Cold River - Carla Neggers [4]
She walked past them down Main Street, which formed the heart of the pretty village of Black Falls, located in a narrow river valley in the Green Mountains. The sand and salt that had accumulated on the sidewalk over the long winter handled any of the cold rain that would have otherwise frozen.
None of the Camerons followed her.
A town cruiser passed her on the street, its lights flashing. She didn’t look back to see it stop in front of O’Rourke’s.
She finally came to the graceful 1835 brick house across from the town green, on the corner of Main and Elm Street, where she’d lived with her brothers for the past seven years. Sean Cameron had inherited them as tenants when he’d bought the house two years ago. Hannah had expected him to kick them out and renovate and sell the place at a tidy profit, but he hadn’t. Then she and two friends talked him into letting them create a café on the first floor. They’d scrubbed, sanded, painted, installed a kitchen, brought in tables and chairs and a big glass display case and come up with a name, a logo, a signature color.
As Hannah unlocked the heavy front door, she thought of the family who’d built the house. They’d made a fortune in Vermont’s burgeoning wool business in the early nineteenth century. Then came high tariffs and an economic bust, and they’d cleared out for a new start in Ohio.
Part of her wanted her own fresh start. To just pack up and take off.
But that wouldn’t happen. Devin was struggling with his grades and needed her help and support to graduate. Toby had another year of school. She had law school to finish, then the bar exam and hopefully a clerkship and work as a prosecutor. She wasn’t going anywhere.
A second cruiser raced down Main Street.
Shivering now, biting back tears, Hannah went inside.
There was nothing she could do to help Bowie O’Rourke.
There never had been.
The three men who’d insulted Hannah came to the café two days later and apologized to her for their behavior that night at O’Rourke’s. Derek Cutshaw did most of the talking. Robert Feehan was flushed and clearly embarrassed. Brett Griffin, who hadn’t participated in the fight, stayed quiet.
They’d been drunk. They were idiots. They didn’t mean what they’d said.
They were so sorry.
“It was all me,” Derek said. “Robert and especially Brett didn’t do anything.”
“Apology accepted,” Hannah said.
They all received the legal equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
Bowie, on the other hand, was charged with aggravated assault. His court-appointed lawyer got the charge reduced to simple assault, for which Bowie received a split sentence of sixty days in prison and three years’ probation. He’d had too many run-ins with the law. He wouldn’t just get a fine and a warning to behave.
The Cameron men went back to their lives. Sean returned to Beverly Hills. Elijah returned to war. A.J., as ever, continued his work at Black Falls Lodge.
Two weeks later, their father shocked his three sons and daughter and everyone in Black Falls when he went missing on Cameron Mountain in a fierce spring snowstorm. Search parties fanned out into the wilderness, but it was Devin Shay, Hannah’s eighteen-year-old brother, who found the seventy-seven-year-old Vermonter’s body on the remote north side of the mountain. The autopsy indicated that Drew Cameron had died of hypothermia, probably after becoming lost and disoriented in the storm.
The one consolation to A.J., Elijah, Sean and Rose Cameron was that if their father could have chosen where to die, it would have been on the mountain he loved.
But he hadn’t chosen.
It wasn’t until November—seven months later—that everyone in Black Falls knew the truth.
Drew Cameron had been murdered.
Two
December 28—Black Falls, Vermont
Hannah raised the shade in her bedroom window and looked down at the frozen branch of the Black River that ran through the middle of the village. There