Hidden Falls

by Newport, Olivia

  When he picked up the coffee, Ethan knew he had lost the edge he’d felt a few minutes ago. With the first sip, he was in her debt.

  “My day is scheduled.” Dani used a corner of toast to scoop eggs.

  “Then I need you to reschedule it.”

  She scoffed. “You’re a piece of work.”

  He plunged in. “I’m guessing you’ve worked on Quinn’s laptop.”

  She raised one shoulder about an inch and let it fall. “That’s not exactly a secret.”

  “Recently Quinn’s computer has been … transferred to a new location, and it doesn’t seem entirely happy with the change in locale.”

  “I can’t help you if you’re going to talk in code.” Dani took a long draft of coffee.

  “We took Quinn’s computer to Lauren’s apartment.”

  “We?”

  It hadn’t been Ethan’s idea. He’d argued against it—vehemently—to Nicole and Lauren. No doubt by taking it they’d added some technical degree of theft to a particular form of illegal entry. Cooper Elliott would know the specifics, but Ethan hoped the whole business would be cleared up long before Cooper needed to know anything about it. Ethan decided not to mention the spare house key that Nicole knew where to find inside Quinn’s kitchen and had dropped in her pocket.

  “The computer won’t power up,” he said.

  “Doesn’t surprise me.” Dani put the last of the eggs in her mouth.

  Good. If she recognized the computer’s behavior, then she probably knew how to resolve it.

  “Perhaps I was chewing too loudly to hear you,” Dani said, “but I think you skipped over the part about why you stole Quinn’s laptop.”

  Ethan didn’t know Dani well, and he was tiring of parrying every time they conversed. But he needed her on Team Find Quinn.

  “So the computer is not dead?” he said.

  “Quinn refuses to let it die with dignity. There may still be some extraordinary measures worth trying.”

  “I want you to come to Lauren’s and try them.” Ethan took a deep breath. “And then I want you to help us find some information that may be on the computer.”

  Dani laughed. “No. I think I have a Styrofoam cup around here if you want to take your coffee with you.”

  Ethan didn’t move. “I’m serious.”

  Dani stood and set her breakfast plate in the sink. “Let me see if I have this straight. You broke into Quinn’s house. You stole his computer—and who knows what else. Now you want me to join your ring of thieves to gain access to private information to which you are not legally entitled.”

  “We didn’t break anything.” Ethan swirled the coffee in his mug. “And I prefer to think of the computer as borrowed.” Since they had a key now, they could put it back.

  “And the private information?”

  “It might help us find Quinn.”

  “I have somewhere to be by seven thirty. And it sounds like you have a busy day of criminal activity ahead of you.”

  Had Dani been this harshly unsympathetic when she was in high school? Ethan couldn’t remember. At the time, he hadn’t known her well enough to care.

  “Think about it, Dani,” Ethan said. “It’s been five days now. Even you have to admit that’s extremely unusual for Quinn. If he’s not up at the lake, where else would he be?”

  She hesitated, a brief interruption to her motion of reaching for her orange North Face vest.

  “No,” she said. “I have to go, and so do you. No offense, but considering what you just revealed, I’m not comfortable leaving you alone in my house.”

  Ethan followed her out. She started up her Jeep and backed out of the driveway.

  Ethan banged a hand against his steering wheel. He was never going to persuade Gonzalez to forgive his transgressions if he couldn’t even persuade someone who cared about Quinn to help with a simple skill. His car lurched as Ethan backed out of the driveway and turned the wheels to follow Dani before he lost sight of her Jeep.

  She headed southwest of town. Ethan tried to remember the geography and what might be out that direction or how far she might drive. He made no effort to disguise his efforts to follow Dani because he knew he wasn’t any good at stealth, and he didn’t want to risk losing sight of her vehicle among the rural back roads. When she pulled up in front of a house in a subdivision that had not existed when Ethan lived in Hidden Falls, he was right behind her.

  “Is this some kind of a joke?” Dani took her toolbox from behind the driver’s seat and slammed the door.

  “I’m not letting go of this.” Ethan braced one arm against the Jeep to block her path.

  Dani pivoted and walked the other direction around the car. Ethan met her at the walkway leading to the front of the house.

  “I have a job to do here,” Dani said. “You’re not invited.”

  “I’m not leaving.” He matched her stride. “You can show your tough exterior all you want, and I respect it, but I know you care about Quinn.”

  At the front step, she glared at him. When she reached for the doorbell, Ethan covered it with his hand.

  “Don’t do this for me or Nicole or Lauren. We’re nothing to you. I get that. Do it for Quinn.”

  “Fine.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll come this afternoon. But I’m not making any promises beyond that.”

  7:46 a.m.

  Lauren pulled open three drawers in the kitchen and came up empty-handed. In the bedroom, she went through her dresser drawers, and in the second bedroom, she rummaged through the desk drawers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used a magnifying glass.

  It turned up in the hall closet.

  Lauren carried it out to the living room, where Nicole sat in the recliner with her foot propped up and a photo in her lap, and snapped on the lamp above Nicole before handing her the magnifying glass. Lauren sat on the arm of the chair, and together they hunched over the image.

  “It’s freaky how much this guy looks like Ethan,” Nicole muttered as she adjusted the distance between the glass and the picture.

  Lauren had to agree. The man in the photo had a beard, but it wasn’t thick enough to obscure the lines of his jaw or cheeks. In a black-and-white photo, it wasn’t possible to judge the mixed shades of his hair color or the pigment in his eyes, but the angle and width of the man’s nose could have been Photoshopped in from Ethan’s face. The same was true of the distance between his eyes and the precise point at which the hairline began to slope back. The age of the photo made it impossible for the image to be Ethan, or even his father. Based on the cut of the suit the man wore, the picture had to have been taken before 1940.

  But why would Quinn have this photo tucked away in a folder in his filing cabinet? The folder had otherwise been empty, and the ones around it contained a variety of documents with no bearing on the photo—expired car insurance policies, receipts for tools long past their warranty periods, paint color samples.

  “Who files paint swatches?” Lauren had said aloud when Nicole pulled the samples from the file drawer she was rifling through the night before. Apparently Quinn did.

  Lauren couldn’t see very well. Nicole had the magnifying glass adjusted for her own vision and angle. “What can you see?” Lauren asked.

  “Other than Ethan’s twin? It’s hard to say. The photo is pretty grainy.” Nicole handed the glass and picture to Lauren.

  The picture was taken outside. That much was indisputable. Grass filled in much of the lower part of the photo. Dense summer grass, Lauren thought. The man stared at the camera almost as though he didn’t see it or was looking beyond it at whatever demanded his focus. He wasn’t a happy man, at least not on the day the shutter captured this moment. If there was any difference between his eyes and Ethan’s, it was that they were sunken, strained.

  “It looks like a full lawn,” Nicole said, “but there are tiles or stones of some sort. Maybe they made some kind of design if you stood back from them.”

  And that’s when Lauren knew.

>   “Graves,” she said. “The kind of markers that lie flat on the ground.”

  Nicole grabbed Lauren’s wrist. “You’re a genius.”

  “Ethan should ask his parents about this picture,” Lauren said.

  “He won’t. He doesn’t want to see them.”

  “But this changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Nicole sighed. “I doubt it.

  “He’s got to be curious.”

  “We need more to go on,” Nicole said. “We’re already on thin ice after we made Ethan climb that tree. I thought he was going to have a stroke when I said we should take the computer.”

  They looked at Quinn’s computer set up, but silent and lifeless, on Lauren’s small dining table. They’d been up half the night trying to get it to turn on, but it kept shutting off before all the applications cycled into action.

  “One thing at a time,” Lauren said. “If this is a graveyard in the photo, where is it?”

  “Here,” Nicole said. “Hidden Falls Memorial Garden goes back a long way—much further than this photo.”

  Lauren squinted at the picture. “How can you be sure?”

  “It’s a hunch, I admit,” Nicole said. “We need a name. Can you make out any of the lettering on the graves?”

  “It would be easier if they were tombstones.” Lauren adjusted the magnifying glass. “The ones around his feet are too flat to read.”

  “Look behind him.” Nicole took the photograph back. “That thing shaped like a tower could be a tombstone.”

  Lauren leaned over Nicole’s shoulder. “Maybe.” It seemed too far away from the man to be the grave he was there to see. He had the sorrowful look of a mourner.

  “K … maybe K-R.”

  “K-R-A-V or W.” Lauren nudged Nicole’s arms toward the lamp.

  “You live here,” Nicole said. “Can you think of any family names that start with those letters?”

  Lauren shook her head. “Besides, what does this have to do with finding Quinn?”

  “Yes, that’s the main thing.”

  Nicole set the photo aside, but Lauren could tell her mind had not let go of the mystery. Lauren was curious, too. Her day, however, already overflowed. Last night’s escapade had yielded Quinn’s notes about the health fair, and the event was the day after tomorrow. Lauren’s first thought that morning was a prayer for efficiency and insight to recognize each next task that needed to be done.

  Nicole lowered the footrest and took both crutches in one fist. “I have to try the computer again.”

  The old PC laptop had been unused for the last five days during Quinn’s absence. They didn’t know when it had last been turned on successfully. Lauren doubted one more night of inactivity on her dining table would have made a difference. But while Nicole stabilized her balance and crutched her way over, Lauren turned on the computer. The right lights went on and the machine made noises. But the flash of encouragement was misleading. The screen went dark nearly as soon as it lit up, and the cycle of noises stalled in a high-pitched whirr.

  “Nuts,” Nicole said. “I’m good at a lot of things, but resurrecting computers is not one of them.”

  Someone with the right skills could probably tell them within ten minutes whether the computer would ever function, but under the circumstances they couldn’t simply carry it into a shop.

  “Why hasn’t Ethan called?” Nicole lowered herself into the forbidden desk chair parked at the table.

  “Careful,” Lauren said.

  “I am careful. Rolling in a chair is not rocket science.”

  Nicole glanced at the door and then pulled her phone from the pocket of her pajama bottoms.

  “Would you like a shower before I go?” Lauren said.

  “Are you saying sitting around for two days has ripened me?”

  Lauren chuckled. “You have your own things now. Maybe you’d feel better if you freshened up. I have a plastic lawn chair downstairs that I sometimes take to the park across the street. You can sit in that.”

  Nicole sniffed her own hair. “I admit it’s time.”

  “I’ll be right back with the chair.”

  “Thanks. But when I get out, I’m going to figure out what to do about the computer. And Ethan had better get here soon.”

  Lauren ran downstairs to a small storage area tenants shared, brushed off the chair, and carried it upstairs. She started the shower, and in a couple of minutes she heard Nicole hopping around the bathroom. Lauren was eager for Ethan to arrive, too. He would reinforce efforts to keep Nicole’s ambitions for the day within reason.

  Lauren picked up the clipboard, which now held her own notes on yellow sheets and Quinn’s half sheets of white paper. She adjusted her glasses. This pair didn’t fit her as well as the pair bent out of shape the previous day, but they would have to do until after the fair. With a pencil, Lauren underlined on Quinn’s pages details that she hadn’t thought of. Next to each entry, she wrote initials of committee members she would ask to follow up on the task.

  When her cell phone rang, Lauren answered.

  “Lauren, this is Benita Booker.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I’m calling because most of my day is free, and I have a feeling yours is not. What can I do to help?”

  Lauren’s feet jumped a little as giddiness ran up her legs. This was a great start to the day. Benita Booker wasn’t on the health fair committee, but she was one of the most dependable people at Our Savior Community Church. Lauren picked up the clipboard and assigned five tasks to Benita with certainty of her ability to accomplish them. Lauren wouldn’t wait for Ethan. As soon as Nicole was out of the shower and settled again, Lauren would make sure everything her nonambulatory houseguest needed was within reach, and then she would attack the list with a furious squall of organization and productivity.

  The shower shut off. Lauren studied the list again, marking it up with a code of check marks, stars, and brackets.

  Her phone rang again, and Lauren answered. Her cheerful greeting brought no response.

  “Hello?” she said again.

  She heard enough noise to know the call had not dropped, but no voices. Had someone’s phone accidentally dialed her from a pocket or the bottom of a purse? Lauren looked now to see what the number was. She recognized it—the same one she’d seen two days earlier, while she was at the urgent care center with Nicole.

  Lauren was no closer to knowing the identity of the person this number belonged to. Her stomach roiled with the familiarity of a sensation she thought she’d left behind ten years ago.

  She was not going to call the number back.

  8:16 a.m.

  Lauren was gone. Nicole didn’t know where Ethan was. He could be on the way to Columbus, for all she knew. They were years beyond his owing her an explanation for his decisions, but disappointment mingled with irritation that he hadn’t at least sent a text by now. On Saturday night, she didn’t see how he could go home without knowing what happened to Quinn. But five days changed that. No one could put life on hold indefinitely. If she hadn’t broken her ankle, Nicole would be wrestling with the same decision. Was it time to go back to work and wait for news from the authorities?

  Nicole adjusted the pillow under her foot and picked up her phone from the side table. She wasn’t used to how quiet her phone had been without the frenzy of an active story to work on for the St. Louis newspaper that employed her. No sources to confirm, no facts to check, no quotes to capture, no long text message threads with the detective who was her first contact on any crime story. The only project she brought with her when she left St. Louis was a tame background story on St. Louis history that wasn’t due for another two weeks. She’d already done the interviews and research she needed in order to write it, and the latest information from Terry, the administrative assistant, was that the editor no longer wanted it. The lack of an investigative assignment didn’t explain the silence from Nicole’s editor—especially since Nicole had left multiple messages about her
injury. She could believe no one had time to be chatty on the phone, but she at least expected a sympathetic e-mail. Nicole lifted a finger to call again but changed her mind. What good would one more message do? They knew where she was.

  Mentally Nicole reviewed the facts surrounding Quinn’s absence, as if organizing them for a story and searching for the overlooked detail that would unlock the mystery. She looked across the room at Quinn’s unyielding computer, and frustration welled. Computers were like brains, she mused. They held memories and evidence of fleeting thoughts and the language that distinguished one person from another. She’d never had a story where she got access to a computer and didn’t find something—a new fact, confirmation of a suspicion, a downloaded photo, a revealing Internet search history, a deleted e-mail thread that still existed in the ghostly interior of the computer’s memory and came to life in the hands of a computer specialist. Usually, though, she had help discovering what a computer held.

  She’d never stolen a computer before. She told herself that in Quinn’s neighborly spirit he’d never denied her the loan of any of his belongings. Ethan had guessed that Quinn’s computer was at least seven years old—ancient by technology standards. No wonder it didn’t have the energy to cooperate with her inquiry.

  Before she left, Lauren had pushed the recliner closer to the window with the remark that Nicole might enjoy a better view that didn’t require twisting her spine. Now Nicole turned her head to the window and the brightness of the day. The whole week had been stunning, stirring in her a craving to be outside. Each day, though, rattled Hidden Falls. Nicole was used to finding answers. People called her persistent—or downright stubborn—but no one would describe her as patient.

  Main Street was full of memories, some of them welcome and some less so. Nicole could see the bench across the street, where in his grief her father had once left her and forgotten to come back. She’d waited and waited, clinging to his promise that he’d be right back. In the end, it was Quinn who found Nicole shivering in fear and warmed her with the jacket that swallowed her as she plunged her face into the inner panels that smelled most like Quinn.