Violet breathed in the fresh, salty air, focusing on the children’s laughter from the park and the sounds of jazz music drifting from the riverbank.
Someone had tacked flyers on lampposts and bulletin boards with the missing girl’s picture and a full description. Violet studied one. Amber Collins was twenty-five, originally from Memphis, Tennessee. She had light blond hair, green eyes, was five feet nine inches tall and weighed approximately one hundred thirty pounds. She’d been last seen leaving her dorm room at the college, heading toward the library. She’d been wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt.
Violet hoped they found her alive. The coed was too young to die.
Taking a flyer for her store, she cut across the square, keeping her distance as she passed the graveyard near the parking lot where she’d parked her Civic. She hated cemeteries, had ever since her father had taken her to visit her mother’s grave when she was three. It had been a cold winter day in the mountains, and a bristly wind had rustled the bare branches of the trees, heavy with ice from a recent hailstorm. She’d dropped rose petals on the slab of marble, not knowing how to feel as she tried to picture the faceless woman who had died giving birth to her.
Although giant azaleas, neatly trimmed hedges and jonquils flanked the iron gates of this cemetery in Savannah, disguising the morbid interior, the hair on the back of Violet’s neck stood on end. Suddenly a whisper broke through the haze. “Help me.”
Violet hesitated, wheeled around to stare at the tombstones. She could almost see the ghosts of the dead in the sea of monuments. And she could have sworn someone had just called to her. A woman’s voice…
A storyteller from one of the walking ghost tours was spinning a tale for a group of tourists. Slowly, the faces and storyteller’s voice faded.
Dizzy, Violet stumbled toward a park bench and dropped onto it. She yanked at the neckline of her shirt as the voice whispered to her again. Images played in her head like an old movie trailer….
HE WAS WATCHING HER, playing out his sick twisted game, dancing around the fact that he was going to kill her with platitudes in that singsongy voice that had grated on her nerves for hours. He enjoyed seeing the terror in her eyes.
And she was helpless to stop from showing it.
She did not want to die.
His olive skin looked pale beneath the harsh fluorescent light. Bluish veins bulged in his arms as he stalked around her. She struggled against the bindings holding her down, but the drugs he’d given her were slowly paralyzing her limbs.
“Your blood is rich and thick, and in some ways perfect,” he murmured. “But you aren’t the one.”
His face loomed like some kind of distorted monster. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” he said in a soothing voice. “I wanted you to be it. I really did.”
She moaned and tried to scream, fighting to escape. But a gag captured the sound, and her movements were stilted and slow, only token gestures of the will to survive.
He brushed a tendril of her wiry, tear-soaked hair from her face. “You let me down.”
She shook her head violently, silently pleading for him to spare her. But anger darkened his already poisonous-looking eyes.
“It’s not my fault. Father needs you. But you can’t help us. Don’t you see that?” His voice grew edgier, his eyes like marbles cut from ice. “I’m doing it all for him. I shall pray for your soul, and the angels will carry you to heaven. We are all children under one blessed father.”
He ran a steady finger over the sharp end of a piece of bone he’d carved earlier. Then he slid the blade of a pocketknife along the jagged edge, scraping and shaving off more brittle bone. The rhythmic sound crawled over her skin. He scraped and whittled, painstaking in his task. Perspiration rolled down her breastbone as he held the bone up to the light and tested its smoothness. Then he raised it to his lips and began to blow.
“The tune of the bone whistle,” he said softly. “The song that tells the story of sacrifice. Pin peyeh obe, my sweetness. Then you must die.”
CHAPTER THREE
A MAN WAS DEAD. Was he a local or a tourist?
Grady flipped on the siren, tore from the Redbud Café and headed toward the ridge. Cutting across town, he took all the side streets because he didn’t want any of the nosy townsfolk following. They might interfere with an investigation. If one was required.
He doubted it. The victim was probably some unlucky vacationer who’d wandered too close to the edge and lost his balance.
The Great Smoky Mountains rose in front of him as he veered from town onto Route 5. He sped past run-down chicken houses and deserted farmland, through the valley, then steered onto Three Forks Road to wind up the mountain. Sweat beaded his forehead and he cranked down the window of the squad car, cursing the stifling summer heat and his broken air conditioner. Thick pines and hardwoods dotted the horizon; blinding sunlight reflected off the steaming asphalt. The smell of manure and wet grass filled the air. He shoved his hand through his hair, his throat tightening as it always did when he passed Flatbelly Hollow, where his little sister’s body had been found.
The Deer Crossing sign had been vandalized, he noticed, the stop sign from the side road leading to the fishing camp turned the wrong way. The latest graduating class’s graffiti defiled the rocky wall of the rising cliff. Moss flanked the embankment, icy water trickling down the rocks like a small waterfall. The air cooled as he navigated up the mountain, the curves so routine he could have driven them in his sleep. Shadows from the yellow pines cast a murky haze over the ground as he parked at Briar Ridge next to Logan’s squad car. Paramedics stood on the ledge, organizing the lift procedure.
Logan stalked toward Grady, his sunglasses shading his eyes. “I’ve already photographed the body and surrounding area.”
“Good.” Although Grady would take more photos as backup. He peered over the jagged ridge to assess the situation. The man’s body sprawled facedown on the ledge a few hundred feet below, his arms and legs twisted at awkward angles. Blood splattered the rocks around his head. He wore plain jeans and a ragged T-shirt, nothing outstanding to distinguish him from any other tourist or a local.
“How did you find him?”
“Hiker called in. He was taking pictures of the mountains and spotted him.”
“He still around?”
“Waiting in the car.” Logan cleared his throat. “Young kid. Poor guy’s pretty shook up.”
“Did you question him already?”
“Yeah, said he didn’t see any other cars around, hadn’t spotted a soul until he came to the ledge and found the body.”
Grady nodded and gestured toward the dead man. “You recognized him?”
“No.” Logan shoved an evidence bag holding a piece of paper toward Grady. “But I found this thumbtacked to that pine tree.”
Grady pulled on gloves, then removed the note and unfolded it. The handwriting was scrawled, almost illegible, but he slowly managed to decipher the words.
“Sorry. Killed her. Couldn’t
