Hidden Falls

by Newport, Olivia

  “Everything is looking good,” Ethan said. “I can’t find much to complain about.”

  “You’re not going to chase Cooper out again, are you?”

  Ethan glanced at Cooper. “I think he can stay as long as you’d like him to, if you promise to let him know when you’re tired.”

  “I will.”

  Lauren’s eyes focused on a smudge of dirt on Ethan’s forearm. Then she noticed the layer of dirt across the tops of his shoes.

  “What have you been up to today?” she said. “You look woodsy.”

  “I was out and about for a while today.”

  “More photos?”

  “Not today.” Ethan closed the chart and glanced at the wall clock. “I’m already late for a meeting with Dr. Glass, but, Cooper, I’d like to check in with you later about something. Will you be available?”

  “Call me,” Cooper said.

  “When are you going to spring me?” Lauren asked.

  “We’ll talk about that tomorrow. I think we’ll take the drain out in the morning and see where we go from there.”

  “You’re throwing me a bone, aren’t you?”

  Ethan tucked the chart under his arm. “I’ll make sure all this gets into your electronic medical record so it can haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  “Aren’t you sweet?” Lauren grinned.

  “Later.” Ethan left.

  “Is it my imagination,” Lauren said, “or is everyone acting weird today? I asked an innocent question about what he did today, and he didn’t want to answer it.”

  Cooper shrugged. “He’s entitled to privacy.”

  “After everything we’ve all been through? I thought we were past that.”

  “He’s your doctor now. Professionalism and all that.”

  “Maybe.” Lauren wasn’t convinced. “What do you suppose he wants to talk to you about?”

  “I don’t know.” Cooper leaned back in his chair. “But it reminds me your aunt wanted to talk to me earlier, and I never got the chance to find out what was on her mind.”

  “Off duty or not, it looks like your day is far from over.”

  “It does seem that way.”

  “You’ll call my aunt, won’t you?”

  “I’ll do my best to track her down. Maybe I’ll buy her dinner and find out what’s going on.”

  Cooper would be waiting for Ethan’s call now, as well, and there was no telling what his evening held when it came to Liam. Frustration washed over Lauren. It wasn’t like her to stay in bed. She wanted to be up and doing something. Problem solving was in her nature.

  “Are you sure you haven’t heard anything about Quinn? Did you question Bobby Doerr?”

  “He’s adamant that he didn’t see Quinn—that he doesn’t even know who Quinn is.”

  “Don’t you find it odd anyone would want to steal a car as old as Quinn’s?”

  “Doerr says his uncle used to have one just like it. He was feeling sentimental.” Cooper caught himself. “You can’t tell anyone I said that. It’s an active investigation.”

  Lauren sighed. “I only wish he’d seen Quinn at some point.”

  “No one’s giving up,” Cooper said.

  “I’m going to nag Ethan to discharge me tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to do what he tells you to do.”

  “I don’t think Ethan can imagine living in a small town again,” Lauren said, “but I really want my quiet small-town life back.”

  “I know what you mean.” Cooper stood up. “I should go check on things, but I have one question before I go.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Can I take you to dinner on Saturday night?”

  Lauren flushed. “I would love that.”

  5:41 p.m.

  The problem was that half the town knew who Dani’s cousins were.

  She had dodged the morning’s events as much as she could, but when one cousin was a popular sheriff’s deputy and another was engaged to marry a woman who exuded enough chic to make a hundred women jealous, suddenly everyone wanted to pick Dani’s brain.

  What did Dani really think about Jessica McCarthy? Did she think Jessica was guilty? What about Liam? Had he embezzled as well? Was Cooper going to arrest his own brother next?

  It would have been a great day for Dani to ignore her phones and go hiking, but before the arrest, she had committed herself to a minor plumbing repair, giving a quote on some painting work, and looking at a desktop computer on which the warranty had expired three weeks before the machine started freezing. That meant at least three lengthy conversations during which Dani said little while she concentrated on working but her clients speculated at length, plus a string of efforts to trap her by store clerks or people who happened to cross the street at the same time Dani did.

  When were people going to learn?

  The cumulative effect, though, was to make Dani wonder. She didn’t devote much mental energy to Cooper. He’d done what everyone depended on him to do and upheld the law. It was Liam who was on Dani’s mind. Despite overlapping hours at the hospital over the weekend and being together when Cooper arrested Robert Doerr, she hadn’t had a private conversation with Liam since the day she discovered Jessica had put him at risk and broken his heart. While Dani wouldn’t satisfy the misplaced inquisitiveness of people who didn’t know Liam well and would jump to their own conclusions anyway, she did wonder how Liam was doing.

  So at the end of her day, Dani swung by Liam’s apartment hoping he was there alone.

  He was.

  Liam answered her knock within only a few seconds and admitted her without resistance. Dani surprised both of them by kissing his cheek.

  “What was that?” Liam asked.

  Now she slapped his shoulder. “It’ll never happen again.”

  “Thanks for coming over.”

  The television wasn’t on. No reading material lay open.

  “Were you sleeping?” Dani asked.

  “No.”

  Dani couldn’t see that Liam had been doing anything else. “Just sitting?”

  Liam nodded.

  He looked relatively calm to Dani, considering that his world had disintegrated in the last few days. His briefcase was missing from its usual spot on the corner of his desk. Dani saw no sign of food or even an open can of pop.

  “So I guess you heard.” Liam put his hands in his pockets and pressed his lips together.

  “Cooper has got to stop arresting people on Main Street,” Dani said. “It gets people riled up.”

  “Right. Not at all like taking a guy out at the knees in a hospital hallway.”

  “That was different.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it, Dani.”

  “Neither do I.” That was the truth. “You hungry?”

  “Nope.”

  “How about some TV?” Dani picked up the remote control from a side table and noticed Liam’s cell phone was lying beside it, turned off. “Not in the mood,” he said.

  Cheering people up was not one of Dani’s areas of expertise. But then, cheering up was not what Liam needed. There was no point in pretending the day’s events hadn’t happened.

  “Let’s go to the lake,” Dani said.

  He grimaced. “That’s more your thing than mine.”

  “It’s a lake,” she said. “Maybe you remember we have some property there.”

  “I haven’t been to the cabin in years.”

  “I know.”

  “Too rustic for my tastes.”

  “Then lucky for you, I’m not inviting you in. But you can’t sit here and stare at four walls.”

  “Yes I can.”

  “But you shouldn’t. You’ve seen a whole lot of ugly the last few days. Your soul needs something beautiful.”

  “If I have a soul, it’s toast.”

  Theology was also not one of Dani’s areas of expertise, at least not the arguing variety, but leaving Liam alone right now seemed like the worst idea in the world. She also was c
ertain she couldn’t make herself sit still in his apartment no matter how hard she tried. She opened the closet beside the apartment door, pulled a leather jacket off a hanger, and tossed it at Liam.

  He caught the jacket reflexively.

  “Come on. I’ll drive.” She opened the door and stood, waiting, until Liam relented and put his arms into the sleeves and straightened the jacket over his shoulders.

  Dani drove, without speaking, to her cabin on the edge of Whisper Lake and turned off the ignition. Darkness had not yet overtaken the sky. Dani estimated they had another thirty minutes before sunset, plenty of time to savor the oozing orange hues fading into the horizon. She had no more need of words than Liam. To stand on the pier, where Ethan had interrupted her morning with news of his sighting of Quinn, was all Dani wanted.

  Liam followed her lead and got out of the Jeep. Dani could see him looking around, as if scraping for memories of outings with their grandfather or identifying vague recognitions of what seemed different. Dani offered no explanations. That could come another day if Liam was ever genuinely interested. For now she led him along the path to the short pier and positioned herself at its farthest edge, listening for Liam’s footsteps behind her. Silent and motionless, Dani gave herself over to the sensations.

  The water lapping against the slender pilings of the pier.

  The slight breeze rustling what was left of the leaves on the trees.

  The almost imperceptible drop in temperature as evening eased its way in.

  The disc of light dissolving into dusk and shadow.

  They stood in full darkness when Liam finally spoke.

  “I’m not sure how I can fit in here now. Maybe I should leave Hidden Falls.”

  Dani felt a pebble caught between planks of the pier under her feet and bent to dislodge it.

  “I’d miss you,” she said.

  “You and Cooper,” he said. “That would be it.”

  “There may be one or two others. Quinn, for instance.”

  “Quinn likes everybody. That’s hardly a recommendation for popularity.”

  Dani threw the pebble out into the lake, listening for its plink. “As you know, I’m not an expert in popularity. But moving away is not going to change things.”

  “I’d get a fresh start.”

  “A fresh start to do what, Liam?”

  “Make something of myself, obviously. If I stay here, I’ll just be the laughingstock of Hidden Falls. Nobody will ever trust me with their money again, either.”

  He had a point. Liam’s career might never be the same. Maybe his company wouldn’t even want to keep him on if they thought he had anything to do with how the accounts were compromised.

  “You did the right thing, Liam.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m relieved it’s all over, but I still feel kicked in the gut.”

  “And a new town and a new job is going to change that?”

  Liam had no response.

  “Your soul is not toast,” Dani said. “That’s not what we learned in Sunday school.”

  “You think about Sunday school?” Liam said.

  “Don’t sound so shocked.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You know, Cooper would have helped me find whoever put a hole in my boat if I’d given him half a chance.”

  “Are we changing topics of conversation?”

  Dani sighed. “No. Tackling Bobby Doerr wasn’t one of my finest moments, and I was wrong to get angry at Cooper for doing his job. At least you did the right thing.”

  “Just barely,” he muttered, “and only because I was afraid for my own skin.”

  “But you did it. Give yourself credit.”

  Beside Dani, Liam cleared his throat.

  “I’ve been thinking about how old we are,” Dani said.

  “Not that old,” Liam said.

  “Old enough to stop thinking I can outrun God. Your soul is not toast.”

  6:29 p.m.

  Jack’s theory was that if he didn’t look at Dominick, the old man couldn’t be sure Jack had seen him and therefore would not be offended by his guest’s intrusion into the dinner hour. Casually scratching the side of his nose, Jack angled his head away from the doorway where Old Dom lurked.

  The muffled cough Dom managed was the most fake and least subtle expulsion of air Jack had ever heard.

  “I’ll just be a minute,” Jack said, turning another thick page in the dusty ledger book from the mid-1930s. It had taken him a long time to adjust to decoding the slender flowery handwriting without feeling as if he was mentally translating word by word into a typeface he could recognize. Now that he was reading more fluidly, he was out of time.

  Dom flicked the lights off and on a couple of times.

  “You’ve been so helpful,” Jack said. “Please bear with me.”

  “You’re welcome to come back,” Dom said, “but I’ve got to go. I don’t normally drive after dark.”

  “I can take you home.”

  “Don’t want to leave my car here.”

  Reluctantly, Jack closed the book without being sure what he’d accomplished by spending the last couple of hours with Dom. He still had no idea who was buried in the grave marked simply Infant. Here and there in the book, Jack noticed the dots and dashes Nicole had referred to, but he didn’t know Morse code. Whatever conclusion Nicole had come to, she’d had the advantage of Quinn’s secretive trail of hours of poring through the records and chatting with Old Dom about what he remembered. Jack was depending on his instinct, and it was falling short.

  Jack’s phone rang. He didn’t have to look to know it was his wife.

  “Dinner is on track for seven,” Gianna said. “Are you?”

  “I should come pretty close.” Jack stepped across the room into Dom’s office area. The groundskeeper turned off the lights and pulled the door closed before turning a key in the lock.

  “If you’re not here by 7:15, I’ll keep a plate warm.”

  “Thank you,” Jack said. “I won’t be long.” He heard no scolding in Gianna’s tone. She didn’t even ask where he was or what he was doing. Perhaps the last few days had moved them out of the tunnel they’d been stuck in for so long.

  He walked out with Old Dom.

  “Do you figure you’ll be back?” Dom asked.

  “I’m not sure.” Jack pulled his keys from his pocket. “Tell me, Dom. If you had to say who was buried in that infant grave, what would be your guess?”

  “I don’t suppose I’d have a guess.”

  “No? Your father seemed to have opinions.”

  “Hard to say he was always right, though. I long ago gave up trying to ferret out what was in his mind.”

  “Oh?” Jack raised his brows. “I thought you believed he had his ways of knowing things.”

  “There’s knowing, and there’s knowing, if you get my gist.”

  Dom’s words cast a blanket of doubt over what Jack thought he knew. If the cemetery records couldn’t answer his questions about the mysterious grave, he would have to dig deeper into other sources of information—birth records, family histories, law enforcement records, missing children’s reports. He could investigate multiple avenues before he gave up on isolating what kind of crime—or crimes—might have been committed and for what reasons. The main question was what consequences resulted. Who benefited?

  “You heard a baby cry that day,” Jack said. “Even then you thought something was funny. Wouldn’t you like to know what really happened?”

  Dom shuffled toward his car. “People have their reasons. I think that’s what my daddy believed.”

  “There could have been a crime.”

  Dom nodded. “True. Or maybe it was just the best way out of a hard time.”

  Jack didn’t want to let go. He would have to tell Ethan he was going to get to the bottom of whatever happened. He could promise to try to minimize the impact of the investigation on the Jordans, but there was no getting around the fact that the baby presumed to be in that grave had in
fact not died for more than another twenty years.

  “Good night, Dom. Thanks again.” Jack got in his car. The hospital wasn’t far from the cemetery and it wasn’t large. How long could it take to determine whether Ethan was there? Jack could get this settled now and still make it home for dinner only slightly late.

  At the hospital, Jack inquired about Ethan at the information desk and fingered the coins in his pocket while the volunteer on duty made a couple of calls. She hung up the phone and smiled at him.

  “Looks like you just caught him,” she said. “Our new doctor is checking on patients on the second floor. You should be able to catch him at the nurses’ station.”

  Patients? Our new doctor? Jack withheld his opinion that the gray-haired woman had overstated Ethan’s relationship with the Hidden Falls hospital, instead thanking her and moving down the hall toward the elevators. And the plural patients was a curious word choice, considering Ethan had only one patient.

  Jack went up to the second floor and down the hall. Ethan was making notes on a small computer and looked up.

  “Hello, Jack.”

  “Hello, Ethan. Got a minute?”

  Ethan leaned his head away from the nurses’ station, and Jack followed Ethan down the hall and a few feet into an unoccupied room.

  “I’ve been thinking about our conversation yesterday,” Jack said.

  “Good,” Ethan said. “I hope you’ve come to see how it would be best for my family if we left well enough alone at this stage.”

  “I understand how you feel.” Jack hadn’t thought through the words he would use at this moment.

  “Thank you. I don’t want to muck things up more than they already are. Let’s just give history a fresh start.”

  Jack cleared his throat. This wasn’t the conversation he’d intended to have.

  Hidden Falls was supposed to be his fresh start, a chance not to muck things up further. Gianna would never understand if Jack held on to this against all odds—and no billable client. The truce between them held the promise of affection again, but it was fragile.

  If Jack left now, he could still be on time for dinner with his family.

  “I’m going to put the will and the contract right back where I found them,” Jack said. “They’ll be there if you ever decide you want them. In the meantime, I wish your family well.”