So, okay. Maybe she wasn’t completely over the temporary insanity that had possessed her at Appleton. “If it wasn’t for the fact that I rescued you one month ago, you’d be fish food.”
“You’re still rescuing me.”
“Stop saying endearing things!”
“You don’t like it when I say endearing things?”
“No! It’s off-putting. Inauthentic.”
“These are the most authentic things I’ve ever said to you.”
“Let’s discuss what we know about Maiden’s Cliff and Alexis’s death.” Just as she’d known it would, the subject change thrust his deceased wife between them. Which put things back on familiar footing that she could navigate.
Finally. Jeremiah was with Remy again.
They parked at the base and set off on the trail toward Maiden's Cliff. Before leaving home, he’d read about the hike. He knew it was two miles long, which would have been easy on flatter ground. This was a lot steeper than he’d expected. Not easy, especially on his healing lungs. He pretended that the elevation gain wasn’t a problem, but Remy had a sixth sense about him. Halfway up, she started asking if he was all right. Three-quarters of the way up, she started insisting on stopping for water breaks.
More and more sky began to show through the branches as they finally approached the cliff. Here bare mountain jutted out like a stubborn chin. The forested arms of the land reached down on both sides to embrace the dark blue lake eight hundred feet below. Clouds threw uneven shadows over miles of hills and water.
This spot had been named Maiden’s Cliff in honor of a girl, Elenora French, who’d died here in 1864. She’d been just eleven years old when a gust of wind had blown off her hat. She’d caught it successfully but as she’d tried to put it back on, she’d fallen over the edge. They’d placed a cross and a plaque here to remember her by. The elements had destroyed several crosses over the decades, but new generations had replaced them all. The current cross was large, made of steel, and painted white.
Looking over the edge caused a sick feeling to jump in the pit of Jeremiah's stomach.
It was hard to imagine the terror of falling through inky black air, knowing that death was rushing up toward you. Then the unimaginable impact. Awful enough if Alexis had chosen that fate, but much worse if she’d been shoved to it.
He felt Remy’s attention on him and glanced down at her. Her expression was serious, as if they were standing at someone’s graveside. Which, in fact, they were.
Her beauty stilled his thoughts and stole his words. The better he knew her, the more stunning she was. Creamy skin. The face of an artist. Gray eyes lit from within by intelligence. She carried herself like an independent woman who’d embraced who she was.
Remy’s phone alarm sounded. It took her at least twenty seconds to find it in her pocket and silence the thing.
“Time for lunch?” he asked mildly.
She tucked her phone away. “It is, indeed, time for lunch, Jeremiah.”
“Good to know.”
“Hey,” she said softly.
“Yeah?”
“No one should die the way Alexis did.”
“No. They shouldn’t.”
“Are you glad you came here? Or is this too hard?”
“I’m glad.”I’d go to every sad place in the world if it meant you were next to me.
“Good. Does anything about this site help illuminate your investigation into what happened?”
“It’s more difficult than I’d realized to get from the parking lot to here.”
“And in the dark, when Alexis came, even more so.”
“Right. So if she came here intending to commit suicide, it wasn’t a spontaneous choice—she’d have had a lot of time to think about it on the way up. And if someone brought her here to kill her, they couldn’t have hauled her—either conscious or unconscious—all the way from the parking lot.”
“Which means if she came here with someone or met someone here, she did so willingly.”
