Until another phone call awakened him. This time it was Des. It was dawn now and a steady, driving rain was pounding the skylight over Mitch’s head.
“Baby, I’m sorry to wake you-”
“No, no. I’m glad you called,” he assured her, yawning. “I didn’t feel good about how we left things yesterday. I shouldn’t have hung up on you.”
“Mitch…”
“I was just having a bad day. I understand that you have to obsess. If you don’t, you won’t get anywhere.”
“Mitch…”
“So was that our first real fight? Because if it was I don’t think it was that bad, do you?”
“Baby, please listen to me…”
Something in her voice stopped him now. “Why, what is it?”
“I’m on my way up to the Devil’s Hopyard. The ranger’s found a body at the base of the falls. A jumper, apparently.”
The hangman says it’s time to let her fly.
Mitch’s heart began to pound. “God, I should have known. The falls, damn it. That’s what I was hearing…”
“When?” she demanded. “What do you know about this?”
“It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, his voice filling with dread. “It’s Tito.”
She didn’t need to answer him. Her silence said it all.
Mitch closed his eyes and let out a groan of sheer agony.
His own worst nightmare had just taken a giant leap into pure horror.
CHAPTER 6
The road up to the Devil’s Hopyard State Park was intensely twisty and narrow. Des’s cruiser very nearly scraped the mountain laurel and hemlocks that grew on either side of it as she steered her way toward the falls, the wet pavement steaming in front of her as the sunlight broke through the early morning haze. Already, she had her air conditioning cranked up high. The Hopyard was situated in Dorset’s remote northeast corner. Very few people lived up here. She spotted a farmhouse every once in a while. Mostly she saw only granite ledge and trees, trees, trees.
The road dead-ended at the entrance to the falls, where a uniformed park ranger was waiting for Des next to a green pickup. Due to funding cuts, many of the state parks made do with summer interns, most of them college students. Kathleen Moloney, the trimly built blond who met Des, was exceedingly young and fresh faced.
Des nosed up alongside of the pickup and got out, her hornrimmed glasses immediately fogging up in the warm, humid air. Des had to wipe them dry with the clean white handkerchief that she kept in her back pocket.
One other vehicle, a scraped-up black Jeep Wrangler, was parked there in the ditch next to the gate.
“It’s just awful,” Kathleen said to her over the steady roar of the falls, her voice cracking. “I’ve never seen anything like this. I was making my routine morning swing through the park, you know? I didn’t even know what I was looking at when I first saw him. I swear, I just thought it was a bundle of old clothes.”
“I’m sorry you had to see it,” Des said to her sympathetically. Finding a jumper was definitely pukeworthy.
Des paused to take a closer look at the Jeep. The scrapes werefresh-loose flecks of black paint came right off on her fingers. A mud-splattered cell phone lay on the wet ground a few feet away on the driver’s side. Before she did anything else Des bagged it and stashed it in her trunk. Then she opened the Jeep’s passenger door and poked around inside. She spotted no suicide note. She did find a car rental agreement stuffed in the glove compartment, made out to Tito Molina. She returned it to the glove compartment and closed the Jeep back up.
“Let’s go have us a look, Kathleen, okay? And if you start to feel the least bit funky, just sing out. We don’t have any heroes in this unit.”
The young ranger smiled at her gratefully and ushered her inside the gate on foot, where there was a parking lot adjoined by picnic grounds. At this spot, they were up above the waterfall. “It’s happened before,” she told Des as they walked. “A pair of lovers jumped off together back in the ’80s. And there was a teenaged boy high on drugs a couple of years ago. I was warned. But I still… I wasn’t ready for this.”
“Trust me, no one is,” Des said as they arrived at a guardrail that was posted with a sign: Let the Water Do the Falling. Stay Behind This Point.
“I think I know where he jumped from. We can take a look before we go down, if you’d like. Just watch your step.”
Des followed her over the guardrail and out onto a bare outcropping of rock, stepping carefully. The granite surface was slick and mossy, and the soles of her brogans were not ideal for rock climbing. An empty pint bottle of peppermint schnapps lay there. She eye-balled it to see if he’d left a suicide note rolled up inside of it. He hadn’t. Beyond that, she kept her distance, not wanting to compromise the scene. From where she stood she saw a few spent matches. No muddy shoeprints on the granite. Not that she expected any. The night’s rain would have washed them away.
“You can see him from here.” said Kathleen, crouching near the edge of the outcropping.
Des inched over beside her and peered over the side of the sheergranite face. Mostly, what she saw was the swirling white foam of the river as it came crashing down onto the smooth, shiny gray a hundred feet below. But then her eyes did make out a small patch of color-a figure in an orange T-shirt and blue jeans that lay there down on those rocks.
“Okay, Kathleen, I’ve seen enough.”
They retraced their footsteps back to the guardrail and made their way down a narrow footpath to the base of the falls. It was a steep and demanding descent. The path was not only mucky from the rain but was crisscrossed with exposed tree roots. Des wished she had on hiking boots like the ranger did.
Tito Molina had landed faceup on the boulders that were next to river, his eyes wide open. His arms and legs seemed grotesquely shrunken inside of the T-shirt and jeans he had on. He looked like a small boy dressed in a man’s clothing. His famous, chiseled face had crumpled in upon itself, like a high-rise building after the demolition man has imploded it. Blood and brain matter had oozed out onto the rocks from under his shattered head. The back of his skull seemed to have borne the brunt of the impact, which Des found a bit surprising. So did the direction he was facing-his feet were pointing toward the outcropping that he’d leapt from. She stood there looking at him for a long moment, feeling that old, familiar uptick of her pulse. She hadn’t felt it for a while. Not handing out traffic tickets to obnoxious tourists.
Briefly, her eyes lingered on the T-shirt Tito was wearing. It was a New York Mets 1986 World Series T-shirt, a shirt that she swore she’d seen Mitch wear. In fact, it was one of his prized possessions. Why on earth would Tito Molina be wearing it?
Now she tilted her head back and gazed up, up toward the top of the cliff, which loomed straight overhead. Rooted there in a fissure in the granite face, perhaps ten feet beneath the rock outcropping where they’d found the schnapps bottle, Des could make out a small, hardy cedar tree clinging for life. Tito’s fall had snapped off one of its limbs. The raw wood stood out like exposed bone against the darkness of the stone. She stared at the tree, transfixed, certain that itwas trying to whisper something crucial to the suffering artist deep inside of her. But whatever it was she couldn’t comprehend it. Didn’t speak the right language. Didn’t even know any of the words. Didn’t know. Didn’t know…
“I didn’t move him or anything,” Kathleen said, raising her voice. The roar of the falls was even louder down here. “I couldn’t bring myself to get near him.”
“You did right, Kathleen.”
“I have a tarp in my truck. Should we cover him?”
“We don’t want to go anywhere near him,” said Des. “That’s the medical examiner’s deal. What we do need to do is secure this scene. Are the other entrances to the park open yet?”
“No, I always open this gate first.”
“Well, that’s a help,” she said, knowing full well that once word of this got out the paparazzi would be coming over, around, and through any gate they could find. “I need for you to stand guard over the body while I radio in. No one, but no one, comes near it, okay?”