Everlasting (20 page)

“Finding out is for my peace of mind, no one else’s.”

Except
, Ivy thought,
others’ safety could depend on it
.

Gran put aside the shirt she’d mended and picked up the jar of buttons. She shook it, held it up, squinting at it, then poured what was left in the jar on the table between them. Picking out a gold button, she studied it for a moment then held it out to Ivy.

“This is the only clue she left.”

IVY OPENED HER PALM, LETTING THE PIECE OF GOLD
drop in. “A cufflink.”

“Ever seen one like it?” Gran asked.

“No. My stepfather is the only person I’ve known to wear them to work. What is this design?” Ivy turned it around. “An arrow?”

“Looks it to me,” Gran said. “Nobody you know at school makes jewelry?”

Ivy hesitated. “No one I’m friends with. But Corinne and I didn’t share friends. It’s not like high school when
you have a clique you belong to. I assume Corinne gave this to you.”

“Left it here that night. Hid it in the button jar.”

Ivy turned the cufflink this way and that, looking for a fine engraving of initials or a jeweler’s signature. “I don’t see anything but the arrow on it. Are you sure Corinne was the one who dropped this in the button jar? You’re sure she put it there the night she was killed?”

Gran nodded. “When she was a little girl, she used to play with the buttons while I sewed, made pictures around them, used them for faces and flowers and things. The night she was murdered, she emptied the jar and was moving the buttons around like she did when she was little, then she put them all back. I didn’t think about it till after her funeral. I was sitting here, missing her, and poured out the buttons. There it was.”

Ivy wished she could take the cufflink and wondered who else Gran had shown it to. “And no one else who you showed it to had any idea where she got it?”

“I haven’t told nobody. Her mother’d sell it for its weight in gold. The police would put it in a plastic baggy and I’d never see it again. It’s the last thing I have from Corinne. It stays with me.”

Ivy handed it back to her.

“I’ll show it to Luke. Maybe he knows something,” Gran said.

“Let me get him,” Ivy offered, rising quickly, not wanting
Gran to walk in on Tristan searching the room. “Luke,” Ivy called out before reaching the bedroom door, “Gran has something curious to show you.”

Tristan followed her back to the room and studied the round cufflink. “Sorry,” he said, handing it back. “Never seen it.”

They stayed an hour longer, looking at old photos of Corinne, several of which had a young Luke in them, and listening to Gran’s stories. It occurred to Ivy that Corinne’s grandmother had not been able to share her grief with anyone else, including Corinne’s mother.

She held Ivy tightly when saying good-bye. “Just your age,” she kept repeating. Ivy walked ahead, letting Gran say a private good-bye to “Luke.” Then Tristan and Ivy drove off silently, not speaking till they were beyond the boundaries of River Gardens.

“That was hard.”

“Yeah,” Tristan agreed softly,

“When Gregory died, his dad cried like a baby. Andrew was horrified at what Gregory had done, but he still grieved for him.”

Tristan nodded. Ivy was wondering when he would ask about his own parents; whenever he was ready, she told herself.

“Art school next?” Tristan asked. “Think anyone will be there for summer session?”

“It’s worth a try. There should be dark rooms and computers where photography students hang out. And it’s not far from the mall where Corinne worked. Grab the maps in the back seat.”

They set their course, then Ivy recounted her conversation with Gran.

“So what do you think was going on?” Tristan asked.

“Gran wasn’t supporting Corinne, not if she was wondering if Corinne had a rich boyfriend to pay for her stuff. And I’ve worked at a mall shop. Even if school tuition was completely covered by scholarship, there’s no way Corinne was paying for her own apartment and buying nice things with a part-time salary from a store.”

“Then you’re thinking the same thing I am,” Tristan said. “The elementary school snitch—”

“And middle school cyberbully—” Ivy interjected.

“Figured out how profitable real blackmail could be.”

“Sure looks that way,” Ivy agreed. “All her electronics are gone—anything which might have photo files that could be used for blackmailing.”

“I wish I’d had more time to search,” Tristan said.

“Was anything damaged other than the handmade boxes and jars?”

“No. I think they were broken because someone was looking for a small object, like a flash drive.”

“Or a cufflink!” they said at the same time. Ivy added,
“Corinne anticipated that someone would come looking, so she put it where her victim wouldn’t think to search, in an old woman’s button jar.”

“So why is this cufflink so important?”

Ivy didn’t respond until she had merged off the exit ramp. “Well, if you lose a piece of jewelry somewhere, it proves you were there. And if you weren’t supposed to be there—”

“But you could always deny it,” Tristan pointed out. “You could claim you were set up, that someone else put it there. Although I suppose enough damage could be done just by others believing you left it there.”

“Not that many people wear cufflinks,” Ivy said.

“Yeah, only classy guys like me, working as a waiter at your mom’s wedding.”

Ivy laughed at the memory. “I guess it was the weight of those cufflinks that made you spill the trays. You also wore them for the prom.”

“So it’s possible Tony’s worn them,” Tristan said.

“And Hank, driving the execs around.”

“Or a professor type from her school. Or someone she caught doing something at the mall where she worked. The list is getting long,” Tristan noted.

“Or maybe she
did
have a rich boyfriend,” Ivy suggested, “one that was married, and she blackmailed him.” Ivy sighed. “We need to find out as much about her life away from home as her life in River Gardens.”

For the next three hours they tried and had little success. The two students they found working on photos in the school lab shrugged off their questions, saying Corinne hung around a little with everyone but not much with anyone; no one was close to her. The people in Corinne’s apartment building shut their doors in Ivy and Tristan’s faces, all except one neighbor who, after an extended interview, was discovered to have moved in after Corinne left. Ivy guessed the man was lonely for company. At the mall they received strong opinions from her coworkers. The two twenty-somethings clearly didn’t like her. She was “always watching us” they said, and she “sucked up” to the owner; Ivy figured that Corinne the snitch had made their lives miserable.

At last, tired from a long day of faking and questioning, Ivy and Tristan collapsed at a local Panera. They didn’t say a word till they were both digging into sandwiches, enjoying the comfort of a cushioned booth. They sat side by side, Tristan putting his long legs up on the bench opposite, Ivy leaning happily against him. She wondered if Tristan had any idea how precious these ordinary moments were to her.

During the meal Ivy told Tristan that Beth was continuing to act strange, but she stopped short of mentioning the attempt on her life. There was no need to worry him more, Ivy decided; it wasn’t going to happen again.

“Will’s keeping a close eye on her,” Ivy said, then
checked her phone for messages. “No news, and no news is good news.”

“Did you bring in your laptop?”

“In the big bag,” she replied, pointing.

He retrieved and opened it so they both could see the screen. “Let’s search for cufflinks and see what we can find out about designs and makers.”

They discovered that cufflinks came in every imaginable shape and color, and that there were a million specialty cufflinks featuring sports teams, rock stars, college seals, and animals, along with cufflinks with designs that made them “perfect gifts” for bankers, teachers, gardeners, gamblers, computer geeks, fantasy players . . .

“We should take a photo of the cufflink and send it to Suzanne. She’d enjoy this kind of research,” Tristan remarked. “It’s going to take days.”

“Try
cufflink
and
evidence
,” Ivy suggested. “I’ve been assuming that the owner of the cufflinks, our blackmail victim, has the matching link. But that would result in the situation you mentioned: Corinne claiming the link was found in a certain place, and the owner denying it. What if the police had the matching cufflink? What if they found it at a crime scene?”

Tristan typed the terms in the search box, then read aloud. “
CSI: Miami
Season 8—several entries for that. And a case in Colorado where the cufflink is forensic evidence,
and then there’s ‘evidence’ of ‘cufflinks’ in seventeenth-century England, and evidence they existed as far back as King Tut’s dynasty—who knew—and . . . Ivy, look!”

She leaned closer. “Click on it!”

The article had appeared in a Springfield, Massachusetts newspaper.

A 43-year-old motorist was killed early Saturday morning by a hit-and-run driver along Route 20, southeast of Brimfield, Massachusetts. Genevieve Gilchrest was found severely injured about fifteen feet from her car, a gray Nissan Altima, which was parked on the side of the road with a flat tire. She was flown to the Trauma Center at UMass Memorial in Worcester, where she died several hours later.

Police recovered a partial imprint of a second vehicle’s tire tracks near the victim’s car as well as a gold cufflink near the body. The cufflink, which appears to be custom made and bears a design resembling an arrow, may belong to someone who stopped to look at the victim, possibly the driver who struck her. The vehicle which struck Ms. Gilchrest is likely to have sustained obvious damage to its grill or hood as well as a cracked or broken windshield.

Crimestoppers is asking anyone with information
to come forward. All calls will be kept strictly confidential.

“It happened in May a year ago,” Tristan observed. He and Ivy checked through other entries listed by the search engine, then returned to the article. Mapquest showed Brimfield to be about an hour and fifteen minutes from Providence.

“That was the end of senior year for Corinne. What do you think she was doing there?”

“Maybe nothing,” Tristan replied. “The police found the cufflink mentioned here. She simply had to hear about it, recognize the cufflink, and know how to get her hands on the remaining one. Let’s see if the Providence papers carried the story . . . no.”

Tristan tapped his fingers on the edge of the keyboard, thinking. “The car would have damage. And the police would survey body shops in the area—in Massachusetts, but maybe not Rhode Island. What about—”

Ivy met his eyes. “Tony’s? Could be! Tristan, we need to convince Gran to turn the cufflink over to the police.”

“Or give it to us,” he said. “We can go back to Tony and press him for information.”

Ivy shook her head. “I think it’s too risky, and not just for us. What if Tony is innocently involved?”

“I guess you trust the police more than I do,” Tristan replied.

“I trust them more than I trust Corinne’s killer, and Luke’s, and Alicia’s. Tristan, at least one person—maybe several—is desperate to cover up something and willing to murder whoever gets in the way. Tonight we should keep our distance from both Providence and the Cape, and tomorrow, tell Gran what we’ve discovered. Then, after I drop you back at the church, I’ll call the police and let them take it from there. Okay?”

She looked into his eyes, not the hazel they once were, but a brilliant blue, and yet she knew from the way he looked at her, they were the windows to Tristan’s soul.

“So where are we spending tonight?” he asked, brushing her cheek with his fingers. “Another state park?”

She thought for a moment, then smiled. “I know a great tree house high on a ridge in Connecticut.”

FROM THE TIME TRISTAN HAD REALIZED WHO HE
was, he had thought about his parents and wondered about their life now. The dangers of the moment had often pushed back these thoughts, but during quiet stretches when he was alone in the church, he had recalled memories of his life with them with both joy and sadness. His meeting with Gran had made these memories weigh heavier on his heart.

Ivy had been driving for an hour and a half, and they were approaching the outskirts of his hometown, Stonehill,
when he said, “Gran will mourn Corinne for the rest of her life. She’ll never get over losing her.”

Ivy slowed the car down and looked over at him. “That’s how it is when someone you love dies.”

“My parents,” was all he could get out.

She nodded as if she understood what he was asking. “It’s been very hard for them. I think they’ve poured all the love they showered on you on the people they work with, your mom’s patients, and your dad’s. He’s still a chaplain at the hospital.”

“I can’t believe how self-centered I’ve been,” Tristan said. “I thought watching you from afar, being dead and not being able to reach you, was the worst thing that could ever happen. I felt sorry for myself. But it’s the people left behind who are most badly hurt.”

“Everywhere we looked,” Ivy said, “we saw places we had been with you. Everything we did, we thought of how we had done it with you, and longed to be able to do it again. It was incredibly painful. And yet, to try not to think about those things—to forget—was to lose you forever.

“After you died, Gregory encouraged me to forget. One day he became furious with your mother and told her to leave me alone, that it was over. Your mom said, ‘When you love someone, it’s never over. You move on because you have to, but you bring him with you in your heart.’ Your mom and dad, they still carry you with them in their hearts.”

Tristan swallowed hard, then watched the town of Stonehill unfold around him, the pretty houses and shops, Celentano’s Pizza, where he and his buddies used to eat, the home of his swim coach, the high school where he had met Ivy. He had seen the town at six p.m. a million times, the bustle around the commuter train station, the rush at the grocery story, parents and little kids and teens, and yet he watched it now with wonder, these scenes he once took for granted.