Sweeter Than Sin Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I’m sorry, Sarah.”
    Sarah was three years older than him. She looked like she had him by a decade, though. It wasn’t the simple dress the Amish wore, and it wasn’t the way she scraped her hair back from her face. It wasn’t even the plainness of her features. When she’d been younger she’d been kind of pretty, he thought.
    But Sarah scowled.
    A lot.
    She glared at people; she snarled. She never laughed and she preferred to accuse or threaten rather than ask or request.
    All that bitterness weighed on her, and not in a nice way.
    He had a mouth full of mashed potatoes when she said, “You need to leave Madison and come back home. It’s an evil town, all the things happening back there. If you keep working there, being around those people, you’ll be as evil as they are.”
    “Sarah,” Abraham said quietly, catching his daughter’s eye. “That’s enough.”
    A mutinous look crossed her face. “You know what has taken place there. It’s vile.”
    “That’s enough,” Abraham said, shaking his head. “I won’t hear another word on it. I spend little time with Caine as it is.”
    A tense moment of silence passed and then Sarah left the room, thankfully taking some of the tension with her. As the back door slammed shut, Caine rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t mean to ruin the day.”
    “You didn’t.” Abraham smiled, his worn, tired face softening. “I think Sarah is the unhappy one today, not you.” The old man leaned back in his chair, his expression thoughtful. “You aren’t particularly happy yourself, Caine. What troubles you?”
    Sourly Caine laughed. “Life?”
    He tore a chunk of meat from the chicken breast and popped into his mouth, chewed it without really tasting it as he stared outside. “I find myself wanting to do bad things lately,” he murmured. He could trust Abraham. Caine’s words would go no further, and the other man wouldn’t judge him, either.
    “The police are involved,” Abraham murmured.
    Caine shifted his gaze to Abraham and then shook his head. “Is it enough? Will they believe those boys?”
    “You do.”
    Caine nodded. “Yes. I do.”
    Then he sighed and tossed the rest of the meat down on the plate. His appetite fading, he wiped his hands on a simple white napkin and leaned back in the chair. “Even if they arrest all the men involved, what good does it do? It doesn’t undo the damage, does it? It goes too deep, goes back too far.”
    “Yes. But there is nothing you can do, either. Let God sort it out, son.”
    Caine shot him a look.
    It was respect more than anything else that made Caine keep his mouth shut. But he’d stopped believing in God a long time ago.
    *   *   *
    It was the second time in the span of just a couple of months that they had to dig a vehicle out of the river.
    That was pretty unusual even for a big city.
    Madison, Indiana, was not a big city.
    What was even more fucked up was the fact that this vehicle, just like the first one, had a body inside it.
    This body, though, wasn’t old.
    Charlie Junior had been missing only a few weeks.
    The last time he’d been seen was the morning he clocked out just after the big fire at the Frampton house.
    His wife was currently on the bank of the river, half-drunk and clutching at her mother while they continued to work on the truck.
    It was tricky business pulling a vehicle from a body of water.
    If Chief Sorenson had his way, Missy Sutter would be removed from the area, and if she started screaming again she would be removed, whether she liked it or not. Damn the idiot who’d called her anyway. That was the problem with living in a town like Madison. Somebody had reported the truck and the call went out on the radio. Somebody had heard and given Missy a call—she’d gotten down here only a few minutes after the chief.
    He didn’t want to think about what might have happened if she’d gotten here before. She might have waded into the river herself.
    As it was, she had done