The Girl in Blue

A child’s laughter rang out softly behind her.

Trinity paused to look back. Useless, but instinctive. She couldn’t stop herself.

There was no one there.

She blinked, straining her eyes against the deepening pitch. The moon had yet to rise. The air was cool and still. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. She couldn’t see back the way she’d come. The interior of the covered bridge was pitch-black.

But she heard no steps or any other sound. Only the memory of that familiar laugh echoing in her ears.

Trinity forced herself to turn and continue toward the house. She did pause one more time with a start. A light had come on in one of the upper front rooms. A large shadow passed in front of the light behind a pulled shade, and Trinity knew that someone—or something—was home.

* * *

Hillhaven had been built before Scarlet Falls was more than a muddy little settlement beside a useful river in the 1600s. The original structure had been a mill, but that had long since given over to a great rectangle of a home with a gabled roof and spidery gingerbread trim. The roof was steep and flat across its peak, complete with a widow’s walk where a brass telescope had been used to peer down at the town.

Trinity had done her share of peering.

Always watching. Always trying to help.

In the dark, with a crescent moon too slim to light her way, Trinity could only imagine the gray paint and even grayer shutters. Her parents hadn’t been able to fight time or tradition, and though she was sure her mother had chosen red curtains to offset the colonial drab, the effect was jarring.

She was glad it was too dark to see the arterial fabric peeking out from behind every pane as she walked up to the front door. The key on her keychain rattled in the lock. How many times had she almost thrown it away?

Another childish laugh sounded in the darkness behind her. Its playful innocence caused a renewed surge of dreadto twist up her spine. This time she didn’t look. She twisted the key, urgency causing her fingers to slip and her teeth to nip her tongue. She’d always thought The Girl in Blue was a benign nuisance. A terror gotten used to. No more. No less. There had been other things to fear in Scarlet Falls. Deadlier things. But after the fire in Boston she was no longer so sure.

“Oh,” she gasped when she finally turned the knob and pushed her way inside. She closed the door behind her against the laugh…and the actual danger it might herald.

The strong scent of Scotch confronted her entrance.

Stunned, Trinity dropped her backpack to the floor.

She didn’t clench her fists or dig in her pocket for her phone when the man came around the corner. He was big and tall, and decidedly in the wrong place at the wrong time, but Trinity didn’t scream. Even when he took a swig from the bottle in his hands and narrowedagate eyes that gleamed in the glow of the fireplace, she just bit her lip and refused to cry out.

She had plenty of practice dealing with macabre surprises. Finding a dead man in the front hall of Hillhaven was cake. Absolute cake.

So, though her heart thumped audibly in her ears, her raw throat narrowed and her spine turned to ice, she didn’t scream.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Samuel Creed asked. His voice was deceptively calm and quiet, belying the shadowed glitter of his eyes.

“I have a key and a bedroom upstairs,” Trinity pointed out. She used the key to gesture toward the ceiling at her room above them.

“With ridiculous posters on the wall,” Creed said. His brow was heavy, and he took another sip from the Scotch. The perfect angle of his jaw and the line of his throat when he swallowed were much more ridiculous than any posters she had left over from high school.

“Is that my father’s whiskey?” she asked.

Not “Why are you here?”

Not “Get the hell out.”

Creed leaned his hip against her mother’s antique sofa table and crossed his long, lean legs at the ankle. He crossed his arms, too, Scotch bottle and all, and Trinity swallowed and blinked. It had been three years since she’d seen him. In that time, he’d gone from a brooding post-teen to anadult—the change seemed menacing. She had saved him. She’d administered the CPR that had brought him back to life. But seeing him was always a jolt. It had been when she’d lived in town. It was more so now.

The smirk on his lips was decidedly more sensual, and his hair was still too long. Heavy brown waves fell over his forehead, and even though its edges were less jagged, they still shadowed his already dark eyes. His chest had become more muscular, and it finally matched the broad shoulders that had seemed too angular years ago. In fact, the sleek black shirt he wore unbuttoned at the neck and rolled to his elbows accented the width and breadth of his maturity with startling style.

“I’m too particular to borrow,” Creed said. He tipped the label her way, and she saw it was a brand her father would never have splurged on with a postman’s salary.

Trinity needed him to leave.

From the time he’d fallen into the freezing lake and had then been hauled out stiff and blue and unresponsive for far too long, Samuel Creed had been a vaguely threatening addition to the things that already menaced her life. He’d already graduated from high school at that point. He’d been just shy of eighteen. She’d been almost four years younger and just starting high school. The chasm between them was so great that only a desperate life-and-death situation hadbridged the gap.

“What are you doing here?”

The question came simultaneouslyfrom them both in an odd, amplified cadence that was almost as eerie as the laughter Trinity had tried to lock outside.

“I’m house-sitting for your parents,” Creed said. He swirled the expensive Scotch in his bottle as if he gauged how much he had left.

“There was an…accident…. A fire in my apartment building in Boston,” Trinity said.

At that, Creed stood. He was very tall, and she wasn’t. No longer leaning, he seemed to fill the room. Even more so when he paced toward her. She didn’t know if he moved slowly and deliberately because of the whiskey, or if stalking was simply the way he moved. He’d always been graceful. He’d always liked whiskey. Or, at least, he had since that day by the lake.

“An accident?” he asked.

The cold wood of the door pressed against her back before she realized she’d backed up against it.

Creed came close enough for her to see the thick soot of his coal lashes rimming hismidnight eyes and the glitter of an onyx chip he wore in his left earlobe. His gaze swept her face, then lower, finally coming to rest on the bandages around her wrist peeking out from the sleeve of her coat.

“It’s nothing. I’m fine,” Trinity said.

If possible, his expression turned even darker than before.

“You’re hurt,” he said.

He suddenly reached for her and pulled her coat loose, pushing it off her shoulders. Of course it was crazy, but it was also Creed, so crazy was the least of Trinity’s concerns.

She did step sideways and take over the procedure of disrobing herself. Because she could tell bythe glint in hiscinder eyes that she wouldn’t get away with simply brushing him off.

Her dressings were light and not in the least bit dramatic, but the reveal still added to the storm clouds on Creed’s face.

“One of my friends is dead. Believe me, this is nothing,” Trinity said.

Her voice sounded even huskier than before. Creed’s eyes had been dark and unreadable since that cold frozen day he’d died. Trinity hadn’t been alone in avoiding him since, although she’d probably had more reason to than most. This moment was no different. She should walk away. But something in the luminous depths of his eyes seemed to reflect her own fear.

“You shouldn’t have come back here,” Creed said. The rich scent of mellow Scotch came from him, blended with wood smoke from tending the fire and some other sharper scent she couldn’t place. He’d drowned in late November. She remembered it well. She thought she detected that bite of November wind that had blown along High Lake’s edge that day on his skin.

“I’m sorry to inconvenience you, but I’ve got nowhere else to stay,” Trinity said sarcastically. She bent down to pick up her backpack. When she straightened, he had moved closer. She had to tilt her chin to look up into his face.

It had been so long since she’d seen him. Even longer since she’d pressed her mouth to his icy lips to breathe the fortifying air from her lungs into his. Scarlet Falls was filled with the dead and the dying. That day she’d finally had the chance to stop and reverse one of the tragic accidents that always seemed on the verge of happening.

Many children in town saw and heard things. As they grew—if they grew–they saw and heard less and less.