“Wow,” David said, standing beside her. “It’s a good view.”
He made his way to the edge more quickly than Stevie liked.
“You could fall here really easily,” he said. “If she was distracted or something.”
Stevie began taking slow, measured steps forward toward the edge. Where would Allison have stopped? At the safest spot with the best view, most likely. Don’t just look at it—see it. What did she see? A dark jag of rock, a bit of a slope, but it was gentle. Stevie squatted down and opened her water bottle, letting a trickle of water flow out and down the point. It made a slow, meandering path. It picked up a bit of speed at a point about halfway in, where the ledge had a small dip and really started to tip down. Stevie got down on her stomach and pressed herself along, like a snake, until she could peek over the edge. It was a straight drop onto the rocks below, then a bit of path and some trees, and about ten feet out to the lake edge. There was no sign of the body or what had happened there, but she shivered nonetheless.
It was a bad way to die.
She scooted back, only standing when she felt grass against her ankles. She joined David, who was sitting on the ground.
“So what are you thinking?” David asked.
Stevie brushed at a dark muddy stain that had gotten on the front of her white shirt.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I know that depression isn’t something you can always see and you can’t always tell if someone is in crisis, but I don’t think she went over the edge on purpose. The people below described her tumbling over the edge, screaming.”
“Then she tripped. It would be super easy to do. You’re running. You’re tired. You’re distracted and looking around, and you trip and go over the edge.”
It made sense. It was not just possible—it was likely. It certainly fit the description of what the witnesses had seen.
There was a low rumble of thunder in the distance, and though there were still hours of daylight left, the sky grew dark.
“It’s going to storm tonight,” he said, resting on his back and looking up at the sky.
She rested next to him, tucking her head into his shoulder. He rolled toward her, and his lips were on hers.
If it was bad form to make out in the spot that Allison Abbott had fallen from, Stevie tried not to dwell on it. There was a rush to the moment, as if something pent-up was being expressed, and David rolled on top of her, and then she on
him. They were more or less on the public path, but they were also alone with the woods and the sky. Soon they both had pine needles in their hair and were breathless. Then, as suddenly as the kissing began, it stopped. He smiled again, a questioning smile, and balanced himself up on his elbows.
“So,” David said. “Fall. School.”
He was back to whatever conversation he had started that morning when they left Susan’s house.
“Fall,” she repeated. “School.”
“You’re going back to Ellingham. I am a man without a plan at the moment.”
“I thought you were going to keep working with the group you work with now,” she said.
“That was my plan, yeah . . . but something’s come up. I’ve been offered something.”
She sat up as well.
“There’s someone who’s known me since I was little,” he said, looking at the ground between them. “He doesn’t like my dad—not a lot of people who know him do. He got in touch because he suspected that I had something to do with my dad’s fall from grace, and he knows that I’ve been cut off. He offered to help me out.”
“With money?”