Pre-Meditated Murder

by Tracy Weber

  A huge wave crashed into me, drenching me in freezing, salty water. I tumbled to the ground in what I would forever think of as Ass-in-Sand Pose.

  Bella’s eyes chastised me. I tried to warn you.

  I let loose my first true belly laugh in days. “So much for that idea, huh, girl?”

  Time to utilize the next tool in my yoga toolbox: meditation. I sat cross-legged in the sand next to Bella and tried to cleanse my mind while she covered my face in sloppy German shepherd kisses.

  No use.

  Each time my mind stilled, it flashed on Gabriella. What hold did that gorgeous woman have over Michael? Michael claimed that he loved me, and I believed him. So why did I still feel so jealous? More importantly, why hadn’t he returned my phone calls?

  I felt trapped, torn between irreconcilable longings. I longed to shove Michael away. I longed to grab onto him and never let go. I longed to go back to Dad’s favorite Barbra Streisand movie: The Way We Were.

  I shuddered. That story didn’t exactly end happily ever after.

  Ten minutes of breath-focused distraction later, I checked my cell phone for the five hundredth time. Still five bars. Still fully charged. Still no messages.

  I frowned toward Bella. “No wonder one of the eight limbs of yoga is abstinence.”

  Bella withheld comment.

  I untied her leash and unclipped it from her collar. “Come on, sweetie. Let’s head back.”

  We followed the shoreline back toward Cannon Beach. I swung Bella’s leash in my right hand while she herded waves on my left. By the time we reached the rock wall near the stairway to the parking lot, the tide had gone out enough that we could walk around it without getting wet. Now that it was almost noon, small groups of matchstick-sized people wandered the beach. Some of them were walking toward us.

  I reached for Bella’s collar, but stopped. A few hundred feet ahead, a colony of seagulls—dozens of them—dotted the shore. Bella’s eyes begged me.

  Please? Just one more run?

  Why not? One of us should be having fun. “Okay, girl. Go get ’em!”

  Bella galloped after those birds like a cheetah after a gazelle. It was ridiculous, really. All of us—human, canine, and seabirds included—knew that Bella would never catch them. But that didn’t diminish anyone’s fun. When Bella was about fifteen feet away, the birds took off in unison, flew a hundred feet down the beach, and landed, still in formation. Bella skidded to a stop, let out a single loud bark, and tore after them again.

  May as well give up, hunter dog.

  I reached out my arms and yelled, “Bella, come!”

  As trained, Bella turned a one-eighty and ran back to me at full steam.

  Three hundred feet … two hundred … one hundred … “Bella, slow down!” I yelled. I repeated the command three more times in a rapid-fire panic. “Slow down! Slow down! Slow down!”

  Bella didn’t hear, didn’t understand, or—more likely—chose not to listen. She launched through the air, collided with my chest like a hundred-pound bowling ball, and knocked me flat on my sitting bones for the second time in thirty minutes. A quick German shepherd chin nibble later, she ran a quick circle around me and chose a new destination: a Jenga-like stack of driftwood piled up against the cliff.

  I spit out a million tiny particles of sand. “Bella, come!” I commanded.

  No response.

  I stood, brushed the wet sand off my bottom, and trudged toward my dog. “Bella, knock it off and get over here! Leave it!”

  Bella pretended to be deaf.

  What on earth was she so interested in? Half-eaten hotdogs? Urine from a particularly studly Golden Retriever? A seagull corpse?

  Bella stopped sniffing and commenced digging.

  I groaned. It had to be a dead creature of some kind. Bella couldn’t digest real food unless it was incubated in expensive prescription enzymes; I imagined scooping up undigested seagull parts and groaned louder.

  “Bella, I said come!”

  Not even an ear twitch. This level of disobedience was unusual, even for her.

  I broke into a jog. When Bella wanted something this badly, it was a sure bet that I didn’t want her to have it. I skidded to a stop next to my recalcitrant canine and clipped the leash to her collar. “That’s enough girl. Leave it.”

  She ignored me.

  I tightened the leash and made my voice especially stern. “I mean it.”

  Bella refused to move.

  Whatever she’d found, it was infinitely more interesting than a five-foot three-inch yoga teacher.

  Bella, channeling her inner Ricky, grabbed onto something and pulled, exposing a woman’s tennis shoe.

  “Seriously, Bella?” I grumped. “This much drama over a shoe?”

  I looked closer and gagged.

  The shoe was attached to a foot. A foot that was attached to a caramel-skinned ankle. A caramel-skinned ankle wearing a starfish ankle bracelet.

  Oh God, no.

  Bella had unearthed a body—a woman. She was buried, facedown, in an obviously man-made mountain of driftwood, seaweed, and sand.

  I wish I could say I was horrified. I wish I could say I screamed like a scared little schoolgirl. I wish I could say I vomited like I did the night I found my friend George’s body.

  But I didn’t. I simply stood there, thinking the same words over and over: not again.

  I clawed through the rocks, unearthed the broken body’s left wrist, and forced myself to feel for a pulse. Her fourth finger was bare except for a band of lighter skin where a wedding ring used to be. I suppressed the urge to run off to warn Michael, pulled out my cell phone, and dialed 911.

  “Hi. My name’s Kate Davidson. I found a woman’s body. I think she was murdered.”

  seven

  I spent the next fifteen minutes in a weird sort of attached avoidance. Bella and I huddled close enough to the body to protect it from unsuspecting beach walkers, but far enough away that I couldn’t examine it closely. The dead woman had to be Gabriella, but I chose to live firmly in the land of plausible denial. I’d checked her pulse without excavating the rest of her body. If the police asked me about it later, I could say that I was afraid to tamper with the crime scene. Which was true, but only part of the story.

  I didn’t want to know for sure that the body was Gabriella. Not identifying her might slow down the police, at least for an hour or two. An hour or two during which I could locate Michael and warn him. I wasn’t positive that Gabriella had been murdered, but it sure looked that way. She certainly hadn’t buried herself, and I suspected the tide hadn’t either. Not in a single night. Someone had purposefully covered her.

  Someone who wasn’t Michael.

  I knew that instinctively, the same way Bella knew when a cat had invaded her territory. Michael would never hurt—much less kill—anyone, and especially not Gabriella. As I’d painfully realized last night, he cared about her too much.

  Unfortunately, my girlfriend’s intuition wouldn’t sway the police. Wasn’t the spouse—especially an estranged spouse being denied a divorce—the most logical suspect? Last night’s altercation between Michael and Gabriella wouldn’t help, either. Even the most seasoned police officers jumped to obvious—and sometimes dreadfully wrong—conclusions. Who could blame them? I’d made more than a few incorrect inferences myself.

  Which left me with my current dilemma: how could I keep the police off of Michael’s trail until I had time to talk to him? I would never lie to the police, not exactly. Doing so would go against everything Dad had ever taught me. But I didn’t have to volunteer unsubstantiated guesses, did I? My identification of Gabriella was based on a common skin tone and a cheap piece of costume jewelry. For all I knew, those ankle bracelets were sold all over the coastline, worn by every woman in the area under the age of seventy.

  I was deluding mysel
f, of course, and Dad’s disapproving glare scalded the back of my neck all the way from the afterlife. He’d been a cop, after all. Withholding evidence in a murder investigation ranked high on his list of cardinal sins. But I was exhausted, overwhelmed, and in shock. I couldn’t possibly think clearly. Or at least that’s what I’d have my attorney argue at my accessory-after-the-fact trial.

  I buried my face in Bella’s fur and groaned. How could I be involved in another murder investigation? Dharma, my recently non-estranged mother, would have asserted that my stumbling across Gabriella’s body had been preordained. That the universe was once again helping me to fulfill my life’s purpose. That my dharma—my life work—was to bring killers to justice. For all I knew she was right. Still, in that moment I felt like giving the universe a “universal” hand gesture. The kind you give to motorists who cut you off on the freeway. Why couldn’t my dharma be something less traumatizing? Like dog paddling naked through an ocean of starving barracudas?

  Bella whined and strained against her leash, clearly wanting to go back and dig up the rest of Gabri—oops, I mean the rest of the unknown stranger’s body. I ignored her complaining, tried to call Michael, and checked voicemail. No messages. Mostly charged battery. Still five bars.

  I rubbed my hands up and down my arms, shivering in spite of the early afternoon sun. Bella stopped whining and howled.

  Finally. Sirens.

  As the wails grew closer, I whispered a prayer: Please, God. Please. Just this once, let me be wrong.

  An ambulance arrived first. It drove onto the beach and parked next to the No Vehicles Allowed sign, causing the formerly oblivious passersby to pause, crane their necks, and whisper. Two paramedics—one male, one female—emerged from the vehicle carrying red medical bags. I tied Bella to the ambulance’s bumper, told her to stay, and led them to the body. An insane, delusional part of me hoped that they’d try to revive her, but they came to the same conclusion I had. It was too late. Much too late. They ordered me to wait for the police and stood grimly to the side. I untied Bella and moved her away from the scene, hoping distance would calm her.

  What felt like two centuries but was likely two minutes later, a police car pulled next to the ambulance. A female patrol officer climbed out of it. She spoke with the male paramedic, who showed her the body, shook his head no, and pointed to me. She wrote something in a spiral notebook and strode resolutely toward me. Disembodied voices crackled from the microphone clipped on her shoulder, causing Bella to sit at attention, ears pricked forward with interest.

  Officer Alex Lewis (who asked me to call her Officer Alex) stood an inch or so taller than my five-foot-three-inch frame, had an athletic, swimmer’s build, and wore her hair in a jet black crew cut that made her blue-black uniform look navy. Her energy felt masculine and feminine at the same time. Yin and yang, strong and compassionate. Flexible and competent. I instantly trusted her.

  Evidently, Bella did, too. She abandoned her stay with an enthusiastic woof and greeted Officer Alex with full-body wiggle. For the briefest of moments, the officer’s grim expression lifted. She gave Bella a quick head scratch, then addressed me.

  “I understand you found the body.”

  The next hour floated by in a foggy haze, punctuated by strobe-like flashes of the commotion around me. I vaguely noticed two more police vehicles and a coroner’s van join Officer Alex’s patrol car, but I didn’t meet the people who emerged from inside them. Officer Alex was the only person who interviewed me.

  She jotted notes in her notebook and peppered me with questions, none of which were too pointed. For the moment, at least, she believed my story: I was simply an innocent bystander. A tourist who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. A tourist who needn’t be traumatized any further.

  I answered her questions honestly, more or less. I told her my name (Kate Davidson), how I’d found the body (Bella’s digging), and why I was in Cannon Beach (visiting friends). All the while, I avoided the overwhelming fear pounding my head. Was Michael’s radio silence related to Gabriella’s death?

  A full ten minutes after I thought my heart would explode, Officer Alex said I was free to go. She jotted down my contact information and told me that she might be in touch again later. In the meantime, she hoped that I’d enjoy my vacation in Cannon Beach.

  She had to be kidding, right?

  I grabbed Bella’s leash and staggered back to the rental house, amazed at how normal the rest of the world appeared. How could it not have stopped spinning? A woman was dead. A daughter. A sister. For all I knew, a mother. Probably murdered. Somewhere out there, a family’s life had been changed forever.

  But to the people vacationing on that gorgeous beach, today was simply another twenty-four hours in paradise. Dogs ran after seagulls. Children built makeshift sandcastles. Parents sunbathed and drank bottled water. Their greatest dilemma was deciding which gourmet restaurant they’d choose for dinner.

  How did life just “go on”?

  Bella, too, seemed unaffected. Like all dogs, she lived in the moment. And any moment spent loping along a sunny beach was, by definition, perfect.

  There was a yoga lesson in that somewhere.

  But not for me.

  Not today.

  For me, this was a horrible, terrifying day. A day filled with fears of the past, traumas in the present, and unanswered questions about the future. Questions only Michael could answer. I needed to find him, but how?

  Bella and I opened the door to a completely empty house. No infant cries filled the silence. No adolescent puppies skidded across the floor to torment Bella. No best friends waited to ask me unanswerable questions.

  “Anybody here?” I called.

  No response. Nothing but upscale furniture, glossy bamboo floors, and ultra high ceilings. Not even an errant dust bunny to keep me company. Gorgeous Architectural Digest beach house be damned. I missed my cluttered Ballard bungalow. I missed my life.

  I sank onto the plush couch. Bella jumped up next to me, turned a quick circle, then flopped down and rested her head on my thigh.

  I pulled out my cell phone to call Rene, but I couldn’t bring myself to dial her number. She and Sam were enjoying a day of family picnics, scenic drives, and tours of the Tillamook Cheese Factory. If I called her, she’d come back in a heartbeat. But what could she do when she got here? The person I needed to speak with was Michael.

  So I dialed his number instead.

  Again.

  The phone went to voicemail.

  Again.

  Where in the hell was that man?

  My body felt tight; my skin, itchy. I stood and paced, muttering expletives under my breath. Bella sat up and whined. “It’s okay, girl. You’re not in trouble. Michael is. If he doesn’t call me back soon, his body will be the next one buried on the beach.”

  I froze and sucked in a quick breath.

  Oh no.

  Michael couldn’t be … He wasn’t … he wasn’t lying hurt somewhere, was he?

  Time to up my game. If I couldn’t reach Michael, I’d try his sister. Only one problem: I didn’t know her number. I called information, but Shannon’s personal number was unlisted, and I had no idea which real estate agency she worked at. I considered calling Michael’s parents, but what would I tell them? “Your cheating son disappeared. By the way, did it never occur to you to tell me that he was married?”

  No good. Instead, I tried every other way I could think of to track down Michael. I called Tiffany at Pete’s Pets. Voicemail. I emailed. I texted. I messaged him on Facebook. I stalked him on Twitter. I was about to give up and call Rene for ideas when I remembered: Shannon’s check! In all of the craziness last night, I’d forgotten to give it to Rene. I pulled it out of my billfold. No phone number, but it listed an address in Manzanita. I had no idea if it was Shannon’s home or her business, but at that point, I didn’t care. It was a lead.
I gave Michael’s phone one more try, then grabbed my keys off the counter and strode to the door.

  “Come on, Bella, were going on a road trip.”

  When I pulled up to the check’s address—which was obviously a home, not a business—Shannon’s orange Mini Cooper was parked in the driveway. I saw no sign of her Chevy, ancient or otherwise.

  I clipped on Bella’s lead but hesitated at the garden path, torn by conflicting emotions. Fear over Michael’s well-being; anger that I hadn’t heard from him; dread at the news I was about to deliver.

  I stalled by taking in my surroundings. Everything I saw screamed Shannon.

  The tiny, bright yellow cottage was accented by royal blue shutters and a candy-apple-red door. A coco fiber mat at the entrance read If You Forgot the Wine, Go Home in bold black letters. The large, plant-filled yard added to the oasis of color. Dusky pink hydrangeas bloomed to my right. To my left, a vegetable garden overflowed with yellow crookneck squash, bright orange pumpkins, and dark leafy kale. A trellis of late blooming roses scented the air with a sweet, almost wistful fragrance. Stone pavers at the yard’s entrance spelled out an invitation: Welcome Friends.

  Bella announced our arrival by squatting and peeing on them.

  “Seriously, Bella?”

  She didn’t reply. She was too busy dragging me to the front door.

  Shannon answered before my third knock. “Kate, I’m so glad you’re here.” The thin line of her lips contradicted her words.

  “I’m looking for Michael. Do you know where he is?”