Murder in a Hot Flash by Marlys Millhiser

Author:Marlys Millhiser
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504010269
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul

Chapter 17

“Charlie, stop screaming. Find some cracks to stick your fingers and toes in and hold on to, or you’ll pull me over.”

Charlie had pulled some ohshits in her life but this had to be the granddaddy of ’em all. “I’m not screaming.”

Oh, right, then how come your throat’s so sore?

Charlie couldn’t see anything but black. “Uh, there’s nothing to hang on to.”

Then why aren’t you plummeting through space? Why are you still here to hear him?

Charlie opened her eyes. Wild panicky visions of her impending free-float out and down to doom ricocheted about her brain. Dizziness and nausea and dread washed over her in surging breath-stopping waves.

“There’s not a lot to hang on to up here either.” Even with the ringing in her ears, Charlie could hear his swallow come drier than John B. Drake’s.

He had hold of some part of her sweatshirt, the sweatshirt trying hard to choke her. She knew she could have heard threads and seams ripping if fear wasn’t bludgeoning her ears with the din of a terrified heart.

“Oh, Libby, baby, I’m sorry.” Charlie wished Mitch hadn’t caught her. He was only drawing out her agony of anticipating the fall, forcing her to live it over and over before the final, real one.

Mitch was face down above her. But she could feel him slipping. Charlie should tell him to let go but couldn’t quite form the words. She’d be a murderer if she didn’t. A dead one.

“Kick your shoes off, see if you can get a toehold.” She could hear in the straining of his voice the enormous exertion he used to hold them even this tenuously. “But don’t jerk or anything. Hurry, Charlie, we’re running out of time.”

One of Charlie’s Keds was half off already. Carefully, oh so carefully, she scraped the sole down the rock face and felt the prick of cold air on her toes when it fell. She heard a thump as the rock repelled it somewhere below. But she never did hear it land. It was that far down there.

How would she endure the wait once she was launched herself?

With little hope that it would be of any use, Charlie pried off her other shoe with her bare foot and then used her toes and fingers to search for cracks and crannies. At least it gave her something to do other than contemplate the inevitable.

Charlie’d always considered rock climbers raving lunatics, but could remember pictures of lunatics plastered to smooth cliff faces like spiders and with no discernible handholds. She moved one foot gradually back and forth, and then the other, and met with no opening for her toes. But the fingers on her right hand found an indentation with a warm, mossy feeling to it and grabbed its edge.

For some reason this caused Charlie to raise her left foot a smidgen and it found a slanted crack that cramped and pinched but was deep enough to slip in to the instep and support her weight. This in turn released the choking pressure of the sweatshirt and, unable to believe her luck, Charlie hugged the cliff.

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