Should Be Dead (The Valkyrie Smith Mystery Series Book 1) (8 page)

When the waiter returned, Riley ordered two plates of seafood pasta with salad, appetizers, and a bottle of cabernet sauvignon. Their waiter was a middle-aged man, balding, well dressed, and flamboyant. Something in his body language made Valkyrie wonder if it was all an act.

“Is he gay?” she said quietly after the man had left the table.

“Obviously,” said Riley.

“He didn’t look at you twice.”

“What?”

“Think about it. You’re not a bad looking guy. You dress well. You’re not married. Shouldn’t he have looked to see if you were wearing a ring at least?”

“Maybe he’s married, or attached already.”

“Maybe. Do you suppose that a straight man might get more tips by pretending to be gay?”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not? I mean, it might not fly in Idaho, but California…”

“Are you saying that you think our waiter is a straight guy
pretending
to be gay?”

“I don’t know… why don’t we ask him?”

Riley glanced nervously around to see if anyone else had been listening in on their conversation. His face turned bright red and he looked like he might have a heart attack. Val burst out laughing. “Sorry Riley, I’m just having fun with you. I wouldn’t embarrass the poor man that way.”

“I hope not! Imagine if you were right about him!”

“I wasn’t talking about him,” she said with a sly grin.

The wine came first, followed by salads. By the time their main course arrived, the bottle was empty and Riley ordered a second. By then, he was definitely more relaxed, and Val was feeling warm and tingly. She wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol, or just the effect of watching Riley loosen up, which was quite entertaining.

Halfway through their dinner, he glanced at her and Valkyrie realized she’d been staring at him.

“What?” he said. “Never seen a reporter stuff his face before?”

Val laughed. “Now that you mention it, no, I haven’t.”

“Seriously, why were you looking at me like that?”

“Just trying to figure out who you are,” she said, taking a sip of wine. He cocked an eyebrow.

“Bond, James Bond. Didn’t you get the memo, Moneypenny?”

“Moneypenny? I’m not the secretary type. Can I be the villain?”

“I suppose we could arrange that. But we’d have to come up with a new name for you. Some sort of crude double entendre. I believe that’s how it works.”

“We’ll have to work on that,” said Val. “I have a few ideas. You’re quite a different person when you relax, you know that?”

Riley stiffened a little, suddenly self-conscious.

“Oh, stop that,” she said. “You know, if you grew your hair a bit longer and got an earring, you’d be kind of sexy.”

Riley’s face reddened and Val couldn’t hold back her laughter. “An earring?” he said. “Now you’ve got to be kidding.”

“C’est la vie. I bet Jackie would like it.” His face reddened further, if that was possible, and Val decided it was time to give up her game. She was making him uncomfortable. It was cute, but cruel.

Just in time, the waiter showed up. Val offered to split the check, but Riley wouldn’t hear of it. He paid with a credit card. They finished off the bottle and, at eleven p.m., left the restaurant together.

The couple strolled casually back up the boardwalk, walking silently, enjoying the frosty autumn air and the smell of burning firewood. For the first time since her arrival, Valkyrie understood the charm of the Sequoia coast. It wasn’t the cool northern Pacific, with its long foggy nights and rugged cliff lines. It wasn’t the rolling vine-covered hills or the damp, dark redwood forests. It was all those things. It was the overwhelming simple, natural beauty of the place; something she had been too preoccupied to observe before.

They paused outside her door while Valkyrie fished the key card out of her pocket. Riley cleared his throat.

“I suppose I should have called a cab,” he said, somewhat uncomfortably. “All that wine went to my head. I’m not thinking very straight.”

“Good,” said Valkyrie, pushing the door open. She caught him by the collar and dragged him across the threshold. “I don’t want you thinking too much tonight.”

“I don’t know,” he stammered nervously. “I shouldn’t-”

“You shouldn’t be talking. Listen to me Riley: Do you want to die a virgin?”

“No.”

“Then shut up.” She pushed the door shut, and turned up the fireplace.

Chapter 11

Madeline Thatcher -Maddie to her friends- was a woman reborn. She was seventy years young and she was more vital, energetic, and positive than ever before in her life. She credited it all to yoga.

Every morning before breakfast, Maddie rose with the sun to stretch her limbs on the living room carpet. Sometimes, she could hear Frank snoring down the hall, but she was good at tuning out the noise. She had to be. She had been sleeping in the same bed with the man for forty-seven years.

Maddie always began her routine with the cobra stretch, lying prone on the floor, gently extending arms while bending her spine into a smooth reverse arc. At first, this exercise had been ungodly painful, but Maddie was persistent. After making up her mind to take up yoga, she had practiced every single day -even on weekends- until the muscles in her lower back finally relaxed and the tense pain graduated into a series of pops and cracking noises. Eventually, most of those went away, too.

After three months, Maddie had mastered all the basic yoga stretches. She had also lost seven pounds and improved her general health dramatically. Or so she claimed. According to Frank, it was all in her head. Not that he’d been there when she stood on the scale. Maddie didn’t mind. Yoga wasn’t for Frank. His therapy was fishing, which he had been doing at least three times a week since he retired.

Frank was three years younger than Maddie, and had just finished his first year of retirement from the small independent airline where he’d worked for most of his career. Maddie had been a marine biologist, and between the two of them, they were doing quite nicely in retirement. They now lived full-time in their beach home, a ranch house located at the back of a large isolated piece of property south of Jenner, overlooking the Pacific.

It was a quiet, secluded life. The kids came to visit on holidays, along with the grandchildren of course, but otherwise Maddie and Frank had grown accustomed to spending long periods of time without any company. Frank spent as much of that time as he could on the fishing boat. When he couldn’t be on the water, he was usually in the woodworking shop or watching TV.

Besides yoga, Maddie filled her time with gardening. This was no small feat on the cool Sequoia coast. The ground was barren and dry, the weather cold and foggy, and a gale came blowing in off the water almost every single day of the year. These challenges had inspired Maddie to put in a greenhouse, with Frank’s help, of course. It had worked out better than expected. It was October now, and she still had heirloom tomatoes on the vine and a pumpkin the size of a basketball. All things considered, she was doing very well.

It was four p.m. when the motor home came barreling up the drive, weaving erratically across the dirt lane, kicking up a tail of dust that rose on the wind and vanished seconds later. Maddie was in the greenhouse at the time. She had gone out to check on the tomatoes after her lunch with Frank, while he went to change the oil in the Mercedes. Maddie had ended up staying in the greenhouse for two more hours, curled up on the hardwood bench with a book. It was a nice sunny day on the coast, and with the greenhouse shielding her from the wind, it was downright tropical.

Maddie heard the distant scream of the diesel and leaned around the door to see what was going on. She was a sensible woman, and when she saw the RV plowing its way across the property, Maddie instantly knew something was wrong. She hurried into the house and found that Frank had finished the oil change and climbed into the shower to clean up.

“Hello, sexy,” he said as she pulled open the frosted glass door. Steam came billowing out, and Frank stepped closer, grinning, displaying his paunch.

“Frank, get out of there. Somebody’s here!”

He frowned, but didn’t argue. There was something about the look on her face, perhaps the slight tremble in her voice that told him she was serious. Frank turned off the water and Maddie handed him his bathrobe.

“Out front,” she said, pointing through the bedroom window. Frank peered around the corner just in time to see the RV fly by the front of the house. A trail of dust followed it across the property to the barn, where it parked. A tall, dark-haired man in a leather jacket jumped out and began fussing with the garage doors.

“Open the safe,” Frank said.

He yanked open the closet and tossed a few blankets aside as he dug out his old Mossberg 12 gauge shotgun. It was his only firearm, used on those rare duck hunting trips to Mendocino County. Frank hadn’t cleaned it -hadn’t even had it out of the case- in years, but the blued steel was clean and oily as new. By the time Frank had his gun out of the plastic case, Maddie had pulled the box of shells out of the safe. Frank began pumping shells into the tube.

“Stay here, and keep quiet,” he ordered. “If you can get a signal, call 911.”

He charged down the hall and out the front door without a backward glance. Maddie hurried into the living room and located her cell phone on the table by the sofa. She glanced at the screen. Zero bars. That wasn’t unusual. The location of their house was such that, when the weather was clear, they might get one bar of reception at best.

The couple hadn’t bothered installing landlines when they built the house. The expense would have been considerable, and on the day they made the decision, it was bright and sunny and their cell phones were working just fine. It wasn’t until they had lived in the house for weeks that they understood the mistake they’d made. By then, the contractor was asking an entirely different price for the upgrade, and Frank had told him where he could stick it.

On those occasions when Maddie expected a call, she would often take a hike up to the top of the hill. The reception there was better, and the view wasn’t bad, either. She’d been trying to convince Frank to build a gazebo up there for two years. So far, he wasn’t biting.

Maddie stood behind the curtains, staring out the front window as Frank approached the barn. The uninvited guests had pulled the RV inside, and now they had the doors mostly closed. The space left between them was just wide enough for Frank to fit through.

Don’t you do it,
Maddie thought desperately.
Don’t you dare go in there, Frank!

Frank stopped a few yards away and called out to the intruders: “You in there, you’re trespassing. If you don’t get out of there, I’ll call the police!” Frank’s voice was distant, swept away by the wind so that Maddie could barely make out his words. She watched, her chest tight, her right hand unconsciously squeezing the curtain into a knot. Her chest rose and fell, her breath coming in short gasps. She was hyperventilating.

 
Slow breaths,
she told herself.
Breathe through your nose…

A figure emerged from the barn, a heavily built man in his fifties with silver hair and enough of a gut that it was hanging over his belt buckle. The man was large, even larger than Frank, who was a solid six feet. The stranger must have been six-four, or close to it.

They exchanged words. Maddie couldn’t hear what was said, but the man laughed and Frank seemed to relax a little. The man had made some sort of mistake, she realized. He’d come to visit relatives, and had simply pulled into the wrong barn. He was going to leave. She relaxed her grip on the curtain. The man turned to go back into the barn, and Frank followed him.

A wave of terror washed over her as Maddie’s husband disappeared into the shadows. Why was he going in there? Frank should have known better than that. Something about all of this seemed very wrong. Maddie glanced at her phone again. Still no reception.

Maddie hurried out the back door, and around the greenhouse. She started across the driveway but then heard a shout in the direction of the barn. She glanced in that direction just in time to see a flash of light inside. A thunderous
kaboom
rattled the windows. The sound echoed down the hill and faded in the distance.

Maddie waited, breathless, praying silently to every god whose name she could remember that Frank would come walking through that door. A gust of wind whipped up a cloud of dust. The shadows seemed to stretch across the driveway, reaching out towards her as the sun touched the horizon. Frank’s face appeared, and she almost screamed with joy. Frank took two awkward steps out of the barn and then tumbled to the ground. He landed face-first in the dirt. The back of his white terrycloth robe was stained red with blood. Maddie screamed.

“Frank! Oh my God, Frank!”

She began to run towards him, but the tall man appeared in the leather jacket appeared behind him. The second man, the one with the shotgun, stepped out and stood there, looking down over Frank’s body. He glanced at Maddie and then leveled the barrel at the back of Frank’s head. Maddie turned and ran.

She crossed the driveway in three steps and began climbing the embankment towards the trail. The second shotgun blast went off behind her, and Maddie flinched. She bent forward, clawing at the dirt, half crawling up the steep terrain. She knew what the killer had done. He’d put the gun to Frank’s head and finished him off. Her husband was dead. And if she didn’t get out of there, she would be, too.

Maddie’s chest tightened as she thought of Frank. For all his imperfections, she had truly loved the man. They had been together so long that she couldn’t even imagine life without him. Part of her wanted to stop, to go back to them and let them kill her, too. That would be easiest. It would all be over in a few minutes… But what about the children? The grandkids? Maddie couldn’t bear the thought of leaving them on their own.

She made it to the top of the embankment and began to run. The men called out, telling her to come back. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder and saw the younger one clambering up the hill behind her. Maddie put on a burst of speed.