Read Online Virtue Falls by Christina Dodd - Free Book Online Page B

least the video would be safe in its bag at the top of the canyon.
    Stupid thought, but that bone beckoned. She scooted closer, and closer, the bone gleaming in the gathering twilight. She stretched until her fingertips touched it, leaned farther until she was able to grasp it, brought it back and looked at it.
    It didn’t look that old.
    Of course, it was old. All the flesh had been cleaned away. But it wasn’t petrified. It didn’t show the cracks of extreme old age. She turned it over and over in her hands. In fact, she didn’t even know if it was human. What had she been thinking, to allow her enthusiasm to lead her here?
    From the rim above, a man’s voice snapped, “What are you doing?”
    She gasped, jumped, and dropped the bone. Grabbed for it. Caught it. Her feet skidded out from underneath her. She landed on her butt, crashed into the pile of brush, and came to an ignominious, and lucky, halt. That hurt her hand, a piercing pain that made her close her eyes long enough to gain control.
    Then she looked up at the rim.
    The man loomed there, a silhouette against the failing blue of the sky. He wore a broad hat. His hands rested on his belt. He carried a gun.
    It was the sheriff. Dennis Foster. He glared at her as if he discovered her committing a crime.
    Swift guilt rose in her. “I’m, um … I saw this bone.” She showed him. “I thought an … archeological find…”
    He still glared.
    “You know. I thought that the tsunami had uncovered a site where ancient man had built his home and…” Her voice faltered.
    Sheriff Foster had never liked her.
    She was used to people not liking or trusting her. But from the first moment they’d met, he had seemed more hostile than most. He’d been the one who had brought in the evidence to convict her father. She would have thought he’d be gloating, or patronizing. But he made it clear, right from the first moment he’d spotted her at the Oceanview Café, that he hated the sight of her.
    Maybe she reminded him of Misty. Her aunt had been like that sometimes, angry that Elizabeth looked so much like her mother.
    “You’re alone out here,” he said. “If anything happened to you, no one would find you for a very long time.”
    She found his choice of words … menacing. “I know.”
    “Especially since the earthquake created real emergencies in town.”
    “I’m sure.” She tucked the bone under her arm and started to pull herself up the steep slope to the rim. She grabbed branches and trees, used her good hand to hoist herself from one spot to another.
    Sheriff Foster watched without any offer of assistance. Probably he figured that if she had managed to get herself down there, she could get herself out. But he still loomed, unmoving, impatience shimmering, and if she could have figured out a different way around, she would have taken it.
    At last, she crawled, literally crawled, onto level ground.
    He moved back. But not far.
    She stood. She looked around and located her bag … behind him.
    “Are you satisfied now?” He asked as if he had the right to know.
    Taking the bone out from underneath her arm, she looked at it again. “Archeology is not my specialty, of course, but I think this bone is probably no more than a hundred to two hundred years old.”
    He barely glanced at it. “Probably it came from the whore’s cemetery.”
    The contemptuous tone, the use of that word, the word she’d heard applied to her mother, shocked her. He wasn’t being rude to her —but it sure seemed like it. “What are you talking about?”
    “Local story goes that late in the nineteenth century, Virtue Falls sported a thriving brothel. When the whores died, the ladies of the town didn’t want them resting beside them in the town cemetery, so they consecrated some ground somewhere farther up the canyon on a flat spot, and buried them there.” His words were clipped, his tone was flat and cold.
    “Is that true?” Elizabeth clutched one end of the bone in