The Waterfall - Carla Neggers

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at the U.S. State Department cut short. Madison had been twelve, J.T. nine. Not easy ages to lose a father. Six months later, Lucy had plucked her children away from the only life they knew—school, friends, family, “civilization,” as Madison would say. But if they hadn’t moved—if Lucy hadn’t done something dramatic to get her bearings—they’d have been in danger of losing their mother, too, and that simply wasn’t an option.

      There’d been nothing from Sebastian Redwing when Colin died. Not a flower, not a card, not a word. Then, two months later, his lawyer showed up on Lucy’s doorstep offering her the deed to his grandmother’s Vermont farmhouse. Daisy had died the previous year, and Sebastian had no use for it.

      Lucy threw the lawyer out. If Redwing couldn’t even offer his condolences, she didn’t want his damn house.

      A month later, the lawyer was back. This time, she could have the house at a below-market price. She would be doing Sebastian a favor. His grandmother had wanted someone in the family to have the house. He had no brothers or sisters. His parents were dead. Lucy was the best he could do.

      She’d accepted. She still didn’t know why. Sebastian had once saved her husband’s life. Why not hers?

      In truth, she couldn’t pinpoint one clear, overriding reason. Perhaps the lure of Vermont and starting her own adventure travel business, the stifling fog of grief, her fears about raising her children on her own.

      Maybe, she thought, it boiled down to the promise she’d made Colin shortly before he died. Neither had known until that day on the tennis court that he had a heart condition that could kill him. The promise had seemed like one of those “if we’re trapped on a desert island” scenarios, not something she would ever need to act on.

      Yet Colin had been so sincere, so serious. “If anything happens to me, you can trust Sebastian. He’s the best, Lucy. He saved my life. He saved my father’s life. Promise me you’ll go to him if you ever need help.”

      She’d promised, and now here she was in Vermont. She hadn’t heard from Redwing, much less seen him, since she’d bought his grandmother’s house. The transaction had been handled entirely through his attorney. Lucy had hoped never again to be so desperate that she’d feel compelled to remember her promise to Colin. She was smart, she was capable, and she was used to being on her own.

      So why was she packing herself and her kids off to Wyoming—Sebastian Redwing country—in the morning?

      “Mom!”

      “You’re doing great. Just keep driving.”

      With one finger, Lucy traced the outline of the bullet in her pocket. There was probably an innocent explanation for the bullet and all the other incidents. She should just focus on having fun in Wyoming.

      * * *

      The locals still referred to Sebastian Redwing’s grandmother as the Widow Daisy and the remnants of her farm as the old Wheaton place. Lucy had learned Daisy’s story in bits and pieces. Daisy Wheaton had lived in her yellow farmhouse on Joshua Brook for sixty years as a widow. She was twenty-eight when her husband drowned saving a little boy from the raging waterfall in the hills above their farmhouse. It was early spring, and the snowmelt had made the falls treacherous. The boy had gone after his dog. Joshua Wheaton had gone after the boy. Later, the falls and the brook they were on were named after him. Joshua Falls—Joshua Brook.

      Daisy and Joshua’s only child, a daughter, couldn’t wait to get out of Vermont. She moved to Boston and got married, and when she and her husband were killed in a hit-and-run accident, they left behind a fourteen-year-old son. Sebastian came to live with Daisy. But he hadn’t stayed in Vermont, either.

      Seven acres of fields, woods and gardens, and the rambling yellow clapboard farmhouse were all that remained of the original Wheaton farm. Daisy had sold off bits and pieces of her land over the years to second homeowners and local farmers, keeping the core of the place for herself and whoever might come after her.

      It was said Daisy had never gone back to Joshua Falls after she’d helped pull her husband’s body out of the frigid water.

      The Widow Daisy. Now, the Widow Swift.

      Lucy grimaced as she walked up the gravel path to the small, classic barn she’d converted into office space. She could feel the decades yawning in front of her and imagined sixty years on this land, alone.

      She stopped, listening to Joshua Brook trickling over rocks down the steep, wooded embankment beyond the barn. The falls were farther up in the hills. Here, the brook was wide and slow-moving before running under a wooden bridge and eventually merging with the river. She could hear bees buzzing in the hollyhocks in front of the garage. She looked around her, at the sprawling lawn, lush and green from recent showers, and the pretty nineteenth-century farmhouse with its baskets of white petunias hanging on the front porch. Her gaze took in the stately, old sugar maples that shaded the front yard, the backyard with its vegetable garden and apple trees, and a stone wall that bordered a field of grass and wildflowers, with another stone wall on its far side. Then, beyond that, the wooded hills. So quiet, so beautiful.

      “You could do worse,” Lucy whispered to herself as she entered her office.

      She had learned most of what she knew about the Wheaton-Redwing family not from closemouthed, elusive Sebastian, but from Rob Kiley, her only full-time employee. He was parked in front of his computer in the open, rustic space that served as her company’s home base. Rob’s father was the boy Joshua Wheaton had saved sixty years ago—one of the circuitous but inevitable connections Lucy had come to expect from living in a small town.

      Rob didn’t look up. “I hate computers,” he said.

      Lucy smiled. “You say that every time I walk in here.”

      “That’s because I want to get it through that thick, cheapskate skull of yours that we need a full-time person to sit here and bang away on this thing.”

      “What are you doing?” Lucy asked. She didn’t peer over his shoulder because that drove him nuts. He was a lanky, easygoing Vermonter whose paddling skills and knowledge of the hills, valleys, rivers and coastline of northern New England were indispensable. So were his enthusiasm, his honesty and his friendship.

      “I’m putting together the final, carved-in-stone, must-not-deviate-from itinerary for the father-son backpacking trip.” This was a first-time offering, a five-day beginner’s backpacking trip on nearby trails in the southern Green Mountains; it had filled up even faster than he and Lucy had anticipated. Rob looked up, and she knew what he was thinking. “There’s still time for J.T. to join us. I told him I wasn’t a substitute for his real dad, but we can still have a lot of fun.”

      “I know. This is one he has to figure out for himself. I can’t decide for him.”

      He nodded. “Well, we’ve got time. By the way, he and Georgie are digging worms in the garden.”

      Lucy wasn’t surprised. “Madison will love that. I just sent her to check on them.”

      Rob tilted back in his chair and stretched. Sitting at a computer was torture for him on a day when he could be out kayaking. “How’d she do driving?”

      “Better than I did. She’s still lobbying for a semester in Washington.”

      “Grandpa Jack would love that.”

      “She’s romanticized Washington. It’s everything Vermont isn’t.”

      Rob shrugged. “Well, it is.”

      “You’re a big help!” But Lucy’s laughter faded quickly as she slipped her hand into her pocket and withdrew the bullet. “I want you to take a look at something.”

      “Sure.”

      “And I don’t want you to mention it to anyone.”

      “Am I supposed to ask why not?”

      “You’re supposed to say okay, you won’t.”

      “Okay,

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