But, here now, he stood in the darkness with Trinity as if he didn’t shy from it. On the contrary, the coiled energy of his presence seemed to hold the shadows at bay.
“We’ll comb through the debris tomorrow to make a definite assessment. It’s probably safe to gather some things, but you’ll want to wait for an inspector to deem it habitable again,” the sheriff said.
She wanted to tell him it wasn’t safe, but she didn’t. He already knew it. She could read his frustration in his tight jaw and his narrowed eyes.
“Thank you,” Trinity said instead.
He nodded. He didn’t tip his hat or call her ma’am. In spite of his uniform and his hat, he gave off an air of being ultra-aware and not given to meaningless gestures. In fact, at 2a.m. with the fire out and everyone as safe as could be expected in Scarlet Falls, Sheriff Constantine seemed on edge, prepared even if he also seemed like he knew he could never be certain of what it was prepared for.
With one last penetrating look, he turned away and walked back to the large SUV he’d left by the curb. Trinity watched him climb into the vehicle, slam the door and rev its idling engine to life.
“He’s in over his head,” Creed said. He’d silently come up behind her. Now, he draped an old trench coat over her shoulders.
“I don’t know,” Trinity replied. “He’s pretty damn tall.”
She smiled slightly at the man beside her who was even taller.
* * *
There were firefighters milling around, winding hose and politely not staring at the outline of Trinity’s legs through thin satin. The fire hadn’t touched her room, but smoke had. She would definitely have to stay elsewhere for the night and possibly longer.
Creed disappeared again while she shoved a few things into her backpack. When she came out the front door, she was surprised to see a late model sports car come around the side of the house to pick her up. It was low and silver and sexy—so like Creed—but a far more modern choice than she would have expected from him. Yet, when she sank down into the passenger seat, he was very at home behind the wheel.
“Don’t worry. I don’t drink while I’m writing,” Creed said.
Trinity hadn’t thought to ask. His eyes were bright. His movements brisk. At times, he might depend on the Scotch more than he should, but it was obvious this wasn’t one of those times.
They drove away from Hillhaven.
She would have to call her parents, and once the damage was assessed in the daylight, she would. For now, she struggled to hold back memories of another fire. She also fought the feeling of being hunted and flushed from one shelter after another.
“I have a cottage by the lake. We can stay there until it’s safe to return to Hillhaven,” Creed said.
By the lake?
Trinity looked up and out the window. She recognized the road and the ascent. Sure enough, the town was below them and the black waters of High Lake gleamed, getting closer, ever closer.
She looked at the man behind the wheel.
Creed’s eyes gleamed, too, black and deep, as he drove them to the place that had nearly killed them both.
Chapter Seven
The cottage appeared after they’d left the hard top for a long, winding gravel drive that snaked through a dense evergreen thicket on the south side of the lake. It wasn’t dense enough. As Creed took his car around bumps and curves with surprising ease, Trinity could glimpse the occasional black shine of still waters through the trees.
When the white walls and a high-pitched roof of an A-frame house came into view around a final bend, she wasn’t relieved. It should have been welcoming. A neat oasis of careful landscaping and mulched plantings held back the encroachment of nature while at the same time gave off an air of being a peaceful part of it. Yet, the cottage left her uneasy. It seemed vulnerable. Its cheerful aspect perched on a rocky hill above the tangle of undergrowth surrounding the lake itself.
Creed braked to a stop in front of a steep path cobbled with stone steps that led to an impressive redwood deck and the cottage’s front door. She could see a similar path leading down the back of the house to disappear into the shadowy trees and she thought possibly beyond all the way to the water’s edge.
Trinity straightened her back against the apprehension that threatened to tighten her shoulders.
When Creed opened his door, she followed suit and stood beside the car with her backpack while he rummaged in the trunk for a hastily packed box.
“I keep the kitchen stocked because I come here to work sometimes,” he said. “Nothing fancy. Canned food and crackers.”
She didn’t ask him if he had a stuffed crow or a ragdoll in his box. She didn’t want to know. Instead, she headed up the path with him close on her heels. Here, close to the lake, the air held a metallic bite from the iron water, but it was softened by fir trees and the loamy dirt their fallen needles created beneath their boughs. Still, the bite was there, reminding her of something unpleasant she couldn’t quite place.
She was relieved when Creed unlocked the sliding glass door to let her inside. The cottage’s interior scent was much more pleasant. Books and papers, aged leather and cedar blended together with a warm hint of Creed’s scent—ink and whiskey and sandalwood—very male.
Creed didn’t follow her inside right away.
He stood on the deck and looked out at the trees, and possibly at the black sheen of water peeking out here and there.
Trinity wanted to shut the door.
She wanted to shut the chill black waters out and pretend for a little while that they weren’t even there.
Finally, Creed came inside and placed his box on the wide marble counter which separated the kitchen from the den. Trinity looked away from it, trying not to wonder what was inside. She was relieved when he turned to slide the door closed, but not for long. She stepped into the den to face a floor-to-cathedral-ceiling wall of glass windows that did very little to shield them from the night and the lake outside.
There were no blinds or curtains.
Only polished glass with the black night pressing against it, so dark that it seemed impenetrable and thick.
Trinity told herself it would be dawn in a few hours. The sun would rise.
Then Creed came up behind her, his solid body against her back, and the boxes and the night and what might be in them became the least of her concerns.
“I didn’t think you’d come with me,” Creed said into her tangled hair. “I should have offered to drop you at the Stewart’s bed and breakfast, but I was afraid you’d think it was a good idea.”
He slid her coat down her arms and dropped it on the floor. Not even stepping away long enough to hang it up.
It would have been. The best idea. They’d passed it on the way, a pretty and polished Victorian renovated to within a crooked shingle of perfection. She had been afraid he would offer to stop there. As much as she didn’t want to be near High Lake, she did want to be near Creed. Nearer even than this.
She demonstrated her desire by bumping back against him, bringing herself into full contact with him. His hands came back to her arms, to hold her still or hold her in place, she couldn’t be sure.
But he didn’t push her away.
She could feel the swell of his desire pressing close to her bottom, growing hotter and more insistent.
Trinity nudged her hips back again and he groaned. He buried his face in the side of her neck, finding skin with his lips and tongue. Then he lifted his hand to push her hair aside to find more.
The night was still there. The night and the gleam of the lake in the distance. She no longer cared.
He pressed her forward until the leather sofa met the front of her thighs and then her sensual teasing became serious. She allowed him to press her over the back of the couch, its cushiony firmness supporting her, while he moved his erection more intimately against her—teasing, suggesting—making her ache with the need to pull off his trousers.
“I can still taste you. It’s driving me mad,” Creed
said and there was an unsteady quality to his voice as if he was ready to break.
He’d given her the fiercest climax of her life and she longed to repeat it. So who was she to judge?
“Show me,” she said again as she had when they’d been at Hillhaven.
Creed moved as if her words had given him permission to snap. He only had to lift her gown to find her wet and ready, already tender from their earlier intimacy.
Trinity held the couch so her knees wouldn’t give out at the rasping sound of his zipper behind her and then his bared heat was pressed against her. She cried out when he easily found his way when he buried himself fully inside. She called his name. He held her, rocking her hips with large, warm hands and he met the movement he directed with powerful thrusts that took her quickly back to where he’d already taken her before that night.
Her eyes opened with her release and, as Creed followed, the dark night was only a few feet from her face, still frightening, but also a part of the ecstasy they shared.
* * *
They had collapsed, afterward, on the cool cushions of the oversize sofa softened by a pile of woven throws. When Trinity woke some time later, it was still dark and she was alone. Her eyes fluttered open and her body jerked as if she’d been falling though she had no memory of it in the pit of her stomach.
Unease claimed her.
A thick fog curled against the den’s wall of glass swirling up insidiously from the lake below.
“Creed?” she called softly, not really expecting a reply.
The cottage around her felt empty, barren save for her and the sound of her quickening breaths.
The movement of the fog against the glass made her edge off of the sofa and away from the windows. The move brought her to the counter where Creed’s box still sat unopened. In the soft glow of a phone charger’s light, Trinity didn’t resist the urge to lift the lid. She cringed at the gleam of button eyes, butwhen she reached inside —worse, much worse—was the brittle rattle of loose match sticks against her fingers.
There were dozens of them in the bottom of the box.
Was Creed trying to tempt The Girl in Blue? At Hillhaven, had he been distracting her so that the fire could happen?
A creak interrupted Trinity’s horrified thoughts.
She turned quickly, but saw nothing…save for a long sliver of night at the edge of the front door where the sliding glass hadn’t been pulled up completely to its latch. Had Creed gone outside and neglected to fully close the door?
Trinity knelt to pick up the trench coat off the floor without taking her eyes from the door. She shrugged into it and belted it tightly—naked, vulnerable and so not girded at all.
Maybe he had gone back out on the deck.
Trinity quietly stepped to the door and opened it before she lost her nerve. The deck was empty. Creed was nowhere in sight. An image constructed itself from long buried memories and it wasn’t one she wished to recall. Creed’s face white and deathly still, his brown eyes blank and staring. What if he had gone down to the lake’s edge alone?
The memory spurred her out the door.
But when she stepped onto the deck, she saw more than swirling fog. She saw a flash of pale blue. It disappeared into the trees where the back cobbled path led toward the lake.
Where was Creed?
Trinity paused long enough to slip her feet back into the ballet flats she’d worn earlier in the evening and then she followed the flash of blue into the thick predawn fog rising from the surface of High Lake to engulf Scarlet Falls.
* * *
Blood.
As she hurried down the stone path, she finally placed the metallic iron scent of High Lake’s waters. Her stomach clenched and her steps faltered, but then she heard eerie childish laughter floating back to her through the fog and she pressed on.
The trench coat wasn’t enough. Heavy moist fog damped her skin and wet her hair. Soon she was racked with shivers and awash in gooseflesh. She called his name only once and it sounded too thin and strange to penetrate more than a few inches of the dank atmosphere in front of her lips.
She could hear the persistent whisper of rushing water gurgling in the distance. The path she was on didn’t lead to the falls that had given the town the second half of its name. She was glad. Choked by rocks and rotten leaves, the falls had always repelled her. It was rumored to be a place for suicide in days gone by. She only knew the one time she’d been there it had held the same dark shadows she avoided in cemeteries.
She was silent, now, hurrying through briar and bramble until she came to the water’s edge with a sudden gasp. High Lake. Murky black liquid met and soaked her toes before she back peddled from its pungent touch.
“Creed?” This time her shout was stronger because seeing the water brought more horrible memories flooding back. Pulling. Oh, how she had pulled. But he’d been much heavier than her and she’d come very close to being pulled in instead of being able to pull him out. She could remember the way his hair had floated around his white face. The way his coat—a trench coat like the one she wore—had billowed out from his body in the sucking waves.
She strained her eyes. She tried to see through the fog along the water’s surface and at its edge.
But then she heard the sand paper slide of a striking match behind her. Not ghostly like the laughter. Solid. Real.
She turned and saw The Girl in Blue very close this time, only a yard away near the trees. She stood like she had in the photograph, her empty arms clasped to her chest where the ragdoll should be, but at her motionless feet, a fireplace match burned harmlessly, yet horrifyingly, on the rocks.
Trinity could smell the sulfuric flame. She watched it flicker and dance. And, suddenly, her own thoughts came back to her, but in a little girl’s voice sing-song and sweet.
She was a child of Scarlet Falls. Of course she was afraid of the dark.
The flame seemed to hold back the fog. It seemed to hold back the dark with its tiny flickering halo of light.
Trinity experienced a moment of revelation, but then Clara Chadwick vanished and in the vacuum of her wake the flame went out. Wet rocks under Trinity’s feet inexplicably shifted and she fell in the same instant. She fell back and in and was submerged. Her startled cry cut off by rivers of metallic water flooding into her nose and mouth.
Blood.
Again she tasted blood, smelled blood, swam in blood, but couldn’t get her head above the water. She thought she felt rope binding her arms to her body. She couldn’t move them. Couldn’t claw her way up to the oxygen her tender lungs craved. Her body began to sink in a slow sucking descent to the black bottom of the lake, fathoms below. Time stilled. The water was thick around her. She was frozen, immobilized by ropes she couldn’t see to fight.
She had been nine years old when it happened, already longfamiliar with The Girl in Blue. The night before had been a restless one, huddled beneath a mound of blankets as the dead girl stood vigil beside her bed.
Each time Trinity’s eyes had closed in exhaustion, the pale figure had seemed to manifest a little closer and then a little closer still, until she stood in the warm glow of a bedside lamp, horribly gaunt and hollow-eyed.
Trinity had opened her eyes to the sight of The Girl in Blue less than a few feet away. And there she had stayed the rest of the night as if held by the weak circle of light. She had no matches that night. Perhaps there had been none to be had in the house.
Trinity hadn’t called her parents. By that time, she’d known they wouldn’t see the child that, to her, was as solid and real as a living girl. Instead, Trinity had fought the tiredness that was sandpaper behind her eyelids. She had stayed awake, if not alert, watching The Girl in Blue in fear that she would break the rules of the macabre staring game they played and move to the edge of her bed while Trinity watched helpless in terror.
The sun had risen.
Trinity’s eyes had finally closed.
And the dead girl was gone when she opened them to the
midmorning Saturday light.
She remembered the pancakes she’d eaten for breakfast. They’d been extra fluffy and sweet, seasoned with her relief. She remembered her mother saying her father was down by the bridge filling in gravel where the road ended and the planks began.
With perfect clarity, she recalled climbing the stairs all the way up to the Widow’s Walk to “spy” on her father. He would turn and see her and wave. It was something he’d always done since she was small and her mother would bring her up to the great glass telescope to watch him on his postal rounds. She anticipated his wave. It would further dispel the horror of the night before.
Only that day when Trinity was only nine, she’d seen something far less cheerful when she focused the tarnished telescope.
Her father’s small pickup with its bed full of gravel had rolled back while he worked behind it. She saw it begin to roll. She cried out, but was too far away to warn him. She saw her father fall. She saw the truck come to a stop on one of her father’s legs.
He had waved feebly from the ground where he laid bleeding and crying out, too far for anyone at the house to hear. The noise of the river must have muted his cries from the town close beyond.
She saw their friends and neighbors going about their Saturday business in the distance, unaware. She saw her father helpless and hurt, his lips moving as he called for help.
She answered that call.
Trinity flew down the stairs on panic-fueled legs. Using the adrenaline and not letting it confuse her, she yelled for her mother. She dialed 911. While her mother eavesdropped long enough to understand, she told the operator her emergency.
Then she and her mother ran down to the bridge.
She remembered the blood.
She remembered her mother exclaiming about the emergency brake not being engaged and the truck’s gearshift being in Reverse.
Her mother had stooped to comfort her father as the paramedics arrived so only Trinity had seen the gear shift slowly move back into park.
Most of all, she remembered the hospital. The antiseptic bustle of men and women in white and green helping, healing and making things right.
The Girl in Blue Page 6