“Yeah, that’s the real tragedy here,” Brian said, cutting him off. “The apparent stalking your guest has been doing is nothing compared to that.”
Don wisely left the room after that, and Brian and Jack moved down the bedroom wall gaping at the photos.
Laura had been busy. She’d taken – and printed out – so many photos of Jack and Ivy that they were uncountable. They’d been taken from a distance with a telephoto lens, but there was no mistaking what Laura was doing.
“I don’t even know what to say,” Jack said, running his finger over Ivy’s two-dimensional face in a photo. “I … .”
“All right, let’s take this one step at a time,” Brian instructed, trying to get control of the situation. “Can you recognize where any of these photos were taken … and more importantly, how long ago?”
Jack focused on the first photos. “That was taken the day before our date,” he said, pointing. “I stopped in to surprise her at the nursery and took her lunch.”
“Okay,” Brian said. “We know that she was here at least a full day before she shot Mark Dalton. What else?”
Jack shook his head, his mind overflowing. “That was taken when we arrived at the restaurant for our date.” He recognized Ivy’s pretty skirt and happy smile. “That was taken when we had our picnic in front of the police station.”
“That means she took photos of you before she shot Ivy,” Brian said. “That was ballsy in case someone saw her. What else?”
“I’m not sure,” Jack said. He moved closer to a photo of Ivy. She was on her knees in her front garden, and when he got a better look at her face he could see her eyes were puffy from crying. “I think this was taken the day after Ivy was shot.”
“How can you tell?”
“She’s been crying,” Jack answered, pained. “She told me she felt someone watching her when she gardened that day. She thought it was me after she found me down by the lake.”
“She’s not crying now, so don’t melt down,” Brian instructed. “I’m not sure when this one of Ivy and Max was taken, but it was clearly shot from the woods by Ivy’s house. I don’t think Max and Ivy have been cavorting like this since Dalton was shot, so that means she might’ve been in the area even longer than we realize.”
“She has,” Jack said, his voice dropping. He pointed toward a photograph in the center of everything. “That’s Kelly and her brother. That’s the night we had a barbecue on the back porch. That was weeks ago.”
“So Laura has been watching for a long time,” Brian mused. “Why did she wait so long to approach?”
“And I didn’t notice any of it.”
“You can’t be blamed for that,” Brian chided. “No one could’ve expected this. We need to get a team in here to go over this place. We’re going to need help from the state.”
Jack turned on his heel and stalked toward the door, taking Brian by surprise.
“What are you doing?” Brian asked, following his partner. “We need to go through all of this stuff.”
“No, we don’t,” Jack shot back. “We know what Laura is up to. We know that she wants revenge on me. She’s focused that revenge on Ivy. If we want to catch Laura then we have to get to Ivy.
“Don’t you understand?” Jack continued. “Laura has been playing with me. She’s almost killed Ivy twice. Do you think she’s going to miss a third time? I don’t. She’s readying for her endgame.”
“And her endgame is to kill Ivy,” Brian said.
“I won’t let that happen.”
Twenty-Two
After her lunch with Max – and the odd niggling worry that refused to dissipate after seeing the apparition at the lumberyard – Ivy made a decision. She returned her father’s car to the nursery, listened to him rail at her about being an irresponsible thief for fifteen minutes straight, and then returned to her cottage.
She was careful during the trek, her eyes wide and her ears alert, but she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. Once inside she gathered a blanket, bottle of water, and book before leaving again. She locked the house and headed in the direction of her fairy ring. She had a feeling it was the one place that held the answers she needed.
Max was jovial during lunch and the conversation turned to the occult and paranormal. While he was lighthearted regarding the topic, a few of the things he said made sense to Ivy. She was convinced she felt something in Felicity’s apartment. She was even more convinced something was trying to make contact with her at Max’s lumberyard. If she wanted to know who it was, she was going to have to make things easier on the ghost. What better way than drawing it to a magical place?
It took Ivy about ten minutes to reach her favorite spot in the world. She’d discovered it when she was younger, entranced by the face she swore up and down she could see in the tree. The mushroom circle was another story, and when she did research on the phenomenon she learned about fairy rings.
As a child with few friends and an endless imagination, Ivy was convinced she’d found something that should be coveted. She spent weeks cleaning up the area until she had it exactly how she wanted it. Then she returned to the clearing every day for two weeks, convinced with each visit that she would eventually see something extraordinary.
It never happened … at least not in the literal sense. The fairy ring had proven to be magical, though. She took Jack there not long after meeting him, and that’s where he saved her from a crazy stalker on a dark night a
