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“You think he scratched his attacker’s name on the rock as he was falling?”
“Ha-ha. Humor me, okay? You can take the easy route with Storm.”
“Will you wait until we’re down there first, please?”
“I’m not going to fall.”
“Humorme.”
Dalton is in place below. What do I actually expect to find as I climb down? I don’t know. I just want to figure out what happened. Put the picture into my brain.
As I descend, I do find something. A spot of blood with hairs embedded into it. This is where Bruno must have hit his skull, and when I see it, I have to wince.
He wasn’t standing at the edge when someone snuck up behind and gave him a shove. He had his back to the edge. He saw his attacker. He was facing them, and they pushed him backward.
He fell back onto a ledge that might have saved him if he’d tumbled forward. Instead, he smacked down and his head hit a protruding rock hard enough to leave blood and hair. That’s the source of the head injury. He kept falling, cracked his leg hard enough for the bone to break the skin before he landed on more rock at the bottom. There are twin blood pools from his head and leg after he struck down. I can also see the rocks he landed on, rough chunks that look innocent enough, but if you fell on them? Broken ribs and internal injuries.
Bruno was lucky to have survived. And he wasn’t supposedto. That much is obvious. He’d been near the edge. Maybe his partner asked him to look at something. He turns around to talk, putting his back to the edge, and he’s shoved, hard.
He said he’d been conscious briefly after he landed. Did his would-be killer stand on the edge, looking down, seeing blood blooming from his skull, his body motionless, and presume he was dead? They must have.
I’m peering up, imagining it when I notice something white on the cliffside. It’s about seven feet overhead and tucked back, hidden from my sight as I’d climbed down. When I start climbing to get it, Dalton walks over and reaches up, hand hovering beside it.
“You want this?” he says.
I glare at him.
“You could have just asked,” he says. “I’m always happy to help the vertically challenged.”
I flash him the finger… after he passes over the object. It’s a tissue wrapped around something small, with a bit of heft. A rock? I peel back the tissue, and sun gleams off the bright yellow nugget.
“Gold,” I whisper.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Is it possible that someone randomly tucked a nugget of gold into a tissue and stuck it in the cliffside for safekeeping? It would be if we were in the city, finding a gold ring hidden near where a victim had been pushed from the roof. Out here that’d be coincidental on a mind-boggling scale.
This tumbled out of Bruno’s pocket as he fell. It landed on that small ledge, where it would have stayed if we hadn’t come to check the scene.
I finish my search, finding nothing else of note. Then we head back to Haven’s Rock. Dalton hails the first person we see with “You!” and she turns, brows rising.
“We need to speak to Yolanda,” he says.
“I think she’s in the town hall.”
“Thanks,” I say, Dalton already striding in that direction.
I ask Storm to wait on the town hall porch. Dalton may have gotten there ahead of me, as if he were going to stride in and demand answers to our questions, but now that he’s arrived, he’s waiting. He opens the door and lets me go in first.
Yolanda is sitting at the desk, tapping onto a tablet. When weenter, she looks up quickly, but after a glance at our faces, she sinks back into her chair.
“Nothing,” she says.
“No sign of Penny,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s been forty-eight hours,” she says. “Isn’t there a rule of thumb about that? If a missing person isn’t found within the first forty-eight hours, the chances they’ll be found alive…?”
She doesn’t finish that sentence. We both know what comes next. The chance of being found alive plummets.
