Crybaby Falls

by Paula Graves

  “She already had a lover,” Sara murmured. “She needed a friend.”

  He nodded. “I’d never really had one of those before Renee. People tended to give the Dennisons a wide berth, and they weren’t wrong for that.”

  “Your father had a difficult reputation.”

  “He’d earned it, fair and square,” Cain said, trying to keep the bitterness from swallowing him whole. “Every bad thing you’ve ever heard about him was probably true. And a whole bunch of things you didn’t hear.”

  Sara’s gaze grew troubled. “That bad?”

  “Worse.”

  She closed her eyes briefly, and he felt her pity like a cold touch.

  “Don’t do that,” he said gruffly.

  Her eyes snapped open. “Don’t pity you?”

  “I don’t want it.”

  “Pity isn’t an insult. It’s just a feeling.” She reached across the table. Touched his hand.

  As her fingertips lingered there, cold against his skin, he felt a surge of raw desire so powerful it nearly swamped him. He drew his hand away before he lost his senses completely.

  Sara pulled her hand into her lap and looked down at the table. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m in awe of you, as well.”

  “Don’t do that, either,” he said gruffly. “Don’t make me out to be some sort of tragic hero.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Her voice was bone dry.

  A smile tugged at his mouth. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.”

  “I just mean, you’re here and you’re sane. I came from a great family. I had a great husband. A great life. And sometimes I feel as if I’m living in a world I don’t even recognize anymore.” She looked self-conscious as she tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, not meeting his gaze. He supposed she was no more used to talking about her feelings than he was, especially after being alone for nearly three years.

  Then again, maybe she hadn’t been alone. Maybe there’d been someone else after Donnie’s death. Maybe a lot of someones.

  He didn’t like that thought. Nor did he like just how much he didn’t like that thought.

  “Where do you think I should start looking?” Sara broke the thick silence that had begun to descend between them.

  “For Renee’s murderer?”

  She nodded, meeting his gaze again. “You probably knew her better than anyone else, right? So where should I look?”

  He licked his lips as the answer occurred to him, knowing she probably wouldn’t care for what he was about to say. But she’d asked for his honest assessment, hadn’t she? He owed her the truth.

  “I think you should try to remember what happened the night of your accident,” he answered.

  As he expected, her brow creased into a troubled frown. “I’m not sure that’s even possible. And more to the point, why would that be the place to start looking for Renee’s killer?”

  He voiced the suspicion that had been building since he found the crystal meth in his grandmother’s woodbin. “Because I’m not sure your wreck was really an accident.”

  Chapter Nine

  A flood of cold swallowed Sara’s whole body as Cain’s words sank in. She fought the strange paralysis with a shake of her head. “There was no evidence of tampering—”

  “I don’t know how it was done,” he said. “I just think there’s reason to believe whoever killed Renee would stop at nothing to keep his secrets.”

  She clasped her hands tightly in front of her, unnerved by the way they were suddenly shaking. “Nobody knows his secrets. The police don’t have a clue who killed her. None of us do.”

  “Someone thinks it’s possible for us to find out,” he told her, his voice unusually subdued.

  Leaning toward him, she lowered her voice, as well. “What’s happened?”

  Anger blazed in his eyes when they met hers. “Yesterday afternoon, when I got home from your place, there was a note tucked into my door frame. Plain envelope, no name. Inside was a typewritten note that said, ‘Look in your grandmother’s woodbin. Imagine what might have happened if I’d called the police.’”

  Another chill washed through her. “What was in there?”

  “About five hundred grams of crystal meth.”

  She stared at him. “What?”

  “Street grade, if the guys at The Gates are right about it.”

  The Gates? He’d taken the drugs to work? Had he lost his mind? “You didn’t turn it in to the cops?”

  “Where they can stash it with all the other pounds of crystal meth they’ve got stored up from drug busts in these mountains while they haul me and my grandmother in for drug trafficking and send those two poor girls into the DCS system?” He looked at her as if she were the one who’d lost her mind. “No, thanks. Quinn can get rid of it just as well as the cops, and nobody gets framed.”

  “What about fingerprints? Trace evidence?”

  “The Gates can handle that, too,” he said calmly.

  She blew out a long breath, shaking her head. “You like to live dangerously. What if a cop had pulled you over on the way to the office?”

  “I’d be in jail. Luckily, that didn’t happen.”

  She had grown up in a household where the law was damned near sacrosanct. But would she have been so quick to call the police if she’d found herself in Cain’s situation, with his family background?

  Probably not, she had to admit. “The chain of evidence has been completely obliterated.”

  “We’ll find some way to use anything we discover.” He sounded less than hopeful.

  “You don’t think you’re going to find anything, do you?”

  “Nobody gets away with murder for eighteen years if they go around making it easy for people to find them.”

  She couldn’t argue with that point. Donnie had become increasingly obsessed with finding his sister’s murderer in the months and years preceding his death, and he’d gotten nowhere, despite his intimate knowledge of her life, her personality and her circle of friends and acquaintances.

  Whoever had killed her had done a good job of covering his tracks.

  “Okay,” she said finally, “I’ll buy that. But how does this attempt at blackmailing you figure into my accident? I was the one who was driving. And believe me on this—I wasn’t the one who was asking all the uncomfortable questions around Purgatory. That was Donnie. Anyone who wanted to put an end to his investigation would have gone after him, not me.”

  “He was with you in the car that night.”

  He had a point. “But I can’t find anyone who knew we were going to be in Purgatory that weekend. When would someone have had the chance to do anything to tamper with the truck?”

  “You were in Purgatory the night of the accident, Sara, and you don’t remember where you went.”

  She realized what he was implying. “You think we saw or heard something that very night.”

  He nodded slowly. “It’s possible. Maybe even likely.” He leaned toward her, the legs of his chair scraping closer. The warmth of his body washed toward her, tempering the cold that lingered in her limbs. “You want to remember what led up to the accident, don’t you?”

  She stared at him, realizing with dismay that she wasn’t sure she knew the answer. She’d spent the past three years telling herself, telling everyone, that not remembering what happened was worse than remembering she was at fault. But was that true? Wasn’t it easier not knowing? If she didn’t know what happened, then there was still a chance she hadn’t caused her husband’s death.

  What if she remembered everything and erased any hope that she wasn’t at fault? Could she live with that knowledge?

  She pressed her hand to her mouth. Her fingers trembled against her lips, to her dismay.

  Cain reached across the remaining space between them to touch her hand, gently tugging it away from her face. “I know it must be scary.”

  “What if I—” She stopped short, unable to say the words.

  “What if you didn’t?”
he countered, his voice warm. “What if someone tried to kill you and Donnie that night? Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want justice, if that’s the case?”

  His callused fingers, warm against her skin, had an unexpected calming effect on her trembling limbs. Strange, she thought as she looked up to meet his gaze, considering how his earlier touch had set fire to her blood. “Of course I do.”

  “Have you ever tried to remember?”

  She stared at him, pulling her arm away from his grasp. “What kind of question is that?”

  “I mean, I know you’ve probably tried to remember. Have you ever gone to someone for help recovering your memories?”

  “If you’re talking about hypnotic regression, I don’t buy into that hokum,” she said flatly. “There’s a reason why it’s not admissible in court.”

  “I’m talking about hypnosis to relax your mental barriers against remembering what happened. If you did hear or see something, your mind may not want to remember what it was. Maybe it’s too painful.”

  Like doing something that ends in your husband’s death? She looked down at her hands. “The doctors said it’s possible I’ll never remember. And after so much time, they’re probably right.”

  “Did they say there was a physical reason why you couldn’t remember? A brain injury?”

  “I was in a coma for two weeks.”

  “But that was medically induced, right? Not a result of your head injury?”

  She looked up at him, appalled. “How the hell do you know that?”

  He looked apologetic. “It was part of the information your mother-in-law gave Quinn when she hired The Gates to look into her children’s deaths.”

  Of course, she thought. Her parents would have thought nothing of telling Joyce Lindsey the details of Sara’s condition. After all, as Donnie’s mother, she’d have been considered family.

  And Joyce, apparently, thought nothing of sharing Sara’s personal medical information with strangers at a detective agency.

  “Was Mrs. Lindsey wrong? Is there a medical reason you don’t remember anything from that night?”

  Swallowing the despair rising in her throat, she shook her head. “No. The doctors told me that my head injury was minor. Mostly scalp lacerations and abrasions. The CAT scan didn’t show any damage to my brain.”

  “But when I found you, you were nearly delirious. Then you passed out cold.”

  She nodded, remembering the doctors’ questions after she woke up. “They think it was a combination of emotional distress and pain. I had a couple of bad compound fractures, and the police think, based on Donnie’s time of death, we were down there in that gorge for nearly four hours before you found us.”

  He winced. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Four hours with a couple of compound fractures would be bad enough. Four hours aware that your husband flew through the windshield and was probably dead—” She shuddered, trying to push the thought from her mind, even now. No wonder she didn’t want to remember that night.

  “I wish I’d gotten there sooner.” Cain touched her again, a light brush of his fingertips against her cheek. The potent urge to lean into his touch was so strong, she had to curl her fingers into the sofa cushion to keep from moving closer.

  She couldn’t stop a bleak laugh from escaping her raw throat. “I don’t think it would have changed much. The coroner says Donnie was probably dead the moment he hit the windshield.”

  Cain dropped his hand. “Did he make it a habit? Not wearing his seat belt, I mean. Or did the belt fail?”

  “That wasn’t in the notes Joyce gave you?” she asked, immediately ashamed of the hard edge of her tone. It wasn’t Joyce’s fault that Sara couldn’t provide the answers everybody needed.

  “She didn’t say,” he answered quietly.

  Of course she wouldn’t have. One of Joyce’s best—and worst—traits was her undying loyalty to her family. Renee and Donnie could do no wrong, no matter what they’d done.

  She supposed Cain Dennison would find that trait a bit more appealing that Sara did. He’d grown up with a man who’d apparently found endless, unjustified fault in everything Cain had done.

  But Cain hadn’t had to live with that constant conflict between the truth and Joyce’s unreasonable perception of her son. The only way to win Joyce’s support would have been to agree with Donnie on everything. And Sara just wasn’t wired that way.

  “He usually wore his seat belt,” she told Cain. “He was probably even more militant about it than I am. He was still in the traffic division, so he saw a lot of bad accidents.”

  Cain’s eyes narrowed. “But he wasn’t wearing it that night?”

  “No. I don’t know why he wasn’t.”

  “So maybe you should find out.”

  Frustrated, mostly because she knew he was right, she scraped her hair away from her face and tried to come up with a reason to protest. But nothing came to mind. Nothing, at least, that would pass muster with her own sense of justice.

  “Do you know anyone who does that kind of hypnosis?” she asked finally. “Is that something y’all do there at your fancy detective agency?”

  He smiled at her question, the lines creasing his lean cheeks magnifying his masculine appeal until she felt her insides quiver. “I don’t know of anyone at The Gates who could put you under hypnosis,” he answered, “but I do know a tough old lady who can.”

  * * *

  “ARE YOU TRAINED to do this?”

  Sara’s wary question didn’t seem to faze Cain’s grandmother. She slanted the younger woman a look of amusement as she pulled her old cane rocking chair closer to Sara’s seat on the sofa. “Believe it or not, Sara Dunkirk, I am not uneducated.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I just didn’t get my education from your fancy schools,” Lila added with a laugh. “My mother taught me what she called ‘relaxing magic.’ Not magic at all, of course, no matter what you may’ve heard ’bout us Birdsongs.”

  “I thought Birdsong was your married name.”

  Lila’s eyebrows twitched. “I sent my man packin’ the first time he came home drunk and tried to knock me around,” she said with a hint of peppery heat in her voice. “Just like my daughter should’ve done. Though I reckon things happen as they ought, or Cain wouldn’t be here.”

  Cain wasn’t sure Sara, or anyone else, would find his presence in the world a compelling argument for his mother letting her husband knock her around, but he flashed his grandmother a smile, anyway.

  “So you sent his last name packing at the same time?” Sara asked.

  “No need to keep the name around if the man was gone.” Almost as soon as she said the words, Lila sent a worried look toward Sara. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Different men, different situations.” Sara waved off Lila’s explanation. “If Donnie had been the kind of man to hit a woman, he’d have been gone the first time, too.”

  “Seems it’s always the good ones that pass too soon,” Lila said with a nod, sitting back in the rocking chair and giving a push with her legs. The chair started to gently roll back and forth on its rockers. The rhythmic cadence of floor creaks was part of the relaxation method, Cain knew from experience. He’d spent a lot of his adolescence right here in this room, with his grandmother rocking and humming, as she’d just begun to do. The sounds had done wonders to calm his agitated soul and help him survive the double shots of anger and fear that had dominated so much of his young life.

  He could see his grandmother’s rocking and humming start to have a relaxing effect on Sara, as well. She sank lower in the comfortable cushions of the sofa, her fisted hands releasing their death grip on each other and falling to either side of her legs.

  “Do you know this song?” Cain’s grandmother asked Sara, humming a few more bars of an old mountain ballad.

  Sara began to hum along with Lila in a warm alto harmony. “‘Darlin’ Ginny,’” she murmured, a smile teasing the corners of her mouth. “My grand
mother taught me that song before I could walk.”

  “Do you do the old-time ballad singin’?” Lila asked between hums.

  “All by myself, no instruments?” Sara laughed. “Not if I can avoid it. I prefer singing harmony. Better suits my voice range.”

  Cain took his seat in the armchair near enough to Sara and his grandmother that he didn’t miss a word of their exchange but far enough back to make him a spectator rather than a participant. His gaze settled on Sara’s face, watching the nuances of emotion play over her features as she and Lila conversed. She had a good face, he thought. Good bone structure, his grandmother would probably say, her code words for the kind of pretty that would last beyond the bloom of youth.

  Sara was still young, but already he could see in the curve of her cheeks and the shape of her jaw what she would look like twenty years from now if life treated her well. She would still be a striking woman, able to command a man’s attention as surely as she was commanding his now.

  He didn’t remember thinking of her that way when he knew her as a gawky teenager. She had still been aglow with lingering childhood, far too young and innocent for a boy who’d had to grow up way too soon.

  But Sara had seen the darker side of life in the intervening years, and it had toughened her. Carved a lot of the tenderness out of her, leaving sturdy bone and sinew in its place.

  She continued to hum along with Lila, her eyes closing as she laid her head back against the sofa cushion. Across from her, Lila had pulled a half-knitted scarf from the bag of yarn and needles that hung from the back of the rocking chair, and the soft clack of knitting needles joined the symphony of chair creaks and ballad hums.

  “I remember the night of your accident,” Lila said quietly a few minutes later. “Fall had brung a chill to the mountains, and the trees was already startin’ to turn colors.”

  “Yes.” Without opening her eyes, Sara nodded. “It’s always colder earlier up here than down in Birmingham at this time of year. You get spoiled down there, thinking summer’s gonna last forever, and then before you turn around twice, you’re shiverin’ in your boots.”