Praying for Sleep by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Thrillers, Fiction
ISBN: 0451203054
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2001-03-01T06:00:00+00:00

Heading northeast from Ridgeton, Route 116 winds slowly through the best and the worst parts of the state: picturesque dairy and horse farms, then small but splendid patches of hardwood forests, then finally a cluster of tired mid-size towns studded with abandoned factories that the banks and receivers can’t give away. Just past one of these failed cities, Pickford, is a five-hundred-acre sprawl of rock bluffs and pine forest.

Indian Leap State Park is bisected by a lazy S-shaped canyon, which extends for half a mile from the parking lot off 116 to Rocky Point Beach, a deceptive name for what’s nothing more than a bleak rock revetment on a gray, man-made lake about one mile by two in size. Rising from the forest not far from the beach is what the State Park Service, still overly generous, calls a “peak,” though it’s really just a flat-topped summit six hundred feet high.

These rocks have their ghosts. In 1758 a small band of Mohegans, trapped on the side of this mountain, jumped to their deaths rather than be captured by rival Pequots. The women flung their screaming children before them then leapt to the rocks below with their men. Lis could still recall in perfect detail the bad, earnest illustration in her fifth-grade textbook of a squaw, looking more like Veronica Lake than a princess of the Mohican Confederacy, reaching for her tearful child as they were about to sail into the air. The first time she’d come here, a skinny wan girl, Lis walked these trails close to tears, thinking of the sorrow—whole families flying through the air. Even now, thirty years later, sitting across from Kohler, she felt the chill horror the story had evoked in her childhood.

Six months ago, on May 1, the Atchesons and the Gillespies—a couple they knew from the country club—planned a picnic at Indian Leap. Accompanying them were Portia and a former student of Lis’s, Claire Sutherland.

The morning of the outing—it was a Sunday—had begun awkwardly. Just as Lis and Owen were about to leave, he got a call from his firm and learned that he had to go into the office for several hours. Lis was used to his zealot’s schedule but was irritated that he acquiesced today. He’d worked almost every Sunday since early spring. The couple fought about it—genteelly at first, then more angrily. Owen prevailed, though he promised he’d meet them at the park no later than one-thirty or two.

“I didn’t realize until later how lucky it was that he won that argument,” she told Kohler softly. “If he hadn’t gone into work . . . It’s funny how fate works.”

She continued with her story. Portia, Claire and Lis rode with Dorothy and Robert Gillespie in their Land Cruiser. It was a pleasant two-hour drive to the park. But as soon as they arrived, Lis began to feel uneasy, as if they were being watched. Walking to the lodge house to use the phone she believed she saw, in a distant cluster of bushes, someone looking at her.

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