FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
Dead Man Falls
Mountain Cove, Alaska
Edging closer to the precipice that overlooked the plunging waterfall, Jewel Caraway risked a glance down. Vertigo hit. Dizziness mingled with worry.
Meral and Buck should have beaten Jewel to the falls where they had planned to meet up.
“Meral!” she yelled.
The roar of the water that cascaded hundreds of feet below drowned out her calls, sucking them down with the rushing water. A foaming whirlpool twisted where the frothing, tumbling force pounded the pool at its base. Misty spray drifted up and enveloped Jewel in a sheen of moisture. The sound of her voice could never compete with the rumbling growl of the cataract.
She tugged out her cell phone before she remembered she would get no cell signal here. The only signal she ever had was in Mountain Cove proper. She put the cell away, her gaze drawn back to the waterfall.
Powerful and dangerous.
Beautiful and terrifying.
Dead Man Falls was a force to be reckoned with. That was if one were to take the plunge and get sucked into the swirling torrent at the base.
Kayakers had attempted to navigate the drop and failed.
Part of a rainbow, transparent and fading into the mist, caught her attention. Mesmerized, Jewel stood at the edge of the rocky, moss-covered ledge that was flanked by spruce and hemlock, firs and cedars in the lush, temperate rainforest. She watched the churning at the bottom of an endless vortex that would trap anyone or anything unfortunate enough to fall. She wondered what secrets it held in its depths—then flinched at the memory of how she had buried a secret of her own and never thought about it again. That was until Meral, the sister she hadn’t seen since Jewel had eloped twenty years ago, had arrived on her doorstep with her new husband.
And now they were both missing.
“Meral!” she called again. “Buck!”
Uncertainty roiled inside, tumultuous like the falls.
Those two had gotten lost somehow, which seemed impossible. They’d been hiking together when Jewel realized she’d forgotten her water and had needed to go back. They had gone on ahead of her on the well-defined trail, and the plan had been they would stop at the falls and wait until Jewel could catch up. Where could they have gone?
A twig snapped. Before she could turn, a blunt object smashed into her back. Pain erupted along with her scream as the force of the blow propelled her forward.
Airborne, Jewel plummeted through the clouds and mist, feeling as if her stomach had been left behind on the cliff’s edge.
Terror was catching up with her.
The spray of the waterfall engulfed her. At the last possible moment, she dragged in a breath and fell into the jaws of the beast she’d admired with a healthy fear only moments before. The wrath of the whirlpool plunged her deeper, twisting and tossing, bashing her against sunken boulders.
Dizziness and nausea held her captive within the vortex. The pounding water pushed her deeper, then turned her over again in the same way a crocodile rolled its meal to make it tender.
I’m not ready to die!
Lungs burning, Jewel shoved down the fear. The most important thing she’d learned from self-defense classes with local police chief Colin Winters was not to panic. The violent water was nothing more than an assailant bent on harming her. She could only escape by slipping out of its grip. On the fringe of consciousness, Jewel did a flutter kick, swimming with all her might, and forced her body down and deep below the backwash.
Then she felt it.
The smooth water.
She’d escaped!
Disoriented, unable to tell which way she should go, she allowed the current to sweep her downstream and away from the falls. Jewel opened her eyes and fought through her exhaustion to try to swim toward the surface.
I can do this.
But fear and doubt clawed at her, threatening to drag her down and keep her under. Her lungs burned and screamed as she fought her way to the surface. And in that moment, the instance before she breached, she saw rocks and trees blurred at the top of the ledge from which she’d fallen...along with a figure. A human figure.
She’d thought, she’d hoped, that a branch had fallen from a tree and somehow shoved her in the back, sending her over to plummet into the river.
The way the figure stood there, the wide, deliberate stance, she knew...she knew that he or she had pushed Jewel. Intentionally shoved her into Dead Man Falls to what should have been her death. And she hadn’t made it to safety yet. She could still die today in this river.
Why? Why had she been pushed?
The figure disappeared in the thick canopy even as the current dragged Jewel away.
Finally breaching the surface, she pulled in a breath and braced herself for a new battle to survive the river with its multiple tiered rapids and falls.
Jewel couldn’t be sure how long the river had taken her captive. How long she’d allowed herself to be carried away, floating on her back in order to save her energy for that moment, that one moment, when she might have a chance to escape. Except her reserves were almost depleted.
That moment hadn’t come.
How much longer could she keep her head above the rushing torrent?
Her limbs grew tired and numb, even with her effort to conserve energy. She searched the bank for calmer waters to swim toward. A branch to grab. Anything.
She needed out of the water before she hit the rapids and another set of falls.
God, help me!
Just ahead she spotted the trunk of a dead tree, branches sprawling and reaching. This was her chance and likely her last one before the rapids. Before she drowned.
Jewel reached, but the current, ripping and swirling as the rapids approached, twisted her away. She had no control over her own body. Her own life. She wouldn’t be able to grab the trunk.
Jewel was going to die. Despair engulfed her.
Excruciating
