Dark River

by Mary Jane Beaufrand

Genres: YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

When Ronnie moves from the city to a small town in rural Oregon, she feels secluded from everything and everyone -- except for Karen, a young girl whom she babysits. So when she discovers Karen's lifeless body in the river, Ronnie is compelled to uncover the truth and solve her murder. As she becomes increasingly obsessed with solving the mystery of Karen's death, Ronnie is led deeper and deeper into the woods surrounding the river and to the dark secret hidden within its midst. Dark River (originally published under the title The River) will keep you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.

Release date: April 10, 2012

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 221

Sample

I suppose there are worse things than being soggy and dateless and shoveling bunny carcasses into a garbage bin on Valentine’s Day, but if there are, I can’t think of any. Dad might say being dead in a ditch is worse. Mom would say being dead in a ditch wearing tattered underwear is worse still, at which point Dad might say dead is dead, what does underwear have to do with it anyway, and Mom would shut him up with a pumpkin bar delicately spiced with nutmeg and cinnamon, slathered with cream cheese frosting, which Dad would eat thinking he had cleverly won his case, while the real winner went back to the kitchen to check on her rack of lamb.

Be that as it may, it was ten at night on Valentine’s Day, the most romantic day of the year. Fred the Eagle had dropped his latest kill on the back porch again and some of our guests had complained, so I went out to deal with the problem before the neighborhood dogs did.

This being February and the western side of the Cascade Mountains, I hadn’t been outside for a minute before I was marinated in cold rainwater. I did my best to deal with the carcass problem quickly, while inside the inn diners wearing shades of red and pink had graduated from tables in the café to the sofas around the river rock fireplace in the sunken living room, where they snuggled, forking chocolate fondue into each other’s mouths, flush with heat and growing passion. I had never felt so outside, as though I weren’t a real girl made of flesh and blood but some spirit made of rainwater, doomed forever to hover around windows of places I couldn’t enter.

“I’ve been dumped,” said a voice behind me, drawing me back to my own skin. I turned around to see a dark figure in a rain parka and thick-soled boots stomp up the porch steps. He pulled back his hood and I exhaled. It was Ranger Dave.

“What do you mean, dumped?” I said. I was still thinking of an eagle pecking at a bunny and then dumping it on our back lawn.

“Dumped. D-U-M-P-E-D. Like a bald tire or a three-legged dog,” he said. It was a weird comparison but I understood. Our place was the last building on a dead-end road in the middle of nowhere. Random people decided that this stretch was great for getting rid of things they no longer needed. Tires, puppies, kittens, Styrofoam coolers—it all turned up in our ditches. Including, apparently, Ranger Dave.

Poor guy. His face seemed to have eroded, like an embankment worn away by a swift current. He needed help fast. I’d have to postpone feeling sorry for myself. I hoisted the bunny carcass into the bin marked yard waste and stowed the shovel against the house.

“Let’s get you inside,” I said.

As Ranger Dave shook the water off his parka in the sun porch, I leaned on the carved-beaver banister at the top of the stairs that led down to the Astro Lounge. “Dad!” I yelled. “Ranger Dave’s here!”

Dad’s head appeared at the bottom of the stairs. He was drying a huge beer stein. We’d been country innkeepers for almost a year, but I still hadn’t gotten used to the change in my father. He had morphed from Republican Attorney Dad to Hairy Viking Dad. He had facial hair. He wore flannel.

“Veronica, what have I said about shouting?” he yelled just as loudly as I had. He took in all the rainwater sluicing off me and onto the carpet. “Get a towel and change your shirt, please. And wash your hands!”

I ignored him. “Ranger Dave is having a crisis.”

Dad and I stared at each other for a beat. I continued to drip.

“What kind of crisis?”

“Girl kind.”

Dad kept wiping, even though the stein was clean and dry. “Be right there,” he finally said.

Ranger Dave, meanwhile, either didn’t hear me broadcasting his woe, or didn’t care. He took off his boots and shuffled over to the hearth, where he carefully swept little embers back into the fireplace. As an employee of the U.S. Forest Service, he was always on the lookout for anything untended and emitting smoke.

When Dad emerged he was holding two bottles of Black Butte Porter, one of which he handed to Ranger Dave.

“What is it, dude? What’s going on?” Dad asked. I don’t think my father had ever had a cool friend before, so now he got all embarrassing when Ranger Dave was around. He called him man and dude and even slouched. Ranger Dave was in his thirties and had that long, grunge-band hair, so it was okay for him to at least pretend to be hip; but on Dad it just seemed wrong. He should stick to his new strengths. Chopping trees. Eating manly breakfasts. Sacking villages.

“Kristi dumped me,” Ranger Dave said, not looking at my father as he said it—not looking at any of us.

“Oh,” Dad said, trying to look serious, stroking his beard to hide his smirk. Kristi’s boobs were bigger than her IQ. She didn’t deserve him. And dumping him on Valentine’s Day? That was cold. Colder than runoff.

Ranger Dave sighed. “And I thought she might have been the one.”

“Seriously?” I interrupted. “I mean, she listened to Christian rock. Don’t you hate Christian rock? I thought you said it was an oxymoron.”

“I thought it was cute,” he said, whacking a burning log.

“That is not cute, it’s pathetic,” Dad said, rolling his eyes. “Even I know that.”

“And remember what you used to say about Kristi’s hair?” I prodded.

Dad winked at me and mouthed the words good one behind Ranger Dave’s back.

“I said she could punch a hole in the ozone layer above her vanity table with all the Aqua Net,” Ranger Dave admitted.

Dad smiled. The two of us, working together, had forced a confession. Ranger Dave’s case for heartbreak had just collapsed into a heap of black embers. Now we could all get on with our lives.

But rather than feeling better, Ranger Dave seemed worse. He put the poker down and didn’t even touch his beer, just slouched against the fireplace and sighed as though all the air had been beaten out of him. And Dad? He took our inability to cheer up our guest as his own personal failure. He sat there, stroking his beard, extracting little flakes of dead skin, which he rolled into little pill shapes and flicked onto the carpet.

“Come on, man,” Dad said gently, urging him downstairs. “I’ll let you kick my butt at darts.”

“That’s okay, Paul. I don’t really feel like playing right now.”

Now Dad was really alarmed. Ranger Dave was always up for a game.

Fortunately, at this point, the kitchen door swung open and Mom came out. Her brown hair was secured with a banana clip on the back of her head, and her white chef’s smock and black-checked pants were baggy over her thin frame, making her look like a hip-hop cook.

She carried a tray covered with an elaborate linen napkin. She placed it on Ranger Dave’s lap. Suddenly we were surrounded. Our dinner guests stopped smooching; our wait staff, including Daisy and Wanda, not to mention Tomás and Gretchen, my only friends in town, pushed forward with the promise of witnessing something spectacular.

What would Mom offer him? Cardamom bread? Northwest pizza with smoked salmon, roasted red peppers, and feta cheese? Sacher torte, so dense and rich, each bite landed like semisweet buckshot in your stomach?

With a flourish, she whisked the napkin away, revealing a bag of marshmallows, two slabs of Hershey’s chocolate, and a box of graham crackers. She speared a marshmallow on a fondue fork for Ranger Dave and held it out to him, as if he were a child of five. “Here ya go,” she said.

I held my breath. Mom could usually read people’s hunger with an uncanny level with accuracy, but she was wrong on this one. Ranger Dave, when he wasn’t live-trapping aggressive bears or putting out brush fires, was Mr. Ultra Healthy Marathon Man. He once told me he survived a whole week on nothing but bottled water, bananas, and orange GU gel. To him, food was fuel.

S’mores? Mom might as well have offered him a big plate of Styrofoam.

I held my breath as Ranger Dave took the fondue fork and stuck the marshmallow by the embers of the fire. He was humoring Mom. Had to be. We all watched as his marshmallow turned from white to golden to brown and finally black. He pulled it out of the hearth, blew the flame out, and put the hot, black goo in the chocolate graham sandwich Mom held out for him.

He devoured his s’more, then licked the gunk off his fingers one by one. When he was done he carefully closed his eyes. “Disgusting,” he pronounced.

But he reached for another.

Around us, people politely applauded and Mom circulated the s’mores plate around the rest of them. You could tell what they were thinking: I always liked s’mores, but now it’s okay to admit it because Claire Severance serves them. Dad, meanwhile, poured more champagne to anyone who wanted it, all the while smiling at the shadow Mom cast over the soft firelight, a shadow that seemed to cover all of us like a blanket. She’d worked her magic yet again. Dad knew she would; Ranger Dave knew she would (which is why he’d come to us to begin with); our guests and employees had known as well. Mom’s culinary powers were legendary. There was nothing she couldn’t put right with food.

Nothing, that is, except for me.

Don’t get me wrong: I had some decent days—days when I didn’t dwell too much on what I’d lost when we moved here, like coffee shops, Nordstrom, clubs with all-ages shows, a school with funding for arts programs.

But then there were other nights when I couldn’t filter out the loneliness, and I would lie awake torturing myself, listening to the sounds of the Santiam River running through the backyard, pretending it was just the familiar city cries of the drunks and the meth addicts staggering home from an after-hours show at the Crystal Ballroom.

There was nothing wrong with my life that going home—my real home—couldn’t correct.

At least that was what I thought that Valentine’s Day, when I still hoped I could be fixed—when I hoped all of us could be fixed. Now I know better. I know there are things we can understand and control, and then there is the wilderness of the unknowable. Our inn was situated on the frontier between the two—the last building on a dead-end road; beyond us there were only trees and mountains and sky and river—always the river.

And what happened there, at the boundary between the wild and the tame? That I need more strength to tell. Best to stop here with marshmallows and chocolate.



Lost lost lost…

The next morning was Saturday. When I woke up the river had a new mood. I thought I’d heard every noise it could make. When the water was high and swift and muddy, it seemed to be shouting; when it was low and treacherous and soothing, it was almost like a lullaby, one of the lovely but really brutal ones. Come, dip your toes in my glacial goodness. I will rock you to sleep, and then dash your head against a submerged boulder.

I’d heard the river angry, I’d heard the river playful, but until that morning I’d never heard the river grieve.

My bedroom was in the attic under a sloping ceiling—a scrawny room that must once have belonged to the hired help or a very cold nun when my great-grandmother first ran Patchworks during the Depression. Back then it was a kind of homey barracks for lumberjacks—a place where a woman with a genteel southern lilt served stacks of biscuits and sweet corn on the cob to men who wanted to remember they weren’t one hundred percent wild.

The crow’s nest (as Mom called my room) was in the corner on the river side and had a turret with a territorial view. And man, did it cover a lot of territory—rushing water, tall trees, rolling foothills—if I opened the window in winter and leaned out I could almost see the Hoodoo Ski Bowl. But since I didn’t ski it was no big deal. I felt no need to conquer mountains or speed down them. Since I was a runner, my attitude was: downhill is cheating.

My room was also the noisiest in the place, especially in a storm. Between the rain slapping the roof and the white water rushing out back, most of the time I woke up feeling pelted. But not that morning. That morning I felt more adrift than usual, as though someone had cut an anchor.

I got out of bed and smoothed the three layers of antique quilts behind me. As I did, I closed my eyes and listened. It definitely seemed as though the river were crying.

I looked out the window. The water was brown and high, but we seemed in no danger of flooding, so I s. . .