Excerpt of The Falls by Karen Harper

September 5, 2000
Portfalls, Washington

Though Claire Malvern was a sound sleeper, something woke her. Except for the constant, distant roar of the waterfall, their fishing lodge lay silent. She couldn't even hear her husband's usual deep and steady breathing.

She reached across the king-size bed. The sheets on his side were cold. Still groggy, she pushed herself up on her elbows. The muted red glow of the digital clock on his side of the bed illuminated no shoulder, no silhouette. The numbers read 3:13 a.m.

She flopped back down, then held her breath, straining to listen, but the rush of river mingled with the falls shrouded other sounds. Once comprising a central dining hall and a series of separate cabins, their rebuilt fishing lodge sprawled along a heavily treed crest overlooking the volatile Bloodroot River, which ran with rain and snowmelt from the Cascades to Puget Sound.

Claire fought her exhaustion. They had both been working too hard. Yesterday had been Labor Day, and labor they had, on this big, old place into which they'd sunk their assets, toiling toward their dream of opening The Falls Bed and Breakfast as soon as possible. Keith had been a bit edgy lately; he'd probably just had a bad dream or couldn't sleep. Or maybe the anchovy pizza had given him heartburn.

Their attached bathroom was dark, and the door wide-open. Perhaps he was downstairs, just wandering, planning, envisioning the future. Their move from Seattle to the small town of Portfalls, in rural, rugged Washington, had been his idea. She loved the beauty here, too, but they had left good careers in their mid-thirties for this great escape, as he called it.

Adrenaline pumped through her. She sat up. The room seemed chilly, but she felt flushed with distress.

"Keith?"

The sharp sound of her voice startled her.

"Keith?" she repeated louder.

Claire got up, shoved her feet into her slippers and tugged on her terry-cloth robe. In the cold moonlight that threw itself through the tall, new windows, she could see quite clearly. Knotting her belt, she looked over the banister at the hulking shadows cast by the big pieces of furniture in the high-ceilinged great room below.

"Keith? Where are you? Are you okay?" In both the bedroom and loft, she began to turn on lights, even though it meant anyone on the river would be able to look in on her through the span of windows, as if this were a lighted aquarium. But surely no one was out there at three- thirteen in the morning. Besides, if Keith had stepped out on the deck for some reason, the lights would draw him back. So what if he'd surprised her with a late-night walk, however unusual?

Claire hit the recessed ceiling lights for the great room and hurried down the curved wooden staircase, blinking at the brightness. She sensed, somehow, that Keith wasn't in the house, but she kept looking. She checked that the doors were still locked, the bolts shot, too, then realized he could have gone out and relocked everything. She rushed through the kitchen to the garage, where their SUV and truck sat. Then, hoping he had just walked to one of the three bedrooms in the wing they'd been renovating for future guests, she snapped on more lights. In each room, Claire looked out onto the deck that ran the entire length of the lodge above the river.

No sign of Keith.

She began to panic. Claire considered herself a down-to- earth person, but she had a fanciful bent, too, or she would never have been a successful interior designer and painter. Her serious nature began to do battle with her imagination. Her husband had gone for a walk and had been sitting on the deck stairs, staring at the beauty of the moonlit woods and the rapids of the foaming salmon river, when he tumbled off the step and hurt his ankle. Maybe he'd been calling for her outside and she hadn't heard him. Or he'd gone out to the old fish-cleaning shed to putter.

But none of that was like him.

Her heart pounding, she tore back upstairs, taking the steps two at a time, and yanked off her robe and nightgown. Shivering, she pulled on underpants, jeans and a sweatshirt, and shoved her feet into her old, paint- splattered loafers. She was angry with him now. Why had he left without waking her? This wasn't like him. In ten years of marriage, he'd never done anything like this.

She took his pistol from the bedside table drawer. The Smith & Wesson .38 revolver was ice-cold to the touch; she grabbed a jacket just to have a pocket to carry it. Though only nine inches long and one pound in weight, it felt huge and heavy. She hated guns and rarely touched the thing. But outsiders might be camped nearby, especially during these big salmon runs on the river. It was common for fishermen to walk under their windows, hopping across the boulders below, or to park along River Road and access the river through their driveway, even though their sign said Private — No Parking or Stopping.

Downstairs again, with a flashlight in one hand and cell phone in the other, Claire went outside and checked the back deck. She thudded down the stairs, circling the lodge and looking in the outbuildings, then moved away from the lights. She decided she'd have to shout for him, even if it attracted someone else. Fishermen were mostly a helpful lot, caught up in the excitement and camaraderie of chasing the silvers, pinks and sockeyes driven here by desperate instinct to spawn.

For once she cursed the Bloodroot River and the falls, wishing for silence so she could hear Keith's voice. Her flashlight trained on the ground, she started down the path that ran along the river.

"Keith?" she shouted, her voice breaking. "Answer me!"

"I can't believe it's this late — or early," Nick Braden told the two other men chowing down at the counter of D.B. Café at the tiny Portfalls airport. "It's four a.m., I'm on duty at eight, and need some shut-eye. I haven't done the graveyard shift for years — thank God. Even with this food, I'm starting to feel like a zombie."

"You make out the schedules," said Jackson, the Native American counter cook. "Give yourself a coupla days off for once."

"You the man!" Herb Black agreed, his mouth half-full. "So how in the Sam Hill you gonna get the graveyard shift when you're doing the sched'ling?"

All three customers, hunched over the cedar counter, were polishing off plates of bacon, eggs and hash browns smothered in ketchup. Jackson kept the coffee cups full. Nick sat around the corner from the other two, where he could observe them and the entire room — habit from years as a military policeman and then as an officer for various rural Washington police departments.

"Yeah, you got you a real hotbed of crime to keep an eye on 'round here, Sheriff," Herb kidded him. Herb was a pilot who flew fishermen or tourists out to the San Juan islands. "Piece o' cake — that's what you oughta be eatin'."

On Herb's other side, Pete Simpson, who was shiny-head bald, snorted a laugh as he wiped his plate with a piece of toast. "Hell, show some respect here. The man's got three deputies to cover three islands, on top a big, bad Portfalls. He's not exactly Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry anymore. I'll bet his officers got more than one bullet in their guns, too. With the growth 'round here, it's more like NYPD Blue these days."

"You got that right," Nick said, going along with their ribbing. He was used to masculine kidding from the military and the sheriff's office, and always gave as good as he got. "Juvies with too many beers in them, domestic spats — I could tell tales that would curl your hair, me hearties." He rose from his stool and dropped a folded five on the counter, though the bill only came to $2.99.

"Not to mention," he added under his breath,

"drugs, thefts and the big biz in search and rescue for jumpers."

Beyond banter now, the others nodded. Citizens were concerned about crime creeping north from Seattle as the population of tourists and citizens climbed. It was common knowledge that the old railroad bridge had been a favorite site for local or drive-in suicides for years.

The derelict bridge offered a scenic view of swift water fed by the mesmerizing falls, but there were few observers. Only the occasional fisherman hiked up the river that far; once in a while, Nick's deputies on random patrol checked the river path. Unfortunately, during the overlapping salmon runs, something especially luring and elemental seemed to beckon as a person looked down into the rushing river with fish leaping, fighting hard against the pristine but powerful current.

On his way out, Nick nodded to Jackson, who sent him a two- fingers salute on his baseball cap for the good tip. More than once, the cook had given Nick a heads-up when he suspected something strange going down around here. Just last month, Nick had busted a so-called sportsman flying cocaine in from Canada, in a clever reversal of the usual south-to-north route.

Nick walked through the otherwise empty café, which was built like a big Quonset hut. He stopped part way, looking out the windows that faced the short, blue-light-edged runway where small planes landed from the various islands and towns up and down this part of the coast. His only luxury in life, the beloved purple-and-white Cessna 206 Amphib, sat anchored near the single hangar, sitting high on her wheels and floats. He often flew the Susan to the small outer islands included in his jurisdiction. Despite the heckling he took, his duties as small-town, rural county sheriff were many and demanding, so he rarely used the plane just to get away anymore.

He started out of the café again, glancing as he always did at the framed, yellowed FBI poster hanging by the front door. MOST WANTED, the big print read. Twenty-some years ago, the now-notorious D. B. Cooper had hijacked a Boeing 727, then bailed out nearby at ten thousand feet with $200,000. Some of the money had been found, but never the man himself — who would be in his seventies by now. The guy had simply disappeared, and many, including Nick, had spent far too much time trying to figure out how.

Capturing such a high-profile criminal was the stuff that law enforcement officers' dreams were made of. Nick's ambition had been to be sheriff here, so he'd worked hard and spent too much money for his campaign last November. His landslide election had been worth it, but being sheriff was a double-edged sword.

It meant more Rotary Club speeches, more PR work and even media interviews, more hand-holding of distraught victims before turning the case over to his staff — and, in this day and age, more attempts to stay politically correct and not get sued. It meant less time for the hands-on solving of cases that had once excited and challenged him. But it kept him damn busy, and he needed that. He'd lost his wife, Susan, five years ago this week, but somehow he had never quite moved on emotionally from her death.

The moment he unlocked the door of his unmarked Ford, he heard his radio crackle with the night dispatcher's voice. The static of his portable radio had bugged him while he was eating; at this late hour, since he wasn't technically on duty, he'd turned it off for once.