Page 20 of Indigo Ridge (The Edens 1)

“I’ll have to question him later.”

“Sure.” He nodded. “He works for us. I sent him out here to fix fence.”

“What time was that?”

“Around ten. We worked in the barn first thing this morning for a couple of hours.”

“Did he touch the body?”

“Probably.” He sighed, then led the way over the fence.

The posts were wooden here, the wires too tight to stretch, so I planted a boot on the bottom brace and swung my legs over. Then I set off toward the cliff, walking slowly to take it all in.

A trail of broken grass had been made, probably from Conor and Griffin. Otherwise, the area seemed untouched.

Griffin and Allen stayed close behind as I set the pace to the rocks, moving as methodically up their steep face as I had through the flat meadow. We climbed until I reached a landing spot.

And a broken body.

I flipped off the switch in my mind that panicked at the blood. I shut down the emotions that came with a gruesome death. I swallowed hard—I did my job—and surveyed the scene.

The body was of a young woman, facedown. A few errant strands of blond hair blew in the breeze. Death blackened the area beneath her smashed skin and bones.

Most of the blood had dried and hardened in sticky pools and trickles from where it had flowed. She wore a white dress, the skirt mostly unharmed where it brushed her ankles. The bodice would never be clean again.

Her arms were splayed to the sides. One leg was bent at an unnatural angle. Only a few patches of smooth, graying skin remained on her calves. Otherwise, bone protruded from the surface of her limbs.

“Another one,” Allen whispered.

I looked over my shoulder. “Another what?”

He pointed to the ridge above us.

There was a trail cut into the rock about halfway between us and the cliff’s pinnacle. I hadn’t noticed it on the drive. The path disappeared around a bend, probably where it descended down the hillside, but the end was directly above us.

Had this girl been pushed? Had she jumped?

“What am I looking at, Allen?”

“Suicide,” he explained.

Damn. “Why do you say that?”

Allen and Griffin shared a look.

“What? What am I missing?”

“You’re new here.” Griffin spoke the word new with such scorn it was like he’d taken those three letters and thrown them in my face. “This isn’t the first body found at the base of Indigo Ridge.”

“How many others have there been before?”

“Two.”

Two. This made three. Holy. Shit. What the hell was going on? What had I just walked into?

“We’ve had a string of suicides in the past ten years.”

I blinked. “A string of suicides.”