Everafter

  Anyone watching them, anyone who didn’t know what she knew about Bryan, would see only the smiling green eyes and playful manners of a guy who liked nothing better than to have a good time.

  “You know what I’m capable of, Ivy.” His genial face made his words all the more chilling. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  She wanted to run down the path to the cottage, but she forced herself to walk at an easy pace. “I haven’t said a word to anyone,” she assured him. “But I’m surprised by what you divulged to the police and Kelsey, telling them you were chasing Luke. I can’t believe you called into question Alicia’s death, which they were ready to dismiss as suicide. You’re inviting attention that we could all do without.”

  “I had to offer them some excuse after they fished me out of the canal. Those damn helicopters. Too bad they didn’t reel in Luke. He jumped before I did.”

  “Did he?” Ivy replied quickly. “Did he swim away?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Ivy!”

  So maybe Tristan was safe!

  “Where is he?” Bryan demanded.

  “Several days west of here, I hope.”

  They stopped at the end of the path near the large garden that separated the inn from the girls’ cottage.

  “No way,” Bryan replied. “Luke’s a stupid homing pigeon, always returning to his nest. He’ll come back to you.”

  “But it’s too dangerous for him. Just like it is for you and me,” Ivy added, wanting to make a point. “The police are watching us both very carefully, Bryan.” Right now, it was the only argument she knew that might keep Bryan from killing “Luke” the moment he found him.

  “For a while maybe,” he said. “But the police have a short attention span, and you and Luke have no evidence against me. The cufflink’s at the bottom of the canal, the deepest part of it.”

  Ivy’s heart fell. Their one piece of evidence, gone.

  Bryan leaned close to her, reaching for a lock of her hair, twining it around his finger. “If you want to survive this, if you want Luke to, don’t tell the cops anything. You may think they can protect you. They may tell you they can, but they’re slow and clumsy—and I’m not.”

  The cottage door opened. Ivy was glad it was Kelsey who’d spotted them; her roommate’s jealousy would quickly put an end to this conversation.

  Bryan let go of Ivy’s hair, then glanced down at her bare arm. “Goose bumps, on a hot day like this!”

  Kelsey strode toward them, and Ivy headed for the inn.

  Inside the large, square kitchen where the girls and Will began each workday, Beth and Kelsey’s aunt was brewing tea.

  “Want some? Apple-cranberry,” she said, brushing back strands of thick red hair that had fallen out of her French braid. “Though I think I could use something stronger than tea.” Her usual crisp button-down shirt was wrinkled. Despite her smile, sun-pinked cheeks, and sprinkle of freckles, she looked exhausted. Food in plastic containers and a key with a large S attached to the ring lay on the kitchen table.

  “How are the Steadmans?” Ivy asked, guessing it was their key.

  “Struggling,” Aunt Cindy replied. “They closed up their beach house today and are returning to Boston.”

  Ivy accepted a cup of tea. “I felt so bad for them. When I saw his little brother and sister at the funeral . . .”

  Aunt Cindy nodded. “I appreciate the way you girls and Will have pitched in around here the last several days, especially without Beth.”

  “No problem.”

  “As soon as Beth gets back,” Aunt Cindy continued, “I want to give Will, Dhanya, and Kelsey some extra days off. How are you holding up?”

  “Great,” Ivy replied, despite her own sleepless nights. “I had my extra days off. And we’ve got the routine down now, which makes it much easier.”

  Aunt Cindy nodded, then carried the Steadmans’ key over to the pegboard of room duplicates. “Almost forgot to tell you,” she said, glancing at the staff mailboxes, “I took a phone message for you.”

  “My mother?” Only their parents were allowed to call on the inn’s landline.

  Aunt Cindy smiled and returned to the table. “No, a gentleman caller.”

  “Oh, sorry,” Ivy said quickly.

  “That’s okay. He had such a nice voice, I wished he were calling me. Billy . . . Billy Bigelow.”

  Ivy caught her breath. When she and Tristan were getting to know each other, he had told her that he, too, enjoyed “classical music”—only his idea of classical music wasn’t Mozart or Mahler, but Broadway shows from his parents’ collection of musicals. Carousel was a favorite, and Billy Bigelow was the romantic lead in the story. Tristan had given himself an alias he knew she’d recognize!

  Ivy quickly crossed the kitchen to the wooden cubbyholes and picked up the message slip.

  Time: 6:10 p.m.

  To: Ivy

  From: Billy Bigelow

  (203) 555-0138

  Vacationing here a few days, borrowing a boat on Nauset Harbor.

  Come by when you’re free.

  “I take it from the glow on your face that this is an invitation you’ve been hoping for,” Aunt Cindy said. “A sweetheart from home?”

  Ivy tucked the note in her pocket, smiling. “You might say that!”

  TRISTAN SAT ON THE FLOOR OF THE WHEELHOUSE, watching the eastern sky darken, listening and waiting. With his leap into the canal, he had lost Ivy’s number, but the Orleans information booth had listed the Seabright Inn, and he’d talked a kid into lending his phone. The last four digits of the number he’d left for Ivy matched the last four of the boat’s registration, painted on the bow.

  Lying back, hands behind his head, lulled by the water’s rhythmic lapping, Tristan fell asleep. He awoke to the whistled melody of a song from Carousel. Scrambling to his feet, he whistled back and heard a light bump against the side of the fishing boat. He climbed over a jumble of crusted wire traps. Ivy smiled up at him from the kayak, her hair a gold tangle sparkling with sea mist. Half mermaid, half angel, he thought. For a moment they just gazed at each other.

  “Billy Bigelow?” she asked.

  He laughed, and felt the laughter in every part of his body, the way he always did with her. “I knew you’d find me.”

  “Permission to board, sir?”

  He tossed her a rope and she handed him an oar, then a backpack. When he reached for her, she sprang easily onto the deck. Pulling her close, he buried his face in her damp hair, then kissed the high line of her cheekbone. His mouth found hers in a sweet kiss. “I missed you,” he said, losing the last of those words in another, deeper kiss.

  He felt her shiver and wrapped his arms around her tightly, as if he could keep all that was evil away from her, as if he could hold them together forever.

  “I love you, Ivy.”

  “I love you, Tristan.” They kissed again. “I was so afraid,” she said. “You could have drowned!”

  “Drowned—with you as my swim coach?” he teased.

  She laughed and rested her head against his chest.

  “I was closer to shore than Bryan,” Tristan said, “and I had swum farther downstream from the bridge. Once the police were busy with pulling him out, it was easy for me to slip ashore.”

  “He said the cufflink is gone. He knew we had it.”

  “I think he’d trailed us to Gran’s. On the bridge, he demanded it.” Tristan took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “When he caught up with me, I threw it over his head, so he’d chase it. . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? No! It was smart,” Ivy insisted. “He would have killed you on the spot. We’ll find some other piece of evidence.”

  Tristan shook his head; the truth was the truth. “We’ve already searched Corinne’s room at home from top to bottom. And her apartment was ransacked.”

  “So the evidence is somewhere else now.”

  “At the bottom of the ocean,” he replied. “Maybe you’ve noticed: Bryan likes to leave people and other disposable thin
gs in deep water.”

  “We can’t give up, Tristan. If we want to be together, we have to clear Luke’s name.”

  He held her close again and rested his chin on her head. “We have to do a lot more than that.”

  “When you were on the bridge, did you learn anything new from Bryan?”

  Tristan told her what Bryan had admitted—boasted of, actually. A year and a half earlier, when he struck the woman on the side of the road, he left her there to die, prizing his hockey career above her life. He knew he could rely on his old friend Tony to fix his car and not report the drunken hit-and-run, but he hadn’t counted on Corinne being at the body shop that morning, working on a photo essay. She’d always been a snoop and a blackmailer, and she found in Bryan’s damaged car the custom-made cufflink he had worn to the sports banquet. Unfortunately for Bryan, the police found the other cufflink at the site of the accident.

  As Ivy and Tristan had suspected, Bryan grew tired of paying off Corinne; so he strangled her, framing her old boyfriend, Luke. But Bryan soon realized he couldn’t rely on Luke to stay out of police view. He killed him, too, dumping him in the ocean off Chatham. After Ivy and Tristan discovered that Alicia could provide Luke with an alibi, Bryan added her to his list of victims.

  “There’s evidence somewhere,” Ivy said. “The more you kill, the more witnesses and evidence you leave behind. Somebody saw something each time Bryan murdered. Somebody has or knows something very useful to us, but just doesn’t realize it.”

  “Ivy, most of the murders happened months ago, and the more time passes, the harder it is—”

  “Stop and think about it,” she interrupted. “A lot of people were at Max’s party the night Bryan slipped off to kill Luke. A lot of people went to the sports banquet the night of the hit-and-run. . . . Of course! They would have taken photos at the banquet. I bet they hired a photographer to sell pictures to all the proud parents.” She laughed and picked up a plastic buoy, shook Tristan’s hand, and awarded him the float as if it was a trophy. “Smile,” she said. “Your cufflink is showing!”

  He laughed with her but quickly grew serious again. Bryan was a threat, Tristan thought, but Gregory was an enemy that no gun or human authority could stop. And Gregory had one goal: to kill Ivy. Who would he possess next? Both Dhanya and Kelsey would give him easy access to Ivy.

  “We need to find you a safe place, Tristan, somewhere far from here.”

  “As long as you’re with me,” he said.

  “No, we need to stay separate—just for a while.”

  “No way!”

  “Bryan’s lying low right now, pretending we have a deal,” she went on. “But he killed everyone else who knew something that would incriminate him. Why would he spare us?”

  “Because,” Tristan said, “from the police’s point of view, Bryan is friends with too many corpses.”

  “Tristan, don’t you see? That’s exactly how he’ll use us—to cover himself and neatly tie together the murders of Corinne and Alicia. He can finally get his frame-up of Luke to work if he kills us together, so neither of us can talk. He’ll make it look like a murder-suicide, the end of Luke’s killing spree against the women he loved. The way to stop Bryan is to put distance between you and me—”

  “I’ll never leave you!”

  “Tristan,” she pleaded. “We want the same thing, to be together. But for a while we need to be apart.”

  “I’ve been apart from you. I won’t leave you again.”

  Ivy closed her eyes and leaned against him, silent for several minutes. At last she said, “Does this boat sail? If I brought fuel for it, could it go?”

  Tristan shook his head. “I don’t know anything about boat engines, but the electronics are stripped.”

  “Then you’ll be safer on land. Here your only escape is to swim.”

  “I could go back to Nickerson.”

  “No, too many park rangers have seen your photo.” She hesitated, then said, “I know a place close by that you could use. The family has just left there and Aunt Cindy has the key. It’s hanging on the pegboard—I can make a copy.”

  “How long will they be gone?”

  “I don’t know. Their son was killed on the beach the afternoon Gregory left Beth. He was struck by a bolt of lightning.”

  Tristan took a step back from Ivy and stared at her, horrified. “Gregory will kill anyone!” But he knew there was one person in particular he wanted to kill.

  Fear and anger ground a fist in Tristan’s gut. Unlike Bryan, Gregory wouldn’t be cowed by the threat of getting caught. Ivy’s safety depended on him. He would destroy Gregory if it was the last thing he did.

  Three

  “BETH’S BACK!”

  Late Thursday morning, Ivy looked up from the bed she was making and grinned. Will, who had the day off, stood outside the window of the barn suite, his tan body glistening with seawater, his hair spiky. “When you’re done, meet us on the beach steps,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later, Ivy crossed the lawn that lay between the inn and the edge of the sandy, shrub-covered bluffs. Beth and Will stood on the landing that was halfway down the steps, looking out at the glittering ocean. From her view at the top, Ivy’s eyes traveled to her left, where the sea swept around a long point of land, pooling behind the line of dunes to make Nauset Harbor. She said a prayer for Tristan. She had told him she wouldn’t be back until she had copied the key to the beach house, not wanting to draw more attention to the fishing boat until he was ready to leave it.

  Beth turned suddenly, as if the psychic part of her had sensed Ivy approaching. Ivy rushed down the steps.

  “Whoa! Slow down!” Will exclaimed. “I can’t catch both of you.”

  Ivy hugged Beth. “I’m so glad to see you.”

  “Me too! I mean, I’m glad to see you,” Beth said, and they laughed.

  Beth’s blue eyes were without the shadow that had darkened them when Gregory possessed her. Her light brown hair, streaked with summer sun, lay softly against her apple cheeks. “How are you feeling?” Ivy asked.

  “Good, really good. How about you?”

  “Great, now that you’re back. We missed you!”

  Ivy sat on a bench and Beth joined her. Will sat across from them, his paddle and board propped against the railing.

  “I missed you, too, but I had you with me,” Beth said, lightly touching the pendant that Ivy and Will had given her.

  Ivy squeezed Beth’s hand, then looked across at Will. She remembered the fear and pain that had lined his face when they found Beth in the bell tower with a rope around her neck. She remembered the agony in his voice: Ivy, if I lose her, I can’t go on! Now his brown eyes were shining.

  Beth reached for Will’s hand and Ivy saw the way his fingers twined with Beth’s, as if he was acutely aware of each place where their hands touched. Ivy knew that Will loved Beth as deeply as Ivy did. But had something changed—was he in love?

  Will pulled back suddenly. Beth bit her lip, then tucked her hand beneath her leg. Ivy wished she had been more discreet in her staring. Trying to steer them onto a light topic, she said, “You’re back just in time, Beth. Philip, Mom, and Andrew are coming to the Cape Sunday. You guys better get cracking on The Angel and the Alley Cat.”

  It was a graphic novel, a series of adventures that Will and Beth had created for Philip.

  “I’ve got a zillion ideas,” Beth said. “I just hope my illustrator can keep up with me.”

  Will laughed.

  “But first Will’s going to teach me how to stand-up paddleboard,” Beth said to Ivy. “Do you think I can get my hair to spike like that?”

  Will self-consciously brushed down his damp hair, and Ivy sat back, smiling to herself.

  “Ivy,” Beth said, her face growing serious, “what’s going on with Luke? Will told me what happened Saturday night.”

  What Bryan claimed to have happened, Ivy silently corrected her friend.

  She didn’t want to endanger Will and Beth by
revealing that Bryan was the murderer—the kind who killed those who knew what he had done. But it was time to tell them about Tristan’s return; she and Tristan might need their help.

  “Luke isn’t who Bryan thinks he is.”

  Will and Beth looked at her, puzzled.

  “The real Luke died. He drowned off Chatham.”

  “Drowned!” Will exclaimed. “Then who is—”

  “Tristan. It’s Luke’s body, but Tristan’s spirit.”

  A small gasp escaped Beth.

  “Tristan’s occupying Luke?” Will asked. As Ivy explained everything, Will gazed out at the ocean, his eyes darting over the vast blue, as if he was seeing anew the reel of events from the last five weeks.

  “It’s no more unbelievable than Gregory possessing me,” Beth remarked quietly.

  “There is one difference,” Ivy told her. “Tristan has taken on all of Luke’s body. Luke’s spirit—his mind, his memories, his soul—is gone. He died and went on.”

  “Does Gregory know that Tristan has returned?” Beth asked.

  “Not yet. Not as far as we can tell.”

  Will frowned. “Where’s Gregory now?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’ll be back,” Beth said. “He wants revenge.”

  They sat silently. Beth’s cell phone rang, and she automatically shut it off.

  “It’s your mom,” Ivy and Will said at the same time, recognizing the ringtone.

  Beth read the text, then pulled the car keys out of her pocket. “Be back in a minute.”

  When she had disappeared, Will turned to Ivy. “I’m really sorry, Ivy. I didn’t understand what was happening when Tristan first came back. I felt like you had just thrown me aside.”

  “After all you had done for me!” Her voice shook a little.

  Will leaned forward, making her look at him. “I knew you had never stopped loving Tristan. Even when I was most in love with you, I knew you loved him, too. And that was okay with me. I trusted your heart—knew it was large enough to love us both. Then when this stranger came between us, I couldn’t understand. I was so angry—at you and at myself.”