Meral and Buck should have beaten Jewel to the falls where they had planned to meet up.
“Meral!” she yelled.
The roar of the water that cascaded hundreds of feet below drowned out her calls, sucking them down with the rushing water. A foaming whirlpool twisted where the frothing, tumbling force pounded the pool at its base. Misty spray drifted up and enveloped Jewel in a sheen of moisture. The sound of her voice could never compete with the rumbling growl of the cataract.
She tugged out her cell phone before she remembered she would get no cell signal here. The only signal she ever had was in Mountain Cove proper. She put the cell away, her gaze drawn back to the waterfall.
Powerful and dangerous.
Beautiful and terrifying.
Dead Man Falls was a force to be reckoned with. That was if one were to take the plunge and get sucked into the swirling torrent at the base.
Kayakers had attempted to navigate the drop and failed.
Part of a rainbow, transparent and fading into the mist, caught her attention. Mesmerized, Jewel stood at the edge of the rocky, moss-covered ledge that was flanked by spruce and hemlock, firs and cedars in the lush, temperate rainforest. She watched the churning at the bottom of an endless vortex that would trap anyone or anything unfortunate enough to fall. She wondered what secrets it held in its depths—then flinched at the memory of how she had buried a secret of her own and never thought about it again. That was until Meral, the sister she hadn’t seen since Jewel had eloped twenty years ago, had arrived on her doorstep with her new husband.
And now they were both missing.
“Meral!” she called again. “Buck!”
Uncertainty roiled inside, tumultuous like the falls.
Those two had gotten lost somehow, which seemed impossible. They’d been hiking together when Jewel realized she’d forgotten her water and had needed to go back. They had gone on ahead of her on the well-defined trail, and the plan had been they would stop at the falls and wait until Jewel could catch up. Where could they have gone?
A twig snapped. Before she could turn, a blunt object smashed into her back. Pain erupted along with her scream as the force of the blow propelled her forward.
Airborne, Jewel plummeted through the clouds and mist, feeling as if her stomach had been left behind on the cliff’s edge.
Terror was catching up with her.
The spray of the waterfall engulfed her. At the last possible moment, she dragged in a breath and fell into the jaws of the beast she’d admired with a healthy fear only moments before. The wrath of the whirlpool plunged her deeper, twisting and tossing, bashing her against sunken boulders.
Dizziness and nausea held her captive within the vortex. The pounding water pushed her deeper, then turned her over again in the same way a crocodile rolled its meal to make it tender.
I’m not ready to die!
Lungs burning, Jewel shoved down the fear. The most important thing she’d learned from self-defense classes with local police chief Colin Winters was not to panic. The violent water was nothing more than an assailant bent on harming her. She could only escape by slipping out of its grip. On the fringe of consciousness, Jewel did a flutter kick, swimming with all her might, and forced her body down and deep below the backwash.
Then she felt it.
The smooth water.
She’d escaped!
Disoriented, unable to tell which way she should go, she allowed the current to sweep her downstream and away from the falls. Jewel opened her eyes and fought through her exhaustion to try to swim toward the surface.
I can do this.
But fear and doubt clawed at her, threatening to drag her down and keep her under. Her lungs burned and screamed as she fought her way to the surface. And in that moment, the instance before she breached, she saw rocks and trees blurred at the top of the ledge from which she’d fallen...along with a figure. A human figure.
She’d thought, she’d hoped, that a branch had fallen from a tree and somehow shoved her in the back, sending her over to plummet into the river.
The way the figure stood there, the wide, deliberate stance, she knew...she knew that he or she had pushed Jewel. Intentionally shoved her into Dead Man Falls to what should have been her death. And she hadn’t made it to safety yet. She could still die today in this river.
Why? Why had she been pushed?
The figure disappeared in the thick canopy even as the current dragged Jewel away.
Finally breaching the surface, she pulled in a breath and braced herself for a new battle to survive the river with its multiple tiered rapids and falls.
Jewel couldn’t be sure how long the river had taken her captive. How long she’d allowed herself to be carried away, floating on her back in order to save her energy for that moment, that one moment, when she might have a chance to escape. Except her reserves were almost depleted.
That moment hadn’t come.
How much longer could she keep her head above the rushing torrent?
Her limbs grew tired and numb, even with her effort to conserve energy. She searched the bank for calmer waters to swim toward. A branch to grab. Anything.
She needed out of the water before she hit the rapids and another set of falls.
God, help me!
Just ahead she spotted the trunk of a dead tree, branches sprawling and reaching. This was her chance and likely her last one before the rapids. Before she drowned.
Jewel reached, but the current, ripping and swirling as the rapids approached, twisted her away. She had no control over her own body. Her own life. She wouldn’t be able to grab the trunk.
Jewel was going to die. Despair engulfed her.
Excruciating pain stabbed across her shoulder and back. Her body suddenly jerked and her forward momentum stopped. Something had caught her. Wrenched her from the river’s grasp.
Stunned, recoiling in pain, Jewel twisted around. A branch from the fallen trunk had snagged and cut her deeply, but had saved her life even as it had wounded her. She held on with everything in her.
This was the chance she’d been hoping for. She wouldn’t lose it. After coughing up more water, she dragged in air and allowed a measure of relief to set in. Now to pass the next test.
This was no time to rest. She had to get out of the river.
She gripped the slick trunk and pulled herself up, higher out of the water until only her legs were beneath the surface. Slowly, she inched toward the bank.
Her left hand slipped, and she let out a cry as she slid deeper into the water. But she reached again, grappling with another branch to keep from slipping completely back into the river’s grasp. If only she weren’t already so weak from her injuries and exhaustion.
Finally, she reached the rocky outcropping of boulders hugging the bank and pulled herself out of the river completely. Laying flat across a slick boulder, Jewel rested her gaze on the swift river and its endless push toward the deeper waters of the channel.
I made it out. Thank You, Lord.
Jewel rallied and pushed to her knees to climb over more boulders. Every ache, every bruise, every scratch and sprain screamed in agony as the numbing power of cold water that had served as an anesthetic now seeped away.
Free of the rocky edge, Jewel crawled until the river was no longer a threat and fell face forward into the mossy loam. She clung to the dirt, breathed in the earth. She’d made it this far, and she would be grateful for small things.
She wouldn’t think about getting out of the wilderness. Maybe by now Meral