LITMIR.BIZ

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down to the churning maelstrom at the base of the falls, where the power of the water slamming into the rocks below created a perpetual explosion of spray, both constant and ever changing. The official name of the cascade was Warrior Creek Falls, but it had been called Crybaby Falls for as long as anyone could remember and even appeared that way on some local maps.

      Legend had it that a young Cherokee maiden in love with a white settler had discovered, soon after her lover’s death in battle, that she was carrying his child. She’d hidden her pregnancy from her family until the day she gave birth in the shelter of the rock beneath the falls. But she’d died in childbirth, leaving the tiny infant alone, unprotected against the elements.

      The sound of the crying baby had, supposedly, brought the Cherokee tribesmen and their white enemies together for a time, as they joined forces to search for the source of the cries. They found the baby just as he breathed his last. Touched and chastened by the tragic, unnecessary deaths of mother and child, the Cherokees and the white settlers had made peace.

      For a time, at least.

      According to the stories, if you came to the falls at night when the moon was bright, you could hear the baby’s plaintive cries coming from the rocky shelf behind the falls. A nice story. Dreadfully romantic. And almost certainly pure bunk.

      The true history of Crybaby Falls was tragic enough without embellishment. Another pregnant girl had fallen in love with the wrong person and died here for her mistake. But there had been no crying baby, no lesson learned. Only death and grief and a gut-churning failure of justice.

      Cain reached the other side of the falls and bent to pluck a sunny golden coneflower from a patch of the wildflowers that grew along the bluff overlooking the falls. Coneflowers had been one of Renee Lindsey’s favorite. “They’re like lookin’ into the sun,” she’d told him one day as she plucked one and handed it to him. “They make me feel warm and happy.”

      He pulled one of the golden petals and let the wind pick it up and swirl it into the churning water below.

      She loves me, he thought.

      He tossed another petal.

      She loves me not.

      Renee had once told him he was her best friend, and he had thought at the time she was either lying or sadly short on friends. He hadn’t been the kind of kid who made friends easily, for a variety of reasons, some his own fault and some not. And his high-school years had been among the worst years of all.

      But something about Renee had drawn him to her. He couldn’t say they’d shared much in common, except maybe an inborn impatience with phony people. She was from a family with two parents and two perfect kids, a family with a nice house in town and money in the bank. Her father owned a small chain of stores providing automotive parts and service. Her mother had been a stay-at-home mom, always there for her kids after school.

      All Cain had waiting at home, back then, was a mean drunk of a father who liked to knock him around and call him names. Hell, he’d named Cain after the Bible’s first murderer because he’d been the only survivor of his mother’s attempt to give birth to twins—a fact his father had been only too happy to explain when Cain had come home crying after a nightmarish first day of school. “You earned your name fair and square, boy. Live with it.”

      Taking someone home after school to study or just hang out was so beyond a possibility that Cain had never even wished he could have friends over. And he knew enough about the real world to refuse all of Renee’s hints that he could come home with her sometime.

      Lindseys and Dennisons didn’t live in the same world. Hell, there’d been some whispers and raised eyebrows when the Lindsey boy, Donnie, had married Sara Lynn Dunkirk, whose daddy was a lifelong Ridge County sheriff’s deputy and whose mama was one of those Culpeppers from over in Cherokee Cove.

      If the people in Renee’s circle could barely accept a nice, good-natured girl like Sara Dunkirk because of her family connections, what on earth would they have done with Billy Dennison’s long-haired, bad-tempered spawn?

      He released the last of the coneflower petals and looked over the bridge railing. The thickening clouds overhead had darkened the tree-dense forest, plunging the world around him into premature twilight, but he could still make out the tiny golden petals as the whirling waters sucked them under and regurgitated them a few feet downriver.

      He turned away from the falls and started back across the wooden bridge, watching his steps on the rain-slick wooden slats. When he looked up again, his whole body jangled with surprise.

      Standing at the other end of the bridge was Sara Lindsey, her shoulder-length hair dancing around her face in the damp wind. Her body was rigid, her hands clasped so tightly around the rails of the bridge that her knuckles had turned white.

      Cain’s heart gave a lurch and settled into a rapid, pounding cadence against his rib cage. Low in his belly, he felt the slow, sweet burn of attraction and wished she was anyone else in the world.

      That he was anyone else in the world.

      “Did you kill her?” Sara asked, her low voice whipped toward him by the wind.

      He stared back at her, wondering if he’d imagined the question. Wondering if he was imagining her, standing here at the scene of the crime like an avenging angel.

      “No,” he answered.

      But he couldn’t tell if she believed him.

      * * *

      DESPITE THE PASSAGE of seventeen years since Sara had last seen him, Cain Dennison had changed little. The tall, lean boy with wary gray eyes and a feral sort of masculine beauty had aged into a taller, lean-muscled man in his mid-thirties with the same winter-sky eyes and a touch of the wild. Life had etched a few more lines in his face, but those lines only made him seem more mysterious and compelling than she remembered.

      Once a bad boy...

      He had always been an object of girlhood fantasies, as sweet a piece of forbidden fruit as Purgatory had to offer. Sara herself had not been immune, even as madly in love with Donnie Lindsey as she’d been.

      The flicker of heat building low in her belly suggested she still wasn’t immune, all these years later.

      “Why are you here?” she asked. He’d left town not long after Renee’s murder, coming back now and then only to visit his grandmother, who lived near Miller’s Knob on the eastern edge of town. According to her father, who’d kept an eye on Cain Dennison’s comings and goings ever since Renee’s murder, he hadn’t been back in town since the accident three years ago.

      “Why are you?” he countered, a snap in his voice, as if he couldn’t quite control the defensive response.

      She wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Her official reason for returning to Purgatory had been to attend Joyce’s memorial day for Donnie, but she’d known before she ever climbed behind the wheel of her Chevy Silverado that she wasn’t going to make it to the cemetery.

      So why had she come?

      I want answers. The thought formed like a lightning bolt slashing through her brain.

      But answers to what questions? She couldn’t even remember coming to Purgatory the day of the accident. She knew Donnie’s motivation—the new lead she couldn’t remember. And was it a coincidence the accident had happened the day before the fifteenth anniversary of Renee’s death?

      But why had she come with him this time? Her boss at the police department hadn’t been much help in answering that question; he’d told her she’d given him no reason for asking for a few days off. The demands of her job meant that most of her closest friends had been fellow cops and their families, but apparently she’d failed to inform any of them what she and Donnie had planned to do in Purgatory, either.

      And neither her parents nor Donnie’s had known they were in town, though Joyce and Gary had told her later, in the hospital, that Donnie had called the night before to tell them he’d be in town for the anniversary of

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