ONE
BIRD
“This is the most beautiful stretch of beach for miles. It’s perfect for a corpse!”
Godiva spoke with somewhat breathless satisfaction, the pompom on her purple knit cap bouncing as she looked around. In a lower voice, she added, “Whew, that was quite a hike.”
Bird knew how much Godiva hated admitting to her age, which had to be mid-eighties. Godiva was the oldest of the four friends in the writers’ group, but she made up for that in vigor.
Bird leaned her hands on her knees, wishing for the thousandth time that she got more exercise than tooling her bike around town. After the arduous trek down a tiny path that had looked too dangerous for goats (assuming there were any goats along the California coastline), she couldn’t see much past her own breath steaming up her glasses.
As she tried to catch her breath, she thought ruefully of what her children would think if they could see her now. Her two practical, responsible, loving kids—though she could scarcely call them kids, could she? Both of them were older than she’d been when she married. Still, just the idea of them catching her on this expedition made her start coming up with mental excuses for where she was, what she was doing, and how she looked, though they weren’t even there.
When she was young, she had always heard, A reputation for being odd is a recipe for spinsterhood . . . A lady doesn’t draw negative attention . . . No gentleman worth the name would ever look twice at a girl whose name gets bandied about . . .
And after she married the gentleman worth the name, she heard, Now, dear, a little eccentricity might be good for publicity, but within reasonable bounds, and, Think of my standing. A wife gossiped about as peculiar will kill any chance of advancement, you know how cutthroat college politics are, and of course the sharpest guilt-bullet of them all, Think of your children!
She had tried to be so very good . . .
But not good enough.
Now that her beloved children were back in her life, she hoped that neither of them would show up unexpectedly and decide that she was too odd, too messy, too impractical, too ... the word “barmy” would do. It hurt less than the crueler terms she’d heard in the divorce court, before she lost her children altogether for twenty-seven long years.
She sighed quietly, and with practiced habit mentally pushed the past to the back of her mind. Her glasses had cleared enough to see that Godiva had been right about the beauty of the beach. To the left lay a picturesque tumble of rock from the recent earthquake. Above it loomed towering cliffs full of hollows that reminded her of melting candles. To the right lay the picturesque lagoon, full of little boats tied to the floating docks, their masts a forest of sticks gently swaying on the rippling tide.
And straight before her stretched the Pacific Ocean, pewter-colored this early in the morning, and deceptively peaceful at low tide. Sand birds hopped along, pecking at the wet sand. It seemed a shame to mar the pristine sand with their footprints.
Privately, Bird thought that it was far too beautiful to be the setting for a bloody murder. But Godiva’s popular mystery series always began with a corpse in a gorgeous setting. And she took her research seriously.
Very seriously.
Case in point: the four women standing in the chilly pre-dawn air after picking their way past the gigantic NO TRESPASSING and UNSAFE PATH signs, with Bird dressed in ill-fitting men’s clothing rescued from the donation bin at Doris’s synagogue.
“We’d better hurry,” Doris said briskly. “Before we get busted.”
Godiva was as brown and wrinkled as a walnut, her face dominated by expressive black eyes. She gave a loud snort. “What are the cops going to do, toss four old battleaxes in the slammer?”
“Technically they could,” Doris said as she took out her cell phone. “We are trespassing.”
“Nah, the lockup only has two cells.” Godiva shrugged a bony shoulder. “Tiny ones, single bedders. They can’t legally toss two in a cell with a single cot. If they arrest a gang of four hooligans like us, they’d have to pull in the county sheriff.”
She would know. Godiva had probably researched Playa del Encanto’s tiny police station before most of its current police force was born.
Godiva whipped off her purple cap, and her thin white braid unrolled to flap against her back. She wiped her arm across her face, wound up the braid that had been a thick, glossy black during her wild hippie days, shoved it back under her cap, and grabbed her cane.
“But it’s colder than a politician’s heart out here, so let’s get cracking.” Godiva turned to Bird. “You look great, but straighten that tie.”
Bird loathed ties. They reminded her of Bartholomew, her ex-husband. He’d had a huge collection of them, all made of pure silk. He’d even worn them on the weekends if he thought someone important might drop by their house.
The tie Bird wore now was traffic cone orange except for the giant soup stain in the center, which was an unpleasant shade of green. (At least, Bird hoped it was soup.) She’d picked it as the opposite of anything Bartholomew might have worn. She snugged it up above her collarbones, its cheap polyester slick against her fingers, then tucked the flapping ends into her pants.
“Why do men still wear these things?” Bird mused. “It’s such a stupid fashion, you wouldn’t think it would have lasted for more a hundred years. They have no actual purpose, and they feel like a noose.”
“Why do women wear stiletto heels?” Doris asked as she checked the camera lighting on her phone. “I thought we got rid of them forever in the seventies, then they came right back, busting our feet all over again.”
Godiva snorted. “They make girls’ legs look good. Ties? Hah! Never met a man yet whose neck was improved by one. Got your blood, Bird?”
Bird had been unable to find a man’s wig, so she’d brought a brown yoga wrap. She tied it tightly around her head to hide her mass of curly graying hair and hopefully make her look more mannish. Also, to hide the bag of stage blood. “Tucked right here.” She tapped the side of her head.
Godiva scowled at the yoga wrap. “Will it spurt from under that thing?”
“Oh, yes,” Doris said calmly. She was always practical, unsurprisingly as she’d been reining high schoolers for more than a quarter of a cen
tury, and dealing with her eccentric family all her life. “We use them all the time in school plays. You can trust them to do the job.”
Godiva turned to Jen, the fourth in the group of writer friends. Jen stood quiet and imperturbable, the only one not shifting from foot to foot or rubbing her arms against the brisk breeze coming off the Pacific. Jen was the tallest of them, and the second youngest in the group. She had dressed for her role as the killer in a bulky jacket, black sweat pants, a black ski mask, and leather biker gauntlets.
Bird, who at almost fifty-five was the youngest and spryest, generally played the victim in Godiva’s scenarios. Jen served as drug-crazed biker killers, mafia hit men, deranged survivalists, and other male murderers. Short, curvy Doris could never pass as a man, so she played female killers, in which case Jen did the camera work.
Up on the street level, the early morning sun had already come out, but down at the beach the damp chill of night still lingered. Bird hugged her arms to her sides.
“Where do you want us?” Doris asked briskly as she thumbed her phone into video mode.
Godiva motioned her to one side. “You can shoot from here. No. When the sun comes up, you’ll be shooting right into it. Over there. Bird, you get right up next to the water, and Jen, you come at her from this side.” Gleefully, she said, “I want to see the blood splatter on the wet sand!”
Bird stepped to the edge of the sand, glad the tide was low. While she never minded being a crash test dummy for Godiva’s mystery novels, she drew the line at throwing herself into icy seawater. She fingered the stage blood pack, making sure it was in place.
“I hope you can get it on the first try, Jen,” Bird said. Smiling, she added, “Godiva needs her authentic-looking splatter.”
Godiva clapped her hands. “Hear, hear! Listen to her, Jen. If we have to do ten tries, you get to answer the fifty helpful letters from A Fan informing me that blood doesn’t do that.”
“Okay.” Jen hefted the prop baseball bat that Doris had liberated from the high school drama department.
Doris squinted into her cell phone. “Lights! Camera! Action!”
Jen advanced menacingly, her bat held high.
Bird threw up her hands pleadingly. “Don’t kill me!” Then, trying for some extra realism, she yelled, “No! Argh! Yargh!”
Jen lunged and swung dramatically. The foam baseball bat tapped Bird on the side of her head, light as a feather.
Bird started to throw herself backward, then paused.