Fall from Grace Read Online Free PDF Page B

mother had not done so—she had buried him in the earth, next to the father he despised, perhaps the only revenge she had left. His father had died in this place, his skull shattering on the rocks below. Another memory came to Adam—as a small child, bold even then, he had stood at the edge of the promontory, gazing down the sheer cliffside with no thought to his safety. Taking his hand in a strong grip, his father had pulled him back. In gentle rebuke, Ben said, “Don’t stand so close, son. You could fall to your death. Follow my example and stay back from it.” Perhaps Ben, sure-footed as he was, had said this for a child’s benefit. But even on that last night, their final sunset together, his father had stood well short of the cliff.
    Amid this skein of memory, another thought came to Adam—that, however subconsciously, his childish resolve to stand at its edge had been a way of showing up Teddy, who suffered from vertigo and endured these family picnics like a conscript. Odd, too, that in these memories his mother, though surely present, had left no image of herself behind.
    Pensive, Adam walked to the edge. Ninety feet below, the coarse sand was covered with rocks and boulders; no one could survive such a fall. “Where exactly did you find him?” Adam asked.
    Jack pointed at a group of jagged rocks. “Beside those. The last thing you’d imagine, I know.”
    “The very last.”
    “Ten years makes a difference, Adam. In me, in you—even in Ben. The man you remember wasn’t the man I found there.”
    Adam shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling the wind on his face as he watched the sun, a red-orange disk, slice into the water. At length, he said, “Funny he died on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. His favorite time to come here.”
    Jack gave him a curious look. “You sound almost sentimental.”
    “I’m just trying to envision what happened that night.” He turned to Jack. “The state police taped off this area, I assume.”
    Jack inclined his head toward the hiking trail that ran along the cliff. “Only for a few hours. There’s too much foot traffic here.”
    Adam looked around them, gauging how the police would evaluate their surroundings. Bordered by woods, the promontory would be visible only to hikers or from the waters below. The trail itself, running in both directions, headed past other homes until it meandered to the main road. The pathway from the Blaine house, trod by his mother’s family and then his own, ran to the cut in the trees perhaps fifty feet to Adam’s left. Peering over the rock again, Adam saw the wooden stairway to the beach, built by Ben for his sons when they were young. That night anyone could have approached this promontory from any of four directions, and likely remained unseen by anyone but Ben himself.
    “They took your shoes,” Adam said. “That suggests there were footprints here. What was the weather like that day?”
    Jack stared at the clay, his shaggy white-tipped eyebrows raised in thought. “It had rained that morning. Anyone coming by might have left some prints.”
    Adam scoured the area around the rock. “Even wet, that clay is pretty hard.”
    “True. Anyhow, no point looking now. A few hours after I found him it started raining buckets.”
    Adam faced his uncle. “Tell me what you think, Jack. Did someone give him a shove?”
    Jack shook his head, less in demurral than distress. “Why would they?”
    “Take your pick. Fear. Greed. Reprisal. Not to mention the sheer pleasure of it.” Adam’s voice hardened. “Personally speaking, I don’t much care if someone helped him, or who it was. But Sergeant Mallory does.”
    A look of reticence entered Jack’s eyes, perhaps the superstitious fear of speaking ill of the dead, or worry about the police. “Whatever Ben did, he’s gone now.”
    Adam felt a resurgence of the anger he could never escape, stirred by the revelations of the last hours. “Gone? In a year, maybe I’ll