'Stay with her, Tristan,' Lacey said. 'Keep your focus.'
Back up. Delete word. Oh, bitter heart, Tristan prompted Beth.
'Oh, bitter heart, lonely heart,' Beth typed, then paused.
They were both stuck, then Tristan saw the connection: You should not stay home alone.
'You should not stay home alone,' Beth typed.
It's not safe alone, he thought.
'It's not safe alone,' she typed.
Then, before he could send her a message about anything else, she wrote on: 'But is my heart safe alone with him?'
No,he thought.
'Yes,' Beth replied.
No!
'Yes!'
No!
'Yes!' Beth frowned.
Tristan sighed. Of course, she wanted the romance to work out and have the girl who was gazing at the night sky not be lonely anymore. But Tristan wanted to issue a warning. If Ivy was alone with the wrong guy… 'What's wrong?' asked Ivy. 'I've got that funny feeling again,' Beth said. 'It's really strange, like there's someone inside my head, saying things.'
'Oh, you writers.' Suzanne snorted. Ivy bent down to look at the screen. ''No! Yes! No! Yes!'' she read, then laughed a little sadly. 'It sounds like me when I first met Tristan.' 'It's Tristan,' Beth typed quickly.
Ivy stopped smiling.
Tristan pressed on, and Beth typed as fast as he thought: 'Be careful. Ivy. It's dangerous. Ivy. Don't stay alone. Love you. Tristan.'
Ivy straightened up. 'That's not funny, Beth! That's stupid, and mean!'
Beth stared at the screen, her mouth open in disbelief.
Suzanne leaned down to read it. 'Beth!' she said. 'How could you? Ivy, wait!'
But Ivy was already halfway out of the store. Suzanne ran after her. Beth stared at the screen, her entire body shaking. Tristan slipped out of Beth's mind, exhausted.
'Would you like to print that out now?' the salesman asked, walking toward her.
Beth shook her head slowly and keyed in Delete Page. 'Not this time,' she said with tears in her eyes.
Every effort Tristan made to reach Ivy that week failed. What was worse, his attempts at warning her had pushed her further away from him and from those who cared for her. She was avoiding Beth, and now Philip too, after the little boy told her his angel said she must not stay alone. Tristan could have tried once more through Will, but he knew Ivy would just build another wall, a higher one.
Thursday night he headed for Riverstone Rise Cemetery, planning to get some rest, hoping to stave off the dreamless darkness so that he could keep watch over Ivy through the long weekend. On the way to his own grave, Tristan decided to go by Caroline's plot and see if fresh roses had been left there. He thought that Lacey was right: they had to find out who Caroline's visitor was and what he knew about her death.
Tristan crept along the cemetery road as if he were still flesh and blood, afraid of rousing the peaceful dead. In the moonlight, the white stones made a stark cityscape: obelisks towering like skyscrapers, mausoleums standing as mansions, the low rounded stones and shiny rectangular blocks marking neighborhoods of ordinary people. It was a still and eerie city, the city of the dead— my city, he thought grimly. Then he recognized the stone that marked one corner of the Baines family plot-It was a well-kept plot with some ornate statuary, figures that seemed to watch Tristan as he approached Caroline's grave from behind. When he walked past her marker, he spun around with surprise. Sitting on Caroline's grass, lying back against her stone as if he were lounging in bed, was Eric. His arms and legs were limp, and his head was turned sideways, his cheek flat against the stone. For a moment Tristan wasn't sure if Eric was breathing. Moving closer, he saw that Eric's pale eyes were open, his pupils so dilated they looked as if he had drunk up two pools of night.
He was breathing softly, and he was mumbling something — something that made sense only to a mind high on drugs. Tristan wondered if Eric was capable of certain actions in this state. Could he stand up, could he walk? With his mind messed up like this, could he do something he'd wish later on that he hadn't done? Materializing his fingers, Tristan ran them across Eric's upturned palm.
Eric grabbed Tristan's fingers and for a moment Tristan was caught. Then he let his fingers dissolve and pulled himself free.
'Been a while,' Eric said, flexing the hand that had grabbed hold of Tristan. 'Been too long, Caroline, sorry about that. A lot's been going on, a lot more than anybody knows.' He laughed quietly and pointed, as if he could see her directly in front of him. 'Of course, you know.'
'I don't know,' Tristan replied. 'What's going on? Tell me.'
Eric cocked his head, and for a moment Tristan thought he had heard the question.
'Yeah… probably,' Eric said, answering some other question. 'But it could be, you know, messy. I don't like things… messy.'
Messy? Tristan wondered. What did that mean? Complicated? Bloody?
Eric sat straight up now, blinking his eyes, attentive to the voice he was hearing in his head. His hair was almost white in the moonlight, and his shadowed eyes stared holes through Tristan.
'You mean Ivy. Her name's Ivy,' Eric said, waving his bony hand in the air. It passed directly through Tristan, chilling him like the touch of a skeleton.
'Well, what can I do?' Eric said. 'You know where I'm at, Caroline. Don't push me! Back off!' He jumped to his feet and stood there, teetering.
Then he started to laugh low in his throat. 'Yeah, yeah,' he said. 'This weekend everyone's going to the lake but Ivy.' Eric smiled as if he'd just heard something funny. 'Now, that's not a very nice thing to say!'
What, in his drug-crazed mind, did he think Caroline had said?
'Hey!' Eric shouted. 'I said don't push me.' He took two steps sideways. 'Back off, Caroline. I don't want to listen to you anymore. Back off!'
Eric started running then, stumbling into markers and lurching from side to side, shrieking in a weird, high- pitched voice, 'Back off, Caroline! Back off! Back off!'
Tristan watched him until he disappeared down the road. He tried to imagine the other half of Eric's conversation. What did Eric think Caroline wanted him to do?
Terrifying thoughts flooded Tristan's mind. Then he calmed himself and, focusing all his energy, called out, 'Caroline, are you there?' He called her three times, hoping each time that she'd answerback. But his angel senses had already told him what the silence proved: There was nothing there but a cold body, and its answers were rotting with it.
Friday morning Gregory waved a piece of paper with a phone number on it at Ivy. 'Promise me,' he said.
She shrugged, then nodded halfheartedly. 'Juniper Lake is an hour and a half away, and the way I drive, just an hour,' he added with a grin. 'Promise me. Ivy.'
'I can take care of myself,' she told him, and rearranged the food in the ice chest for the fourth time.
Maggie was feeding Andrew, Gregory, Philip, and herself that weekend but had packed enough additional food for a family of bears.
'I know you can take care of yourself,' Gregory said, 'but you still might get down or freaked out. This place can be pretty scary when you're alone.' He rattled the paper. 'If you need me — I don't care if it's in the middle of the night-call me.'
Ivy gave a little duck of her head, which didn't mean that she would or wouldn't, then started packing the variety of cookies and chips that her mother had set out on the kitchen counter. 'I hope you're ready to eat twenty- four hours a day,' she told Gregory.
He laughed and opened one of the bags she was holding, snagging two cookies. He held one up to her mouth, and she bit it.
'I told you, Ivy, I won't squeal about you being alone here,' Gregory said, 'but the deal is that you have to call
