Rapid Falls by Amber Cowie
PROLOGUE
June 1992
The night before my seventh-grade field trip to Rapid Falls, the waterfall that our town was named after, my dad came up to my room. He didn’t visit my bedroom often, especially to talk about dead girls, so I remember the way he said my name. His voice sounded like a door I was supposed to open.
“Cara? Do you have a minute?”
I nodded as I stepped back to let him in. I climbed back up to the head of my bed, closing my well-worn novel. My dad hesitated for a moment, then sat. His unfamiliar weight made the bed feel odd, almost unbalanced. He cleared his throat.
“I wanted to talk to you about something. It’s really important to stay safe tomorrow. No horsing around, okay?”
I nodded, not completely certain what I was agreeing to.
“The year my class went up, there was . . . an accident.”
“What happened?” I blurted. My dad looked startled at my eagerness, and his expression became guarded. I worried that my desperation would shut down our talk. Even at thirteen, I knew that the best way to lose something was to want it too much.
“Sorry,” I muttered. My dad rubbed his chin before he spoke again. I could see the semipermanent shadow of motor oil in the lines of his knuckles.
“There was no railing back then, on the side of the cliff, and it’s not much of one now. If anyone walks too close to the edge tomorrow, if people start pushing or getting wild, I want you to tell your teacher right away. It’s important, Cara.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. This wasn’t the talk I was expecting. The outing was an elementary school rite of passage, a moment that marked the end of being a kid. Our town was too small to have a junior high, so the field trip was the last thing seventh graders did before moving on to high school. I thought my dad was going to tell me how proud he was of me, not lecture me about safety.
My dad continued, “When we went up, the teacher wasn’t paying attention. I still don’t know why not. She was the one who was supposed to protect us.” My dad’s voice broke on the last word. It made me realize what he had sounded like when he was a teenager.
I nodded.
He went on. “I forgot my water canteen, so I left the group to go back to the bus. That’s when I saw her, writing something in her notebook. Probably a poem. She always wrote poems, you know? I don’t know why no one noticed she wasn’t with the rest of us. She was at the edge, the part of the cliff that the wind gets at from underneath. There was no dirt under the bank she was standing on, but she couldn’t tell. I tried to call out to warn her, but my voice was gone. It felt like my throat was filled with sand.”
He pressed his hands together, not meeting my eyes.
“She looked up at me, and then the ground just crumbled beneath her.”
My dad blinked, and the skin around his eyes wrinkled like a sheet of aluminum foil. When he opened them again, his eyes were glassy but his voice was firm.
“My teacher must have been right behind me. I’ll never forget the way she screamed. It was the only sound I heard. The girl didn’t yell at all. Maybe she didn’t understand what was happening. Maybe she didn’t believe she was about to die.”
The way my dad said the words made it seem like they had been stuck in his head since it happened. His classmate had been beautiful, my dad said—long red hair and freckles. There was a note in his voice that I had never heard before. Longing, or something like it. I felt a pang of jealousy when he told me what she looked like. I wondered if my dad thought I was as pretty as she had been.
Years later I spent an evening hunting through the online archives of the Rapid Falls Times, looking for pictures of her. The records seemed incomplete, but I found one story on the tragedy, accompanied by a grainy photo of a dark-haired girl with clear skin. Memory is odd, the way it let him rewrite things in his mind. My dad was right about the pretty part, though. Even in the grainy photograph, she sparkled. You could tell she was about to turn into the kind of girl who could devastate a person with her smile. A girl like my sister used to be.
The newspaper account confirmed most of the details my dad had told me. She died in 1963 on a sunny June day. The article quoted two chaperones, their words full of sad confusion. A maudlin poem by the girl about a rose and a bee ran as a sidebar. The news piece concluded by calling it an accident that no one could have predicted or avoided. It didn’t put forward a theory about why she had been standing so close to the edge. I wondered if my dad ever told anyone what he saw. I never heard anyone else talk about her in Rapid Falls. It seemed like they forgot.
Her name was Josephine—Josie for short. My stomach dropped when I read that. It sounded so much like Jesse, my high school boyfriend, the boy the whole town believed my sister killed. Even though he’s been dead for nearly twenty years now, no one has forgotten him. I guess it’s different when someone is murdered. People tend to remember that.
CHAPTER ONE
June 2016
In the pediatric emergency ward, they have customized equipment to keep tiny arms and legs from flailing. I look at my three-year-old daughter, restrained like a prisoner on her way to execution. I feel like I’m going to be sick. They allow only one parent into the X-ray room, and for some reason Maggie insisted it be me. If my husband, Rick, were in here, he would be soothing her with endless renditions of “Baby Beluga.” I don’t sing. I know that nothing will drown out the fear in either of our minds.