“That’s conjecture, Ivy.”
“I am fully aware of that.” She shot a stern look at Joel. “But it may have happened.”
“True, but it changes nothing.”
“You said you needed all the details. That’s what I was thinking at the time.” Ivy pursed her lips. Dust particles danced between them in the sun’s ray.
Joel cleared his throat. “I would prefer the details of what you saw.”
“Of course.” She knew what he wanted. Straightforward facts. But one must theorize to shape the facts into any kind of potential. She mustered a small smile, a truce of sorts.
Joel blinked and his features relaxed. “All right then. Continue. What did your assailant look like?”
Ivy cleared her throat. It hurt to swallow. The sensation of her attacker’s arm around her throat returned, along with the memory of the scratchy wool of his sleeve chafing her skin. Her breaths shallowed. She needed to breathe, yet a suffocating fear gripped her as the memories overwhelmed her.
“I-I don’t know. He came up behind me.” The memory assailed her. Fear crawled into her stomach and up to her throat, squeezing at Ivy’s breath like it was happening again. “I never saw his face. His voice—I didn’t recognize it. It was—” She needed to breathe.
Ivy grabbed the bed frame. Joel was beside her in a moment, his hands on her shoulders. He lowered his face to match hers, eye to eye.
“Take a deep breath, Ivy.”
She was. Or she was trying to. Fear was a vicious enemy. She couldn’t let it best her. Ivy closed her eyes, wishing she had reconciled enough with God to pray, to feel the old assurance of His presence beside her. But her mind was empty of prayer. Instead she heard Joel’s quiet breathing, and she matched hers to his.
When her panic lessened, Ivy shrank from Joel’s touch. She didn’t want to be mollycoddled. She didn’t want to be ministered to or treated like a swooning female.
“There was a book.” Ivy reinserted herself into her memories and avoided Joel’s searching eyes.
“Where?”
“It was . . .” Ivy tried to remember. It had been dark. So dark and then— “There.” Ivy remembered. She turned to Joel as she pointed at the floor next to the bed. “It was a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations. Someone had written in it. Scrawled with a pencil, ‘This house holds secrets. I am one of them.’”
Joel did not seem triumphant at their first real, tangible clue.
“Well?” Ivy rested her hand on the dusty footboard of the bed. She was still dizzy, but loath to admit it to Joel.
“Anyone could have written it.”
“What if Gabriella wrote it?”
“Was her name in it?”
Ivy leveled a look of derision on him. “We don’t know her name.”
“Exactly.” Joel nodded. “There’s nothing to indicate that it was Gabriella’s, or whoever she is. The book isn’t even here anymore.”
“I realize that.” Heaven help her, she might align herself with her attacker and strangle Joel. She frowned and tightened her grasp on the bed. “But, if it was Gabriella, then she’s trying to tell us something. Something about Foster Hill House. Something about how she died.”
Joel drew in a deep breath and looked beyond Ivy to the floor where the book had been the night of her attack. He braced himself with his hand on the mattress and gave a cursory glance beneath the bed. It was apparent the book hadn’t been kicked beneath it during the struggle when Joel stood up empty-handed. “While I see the importance of theorizing, we must be careful it lines up with evidence. Otherwise we’re chasing ideas.”
“Desperate situations sometimes call for it. I think the existence of a baby warrants even extreme speculation, don’t you? I don’t believe it’s farfetched to consider the fact that Gabriella was here in this house and did write that note. She was, after all, found just down the hill from here.”
Doubt flickered in his eyes. “And now the book has disappeared.”
Ivy tapped her toe on the wood floor, impatient and disconcerted all at the same time. It didn’t seem that Joel was implying someone had swiped the book after attacking her, so much as suggesting she might have never seen the book to begin with.
“The book was here.” Ivy stopped her toe from its agitated dance.
Joel nodded. His silence was a stronger answer. He turned his attention from her and began to poke about the room. He opened the closet door and peeked in. Empty. He moved to look behind a dusty bureau and the miniscule gap between it and the wall.
So be it. Ivy let the conversation rest alongside its bedmates of doubt and mistrust. Her breath caught, partly because of her bruised ribs and partly due to the ache in her spirit. She wanted to contemplate the what-ifs, but Joel was only focused on the what-is.
Joel pulled out a drawer from the bureau and a poof of musty, dank smell invaded the room. Ivy wrinkled her nose as she came up behind him. There was nothing inside. Nothing to indicate anyone had lived here since the Fosters abandoned the house forty years ago.
“The mice are loving this place.” Joel pointed to a pile of droppings.
Ivy backed away. She reached the window and pressed her hand against the glass as she stared out over the hillside, its grasses heavy with spring’s thaw. She knew, deep inside, that Gabriella had been here, had been in this room, and had looked out this very window. But Joel was right. There had been no name in the book along with the cryptic message. Even if there were a name, they couldn’t attach it to the nameless woman found dead in the hollow tree. And now the book had disappeared. Had her attacker swiped it? That was the most logical conclusion, but again, it was speculation.
Ivy slid her hand down the window and rested her fingertips on the wooden strip that crisscrossed it. She needed to show Joel the piano downstairs, its clean keys and the sheet music. Maybe that would be the evidence to convince him someone had been in Foster Hill House recently.
“Joel, I—”
He interrupted. “I’m sorry, Ivy, but there’s nothing here. If I’m going to pursue the possibility that the book you saw was truly scribbled in by Gabriella, I need proof she was here. I can’t go back to Sheriff Dunst with pure assumption.”
“I realize that.” Ivy turned. It was a mistake. Her eyes dropped to his mouth, then rose to meet his narrowed gaze. There was savvy there, but a touch of tenderness at the edges. She tried to soften her voice, but wasn’t sure she was successful. “There’s more you need to consider.”
“I am already considering some leads.”
She didn’t miss the inflection in Joel’s words, an inflection that excluded her. Ivy turned back to the window and rested her hands on the sill. She made pretense of watching a robin flutter by to its perch on the hollow oak tree that had been Gabriella’s initial grave.