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Ten minutes later, we pulled into a turnaround. Pinkie stopped the truck, shut off the headlights. Here, where the trees opened up, the moon threw an even brighter light.
“Where are the pools?” I asked.
My cousin pointed at a gravel trail. “They’re not far. Lot of people go swimming here.”
“Got a flashlight?” I asked.
“What do you think you’re looking for, Alex?”
“I don’t know. I just want to see the pools.”
Pinkie paused before he asked, “You sure you’re up to it?”
“You give me a hand over anything rough, I think so.”
He sighed, said, “Suit yourself.”
My cousin came around to my side, opened the door, and helped me out. He fished in a toolbox in the bed of the truck and came up with a portable spotlight. He flicked it on. The shadows fled.
Moving slowly, guarding my ribs, I followed him down the gravel path to a grassy flat area by the banks of the Stark River. Moonlight bathed the place, which featured two large pools almost bisected by an outcropping of granite that looked like a chess bishop laid on its side.
Pinkie turned off the spotlight after we walked out on the ledge. Where the channel narrowed and flowed around the round knob of the outcropping, the current was swift. But in the pools, it was much stiller, and the moon reflected off them brightly. A quarter mile upriver you could make out the wall of the ridge and hear the roar of the water spilling out the mouth of the gorge.
“You ever hear of anyone falling into the gorge and surviving?” I asked.
Pinkie said nothing for several beats before replying, “They got kayakers in there all the time nowadays.”
“I meant a swimmer. Have you ever heard of someone swimming out of the gorge after falling from the arched bridge?”
Pinkie didn’t reply for several long moments. I turned and looked at him in the moonlight. He was staring at the water.
“Only one, Alex,” he said quietly. “Your dad.”
Chapter
46
With the pain in my ribs and the shot I’d taken to the head earlier in the night, I was sure I’d misheard him.
“Did you say my dad?”
Pinkie still wouldn’t look at me, but he nodded.
My stomach fluttered. I tasted bile. I saw dots glistening in front of my eyes and felt like I was going to pass out. Then an irrational anger seized control of me. I grabbed my cousin by his shirt collar.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, Alex,” Pinkie said, sounding guilty. “Uncle Cliff swore me to secrecy about it years ago.”
I stared at my cousin in disbelief. “You’re saying my father didn’t die that night? He made it through the gorge?”
“Crawled out somewhere right around here,” Pinkie said. “Cliff found him passed out on this ledge long before dawn and long before the police came looking for his body. Your father was seriously busted up.
“Cliff got him out of here, took him to his fishing cabin up on the lake,” my cousin went on. “He nursed him back to health.”
“And told no one?” I asked incredulously.
“Just me,” Pinkie said.
