Silent Fall Read Free

You could have contacted me in San Francisco. You know where I live." It didn’t make sense to him that she would have come all the way to Tahoe to talk to him.
    "Let’s go this way," she said, taking a path to the right. "I knew I would have to surprise you, or you’d find an excuse to avoid me."
    "You should have waited until after my brother’s wedding. This is a big day for him."
    "You don’t care about weddings, Dylan."
    "When they involve my brother, I do."
    She rolled her eyes. "Right," she said, a cynical note in her voice.
    Dylan stopped abruptly, losing patience. "Look, whatever you have to say, just say it. It’s getting dark, and I don’t feel like getting lost in the woods with you."
    "Let’s walk to the end of the path. There’s a bench. We can sit." She proceeded without waiting for him to answer.
    The cement walkway was lined with small lights every ten feet or so, but as the path turned into dirt the lights disappeared and dark shadows surrounded them. He tried to call out to Erica to stop, but she was moving at a good clip, and his tongue felt thick in his head. He must have had more to drink than he’d realized.
    Where the hell was the bench Erica wanted to reach? His legs felt strangely fatigued, and the scenery began to spin in front of his eyes. It took everything he had to put one foot in front of the other. What was wrong? A sick, queasy feeling swept through him. He stumbled and almost fell, but he caught himself at the last minute. He put his hand on the trunk of a nearby tree to steady himself.
    "Erica," he mumbled, forcing the word out.
    She turned to stare back at him, but she made no move to come to his side.
    "Help me." He tried to lift his arm, but it was too heavy.
    "This is your fault, Dylan," she said. "I had no choice. I had nowhere else to turn."
    No choice? What was she talking about?
    "It always comes down to every man for himself. You said so yourself, Dylan. Now it’s my turn to look out for me."
    She took a few steps backward. She was getting awfully close to the edge of a very steep cliff. He wanted to warn her to stay back, but he couldn’t get the words out. The landscape took another wild spin.
    She’d drugged him, he realized, suddenly remembering the overly sweet taste of the champagne. Why? What the hell did she want? Before he could ask her, his legs gave way and the world went black.
    * * *
    Catherine Hilliard awoke in the middle of the night, her heart racing and sweat dampening her cheeks. The digital clock read four-forty-four. Every night for the past two months she’d woken up with terror flooding through her body like a tidal wave threatening to take her under. The screams of the past ran through her head, a maddening refrain that she feared she would never forget and yet never fully remember.
    The events of one night had been lost in her subconscious for twenty-four years. And every few years the nightmares came back, torturing her for weeks at a time and then disappearing as quickly as they’d come. But this time was different. The dreams were getting worse, and the fear was relentlessly increasing with each passing night, as if something were coming for her, something horrific.
    Scrambling out of bed, she did the only thing she could do to take the fear away. She painted.
    On the easel a blank canvas waited. She picked up her brushes and opened her mixed paints, finding comfort in the familiar actions. Dipping her brush into the paint, she paused for a second and then put the brush to the canvas. The nightmare in her mind took shape with bold, dark swaths of color, red, green, black, blue. She barely breathed as the fear seeped out of her with each swipe of the brush. She never knew what would come out of her subconscious. Finally, shaken and drained, she set down her brush and backed away.
    The picture she’d painted would make no sense to anyone. It was a mess of lines and shapes, collisions of color,