Buried (Twisted Cedars Mysteries Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page B

mountain roads that paralleled the Rogue River. A distance that would have taken an hour to drive on a normal highway, chewed up almost double that amount of time. Finally Dougal arrived at the edge of the continent, facing the Pacific Ocean and the one-oh-one highway. He turned left.
    Only sixty miles separated him now from his destination. So many years had passed since he’d been in this part of the world, he felt like another person. But his memories were stubbornly intact and he had a different one for every mile of this familiar stretch of the Oregon coastline.
    Most of them involved his old friends, Wade, Kyle, and Daisy. Kyle had owned a convertible back then, a 1988 red Mazda RX7, and the four of them had clocked a lot of miles looking for thrills, heading out to parties, or just aimlessly cruising.
    Though he’d played football with Wade and Kyle, and hung out with them on weekends, Dougal had always been aware he was a misfit. The others were all from wealthy families...at least wealthy compared to his mother.
    Wade’s father was the Sheriff of Curry County, Kyle’s dad owned the local real estate agency, and Daisy’s father was a bank manager, the town mayor and the richest of all. No one talked about the fact that Dougal’s mother cleaned all of their houses. Certainly none of them ever came to visit him at the trailer where he lived with his mom and sister. He would have died of embarrassment if they’d tried.
    Dougal recalled his mother asking him to introduce her to his friends after a football game once. He’d been so embarrassed of her then. Now his jaw clenched with shame for himself. What a jerk he’d been.
    One hand on the steering wheel, the other resting on the gear shift, Dougal focused on the scenery—the ocean churning at his right, the dark forest looming to his left. He lowered his windows so he could smell the pine and salt in the air.
    The miles flipped by, like pages of a familiar book, disappearing much too quickly. His hair, whipped by the early summer wind and air-borne salt, began to feel thicker, wilder.
    He passed a beach that had been the location for one of their wilder parties. Kyle had been dating Daisy Hammond already, by far the prettiest girl in town, but he’d hooked up that night with the girlfriend of the quarterback of the rival football team they’d played against that afternoon.
    “Cover for me, Dougal,” Kyle had said, as he and the girl slipped into the tall grass beyond the bonfire.
    Dougal winced at the memory, at his own weak desire for Kyle’s approval, at his guilt for not telling Daisy what had happened.
    Maybe Kyle had changed over the years, become a stand-up guy. But Dougal doubted it.
    And Jamie, his too-sweet, too-good sister, was planning to marry him.

chapter four
     
    late Thursday afternoon , Charlotte finally had time to file the DVDs that had been returned the previous day. Ten years ago she would have had a huge stack, now there were just a couple. Most people watched their movies on Netflix nowadays or downloaded them from the Internet.
    Included with the DVDs was the movie she’d watched after dinner last night. One scene had stuck with her all day. The hero of the story—a young teacher suffering from cancer, about to marry a woman he’d been dating for a long time—shares a joint with a hippy who claims to have been happily married for seventeen years to his childhood sweetheart.
    “How did you know she was the one?” the teacher asked.
    “If you have to ask, she isn’t.”
    Charlotte couldn’t stop thinking about that. Was it true? Did the best romances and marriages come wrapped in that sort of certainty?
    She couldn’t imagine ever feeling so—swept away. She certainly hadn’t in her relationships to date. Not that she’d had many. There’d been Ned Pullman in high school, Craig Turner in college...and now Wade.
    They’d made love for the first time on Friday. She’d been surprised, at first, when Wade asked if he could