Paradise Falls (67 page)

They ate breakfast together. In deference to Jennifer’s many first-day-of-school rituals, Jacob made up the gummy oatmeal protein shakes the night before and they stood next to each other in the kitchen, and gulped them down while standing. They finished at the exact same time, moved to the front door at the same time. Jennifer strapped on her messenger bag. Jacob shrugged into a backpack and put on his helmet and riding gloves. Jennifer strapped hers on, walked out to the porch and lifted her new bike down to the sidewalk.

Jacob followed a moment later.

“I had to make sure the door was locked,” he said.

Jennifer sighed. “When we get home we’re having sex again.”

“Yes, dear.”

The old house that once stood on these foundations had a crawlspace basement- open dirt floor, full of water and bugs. Jennifer never used it, not even for storage. Before Jacob had the renovations done, he had the basement, ah, expanded. Rebuilt. The garage on Jennifer’s side of the house was new, too. The Toyota sat inside, unused most of the time. They rode bikes together unless it was raining or they were going to the grocery store after work. Of course, it was a
two
car garage. One side for the Toyota… and one for the
other
car.

Jacob nudged her shoulder.

“Race you.”

He took off before she could reply. Laughing through a scowl, Jennifer took off behind him, and caught up quickly.

The ride to the school was brisk, the breeze warm. Jennifer locked up her bike alongside Jacob’s, alongside all the student’s who’d already arrived, and headed into her classroom. It was not her old one but she’d only spent a few years there. She gave Jacob a kiss on the cheek as he headed to his classroom, and batted his hand away when he groped her butt. She gave him a smack on his and retreated, snickering, into her classroom. One she shared with Rachel, now that they were all pressed together into one school until No. 1 was expanded.

“What’s gotten into you?” said Rachel. “Wait, nevermind,” she deadpanned. “I don’t want to know.”
 

Jennifer scowled at her and headed for her desk. As a newer teacher, she had to split her time between moving from room to room with a cart and teaching in here while Rachel was in another room. The logistics of it made her head hurt.

She could see the construction site from here. The new bridge was being laid our already, but would be another two years to completion. Closer to the hill, it was easier to make out the Dean House, now the Candace Kane House for Disadvantaged Youth. Faisal Bayati, director. Jennifer smiled, thinking about that.

Taking her cart of supplies, whistling softly to herself, she pushed out into the hallway and headed for her first class.

The bell would ring any minute, and start a brand new day.

Afterword: After the Fall

Thank you for reading Paradise Falls.

I know it says that at the end of every volume, but I wanted to include a little bit more this time, and genuinely thank you for reading this work. What you hold in your hands now represents a year of my life. For the last year, Jennifer and Jacob have been my constant companions. Now I have to say goodbye to them.

For now, anyway. Jennifer and Jacob will return- they live in a much larger world and, of course, they’ll be popping up again. They may be a little beaten up, but I’m sure they won’t let anything untoward go down in their little town, after all.

Anyway, on to the acknowledgements.

This serial would not have been possible without the generous efforts of several of my friends, some of whom have asked me not to thank them by name, but they know who they are. Another author generously provided me with free editing services on parts one and two. Before she came along, PF was a mess. Additionally, two other authors generously provided me with beta reading and editing services, and helped shape Paradise Falls dramatically. You all know who you are.

This story started when I decided I wanted to write a romance novel about a teacher. Originally I meant it to be about half as long as it is now. I ended up breaking it into parts because it quickly grew gigantic. The scope kept expanding. At first the plot was confined to the town of Paradise Falls, more
 
focused on Jennifer’s personal struggles, and a land dispute, and then my influences and interests started to creep in. The scale expanded, and expanded, and expanded.

When I was little, my mother baked cakes as a side business. Some of my fondest memories are sitting in our little kitchen eating icing while my mother put together a wedding cake and watched soap operas (Only on ABC. With the exception of
Passions
, she never watched any NBC soaps). Many of the old soap operas are off the air now and I think that’s a shame.
Guiding Light
, for example, is the longest work of continuous narrative fiction in human history. Kinda weird when you think about it, isn’t it?

So, I decided I wanted to write a soap opera. I love soap operas. I love how serious and silly they are, how they can have deep personal struggles and absurd piles of tragedy in character backstories and the way they mingle down to earth stories of interpersonal relationships with outlandish, almost cartoonish plotlines. I was very small but I still vaguely remember, I think it was
General Hospital
, running a storyline where one of the villains was plotting world domination via a weather controlling machine.

Paradise Falls itself, the town, is an homage to my mother’s favorite soaps, particularly Port Charles of
General Hospital
. If you try to use my description of the town of Paradise Falls to find it on a map, you’ll wind up hopelessly lost. It’s an hour away from Philadelphia, north of it, yet somehow sits on the Susquehanna, and far enough upriver for a waterfall while downriver enough to need a cable-stay suspension bridge to cross. The descriptions of the town come from various places, like the towns where my father and grandfather grew up, the town where my grandmother lived until her passing a few years ago, the town of Hershey, various places I’ve been throughout the state all mashed together into one little ‘burg’.

The other parts of this work all come from my father, and our shared interests. His love of comic books, and fascination with old-school, good-triumphs-over-evil pulp stories and serials like
The Shadow
did a lot to shape my own interest; the serialized format of Paradise Falls is, in part, an homage to that. We also share a fascination with Weird Stuff- UFOs and aliens and loch ness monsters; whenever I visit home there’s fifty-fifty chance the kitchen television will be tuned to Pawn Stars or some show about hunting bigfoot. Some of the eerie nature of Paradise Falls comes from that, and most importantly, the bridge collapse.

I based the bridge tragedy on the collapse of the Point Pleasant bridge outside of the town of the same name in West Virginia. Much of the imagery, like Christmas presents floating down the river after the disaster, is lifted directly from descriptions of the actual event. The technical details are partly my own fabrication and partly from a book on engineering disasters called
To Forgive Design
by Henry Petroski, which devotes some of its length to a discussion of the collapse.

Fans of the paranormal will recognize the bridge from its association with paranormal investigative writer John Keel and his book “The Mothman Prophecies” about the strange events of that year leading up to the collapse, which some people believe are related. (For my part, I think the tragedy was a perfectly explainable failure of planning and engineering)

Finally, in this last installment I began adding a dash (maybe more than a dash) of flavor to the Fangs, who to that point had been generic villains right down to matching jumpsuits. I wanted to show a little of the inside of the group and what they were really about, and drew inspiration from a number of sources, mostly cheesy saturday morning cartoons and the outlandish legends surrounding a sect of mystics called the
hashishin
, from which we derive the word Assassin. The Assassins supposedly used psychotropic drugs to condition their members and had a reputation for being able to slip in anywhere and take out a target. I basically threw a few villain tropes in a blender to see what I would come up with, and I liked the result so much I’m probably going to write a whole novel about Saba’a and her improbably adventures with the motorcycle club that rescued her from certain death. I really intended to show more motorcycle gang stuff, including introducing a rival club, but to keep the story of Paradise Falls focused I had to cut that, among many other things, and so I plan to revisit those ideas in future books. I hope you’ll follow me on those journeys, as well.

After all that, I’m most grateful for you, the reader, for taking this ride along with me. Without you, none of the above would matter all that much. I hope you enjoyed this serial novel. I look forward to reading reviews and hearing your comments at
[email protected]
. Drop me a line and let me know what you think, and if you’re interested in more of my work,
please sign up for my newsletter for updates
. Now that Paradise Falls is concluded I have a number of projects I’ll be working on, and I’m very excited to share them.

Again, thank you for reading.

-Abigail Graham (“Abby”)

January 2014 to January 2015

Thank you for reading
Paradise Falls
. I hope you enjoyed it!

Comments are welcome at
[email protected]

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Chapter One

Victor

I live in a studio apartment over a massage parlor in the Old City. It’s a six block walk to the liberty bell. It’s two flights of wrought iron stairs down to the parlor on the first floor. The scents of Korean cooking waft up to my apartment, a two hundred square foot studio with one tall narrow window that looks out over the alleyway. If I stand there I can watch a steady stream of men walk in and out of the parlor. Young and old, plump and thin, chubby boys and stooped graybeards, they all have one thing in common. Slumped shoulders and a faraway look. They know what they’re about to do and when they come out they know what they’ve done. I drink whiskey from a chipped coffee mug and watch.
 
I don’t know how
 
the mug came to be in my box of personal effects, the one they gave back when I was paroled. It was my father’s, though. It’s all that I have of him. For now.

I have a business meeting this afternoon in New York. I’ll be catching a private jet in a few hours. I’m not sure if I’ll be violating my parole or not. I’m allowed to travel for business.

First, I need to steal my car back.

This ‘apartment’ is about the size of my closet in the suite of rooms where I grew up.
 

Suits hanging on a rack, a cart like the use at a dry cleaner’s, socks and underwear in a rubber tub, and a mattress covered in a plain white sheet. A refrigerator rattling away as it cools a block of Velveeta, a pack of imported ham, eight beers and a jar of peanut butter.

I don’t even know why I keep the peanut butter in the fridge.

This is my life.

For now.

As I descend the rickety cast iron staircase I check my watch. It’s a Timex I picked up at K-Mart after I stepped off the bus. I have to be on the flight in eight hours. It’s now two thirty-three in the morning. The parlor closes at three, I think. That’s when the in-and-out stream stops, or maybe the patrons are too scared to brave the mean streets at four in the morning. I don’t know or care.

A stoop-shouldered man emerges and doesn’t look at me and I don’t look at him. I check my watch again and walk in the rain. It’s a light drizzle that covers everything, makes the world glow. Water slides down my face and clings to my eyebrows. I glance at a shop window. The lights are shut off inside, and I see myself in a glass darkly. For a startling moment I’m walking side by side with my father’s ghost, but I see the tattoos running down both arms to stop just above the wrist and it’s just me. Dad never wore his hair this long and he never visited a tattoo parlor.

He had one tattoo, a crudely incised PETER in blue ink on his right shoulder. When he was a kid he and some boys he knew gave themselves tattoos with pins and a ballpoint pen. His was buried so deep in the flesh that all his attempts to remove it failed, and so he had his own name tattooed on his meaty shoulder until he died.

I should probably be wearing a jacket. November, and rain, but it’s unseasonably warm, almost fifty. I’ve had enough of being confined. I want to swing my arms.

The car is parked in a lot. I stop to pay a bleary-eyed attendant and walk over. It’s an unremarkable Toyota. I’ve been ordered to keep a low profile.

I hate driving this thing. The old city is dead at night. Last call was over an hour ago and the tourists get scared of the dark. It’s one of the safer areas but all cities are the same. I fucking hate cities. Too much chain link and concrete and neon, not enough trees. I don’t belong here.

Turn on 3
^rd
onto Market, catch I-95. It’s a straight run now. I obey all posted limits and traffic signals.

Have to. I’m on parole, after all. I wouldn’t want to get pulled over on my way to steal a car.

Driving gives me a lot of time to think. My knuckles go white. The wheel creaks in protest.

I’ve had plenty of time to think.

That’s what prison is. The punishment isn’t confinement. They put a roof over your head. It’s not isolation, either, unless you get sent to solitary. I never did. It’s not following orders, it’s not the shitty therapy groups, either. (Evidently, I have an anger management problem.) No, the punishment is
time
. Time to think, time to brood, time to plan. When you’re out in the world all you want is time. People say “there aren’t enough hours in the day” and try to stretch them out.