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“You know there’s something about the scene that keeps plucking at my brain—like there’s something in there that I should remember. I know you and Daniel were behind me in school, but does any of this seem familiar?”
“Not really.”
“Can we use your computer to pull up some of Daniel’s work?”
“Sure.”
Fiona sat down and searched for links that led to his work. Some were glorious abstracts of color and movement. Others were dark and gloomy shapes that seemed to be falling in on each other.
“Daniel had some issues, among them bipolar disorder. I was afraid when I first heard that he’d died at the falls that he’d killed himself.”
Fiona laid her hand on his arm. “Even if he had, there was nothing you could have done.”
“But he was afraid. He believed people were after him. Look at his work—most of it now seems like a cry for help.”
“And you gave him that. You were not his keeper. If he wouldn’t check himself into an inpatient facility or stay on his meds, there isn’t a lot that you could have done.”
“You’re very kind.”
“Not really. Wait until you get to know me. At best I’m pragmatic. While some of my books have romance or sex in them, not all of them do. I could never write romance for a living; I just don’t have the right rose-colored glasses to always see a happily ever after.”
“Then we’ll have to get you new glasses.”
Fiona could feel her silly grin widening from ear to ear. “Wait a minute,” she said as something percolated up from her past. “I want to scroll back to one set of paintings that tickled something in my brain.”
She moved back through the paintings to a set of stark charcoal, black and muted gray paintings.
“What interests you in these? They seem pretty dark to me, but I’m no art expert.”
“They’re an abstract rendition of the murder and how it occurred back when Daniel and I were in school.”
“Huh? I don’t see a man or a rock…” his voice trailed off as, Fiona suspected, he started to make sense of the stark images. “Didn’t something happen up there at Angel Falls?”
Angels Rise was a tradition that was said to go back to the founding of the town. There had been rumors of pagan sacrifices and burnings of a wicker man. It had always been a lot of fun and an excuse for the teenagers to have a party with loud music, weed, and booze.
“Yeah,” Fiona said, thinking back and trying to bring up the memory. “I think it was my freshman year. There had always been a dummy or mannequin staked out…”
“Right, with a red slash on each wrist and across the throat. Was it staked out?” he asked Fiona.
“No, I don’t think so, but maybe. Oh god,” she said as the wall she had built to block that memory crumbled, “that was the last night the cops turned a blind eye. That was the year where it wasn’t a dummy. It was an actual cadaver that had been staged. And the wicker man had another cadaver inside. It was awful. I can still remember the smell of burning flesh.”
He nodded. “Not something one forgets unless their mind has blocked it out. I remember my brother bemoaning the fact that the cops had really cracked down and he didn’t get to have his Angels Rising.”
“I remember some of the kids were really freaked out. One of them might have been Daniel. There was a panic and somehow one of the kids was either pushed or fell over the cliff to the rocks below. None of us up there that night was able to volunteer any details about what happened.”
“You should have called the cops.”
“You’re right. We should have, but we didn’t. No one knew about the boy who fell until sometime the following afternoon. Then the animals had gotten a shot at him.”
“The soft flesh; the easy pickings.”
“Right,” said Fiona, nodding. “By then the boy’s body resembled the corpse staked out on the rock, minus the staking out part.”
Reaching over her shoulder, Slade scrolled to the last painting in the series. “Look at that. If we’re right about what Daniel was painting, that could very well be…”
“The boy at the bottom of the cliff.”
“Like me, Daniel left right after high school…”
