Chapter Four

She had waited for Creed to leave the house before slipping back to his rooms. They’d parted awkwardly, like two boxers retreating to neutral corners of the ring. She told herself discretion was the better part of valor, but in reality a little time in his presence went a long way…especially since she was determined not to eat him alive. He was indelibly entwined with Scarlet Falls. It was almost impossible to tell where Creed began and the town ended. He was fascinated by its darkness. She feared the lake hadn’t really let him go that day, no matter that she had saved him. Giving in to her attraction to him felt like tempting Scarlet Falls to reach out to claim her, as well.

She found the photograph where he had placed it back among the eclectic clutter of his collection which seemed to hold everything from the mundane to the macabre. The crow “watched” her when she picked up the old photo and turned it over in her palm. Worse, the button-eyed doll sat—its creepiness magnified by the evidence of its longevity Trinity held in her hands.

On the back of the brittle paper, “Clara Chadwick” was written in old-fashioned script, the kind children used to practice painstakingly on slates and women used to use in treasured correspondence on precious paper. Beautiful and slanted, such writing was a lost means of communication gone the way of smoke signals and hieroglyphs. It seemed as exotic to her and strange as she deciphered the name.

She turned the photograph over again, avoiding the doll’s stare in order to examine the other clues to The Girl in Blue’s identity. The dress was a sailor suit style. The curls slightly frizzed, probably from the kind of permanent wave machine that relied on heat instead of chemicals. Her shoes were shiny and black. Her tights white.

Trinity glanced up at the doll. It was moth-eaten and shabby, but its stitching was fine and the yarn on its head still a vivid red. She shivered as she met its blank button stare. Then she forced herself to move forward to lean down and pick the doll up.

It was heavier than she expected. Something had been sewn into its hands, feet, head and torso to make them more solid than mere batting would have done. An aged, musty smell rose from its dress made from sewn-together pieces of various sizes and patterns in a patchwork style. Would Creed know its age and where it had been found? Did he know Clara Chadwick’s history or had he collected the doll and photo to silence some whisper without thought to their provenance?

A shimmer of movement caused Trinity to turn toward the hall. Nothing. Nothing at all. But she was left with the impression that she’d seen a glimpse of blue. She looked back at the ragdoll in her hands. It was grim and silent as the grave, divulging none of its former owner’s secrets.

But Trinity still placed it back where she’d found it and backed away.

She hadn’t come home in search of answers. She’d been looking for refuge, as impossible to hope for as that would be. But the matches in her room and the grim possibility that the fire in Boston hadn’t been an accident forced her to act.

As she left the rooms filled with Samuel Creed’s assortment of history and mystery, she wondered if she might find refuge in answers she’d never thought to seek.

* * *

The lake glittered distantly on the horizon reflecting the weak October sun. For as long as Trinity could remember, it had been a black gleam in the distance above town. Unlike other places, where bodies of water became a tourist attraction or a local draw, High Lake was small, cold and uninviting. Fed by a mineral spring with high iron content, it wasn’t home to fish or fowl, and it often sent a biting breeze down from across its surface to rime Scarlet Falls with a metallic fog.

Trinity walked through such a fog that afternoon after a midmorning rain shower with nothing but a name to guide her steps.

The Historical Society of Scarlet Falls was housed in the basement of a large Victorian on Elm Street that also was home to Scarlet Falls’ community library in its upper rooms. The trees that lined the rolling sidewalk were already dropping their spotted yellow leaves so that some branches were bare and skeletal reaching into the fog above her head.

Trinity hugged her coat close, glad for the scarf around her neck as the damp fingers of mist trailed moistly against her cheeks and heavy on her hair. The town was quiet, though within the next hour or so the streets would be filled with traffic as buses and cars and trucks sought to finish their commutes before night fell. Schools in Scarlet Falls traditionally ended their day a full two hours before other schools in the surrounding area. It was never talked about. It just was. The people of Scarlet Falls kept their own hours and their own council, and it was rare to find anyone who balked at obeying the setting sun.

And yet the early afternoon bustle amid unpleasant fog wasn’t grim. She heard laughter and cheery calls of conversation between neighbors. Many people nodded or waved as she walked by.

Trinity had her own hands deep in the pockets of her coat because of the chill, but she took care not to crush the photograph as she approached her destination. She slowed, but not because she was putting off her search. Rather, the picturesque building and grounds took her by surprise. She remembered a neglected air the last time she’d seen the place. Crooked shingles, peeling paint andovergrown shrubbery. She found a different view as she drew closer and the fog dispersed.

The house glistened with freshness—paint, landscaping, shingles—even the pale purple trim had been painstakingly restored, each artistically turned piece of gingerbread softly highlighted in the mist.

In the midst of a tidy riot of planter boxes and hanging baskets that had probably been changed out from summer impatiens to autumn pansies and mums in the last month or so, a young woman stood at the top of a ladder tending the flowers.

Trinity came up short and held her breath.

She hated ladders.

But the woman was busy and didn’t seem to mind her distance from the ground or that she was presenting the perfect opportunity for something unfortunate to happen.

People work on ladders every day. Trinity told herself. Even in Scarlet Falls.

Nevertheless, she moved forward with urgency to survey the scene with a gaze that rapidly catalogued. The ladder was a new aluminum contraption with shiny fittings and sturdy appearance.

But…

Trinity saw as she came close that the edge of a rubber gardener’s mat was curled under one foot of the ladder in an unlikely arrangement to have happened on its own unless the young woman had a death wish.

A startled “oh” above her head caused Trinity to look up just as the ladder wobbled dangerously to the side with a jangle of aluminum against the porch roof. Trinity stepped quickly over the short hedge that bordered the walk to the front door. She grabbed for the tilted ladder and was almost pulled off her feet when its weight overcame her own. Her burnedarm stung as its skin pulled taut, but Trinity didn’t let go. She strained against gravity and held on tight.

“Careful,” she called through gritted teeth.

The woman was thin, but still too much weight when combined with the ladder to allow Trinity to smooth the mat. Luckily, the woman was decisive and quick. She came down rung by slanted rung of the ladder as soon as Trinity gripped its sides to stop it mid-fall.

“I could have sworn I left that mat by the zinnia bed,” the woman said in the slightly breathless, slightly disgruntled voice of a person who has avoided a careless accident. Trinity didn’t assure her that she probably had. For all she knew, the woman was absentminded, but something about her neat denim jumpsuit and the pretty gardening gloves on her hands told a different story.

“The flowers are lovely,” she said instead, smiling. No one had been hurt. She had swiftly run her gaze over the woman’s appearance and it didn’t look like she’d suffered so much as a scrape, though a fall from that height would have resulted in serious injury.

The woman pulled off her gloves, returning Trinity’s smile as she pushed tendrils of auburn hair back from a lightly freckled face. She was startlingly beautiful with alabaster skin beneath the freckles and bone structure you’d normally see on the pages of a magazine.

“It’s work I enjoy,” she replied. Then she thrust one of her hands forward. “I’m Maddy Clark.”

Trinity was surprised to find the other woman’s hand perfectly smooth and manicured, her nails a lavender shellac. No wonder she wore gloves.

“I’m Trinity Chadwick,” she replied. Maddy didn’t mention the bandages peeking out from Trinity’s coat, but her clasp gentled when she saw them. Trinity appreciated the consideration and the tact.

“You’re Elise and Roger’s daughter. I’ve helped your mother with her garden from time to time since I moved here last year,” Maddy said. Her mossy green eyes narrowed slightly. Only slightly, but Trinity had to fight the urge to launch into an explanation for her long absence. There was just a hint of Boston brogue in Maddy’svoice. Trinity wondered what had brought the woman to Scarlet Falls. She obviously knew her business. The gardens here and at Hillhaven were as stunning as her face.

“Well, let’s see about this,” Maddy said. She turned and knelt to extricate the mat from under the ladder. “I couldn’t get it to do this again if I tried,” she continued.

“Be careful,” Trinity said again, powerless to make anyone careful enough.

Maddy stood, and while she rolled the mat into a neat bundle and moved to store it in a nearby cart with large, nubby wheels, she looked at Trinity once more.

“I usually am,” she said. Her smile was still soft and easy, but her forehead had crinkled. And that’s when Trinity realized what was so striking about Maddy Clark. She was as natural as she was beautiful, completely easy with her looks and her world even when something puzzled her in it. It was the kind of ease that came with believing there was a logical explanation for everything.

Trinity nodded. There was no way of explaining without sounding crazy. Since gardening was primarily a daytime job, the other woman might never have to worry about becoming accident prone in Scarlet Falls.

It was always worse after dark.

Trinity moved to step back over the hedge and climb the porch steps.

“It was nice to meet you,” she called over her shoulder. She left the obviously talented gardener with her horrifying ladder outside as the beveled glass front door opened with the heavy whoosh of well-oiled hinges.

The fresh scent of lemon polish mingled with older, mustier scents as she stepped inside—books, ink, mothballs. Her boots made her steps seem loud across the pine floors. She walked on the faded Persian carpet rugs wherever she could.

A vaguely familiar woman sat on a stool behind a cluttered welcome desk. Her perch, her black dress and faded chignon and the gleam of her eyes reminded Trinity uncomfortably of Creed’s beady-eyed crow. Trinity had seen her before, but the helpful volunteer badge she wore above her slightly concave chest supplied her name when Trinity’s memory failed to dredge it up from the past.

Violet Jesham.

“Can I help you?” she said in a rusty, but rushed voice as if she rarely got to offer but anticipated the opportunity to such a degree that the wait was worth it.

Trinity pulled Clara Chadwick’s picture from her pocket.

“I was hoping to find out more about this little girl,” she said.

Mrs. Jesham dropped something she was knitting and came forward with several quick steps, so like a bird ruffling its feathers to hop, hop, hop toward bread crumbs in the park. The low heels of her sensible shoes giving off a muffled swish, swish, swish.

Trinity handed her the photograph and the older woman looked at it long and hard with the aid of reading glasses she lifted from her breast with a jet beaded chain.

“Ah, yes, I see. ‘Chadwick,’” Mrs. Jesham said. “Welcome home, Trinity. I thought I recognized you. Your mother and I are in the Garden Club together.”

Trinity forced a smile. Retired or not, she couldn’t imagine her outdoorsy mother socializing with Violet Jesham. In fact, she couldn’t imagine Violet Jesham outside of these almost forgotten walls. Around them, a myriad of old photographs were framed and hung in an eclectic mix of frames—some gilded, some carved—and in every shape and size. Violet Jesham looked very like some of the women in the photographs from centuries ago as if she’d stepped down from one of the frames when she’d heard the door whoosh and it waited for her—silent and empty—to return.

“I would assume this is from the 1930s or ’40s based on the ‘Shirley Temple’ style of her dress and hair,” Mrs. Jesham said.

Trinity privately thought “Shirley Temple” by way of “Alfred Hitchcock,” but she continued to smile. She was grateful for the help even if Violet Jesham seemed eerily out of her own time.

“The original courthouse burned in 1972, but we have quite a few of those old records here,” Mrs. Jesham said.

She handed the photograph back to Trinity and motioned for her to follow, pausing only to pick up a knitting basket from the desk she’d been perched near when Trinity came in. Trinity followed, trying to silence the echoing of her steps through several rooms until they came into an old parlor lined with filing cabinets and incongruously lit by an elaborate dusty chandelier.

A large, yellow tabby cat was curled on an embroidered pillow near the fireplace, but Violet Jesham paid no attention to the cat or the room. She went, instead, to a heavy door and turned the skeleton key that was protruding from a curly cued iron panel below its knob.

“Down these stairs,” she explained.

Mrs. Jesham reached up and pulled a chain dangling from the ceiling of the stairwell and a lone bulb flared to life with an electric pop. Cool, slightly dank air rushed up from below.

Trinity stepped toward the opening, but she paused when her glance was caught by one of the framed photographs hung by the door. It was an 8 x 10 of a group of Edwardian women with serious expressions frozen stiff for posterity. A small gold label on the frame identified the group as the Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922. They were an intimidating bunch. Dressed all in black with hats as impressive as their crinoline-covered hips and not a single smile among them.

Their eyes seemed to track Trinity’s movements as she passed by.

Both her steps and Mrs. Jesham’s echoed and squeaked as they squeezed themselves down the narrow flight of centuries-old stairs that led to the basement rooms.

At least there weren’t any cobwebs. Or did their absence indicate that the basement wasn’t even a place creepy creatures cared to tread?

Trinity was glad she’d kept her coat on when she’d come inside out of the mist. Even with the coat, she shivered as the air grew progressively colder the deeper they stepped into the earth.

They came into a dark room that wasn’t touched by the glow from the ceiling bulb above because of the curve in the stairs.

Trinity braced herself against the dark and against the utter ignorance of what was in it. She couldn’t catalog or survey to check for anything out of place or dangerous. She could only stand in darkness waiting.

The black seemed to envelop her in a cool press of thick atmosphere. She instinctively held her breath against it. Her healinglungs loathed to accept the dark dankness into her body.

Violet Jesham was silent.

In the absence of light, Trinity could no longer see her guide. She detected a shift of movement. Nothing more. Perhaps Mrs. Jesham had climbed back into her frame to leave Trinity alone in this tomb-like basement?

Fluorescent ceiling lights buzzed into life above their heads. Trinity released the breath she’d been holding in a soft sigh. Mrs. Jesham had flicked on a wall switch nearby. She stood with her hand still on the switch looking at Trinity’s relief with knowing eyes.

But the other woman didn’t mention Trinity’s unease.

“Feel free to go through these,” Mrs. Jesham offered.

She gestured toward more filing cabinets around the room with one arm while she cradled her basket in the other. The cabinets were raised up off the packed earth floor by stacks of bricks presumably to keep them dry when wet weather caused the basement to become even damper. Mrs. Jesham took up another perch on another stool, this one placed so that she would be looking down on a nearby table where Trinity would work.

She placed her basket at her feet and took out a long black scarf and a skein of wool yarn. She placed the roll of yarn in her lap and allowed the scarf to fall to the floor as she began to ply two long ivory knitting needles that were yellowed with age.

“That’s a nice scarf,” Trinity said, trying to warm the air with friendly commentary. She moved toward the nearest cabinets somehow, not liking the feel of the hard-packed dirt beneath her feet.

“It’s for the man who paid for the Historical Society’s renovation. A thank you gift,” Jesham said. “He won’t let us thank him publically. He wanted to remain anonymous.”

So, the society had received a donation to renovate the house and grounds. No wonder it looked much more well-kept than the last time she had been in town.

The click-click-clickity-click of Mrs. Jesham’s needles set Trinity’s teeth on age, but she braced herself against the constant clicking so she could get to work.

It took several musty hours before Trinity finally found records for a Clara Chadwick’s birth and death. Mrs. Jesham had watched her like a hawk…instead of like the beady-eyed crow in Creed’s collection. The older woman had hardly moved beyond the busy click of her needles, sitting on her stool, hour after hour, while Trinity dug and shuffled and sorted.

Born 1935—Died 1944. Clara had died when she was only eight years old.

“There was a fever that year,” Mrs. Jesham said over her shoulder. Trinity started and looked up into Mrs. Jesham’s uncommonly bright eyes. The woman still held her knitting needles and the scarf, but she had quieted the project in her fist to speak. “If she was a Chadwick buried before 1945, you’ll find her at the Old Stone Church,” Mrs. Jeshamcontinued.“Many children died that winter.” Her sudden interest and animation after hours of silent, motionless observation except for her busy needles gave Trinity chills.

“The story was that a traveling salesman came into town with a cough. His car broke down and he ended up spending a cold night by High Lake before someone found him delirious with fever the next day. Every house he’d visited that week with his suitcase of whatever it was he was selling fell ill. Many didn’t recover. Especially the children,” Mrs. Jesham said. Trinity wondered how many historical stories the woman had memorized over her lifetime and how many involved tragedy. No wonder she wore black and jet beads. There was a sense of mourning about her. Perpetual mourning. Did it lighten her load to share the stories once in a while? Or was she steeped in darkness, each and every tale she held in her head heavy on her soul?

Trinity didn’t argue that she could have found Clara anywhere in town, not just the Old Stone Church. The Girl in Blue didn’t seem to be content to stay in her grave. Instead, Trinity thanked the woman and helped her put away the faded resources. A part of her wanted to rush away, but even in the oppressive atmosphere, she fought against it. Violet Jesham deserved her gratitude. That she made Trinity uneasy didn’t signify.

* * *

When the Chadwick girl finally left, Violet continued her knitting, completely unaware that she stood in a corner of the room where the light was bad. It didn’t matter. Her fingers clicked the needles automatically. She stared into a photograph filled with long-dead eyes.

The Ladies of the Scarlet Falls Historical Society, 1922.

None of them truly gone.

* * *

Once she was outside, Trinity breathed deep cleansing breaths to clear the dust and must from her lungs.

“I know how you feel,” Maddy said, coming around the corner of the house. She held trimming shears in her re-gloved hands.

“That basement needs some ventilation,” Trinity said. She didn’t want to talk about Violet Jesham’s odd effect on her nerves.

“It’s the cat that bothers me,” Maddy replied, moving to place the shears in her cart.

“The yellow tabby that sleeps by the fireplace in the parlor?” Trinity asked. She couldn’t imagine why a sleeping cat would bother the busy gardener.

“That cat isn’t sleeping. It hasn’t been awake since 1985 according to Violet Jesham,” Maddy said.

Trinity gaped. She couldn’t help it. First a stuffed crow and now a stuffed…

“His name was Gibbons and Mrs. Jesham swears he had nine lives. She swears he lived here fifty years before he died,” Maddy shared.

“I almost went over to scratch his head,” Trinity said, glad that she’d avoided that awkward moment.

“I did. Walked right over and crooned to him. That’s when Mrs. Jesham told me…after,” Maddy said, her eyes wide with a remembered macabre surprise.

They stood a few moments in companionable silence. Trinity had put her hands back in her pockets and Maddy had crossed her arms. The other woman worried her bottom lip in thoughtful consideration of…something. Deceased tabby cats or something else, Trinity couldn’t be sure.

“The place needs these flowers. You’ve done wonders,” she said. She preferred to change the subject rather than dwell on darkness she couldn’t explain away to a stranger who hadn’t grown up in the town where a beloved pet might be seen as comfort even after its death.

“It keeps me busy,” Maddy replied. She faced the plantings, but her green eyes had gone distant and vague. She stood beside Trinity, but her mind was elsewhere. Then, after only a second or two, her whole body seemed to shake itself out of reverie to get back to work.

* * *

The Old Stone Church had probably been called a meeting house at one time. It was almost as old as Hillhaven, having been built by the original settlement on the river. It was kept up by the Historical Society and the Presbyterians who had used the building back in the fifties and sixties before they built a new church across town.

Trinity had long since become accustomed to walking everywhere she went at college in Boston, but the hike down to town from Hillhaven and then from the library up to the Old Stone Church reminded her of how uneven everything was in the town. Scarlet Falls had been built in and around an ancient twisting riverbed where water had once flowed before it had settled on its current course. Sidewalks pitched and rolled. Roads snaked and curved and wound around trees and hills. In fact, several roads in town had historic trees that grew right in the middle of them with forks to accommodate this oak where a speech was given or that maple where a criminal was hung. Maybe some passersby found it charming and eclectic, but if they lingered for a little while they’d realize it was off kilter and strange even as it was beautiful.

When she approached the church, Trinity noted the picturesque worn stone blushing pink in the misty air and the black slate roof gone to green where lichen had taken hold. But she also noted the sag and slump toward the graveyard as if one too many holes had been dug near its foundation, and as the bodies wasted away so had the ground’s support for the church’s heavy walls.

The hillside of the cemetery was pitted and pockmarked, and rather than the neat orderly rows of graves a visitor would normally find elsewhere, the stones and crypts were staggered and crooked. It had probably been caused by geography and geology, the lay of the land and the hard rock found here and there beneath, but the affect was far from natural and peaceful.

Rather than a place where souls went to rest, Trinity could far too easily imagine restlessness beneath her feet. Yet, still, she strolled. From stone to stone. From crypt to cross. The matron at the Historical Society had explained that some of the cemeteries in town had been mapped, but that no one had attempted this one because of its age and the wear on the stones of its oldest inhabitants.

Trinity didn’t bother with the plain stones that no longer showed a trace of what might have been carved into their surfaces for a posterity that had been overcome by wind and rain.

Instead, she walked and scanned the names of the headstones and raised marble crypts that seemed more likely. She found a section in the far south corner sheltered from the foggy breeze by a steeply pitched hill that seemed to hold many Chadwicks. It gave her a queasy feeling in the pit of her stomach to see her own name repeated again and again on stone after stone.

The fog had thickened and the afternoon sun hung low when Trinity finally found her.

So far that day, she’d heard no laughter. She’d only seen a hint of blue in the hallway and that had probably been nothing but her imagination. Her whole body went numb then icy when she walked across the grave.

Clara Chadwick.

The Girl in Blue.

Her arm throbbed although the dressings she’d used that morning were light and her skin was healing, pink and new.

Someone had trimmed the weeds back not too long ago. Trinity knelt to dust dried grass and dead daisies from the base of the head stone.

Why didn’t she rest? And why was it Trinity she followed and menaced and threatened with matches after years of silent haunting?

“Do you often borrow things without asking?” a familiar voice interrupted the silence.

Trinity rose to turn and face him. Had he followed her? Or had he seen her interest in the photograph and remembered it in spite of the mind-numbing kiss?

“You weren’t home. I didn’t think you’d mind,” she said. The photograph was still in her pocket. She tried to tell herself that the flush on her cheeks was nothing but wind burn and not embarrassment because Samuel Creed had caught her ghost hunting.

“Mrs. Jesham mentioned you’d been doing some research. I recognized the photograph when she described it. Why the sudden interest in Scarlet Falls’history?” he asked.

He wore the black scarf Violet Jesham had been knitting wound around his neck.

Trinity refused to tell him she’d seen Clara Chadwick before. She wouldn’t tell him about her fears concerning the fire in Boston, not when his interest in history seemed macabre, sparked by that dark day by the lake when he had died.

Creed must have donated a sizeable amount of money to the Historical Society for their renovations.

Of course, the scarf looked perfect against his angular face and the slight dark stubble on his jaw. His double breasted wool pea coat was open. She could see a glimpse of white oxford beneath, filled out far too nicely by his muscled chest.

Any story she might have made up died on her lips when he reached to pull dried grass from the fringe of her scarf. She immediately remembered his hand wound into the same fabric to pull her to his lips.

Here, in the late afternoon light, he looked…different. The fog had dampened his coat and his hair and even his skin was moistened by October mist. Out of the house, he seemed almost vulnerable, though with his broad shoulders and tall physique she couldn’t imagine why she thought it. Against his damp hair and dark eyes, his skin was pale. The onyx chip in his left earlobe glittered darkly. Any shadows she perceived couldn’t be blamed on a dimly lit room. And there were shadows. His face was stark and tight. His jaw clenched, but it seemed more a battle against constant tension and less about her. Until his lips softened as if fingering her scarf made him remember and desire. Then his tension seemed very much about her after all.

“Idle curiosity, then?” he asked. “Dead children. Graveyards. Dust and bones and crooked headstones…all for an afternoon lark?”

He didn’t believe it. He knew better even if he didn’t know it all.

She stood there with a man who seemed fascinated with the dead and gone, but she was very much alive. Her hands were meant to heal and save whenever they could. He had been to a watery grave and seemed to bring it back with him again. With his grim fascinations and the lingering death and darkness in his eyes, Creed might prove to be more dangerous than anything she’d ever run from in Scarlet Falls.

She’d spent her life learning a way to defeat the darkness and he seemed far too willing to embrace it. She had practically run to get away from the photographs, musty files and gloomy stories she’d found at the Historical Society, and Samuel Creed was their benefactor.

“No,” she said. She didn’t want him digging into her secrets, but she couldn’t pretend that her curiosity was all in fun. “This isn’t a lark,” she continued. She felt sympathy for the poor little girl buried under their feet, dead too soon even though some part of her might still roam intent to bother and burn.

His dark eyes surveyed her face. Her skin felt fragile in the breeze like glass, as if one more jarring incident would shatter her.

It didn’t.

As she looked up at Creed, something appeared at the periphery of her vision.

The Girl in Blue stood under a blazing maple at the edge of the cemetery. She posed exactly as she’d been posed in the photograph except she clutched empty hands to her chest where the ragdoll should be.

Trinity blinked.

She forced herself to breathe.

She didn’t shatter.

She absorbed one more oddity in silence. One more. Each and every one weighed on her, but she didn’t buckle.

“What happens when your whole body stills like the universe is going on without you?” Creed asked. He whispered the words in his whiskey-drenched tones and the query couldn’t have been more intimate even if their heads had been lying on pillows.

“Nothing,” she lied. The untruth came from numb lips.

“Your eyes go wide and your breathing stops and then you catch yourself. You make yourself breathe. You make yourself blink,” he continued a play by play of this moment, but also a commentary on so many such moments he’d witnessed before.

And still she could see Clara Chadwick out of the corner of her eye as if the photograph in her pocket had come to life…if life could describe the hollow-eyed shade of the dead girl who was actually dust beneath her boots.

Creed reached up. He touched her cheek and the chilled brittle flesh there suddenly became supple and warm.

She wasn’t fragile.

That was an illusion.

She was so strong and resilient that she could stand among the restless dead in a cemetery and desire the touch of a man she should fear while resisting the need to confide in him.

He stepped closer when she didn’t flinch from his fingers on her cheek. He stepped closer and leaned down and tasted her again. As if this wasn’t their third kiss in seven years, as if he often leaned to taste her, but also much slower, obviously savoring and prolonging a move others would take for granted because they didn’t have to wait or resist.

“Oh,” she breathed out when his tongue eased in.

He tasted her, slight and teasing, but she hadn’t expected the sensual deepening of a kiss that should have been brief because it was public. The cemetery was sheltered, but it was outside in the open air where anyone might pass. Creed must not care if the whole town saw him lick into her softly open lips and she met his tongue with hers because, while she cared, her body had a mind of its own.

She didn’t reach for him. She responded only with her lips and tongue, kissing him back, but not burying her hands in his hair or twining them around his neck. She kept her hands in her pockets, but both of his came up to hold her face so gently she could barely feel the heat from his fingers. And still his tongue dipped and twirled and dueled with hers, showing her the passion that belied the stillness of his body and hers.

They weren’t alone.

There were shadows around them that didn’t belong. Along the ground they were cast by nothing discernible against the stones. They shifted and swirled though there wasn’t a sunbeam strong enough to create them. The Girl in Blue stood under the tree. Not laughing or burning. Only clutching empty air against her chest.

But for long moments Trinity didn’t care about anything except Creed’s Scotch-flavored kiss.

Then he moved back. Then several strides more. He pushed his hands up into his thick brown hair as if to hold himself together or tear himself apart.

“Every time I kiss you I feel like I’m coming alive. Like I’m coming up out of that freezing water you pulled me from all those years ago,” Creed confessed. His voice was ragged and raw and shuddering.

Then his meaning penetrated and chilled away the vestiges of heat his lips had left on hers.

He was obsessed by his close brush with death. He might as well be soaking wet and shivering in her arms. They were still trapped in that moment and probably always would be.

“And every time you kiss me I feel like I want to die,” she said.

He could have easily pulled her into the lake that day. They could have sunk to the bottom, together forever in an icy grave. He hadn’t, but when she saw his haggard face and haunted eyes she knew the danger of it wasn’t past. She’d resisted the gloomy pall that held Scarlet Falls in its clutches. She’d fought against the idea that she had to be afraid of the dark forever.

But Samuel Creed lived in the abyss. It was crazy for her to play along its edge, contemplating the dive while he dragged her down with him, kiss by heated kiss, disguising darkness with desire.