Crybaby Falls. Пола Грейвс

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СКАЧАТЬ been driving Donnie’s Silverado. His baby. He’d bought the truck used when he’d turned eighteen with money he’d made working at a tourist trap in Sevierville. He’d pampered the old truck as if it were a beloved pet and rarely let Sara drive it, not because he didn’t think she was a good driver but because he found such simple joy behind the wheel of the tough old Chevy.

      So why had she been driving that night? Had he been impaired in some way? Donnie had never been much of a drinker, but he’d had a beer now and then if he was socializing with friends who drank. The police hadn’t checked his blood-alcohol level, as far as she knew, since he hadn’t been driving.

      They’d checked hers in the hospital, of course, and found no alcohol in her system. She’d have been shocked if they had; she had avoided alcohol like the plague ever since one nightmarish teenage binge on prom night her senior year. When she’d vowed “never again,” she’d meant it.

      The tox screen had come up clean, as well.

      But something had caused her to veer off Black Creek Road, a road she’d traveled nearly every day of her life until she was eighteen. A road as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror. She knew every turn, every twist, every incline and straightaway of Black Creek Road, from the old marble quarry north of town to where the road ended ten miles past Bitterwood to the south. She wouldn’t have missed the hairpin turn. Not even at midnight in a snowstorm.

      But it hadn’t been midnight. The crash had happened a little after nine. And the night had been clear and mild, according to reports.

      She hadn’t hit an animal. There weren’t any signs that she’d swerved or braked to miss an animal, either. There hadn’t even been any skid marks to indicate she’d tried to stop their plummet over the cliff.

      How the hell could that be? If she hadn’t been drunk or incapacitated, why wouldn’t she have tried to stop the car from going over the edge?

      Somewhere outside her hiding spot came a distinct snap of a twig, loud enough to make her nerves jangle. On instinct, she tugged her knees more tightly to her chest, like a child hiding from detection.

      Was this how Renee Lindsey had felt? she wondered suddenly as her pulse sped up and her skin broke out in goose bumps. Had this been the last thing she felt before she’d died?

      A man strode into view, moving in quick, powerful strides that exuded barely leashed anger. He was tall and lean, all sinew and muscle.

      And dangerous, Sara thought, staring out from her hiding place with her heart in her throat.

      This particular man was as dangerous as hell.

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 СКАЧАТЬ