Flirting With Pete: A Novel Read Free

breathed in a lungful of fog and looked around. Definitely hopeful.
    How to explain it?
    The quarry was a giant ladle, its bottom a granite bowl filled with springwater from high up the mountain, its top the dirt ledge that capped a twenty-foot handle and was a springboard for the town’s fancy. Dan walked around the bottom of the bowl, stepping cautiously on granite still wet from last night’s rain. He crossed the planked bridge over the runoff of the bowl, which gurgled rapidly downstream, and found himself on the far side, looking off through trees that came and went as the fog drifted, shifted, and bunched.
    He had no idea what he was looking for.
    Then again, he did. Following a hunch, he left the granite for a narrow path that wove through the trees. His sense of certainty grew as he worked his way over pine needles and tree roots, past snarled evergreen thickets, under overhanging boughs.
    Even before he reached it, he knew what he would find. Darden Clyde’s old Buick was hidden in the trees in a spot that few in town knew existed. He hadn’t dreamed Jenny knew of it. He had underestimated her.
    The Buick was empty. He knew that even before he looked. It was part of his certainty, as was the sudden knowledge of what she had done.
    He bowed his head. A spasm of sorrow worked its way up from his gut and forced his head back with a moan. It was a minute before the sorrow gave way to guilt, and another minute before the guilt let him move.
    Retracing his steps to the granite pool, he picked his watchful way around its edge, but there was no sorrow here. There was nothing heavy or tragic or dark. The air was lighter, brighter. His shoulder felt fine here.
    It made no sense, of course. But there it was.
    The fog danced over the water in playful little gusts. A thin spot in the mist caught his eye. He followed it from place to place, higher and higher, until his gaze rested on the dirt ledge above. That was when he saw the clothes.
    He felt another spasm of guilt, but it didn’t paralyze him. Fast now, he went to the far side of the quarry and began to climb. Boulder to boulder he went until he reached the ledge.
    He recognized the dress right away as the one Jenny had bought at Miss Jane’s and worn to the dance the Friday before. It lay neatly folded next to her underthings and the worn sneakers that had taken her many miles into town and back. Her footprints were small and delicate, which few people thought of Jenny as being because delicacy suggested fragility, which suggested vulnerability, which suggested innocence, which should have inspired protectiveness. But Little Falls hadn’t protected Jenny Clyde any more than Dan had. He would live with that knowledge for the rest of his life.
    Small, delicate, lonely footprints were the sole markings on dirt that earlier had been washed smooth by the rain. If she had been with a fellow, he hadn’t accompanied her here. The map was clear, a trail from the spot where Dan stood, to the one where she had removed her clothes, to the very edge where she had let her heels take her weight while her toes went ahead. Then nothing.
    The odds and ends that had nagged at him earlier now fit into a single piece. All the little things Jenny had done that had unsettled him over the past months, even more so over the last few days, made sense. Had he been sharper, he might have seen the emerging picture.
    No. Sharpness had nothing to do with it. He hadn’t added up the signs in Jenny, because he hadn’t wanted to know the sum. Knowing it would have meant acting on it, and he was a party of one in this town, at least where feeling bad for Jenny Clyde was concerned.
    He studied the water. It was calm, still, smug in its silence. They would dredge it, but her body might well have drifted downstream in the rush of water that had followed the storm. They would track the shores in case the body had washed up, but most never did. The annals of Little Falls contained other such suicides,