Page 1 of The Drowned Woman
Prologue
17 years ago…
Flying. She was flying.
Wind sliced against her face. Time was fluid, slippery. Was it centuries, or seconds? She knew she was falling from the lurch in her stomach. She took a ragged breath, in and out, then a slam jolted through her, and her entire body propelled forward until the airbag blew and the seatbelt grabbed her, holding her in place with a bruising grasp.
Her eyes fluttered open as the first splash of frigid water crashed through the open window beside her. She shook her head, startled to be awake—to be alive. Her throat was raw, every breath an effort. Her head throbbed, ears shrieked, body bruised. Hands flailing, fighting…
More water, seeping up from below, streaming through the windows—the car, she was in her car. In the river—how? She blinked, tried to focus past the pain and the rushing noise that consumed her mind. Why?
He’d tried to kill her…Why?
She fumbled at her seatbelt. Jammed. She had a safety tool—where, where… She tried to open the center console, but her fingers were numb from the icy water, unable to obey the commands her brain screamed out as she fought to survive. The black water was already at her neck, the car sinking, the river consuming it with primal greed. Wind howled, water flooded in, the car groaning in protest, the wail of a dying beast.
Still, she fought, tilting her face to swallow a last lungful of air, pulling at the seatbelt that kept her prisoner, straining, tugging, trying, fighting… until finally, there was nothing to fight against. Nothing left to fight with.
Silence. A sweet release of darkness beckoned as the car settled into the cradle of the river’s muddy bottom. The only light a soft glow illuminating a man’s face.
Luka. She strained to call out to him, bubbles escaping her as her lungs emptied for the final time. Luka. Her arms stretched, bobbing in the current now that the car had surrendered to the river. She reached out, felt his hand grab hers, so strong, so warm, his touch bringing a rush of calm.
Luka.She sighed, her body collapsing. She had nothing left except one last thought.Why?
One
It was perfect weather for a funeral. But despite the gusting wind, chill rain, and the other-worldly fog rolling off the Susquehanna River, Luka Jericho was here to celebrate a life.
For seventeen years, every March 18th, no matter the weather, no matter his workload, in sickness or in health, Luka had made the pilgrimage back here, to the place where he’d lost everything.
After almost two decades, there was little left to mark where Cherise had driven off the road and plunged into the river. The scraggly bushes and saplings that had done nothing to slow her car on that chilly night so long ago were all now fully grown. If he’d driven here in summer, he’d be barely able to glimpse the river through their foliage. But Luka never came here in summer. He came only one day—this day—every year. To mark Cherise’s life and to try to understand her death.
That mystery had changed his life and driven him to forsake his college dreams, propelling him into a career in law enforcement. Now, as the detective sergeant in charge of Cambria City’s Violent Crimes Unit, Luka understood the logic behind his choices, the aftermath of trauma. After Cherise, after the gut-wrenching realization that he’d missed the signs, been oblivious to her pain, clueless… of course he’d been driven into a profession where he could help others find the answers they desperately searched for.
He sat in his pickup, watching the way the wind sliced through the early morning fog. Wet, thick spirals dancing across the river emerged on land as wisps that almost—but not quite—appeared human. They beckoned to him, inviting him into the river’s intoxicating, chill embrace. To join Cherise and follow her path into the dark and lonely depths.
On the seat beside him sat his usual offering: a large bouquet of irises, blindingly blue blossoms that, despite being dead and dying, appeared almost too alive and vibrant against the shades of March gray that saturated the landscape. Or maybe it was merely his colorless mood that made it so difficult to place his faith in the promise of spring and the new life it brought. March had started hopeful, with blue skies and sixty-degree weather, but after that false promise winter had returned with a vengeance, suffocating the Appalachian Mountains of central Pennsylvania not with the crisp gleam of snow but rather with the damp chill of relentless freezing rain.
Rain that had gone on for twelve days straight and showed no signs of slowing now. Luka blew his breath out. Maybe he should stop coming, he told himself as he did every year. Maybe he should forgive, forget, and forge on with his life.
Maybe someday he could. But not today.
He picked up the flowers, tugged his hood over his head, and climbed out of the truck. As he tramped through the mud and winter grass, he imagined tire tracks gouged into the earth, sparks flying as she’d gunned the engine to bump over the railroad tracks, the crack and scratch of branches as she hurtled off the side of the hill and flew through the night.
What had gone through her mind in those last few seconds? He imagined her terror as the car pancaked against the river, cold water rushing in through the windows she’d opened, greedily stealing the oxygen, leaving her alone in the dark. That was the image that kept him awake at night. Cherise facing death, probably terrified, maybe even regretting her choice, sometimes shrieking, sometimes whimpering, sometimes silent—but always alone.
He stepped over the rusted train tracks, made his way through the brush to where the hill gave way to a steep drop off, eroded by centuries of flood waters. There he crouched, laying the flowers on top of a flat outcropping of limestone, surrounded by dead grass. Warily, he eyed the river. The clouds obscured any hope of seeing the sun rising behind the mountains to the east. No birds sang to announce the dawn, nothing stirred except the water rushing below him, the wind and rain whipping whitecaps over the river’s surface. The air smelled of damp, dead earth.
He reached for a stone to anchor the irises, although he knew it was futile. They’d be scattered to the wind before he made it back over the mountains to Cambria City. What did it matter? After all, they were already dead.
Standing, he recited the poem she’d left behind to mark her decision. Langston Hughes. The book of poetry had been one of Luka’s, heavily annotated and dog-eared. She’d chosen well, tearing out the well-worn page, a cairn of rocks marking it for the people who followed in her wake. Her final message to Luka, to the world.
The poem was a scant twelve words contained in three lines and was titled: “Suicide’s Note.”
Luka turned his back on the river and its ghosts. After seventeen years of this pilgrimage, he still had no answers, no sense of closure. Only a single question that had burrowed into his psyche and refused to let go:why?
Two
Leah Wright’s Subaru rattled over the metal grating of the bridge leading into Cambria City’s downtown.
