Shadowing Ivy

by Janelle Taylor

It was time to get down to business. She’d had a night in his arms, a night to forget her troubles and sleep. But the bright light of morning meant facing reality.

  “Griffin, what business does Declan want me to stay out of, anyway? His love life? Or could he be talking about something else?”

  He took a bite of bacon. “His love life seems to be his only business,” Griffin said. “My captain thinks we should lay low for a couple of days. Let Declan think he’s scared us into backing off.”

  “Giving him a false sense of security,” Ivy said, nodding. “It won’t be easy to just do nothing. Not that I know what we’re supposed to do. But I can’t say I’m not relieved.”

  There was a knock at the door, and again, Griffin bolted up, motioned for Ivy to move to the living room, and padded to the side of the door, gun in hand. “Who is it?” he said.

  “The happy couple!” came a perky male voice.

  Griffin put his gun away and shrugged at Ivy with a questioning expression. He opened the door, and in walked Joey and a pretty young woman with platinum blond pigtail braids and very short, choppy bangs.

  “We’re engaged!” Joey announced, holding up his and the woman’s entwined hands. A metallic ring glinted on her finger.

  Engaged? Joey wasn’t even out of high school! He was barely eighteen.

  “This,” Joey continued, his arms around the woman’s thin shoulders, “is Julianna. My fiancée. Man, I love saying that. My fiancée. My fiancée.”

  Griffin and Ivy glanced at each other. Griffin let out the deep breath that Ivy was still holding in.

  “And you two are the first to know,” Joey continued, his mop of thick brown hair making him look even younger than he was. “We didn’t even tell our parents yet. I love having this juicy a secret.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Julianna,” Griffin said, shaking the girl’s hand. He introduced Ivy, and after more handshaking, the two were invited to sit down to breakfast. They practically jumped into the chairs.

  Ivy would bet that neither Julianna nor Joey cooked much. Or had much money for the coffee shop. Or groceries.

  “Isn’t the ring great?” Julianna said as she picked up a piece of buttered toast that she topped with a heap of scrambled eggs and a slice of bacon. “We got it on the street for only twenty bucks.”

  Ivy’s gaze focused on Julianna’s strange hair, the short, choppy white-blond bangs that didn’t move. The pigtails. She wore several layers of clothes, too, on her slight frame. She was pretty in an exotic way. But the exotic might have been eyeliner.

  “And once I get a good job, I’ll replace it with a real diamond,” Joey added. “A whole carat.” He scarfed down a piece of bacon. “Wow, this is really good. Guess we’ll both have to learn how to cook now that we’ll be living together,” he said to Julianna, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek.

  “Living together?” Griffin said. “Didn’t you say Julianna had roommates?”

  Joey nodded around a mouthful of scrambled eggs. “Yeah, but we’re only going to crash in her room until we find our own place. We’re thinking a nice one-bedroom with an exposed brick wall.”

  “I think those are going for twenty-five hundred minimum,” Griffin said. “Without roaches, that is.”

  Julianna grimaced. “I hate bugs.”

  “Don’t worry,” Joey said. “Once I get a job and we combine our income, we’ll have enough to get a studio. A really nice one. No roaches.”

  Not in this city, Ivy wanted to say, but held her tongue. Joey and Julianna would discover the reality the moment they opened up the real estate section of the newspaper. She wanted to jump up and shout, For God’s sake, kiddos, are you crazy? You’re like twelve years old! Date. But stay in school, Joey! And forget the engagement until you’re ... thirty!

  “A part-time job after school might not pay much,” Griffin pointed out, barely able, Ivy could tell, to contain himself. “Maybe you could postpone the engagement and the living together until after you graduate, Joe.”

  “Oh, I don’t have to worry about school,” Joey said, scooping more scrambled eggs onto his plate. “I’m dropping out.”

  Griffin froze. “What?” he shouted. “With three months left to graduate? No way, Joey. No. Your father would not want this for you.”

  Damn. He’d surprised himself. He hadn’t expected to play the father card, but in this case, it was true.

  Joey’s cheeks flushed. “Um, Griffin, I totally respect you, but you don’t know what my father wants. I think he’d want me to be happy. And Julianna makes me happy. I’m eighteen and can do what I want.”

  Griffin held the boy’s gaze. “You can do what you want, Joe. But being an adult means making grown-up choices. Not choices that can destroy your future.”

  Joey shrugged and threw his fifth piece of bacon on his plate. “I’ll be fine.”

  Griffin glanced at Ivy and shook his head, then turned back to Joey. “Did you go home last night?”

  Joey pursed his lips. “Nope.”

  “Your parents must be worried out of their minds,” Ivy said.

  “Worried about themselves,” Joey said. “They don’t care about me. Or my father. I’m my dad’s next of kin. And I’m eighteen. So I’m going to decide what’s best for him. And what’s best for me.”

  “Meaning?” Griffin asked.

  “Meaning that my dad is going to come live with me. Us,” he added, squeezing Julianna’s hand.

  Ivy watched Joey’s fiancée turn white. She also put her bacon back on her plate, her appetite clearly lost. Ivy had no doubt that the lovebirds’ engagement would last only until they hit fresh air.

  That aside, from the moment Julianna had walked in and sat down, the girl-woman had seemed more interested in the drama the situation was creating than the situation itself. Joey was in for some more drama over exactly where his father would or would not live. Once Julianna tired of that, she’d tire of Joey. And that would be that.

  “We’re going to tell my parents now,” Joey said. “Right after we leave here. They’re going to freak, but oh well.”

  Griffin let out a breath. “Joey, that doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I’m a new man,” Joey said. “So we’d better go, Jules.”

  “You won’t get a decent job without a high school diploma,” Griffin added. “You can forget about a decent apartment, too. Or eating. Or anything.”

  “I can get my GED,” Joey retorted. “And go to college part-time. It might take a little longer, but—”

  Griffin shook his head. “Joey, have you heard the expression ‘cutting off your nose to spite your face’? Don’t ruin your future to make your mother and stepfather angry. It’ll be you who gets hurt most of all.”

  “Oh, man,” Joey said. “I thought you were on my side.” He stood up, grabbing another piece of toast. “Come on, Jules. Let’s get out of here.”

  Julianna smiled at Ivy and Griffin. “Thanks for breakfast.”

  Once they left, Griffin rolled his eyes heavenward. “Well, she’s talkative. ‘Thanks for breakfast’? That’s all she had to say?”

  “She did mention the ring was only twenty bucks,” Ivy put in.

  “He’s not dropping out of high school,” Griffin said. “Over my dead body.”

  Ivy couldn’t contain a little smile. “You really care about this kid, huh?”

  He dropped down on the sofa and leaned his head back against the couch. “Yeah. I sure do.”

  “Well, I don’t think you’ll have to worry about Joey dropping out of school or running off to Las Vegas. Did you see Julianna’s face when Joey said his father would live with them?”

  He stared at her. “Now that’s good police work.”

  She smiled. “She’ll break his heart. Very soon. And these grandiose plans he has for his father are going to go up in smoke, too. He’s going to be hurt, Griffin. And really need you.”

  Griffin nodded. “I’ll be here. As long as he doesn’t drop out of school. I couldn’t take t
hat.” He let out a deep breath. “Declan dropped out of high school. Did you know that?”

  Now it was Ivy’s turn to shake her head. “He told me he was runner up for valedictorian. And that he’d graduated with honors from NYU.” She took a seat next to Griffin on the couch, leaning her head back and staring up at the ceiling. “I just believed everything he said, like a total fool. Since I believed he was getting his MBA, and he did work for Sedgwick Enterprises—at least for a little while—I had no reason to think otherwise.”

  “He dropped out his senior year, early on,” Griffin said. “I was in college, commuting and working part-time. I tried everything to get him to stay in school, even offered to let him live with me for the rest of the year. But I guess he thought he could scam his mother and stepfather easier than he could scam me. He stayed put there, fooling his parents into thinking he had some amazing job writing software and working for IBM and Microsoft.”

  “Meaning that he was bringing money home?”

  “He started out as a middleman for a loan shark, then for a car theft organization. Then he discovered it was easier to live off the money of unsuspecting wealthy women.”

  Ivy flinched.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean—”

  Ivy offered a rueful smile. “Well, I know you couldn’t mean me, given that I’m far from wealthy and never will be. Not on a small-town cop’s salary.”

  “So you’re sure your dad disinherited you?” Griffin asked.

  Ivy nodded. “I’m sure. But I would like to go see his lawyer and find out what was in that letter I didn’t open.”

  Ivy’s cell phone rang. Alanna. “Ivy, I’ve got some bad news.”

  More bad news? She mentally braced herself. “I can take it.”

  “Your house was ransacked,” Alanna said. “Torn apart. I’m so sorry.” She hesitated, as if she’d started to say something and changed her mind.

  “And?” Ivy said.

  “And there’s another message for you. This time, it was a piece of paper pasted on the wall, typewritten.”

  “What did it say?” Ivy asked, closing her eyes against what she was about to hear.

  “I think you should just come out here. You and the detective.”

  “Alanna, what does it say?” she asked, her voice wound as tight as she felt.

  Alanna hesitated, then said, “‘I didn’t think sleeping with brothers was your style, Miss Priss. But your whoring will make it easier to kill both of you in one shot.’”

  Chapter Eleven

  Hell, Griffin thought as he followed Ivy into her house, someone sure wants to get a point across. And that point, he knew, was that Ivy’s life would be systematically destroyed if she didn’t stop poking into Declan’s life. This vandalism, so soon after the phone call, was Declan’s way of assuring Ivy he would come at her rapid-fire. And that she herself would be next.

  So was it Declan who was behind this? Or a girlfriend doing Declan’s dirty work?

  The note, typed on plain paper, gave little away. Someone knew he and Ivy were spending a lot of time together—that they were sleeping together was a bluff, Griffin would bet on it.

  Would Declan be so brazen to come to Applewood, where people knew him, where the entire police department was on guard for him? If he showed his face in Applewood, he’d be in jail in two seconds. Then again, Declan wouldn’t show the face everyone knew and had grown to hate. He would be in disguise.

  Griffin glanced at Ivy, who stood in the middle of the wreckage. He could see she was trying to keep it together, to not break down. Again.

  The sofa had been slit open, white stuffing everywhere. Two bookcases had been knocked over. Lamps, plants, everything had been overturned. But there was something unusual that struck Griffin, something he didn’t often see in this type of large-scale damage: small, personal items had been destroyed. A music box that sat on the mantel had been smashed, for example. Pictures of Ivy and her sisters were flung across the room. Yet, more ordinary, less personal knickknacks were left alone. Which told Griffin that this was very personal. And potentially another woman. The other other woman. One who didn’t like that Declan had been planning to go through with the wedding despite the fact that Ivy would likely inherit nothing. Would inherit nothing, as she’d ignored the instruction of the will by not opening her inheritance letter before the ceremony.

  Declan had loved Ivy.

  Griffin knew it now as surely as he knew his name. Declan had truly loved Ivy. There was no other reason to marry her. She had no money. And she was so honest a cop that she would never have breached her ethics to support his cons. She would have dumped him in a heartbeat had she known the truth about him.

  So, Declan loved Ivy. Another woman in his life, either a victim or a grifter, didn’t like it. Someone who knew Ivy, too, very likely.

  So why had Jennifer Lexington ended up dead and not Ivy? Perhaps Jennifer had been killed by Declan because she’d threatened to go public with his infidelity, ruin his good thing. His money machine. And perhaps this vandalism was simply aftermath, another woman so incensed by Declan’s love of Ivy, despite her lack of money. And incensed that she was working with New York Homicide to trap Declan.

  Maybe. There were a lot of maybes. Too many. Too many different scenarios and possibilities.

  As Ivy picked up a smashed frame containing a picture of her and her sisters, trying to salvage the photograph inside, Griffin walked into the bedroom, already knowing what he would find. The bed would be slashed, perhaps covered in dirt or even pig’s blood.

  Bingo. Dirt. Which told him that he was on target about a jealous lover. Declan’s cohort was spitting mad. Perhaps they’d gotten into a fight, and Declan had confessed to loving Ivy. Perhaps Declan was very upset that Ivy was staying with Griffin, and that had prompted the fight. Whatever it was, Griffin was sure he was looking for two people now. Declan and his inside lover.

  He could feel Ivy’s presence behind him, and when he turned around the look on her face almost killed him. She seemed to be ... heartbroken. Her gaze was on her dressing table, and she moved in slow motion over to it. She covered her face with her hands and dropped down to her knees and sobbed.

  Griffin rushed over to her and wrapped his arms around her. “What is it, Ivy?”

  It took a minute for her to finally speak. “When I was seven, I met my father for the first time. Can you imagine that? Knowing you have a father out there, being aware of that, at four, five, and six, but being told that your father is scum, a word no young child should know, by the way, and that he wants nothing to do with you?”

  “I’m so sorry, Ivy,” Griffin whispered, stroking her hair.

  “And then I finally got to meet him when I was seven. He decided to let his three daughters spend two weeks at his summer house in Maine. And that first day, he gave each of us a shell he’d picked up on the beach, a shell that he said reminded him of each of us. I remember thinking, ‘But how could anything remind him of me when he’s never met me till today?’ But then I remembered that my mother inundated him with photographs of me, report cards from school, art projects, that kind of thing. And he put a shell in my hand and said, ‘I picked this one for you because you can hear the ocean the loudest in it.’”

  Griffin continued holding Ivy and gently wiped away her tears. “Why do you think he picked that one for you?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t really know. And I never asked him. I always had the sense that one day I would just know what it meant. And as I got older, I started thinking he meant that if I put it to my ear and listened, I would feel his love. That the roaring of the ocean inside the shell would say loud and clear what he couldn’t.” She glanced up at Griffin, her eyes shining with tears. “Stupid, huh?”

  “Not at all, Ivy. And I think you’re absolutely right.”

  “It was the only thing he’d ever given me.”

  His heart squeezed in his chest. “It’s destroyed, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “No. Tha
t’s the strange thing. It’s not. It’s the one precious thing to me that wasn’t destroyed in this house.”

  Griffin stood up and stared at the shell on Ivy’s dressing table. “Who knew about the shell and what it meant to you?”

  “My sisters and I talked about it, about their shells, too, in the past few months. And I told Alanna about it, a long time ago, though. And Declan knew, of course. I also wrote about it a lot in my diary. The last time I wrote in it was the night before I was supposed to get married.”

  “I think you’d better look for it,” Griffin said. But he had a feeling it was gone.

  The drawers to the dressing table were already open, their contents strewn about. Ivy looked inside one of them, then shook her head.

  “It might have been stolen before today,” he said. “By the person who left you the note on your mirror. I’m not sure if it’s Declan or the woman he’s working with or both.”

  “Ivy!”

  Griffin turned around to find Alanna rushing toward Ivy, tears in her eyes.

  “I am so sorry about this,” she told Ivy, wrapping her in a hug. “I went back to the station house to file the report. I was driving by when I saw the door open, and when I checked on the house, I saw the wreckage.”

  He stared at Alanna, at her worried expression, at the protective way she hugged Ivy. Why was he so suspicious of the woman? There was no reason to suspect her, other than his gut instinct that first night, when she’d been prowling outside Ivy’s house. Yeah, her explanations had made sense, but still, something nagged at him.

  “I need to get out of here,” Ivy said. She scooped up the shell and put it in her purse.

  “Ivy,” called an Applewood police officer from the living room, “would you mind just answering a few routine questions? And then we’ll clean up for you.”

  Ivy nodded and woodenly walked over to the group of officers.

  Alanna was surveying the damage in the bedroom, shaking her head. Nothing on her face remotely registered guilt.

  “So, Officer Moore,” Griffin said, “I’m thinking that Declan has an accomplice. A female accomplice. Someone who likely knows Ivy. Is there anyone you can think of who might have fallen prey to Declan?” If it was Alanna herself, he wanted to catch her reaction. And if it wasn’t her, perhaps she could be of help in determining who it was.