Читать книгу Crybaby Falls - Пола Грейвс - Страница 10

Chapter Two

The drizzle had started to pick up, whipping needle pricks of rain into Cain’s face as he crossed the wooden bridge over Crybaby Falls. From here, the roar of the cascade drowned out other sounds in the woods, creating a cocoon of white noise that made him feel as if he were the only person left in the world.

He forced his gaze down to the churning maelstrom at the base of the falls, where the power of the water slamming into the rocks below created a perpetual explosion of spray, both constant and ever changing. The official name of the cascade was Warrior Creek Falls, but it had been called Crybaby Falls for as long as anyone could remember and even appeared that way on some local maps.

Legend had it that a young Cherokee maiden in love with a white settler had discovered, soon after her lover’s death in battle, that she was carrying his child. She’d hidden her pregnancy from her family until the day she gave birth in the shelter of the rock beneath the falls. But she’d died in childbirth, leaving the tiny infant alone, unprotected against the elements.

The sound of the crying baby had, supposedly, brought the Cherokee tribesmen and their white enemies together for a time, as they joined forces to search for the source of the cries. They found the baby just as he breathed his last. Touched and chastened by the tragic, unnecessary deaths of mother and child, the Cherokees and the white settlers had made peace.

For a time, at least.

According to the stories, if you came to the falls at night when the moon was bright, you could hear the baby’s plaintive cries coming from the rocky shelf behind the falls. A nice story. Dreadfully romantic. And almost certainly pure bunk.

The true history of Crybaby Falls was tragic enough without embellishment. Another pregnant girl had fallen in love with the wrong person and died here for her mistake. But there had been no crying baby, no lesson learned. Only death and grief and a gut-churning failure of justice.

Cain reached the other side of the falls and bent to pluck a sunny golden coneflower from a patch of the wildflowers that grew along the bluff overlooking the falls. Coneflowers had been one of Renee Lindsey’s favorite. “They’re like lookin’ into the sun,” she’d told him one day as she plucked one and handed it to him. “They make me feel warm and happy.”

He pulled one of the golden petals and let the wind pick it up and swirl it into the churning water below.

She loves me, he thought.

He tossed another petal.

She loves me not.

Renee had once told him he was her best friend, and he had thought at the time she was either lying or sadly short on friends. He hadn’t been the kind of kid who made friends easily, for a variety of reasons, some his own fault and some not. And his high-school years had been among the worst years of all.

But something about Renee had drawn him to her. He couldn’t say they’d shared much in common, except maybe an inborn impatience with phony people. She was from a family with two parents and two perfect kids, a family with a nice house in town and money in the bank. Her father owned a small chain of stores providing automotive parts and service. Her mother had been a stay-at-home mom, always there for her kids after school.

All Cain had waiting at home, back then, was a mean drunk of a father who liked to knock him around and call him names. Hell, he’d named Cain after the Bible’s first murderer because he’d been the only survivor of his mother’s attempt to give birth to twins—a fact his father had been only too happy to explain when Cain had come home crying after a nightmarish first day of school. “You earned your name fair and square, boy. Live with it.”

Taking someone home after school to study or just hang out was so beyond a possibility that Cain had never even wished he could have friends over. And he knew enough about the real world to refuse all of Renee’s hints that he could come home with her sometime.

Lindseys and Dennisons didn’t live in the same world. Hell, there’d been some whispers and raised eyebrows when the Lindsey boy, Donnie, had married Sara Lynn Dunkirk, whose daddy was a lifelong Ridge County sheriff’s deputy and whose mama was one of those Culpeppers from over in Cherokee Cove.

If the people in Renee’s circle could barely accept a nice, good-natured girl like Sara Dunkirk because of her family connections, what on earth would they have done with Billy Dennison’s long-haired, bad-tempered spawn?

He released the last of the coneflower petals and looked over the bridge railing. The thickening clouds overhead had darkened the tree-dense forest, plunging the world around him into premature twilight, but he could still make out the tiny golden petals as the whirling waters sucked them under and regurgitated them a few feet downriver.

He turned away from the falls and started back across the wooden bridge, watching his steps on the rain-slick wooden slats. When he looked up again, his whole body jangled with surprise.

Standing at the other end of the bridge was Sara Lindsey, her shoulder-length hair dancing around her face in the damp wind. Her body was rigid, her hands clasped so tightly around the rails of the bridge that her knuckles had turned white.

Cain’s heart gave a lurch and settled into a rapid, pounding cadence against his rib cage. Low in his belly, he felt the slow, sweet burn of attraction and wished she was anyone else in the world.

That he was anyone else in the world.

“Did you kill her?” Sara asked, her low voice whipped toward him by the wind.

He stared back at her, wondering if he’d imagined the question. Wondering if he was imagining her, standing here at the scene of the crime like an avenging angel.

“No,” he answered.

But he couldn’t tell if she believed him.

* * *

DESPITE THE PASSAGE of seventeen years since Sara had last seen him, Cain Dennison had changed little. The tall, lean boy with wary gray eyes and a feral sort of masculine beauty had aged into a taller, lean-muscled man in his mid-thirties with the same winter-sky eyes and a touch of the wild. Life had etched a few more lines in his face, but those lines only made him seem more mysterious and compelling than she remembered.

Once a bad boy...

He had always been an object of girlhood fantasies, as sweet a piece of forbidden fruit as Purgatory had to offer. Sara herself had not been immune, even as madly in love with Donnie Lindsey as she’d been.

The flicker of heat building low in her belly suggested she still wasn’t immune, all these years later.

“Why are you here?” she asked. He’d left town not long after Renee’s murder, coming back now and then only to visit his grandmother, who lived near Miller’s Knob on the eastern edge of town. According to her father, who’d kept an eye on Cain Dennison’s comings and goings ever since Renee’s murder, he hadn’t been back in town since the accident three years ago.

“Why are you?” he countered, a snap in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite control the defensive response.

She wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Her official reason for returning to Purgatory had been to attend Joyce’s memorial day for Donnie, but she’d known before she ever climbed behind the wheel of her Chevy Silverado that she wasn’t going to make it to the cemetery.

So why had she come?

I want answers. The thought formed like a lightning bolt slashing through her brain.

But answers to what questions? She couldn’t even remember coming to Purgatory the day of the accident. She knew Donnie’s motivation—the new lead she couldn’t remember. And was it a coincidence the accident had happened the day before the fifteenth anniversary of Renee’s death?

But why had she come with him this time? Her boss at the police department hadn’t been much help in answering that question; he’d told her she’d given him no reason for asking for a few days off. The demands of her job meant that most of her closest friends had been fellow cops and their families, but apparently she’d failed to inform any of them what she and Donnie had planned to do in Purgatory, either.

And neither her parents nor Donnie’s had known they were in town, though Joyce and Gary had told her later, in the hospital, that Donnie had called the night before to tell them he’d be in town for the anniversary of Renee’s death.

“I don’t know,” she finally said aloud. “I guess because it was three years ago today. And tomorrow, it’ll have been eighteen years since Renee’s death.”

Cain looked down at the falls thundering beneath the bridge under their feet, his expression grim.

“Sometimes, I can barely remember what she looked like,” Sara continued when he didn’t speak. “Isn’t that strange? She was Donnie’s sister, and I saw her all the time, but when I try to remember things about her, it’s all fuzzy and distant, like I’m looking at the past through a frosty windshield. I wish I could blame the head injury from the crash, but the truth is, I don’t think I really knew her at all. She was just Donnie’s sister, the one who didn’t want us to bother her or mess with her things.”

“I remember her.” The words seemed to spill over his tongue before he could stop them. His gray eyes slanted her way, narrowing as if he’d said something he regretted.

“Do you know who fathered the baby she was carrying?” she asked.

His gaze snapped up to hers again. “No.”

She knew it hadn’t been Cain’s baby. DNA tests had established that much. But short of court-ordering every male who’d ever had contact with Renee to take a DNA test, the question of her baby’s paternity had remained as open a question as the identity of her killer.

“She wouldn’t say,” he added so softly that for a moment, she wasn’t sure she’d actually heard him speak. But when he turned to look at her again, he added, “She made it clear she didn’t want anyone else to know.”

She stepped closer, lifting her face toward him. The rain had almost stopped, but the wind had picked up, blowing damp strands of her dark hair across her face. One strand snagged on her lips, and Cain’s gaze dropped to her mouth. For a moment, his eyes darkened, and something crackled between them like electricity.

Then he looked away again, his gaze drawn back to the waterfall.

“Did you love her?” She hadn’t realized she was going to ask the question until it tumbled from her lips.

He turned his head slowly, his eyes narrowing as they met her gaze. “I wanted her. I don’t reckon that’s the same thing, though.” His shoulders slumped after a moment and he turned to put his hands on the bridge railing. “I wanted her to be happy. And she wasn’t.”

No, she wasn’t, Sara thought. She might not have a strong memory of Donnie’s sister, but what she did recall was that Renee had been full of life and laughter, even when she was being the imperious older sister—except for those last few weeks of her life.

Sara supposed learning she was pregnant must have been terrifying for a girl like Renee, whose parents had put her on a pedestal and made big plans for her life. College, marriage, a career if she wanted it—the Lindseys had been determined to give their children a charmed life, especially their smart, beautiful firstborn.

Renee would have felt the heavy weight of those expectations and dreaded having to tell her parents the truth.

“She wasn’t dating anyone as far as her parents and Donnie knew.” Sara wondered if Cain Dennison was willing to be any more forthcoming now, all these years later, than he’d been right after Renee’s death. Sara couldn’t bring Donnie back, but maybe she could finish what he’d started before his death. Maybe she could find out the truth about what had happened to Renee.

She’d been a good detective once, before the accident. And she had a lot of time on her hands now, while she tried to figure out what to do with the rest of her life.

“I knew she was seeing someone,” Cain said. “I just never knew who.”

Sara couldn’t hide her surprise. “You never told the cops that.”

He slanted a look at her. “They didn’t ask me that.”

“And you didn’t volunteer the information?”

“The cops thought she was dating me. Secretly, of course.” He laughed, though the sound held little in the way of mirth. “Because Renee Lindsey wouldn’t dare date a Dennison in the open.”

“But the two of you spent a lot of time together.”

“We were friends.”

“And I’m supposed to believe that was enough for you?”

He shot her a narrow-eyed look. “Did your daddy send you to interrogate me, Detective Lindsey?”

“My daddy doesn’t tell me what to do. And, by the way, it’s just plain Mrs. Lindsey now.”

One dark eyebrow arched over a pale gray eye. “Since when?”

“I turned in my badge last week.”

“Your decision?”

The decision had nominally been hers, but she knew it had been a matter of time before her bosses let her go. She hadn’t been able to throw herself into her work the way she’d needed to. Donnie had haunted every inch of the town they’d once called their home, until he was almost all she could think about. Donnie, her questions about his death and her own guilty fear that whatever had happened had been her fault.

“Close enough,” she answered.

He cocked his head, his gaze sliding over her slowly, as if to adjust his assessment of her now that he had this new piece of information. “What are you going to do now?”

She shrugged. “I have some savings that didn’t get eaten by the medical bills. Donnie had some life insurance. I’ve got a little time and space to decide.”

“And you came back here to do your thinkin’?”

She smiled at the first hint of his mountain accent coming into play. He’d been gone from the mountains awhile, just as she had, but highlanders like the two of them could never completely escape their roots.

“My granddaddy died last winter. He left me his cabin. My dad says there’s a lot of work to be done on it, and I should probably just sell it. But I don’t have to decide right away.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling Cain even this much about her plans. He might as well be a stranger to her, and what little she did know about him and his past didn’t exactly paint him as a trustworthy confidante.

“And you figure it’s as good a place to do your thinkin’ as any?”

“Something like that.”

He nodded slowly. “Looks like we’re both back for a while, then.”

“So this isn’t a short visit for you?” She felt a flicker of unease. Purgatory, Tennessee, was a place with a long memory, and there were a whole lot of people in this town who still believed Cain Dennison had gotten away with murder.

Her father included.

Carl Dunkirk had never been happy about the sheriff’s decision not to pursue Cain as a suspect in Renee’s murder. He’d seen Renee’s pregnancy by another man to be a damned good motive for murder rather than exculpatory evidence.

If Cain planned to stay here long, he might come to regret it.

“I have a job,” he said after a moment, not looking at her.

“Doing what?”

He glanced at her. “This and that.”

“Are ‘this and that’ legal?”

His mouth curved, the first hint of a smile since she’d confronted him. The twitch of his lips carved a dimple in his cheek, sending an odd flutter through the center of her chest. “You think I’d tell you if they weren’t?”

She tried a different tack. “I heard you joined the Army when you left town.”

“You heard that, did you?”

“It’s not true?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Did you like the service?”

“Liked isn’t exactly the word I’d use,” he said after a pause. “I guess you could say I found satisfaction in serving my country.”

“How long were you in?”

He made a show of looking at his watch. “Fifteen years, two months and three days.”

Now she was really surprised. The Cain Dennison she knew—through rumors and stories, anyway—couldn’t have lasted a week in the Army. “That’s a career.”

“I thought it would be, yeah.”

“What happened?”

He blew out a long breath. “I guess you could say I didn’t see eye to eye with the brass, and I knew it was a battle I couldn’t win.”

Now that sounded more like the Cain Dennison she remembered.

He lifted his face to the wind, narrowing his eyes. “Looks like the rain’s about to pick up again.”

She knew a dismissal when she heard one. Cain was done with the conversation.

As she started back up the incline to where she’d parked her truck, she thought over what he’d let slip during their brief encounter. He hadn’t exactly been forthcoming, but at least he’d given her a place to start looking.

Renee had been seeing someone secretly, and Cain had known about it, even if he didn’t know who. Which meant it was possible someone else knew something about Renee’s clandestine affair as well, right?

But who?

Buckling herself in behind the steering wheel, she watched the woods, wondering if Cain would follow. Or did he plan to brave the rain that was already pelting her windshield with increasing fury in order to pay his respects to Renee?

When he didn’t appear after a few minutes, she cranked the truck. But before she could change gears, her cell phone rang. Glancing at the display, she saw her mother’s number.

She could imagine what her mother would have to say. She’d probably attended the memorial for Donnie, hoping to see Sara there, as well.

Bracing herself, she answered. “Hi, Mom.”

Ann Dunkirk’s voice held a hint of anxiety when she spoke. “Did you get caught in traffic? You didn’t have an accident, did you?”

She closed her eyes, feeling guilty about giving her mother more to worry about. “No. No accident. I just decided to visit the memorial on Black Creek Road instead of going to the cemetery.”

“Oh.” Ann’s pause extended so long that Sara almost began to squirm. “I wish you’d called Joyce Lindsey to let her know.”

“I should’ve.” Sara knew her mother was right. She didn’t regret missing the memorial, but she shouldn’t have been a coward about it. She should have let Joyce know her plans.

She just hadn’t been up to dealing with the guilt she felt whenever she talked to Donnie’s mother.

“You’re still planning to come to dinner tonight? I’m making chicken chili.”

Her stomach growled at the thought. “I’ll be there.”

“Be careful driving in the rain. And don’t try to drive while talking on your cell phone.”

“Yes, Mom.”

As she ended the call and put her phone back in the pocket of her jacket, she saw Cain Dennison exiting the woods about twenty yards away from where she’d come out herself. His head lowered against the now-driving rain, he walked quickly toward a dark blue Ford F-150 parked along the shoulder a quarter mile down the road.

She watched until he’d climbed into the cab of the truck, curiosity keeping her still. There was something about the truck that seemed familiar, she realized. But what? What was tugging at her memory?

He pulled past her as he drove away. If he noticed her parked there off the road, he didn’t give any sign. As she started to look away, a flash of red caught her attention. It was a bumper sticker attached to the back of the truck that read, “Never follow the advice on a bumper sticker.”

Even as her lips started to curve in a smile, she remembered where she’d seen the truck before—parked at the scenic overlook above the spot where she and Donnie had missed the tight curve and gone down the gorge.

Her smile faded.

So, Cain Dennison had been at the same overlook where she’d parked her car. And now he turned up at Crybaby Falls at the same time she had.

Coincidence?

Not bloody likely.