Kaine’s bite of lasagna went down in a hard swallow. Jesus. Not just God, but Jesus. Joy was as blatantly evangelical as they came.
Joy shifted her attention back to Grant. “I’d be curious to read what Gabriella wrote. Especially since my grandmother knew Ivy.” She folded her hands and rested her elbows on the table. “She said Ivy never discovered who Gabriella was, why she was murdered, or what happened.”
Grant gave a nod. “That’s pretty much what Mr. Mason indicated, and Patti affirmed. Ivy’s memory journal was never completed and there was no record of how it all ended.”
“Were Gabriella’s writings in a journal also?” Joy glanced between Grant and Kaine.
“Not exactly,” Grant said.
“That’s the really creepy part,” Kaine inserted.
“They were pages, buried beneath the floorboards in the third bedroom,” Grant added.
Kaine pushed her plate away. “She wrote her thoughts in the margins of an old book. Great Expectations.”
Joy’s face blanched. Her elbows slid from the table, and her hands bumped the edge. Her plate jumped from the force, clinking against the wood when it landed. Megan stopped chewing and stared at her mother.
“Did you say Great Expectations?” Joy whispered.
“Yes.” Grant reached out to touch Joy’s hand. “Are you all right?”
Joy shook her head. Color returned to her face, but her hands shook. “Just a moment.” She pushed up from her chair and disappeared down the carpeted hallway.
“What was that all about?” Grant said.
Megan smiled and wiped up some of the water that had splashed from her mother’s glass. “Momma has Great Expectations in her room. It was Grandma’s favorite book.”
Kaine cocked an eyebrow at Grant.
He speared a green bean with his fork. “That can’t be a coincidence.”
Joy returned with a shoe box. She pushed her plate out of the way, set the box on the table and removed its cover. “This was my grandmother’s.” She pulled out a lace doily. Then a hardback book. The title was embossed in gold. “She cherished it, but never let anyone read it.”
Kaine tried to calm her excitement. Because Great Expectations was a popular classic and still in print, there was nothing strange about a family having an old copy stored on a bookshelf. Or in Joy’s case, in a shoe box. But, like Grant said, it couldn’t be just coincidence.
Joy ran her hand over the book’s front cover. “I remember one day—I was maybe eight or nine at the time—I saw it in a drawer in her bedroom. I pulled the book out and was going to open it, but my grandmother found me with it.” She looked up at Kaine, her eyes reflective with unshed tears. “It’s the only time I ever remember her raising her voice to me. She propped it up on a high shelf and I never touched it again. Not until after she died.”
“You believe her book relates to Ivy somehow?” Grant spoke Kaine’s thoughts.
Joy took a deep breath and tapped the book with a long fingernail. “You just wait and see, young man.” Opening the book, she rotated it so they could see. A beautiful, cursive script filled the margins. She turned the page and then another, and another. Almost every page included handwriting surrounding the text. “This isn’t just a novel—it was my grandmother’s diary. She wouldn’t let anyone read it because it held her private thoughts. After she died, and I found it, that’s when I saw it was her diary and I knew why she wanted no one to read the book.”
Kaine leaned forward in anticipation. “Just like Gabriella.” The image of Gabriella’s pages popped into her head. “Your grandmother chose the same book and the same style of diary entries. That cannot be chance.”
After helping Megan to another piece of lasagna, Grant looked at Joy and the book in her hands. “Do her writings explain anything?”
Joy blanched. She shut the book. “I don’t know. I never read it.”
Grant folded his arms on the table. “Why?”
The older woman sagged onto her chair, staring at the book for a long, silent moment. “I couldn’t. I can’t. I keep remembering her face that day she discovered me with it. She wasn’t just stern, she was . . . panicked. Anxious. It upset her very much.”
Kaine wanted to ask if she could read it. After all, the book might hold the answers she’d been searching for. But Joy had the appearance of someone guarding a treasure chest, someone with no intention of unlocking it anytime soon.
“You can’t tell me my grandmother didn’t get the idea to write in the margins from someone. Who writes their diary in an old book? And there’s this.” Joy reached into the shoe box and pulled out a page taken from the novel. “I always thought this was my grandmother’s. Now I wonder.” She opened her grandmother’s copy of Great Expectations and compared the page to it. “Just as I thought: The typeset doesn’t match. This page isn’t from the same copy.”
Grant reached for the page and studied it a moment. He looked up at Kaine. “I think this matches Gabriella’s copy. Remember the little fleur-de-lis printed at the top corners of each page? This one has it.”
Kaine took the page Grant offered her. He was right. “How is this possible?”
Joy shook her head and held the book to her chest. “This has to prove one thing I’d never considered and my grandmother never implied.” For the first time, Kaine saw Joy as fragile. “My grandmother didn’t just know Ivy Thorpe; she knew the dead girl of Foster Hill when she was alive.”
Chapter 36
Jvy
Darkness swamped Ivy’s vision, and her scream was muffled as a hand pushed a rough cloth into her mouth, pressing her head into her pillow. Dazed from being woken from her sleep, she kicked at her mattress, clawing her attacker’s arms. The memory journal she’d been writing in before she fell asleep dropped to the floor with a thud. Ivy cast a wild glance over the man’s shoulder to her open window. She’d only wanted to enjoy the warm nighttime air of spring. Instead, she had opened the way for Gabriella’s killer to find her.
“You didn’t die.” The voice grated in her ears. She squirmed in his grasp, but he tied the gag behind her head as she twisted, her bedcovers tangling around her feet.