Casual Conversations About Love and Murder by Chelsea Mueller

Author:Chelsea Mueller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chelsea Mueller

twenty-two

I didn’t need another dead anything in my life. The day had pushed my boundaries to their limits, and the amount of bloody, twisted bodies—animal or otherwise—I could take in a day should have been zero.

Cole and I had trekked from the site of one accident to another. Every location we’d marked as suspicious had proven its status with gory wildlife remains. We’d been to almost all of the places on our map.

Just one more stop, I reminded myself.

Old Callihan Creek had the oldest incident I’d been able to find. There had been a bigger body of water here, but when Nascent Pharmaceuticals built the plant they’d cordoned off plenty of space for themselves. The Camber Courier had only published a three-paragraph note on the drowning of Ryan Driscol. He’d died with a blood alcohol level of one point two and had been found in the water behind the dark trees I was staring at now. He’d died more than seven years ago. Evidence would be long gone, but if our other excursions had taught me anything it was that these woods were tainted now.

The bones didn’t need to be buried here for the place to have become haunted.

Cole’s car was warm and rattling with the dense squealing of guitars turned to eleven. The speakers might not appreciate the max volume, but the excuse to avoid conversation, to let my mind stretch, was appreciated. I smiled inwardly. Cole was pretty smart and outdoorsy for an emo dude. My toes were cold and numbness teased my nose despite the thermostat set fully in the red.

He slowed his car in the middle of a gravel road. “This is as close as we can park.”

He killed the engine and cut the speakers. My breastbone still hummed with the remembered bass.

“We don’t have to go in, if you don’t want to.” They were nice words, kind words, unhelpful words. Cole tapped a one, one, two on the steering wheel.

“It’s fine.” Mostly.

His fingers stilled. “The road continues, but the pond and creek should be over that way.” He pointed out the window next to me.

Trees splotched with umber and burnt orange stretched their branches to one another, a wall of fall camouflage. If there were more grisly deaths concealed behind the trees, did I really want to know? Cole was already out of the car. He wasn’t going to run from the darkness, and I couldn’t either. Not if it meant getting the truth. I climbed out of the sedan and started down the embankment at the edge of the road.

“Hold on.” Cole leaped over the ditch. His boots hit the earth hard enough to shake silt into the gulley between us.

“What?”

“It’s all mud under those leaves. Here.” He stretched out his hand to me. His hoodie sleeve slid back enough to show a black leather bracelet on his wrist. It was simple, and dark, and suited him.

Cole had this soft, doe-eyed sweetness going on underneath the flop of messy black hair, and it emptied my sass reserves.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.