Buried Lies (Wicked Falls #1)

Chapter 1

GREER

The headlights come up behind me before sunrise. Gaining quickly where a mile of empty road just was.

I add a little speed. They match it.

No other traffic. No reason on earth for anyone to ride this close on an empty mountain road unless the closeness is the entire point. The lights fill my mirror until the glare is all it holds, settle onto my bumper, and stay.

My mother's secret rides in my jacket pocket. A name, a town, a key, all of it in June's slanting hand, hidden in the back of a novel she left on my nightstand like a dare she knew I'd take.

The name is the part that won't sit still. I've been turning it over since I found it, and it's a stranger wearing a familiar coat, close enough to recognition that failing to place it feels like a tooth I keep finding with my tongue.

June wrote in the front of the book that she'd left it for me, that I'd know it when I saw it. She was wrong, or she overestimated me, or she counted on something I lost in the twelve years I spent not coming home.

What I do know is where it points. Down the mountain, across the high plains, to a town on the far side of the range and whoever my mother trusted with the copies she made and never spoke of once.

A long way to drive to put my hands on the only version of her record that doesn't sit inside a house an Aldrich has a key to.

So I left while the valley was still dark, and I thought the dark would be cover enough to get gone before the town woke up and noticed.

The first hit lands on the straight above the reservoir.

It comes as a tap to my back corner, almost courteous, more question than blow. Then the back of my car belongs to someone else. The wheel goes light and the world tips a few degrees off true, the white line sliding away to my left where it has no business being.

I turn into it. I feed the wheel the way the tail wants to go, against every instinct screaming to haul it back.

For half a second I'm just a woman sitting sideways at speed above the reservoir.

Then the tires find the road and the car snaps straight. The seatbelt saws my collarbone. My breath comes back all at once, too loud in the small space, and my hands are locked at ten and two hard enough that I'll feel it tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow.

Behind me they drop back a length. A beat of nothing. Then the engine roars and they come again, and this time there's nothing courteous about it.

I can't see who's driving. The windshield in my mirror is a high black square, a truck or a heavy SUV with the cab lost behind its own high beams, and the light is in my eyes now, bright enough that the dials disappear.

Whoever is back there is nothing to me but that light and the weight behind it.

None of it matters next to what I have to do.

I have to get off this open stretch before the next shove puts me through the rail and into the reservoir.

The water down there is deep, black, and cold.

Nothing that goes in this time of year comes back up.

The water runs along my left the whole way down. I feel it more than see it, a wide dark absence past the guardrail, the surface flat and waiting, and some animal part of my brain keeps measuring the distance to it the way you watch a dog that's already bitten once.

The switchbacks are where I stop losing. Six of them, stacked down the ridge face like rungs, and on a road like this, horsepower matters less than knowing the shape of a turn before your headlights reach it.

I take the first without touching the brake, trusting old memory and a gravel shoulder I'm praying is still firm, swinging wide into the apex with the tires howling that thin protest at the edge of letting go.

They hold.

In my mirror the lights lunge straight at the outside of the curve, committed to a line that ends in steel, then haul back hard and fling stones off the lip of the drop. Whoever's back there met that turn like it surprised them. I met it like an argument I've had before.

One.

The name in my pocket is the only thread to where the rest of it lives.

If I go over the rail here, the name goes into the reservoir with me, the copies my mother hid stay in the keeping of someone no one living knows to ask after, and the men the Aldriches buried in that mountain stay exactly where they were left.

I am not going over the rail here.

Two, three, and the rhythm takes me, brake and turn and accelerate, the car loading heavy on its outside tires and unloading as I straighten.

They gain on the short straights and give it all back in the curves, and somewhere in it I let myself believe a road I half-remember and a steady head can outlast a faster machine all the way down.

The belief holds right up until the fourth curve isn't where I left it.

I know it the way you know you've missed a stair in the dark. Some part of my body is already braced for the turn to open the way it opened ten thousand times when I was seventeen, wide and patient, room to drift through lazy as a held breath.

The turn in my headlights is not that turn.

Somebody re-graded this curve during the time I wasn't here. The apex pulls in tight and mean, and I'm into it carrying speed for a road that stopped existing while I was two states away building a life that didn't include this mountain.

Everything slows down. It isn't peaceful, not the way I always heard it would be. It slows because my brain starts taking in more than it can use, every detail arriving separate and too bright.

The rail jumps up white, each post a hard stripe ticking past faster than I can count. The black behind it is the reservoir going straight down. It has no bottom that I can find, only the fall and the cold water that keeps what it takes.

My foot's already on the brake. It's the wrong thing and I do it anyway, because there's no right thing left.

The pedal goes hard, the antilock shudders up through the floor into the sole of my foot, that stuttering refusal, and the back end breaks loose and starts to come around.

The tires find ice where the shadow of the rock wall never lets the sun reach, and the car lets go of the road entirely, sliding across the empty oncoming lane toward the outside of the curve.

The tail swings out over nothing.

For one full second the car is sideways across the road.

The drop is off my left where the shoulder gives out, the tail hanging over it, and the rock wall swings past the windshield as the nose comes around.

The wheel in my hands has gone slack and meaningless, a circle of plastic wired to tires that have quit listening.

My whole body locks. The seatbelt bites.

A sound tears out of my throat that I've never made and won't get to un-remember.

Then the studs catch.

It's nothing I did. The tires find a stretch of dry pavement and grip.

The nose tucks back into the curve, and the rear settles in behind where it belongs.

I come out the low side with my mirror a hand's width from the rail, close enough that a flinch left would have taken it off, and I'm shaking hard enough that the wheel hands it back to me.

Behind me, the lights trust a line that isn't there anymore.

I hear it before I see it. The long shriek of locked tires on cold asphalt, no give in the sound at all, then the heavier noise underneath, the bulk of the thing skidding sideways with nothing under the wheels to check it.

In my mirror the headlights swing wild, sweep the rock wall and the open dark. Metal screams along the guardrail, on and on, sparks throwing orange off the steel as the whole vehicle grinds down the rail like it's trying to climb over and can't.

It doesn't go over.

But it's done. It peels off the rail at a crawl, sideways across both lanes, and stops. I put the next turn between us, and the one after that, and the lights fall back and keep falling, smaller in my mirror with every switchback, until the last one empties me out onto the valley floor alone.

The road flattens. The reservoir slides past on my left, black and level, sitting over whatever it's taken without a ripple to show for it.

The lights are gone. I'm still here, still pointed down the mountain, still carrying the one thing that matters, and I drive a long way before I trust myself to take one hand off the wheel.

Nobody waits on a dark mountain road before dawn by accident.

Somebody knew I'd leave this morning, knew which road, knew there's a stretch between the town and the highway where the only witness is the reservoir.

Which means somebody knew two things at once: that I'd found what June hid, and that I was running it out of the valley before the sun was up.

I work the problem for the next mile, because working it is better than remembering how close I came to going over the edge.

A town like Wicked Falls watches. I grew up knowing it, and the day I drove back in for my mother a woman at a gas station knew my name before I gave it, so nothing about the attention has changed.

So I reach for the innocent versions first, the way you test a sore tooth from the safe side.

Maybe somebody sat on the house all night.

Maybe a neighbor I don't have saw my lights come on in the dark and made a call.

Small towns run on that kind of attention, and June lived inside it for a reason.

None of it holds, and I know it doesn't even as I line the possibilities up, because I'm building this little wall of maybes for one reason: to keep from looking at the name on the other side of it.

But it's a long way from noticing a kitchen light to knowing I'd found a name hidden in the back of a novel and picked which pass to take out of the valley. That isn't a nosy neighbor. That's somebody who knew what I had and where I was taking it almost as soon as I knew it myself.

So I do what I used to do for a living. I take the list of people who could have known and I start crossing names off.