California Schemin'
Kat Duncan
says:
Bella Bree MacGowan is every
timid woman's alter ego. She not only laughs in the face of danger,
but smacks danger upside the head to get its attention when
necessary.
Allison Hine says:
California Schemin' got me
hooked after a few pages, and I couldn't stop reading until I got
to the last page.
by
Smashwords Edition
Kate George
Copyright © 2011 by Kate George
ISBN 978-0-9827952-4-8
Published in the United States of America
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your
personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given
away to other people. If you would like to share this book with
another person, please purchase an additional copy for each
recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or
it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to
Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting
the hard work of this
author.
Dedication
To Sara and Buffy, my catalysts for
change.
To you I owe much love. Thanks for having my
back.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Lisa, Doris, and TNT for your
invaluable edits and suggestions. Thanks also to Marly and Ryan for
titles, names and always being willing to play! Couldn’t do it
without you folks. Well, maybe I could do it, but it wouldn’t be
nearly as good.
My apologies to the citizens of the foothill
communities north of Sacramento for changing the character and
landmarks of your towns to suit my needs.
She was falling, plummeting toward the river.
Her skirt billowed, then wrapped around her as she tumbled. I
watched her through the viewfinder, an unnaturally pink anomaly in
sharp focus against the grey background of the bridge. I'd never be
able to look at that color again without feeling the horror of
seeing a woman plunging from the Foresthill Bridge. Half my brain
followed her descent with my camera while the other half was in a
blind, screaming panic.
"No!" I tossed the camera into my camp chair
and sprinted upriver.
The riverbank was rocky, stone ledge mixed
with large rocks, boulders and pebble beaches. My heart pounded as
I slipped and teetered, skidding over the smooth surfaces, tripping
over loose stones. I scanned the river as I ran, watching for a
splash of pink. Twice I stopped myself from falling by steadying
myself on rocks, and my hands were stinging. I sucked air and held
the stitch that developed in my side as I made my way up stream.
The fall appeared horrific. Could she have survived?
Please, let
her be alive.
I was forcing down panic when I saw her
floating toward me on the current. She was face down in the water,
the pink skirt dark and clinging to her legs. I waded waist deep
into the water and grabbed the back of her shirt as she floated by,
towing her out of the rapids into a calm shallows at the shore. I
needed to get her face out of the water, but I knew I wasn’t strong
enough to lift her. Blood mingled with the blonde hair feathering
around her head in the slow water. A fresh adrenaline rush flooded
my brain, and I began to panic. I had to get her air and stop the
bleeding.
Reaching across her body, I grabbed the
shoulder of her sleeveless blouse. I was able to pull her body part
way out of the water but the fabric slipped from my grasp, and she
was face down again. I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself.
Use two hands, Bree,
I told myself,
you can do it if you
use two hands.
Then it hit me that I might have better luck if
tried to roll her from underneath. I slid my hand under her,
feeling for her arm. I caught what felt like her elbow and tugged.
She floated into me. I pushed up on her near shoulder as I used her
arm to pull her underside up. The movement of her shoulder started
her rotating, and she flipped.
I saw I needn’t have bothered. A hole in her
temple oozed blood into her hair. Drowning had been the least of
her problems, and the best I could hope for now was to get her out
of the water so she wouldn’t float away. I lurched from the river
and lost my breakfast in the trees lining the riverbank.
My name is Bella Bree MacGowan. I’m called
Bree by my friends, and I’m not exactly a stranger to dead bodies.
It hadn’t even been six months since I found my boss dead. I’d come
to California to recover from the experience, and here I was
chasing down another emergency. I hoped I’d be able to pull her
from the water. I’m only five foot six and don’t have too much heft
to me. Luckily, I’m strong. With brown hair and eyes I like to tell
people I look like Rachael Ray without the benefit of a
stylist.
My last dead body had thrown me for a loop,
but it hadn’t been nearly as bad as this. Maybe it was because I
didn’t actually see Vera die, but discovered her afterward, that I
was able to keep my stomach under control. Somehow this was
different. The fall combined with the bullet hole was more than I
wanted to deal with. I looked over to where her blonde hair drifted
on the water. The blood was still mixing with the river water. Had
she already been dead when she fell? I glanced up to where she’d
fallen and saw the glint of reflection off glass. Someone was
watching.
A chill went down my spine, but I waded back
into the water anyway and pulled her to the shore. I hefted a
couple of rocks onto the woman’s skirt. I didn’t want her floating
away when I went to call for help. The sun was warm, and I pulled
off my soaking hoodie as I scrambled back to where I’d left my
stuff. I pulled the cell from my pack and punched 911. Unlike in
Vermont, I always had cell service in California. Even out here at
the bottom of a canyon, I could see the cell tower on the rise
above the bridge.
I finished the call and made my way back up
the river to the body. I sat on a fallen tree where I could see her
but didn’t have to look at her. Closing her eyes crossed my mind,
but the last time I had touched a dead body I’d ended up as the
only suspect in a murder investigation.
Bree, you’ve already
touched her, it wouldn’t hurt to close her eyes. Yes. Yes it would.
My fingerprints would be on her eyelids. That’s just creepy.
Besides, I don’t want to lose what’s left of my lunch.
It would have been peaceful by the river if
it weren’t for the body. I turned so I wouldn’t see her staring at
the sky, but I felt like she was staring at me. Feeling ghoulish
and creeped out, I slid down the side of the fallen tree until I
was sitting on the ground. I knew it was childish, but there it
was. Not even dead people could look through trees.
I flipped open my phone again and dialed Meg.
Meg had been my friend forever and my boss for slightly less than
that. The three-hour difference between Vermont and California
worked in my favor. If I knew Meg, she would have been at work for
a couple of hours already.
“I did it again,” I said, trying to keep my
voice steady and failing miserably.
“Well, hello to you, too. What did you do
again?”
“Found a dead body.”
“Oh, no, Bree. Not another one. Are you
okay?”
“I threw up.”
“Poor baby. What happened?”
“There’s this really high bridge here, a
thousand feet or something like that. I saw a woman fall.”
“Wait. Where were you?”
“I was on the river bank taking pictures. I
thought maybe the river was deep enough that she could survive the
fall, but she’d been shot.”
“Bree, wait. I’m lost here. Start over from
the beginning. Like what you had for breakfast.”
I took a breath, let the feel of the sun and
the sound of the river help calm me. Then I told Meg that I had two
eggs over easy for breakfast. And coffee.
Halfway through my narration I was
interrupted by crashing in the undergrowth. I was wishing it could
have been the sheriff, but it was too soon and coming from the
wrong direction. The trail head was a good five minutes downstream
from where I sat.
I got to my feet, panicked. A wild animal or
murderer, I didn’t want to see either one. I shoved my cell phone
into my pocket without bothering to close it, ran for the nearest
Ponderosa Pine and jumped to grab a branch. My hands stung, but I
dragged myself up as quietly as I could and climbed as high as I
dared while trying to listen and watch to see what was coming.
A bear ambled onto the rocks near the river.
Wild animal, not murderer, but what if it mauled the body? Jumping
down didn’t seem like a wise idea, and I didn’t have anything to
throw at the creature. I pulled my phone from my pocket.
Miraculously, Meg was still there.
“What is going on? You scared the bejesus out
of me. All that running and crashing around.”
“A bear,” I panted. “A dang bear came out of
the woods. I’m afraid it’ll maul the body. What should I do if it
goes for the body?”
“Where are you now?” The stress levels in
Meg’s voice were ramping up.
“Up a tree. I climbed it when the crashing
around started. That’s what you heard.”
“Let me get this straight. You are up a tree,
talking to me on the phone?”
“Well, if you’re going to put it like that,
yes. I’m sitting in a tree talking to you on the phone while a bear
rambles around deciding if it wants to maul a dead body. But hey,
what else could happen?” Oh, man, as soon as the words were out I
knew I was jinxing myself. “Don’t answer that. I’m going to yell at
the bear and see if I can get it to go away. I’ll call you
back.”
Meg called my name, but I’d already snapped
the phone shut by the time it registered in my brain. The bear was
sniffing the ground, not doing much of anything. I couldn’t tell if
it was a boy bear or a girl bear. I was hoping boy, because if it
was a momma bear, I could be in real trouble. The jinx kicked in,
and before I could start making a lot of noise to startle it, a man
came crashing into the clearing.
He was clearly not a country boy. His shoes
were black and shiny. He wore a suit. The only signs that he was
aware of the lack of cement were the tie hanging out of his pocket
and the top two buttons on his dress shirt, which were undone. He
seemed unaware of the bear, his attention riveted by the blond
lying in the water. I opened my mouth to warn him but he pulled a
gun out of a shoulder harness. Of course I’d missed
that
in
my initial assessment, and my mouth snapped shut. As much as I
didn’t want to watch anyone get mauled by a bear, I didn’t want to
end up dead even more. If this was the guy who killed the blond,
then there wasn’t much keeping him from killing me.
I was having a
holy-crap-what-am-I-going-to-do moment when the cops showed. City
boy ducked into the woods and took off running, which startled the
bear. He saw the cops and ran splashing up the river. A fifty-ish
Placer County Sheriff with a military style brush cut that was
thinning on top appeared in time to watch the bear take his leave.
The cop was on the heavy side, breathing hard from the hike. Behind
him came two crime scene guys, significantly younger and more
attractive. They headed straight for the body and started unpacking
their bags of paraphernalia.
I dropped out of the tree, the phone rang,
and the older guy made straight for me. I was uncertain what to do.
If I went for the phone, he might misunderstand my intentions and
shoot me. So I raised my hands in front of me so he could see they
were empty.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” he asked
me.
“Oh, sure.” I yanked the phone from my pocket
and flipped it open. “Meg, I’ve got to call you back. The sheriff
is here. Give me a break, I’m fine. It’ll wait.”
I turned back to the Sheriff, knowing I was
going to sound like a nut job. “Before you got here there was a
man. A guy in a suit. He came out of the woods and went straight
for the body. He heard you coming up the trail before you could see
him, and he took off through there.” I raised a hand to indicate
where the guy had gone.
With a flick of the wrist he sent one of his
crime scene guys after the suit. I heard him crashing around in the
undergrowth for a while, but before long he was back. He shrugged
at his boss and joined the other crime scene tech at the edge of
the river.
“I take it you are the young lady who found
the body? What in God’s name were you doing up a tree?” He squatted
in front of me and pulled his ID, a small notebook and a chewed
pencil from his pocket. “Sheriff Lawrence Fogel. Most people call
me Larry.”
