Marta Perry - Sound Of Fear

“Your mother was a dog person, then?”

“Let’s say she and Barney tolerated each other. He’s a good watchdog, though. Did I tell you about the burglar he thwarted?”

“No.” He frowned. “Was this recently?”

“Within the last couple of weeks.” It seemed longer, given all that had happened since then. “The police seemed to think it was just a random act.”

He must have caught the hesitation in her voice. “You didn’t agree?”

“Whoever he was, he came in through the window in the den. There were some expensive electronics there, but the only thing disturbed was the painting of Echo Falls. I found that odd.” She shrugged. “He may have been interrupted by Barney before he could get any farther, but still, it was strange that he’d go for the painting first.”

Trey, slightly ahead of her on the trail, glanced back to study her face. “Could it have been someone who knew the value of a Juliet Curtiss painting? Maybe the artwork was the goal all along.”

“Possibly. That was my first thought, but it seems strange that someone as sophisticated as an art thief wouldn’t have taken the elementary precaution of finding out that there was a guard dog. It looked as if he went back out the window faster than he’d come in.”

Trey looked at Barney with what seemed increased respect. “A good thing Barney was on the job. So the painting was the only thing disturbed. Damaged?”

“No, but the frame was broken. That’s how I found the inscription on it.” She could hear her own voice flatten at the reminder of why she was here. This wasn’t just a pleasant walk in the woods with an attractive guy. “The wording had been placed so that no one would have noticed it unless the painting was out of the frame.”

“Right.” He seemed to recognize that it was time to talk. The path widened out, the ground becoming more level, and they were able to walk side by side. “Like I said I would, I spoke to my father. He was able to identify a death that is likely the one your mother memorialized. A young woman named Melanie Winthrop.”

“M,” Amanda said, her heart pumping a little faster. “Who was she? How did she die?”

Trey frowned, giving her the impression that he was reluctant to talk about it. “You have to understand first that the Winthrop family is a big deal in Echo Falls. Owners of the mill, town founders, with a finger in just about every pie there is here.”

“Bad things hit rich families, too,” she said, impatient to get on with it. She was on the point of possibly learning the truth about her mother, and he wanted to chat about town history. Didn’t he understand that her stomach was roiling with emotions even she couldn’t sort out?

“True enough,” he said. “But that wasn’t quite my point. The matriarch, Elizabeth Winthrop...well, to hear people tell it, she rules the family. Has done for years. Melanie would have been the daughter of her only son, who died in a plane crash along with his wife, leaving Melanie to be raised by her grandmother, her aunt and uncle.”

She wasn’t particularly interested in all this family detail, not now. “How did Melanie die?”

“According to my dad, she had left town abruptly some months before her death.” Trey seemed to be choosing his words. “Apparently she was pregnant, only seventeen.”

Pregnant. The odds were growing that this girl had been her mother. “They kicked her out?” Anger cut through Amanda.

“No, nothing like that. They sent her away to have the baby and give it up for adoption. Then she was supposed to come home and pretend it hadn’t happened.”

That didn’t seem much better to Amanda. “That’s...barbaric.”

“Old-fashioned. Conservative. Proud. That’s the Winthrop family. Or Elizabeth, anyway.”

“I’m surprised Melanie ever wanted to see them again.” Focus. Don’t think of her as your mother, not yet, or you won’t be thinking straight.

Trey took her arm as she climbed over a tree trunk on the path. “Maybe she didn’t. According to my dad, she didn’t go through with their plans for her. She disappeared, and nothing more was heard of her until her body was found at the base of the falls.”

For several minutes, Amanda had been aware of a faint roaring noise, growing louder as they walked. Now they stepped into a cleared area as the path ended at a stream. And above them loomed the falls.

For a moment Amanda couldn’t speak. She’d lived with the painting for years, and she’d seen numerous photos since she’d identified the location. But nothing had prepared her for the overpowering force of the water rushing down the steep face of rock.

“She fell from up there?” She finally found her voice. “It must be close to a hundred feet.”

“Ninety-some,” he said. “I don’t think they know how high up she was when she fell. It wouldn’t have needed to be all the way to the top to be fatal.”

The story Esther had told her, that if you climbed up the trail by the falls alone, you’d hear something following you, coming after you, slid into Amanda’s mind like a snake. She chased it out again. The trail was a faint, almost impassable-looking line winding up along the right side of the rushing water.

Amanda gave herself a mental shake. There had been nothing eerie about what happened to the girl. Just tragic.

“What was she doing here, of all places? If she came back, it must have been to see her family, wasn’t it?”

“Apparently not,” Trey said. He was staring at the falls, too. “At least they claim to have heard nothing from her. I haven’t had a chance to talk with the police chief yet, but I will. Still, I’m not sure how forthcoming he’s going to be.”

Amanda registered his words without really taking them in. She felt drawn nearer the base of the falls, her eyes on the jagged rocks. The girl who might have been her mother died there.

She tried the words out, but they seemed meaningless. Juliet was still the person she pictured as her mother, and Juliet had died in a spate of meaningless gunfire on a city street.

“Are you okay?” Trey clasped her arm, his hand warm even through the sleeve of her shirt and the sweater she wore.

“Yes.” She clipped off the word. “Can you actually get to the top from here? It looks impossible.”

“It’s actually not that bad.” He pointed to the small opening between two boulders. “Look, there’s a path that winds up through the rocks. Once you get started, it’s pretty easy to follow, but the rocks are slippery, especially when it’s windy and the spray is carried onto the path.”

“I see.” The safe thing would be to stand back and feel...whatever it was she’d thought she’d feel when she came here. But she felt compelled to see what it was like to climb up.

Would Juliet have climbed to the top when she was here? Maybe not—the painting had been done from the bottom. But the unknown Melanie might have.

Amanda clambered over the intervening rocks and took the first few steps up before Trey reached her.

“Hey, wait a second.” He caught her arm. “Always take a buddy with you when you climb. That’s what our scoutmaster told us.”

“I won’t go far. I just want to see...” That quickly, she hit a wet patch on the rock, and her foot slid.

Trey grabbed her in an instant, holding her steady against his solid body. “Take it easy. You don’t want to add to the accident count.”

She tilted her head back so she could see his face and nearly lost track of what she was going to say. He was so close she could see the small scar at the corner of his eyebrow, close enough to smell the faint, clean scent of him.

“I couldn’t kill myself falling from here,” she said, annoyed with herself for sounding breathless.