A long, shrill sound broke in on Ivy’s thoughts, a whistle from a train headed south, echoing against the steep wall of the ridge. She looked back over her shoulder at the rocky hillside. It seemed impossible that Philip could have made it down safely, but maybe if angels were real, if Tristan was there…
The whistle sounded again. Ivy started to run. She took the steps two at a time, then raced across the bridge and down the other side. She could hear the rumbling of the train before she saw its headlight, a pale, blind eye in the daytime. It was one of the big Amtraks that would rush straight through.
She ran to the pillar and stood with her back to it, close to the edge, transfixed by the train’s white eye. Her heart beat faster and faster as the train sped toward her. She remembered Philip’s old story about a train climbing up the hill—a train that was seeking her. It thundered toward her now, its lines sparking, the platform beneath her vibrating. She felt as if her shaking body would fly apart.
Then the train blew by her in one long blur.
Ivy didn’t know how long he had been standing there, close behind her, letting her knot her fingers in his. She turned her head sideways, looking at Will over her shoulder.
“I’m glad you didn’t jump,” he said with a half smile. “We both would have gone.”
Ivy loosened her fingers and turned to face him.
“Do you remember now?” Will asked.
She shook her head wearily. “No.”
Will lifted his arm as if he might touch her cheek. She looked up at him, and he pulled his hand back quickly, digging it into his pocket. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Ivy followed him to the car, continually glancing back at the tracks.
What if Gregory and Eric had worked together? she thought. But she still couldn’t believe that anybody, least of all Gregory, would want to hurt her. He cared about her—she’d thought he cared deeply.
They drove out of the parking lot silently, Will apparently as deep in thought as she. Then Ivy sat up quickly and pointed. About fifty yards past the exit, a red Harley was parked on the side of the road. “It looks like Eric’s,” she said.
“It is.”
A long drainage ditch with high grass and shrubs bordered the road. Eric was searching the ditch and was so intent on his task that he didn’t notice the car pulling over on the road’s shoulder.
When Will opened the door, Eric’s head bobbed up. “Lose something?” Will asked, stepping out. “Need some help looking?”
Eric screened his eyes against the slant of the sun. “No, thanks, Will,” he called back. “I’m just trying to find an old bungee cord I use to tie things down.” Then he noticed Ivy in the car. He seemed startled, glancing from her to Will and back again. He waved them on. “I’m giving up in a minute,” he said.
Will nodded and got back into the car.
“He was looking awfully hard for an old bungee cord,” Ivy remarked as they drove away.
“Ivy,” Will said, “is there any reason why somebody would want to scare you or hurt you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is anyone holding a grudge against you?”
“No,” she replied slowly. There isn’t anyone now, she thought. The past winter had been a different story: Gregory hadn’t been at all happy about his father’s marriage to Maggie. But his resentment and anger had disappeared months ago, she reminded herself quickly. Gregory had been wonderful to her since Tristan died, comforting her, even rescuing her the day of the break-in. It was Gregory who had gotten there first, scaring off the intruder, pulling the bag off her head just when Will arrived.
Or had he? Maybe he had been there all along. His excuse for returning home that day had been an odd one. Suddenly Ivy felt cold all over. What if Gregory himself had attacked her, then changed plans when Will showed up?
The thought ran through her like an icy river, and her scalp and the skin on the back of her neck crawled. Ivy twisted her hands. Without realizing it, she bent a pen she had picked up from the car seat, cracking its plastic shell.
“Here,” Will said, taking the pen away from her and offering her his hand. “I’ll need my fingers back when we get to your house,” he said, smiling, “but for now you won’t get ink all over you.”
Ivy gripped his hand. She held on tightly to Will and turned her head to watch bright patches of green flickering past them, the end of summer spliced with sharp shadows of fall.
“I’ve always been there for you. I love you.” The words floated back to her. “Will, when we were dancing and Tristan was inside you, and you said—” She hesitated.
“And I said…?”
“‘I’ve always been there for you. I love you.’” She saw Will swallow hard. “It was Tristan speaking, right?” Ivy said. “It was just Tristan saying that, and I misunderstood. Right?”
Will watched a wishbone of geese flying across the sky. “Right,” he said at last.
Neither of them spoke the rest of the way home.
P3-5
Ivy stood next to Philip in his room, surveying a bookcase full of treasures: the angel statues she had given him after Tristan died, a stand-up paper doll of Don Mattingly, fossils from Andrew, and a rusty railroad spike.
Philip and Maggie had arrived home that afternoon just as Will was dropping off Ivy. After Ivy and Philip shared a snack, she’d scooped up his schoolbooks while he carefully carried his newest treasure, a moldy bird’s nest, up to his room. Ivy watched him install the nest in a place of honor, then she ran her hand down the line of angel statues. She touched one that wasn’t her own, an angel in a baseball uniform with wings.
“That’s the statue Tristan’s friend brought me,” Philip told her. “I mean the girl angel. I’ve seen her a couple of times.”
“You’ve seen another angel? Are you sure?” Ivy asked, surprised.
Philip nodded. “She came to our big party.”
“How can you tell her apart from Tristan?” Ivy wondered.
Philip thought for a moment. “Her colors are more purplish.”
“How do you know she’s a girl?”
“She’s shaped like one,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Like a girl your age,” he added. From beneath a stack of comic books, Philip dug out a photograph with a strange pale blur in it. Ivy recognized the picture: it was the first photo that Will had taken of them at the arts festival.
Philip studied it and frowned. “I guess you can’t see as much here,” he said.
See as much what? Ivy wondered silently.
“Do you really want just your water angel back?” Philip asked.
Ivy knew he wanted to keep all the statues. “Just her,” she assured him, then carried the porcelain angel into her own room. This was the statue Ivy loved most. Its swirling blue-green robe had prompted her to name it after the angel she had seen when she was four, the angel who had saved her from drowning. Ivy set the statue next to Tristan’s picture, running her hand over the angel’s smooth glazed surface. Then she touched Tristan’s photo.
“Two angels—my two angels,” she said, then headed up to her third-floor music room.
Ella followed her and leaped up into the dormer window across from Ivy’s piano. Ivy sat down and began to work through her scales, sending out ripples of music As her hands moved up and down the keyboard, she thought about Tristan, the way he’d looked when he swam, light scattered in the water drops around him, the way his light could shine around her now.
The late sunlight of September was a pure gold like his shimmer, and the sunset would have the same rim of colors. Ivy glanced toward the window and stopped playing abruptly. Ella was sitting up, her ears alert, her eyes big and shiny. Ivy turned quickly to look behind her. “Tristan,” she said softly.
The glow surrounded her.
“Tristan,” she whispered again. “Talk to me. Why can’t I hear you? The others hear you—Will and Beth. Can’t you speak to me?”
But the only soun
d was the light thump of Ella leaping down from her perch and trotting over to her. Ivy wondered if the cat could see Tristan.
“Yes, she saw me the first time I came.”
Ivy was stunned by his voice. “It’s you. You really are—”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
Within herself, Ivy could hear not only his voice but also the laughter in it. He sounded just as he always had when something amused him. Then the laughing ceased.
“Ivy, I love you. I’ll never stop loving you.”
Ivy laid her face down in her hands. Her palms and fingers were bathed in pale golden light. “I love you, Tristan, and I’ve missed you. You don’t know how much I’ve missed you.”
“You don’t know how often I’ve been with you, watching you sleep, listening to you play. It was like last winter all over again, waiting and wanting, hoping you’d notice me.”
The yearning in his voice made Ivy quiver inside, the way his kisses once had.
“If I’d had the right angelic powers, I would have thrown some broccoli and carrots at you,” he added, laughing.
Ivy laughed, too, remembering the tray of vegetables he’d overturned at her mother’s wedding.
“It was the carrots in your ears and the shrimp tails up your nose that made you irresistible to both Philip and me,” she said, smiling. “Oh, Tristan, I wish we’d had this summer together. I wish we could have floated side by side in the center of the lake, letting the sun sparkle at our fingers and toes.”
“All I want is to be close to you,” Tristan told her.
Ivy lifted her head. “I wish I could feel your arms around me.”
“You couldn’t get any closer to my heart than you are now.”
Ivy held out her arms, then folded them around herself like closed wings. “I’ve wished a thousand times that I could tell you I love you. But I never believed, I just never believed I’d be given a chance—”
“You have to believe, Ivy!” She heard the fear in his voice ringing inside her. “Don’t stop believing, or you’ll stop seeing me. You need me now, in ways that you don’t know,” he warned.
“Because of Gregory,” she said, dropping her hands in her lap. “I do know. I just don’t understand why he would want to”—she backed away from the most terrifying thought—“to hurt me.”
“To kill you,” said Tristan. “Everything that Philip described about that night happened, only ‘the bad angel’ was Gregory. And it wasn’t the first time, Ivy. When you were alone that weekend—”
“But it doesn’t make sense,” she cried, “not after all he’s done for me.” She jumped up from the piano bench and began to pace around the room. “After the accident, he was the only one who understood why I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“He didn’t want you to think too much,” Tristan replied. “He didn’t want you to remember that night and start asking questions—such as whether our accident was an accident.”
Ivy paused by the window. Three stories below her, Philip was kicking a soccer ball. Andrew, coming up the driveway, had stopped the car to watch. Her mother was walking across the grass toward him.
“It wasn’t an accident,” she said at last. She remembered her nightmare: she was in Tristan’s car, and she couldn’t stop—just like the night they’d hit the deer and couldn’t stop. “Someone fooled with the brakes.”
“It looks that way.”
Ivy felt sick to her stomach at just the thought of Gregory touching her, kissing her, holding her close, close enough to kill her when the chance arose. She didn’t want to believe it. “Why?” she cried.
“I think it goes back to the night of Caroline’s murder.”
Ivy walked back to the piano and sat down slowly, trying to sort things out. “You mean he blames me for his mother’s—his mother’s murder? It was suicide, Tristan.” But as she said it she could feel a numbness in her chest and throat, a growing fear that threatened to shut down every reasonable thought.
“You were at the house next door on the night she died,” Tristan told her. “I think you saw someone in the window, someone who knows what happened or was responsible for it. Try to remember.”
Ivy struggled to separate her memory of the night from the nightmares that had followed. “All I could see was a shadow of a person. With all the reflections on the glass, I never saw who it was.”
“But he saw you.”
Bit by bit, the dream was unraveling. Ivy began to shake.
“I know,” Tristan said gently. “I know.”
Ivy longed to feel the touch that she had once felt when he spoke to her that way.
“I’m afraid, too,” Tristan said. “I don’t have the powers to protect you by myself. But believe me, Ivy, together we’re stronger than he is.”
“Oh, Tristan, I’ve missed you.”
“I’ve missed you,” he replied, “missed holding you, kissing you, making you mad …”
She laughed.
“Ivy, play for me.”
“Don’t—don’t ask me that now. I just want to keep hearing your voice,” she pleaded. “I thought I had lost you forever, but now you’re here—”
“Shhh, Ivy. Play. I heard a noise. Someone’s in your bedroom.”
Ivy glanced at Ella, who stood at the top of the steps now, peering down into the darkness. The cat crept quietly down the stairs, her tail bristling. It’s Gregory, Ivy thought.
She nervously opened a book and began to play. Ivy played loudly, trying to blot out the memories of Gregory’s embraces, his urgent kisses, the night they had been alone in the store and the night they had been alone in the darkened house.
Trying to kill her? Killing his mother? It didn’t make sense. She could almost understand how Eric could do it, half crazed with drugs. She remembered the message she’d overheard on Gregory’s phone; Eric was always in need of drug money. Maybe he had tried to get some from Caroline, and things went wrong. But what motive would Gregory have had for such a terrible thing?
“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out.”
Ivy stopped playing for a moment. “You can hear me?” she asked silently.
“You don’t cloak your thoughts as well as Will.”
So he had heard everything she had just thought, including the part about the urgent kisses. Ivy began playing again, banging on the piano.
Tristan sounded as if he were shouting in her head. “I guess I shouldn’t have been listening in, huh?”
She smiled and softened the music.
“Ivy, we need to be honest with each other. If we can’t trust each other, who else can we depend on?”
“I love you. That’s honest,” Ivy said, speaking all her words silently now, so only Tristan could hear. She finished the song and was about to start another.
“He’s gone,” Tristan told her.
Ivy breathed a sigh of relief.
“Listen to me, Ivy. You’ve got to get out of here.”
“Get out? What do you mean?” she asked.
“You have to get as far away from Gregory as you can.”
“That’s impossible,” Ivy said. “I can’t just get up and leave. I have nowhere to go.”
“You’ll find somewhere. And I’ll ask Lacey—she’s an angel—to stay near you. Until I can figure out what’s going on and come up with some evidence to take to the police, you have to get away from here.”
“No,” Ivy said, pushing back the piano bench.
“Yes,” he insisted. Then he told her about what he had learned from time-traveling through the minds of Gregory and Eric. He recounted the angry scene between Gregory and his mother, how Caroline had taunted him with a piece of paper, and how he’d shoved the floor lamp at her, cutting her face. Then Tristan told Ivy about the memory he had experienced in Eric’s mind, the intense scene between him and Caroline, which had taken place on a stormy evening.
“You’re right about Eric,” Tristan concluded. “He needs drug money and he’s involved. But I still don�
��t know exactly what he’s done for Gregory.”
“Eric was searching the gully by the station today,” Ivy said.
“He was? Then he took Gregory’s threat seriously,” Tristan replied, and recounted the argument he had overheard at the party. “I’ll watch both of them. In the meantime, you need to get away.”
“No,” Ivy repeated.
“Yes, as soon as possible.”
“No!” This time the voice leaped out of her.
Tristan fell silent.
“I’m not leaving,” she said, speaking within her mind again. Ivy walked to the window and gazed out at the old and windblown trees that topped the ridge, trees that had become familiar to her in the last six months. She had watched them change from a spring mist of red buds to dense, green leaves to delicate shapes traced with the gold of the evening sun—the color of autumn. This was her home, this was where the people she loved were. She wasn’t going to be chased away. She wasn’t going to leave Philip and Suzanne alone with Gregory.
“Suzanne doesn’t know anything,” Tristan said. “After you left with Will today, I followed her and Gregory. She’s innocent—confused about you and totally hooked on him.”
“Totally hooked on Gregory, and you want me to leave her?”
“She doesn’t know enough to get herself in trouble,” Tristan argued.
“If I run away,” Ivy persisted, “how do we know what he’ll do? How do we know he won’t go after Philip? Philip may not understand what he saw, but he saw things that night, things that won’t make Gregory very happy.”
Tristan was silent.
“I can’t see you,” Ivy said, “but I can guess what kind of a face you’re making.”
Then she heard him laugh, and she started laughing with him.
“Oh, Tristan, I know you love me and are afraid for me, but I can’t leave them. Philip and Suzanne don’t know that Gregory’s dangerous. They won’t be on guard around him.”
He didn’t reply.
Kissed by an Angel/The Power of Love/Soulmates Page 33