Everlasting

  “In an hour it will be dawn. You didn’t even hear your cell phone go off.” His finger followed the soft line of her eyebrow. “You’ve got makeup to do,” he teased. “I’ll hold the flashlight and mirror. You turn yourself into Gemma the art student.”

  Ivy’s response was to press her face between his neck and shoulder.

  “Playing possum?” he asked, but his voice shook, and Ivy knew he was making small jokes to ease the pain of ending their precious time alone.

  Last night, before falling asleep, they had studied maps of Providence and its neighborhood of River Gardens as well as street views Ivy had printed from Google Earth, trying to become familiar enough with the area to find their way around without calling attention to themselves. They had plotted out where they would park and memorized escape routes in case things got rough. They also reviewed the info Ivy had mined from social networks and websites—anything to do with life in the neighborhood and at the schools Corinne and Luke had attended. Ivy planned to do as much of the interviewing as possible. They had argued over the pros and cons of “Luke” showing up at Corinne’s old house. Did Corinne’s grandmother still have a soft spot for him?

  During her shopping spree in Providence, Ivy had purchased a cell phone for Tristan, to be used only in extreme emergencies, since they wanted to leave no electronic trace of their actions. She had already turned off the GPS in their phones. They were as prepared as they could be.

  As Ivy sped along the Mid-Cape Highway, she caught Tristan peeking at her and grinning.

  “If your eyelashes were any longer, you could use them for paintbrushes,” he said.

  Ivy batted them. “This is what a lot of girls wear.”

  “Maybe, but I like your curly blond ones.”

  Arriving in Providence, they drove a distance beyond the city, following Route 1 along the coast, gradually merging with the morning rush. They didn’t want to show up in River Gardens until they could blend into the neighborhood bustle rather than appear as unfamiliar figures on a near-empty street.

  After a fast-food breakfast, Ivy left Tristan and the car at the edge of River Gardens and walked several blocks to Tony’s. The streets were lined with wood frame homes, bungalows and three-story houses; many of the taller ones had several mailboxes, indicating they were divided into flats. Rusty chain-link fences and spans of electric wires knotted together the streets. The small lawns were like worn carpets, with patches of pebbles and dirt showing through.

  Tony’s home and business was at an intersection, the bungalow facing one street and the entrance to a large, paved backyard facing the other. A cinderblock building behind the house had two bays, and the garage door was open in one of them. Inside the open bay someone worked on a car with a whining power tool. Someone else must have been at work in the closed bay, for fumes were pouring out of an exhaust fan high in the wall. The sign on the door said PAINTING. STAY OUT.

  The paved lot between house and business, which held two damaged cars, was surprisingly orderly in its piles of stuff: cans and drums of chemicals, coiled hoses, twisted metal, and swept-up shards of fiberglass and cracked lights. A rack with a new windshield stood near a car bearing a mesmerizing web of fractured glass. In the photo essay, it was the twisted metal and broken glass that had drawn Corinne as a photographer.

  Ivy was staring at the web of glass when she heard a door open in the painting bay. A person wearing a hooded visor with a breathing apparatus studied her for a long moment, having the intimidating advantage of being able to see her face while she could not see his. The painter ducked back into the building for a moment, then reappeared, having disposed of his headgear and gloves, and walked across the lot toward her.

  “Help you?”

  “Yeah, hi. I’m Gemma. I’m looking for Tony.”

  “You found him.”

  “Do you have a few minutes?” she asked.

  “Depends.”

  Tony’s long hair was light brown and pulled back in an elastic band; his eyes were dark blue and intense. He was the same height as Ivy and, as far as she could tell, slender in build. His jumpsuit with its many brilliant colors looked more like an artist’s smock than industrial overalls; Ivy assumed he did custom painting—perhaps cars tattooed with skulls and orange flames—as well as repair work.

  “I was a friend of Corinne’s.”

  If he hadn’t been sweating, Ivy wouldn’t have seen the change in him: the tightening of his jaw and the muscles in his neck.

  “I went to art school with her.”

  “Three cheers for you.”

  His voice said who cares, but his eyes, which were glued to her, betrayed him.

  “We have a gallery at school. We’re doing an exhibition in October and each entry needs an artist’s statement. I volunteered to do Corinne’s for Carscape, her photo essay.”

  “That was done before art school.”

  “Was it? Oh, well, nobody’ll know but us. I was hoping you could fill in some background, tell me how you came to know her, how she came to photograph this place, something about the time she spent shooting pictures here, all that kind of stuff. The more personal the better. We want people looking at the art to have a sense of the person behind it.”

  “Anything I have to say, you don’t want to print.”

  “So tell me a few things, and we’ll see,” Ivy said lightly.

  He gazed at her as if she was an idiot who hadn’t caught on to his anger and his buzz-off message.

  “Lots of artists are controversial,” she went on. “It makes them interesting.”

  “Tony?” someone called from the house.

  A woman, who appeared to be in her twenties, stood on the back step, gave Ivy the once over, then moved swiftly toward them as if she had seen something she didn’t like. Older sister, Ivy thought; she had the same hair and eyes, though she was heavier than Tony.

  “Who are you?” the young woman demanded.

  “Gemma Schumann,” Ivy said, holding out her hand.

  The woman didn’t shake it.

  “Are you Tony’s sister?” Ivy asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Gemma was an art school friend of Corinne’s,” Tony told the woman.

  What had been instinctive wariness now settled into confirmed distaste: “I have nothing to say to her snotty art friends. I don’t know why you waste your time, Tony.”

  “So I guess,” Ivy said quickly, “Corinne was as popular at home as she was at school.”

  The young woman smirked. “You tell me. Was she a manipulative bitch? A world-class snitch? That’s the Corinne we all knew and loved.”

  Before Ivy could think of a response that would elicit enough trust or anger to draw more information, the woman turned on her heel and stalked back to the house.

  “So . . . so it wasn’t just the pressure of school that made Corinne the way she was,” Ivy baited Tony.

  He didn’t reply.

  “At art school, things can get competitive—cutthroat.” She saw Tony’s hand flex. “So I figured it was a school thing. . . .” She shrugged. “Anyway, that doesn’t make Corinne any less of an artist.”

  He snorted.

  “Is that what made you friends?” Ivy asked. “You’re an artist, aren’t you? Cars are your canvas. Was it a love of images that drew you together?”

  “Corinne used images to hurt.”

  Hurt—how? Ivy wanted to ask. Aloud she said, “Well, art is often provocative. It is a form of social conscience. I can think of several famous photographers who—”

  “Corinne had no social whatever. She didn’t care about issues, much less about other people!” His hands were shaking. As if suddenly aware that she had noticed, he shoved them in his pockets.

  “Okay, so it was art for art’s sake.” Ivy was pulling out every cliché she could think of to keep him talking.

  “Corinne loved power, not art. For her, a photographic image was power over others. She destroyed, not created.”

&nbs
p; Ivy wondered if Corinne’s photos had hurt or angered someone enough to attack her. “She liked to post her photos on the Internet. Did she get some people upset?”

  Tony eyed Ivy suspiciously for a moment. Perhaps a school friend should know that, Ivy thought. She was afraid she had blown her chance with him.

  He glanced toward the house, then shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. She’s dead now.”

  “Can I see what you’re working on?” Ivy asked, hoping that, like most artists and musicians, he liked an audience. “Is it a custom paint job?”

  Without replying, he started toward the closed car bay and Ivy followed, hoping this was an unspoken invitation.

  Leaning over, he yanked up the garage door. “The fumes will kill you,” he warned.

  “Wow! It’s incredible!” She didn’t have to fake admiration. With every quarter-inch covered with shapes and colors, details that must have taken months to paint, he had created a car writhing with snakes. Coiling, undulating, and intertwining bodies, burning eyes and yawning mouths—the details were beautiful, the whole work horrific.

  “Do you copy designs from different sources?”

  “Sometimes, but this one came from my dreams.”

  Ivy was glad she didn’t have his dreams and wondered what generated them, but made no further comment, instead inquiring about the kinds of paint he used. While she knew nothing about pearls, metal flakes, and chameleon pigments, she knew the kind of questions to ask from listening to Will talk about his artistic media. At last she attempted to shift their conversation back to Corinne.

  “Did Corinne ever help you design or paint a car?”

  Tony studied Ivy so intensely, she felt as if he were scraping the makeup off her face. “You really didn’t know her, did you?”

  “You mean know her well? She was in two of my classes, and, well, I guess everybody kind of puts on an act at school,” Ivy replied, trying to sound casual.

  “She made fun of this kind of work. She called it ‘Redneck Fantasy.’”

  “I see.”

  “She hated River Gardens—she was on her way up, she kept saying. Had a job at a mall, her own place, and art professors. She was just too good for the rest of us dummies who couldn’t figure out how to get out of here.” His voice was as bitter as the smell of the paint.

  “So I guess she didn’t have any friends left here.”

  “No real ones. Corinne watched out for only one person, herself.”

  “Apparently she didn’t watch out enough,” Ivy remarked.

  He cast a sidelong look then made a motion to pull down the overhead door. She stepped back quickly.

  “No one who knew Corinne blames Luke,” he said.

  “Because . . .” Ivy hesitated. “They don’t think he killed her?”

  “Because she got what she deserved.”

  “I see.”

  A long silence followed.

  Ivy pulled a small notebook from her pocket. “Maybe for the exhibition I could use your earlier quote, ‘For Corinne, image was power.’”

  “Sure,” he said, “along with my other quote: ‘She’s dead now.’”

  Turning his back on Ivy, he walked toward the house, where the woman with the same hair and eyes was watching from a window.

  Twenty-one

  “HEY, BABE, NEED A LIFT?” TRISTAN ASKED, SITTING IN the driver’s seat, sunglasses on, baseball cap pulled down, making a joke to disguise the fact that he had sat with his eyes trained on the entrance to the store lot for the last thirty minutes, nervously waiting for Ivy’s return.

  “I already have a boyfriend,” Ivy replied, then leaned down to peer in the window. “But you are kind of cute with that beard and all. Oh, why not?”

  She scooted around the car and slipped into the passenger seat.

  Tristan grasped her hand, intertwining his fingers with hers for a moment, then said, “Security has cruised by twice. I’m going to take off, then we can talk.”

  Ivy waited till they were weaving through streets beyond the boundaries of the neighborhood, before recounting her conversation with Tony.

  “So what do you think?” she asked at last.

  Tristan shook his head in disbelief. “Makes you wonder what Luke saw in Corinne.”

  “Tony saw it, too,” Ivy pointed out. “Remember, Alicia had said he was once Corinne’s confidante. I don’t know if she betrayed him in some way or just tossed him aside on her way out of River Gardens, but he’s pretty bitter.”

  “Bitter enough to kill her?”

  “Perhaps. The woman who seemed like an older sister definitely wanted me off the premises.”

  Tristan slowed for a traffic light. “Maybe she thinks he needs to be saved from something he did.”

  “Or something they did,” Ivy replied. “So now we have even more suspects.”

  “Because Corinne was a cyberbully.”

  “Looks that way. And if she was,” Ivy added, “our suspects could range far beyond River Gardens.” She reached behind the seat and dug out a folder of maps she had printed. “We should check out the shop where Corinne worked as well as her school, to see if she was upsetting people there, too.”

  Tristan nodded. “Before we do, let’s stop at her house and talk to the grandmother who is supposed to like me. After that, we should probably cut out of the neighborhood, before word gets around about us.”

  Fifteen minutes later they pulled up in front of a tall frame house surrounded by a chain-link fence. Two mailboxes with locks on them stood just inside the gate.

  “So who’s going to ring the doorbell?” Tristan asked quietly, pointing to a sign on the gate: BEWARE OF DOG. “Which one of us runs faster?”

  “Me,” Ivy whispered back, “but I bet you’re quicker getting over a fence, so you go and signal me when it’s all clear.”

  Tristan laughed softly. “It’s awfully quiet, and the windows are open. Let’s see if Fido barks.” He opened and closed the gate with a bang.

  The only sound was a motorcycle rumbling down the street.

  “You’d expect a path to be worn around the edge of the yard,” Ivy said. “Dogs don’t just run up and down a sidewalk.”

  “Maybe the dog is her stepfather,” Tristan joked.

  “Right. It’d be better for you not to run into him. I’ll see who’s home.”

  “No,” Tristan said quickly, his pride getting the better of him. “It’s both or neither of us.”

  “Stubborn angel!”

  Together they walked up the front path and rang the doorbell.

  After the second ring, a lace curtain was pulled aside, then let go. A short, squarely built woman with expressive eyes and thick white hair opened the door. Tristan removed his sunglasses. Her eyes widened as she peered up into the shade of his baseball cap. Before he could react, she reached and pulled the hat off his head. “Luke! It is you.” Tears filled her eyes.

  It was hard for Tristan, the way the old woman gazed at him. He felt so . . . unworthy around people like her and Alicia, who looked at him with a love that he had done nothing to deserve, people who were desperately glad to see him, a mere pretender.

  “I missed you, Luke. It broke my heart, losing Corinne. And then I lost you, too.” One worn hand cupped his cheek. “Come in, come in.” She turned to Ivy, then cocked her head at Tristan. “A friend?”

  “This is Gemma. She wanted to meet you, Gran.” Although Alicia said everyone called the old woman that, it was hard for Tristan to, because he suspected, coming from “Luke,” it would mean something to her. The look she gave him, her eyes glistening, told him he was right. He wanted to look away, but he knew that he couldn’t. “Gemma went to art school with Corinne.”

  Gran reached and took Ivy’s hands in her own, then turned and led them through a living room of assorted dark wood furniture. Her kitchen was scrubbed clean and made bright by chipped, colorful dishes.

  “Still like your coffee strong?” Gran asked, and, without waiting for an answer, poured Tristan a
cup. “How about you?”

  “Thank you, but no for me,” Ivy said

  Tristan sipped the coffee. It made Starbuck’s espresso taste like flavored water.

  “Tea?”

  “That would be perfect,” Ivy agreed.

  Gran turned on the kettle. “How have you been, Luke? Where have you been? There were so many rumors.”

  “Different places,” he replied.

  “Why didn’t you write me? I wouldn’t have told no one. I knew you could never hurt my Corinne.”

  “And I knew you wouldn’t tell anyone, but other people might have seen the letter and the postmark before it got to you.”

  “Excuses!”

  Tristan smiled—she sounded less like a scolding grandmother and more like a flirtatious girl who was letting him know she hadn’t gotten the attention she wanted. She smiled back, then placed a mug and two boxes of tea in front of Ivy. “You look like art school,” she remarked.

  “Thank you. . . . I think.”

  “How have you been, Gran?” Tristan asked.

  “You know, you know, nothing different ’cept I don’t have my Corinne. He’s the same.”

  Tristan figured that he was Corinne’s stepfather. “How’s her mom?”

  “Acting like a fool.”

  Tristan wondered what that meant, but nodded like he knew what she was talking about.

  “Corinne had some issues with her mom,” Ivy said.

  “Don’t we all,” Gran remarked.

  “But she always talked about you and—”

  The front door banged back against the wall. Ivy jumped, but Gran appeared used to it; her only response was to turn off the kettle, which was about to whistle.

  “Whose car is that?” a deep male voice demanded from the living room.

  Gran put her finger to her lips.

  “Gran?” he yelled. “Gran? I smell your stinkin’ coffee.”

  Tristan slipped on his sunglasses and hat.

  A large man with a shaved head entered the kitchen. He was neatly dressed in a white shirt, black tie, and black pants, his clothes seeming more refined than his manners. His high bald dome made his facial features look low on his face, pushed down toward his chin with a kind of meanness. Hank Tynan, Tristan thought.