygen deprivation from being underwater for an extended period of time. You were a true medical puzzle.
“And speaking of medical puzzles,” Andy added, “how’s Ivy?”
“You knew?” Tristan asked, surprised. He hunched over. “They put her in the paper, didn’t they?”
“No. They didn’t. Under eighteen, they protect your identity. But Ivy came to see me the same afternoon you left here. And besides, the day I sent her friends and her to the solarium, hoping to cheer you up, I saw your face when you shot out of there.” Andy smiled. “She’d gotten under your skin. And I saw you go back after her friends left.”
“You don’t miss much,” Tristan said.
“No, just my patients checking out by way of the stairwell,” Andy replied dryly. “Guy—Luke—there’s one more thing. We did toxicology tests and no drugs showed up. But there are drugs, not the kind people use by choice, that don’t leave an identifiable chemical trace in the body. The one I’m familiar with is used for medical purposes—it temporarily paralyzes the patient. Some patients react to it afterward with muscle twitches, especially when awakening. It’s one of those things you observe as a nurse, and I observed it with you.”
“Did you tell that to the police?”
“When you were here, the police were interested only in what the first responders and doctors had to say, not a lowly nurse.” Andy met Tristan’s eyes. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
Tristan nodded slowly as he realized what this information meant. “That I might have been given a drug that would keep me from running or swimming to safety, a drug that would prevent me from fighting back.” A chill swept over him. “That this thing that landed me in the hospital, it wasn’t just an argument that got out of hand or a fight between two drunk guys. It was premeditated murder.”