Perhaps it would be easier if she never recalled what had happened, Ivy thought. But every time she looked at the photo now, there was a prickling in the back of her mind. Something wouldn’t let her look away and forget. Ivy stared until the picture ran blurry. She didn’t realize she had begun to cry.
“Ivy … Ivy, don’t.”
Suzanne’s words jolted Ivy back into the present. As she lifted her head her friend crouched down next to the school locker. Her mouth was a grim, lipsticked line. Beth, who had also come back from orientation, stood above her, fumbling through her knapsack for tissues. She glanced down at Ivy, her own brimming eyes reflecting Ivy’s tears.
“I’m okay,” Ivy said, wiping her eyes quickly, looking from one to the other. “Really, I’m okay.”
But she could tell they didn’t believe her. Gregory had driven her to school that day, and Suzanne would be taking her home. It was as if they didn’t trust her to drive herself, as if they thought that at any minute she’d lose it and steer right off a cliff.
“You shouldn’t have that picture taped inside your locker,” Suzanne said. “Sooner or later you’re going to have to let go, Ivy. You’re just making yourself—” She hesitated.
“Crazy?”
Suzanne smoothed back her mane of black hair, then toyed with a gold hoop earring. She had never been shy about speaking her mind before, but now she was being careful. “It’s not healthy, Ivy,” she said at last. “It’s not good to have his picture here to remind you every time you open the door.”
“But I wasn’t the one who put it here,” Ivy told her.
Suzanne frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Did you see me do it?” Ivy asked.
“Well, no, but you’ve got to remember—” her friend began.
“I don’t.”
Suzanne and Beth exchanged glances.
“So someone else must have,” Ivy said, sounding a lot more certain than she was. “It’s a school picture. Anyone could get a copy of it. I didn’t tape it here, so someone else must have.”
There was a moment of silence. Suzanne sighed.
“Did you see the counselor today?” Beth asked.
“I just came from there,” Ivy told her, closing her locker, leaving the picture inside. She stood up next to Beth, whose outfit had also been selected by Suzanne. But Beth, no matter how fashionably dressed, would always look to Ivy like a wide-eyed owl, with her round face and feathers of frosted hair.
“What did Ms. Bryce say?” Beth asked as they started down the hall.
“Nothing much. I’m supposed to come talk to her twice a week and check in if I’m having a bad day. So you’re both coming Monday?” Ivy asked, changing the subject.
Suzanne’s eyes brightened. “To the Baines Bash? It’s a Labor Day tradition!” She sounded relieved to be talking about a party.
Ivy knew that the last month had been hard on Suzanne. She’d been so jealous of the attention Gregory paid Ivy that she’d stopped speaking to her oldest friend. Later, when Gregory told Suzanne that Ivy had tried to commit suicide, she blamed herself for turning her back. But Ivy knew that she herself was partly to blame for the rift. She’d gotten too close to Gregory. In the three weeks since the incident at the train station, Gregory had cooled toward Ivy, treating her more like a sister than a girl he was romantically interested in. Suzanne had readied out to Ivy again, and Ivy was glad for the change in both of them.
“We’ve been going to the Baines Bash since we were kids,” Beth told Ivy. “Everybody in Stonehill has.”
“Except me,” Ivy pointed out.
“And Will. He moved here last winter, like you,” Beth said. “I told him about the party, and he’s coming.”
“Is he?” Ivy had noticed that Beth and Will were hanging around together more and more. “He’s a nice guy.”
“Real nice,” Beth said enthusiastically.
They studied each other for a moment. Were Beth and Will getting to be more than friends? Ivy wondered. After writing all those romantic stories, maybe Beth had finally fallen. It wouldn’t be hard to do: A lot of girls had crushes on Will. Ivy herself found that whenever she looked into his dark brown eyes—She caught herself and quickly shoved aside that thought. She would never let herself fall in love again.
The girls pushed through the school doors, and Suzanne led them on a roundabout route to their cars that conveniently ran past the field where the football team was practicing.
“I have to get a team program,” Suzanne said after several minutes of watching. “What if I start drooling over number forty-nine and discover he’s just a sophomore?”
“A hunk’s a hunk,” Beth replied philosophically. “And older women with younger guys are in.”
“Don’t tell Gregory I’m looking,” Suzanne said in a stage whisper as they moved on toward their cars.
“Isn’t looking allowed?” Beth asked innocently.
“On second thought, tell him, tell him!” Suzanne said, flinging her arms out dramatically. “Let him know, Ivy, I’m out and looking.”
Ivy just smiled. From the beginning, Suzanne and Gregory had played mind games with each other.
“I mean, why should I tie myself down to one guy?” Suzanne continued.
Ivy knew this was just an act. Suzanne had been obsessed with Gregory since March and wanted desperately to tie him down to her.
“I’m going to start at the Baines Bash.” She unlocked her car door. “That’s where a lot of school romances have started, you know.”
“How many are you planning for yourself?” Ivy teased.
“Six.”
“Great,” Beth said. “That’s six more heartbreaks for me to write about.”
“I’d settle for five romances,” Suzanne added, giving Ivy a sly look, “if you’ll take the other one and stop thinking about Tristan.”
Ivy didn’t reply.
Suzanne got in her car, closed the door, and reached across to unlock the passenger-side door. But before Ivy could open it, Beth caught her hand. She spoke quickly, quietly: “You can’t forget, Ivy. Not yet. It would be dangerous to forget.”
In the back of her mind, Ivy felt that prickling feeling again.
Then Beth yanked open her own car door, hopped in, and drove away fast.
Suzanne glanced in the rearview mirror, frowning. “I don’t know what’s gotten into that girl. Lately she’s been hopping around like a scared rabbit. What did she just say to you?”
Ivy shrugged. “Just gave me a little advice.”
“Don’t tell me—she got another one of her premonitions.”
Ivy remained silent.
Suzanne laughed. “You’ve got to admit, Ivy, Beth’s flaky. I never take her ‘advice’ seriously. You shouldn’t, either.”
“I haven’t so far,” Ivy said. And both times, she thought, I’ve been sorry I didn’t.
P3-2
“Yo! Romeo! Where art thou? Rooo-me-ooo,” Lacey called.
Tristan, who had been following Ivy down the wide center stair of the Baines home, stopped at the landing and stuck his head out an open window.
Lacey smiled up at him from the middle of a flower bed, the only piece of Andrew Baines’s property that hadn’t been overrun by the hundreds of guests with their picnic blankets and baskets. A Caribbean steel band was warming up on the patio. Paper lanterns hung from the pines around the tennis court; beneath them tables were laid out with refreshments.
Long before Tristan met Ivy, long before Andrew surprised everyone by marrying Maggie, Tristan had come to this annual party. He remembered how huge the white clapboard home had seemed to him as a little boy, with its east and west wings and double chimneys and rows of heavy black shutters—like a house that would be pictured in his mother’s New England calendar.
“Ditch the chick, Romeo,” Lacey called up to him. “You’re missing a great party. Especially under some of the bushes.”
Even now, after two and a half months of being an angel, T
ristan’s first instinct was to quiet her. But no one else could hear them, except when Lacey chose to project her voice, a power he hadn’t yet mastered. He gave her a lopsided smile, then withdrew from the window. At the same moment that Tristan turned back toward the stairs, Ivy stopped and turned toward the window.
Instantly he began hoping. She senses something, he thought.
But Ivy looked right through him, then without hesitation moved past him. She leaned upon the sill of the window, gazing wistfully at the scene before her. Tristan stood beside her and watched as torches were lit, flaring up suddenly in the summer twilight.
Ivy turned her head, and Tristan did, too, following her gaze to Will, who was standing at the edge of the crowd, surveying it. Suddenly Will looked up, meeting Ivy’s eyes. Tristan knew what Will saw: brilliant green eyes and a tumbleweed of blond hair falling over her shoulders.
Ivy looked down at Will for what seemed like forever, then stepped back abruptly, her hands going up to her cheeks. Tristan pulled back just as fast. Take a picture, Will, it lasts longer, he thought, then quickly descended the steps.
Lacey was waiting on the patio, amusing herself by hitting the drummer’s cymbal every time he turned his back. Of course, the drummer didn’t see her, not even the purple shimmer that some believers glimpsed. She winked at Tristan.
“I’m not here to fool around,” he said.
“Okay, sweetie, let’s get down to business,” Lacey said, giving him a little push. Though they could slip through other people’s bodies, they appeared and felt solid to each other.
“I want to show you someone who’s gulping down drinks over by the tennis court,” Lacey told him, but first she headed for Philip’s tree house. She simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to knock away the tree’s swing seat when a girl in a pink sundress tried to sit on it.
“Lacey, act your age.”
“I will,” she said, “just as soon as you decide to act like an angel.”
“Seems to me I am,” he said.
She shook her head. Her purple spiked hair, like his own thick brown crop, did not move with the breeze. “Repeat after me,” Lacey instructed in an obnoxious teacher voice. “Ivy’s breathing, Will’s breathing, I’m not.”
“It’s just that she looked straight at me at the train station,” Tristan said. “I was sure she believed again. When I pulled her and Philip back, I was sure Ivy saw me.”
“If she did, she’s forgotten it,” Lacey said.
“I have to get her to remember. Beth—”
“Is feeling too rattled to help you out,” Lacey cut in. “She predicted the break-in, then foresaw danger that night at the train station. She has a special gift, but she’s too frightened to be an open channel anymore.”
“Then Philip.”
“Philip! Oh, puh-lease. How long do you think Gregory’s going to put up with the kid who keeps talking about angel Tristan?”
Tristan knew she was right.
“That leaves Will,” Lacey said. She walked backward and pointed a long purple nail at him. “So. Just how jealous are you?”
“Very,” he replied honestly, then sighed. “You know how you feel about the actress who took your place in that film, the one you said stinks?”
“She does stink,” Lacey said quickly.
“Multiply that feeling by a thousand. And the thing is, Will’s not a bad guy. He’d be good for Ivy, and all I want is what’s good for Ivy. I love her. I’d do anything for her—”
“Die, for instance,” Lacey said. “But you’ve already tried that, and look where it got you.”
Tristan grimaced. “Time with you.”
She grinned, then nudged him. “Look over there. Next to the lady who looks like she got her perm and cut at the poodle parlor. Recognize him?”
“It’s Caroline’s friend,” Tristan said, observing the tall dark-haired man. “The one who leaves roses on her grave.”
“He creamed Andrew at tennis and looked like he enjoyed every minute of it.”
“Did you find out his name?” Tristan asked.
“Tom Stetson. He’s a teacher at Andrew’s college. I tell you, who needs soap operas when you can hang around Stonehill? Do you think it was a long, torrid, secret affair? Do you think Andrew knew? Yo, Tristan!”
“I hear you,” he said, but his eyes were focused on the crowd twenty feet away, where Ivy, Will, and Beth were talking.
“Oh, the arrows of love,” Lacey crooned. He hated it when she exaggerated her words like that “I swear, Tristan, that girl’s put so many holes in you, one day you’re going to fold over like a slice of Swiss cheese.”
He grimaced.
“It’s pathetic, the way you look at her with those big puppy dog eyes. She doesn’t even see you. I just hope that one day—”
“Know what I hope, Lacey?” Tristan asked, swinging around to her. “I hope you fall in love.”
Lacey blinked with surprise.
“I hope you fall in love with a guy who looks right past you.”
Lacey looked away.
“And I hope you do it soon, before I finish my mission,” Tristan went on. “I want to be around to make lots of jokes about it.”
He expected Lacey to make a snappy comeback, but she kept her eyes away from him, watching Ivy’s cat, Ella, who had followed them through the crowd.
“I can’t wait till the day,” Tristan continued, “that Lacey Lovitt falls in love with some guy beyond her reach.”
“What makes you think I haven’t?” she muttered, then crouched down to scratch Ella. She petted the cat for several minutes.
After two years of procrastinating on her own mission, Lacey had developed more endurance and more powers than Tristan. He knew that she could keep the tips of her fingers materialized to scratch the cat much longer than he.
“Come on, Ella,” Lacey said softly, and Tristan saw the cat’s ears prick. Lacey was projecting her voice.
Ella followed Lacey, and Tristan followed Ella to a refreshment table. Eric and Gregory were standing there. Eric was arguing with Gregory and the bartender, trying to convince them to give him a beer.
Lacey gave Ella a nudge, and the cat leaped up lightly on the table. The three guys didn’t notice her.
“A bowl of milk, please.”
“Just a minute, miss,” the bartender said, turning away from Gregory and Eric. His eyes widened as they fell upon Ella.
Ella winked.
The bartender turned back to the boys. “Did you hear that?”
“Milk, and hurry it up, please.”
Now Eric and the bartender stared at the cat. Gregory craned his neck to glance behind Eric. “What’s the problem?” he said impatiently. “Just fix an iced tea.”
“I prefer milk.”
The bartender lowered his face to Ella’s. She meowed at him and leaped down from the table. Lacey snickered, but she had stopped projecting her voice, and only Tristan could hear her now.
The bartender, his brow still furrowed, poured the iced tea for Eric. Then Gregory flicked his head to the right, and he and Eric started off in that direction. Tristan trailed them as they wove their way through the crowd and beyond it, to the stone wall that marked the edge of the property.
Far below them was the tiny train station and the track that hugged the river. Even Tristan could hardly believe that he and Philip had made it down this side of the ridge. It was steep and rocky, with little to cling to but narrow stone ledges and an occasional shrub or dwarfed tree.
“No way,” Gregory muttered to himself. “That kid’s lying to me, covering up. Who’s in with him?”
“Just let me know when you’re talking to me,” Eric said cheerfully.
Gregory glanced at him.
“You’ve been doing it a lot lately, talking to yourself”—Eric grinned—“or maybe to the angels.”
“Screw the angels,” Gregory said.
Eric laughed. “Yeah, well, maybe you should start praying to them. You’ve gotten yo
urself in deep, Gregory.” His face grew serious, his eyes narrowing. “Real deep. And you’re getting me in with you.”
“You idiot! You’re getting yourself in. You’re always high—and you’re always messing up. I’m asking you one more time, where’re the clothes?”
“I’m telling you one more time, I don’t have them.”
“I want the cap and the jacket,” Gregory said. “And you’re going to find them for me, because if you don’t, Jimmy’s not getting the money you owe.” Gregory tilted back his head. “And you know what that means. You know how touchy those dealers can be when they don’t get their money.”
Eric’s mouth twitched. Without alcohol he could not stand up to Gregory. “I’m sick of it,” he whined. “I’m sick of doing your dirty work.”
He started to walk away, but Gregory yanked him back by the arm. “But you’ll do it, won’t you? And you’ll keep quiet about things, because you need me. You need your fix.”
Eric struggled weakly. “Let me go. Someone’s watching.”
Gregory loosened his grip and looked around. Eric quickly stepped out of his reach. “Be careful, Gregory,” he warned. “I can feel them watching.”
Gregory arched his eyebrows and began to laugh menacingly. Even when Eric was out of sight, he continued to chuckle.
Lacey wriggled her shoulders. “Major creepo,” she said.
They watched as Gregory worked his way back into the party, talking and smiling at the guests.
“What do you think Eric’s dirty work was?” Lacey asked Tristan. “Knocking off Caroline? Cutting your brake line? Attacking Ivy in Andrew’s office?” She materialized her fingers and hurled a stone as far as she could over the ridge. “Of course, we don’t even know for sure if Caroline was murdered or if your brake line was deliberately cut.”
Tristan nodded. “I’m going to have to time-travel through Eric’s memories again.”
Lacey had picked up another stone and now dropped it to her side. “You’re going back through Eric’s mind? You’re crazy, Tristan! I thought you learned your lesson the first time. His circuits are fried, it’s too dangerous, and his memories won’t give you any proof.”
Kissed by an Angel/The Power of Love/Soulmates Page 30
