California Schemin' (25 page)

“You can’t buy just one. They only sell them
in fleets. That’s the only way they could make the price comparable
to a re-purposed Crown Vic.”

“Jeez. That’s too bad. You guys should have
these.”

“You could write a letter to the guy in
charge for us. Put in a good word.”

“Because Lord knows I’m in good with the guy
in charge. Bree? Bree who? Keep dreaming, Steve.”

We wandered back into the banquet room where
it looked like they were getting ready to serve dinner. I sat down
and took a drink of my beer. It seemed strange to be swigging beer
wearing a fancy dress, but it was what everyone was doing. At least
the cops.

The servers started bringing meals to the
tables near the door, and the other occupants of our table sat down
and introduced themselves. Three couples, two married, one not. I
forgot most of their names the minute after I heard them except for
the redhead who sat next to me. She was the undercover cop I’d seen
earlier. Her name was Meg. My best friend’s name. I immediately
started missing home.

“What’s the matter?” asked the redheaded Meg
sitting next to me.

“Nothing,” I said. “My best friend’s name is
Meg, and I haven’t seen her in a while. I probably should lay off
the beer.”

“Nah, have more. That way you’ll be in too
much pain to miss her tomorrow.” She laughed, joyful and free. I
smiled.

“You have a great laugh,” I said. “It’s
contagious.”

“Need a sense of humor in my job. Something
like ninety percent of undercover cops are guys. If I couldn’t
laugh, I’d go nuts.”

“I know what you mean.” I looked at her with
interest. “But I bet you’re not bored much.”

“Nah, almost never bored.” She laughed
again.

“I’m going to get another beer,” she said.
“You want one?”

“Sure.”

I turned to Steve.

“Sorry, girl talk.”

“That’s fine. I’m glad you’re enjoying
yourself.”

A hand dropped onto my shoulder, and I looked
up to see Steve’s Shirl standing over me.

“I think you’re sitting in my seat.”

Next to me Steve was stammering.

“Shirl? What are you-?”

“Oh. Hey, Shirl. I was saving it for you.” I
grabbed my little beaded bag and vacated the chair. She was wearing
a red dress designed to catch eyes, backless, low cut and so tight
you could see every pore in her body. Yowsers. Leftsky didn’t have
a chance.

“Glad to see you aren’t missing anymore,
Bree. I think everybody in the Upper Valley was worrying.”

“Thanks. It’s good to be found. See you
later, Steve.”

Steve started to get up, but I shook my head
at him. I wasn’t getting in Shirl’s way. I wanted to still be
un-missing tomorrow.

“You’re back early.” Beau was lying propped
on the bed watching a cop show on TV.

“Yeah, well, Shirl showed up, and I thought
it might be a good idea to bow out.”

“Shirl showed up? You mean like showed up
from Vermont?”

“As far as I can tell.” I hung the black
dress in the closet and slipped on an oversized T-shirt.

“That new?” Beau asked. “Don’t think I’ve
seen that before.”

I joined him on the bed and punched up my
pillow.

“I picked it up today. You paid for it.”

“I’ve got good taste.” He slid a hand along
my thigh.

“Yep, you do. Want me to put it back on?” I
dropped a kiss on his chin.

“Nope.” He pulled me into a kiss that melted
my knees. “But I think you could lose the T-shirt.”

So I did.

I woke to more tapping at the door. Beau was
asleep beside me, so I slid out of bed and pulled on my new sweats.
I almost opened the door without looking through the peephole, but
I caught myself and looked to see Steve’s face sporting the biggest
smile I’d ever seen.

I stepped out into the hall. “So what’s up?
You look like you just won the lottery.”

“Shirl asked me to marry her.”

I threw my arms around him. “Steve, that’s so
great! She flew out here to propose? That’s wild.”

“Yeah, I guess her mother told her she was
being unreasonable. She thought about it for a while and realized
her mom was right. So she bought a ticket and flew out. If you
hadn’t been found, she was going to help me look. But you were
here, so she proposed instead.”

“That’s great. I can’t think of anything but
crappy clichés. I’m glad you’re happy.” I hugged him again and
headed back to bed.

“What was that about?” Beau asked. “You were
squealing in the hall.”

“I wasn’t squealing. Shirl asked Steve to
marry him. He wanted me to know.”

“It’s about time, although I doubt the drama
is over.”

Madison drove us to the airport. She was
tall, thin and brunette today. I didn’t think the look was quite
right for her, but hey, it wasn’t my life. For all I knew, she’d be
short, blue haired and plump by the end of the day.

She offered me her hand when Beau and I were
on the sidewalk.

“No hard feelings?” she asked.

“God, no,” I said. “You saved my skin. Come
visit Vermont sometime. You could let your hair grow out to its
natural color for a while, rediscover the real you.”

“Thanks for the invite, but I’m not sure you
want to see an alien shape shifter’s natural color. It’s a little
startling to see a woman with transparent hair.”

Beau decided getting home was the key thing,
and he sprang for first class tickets, the only seats that were
available to us at short notice. I couldn’t help but wonder how
much influence the painkillers had had on that decision, but I
wasn’t complaining. I was more than ready to go home.

The trip was uneventful. Fogel had taken care
of the ID problem, and we flew from Sacramento to Manchester, New
Hampshire, not nonstop, but at least we didn’t have to change
planes. Tom and Meg were at the airport without their kids for a
change. Meg told me later that they weren’t sure what kind of shape
we would be in and didn’t want to alarm the younger kids. Not that
it mattered to me. I slept through both car rides and the
flight.

My homecoming was all I expected it to be.
The beagle, boxer, lab cross and Irish wolfhound all tried to get
into my lap at once. The Chihuahua completely ignored me and sat
behind the cat, who hissed at me and unsheathed her claws.

“All right, Annabelle, I know you’re mad at
me for leaving you again, but it wasn’t my choice, believe me. As
for you, you little jumping bean,” I picked up Beans and held him
up to my face. He growled at me. “Listen, you aren’t even really my
responsibility. Quit with the tough dog act. I’ll take you to
Beau’s house tomorrow.”

Only Lucky treated me normally. When I’d
settled in and made my way out to see how everything in the barn
was doing, he looked up from his hay, snorted and went back to
eating. He seemed to enjoy the rubdown I gave him and puffed his
breath onto my neck, but it was more like a “nice to have you back”
versus the “Oh my God where have you been” I got from the dogs or
the “I’m never going to forgive you” that Annabelle greeted me
with.

I walked through the side yard around to
where the chicken house stood. Counting the chickens was a
homecoming ritual for me. My chickens were pretty good at
self-preservation, but you never knew when a fox or coyote would
sneak in and grab one. My chickens were a constant source of
vexation for me. I loved them, they made me laugh, and like all my
animals, I was insanely attached to them. The problem was that I
kept chickens partially because I liked having fresh eggs. I have
twenty-eight chickens, but lately I’m lucky to find even one egg a
day.

The phone was ringing when I woke the next
morning. I figured I’d be answering a lot of calls until the news
of where I’d been got around, and life went back to normal.

“Hey, MacGowan! Get your butt down here. You
slept all the way home, and I want to hear all about what
happened.” It was Meg.

“I’ll be down in a little bit. I desperately
need a shower, and then I need to drop Beanie off at Beau's. Give
me an hour.”

I drove into Meg’s drive almost an hour to
the minute after I hung up the phone. Beans was still in my lap, as
when I got to Beau’s he wasn’t there. Not knowing when Beau would
be home, I didn’t leave the little guy. He was still young, and I
didn’t trust him not to pee on the rug, the bed, the couch or the
chair. Besides, he wasn’t used to going solo.

I carried Beans through the flying snow to
the back door. Meg’s dogs surged around me as I stepped into the
mudroom, and I put Beans on the floor. Beans was used to Meg’s
house and ran off through the kitchen with a pack of dogs in tow. I
kicked off my boots, hung my jacket on a peg and made my way
through the remaining dogs into the kitchen.

“Wow! My God, Meg, how did you do that?” The
sheet rock we’d started to hang before my absence from the project
had been covered with beautiful bronze tiles that were embossed in
patterns. The new ceiling gave height and light to the kitchen,
creating the illusion of a bigger room. Meg was at the sink,
rinsing glasses and stacking them in the drainer

“Jeez, this must have cost you a fortune,” I
said. “When did you decide to go with a metal ceiling?”

“I don’t know, I guess when we found all that
old metal under the Homasote, but it’s not real embossed bronze or
anything. It’s molded plastic, painted with metallic paint. It was
pretty inexpensive compared with, say, real metal tiles.” She
laughed. “I think they look pretty good, if I say so myself.”

“Looks fab. What’s Tom think?”

“He likes it. It was a little too much work
in his mind, but I think it was worth it. Forget the ceiling. Tell
me what happened to you. I had to run a story written by Lucy in
the paper and listen to her yak about how I’d have to hire her back
if you didn’t show up soon. Dirty little .”

“Backstabbing Howe,” I finished with her. Not
that all Howes were like Lucy. It’s just what we’d called her for
as long as I could remember.

“Spill.”

So I told my story, front to back, including
the identity of the dead woman and the mysterious Richard Hambecker
and his disappearance. A gambit of emotions ran across her face as
I talked, and she got more and more serious as I got to the
end.

“The senator got away? He murdered his wife
and got away?”

“As far as I know. I haven’t heard any noises
about him showing up back in Sacramento. My bet is Mexico. Easy
access.”

“And Richard Hambecker?” The look she shot me
made me squirm. Meg could always read my mind. “Do you think he
headed to Mexico, too?”

“No. Somehow I think he’s cut his losses and
moved back into the dark recesses of whatever agency he came out
of, the identity of which remains a mystery. I’m thinking not the
FBI, because that’s where Madison hails from, and she swears those
boys were not with her.”

“You really can’t remember Moose’s real name?
That’s strange.”

“I’m pretty sure he told me, but I just can’t
remember. I’m blaming it on the drugs. I’m sure being sedated for
hours on end must have affected my memory.”

“Richard admitted to sedating you? Why would
he do that? You could sue him for all sorts of things, if you ever
saw him again.”

“He always seemed like an unlikely thug—or
agent, whichever. He was nice to me. He seemed like the kind of guy
who’s naturally nice to people in general, but he had this hard
edge, too. Self-preservation, I think. The ability to do what
needed to be done, even if it was distasteful to him.”

“Well, I don’t like him. Anybody who can drug
a woman and drag her all the way across the country is not okay in
my book, especially when it’s my best friend he’s abducted.”

“How did you even find out I was gone? It’s
not like I called everybody up and announced I’d been
abducted.”

“Max called. He stopped by to see to his
horses and noticed the dogs acting strangely. He checked in the
house and called Tom when you weren’t there. Tom called me. He was
hoping you’d decided to go away for a couple of days or something
and forgot to tell Max, like you’d ever leave your animals without
making sure you had them taken care of.”

“He was just hopeful. He would rather think
I’d neglected my animals than think I’d been abducted. It’s a
natural response.”

“Then there was the mad flurry of activity
when Brooks was trying to find out where you might have gone and
Sheriff Fogel wasn’t available because of some emergency at the
Sacramento Airport, which I knew was about you, but no one believed
me. Brooks apologized later, but Tom never did. On top of that,
Beau was gone off somewhere and hadn’t bothered to tell us where,
just called and left a message.”

“Yeah, well, he walked right into the
spider’s web. Didn’t even know he was a hostage until I showed up.
I swear guys are dense sometimes. Feed them chips and beer and give
them either sports to watch or a project to work on, and they won’t
even come up for air until the world's already come to an end.”

“They can’t help it. It’s the way they’re put
together. You’ve got to admit it has advantages. By the time they
even realize something’s wrong, the world’s been saved, the
emergency is over, and all they have to do is say phew, boy, that
was a close one, and do a bunch of chest butts.”

“Who came up with the whole chest butting
thing anyway? That’s got to be painful.”

“Proves their manliness.”

“What proves our manliness?” Jeremy, Meg’s
sixteen-year-old son, was standing in the doorway.

“Chest butts,” I said.

“Chest butts? Bree, it’s chest bumps, not
chest butts, and it’s about releasing adrenaline, not manliness.
Why are you guys talking about chest bumps?”

“We’re thinking of taking it up,” I said.