Silver Falls Read Free Page A

he headed back down the mountain to find his father and brother.
    And this time he wasn’t going to leave until he found the truth. Even if it was as bad as it could possibly be, as horrifying as he’d always feared, he’d face it. You could only run for so long, and now that there was a new member in his happy little family, he couldn’t wait any longer. David had done the unthinkable and gotten married. His father had written him in one of his cryptic letters.
    And Caleb could no longer pretend that something very bad wasn’t going on in this gloomy, tight-assed little town.
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    Sophie Chapman shoved her blond hair back and made a face at her best friend Kristen. At least there were a few good things about this rain-soaked, godforsaken place, and Kristen was right there at the top of the list. In her thirteen years, Sophie had been in more countries than most people saw in a lifetime, and she had an easy time of making friends. She and Kristen had been soul mates from the moment they met at Silver Falls Union High School, and they’d been almost inseparable ever since. Sophie was the math whiz, Kristen was the brilliant writer—they complemented each other’s skills perfectly. Kristen’s mother, the sheriff of this gloomy town, was down-to-earth, no-nonsense and surprisingly easygoing, and she got along very well with Sophie’s mother. If not for Maggie, allRachel would have was David, and a little bit of him went a long way.
    She loved her mother, but sometimes she was just particularly brainless, like when it came to choosing a husband. Yes, losing Tessa had been hard. Sophie still missed her, still grieved for her and the awful way she’d died, but she was far too practical to let it turn her into a drama queen. Bad things happened, bad people existed. You just had to do your best to avoid both of them.
    It was getting a little harder to avoid her stepfather. Not that he was evil, of course. He went out of his way to dote on her, giving her little presents that she really didn’t want. She was very good at sussing people out, though, and there was some thing about him that didn’t compute.
    She didn’t waste time thinking about it. He made her mother happy, gave her the normal life that she must have always wanted. For some reason Sophie had thought they were having a wonderful time, traveling the world, getting by on the money Rachel made from her photographs. Some times, when she sold stuff to a travel magazine, they could stay in nice hotels and eat steak. Some times it was youth hostels and granola. It didn’t matter—it was all a grand adventure, and Sophie had loved it.
    Apparently Rachel hadn’t. David Middleton had shown up a few weeks after Tessa was found, and her mother had fallen for him like a stone. Rachel, who usually kept her distance from men on the make, had dropped all her usual defenses and jumped straight into marriage with a stranger.
    She’d always loved her mother’s impulsiveness—now she wasn’t so sure. There was no way she could tell her mother she found David a little creepy. He watched her too much, paid too much attention to her, trying to be her friend. The last person she wanted to be friends with was the man who slept with her mother. Rachel was so certain this was the answer to all their problems: a safe life in a sweet little town in the Pacific Northwest—what could be better?
    Sophie could think of a number of places, but she’d taken one look at her mother’s face and kept her mouth shut. Besides, it was natural that she’d be jealous of the first real rival for her mother’s attention, according to the guidance counselor.
    So here she was, making the best of things, and Kristen was definitely one of the best.
    â€œYou want to see if my mother will give us a ride to the mall?” Kristen suggested lazily, stretched out on her bedroom floor. “She should be off-duty soon,