Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(21)
“Since you feel that way, and we’re desperate,” he said, “could you be brave enough to reenact the day you were taken? I mean, with me there, right beside you instead of across the backyard, beside you when we go into the corn. I got the feeling you were staring down that cornfield today. We could walk through it together the way you must have been taken. You just never know what that might trigger, and like I said, I’m desperate for leads. Tess?”
He pulled over on the deserted road but kept the motor running. As he turned to her, their gazes held.
Talk about bombs going off, she thought. Though his plan was enough to shock her, something huge leaped between them that had nothing to do with anything they were talking about. Once she’d stuck a fork into a toaster to try to get a piece of bread out and took such a jolt that her hair stood on end. It was crazy, but she felt that way now, like nothing she’d ever known.
“So, what do you think?” he prompted.
“I’ll try. I trust you, and I want to help. Not only to save Sandy and Jill—maybe Amanda—but my own sanity, as well. Talk about your being haunted by regret about your fellow soldiers. I regret the fate of any abducted child who did not come back like I did.”
“Kind of like survivor’s guilt—like me.” He reached over and put his hand on her knee, then withdrew it as if she’d burned him. He put the car in gear and drove around the next turn. The thirty-foot waterfall appeared with its frame of surrounding gray rock and trees hanging on to tiered ledges for dear life.
“See how people ruin beautiful things?” he said, and pointed through the windshield.
The Falls falls, as locals jokingly called them, were still spectacular, but she saw what he meant. With orange spray paint someone had scrawled a message in very fat, outlined letters on the face of the stone next to the white-green water spewing over the cliff above. Tess sucked in a deep breath. GIVE BACK THOSE TOWNIE KIDS YOU PERV OR ELSE!!! Then off to the side, though in different paint and writing, was AZURE ROCKS!
“Well, Azure rocks is a good pun,” Gabe said. “Azure, referring to the new consolidated high school, not far from here. As for the threat about the ‘perv,’ a good thought, but delivered the wrong way.”
“And in a different, more arty script.”
They got out of the car and walked around the deep pool that was the source of Cold Creek and headed toward the cliffside path. The noise was so much louder outside the car that they had to raise their voices.
“I’d like to believe,” he went on, “that message was also done by some kid from the school, where the Lake Azure students don’t get along very well with the locals. I want to walk closer, see if I can find any discarded paint cans or something else to nail anyone. It’s going to take expensive, dangerous sandblasting to clear that off, so it will be a felony, not just a misdemeanor for defacing state property.”
“I heard that Sandy Kenton’s father is a park ranger, right? Maybe someone who knows him or his family did this to get even more attention paid to her being taken. And we can figure Marian Bell didn’t do this, because it only mentions townie kids and she and Amanda lived in the Lake Azure area.”
Gabe’s eyes widened at that as they started on the path around the pool toward the foot of the falls. “The mayor insists we can afford only one deputy, or I’d hire you,” he told her. “I think Amanda’s father, Win Kenton, comes through here a lot, so who knows what a desperate dad will do? And it didn’t hit me about Marian, but I’m putting nothing beyond her. Besides that, what’s been worrying me is whether it meant anything that this latest victim was taken from the building that used to be the police station—like a challenge to the police, namely me.”
The spray was drifting here but it felt good, cooling her flushed face. Just being with Gabe made her feel warmer than the climb did. She skidded on the path, cried out, and he reached back for her.
He grabbed her arm hard, held her steady, then leaned back against the rock face and pulled her against him. With her body pressed to his side, her head fit perfectly under his chin. His grip was strong around her, and she clasped his upper arms. His leather jacket was wet. She leaned her hip against his and lifted her head to say something as he turned his head.
They kissed. Tentative, gentle, then strong and sure, mutual. She felt his slight beard stubble, his warm flesh against her chin and cheeks as they moved their heads. She held to him, opening her lips. Was the entire cliff face moving?
“Aha,” he said when they finally broke the kiss. Lips still parted, both of them seemed to breathe in unison. In the noise of crashing water, she stared at his mouth to read his words. “I didn’t mean to do that, but...”
“I know. Me neither.”
It was like a dream. They still held to each other, not moving, not saying more, pressed back against the solid rock. Tess felt strangely content. She liked heights—at least you could see everything around you. She sighed but that too was swallowed by the crash of the falls.
Finally, Gabe spoke, putting his lips close to her ear. “We’re almost where the person with the paint must have stood.”
“I can’t believe I slipped,” she said, almost shouting. Suddenly she had to fill the space between them with words, however loud the noise. “Where we grew up—after we left Ohio, I mean—in Jackson, Michigan, the big attraction was not a natural waterfall but a man-made one called the Cascades. Big, tall stairs, tumbling water, lit by colored lights,” she went on, gesturing grandly. “You could go all the way up on side stairs. My sisters and I often did. But you’d get the spray if the wind was wrong, and the steps would be slippery running up and down.”