PART ONE
Prologue
Trenae didn’t
want the memory, not now. Yet she knew why it haunted.
She cringed, squeezing her eyes
shut. But the memory forced itself anyway, in
heightened details, putting her there again; darkness surrounded Trenae as she
stood at the cliff’s edge, her hand shining the flashlight far below, at the
stream racing around sharp rocks, sending faint gurgling sounds to her ears. In
her other hand, she held the wine bottle. Her purse draped her shoulder. Maybe
the fall would kill her, maybe not.
Her thoughts wrangling and
wrestling, she finally changed her mind. Yet as she backed away from the edge,
both spiked high heels of her boots slipped on crushed gravel. Her backside
landed hard on flat rock, sending her belongings airborne. Nothing mattered now.
Searching, grasping, her nails scraped, bled into stone, loose brush branches,
anything. But it all failed. Her foot jolted painfully
against a lower protruding boulder, on the cliff’s side, twisting, thrusting
her outward, empty, free into the cold night air. She began to fall, headfirst,
to her demise below.
The doorknob clicked.
Her eyelids sprung open; the memory
scattered. Dark brown wood swept forward.
A female reporter entered the
room....