The Last Witness Read Online Free

boisterous thrashing – stood the gates to the lookout. Here, amid the pungent smell of lavender and the mighty roar of rapids below, she could peer out onto the gorge. It was spectacular, but not as spectacular as further to the west where the Grand and Irvine Rivers met. If you had never seen it before, the site was something to behold.
    Christine parked her car and grabbed the old hardcover book she had placed in the seat beside her. She walked into the old building where the mill once stood and headed downstairs tothe dining room with the rushing water running just outside the window. She could hear it. The sign on the doorway with Rules of This Tavern bid a quaint hello to all who ventured in:
    Four pence a night for Bed
    Six pence with Supper
    No more than five to sleep in one bed
    No Boots to be worn in bed
    Organ Grinders to sleep in the Work house
    No dogs allowed upstairs
    No Beer allowed in the Kitchen
    No Razor Grinders or Tinkers taken in
.
    It was called The Gorge Lounge and its stone walls, cosy fireplace and grand piano offered the ambiance of a country retreat. The waiter arrived and Christine ordered her favorite meal – organic green salad, a main course of tomatoes filled with chickpeas and spinach, all of it washed down with a glass of red wine. So delicious and sad. The wine tasted good and made her a bit queasy, and then she was finished, leaving not a thing, not a morsel, and it was almost as if no one had eaten off the plate at all.
    She placed her tip on the table, left the building and walked two minutes up Mill Street before turning onto Metcalfe. One block north she turned again, passed a string of old homes and ventured into the park. She waded through the thick underbrush, dodging in and out among the long narrow trees, and headed for the gorge. A wire fence was at the pathway’s edge, but it was easy to lean over and look onto the rocks below. There was a warning. UNSUPERVISED AREA – USE AT OWN RISK. Then she walked down the six slab steps to the end of the concrete where a low-lying, stone wall served as the barrier.
    It was called Lover’s Leap Lookout, but that was just a name. Still, Christine knew that people had jumped into the gorge. It was a serene place to end it with the trees, the sky and the water. She was all alone, accompanied only by her thoughts.
    Her great-grandfather Jack was a hundred years old and he more than anyone inspired her to become a history teacher. He had so much history in him, a hundred years of it, and while much of it was good – the life he had built, the family he and his wife had raised, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren – there was that other part. The nightmare. That was how he once described it to her. The total nightmare of his childhood. But then it wasn’t a childhood, was it? That had been stolen from him, cut off and snuffed out before it even began. When he first told her about it, she found it hard to believe. Who could believe such things? Who would
want
to believe such things? No one wanted to think things like that really happened. It was better, safer, easier to simply forget and pretend it wasn’t so.
    She had the book, the one she hated so much. She lifted it over her head as if passing sentence, and with smug satisfaction tossed it over the wall right into the gorge. The pages filtered through the air, slowing the speed of descent, and it seemed such a long time to drop a mere hundred feet or so. Such a long time to die. She watched the book strike the rocks and skip into the water before disappearing below the surface. She heard it, too. The fluttering of the windswept pages as the book fell. The harsh
thud
when its spine hit the rocks. The soft, but sharp
plop
when the river swallowed it whole. She stood there, looking into space, drawn to that familiar stone wall, and realized just then that the time had come.
    A young girl was sitting on the ground behind the trees eating a sandwich. Off in the distance through the