Paradise Falls (15 page)

Just last night, Grayson Carlyle broke into her home and tried to spirit her away. Jennifer held her own for a little while, but Grayson was a living wrecking ball. When he was in high school, he the biggest, yet fastest, linebacker on the Paradise Falls No. 2 Sentinels. Back then Grayson was always hovering over the shadow of Elliot Katzenberg, Jennifer’s brother in law. The two were close now that Elliot’s father was a senator and Elliot was climbing the ranks behind him.

Jennifer still didn’t know why her bother-in-law had gone so far this time, accosting her in the street, showing up at her house, and finally sending Grayson to simply drag her out in the middle of the night. She only knew if it wasn’t for Jacob, she wouldn’t have stood a chance.

His house, his bed. In a way, it was her house- her great-grandfather built it back in the robber baron days, overlooking the winding turn of the Susquehanna that cascades down over the falls that give the town its name. As the family fortuned declined and the dairy struggled, it was sold off and left to rot as an empty shell until Jacob came back to Paradise Falls and rebuilt it.
 

She had a claim to it, though she’d rather have been at home. Jennifer rolled onto her side, tired of looking at the ceiling. The ring on her left hand itched, and she took it in her fingers and twisted it. The itch abated for a time, but when she stopped the twisting it came back with a vengeance. Her skin was already red and raw around the band of gold. It usually was. Making a fist to stop herself from worrying at it, she sat up and propped on her knees, and let out long, low sigh.

The house, Elliot, all of that was just a way of avoiding the true cause of her sleeplessness. That morning, Jennifer took a phone call from her boss, Howard Unger, the vice-principal at PF No.2. She expected storm damage to her classroom, or something of that nature. Another problem to be piled on, but something solvable, something she could work past. Instead, in a hollow, defeated voice, Howard told her that two of the kids had been murdered.
 

Students in Jennifer’s advanced placement English class. One of them was Krystal Summers, Jennifer’s protege of sorts. She thought of the girl as her shadow, and Krystal thought of her as a mentor and friend. Jennifer could hear her voice now, bubbling through the back of her mind.

My best big sister teacher
.

She’d never hear that voice again. The recommendation letter Jennifer wrote would never be sent. Krystal would not walk at graduation, she would not come visit when she was grown, as some of Jennifer’s students had, if they didn’t leave town completely. All her potential and her bubbly, energetic wit and charm were snuffed out. All those future threads had been cut, and Jennifer was in tatters.

She blinked a few times, and wondered why she wasn’t weeping. The sorrow was heavy in her chest, like a deep cold settling into her lungs. It was a bitter reminder of grief past, from her husband, and earlier her father, and the night when she realized that while her mother was alive and well, she would never truly have a mother again, if she ever had in the first place.

A deep sigh rolled out of her, and she stood up and stretched. Pain flared in her ankle. It wasn’t as bad as she first thought, but she’d twisted it hard only a few days earlier, when Elliot and Grayson nearly ran over her in his car, and then again while she was fighting off Grayson.

Jennifer slept in pajamas with long legs and sleeves, covering her from ankle to wrist, and buttoned the top up to her neck. Even being barefoot made her nervous, and so she wore a pair of socks to bed as well. Fortunately, the house was well cooled, freezing even. The weather had gone from blistering hot to unseasonably cool almost overnight. The weather could be brutal in Paradise Falls, wild and unpredictable. One summer might be sweltering and leave the river running at half its depth, the next cool and cloudy, rain swelling the river to a raging torrent.

The lights on the new bridge flashed in the darkness. Jennifer wondered why Jacob would make his home here, overlooking the river that swallowed his family when the bridge collapsed and spilled dozens of cars into a raging, snow melt swollen Susquehanna. Jennifer didn’t want to look at it now, of all times. The waters took her husband too, and she still dreamed of the shrieking of shearing metal and the tremendous, wounded animal sound the structure made as it gave way.

Everything was piling up on her, all at once. Now she was most of the way convinced that Jacob was right and the collapse wasn’t an accident, not truly. Not intentional, but the authorities knew the structure was failing. Her father-in-law and Elliot and all their cronies, they knew, they took the money to repair the bridge and didn’t fix it. They let all those people die.

For all its size, the bedroom was stifling. The walls throbbed a little closer every time she breathed, and so she stepped out into the hallway. The rest of the house was pitch black, except for a light in the kitchen and the lights outside. Spotlights covered every angle, blanketing the world in light all the way to the tree line on one side and the downward slope of the hill on the other. There was a lot of
stuff
out there. Cameras and sensors and things, boxes with antennas. Jennifer looked at them through the window and moved away from it. She pulled open one of the boxes and pulled her photo album out.

Many of her pictures were destroyed. She had a whole wall of them in the house, but after Jacob fought off Grayson and brought her here, someone else trashed her place. Part vandalism, part search, like they were looking for something. The album was heavy in her hands, the fake leather cover rough and pebbly under her touch. It would bring her comfort to sit with it and look at the pictures and feel the times of genuine happiness they represented, mostly when her father was still alive and took her and her sister Katie on trips, and left her mother at home.

Now touching the album made her feel sick to her stomach, and she put it back without opening it. The last thing she needed was to flip to a picture of herself with Franklin and see him staring back at her, his boyish smile and bright eyes heavy with accusation.

The hallway was dark. The floorboards creaked under her feet and she froze.

I should go back to bed
.

She had yet to really look around the place, even though she was effectively living there. There were several rooms on the second floor, not just the huge master suite. One was set up as an office. The door was wide open, so she stepped inside. The room was sterile, like a display in a furniture store. She half expected the computer on the desk to be a fake, a piece of plastic with painted on buttons, until she touched it. There were no identifying items, no knickknacks or personal touches or clutter. With a glance over her shoulder, she pulled open one of the drawers.

Nothing inside but advanced placement calculus lesson plans. The kid’s homework from the week before lay in a pile on the desk, neatly organized by subject and class. He’d even started grading some of it. School was out for the rest of the week following the murders. He could take his time.

Jacob had just started teaching. Jennifer still scratched her head sometimes, trying to figure out how he even earned a degree if he was in the military and overseas for at least two years of the four he’d been away from Paradise Falls. He had a genuine-enough looking diploma on the wall, the only decoration in the room.

Sighing again, she closed the drawer and left the room, glancing back to make sure she hadn’t moved anything out of place. Jacob came across to her as obsessive about organization, a neat freak. Jennifer was not. Clutter made her comfortable and she felt isolated if she wasn’t surrounded by piles of books and papers and odds and ends. She liked to nest.

Padding quietly down the hall, she went to the next room. She put her hand on the doorknob and stopped. This wasn’t her place, it wasn’t her business. Sleep or not, she should go back to bed and at least try to get some rest. She was in for a trying day ahead. There was to be a press conference about the kids. About the murders. Jennifer shook her head and started to turn, stopped, and turned the doorknob.

It slid silently around its oiled core and the door swung open. Just a peek. She really didn’t know anything about Jacob, except that he’d lost his family, he saw her as some kind of a goddess, and he could throw a knife in the dark with inhuman accuracy. The door swung wide, and she leaned into to take a little look around the dark room.

It was empty, except for shelves lining the walls. Cheap wire shelves. A laugh tried to bubble out, but died before passing her lips. The guy with the Aston Martin bought his shelves at a thrift store. She took a look at the stairs, saw she was still alone, and stepped inside. The light switch bathed the room in a warm glow from a table lamp. She was wrong, there was a desk in here, too, or maybe a reading table. Most of the shelves held long, plain white boxes. A flicker of recognition struck her when she touched the cardboard.

Before they closed, Arner’s, a junk and thrift store with a pharmacy in the back, sold comic books from long boxes like these. Back issues mostly, cheap ones no one particularly cared for, that held no collector or historical value. Jennifer lifted the lid and tugged one of the comics inside loose from the others. They were all in bags with cardboard backing.

If the issue she’d pulled was rare, she couldn’t see why. Just a random issue of
Detective Comics
. No 456.

The other boxes had actual things in them. Toys, by the looks of it. One held an XBox, the first generation model from when they came out, before they were 360. Jennifer had just about zero interest in video games, but she picked up things about them by osmosis, dealing all day with teenage boys who could wax eloquently about their virtual entertainment. The game console was smashed, like someone took a hammer to it. Jennifer had to wonder why Jacob would keep something like that. Then she felt a little flicker.

Their first date, disaster that it had been, somehow managed to include a stop at the memorial by the bridge. Jacob mentioned staying home to play video games while his family went Christmas shopping. Suddenly cold, she pushed the box back into place and left the room.

One more.

She sighed again, fighting the urge to run back to the bedroom and hide. Again she stopped at the landing and looked down. The house was empty and quiet.

The last door opened freely.

Jennifer blinked a few times. What she was seeing didn’t make any sense at all.

The walls were pink. Along one side was a twin bed, with a high brass headboard and footboard and frilly pink sheets. The bed was piled with stuffed animals, arranged neatly around the pillows. More stuffed toys rested in a miniature hammock, pinned to the wall, hanging eerily still. Posters were crudely tacked to the wall, boy bands and a movie poster for
The Princess Bride
.
 

The desk next to the bed was painted white and pink, topped with a vanity mirror, and covered with makeup. It was a child’s makeup, more for play than adornment, the kind of stuff a twelve or thirteen year old girl might have. Silly purple eye shadow and pink lip gloss. There was a dresser with another mirror and top completely covered in
My Little Ponies
.

In the middle of it was Jacob, sitting against the bed.

He didn’t look at her.

“If you wanted a tour, all you had to do was ask.”

Jennifer flinched.

“I’m sorry, I couldn’t sleep.” her voice caught. “I’ll leave.”

“Wait.”

Jennifer looked around, and his sorrow settled over her like a blanket.

“This is her stuff, isn’t it? Your sister.”

He nodded, but didn’t look at her.

“My aunt kept it for me while I went in the service. My uncle threw away all of my comics and stuff. I’ve been trying to rebuild my collection…” he set the unopened DVD on the top of the desk. “Honestly, I haven’t found the will to make myself give a shit. I don’t even look at any of it.”

“Then why do you have it?”

“I had to put something in there. This place has a lot of rooms.”

Jennifer laughed, and a smile cracked his features.

“I’m sorry for spying on you,” Said Jennifer.

“I’m sitting in a copy of my dead sister’s bedroom,” said Jacob. “Let’s not get into which one of those things is weirder.”

Jennifer took a breath and walked into the room. She turned on the light. Jacob’s face lost that faraway look and he drew up his legs and stood up in a single, startlingly swift motion. On his feet he towered over her, a rarity since Jennifer was taller than most men.

“She would probably be in your class,” said Jacob. “Next year. She’d have liked you.”

Jennifer looked away. His eyes were intense, a deep emerald green and she felt a flutter whenever she looked at them, and then her ring started itching again.

“What was she like?”

“About what you‘d expect a twelve year old named Candy to be like,” said Jacob. “Lots of energy. A chatterbox. She never shut up, and I had to lock my door if I ever wanted to be alone,” his voice strained a little. “If I left my door open I wake up to her sitting a the foot of my bed, like a cat. Sleeping in on Saturdays wasn’t a possibility. Here.”

He pulled an album from her desk and spread it open on the bed.

Jennifer leaned over. She fought the urge to swallow and try to wet her dry throat. She had to stand close to him to look at the book. Almost touching. He had an aura around him, like static electricity. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being touched, but the wrong touch terrified her, and most days any touch was the wrong touch. The need and the fear were always together and never apart, like oil and water poured into the same vessel, and the thick, oily fear was always floating to the top. She fought the sudden tension in her nerves to lean close and look over the book. Pictures. The biggest was a posed family photo. Jennifer recognized the sky blue backdrop from the old JC Penny on Commerce Street, that was gone now. Jennifer had some pictures taken in the very same studio.

His father was standing up, arms spread to encircle his family. Jacob sat next to his mother. He must have been about fifteen when the picture was taken, his sister ten. Jacob’s mother was a tall, lean, willowy woman with a long elegant face and sharp, clear eyes and a warm, but somehow mischievous smile. Seated beside her, Jacob was a gangly teenager, with all the height but none of the mass.