Dark Debts Read Online Free PDF Page A

that, and only that.
    What was this about? And how did it involve her? No matter what trouble Cam was in, he had throngs of friends he could have called. People who lived closer, people who stayed up later, people he hadn’t spent the last year trying to pretend he’d never met. Not to mention Lady Macbeth. Where was her lying ass?
    Half an hour and two cups of coffee later, Randa was sick of waiting. Cam could have walked here three times since she’d left the message. It was obnoxious enough to have called her here in the first place. Now he was taking his time getting here, leaving her to cool her heels among the night crawlers?
    As soon as Ray’s back was turned, she put some money on the table and left to drive up the hill to Cam’s place.
    She remembered the drive well. It was only then that she had started to wonder if Cam really was in some kind of trouble. Up to that point, she’d been telling herself not to panic. Given Cam’s flair for hyperbole, he could make misplacing a credit card sound like a matter of life and death. But he had sounded different. She’d told herself that he’d felt awkward because of the nasty way they’d parted. Hell, he should feel awkward . If he was suddenly willing to call her, knowing it would mean having to face her fury . . . something might really be wrong.
    But what?
    She’d just begun to hypothesize when she’d turned onto Cam’s street, into a sea of flashing lights.

TWO
Barton, Georgia, 1996
    J ack reached over and turned off the alarm clock the second it started to buzz. He’d awakened at four a.m. with a sense of foreboding so strong it felt like someone was sitting on his chest. He was used to vague, intangible fear. He’d lived with it his entire adult life. Fear left over from when there was a reason for it, the way an amputee still feels pain from a missing limb. But this was different. It was as if he’d been jarred awake by a loud noise, but he couldn’t remember hearing anything.
    And then he’d had the most ridiculous urge to call Cam. Where the hell had that come from? He hadn’t seen or talked to Cam in almost a decade. He rarely thought of his brother, and when he did, he still felt an anger bordering on rage. Why would he think of calling Cam? What did he think he’d say? “Hey, asshole, it’s the Ghost of Christmas Past. How’s your cushy life?”
    As soon as he’d sent those thoughts packing, his mind began to bombard him with memories of things completely forgotten about. Vignettes from his childhood, random and meaningless. Like fishing trips with his mother’s twin brother, Uncle Ryland, the only member of the extended family who had ever acknowledged their existence. Ryland had adored the boys, and they’d adored him, even if he was a certified loon. It was Uncle Ryland who had taken them to the Rotary Club–sponsored Huck Finn Day at Lake Allatoona, the one summer they’d managed to attend that much-heralded event. It was one of his few pleasant childhood memories. Their mother had dressed the four of them in matching overalls and different-colored plaid shirts, borrowed from Ryland’s kids (cousins they’d never met), and they had passed themselves off as a normal family. Tallen caught the biggest fish of the day and got his picture in the paper. Probably the only time in his life Tallen had his picture in the paper without breaking a law. There was something about Tallen and fish. Ryland used to say that all that boy had to do was call them.
    Their father had been unimpressed. Said fish liked Tallen because they had so much in common—their main thought in life was how to keep from being caught. He also said Tallen wasn’t any better at it than the fish were. He always seemed to have even more contempt for Tallen than for the rest of them, which was saying something. Jack’s theory was that it was because Tallen so