Death Falls. Todd Ritter

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СКАЧАТЬ to the sign, the Realtor was Ginger Schultz, a former high school classmate. She and Kat had taken algebra together, and they’d spend the class sitting in the back row giggling and slipping notes. Now that Kat thought about it, a lot of those notes had to do with Eric Olmstead. That he and Kat were once again in the same place at the same time would amuse Ginger to no end.

      “Who used to live here?” Nick asked.

      “Ruth and Mort Clark,” Eric said with noticeable affection. “My mom actually liked them. They were good people.”

      “When did they move?”

      Kat, whose job required her to know as much as she could about everyone in town, took the liberty of answering. “They didn’t. They died. Mort sometime in the late eighties. Ruth was in the early nineties. The house has been on and off the market a lot since then.”

      “Any particular reason?” Nick asked.

      “No idea.”

      Eric started walking again. “I’d say it was the street. People know what happened here. Word gets around. It makes the place feel …”

      His voice trailed off, but Kat knew what word he had intended to use. It was the same word that had popped into her head earlier. Haunted.

      As if they needed further proof of that feeling, Kat turned to the house across the street. Absurdly tall and run-down. The only way it could have looked more haunted is if there had been a cemetery in the front yard. Kat’s gaze started at the widow’s walk on the roof and slid down the house’s façade. The windows were wide and rounded at the top, giving the impression of many eyes staring outward. Some were cracked. Others were missing shutters. The siding—Kat assumed it had once been white—desperately needed stripping and a fresh coat of paint. The front porch was in equally bad shape. Holes gaped willy-nilly in the floorboards and a whole section of railing had broken off. It now lay on the ground, partially hidden by knee-high crabgrass.

      “Let me guess,” Nick said, “this one is also vacant.”

      “You’d think that, from the looks of the place,” Kat replied.

      Nick jabbed his cane in the house’s direction. “Someone actually lives there?”

      Kat nodded. “Glenn Stewart. He’s the town’s recluse.”

      Other than the fate of Charlie Olmstead, Mr. Stewart was Perry Hollow’s biggest mystery. Kat, who could recognize almost every one of the town’s residents, had never knowingly laid eyes on the man. She also didn’t know too many people who had. In order to see Glenn, you’d have to go inside his house or he’d have to come out. As far as she knew, neither of those things happened very often.

      “He was here in 1969?” Nick asked.

      “Yes,” Eric said. “But according to my mother, he didn’t leave the house back then, either. He just stays inside, in his own little world. If it wasn’t for the occasional light in the window, you wouldn’t know he was there at all.”

      Craning his neck, Nick scanned each window that faced the street. “He can hear us,” he whispered.

      Kat whispered back. “How can you tell?”

      “Because he’s watching us.”

      She tilted her head upward until she, too, saw what Nick was looking at. It was a lace curtain hanging in the window, yellowed by the sun. Holding it away from the glass was a pale hand. After a few seconds, the hand retreated and the curtain dropped into place.

      “Weird,” Nick said.

      “Very.”

      “How much do you know about this guy?”

      Kat struggled to come up with something—a random tidbit, a minor piece of gossip—and failed. She knew absolutely nothing about Glenn Stewart, a fact that bothered her immensely.

      They moved forward, not speaking, until they reached the end of the cul-de-sac. A thick swath of trees created a green wall in front of them. Emerging from deep inside it, barely audible, was the muffled rush of water.

      “It’s this way,” Eric said, pointing to the remnants of a path that had once cut through the woods but was now camouflaged by weeds and brush.

      He led the way, tamping down the weeds in front of him. Kat went next, kicking away anything that had the potential to trip up Nick. When she checked to see how he was faring, she saw his eyes narrowed in concentration as he carefully made his way.

      In the distance, the roar of Sunset Falls grew louder as they continued to trudge through the woods. Soon they cleared the trees and emerged along the water’s bank, where the sound enveloped them. It was a steady thrum that echoed off the trees and forced them to raise their voices.

      “This is it,” Eric announced. “Sunset Falls.”

      In front of them, the creek rushed along with abnormal speed. It had been an unusually rainy summer, with the clouds opening up more often than not. The result of all that precipitation was a swollen creek that sparked into white water near the lip of the falls.

      A wooden footbridge spanned the width of the creek, about fifty feet. It was narrow—barely wide enough to let two people pass—and of dubious strength. The trail continued on the other side, although it looked more neglected than the one on which they stood.

      “Where does that path go?” Nick asked.

      “Nowhere,” Kat said. “It just slopes down to the bottom of the falls, where it dead-ends. It used to be a popular place for picnics and pictures. Then Charlie Olmstead vanished, and no one wanted to go down there anymore.”

      “Is there any other way to get there?”

      Kat knew where he was going with the question. If an abduction did occur at the falls, he wanted to know all the ways to get in and out of the area.

      “Nothing. This street is the only way to reach it.”

      She should have said it was the only way to reach it. The bridge leading to the trail was now closed, a decision made sometime between her father’s reign as police chief and her own. Signaling its closure was a rusted sign nailed to a decrepit sawhorse that sat in the way.

      “Do you think it’s safe?” Eric asked.

      Kat, who hadn’t been on the bridge in probably twenty years, said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

      Moving the sawhorse aside, she contemplated the span. Age and exposure to the elements had turned the wood slate gray, and cracks and termite holes were visible everywhere. But the bridge seemed sturdy enough, so she took a single step onto it.

      Nothing happened. So far, so good. Only about fifty more steps to go.

      “You guys coming?”

      Nick shook his head and backed away. “No thanks.”

      Kat bobbed up and down on the bridge’s first plank, testing its sturdiness. “It seems fine to me. Where’s your sense of adventure?”

      “The СКАЧАТЬ