Virtue Falls Read Online Free PDF

parents, and to see her mother murdered had devastated her. Afterward, to be torn from his arms—that was nothing less than cruel. He worried about the possible psychological scars; he tried to comfort himself that her aunt and uncle would care for her.
    But Misty’s sister and her husband were middle-class, salt-of-the-earth people who worked, watched television, went to church, and never looked beyond the boundaries of their own narrow lives.
    And Charles knew Elizabeth; she was like him. She would always be asking why. Why had her mommy died? Why couldn’t she see her daddy?
    What would they tell her? If he could only have had some communication with the child … But that wasn’t allowed.
    As for the prison beatings … Charles was, after all, an easy mark. The other prisoners mocked him. The guards, tough guys in a difficult environment, detested him. He was not only smarter than everyone else, but he had never won a fight in his life. In fact, before prison, he had never been in a fight.
    He’d never been raped before, either.
    There was a first time for everything.
    Even losing his mind.
    One day, he visited the prison library to study the current report on his geological study at Virtue Falls Canyon, and he discovered notes written in the margins. He then realized those notes were accurate, they were in his handwriting, and he had no memory of making them.
    He had at once gone to the prison doctor.
    Not surprisingly, Dr. Walter Frownfelter accepted Charles’s analysis. When Charles and Misty lived in Virtue Falls, Dr. Frownfelter had been the physician there, and when the doctor joined the penitentiary staff, Charles had been glad to have another scientist to talk to.
    But that worked against his diagnosis; the warden noted they had a friendship, and that put Dr. Frownfelter’s word in doubt. Getting Charles released to the care facility had taken multiple psychiatric evaluations with an ever-changing list of physicians, and hearings with highly suspicious parole board members.
    Finally a criminologist examined the evidence that had convicted Charles, and she stated that, given the current tests that were not available twenty-three years ago, there could possibly be reasonable doubt about his guilt. She pointed out that Misty’s body had never been found, which left the murder in limbo, and Charles’s record of good behavior along with ongoing mental deterioration made him a likely candidate for release to an asylum or care center with a secure facility for dangerous patients.
    So the state, with their typical lack of care and foresight, sent him back to the place where he had last lived, the town where the crime was committed: Virtue Falls.
    By the time he arrived, two years after the diagnosis, his disease had advanced enough that he didn’t remember a lot about his years in prison. He only knew this place was much nicer that the last place. No one beat him up. No one pushed him around. No one cared if he read books and scientific articles.
    At first, the nurses kept him separate from the other patients. At night, they locked him in his room. They watched him in alarm, and when tending to his needs, always kept a strong, muscled orderly with them.
    Then, sometime in that first year, something happened, because apparently they decided he was harmless. They stopped following recommended protocol, and even allowed him to sit at the nurses’ station and tell them about the intricacies of the Virtue Falls geological studies. They didn’t say he was boring; they said his pleasant voice relaxed them.
    Most of the time, the other patients didn’t fear Charles, either, but George Cook had developed a dementia that left him loud and abusive. Or maybe his dementia exacerbated an already nasty disposition. George was always after Charles, making comments about how he wished he’d thought to kill his wife with a pair of scissors so he could go to prison for a little while and then get out and live for free on the