Rapid Falls Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Amber Cowie

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503904743 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503904741 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503903869 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503903869 (paperback)

  Cover design by Rex Bonomelli

  First edition

  To Ben, my one.

  To Morgan, my always.

  To Kim, my spirit.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  READER GROUP QUESTIONS FOR RAPID FALLS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  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.

  I got the call from Rick in the car on my way home from work. Maggie had collapsed abruptly. Conscious, but unable to walk. Rick rushed her to the doctor, who diagnosed possible meningitis and c
alled an ambulance. I changed course and met them at the hospital. Panic sweat still dampens my lower back.

  “Mommy. Please come.” Her small voice, full of fear, is worse than a scream. I step out from behind the screen. The technician sighs loudly and the buzzing stops.

  “We are almost done, ma’am. Please step back.” His voice is laced with annoyance. I ignore him and lean toward Maggie. Her warm brown eyes are swimming in tears. She looks so much like my sister when she’s frightened. They both seem certain that I can help, but they are wrong. Most of the time, I’m as helpless as they are. I’m just better at hiding it.

  “I don’t like this, Mommy. Please make them stop.”

  “I can’t, sweetheart. Just a minute more.” My throat closes around the sob I’m fighting to keep inside. I try to let go of her hand, but her grip is too tight.

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go,” she whispers. I nod and turn back to the technician, quickly wiping a tear away with my free hand.

  “Take the X-ray,” I say. “It’s okay.”

  “Radiation. It’s against hospital policy, ma’am. Step behind the screen.”

  “I’m not leaving her.” My voice shakes with ferocity. We stand in silence until the buzz of the machine once again echoes in the small room.

  I realize suddenly that I said the same words before, almost twenty years ago, in a different hospital. The staff told me to let Anna try to walk alone even after she vomited from the pain of standing. Hospitals always remind me of my sister. She’s been in so many of them: first, because of the accident, and later, for all the other reasons. I’m grateful that the staff here is taking better care of my daughter than the other hospitals ever have of Anna, even though my sister and daughter often act the same. Both throw wildly careening tantrums, issue sullen responses to questions, and defy direct requests. Maggie is forgiven for this behavior because she is a toddler. My sister is a drunk who has served time for murder. People don’t give her the same amount of leeway.

  Anna’s drinking problem started the day she was released from prison sixteen years ago. She stops once in a while, sometimes long enough to make it seem like it will stick, but it never does. There was a hopeful spell about four years ago, after Anna’s drinking had escalated to the point where my mother wouldn’t take her calls anymore. I understood my mom’s decision even though I didn’t feel capable of shutting my sister out in the same way. My phone rang often with requests to rescue Anna from awful situations. One Friday night, a guy I had never met called to say that he was leaving her at the hospital. She had cut her head, and they couldn’t stop the bleeding without stitches. When I arrived, the guy was gone, and Anna didn’t remember what had happened or who he was. Not that it mattered. I was grateful, in a strange way, for the call. I needed to talk to Anna, but I’d been dreading the conversation. I had just found out I was pregnant.

  I contemplated trying to talk to her in the car as I drove her home from the hospital. Then she passed out. I turned on the radio so I wouldn’t have to hear the hollow thud of her head hitting the window when we went around corners. She was too drunk to hear my big news, and I knew it was better for Rick to be there when I told her. Back then, he was kinder to my sister than I was. He still had hope.

  A few days later, we met at a greasy spoon diner around the corner from her house. The server filled Anna’s and Rick’s cups with steaming coffee. I shook my head when she tried to do the same to mine. Anna turned to me with her eyebrows raised. Her mascara was clumped on her eyelashes like black glue, but the question in her eyes was clear.

  “Are you okay?”

  Rick squeezed my hand under the table, and I took a deep breath. “Anna, I’m pregnant.”

  Her face went blank.

  “We are both thrilled,” Rick said. She turned her gaze to him, then nodded, picking up on his cue.

  “Of course! Congratulations.” She tilted her coffee cup, as if toasting us. A brown rivulet slopped over the side.

  “Thanks, Anna.”

  She seemed to be struggling to think of something else to say, and the silence between us made me feel like I was sitting across the table from a stranger.

  “What a big change for you,” she finally blurted.

  And you, I thought.

  “Yes. It will be.” I looked down at my menu so I wouldn’t have to meet her eyes.

  “Look, Anna, I have a crazy idea.” Rick sounded excited. “Being a dad is a big job. I’ve got nine months—”

  “Seven and a half,” I interrupted.

  “Yeah, seven and a half, to prepare. I need to get back in shape. I want to run a marathon. You used to run, right?”

  Anna nodded.

  “Want to join me?”

  The blank look reappeared on my sister’s face. I took a sip of water to hide my discomfort. I expected Anna to roll her eyes or worse. Instead she smiled. It made me remember the look on her face when she used to cross the finish line.

  “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  “Yes!” Rick fist-pumped the air.

  “Are you going to do it too, Cara?”

  Fatigue had been weighing heavily on me for weeks, but I smiled at my husband and sister. I couldn’t let the two of them train alone.

  “I’ll walk while you two run. You can loop back and pick me up on your way home.”

  We decided that we would have a standing breakfast date together too, every Sunday. Several weeks into training, just as I started feeling sick in the mornings, I began to see a glow in my sister’s cheeks that I hadn’t seen since her track meets in high school. She ran every day, though Rick’s schedule required us to go out only five times a week. She kept going even when Rick’s old knee injury and my nausea forced us both to quit. I was relieved when Rick threw in the towel. I had been trying to figure out a way to say it, but the training had been taking a lot of time from our evenings together. Rick and I cheered her on from the sidelines during her first five-mile race. I didn’t say it out loud, but I wondered if Anna would celebrate her victory by drinking.

  Instead she kept at it. The next month, Anna signed up for a half marathon and finished it. Then she committed to a marathon and finished that too. We invited her for a backyard barbecue to congratulate her. As she settled at the patio table on the back deck, she beamed. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her so happy.

  “Running has changed my life, you guys.”

  I was huge by that point and couldn’t help casting a look over her lean body. I was glad that Rick didn’t seem to be paying attention. He seemed focused on the sizzling meat on the grill.

  “That’s great,” I said.

  “When I’m running, I don’t want to drink.”

  I smiled, slightly surprised, and clinked her glass of cranberry and soda water against mine. It seemed like a good sign that Anna was finally acknowledging her dependence on alcohol. She was thirty-two. She still had time to turn things around.

  “I knew it!” Rick crowed as he flipped the steak. He had been listening after all. “Endorphins beat booze every day of the week.”

  I laughed.

  “It’s kind of true, though,” Anna said. “Thank you, Rick. I really don’t think I could have done this without you.”

  I felt something surge through me as my husband grinned at my sister, but I smiled too.

  “We almost ready to eat?” I stepped between Rick and Anna to take a look at the grill. Rick turned to me with a proud expression on his face. I could see the triumph that came from rescuing Anna, and I knew how powerful the feeling could be. I hoped he was right, but I felt a little sick. I wasn’t sure that anything could save Anna from herself.

  In the weeks that followed, she seemed determined to prove me wrong. We went crib shopping together. She bought books with women and moons on the covers to prepare for my baby’s birth. I didn’t have a lot of close friends, and Anna was sober and ready to help us for the first time in our entire adult lives. I almost felt like I could count on her. Then, days before my due
date, Anna mentioned casually during Sunday brunch that she’d had a beer the night before, after she finished her shift at the bar. I pushed back my empty plate as she spoke, feeling Rick’s body stiffen beside me.

  “Just one. A lot of guys who work there are former alcoholics, but they drink once in a while. They totally keep it together. I think I can too.” Anna rolled her shoulders. “It’s been hard to sleep lately. The beer really helped.”

  “Seriously, Anna?” The edge in Rick’s voice made a woman at the next table turn in our direction. I signaled for the bill and sighed. I didn’t want to see Rick’s face when he realized that he couldn’t help my sister. No one could.

  I turned to Anna, trying to stop Rick from speaking. I knew he was angry, but I was too tired for a scene. “That’s a big step for you.”

  “Do you honestly think you can drink again?” Rick’s voice was even louder than it had been.

  “Yes. I really think I can.” Anna was calm, as if she believed what she was saying. As if she couldn’t tell how angry Rick was.

  “Be careful, Anna.” I touched Rick’s arm. “Let’s go, sweetheart.”

  “Cara!” Rick’s jaw was tight, but I patted my rounded abdomen pointedly.

  “Please, Rick. Let’s talk about this another time.”

  He breathed in sharply, then rose to pay the bill without saying goodbye. I kissed Anna on the cheek.

  “Take care, Anna.”

  “You too! Call me if you feel anything. At this point, any sign could be the real thing!” she said.

  I smiled. This was my moment, and I wouldn’t let her ruin it. “I will.”

  As we stepped outside into the sunshine, Rick spoke. “She’s making a mistake, you know.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Definitely. It’s a joke. Why does she want to go back to the way she was living? She was a mess.”

  “I don’t know, Rick. Maybe she can have a drink without losing it all again.”

  Or maybe she needed to drink to stop herself from remembering all the awful things she had done.

  “It’s a terrible decision, Cara. She’s making the wrong choice.”