Crybaby Falls

by Paula Graves

  He didn’t let anyone get too close, of course, but his track record with friendships hadn’t exactly been great, anyway. He didn’t mind being alone.

  He was used to it.

  “Think about what I said,” Quinn said after a long, tense silence. “If you still want out of the job, I’ll see that you get back to Atlanta.”

  “But don’t expect a reference?”

  Quinn shrugged. “There are some things even I won’t lie about.” He turned back to the window, his posture a clear sign of dismissal.

  Cain left the office and wandered down the short corridor into the large communal office shared by Quinn’s agents. Even after the official closing time, there were still a few agents at work. He spotted Sinclair Solano sitting on the edge of Ava Trent’s desk, his dark head bent low as they conversed in quiet tones. Sinclair looked up and nodded a greeting before he turned his attention back to the other agent.

  There was something going on with those two, Cain thought, although they made an effort to keep it under wraps at work.

  The new hire was still here, too. Nick Darcy. Guy had a British accent, despite being one-hundred-percent genuine American. At first, Cain had figured he was putting on airs or something, until he learned Darcy had grown up in London because his dad had been the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. Darcy himself had worked for the State Department, in Diplomatic Security. Cain had no idea, however, why he’d left that job behind to work for The Gates.

  Alexander Quinn had put together quite the motley crew. Cain just didn’t know where he was supposed to fit.

  * * *

  “CAIN DENNISON’S BACK in town.” Sara watched for her father’s reaction to her casual remark. Carl Dunkirk had been a good cop, with a good cop’s poker face, but she’d figured out his tells a long time ago.

  He leaned back in the kitchen chair across the table from hers. The corner of his left eye twitched, even as he adopted a tone of nonchalant surprise. “Really?”

  “But you already knew that.”

  Her father’s lips quirked. “You’ve gotten too big for your britches, young lady.”

  She grinned at him, the sensation strangely alien, as if her muscles weren’t accustomed to stretching that way. “So, what’s his deal?” she asked, giving her own poker face a workout. “Why’s he back in town?”

  “How’d you know he was back?” Carl asked, ignoring her question. She wasn’t the only good investigator in the family.

  “Ran into him,” she said vaguely.

  “Where?”

  She supposed it was too late to back out of this conversation now that she’d started it. She glanced toward the stove, where her mother stood stirring her famous homemade chicken chili in a stew pot. “I went to Crybaby Falls,” she said in a hushed tone. “He showed up.”

  Her father’s eyebrows joined over the bridge of his nose. “You went there by yourself?”

  “I’m a cop, Dad. I was armed, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t.”

  “You know your father’s just going to tell me what you two are whispering about later,” her mother said from the stove.

  Sara arched an eyebrow at her father. He shrugged.

  “Tomorrow’s the eighteenth anniversary of her death. I guess Dennison went there for the same reason I did.”

  “You went to Crybaby Falls?” Ann Dunkirk turned from the stove and gave her a curious look.

  “She ran into Dennison there,” her father said, shooting Sara a look that was part apology, part resignation.

  “Really? I didn’t know he was back in town.”

  “Y’all don’t exactly run in the same circles,” Sara said.

  “I don’t think Dennison ever had a circle,” Carl said in a flat tone Sara recognized from her teenage years. Apparently his assessment of Cain Dennison hadn’t mellowed a bit in the intervening years. “He was too much like his daddy that way. Anybody with sense steered clear of the boy.”

  “Renee didn’t.”

  Her father just looked at her. She supposed his opinion of Renee’s judgment wasn’t something he planned to speak aloud. She’d heard it years ago, anyway, listening to her parents’ conversation shortly after the murder.

  “I told Gary Lindsey the girl was heading for grief,” her father had murmured, not realizing Sara was sitting on the stairs around the corner, feeling queasy and unsettled by the news about Donnie’s sister. “The Dennison boy has never been anything but trouble, and he’s been sniffing around her for months. Gary should’ve done something.”

  “Done what?” Ann had asked, her voice gentle the way it always was when she was trying to talk her husband through what she called “the valley of the shadow”—the gut-burning stress that came from dealing with death and depravity on a constant basis.

  “Locked her up until she was thirty,” her father had growled with a burst of anger. “Had the boy arrested.”

  “On what grounds?” Her mother had tried to walk the line between sympathy and rationality when dealing with her father’s bleak moods. Most of the time she succeeded.

  That time, not so much.

  “Stalking. Harassment. Statutory rape.”

  “She was nearly eighteen, Carl. And nobody knew she was pregnant.”

  “All I could think was, what if it had been Sara?” Her father had broken down then, the sound of his harsh sobs sending chills up Sara’s spine. She’d sneaked back upstairs to her bedroom and curled up under the bedcovers, shaken to the core, as much by her father’s reaction to Renee Lindsey’s death as by the murder itself.

  “You still think he did it, don’t you?” she asked her father.

  Over her father’s shoulder, Ann Dunkirk gave her daughter a warning look. Apparently the Renee Lindsey murder was still a volatile subject in the Dunkirk household, all these years later.

  “I don’t know,” Carl answered after a pause. “He was always the most likely suspect.”

  “Even though he wasn’t the baby’s father?”

  “That might have been the motive.” Carl scraped his empty coffee cup in a small circle across the table in front of him. “Maybe she told him about the baby and he killed her in a jealous rage.”

  “Did you know he was in the Army?”

  Carl shot her a skeptical look. “He tell you that?”

  She nodded. “You think it’s a lie?”

  “Hard to imagine that wild buck making it through boot camp.”

  “The military can sometimes straighten a person out.”

  “Sometimes. If he wants to change.”

  Sara put her hand on her father’s cup, stopping him from scraping it across the table again. “He struck me as different from the man I remembered.”

  “Apparently he’s been trying to talk to some folks at the sheriff’s department about Donnie’s accident.”

  Sara tried not to react, but she could see by the narrowing of her father’s eyes that she’d failed. Her mother stopped stirring the chili and turned to face them again.

  “Why would he be looking into Donnie’s accident?” she asked.

  “He was first on the scene, remember?” Sara murmured. She didn’t actually remember seeing him; she didn’t remember anything about the accident, really. But she’d heard what Cain had done to save her life.

  And she’d never even told him thanks.

  “You’re not entirely surprised to hear that Dennison’s been asking questions, are you?” Carl asked bluntly. “What do you know?”

  She sighed and pushed the coffee cup back toward him. “Before I went to Crybaby Falls, I went to the roadside memorial Joyce maintains for Donnie on Black Creek Road.”

  “She went there instead of the cemetery,” her mother told her father before turning her gentle, dark eyes toward Sara. “I called Joyce after we talked earlier. To let her know where you’d been.”

  Sara felt a flutter of guilt. “I should have called her myself.”

  “I tried to explain to Joyce that you deal with your grief in priva
te ways. You always have.”

  “Joyce wasn’t happy, I guess.”

  “Joyce hasn’t been happy in eighteen years,” Carl said bluntly. “And she never liked that you and Donnie got married.”

  It was nothing she didn’t know already, of course, but hearing her father say the words out loud stung more than she’d anticipated. “Yeah, well. Back to what happened when I went to the roadside memorial—to get there, you can either park on the shoulder, which is practically nonexistent on Black Creek Road at that point, or you can park at the scenic overlook up the mountain and walk back down to the curve. Which I did. When I got back to the scenic overlook, I noticed a truck with a humorous red bumper sticker as I was leaving. Didn’t think anything about it, until I saw Cain Dennison driving away from Crybaby Falls in that same truck.”

  Her father’s forehead crinkled. “So you think he followed you to the roadside memorial, then to Crybaby Falls, too?”

  “Hell of a coincidence if he didn’t.”

  “Language, Sara,” her mother said automatically, then shot her an apologetic grin.

  Sara smiled back, though inside, her guts were twisting a little at the news that Dennison had been asking questions about Donnie’s death.

  Why would he do that? Asking about Renee’s murder, she could get, but why Donnie’s death? Was he somehow invested in the answers because he was the one who’d found them after the accident? Maybe he felt a sense of responsibility, as if he owed it to Donnie, somehow, to get the answers nobody had seemed able to provide.

  “He’s working at that new private eye place that’s opened in the old mansion on Magnolia Street,” Carl said. “The Gates, I think they call it.”

  “Odd name,” Ann commented.

  “I think it’s probably a play on the whole ‘gates of purgatory’ thing,” Carl said.

  “Someone opened a detective agency in Purgatory?” Sara asked, surprised. “How do they get enough business to keep the doors open in a little place like this?”

  “Oh,” Ann said suddenly, turning to look at them. “I wonder if that’s what Joyce was talking about today at the cemetery.”

  “What did she say?” Carl asked.

  “Well, I was telling her how sorry I was about all she and Gary have gone through, losing both their children, and she said something like, she hadn’t been able to prevent what had happened to them, but she’d do anything, pay anything, to get the answers about their deaths.” Ann slanted a troubled look at Sara. “I didn’t want to argue with her about Donnie’s accident, but she has to know that’s what it was. An accident.”

  “Mom, I don’t blame her for wanting answers. I’d like a few myself. Like why we were even in Purgatory that night to begin with.”

  “You think maybe she’s hired The Gates to look into Donnie’s accident?” Sara’s father looked thoughtful.

  “Well, you said the Dennison boy is working at The Gates, and you said he’s asking questions about Donnie’s accident. Maybe those things are connected.”

  “Who on earth would hire Cain Dennison as an investigator?” Sara asked. “I mean, even if he was in the Army and all that, he’s still got a pretty sketchy background for private-eye work, doesn’t he?”

  “From what I hear, the fellow running the place has taken on more than one hire with a checkered past. Heard of a fellow named Seth Hammond from over Bitterwood way?”

  The name sounded familiar. “Meth mechanic or something like that?”

  “No, that was his daddy, Delbert, who blew himself up about twenty years ago. You might have remembered the name from that. Seth, on the other hand, made quite a name for himself as a con artist before he supposedly went on the straight and narrow.”

  “Hell of a chance to take, hiring a retired con man as a private eye.”

  “You think that’s something, apparently he’s also just hired Sinclair Solano.”

  “That hippie boy from California who became a terrorist?” her mother asked, her eyes widening.

  “Actually, he spent most of the time he was on the FBI’s most wanted list working for the CIA as a double agent,” Sara corrected. The story of the radical turned spy had made every major daily newspaper in the country when the truth had come out about a month ago.

  “I guess the CIA connection might explain that hire, then,” Carl said. “I hear the guy who runs The Gates is a former spook.”

  Sara glanced at her watch. It was a quarter past six—any chance there was anybody still answering the phone at The Gates?

  Her father’s sharp-eyed gaze met hers. “What are you thinking?”

  She pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I’m thinking that if Joyce really did hire The Gates to look into Donnie’s accident, someone there might want to talk to the only person who made it out of that wreck alive.”

  Chapter Four

  Sinclair Solano and Ava Trent had left separately ten minutes ago, as if they thought they were fooling anyone. Nick Darcy was still here, on the phone at the other end of the communal office. Cain sat at his own desk, trying to come up with a new reason not to go home, if you could call the rented Airstream he’d parked by his grandmother’s cabin a home.

  His grandmother, Lila Birdsong, had offered to let him stay with her, but she’d taken in enough strays this month. Her current boarders were a couple of Cherokee girls whose alcoholic parents had arranged for the girls to stay with Lila to avoid the state taking them into custody while their folks went through court-mandated rehab. Lila was a distant cousin, according to all parties involved, though Cain had his doubts. Over the years, his generous grandmother had seemed to find more than her share of distant relatives in need.

  And not-so-distant ones, he thought with fondness. If it hadn’t been for Lila, he doubted he’d have survived to adulthood in his father’s custody.

  The phone rang. Darcy looked up from his own call, lifting his dark eyebrows at Cain. The number on the display wasn’t a local one, and Cain considered letting the answering service pick up, since office hours were, technically, over.

  But what the hell—he could use a distraction from his own gloomy thoughts. He picked up the receiver. “The Gates. Dennison speaking.”

  “So. You really do work there.”

  His hand clenched around the receiver as he recognized Sara Lindsey’s soft voice. “Been doing a little detecting of your own?”

  “You were in the woods, watching me at the roadside memorial, weren’t you?”

  How had she figured that out? “You going to have me arrested for stalking or something?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “How’d you get this number?”

  “My father. You know him. Used to be a sheriff’s department investigator. Tried to send you to jail more than once.”

  “Yeah, your daddy and I go way back.”

  “Did Joyce Lindsey hire you to investigate Donnie’s accident?” She sounded as if she didn’t believe it was true, even as she asked the question.

  “I can’t comment on agency clients,” he answered carefully.

  “Which means yes.” There was a long pause on the other end of the line, making him wonder if she’d hung up on him. But a moment later, she added, “I can’t believe she hired you, of all people.”

  He didn’t respond. Anything he said would break a company rule.

  “But she didn’t, did she?” Sara added, realization coloring her voice. “She hired the agency. She didn’t know you’d be the person they’d send out to investigate.”

  Well, he thought. That didn’t take long. If only he hadn’t gone to Crybaby Falls...

  “Does Joyce think I did something to cause the accident?”

  The hint of vulnerability in Sara’s voice caught him by surprise. What could he tell her? Anything he said at this point would be a breach of confidentiality.

  “Oh, right,” she said when he didn’t respond. “You can’t comment on clients.”

  “Detective Lindsey—”

  “Mrs
. Lindsey,” she reminded him. “Not a cop anymore, remember?”

  He closed his eyes. “I don’t have any reason to think you did anything to cause the accident. It was a hairpin turn at night. Anything could have happened—maybe you swerved to miss a deer or a raccoon—”

  “I’ve gone over the police reports on the accident. There’s nothing to suggest I swerved. It was like I went straight over the edge without stopping.”

  “Mrs. Lindsey—”

  “Oh, for pity’s sake, just call me Sara. Mrs. Lindsey is my mother-in-law.” Her voice came out in a frustrated growl that made him smile despite the knot of tension in his stomach. “Speaking of Joyce, what are you going to do when it finally gets back to her that you’re the agent doing the investigating?”

  “That won’t be a situation for me to deal with,” he answered carefully.

  “Have you found out why Donnie and I were in Purgatory the night of the crash?” she asked.

  “No. If you saw anyone that day, nobody’s saying.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line before she spoke in a quiet tone. “That’s a mystery itself, isn’t it? Why would we come to town and not see anyone who knows us?”

  “What’s the last thing you do remember, before the accident?”

  Once again, the other end of the line went quiet.

  “Sara?” he prodded, wondering if the call had disconnected.

  “I’m not at liberty to share the details of my investigation with you,” she answered primly, although he thought he heard a hint of payback in her careful tone.

  He stifled a smile. “Fair enough.”

  “If you want to ask me questions, next time just ask me straight out,” she added. “Instead of playing games.”

  “I thought I did just ask you straight out.”

  “Good night, Mr. Dennison.”

  “Cain,” he corrected, but she’d already disconnected.

  With a sigh, he hung up the phone and looked up to find Nick Darcy watching him curiously.

  “You’re working rather late,” Darcy commented. His odd British-tinged accent made the corner of Cain’s mouth twitch.

  “Yes, rather,” he agreed, unable to resist mimicking Darcy’s accent.