Crybaby Falls Page 2

  Cain pressed his mouth to a thin line, torn between irritation and an unexpected flicker of gratitude. “I’ve lived this long without answers.”

  “Too long. You almost turned down a job with The Gates because of what happened here in Purgatory eighteen years ago. Nobody should have to live his life under a constant cloud. Believe me.”

  Cain almost laughed. Quinn’s whole life was lived smack-dab in the middle of an impervious cloud of secrecy and lies. Little of what Cain knew about his boss’s life and history was reliable. Quinn had spent two decades in the CIA, fabricating an identity as impossible to penetrate as a Smoky Mountain midnight.

  He sighed. “Okay, fine. But how am I supposed to investigate Renee Lindsey’s murder when half the town still thinks I did it? Who’s going to be willing to talk to me?”

  “You had an alibi. There was never any evidence to implicate you. You weren’t charged with anything.”

  “Small-town gossip doesn’t deal in evidence and legal outcomes.” Cain reached the summit of the hill, where a scenic overlook offered parking for a half dozen vehicles and an observation deck with a panoramic view of the Smoky Mountains. “People know what they know, the truth be damned.”

  As he unlocked the cab of his Ford F-150, he spared a moment to gaze out across the spectacular mountain vista. The sight tugged at something deep inside him, something he’d have sworn died years ago when he’d shaken the dust of Purgatory, Tennessee, off his boots.

  Yet, thanks to Alexander Quinn, here he was again, back in the hills he’d left behind, ready to face a past he’d long been determined to forget.

  What the hell was he thinking?

  “Don’t you want to know who killed Renee Lindsey?”

  If Cain didn’t know better, he might have imagined a touch of sympathy in Quinn’s soft question. But Cain did know better. If there was any emotion in Quinn’s voice, it was carefully planted there for a reason. To disarm him, perhaps. To get him to spill his own secrets.

  To prod him into doing whatever it was Quinn wanted for whatever reason he wanted it.

  “Of course I do,” Cain answered, keeping his tone businesslike and free of the emotion that burned like a furnace in the center of his chest.

  Of course he wanted to know who’d killed Renee Lindsey. In his own way, he’d loved her almost as much as her family had. And when he’d found her body at the base of Crybaby Falls, he’d felt so much rage he’d thought he’d combust. She’d been a sweet girl. A good girl, despite her foolish choices. She hadn’t deserved to die for her mistakes.

  “Keep me informed.” Quinn hung up without saying goodbye.

  “Goodbye to you, too,” Cain muttered, shoving his phone into his pocket and climbing into the truck cab.

  As he belted himself in, he stared through the windshield at the cool blue mountains spreading out in front of him as far as the eye could see. Just over the closest rise, he thought, was Crybaby Falls. He could be there in five minutes. Maybe less.

  He tried to quell the thought. He’d spent too many hours haunting the falls all those years ago before he’d left Purgatory behind. Too many hours beating his head against an invisible wall of secrets and lies, grieving the loss of his friend and the colossal unfairness of a world where Renee Lindsey had to die while Cain’s bastard of a father got to live. He’d buried the boy he’d been deep in the rocky soil of Mulberry Rise when he left Purgatory behind. He hadn’t been back to the falls in years.

  But when he reached the turnoff to Old Bridge Road, he took a right and headed down the narrow, rutted one-lane that would take him straight to the footbridge over the falls.

  * * *

  A WOODEN BRIDGE crossed Warrior Creek mere yards from the top of Crybaby Falls, close enough to the water’s surface that a strong rain could raise the creek high enough to swamp the rough wood slats that made up the floor of the bridge. But even though the afternoon sun had surrendered to clouds and a light shower, the rainfall never made it past a slow, steady drizzle, cooling air shrouding the woods in a misty fog that made the trees and rocks look like an alien landscape, full of mystery and danger.

  Or maybe it was this landscape in particular. These rocks, these trees, these thundering falls.

  Sara tucked her knees up closer to her chest as a rising breeze blew the rainfall under the rocky outcropping providing her with shelter. She wondered, not for the first time, if she and Donnie had stopped here at Crybaby Falls before heading up the mountain the night of the accident. Had they lingered here, Donnie stewing in a toxic blend of grief and obsession? Had she tried to coax him back to the present, to what he still had rather than what he’d lost so many years ago?

  She’d tried to understand his driving need for answers. He and Renee had been close, despite the four-year difference in their ages. When Renee had died at eighteen, Donnie and Sara had been high-school freshman, just starting to transition from their innocent childhood flirtation to the complexity of a high-school romance. At fourteen, Sara hadn’t known how to comfort her grief-stunned boyfriend.

  At twenty-nine, she still hadn’t known how to comfort Donnie. And she’d begun to fear what his intensifying obsession was doing not just to him but to their marriage, as well.

  They’d both been Birmingham police officers. But while Donnie had been content in uniform, she’d been pushing her way up the ranks, making detective and settling into a professional life she’d loved, despite the pressures of the job.

  Ironic, she supposed, that the strain on their marriage hadn’t come from the stress of her work but from her husband’s inability to get past that one, tragic moment from his past.

  She’d wanted answers, too. But if she’d learned anything in her time as a Birmingham police detective, it was the awful truth that some murders never got solved. Some killers never saw justice.

  And she’d had a sinking feeling that Renee Lindsey’s murder was going to turn out to be one of those cases that went permanently cold.

  “I won’t accept that,” Donnie had told her as he’d packed his bags for a trip back to Purgatory the morning before the accident that took his life. It was the last moment of her life she could remember before waking up in a Knoxville hospital, drowning in bandages and a relentless tide of pain.

  She rubbed her gritty eyes. They’d come here to Purgatory to follow a new lead. That much she knew.

  But what new lead? Had Donnie told her? Or had he kept it to himself, the way he’d begun to hide all aspects of his investigation into his sister’s murder from Sara, as if he no longer trusted her to listen to his theories with an open mind?

  Had she forced him into such secrecy with her growing impatience? She didn’t want to believe she’d made him feel he couldn’t trust her with his thoughts, but if she was truthful with herself, she knew it was possible. The more she’d settled into her new life in Birmingham, the more distance had seemed to grow between her and Donnie. His mind, his heart, was still in Tennessee. It was as if the world had stopped turning for him fifteen years earlier, when the Ridge County sheriff had shown up at the Lindsey house to break the wretched news of Renee’s death.

  She had wanted to understand. But his grief wasn’t hers, no matter how much she’d wanted to bear it for him.

  Had they been arguing in the car? Had she let his anger, her growing impatience, distract her at the wrong moment?

  Pressing the heel of her palm to her forehead as if she could somehow quell the throbbing ache behind her eyes, she tried to remember something, anything, from that night.

  She’d 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

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  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 gra
y 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.