by Simply BWWM
“So, they don’t have a leg to stand on. There’s no way to prove anything, and the state isn’t going to go after you if you have someone there stating that he’s the father.”
“Who’s going to—” she stopped abruptly. “Are you serious? Lincoln, I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“This is insane. Do you really think that this is a good idea?”
“Of course, I do. It’s not the child’s fault, and it’s certainly not your fault. Plus, I talked to my lawyer while I was waiting for you, and I was coming back to talk to you about something.”
He looked over his shoulder through the glass door, and all at once the people on the other side pretended to look busy as if they hadn’t been watching them seconds before and straining to hear their quiet conversation though it was futile. He smiled and waved at them, then turned his attention back to Charity.
“You and I are the only witnesses, and we were seen leaving the mountain that same day. It’s only a matter of time before your picture ends up on the news as a person of interest, and then Will is going to call in with a tip that we were seen together, and all hell will break loose.”
“Can you talk to him?”
Lincoln laughed, but the sound held no humor.
“Not a chance. Will hates me. Something like this would take me out of the game for good, and he wouldn’t have any competition anymore. He wouldn’t miss a chance to ruin me.”
“Then what is your plan?”
“To claim that we went up there together, and George attacked us in a jealous rage when he found me proposing to you.”
“Proposing?”
“Yes. There’s this thing called spousal privilege. If we’re married, then they can’t force us to testify about each other.”
“I would never throw you under the bus,” she said.
“You wouldn’t do it intentionally, but these lawyers are cunning. They’ll ask you seemingly innocent questions and paint you into a corner. Trust me, I’ve seen it happen. But spousal privilege means that they can’t ask you to testify to anything about me, and the same goes for me. If we both tell the truth—that he attacked you and accused you of cheating on him even though you broke up with him months ago, and I wrestled him off and went to save you—there’s no one who can refute our story. Any evidence from three weeks ago is gone by now, and I didn’t push him. He rolled away from me and didn’t realize how close we were. He basically killed himself.”
“But you beat the hell out of him first.”
“And him, me, but I don’t have any bruises, and he didn’t scratch me. I went over all this with my lawyer. He said there is no way there’s enough evidence to do anything but drop any and all charges.”
“What about the baby?”
“You’re not even showing yet, and you probably won’t for a while. Even when you do, it doesn’t matter. They have no way of knowing when we hooked up the first time, and you and George were on again off again, right?”
“Right.”
“If we’re married, I’m the assumed father. If I sign the certificate, that’s me swearing that I believe the child is mine. If you sign it, too, that’s basically a statement that you believe the same. With us both on the same side, Wittman hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Plus, I have enough money to bury him in the system for years. Family Court doesn’t play by the same rules that Wittman does; he’ll be out of his league, and I already got the most ruthless divorce lawyer in the state on retainer as of noon today.”
“Will he be up to the challenge, going against a lawyer like Wittman?”
“She would love nothing more than to beat a man like Wittman at his own game. When I Skyped with her from my lawyer’s office, she looked like she was ready to go after him now. She’s a little disappointed that we probably don’t have to worry about it.”
Charity let out a huge breath she didn’t know she was holding.
“That all sounds great, but this is a big commitment. What if we call it quits a few years down the road?”
“I’m not going to sign a birth certificate then turn deadbeat on you. If you will let me help you, I promise that I’ll be the dad my own father never was, and I’ll be the man that George could never be.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t just want to pretend to marry you. I want to marry you.”
“Are you serious?” she asked, covering her mouth.
“If you’ll have me,” he said, then he fumbled in his pocket. “I went with a simple band and engagement ring because I didn’t have much time. If you don’t like it or it doesn’t fit, that’s fine. I just wanted to have something.”
“Right now?”
He smiled.
“Does that mean that you’ll consider it?”
“I can’t believe you’re serious,” she said, her heart bursting and her mind reeling from everything that was happening.
“Would you believe me if I did this?”
He got down on one knee, holding the simple velvet box out in front of him and looking into her eyes.
“Charity Derrick, will you take this leap of faith with me and be my wife?”
Her hands went to her mouth, and she felt her heart pounding in her chest. The man of her dreams was on one knee in the most beautiful courtyard in the middle of a doctor’s office. She almost laughed, but the tears came instead.
“Yes,” she whispered, then said it a little louder when she noticed the nurse and a few of the patients still waiting in the lounge leaning closer so they could hear what was being said. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
She hugged him before he could put the ring on her finger and kissed him passionately as the small crowd on the other side of the glass whooped in delight.
“So, what now?” she asked, holding out her hand so he could put the ring on her finger.
She gasped when she saw it.
“This is just something you picked up in a hurry?”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s amazing,” she said.
“Good.”
“Like I said, what now?”
“Well, I pulled a few strings, hoping you would say yes, and if we hurry, we can have the justice of the peace make it official.”
“Isn’t there a waiting period?”
“Money tends to smooth out the kinks.”
“Okay,” she said. “How much time do we have?”
He looked at his watch.
“An hour, why?”
“I have a call to make,” she said. “If I get married and I don’t invite Shanice, she’s going to kill me.”
“Who’s Shanice?” he asked.
“My best friend and the only family you have to win over.”
“Piece of cake,” he said.
Cake will help, but good luck with her. She’s not easily charmed.”
Lincoln laughed, standing up and scooping her into his arms for another kiss.
“I’m not worried.”
“Oh, and why not?”
“I got you to say yes, didn’t I?”
She smiled, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him again.
“You did,” she said with a huge smile. “You sure did.”
Chapter15
Will tested the rope again, making sure that it was anchored securely, then he stepped over the edge and pushed off the cliff face. He swung out into the air, his body light and free for the instant between pushing off and when gravity swung the pendulum back toward the wall. In one smooth motion, he bent his knees to absorb the impact, then pushed off again, already a few dozen feet down from the top.
Repelling was one of his favorite activities, with climbing back up the cliff coming in a close second. There was something so primal about it all, and being alone made it all the more enticing. He had only himself to depend on, with no one to catch him if he fell. It was a liberating feeling.
He checked his progress each time he connected with the wall. On
the last push, he thrust as hard as he could, getting almost double the distance of the previous drops and putting himself a few feet above the ground. He lowered himself the last two feet, removing his harness and leaving it at the base of the cliff with the end of his rope. He almost left his backpack there, too, but decided against it. If he got lost or needed to make camp a few miles out from base, he didn’t want to have to double back for his supplies. He’d learned that lesson the hard way years ago.
The brush was thick at the base of the ravine, the growth fed by a narrow stream that ran through the entire ravine. The immediate area wasn’t much bigger than a football field, but with waist-high vegetation and the swampy, almost muddy earth sliding beneath his feet, it was going to take him most of the day to search the area thoroughly.
“Good thing I started at dawn,” he said as he scanned the area for any signs that someone had walked through there recently.
There was nothing to indicate anything human had passed through there, so he mentally checked off his grid pattern and began working his way from the wall directly below where George likely fell and fanning out.
The work was strenuous, and with each step he took, he had to yank his stationary boot out of the sticky, clay-like mud. But worse than the mud, was the smell. The water in the ravine didn’t flow very quickly, and the undergrowth coupled with the shade from the high walls on either side didn’t allow the sun to dry things out. It smelled like an old basement, damp from years of being closed up with a bad leak and full of mold. It was stifling and made the work that much worse.
He’d picked up a stick lying on the ground, using it to move the foliage around him so he could see the ground before he took a step. When he pulled back one large leaf and saw a rabbit carcass melting into the surrounding roots and rocks, he gagged and quickly let the leaf fall back into place.
This place is probably littered with carrion, he thought in disgust as he took another step. He didn’t doubt there were many casualties just from prey running for their lives in the night, not noticing that the cliff’s edge was there, or deciding that jumping over the edge was a safer bet than facing whatever predator had them cornered. It was an ending he didn’t envy, and one that he knew George had likely faced. Unless he managed to grab roots as he slid down the nearly vertical wall, there was no way a body could withstand the force of hitting the ground at least two hundred feet down.
“Unless he fell into some of this soft shit just right,” he muttered, checking the ground with his stick and taking another step, then laughed. “It probably is crap.”
It was almost an hour later when he stopped to get his bearings, correcting his trajectory and noting how far he was from the wall. He had only made it about ten feet out, working in a half circle pattern from the wall. The diameter of his half circle was far larger, covering a twenty-yard length against the wall. Since the picture showed him about to pitch Charity off the edge, he couldn’t be sure exactly where George had fallen. They could have scuffled for quite some time before either of them went over the edge.
“And since Mrs. Wittman had spoken to Charity since then, something happened after that picture was taken.”
Unless the girl in the blurry, long-distance shot wasn’t even Charity. That was a possibility as well.
He groaned, stopping to get a drink of water and letting some of it trickle over his face and down his chest. He could be looking for two bodies.
The more he thought about it, the more nervous he became about being involved with the Wittmans at all. They were hiding something, and it wasn’t just that their son probably had a hot temper. Most men didn’t suddenly snap and grab women like that no matter what happened in the seconds before the photo was shot. A picture was worth a thousand words, but this picture was worth decades of backstory. Had George succeeded in murdering the woman in the picture? Were they trying to find evidence before the police investigated? Would he be complicit in covering up evidence after the fact just by being there?
“You haven’t found anything yet,” he grumbled at himself. “Stick to the plan.”
Steeling himself for another hour of nothing, he went back to his grid pattern, pushing the foliage aside before each step so he didn’t step into something he couldn’t wash off.
He shoved his stick into a large creeping vine with wide leaves, swinging the stick to the side to move the leaves out of the way. His stick hit something, and he almost lost the stick when his arm kept swinging outward. He stepped closer, carefully moving the leaves aside and leaning down to get a good look.
He jumped back when he came face to face with a man’s face, eyes milky and opened wide, his mouth frozen open in his final scream. A shocked yell escaped him, and he nearly lost his footing. Windmilling his arms to keep his balance, his foot shot outward to try to stabilize himself, kicking back some loose dirt and foliage, revealing a leg partially buried in the mud inches from where he’d stepped.
Taking deep breaths and trying to remain calm, he stared at the man’s pants in an attempt to make sense of what he was seeing. When it finally clicked, his stomach rolled and he nearly vomited right there beside the body. George’s head was twisted facing up, but the rest of his body was facedown. If he hadn’t died on impact, he’d certainly died seconds later. At any rate, no one could’ve survived those injuries.
The man’s back pockets were facing upward, an obvious bulge where the wallet was. Careful not to touch anything else, he slid the wallet out and opened it. The driver’s license confirmed what he already knew. The body in the brush was George, and by the looks of his badly decomposed body, he’d been dead since the day he went missing.
He took a picture of the phone and a few pictures of the body both up close and with the surrounding area. He immediately put the pictures of the body into a private folder on his phone that only unlocked with his fingerprint. Even if the parents wanted to see it, there was no way he was going to allow it. No one should remember a loved one this way, even if it looked like George’s death had been a form of instant karma. It was clear from the picture that George had started out the aggressor. It was going to be next to impossible to pin the man’s death on anyone else.
Will stood for a long time after he set the coordinates in his GPS and marked the body’s location on the map. Then he packed everything back in his bag, but he couldn’t force himself to move.
The body wasn’t visible from even a few feet away, and the ravine was not somewhere traveled by humans. If he said nothing, it was likely that George would never be found, and his parents wouldn’t be able to take this any further than they already had.
He groaned, shaking his head.
They had tried people for murder without a body before, and the body proved that George had died in the fall. And with the body being so close to the base of the cliff, Will knew that there was no way he was pushed. Hiding the evidence could prevent authorities from ruling his death an accident, and even though no one could prove the ex-girlfriend was the woman in the picture, he had a feeling in the pit of his stomach that Mr. Wittman was going to try. He couldn’t fault any grieving parent for wanting to lay blame on someone other than their own child, but in this case, Will couldn’t risk just walking away and claiming that he hadn’t found him.
“It’s not my call,” he muttered as he walked away from the body and prepared to make the climb back to the top. “It’s not my call.”
He dropped the wallet into a storage bag and zipped it closed before stuffing it into his backpack. He’d only checked the ID and had no idea if there was any money in it. The only thing he was interested in was the proof it provided to Mr. Wittman that he had indeed found the right body.
At the thought of another body being in the ravine, he shuddered. He almost turned back to investigate more, then thought better of it. If the woman in the picture was in the ravine somewhere, the crime scene techs would find her and draw their own conclusions from what they found. It wasn’t his place to mess with it, and if he
did, he risked messing everything up.
Resigned to his forensic uselessness, he began his ascent, running the rope through the safety harness and chalking his hands for a better grip. His tired legs protested with each step, but he pushed through, taking it one move at a time until he was almost to the top. He looked down one last time, and even knowing where George was, he couldn’t pick it out. It was going to take a bit of doing for the investigators to get to where George was, but if they were willing to take a long hike in from below, they would manage it.
“It’s not your problem,” he said, grabbing the rope and swinging his leg over the ledge before he pulled himself up.
He took a picture of the spot from the top of the hill, using the draw feature to put a circle around the area where the body lay hidden beneath the brush, then went to work gathering his things for the long hike back to his car.
The hair stood on the back of his neck and he froze, hand slipping into his backpack to grab the bear spray just in case. A twig snapped about a dozen yards behind him and his mouth went dry. It was only a few weeks until bears went into hibernation, which meant they were calorie loading for the long winter. A hungry bear was a desperate bear, and Will wasn’t looking to get eaten.
He turned quickly, can of spray poised in the air, finger on the trigger. He’d nearly pulled the trigger when the man threw his hands up, backing up in a panic.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” the man said. “Sorry to startle you.”
“Mickey?”
“The one and only. Looks like I won the contest, right?”
“What are you doing here?”
The man shrugged.
“I wanted to check out my guess and see if I had the right coordinates. I thought you’d be long gone by now. I promise I wasn’t stalking you.”
“This time.”
The man rolled his eyes.
“Dude, they used to call that determination. Now, if you want to find a man and beg for a job, it’s stalking.”
“You messaged me your resume, I wasn’t interested, end of story.”
“Whatever, dude. I’ll find my own way. I hope the takeover is still valid. Like I said, totally thought you would be gone by now. It’s been days, man.”
