Chapter One
Bishop, California
Bishop, California is the self-proclaimed fly-fishing capital of the world. Since I don't fish, I can't defend or deny the claim. The people who live here just say it and every spring and summer the fly-fishermen and women show up. I just know that it is a pretty little town that I've come to call home. It sits at the forty-three hundred foot mark on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. The population normally is about forty one hundred folks give or take. Fishing season is a more crowded time but we who live here love it.
My name is Alexandra Cross. Oh, no relation to Alex Cross of James Patterson fame. I've been teased about it for some time now but I do believe it was my name first. I'm fifty something years of age with strawberry blond hair and hazel eyes. Some people call me petite statured. I like the idea of being fun-sized. I prefer hiking to watching television even though I own one. I'd rather kayak across a lake and not sit on a dock watching the world go by without me. I am a doer. I moved here about ten years ago from a hum-drum life in Washington where my life consisted of meetings with stuffy old men who thought that their time is all there was and a man who disappointed me greatly. I thought that three thousand miles and ten years might give me some distance and solace from that pain. Oh well that's a story for another time.
Right now I need to get my head back in the current game. The Woman's Club of Bishop assigned me to a committee helping with a Fourth of July event that would take place on Lake Sabrina. Margo Fontaine and I are working with two other groups finding vendors for food and crafters. Between the three groups we'd come up with forty vendors. Not a bad haul for the event. Between this my job at the hospital gift shop and my gardens I keep busy.
My gaze slipped back to the waterfront outside of the restaurant and I felt my mind slide back to those days in D.C. Thinking about that man brought back both good memories and some extremely painful ones. Try as I might I just couldn't get my head back into the meeting.
Margo noticed that I'd stopped paying attention to our table and tapped me on the arm. "Are you doing alright Alex?"
Suddenly I knew that this meeting wasn't happening for me. "No Margo I'm not. I think I'll head home." I reached for my purse and took out cash to pay for my lunch. I left a twenty sitting on the table. I rose from my seat and pushed my chair in. "Sorry ladies…all of a sudden I don't feel well so I'm going home and lie low. See you next week. Margo, I'll call you tomorrow to catch up on what I missed." I turned and walked out of the restaurant.
As I walked home my head kept playing the loop of my leaving D.C. and my last encounter with him. We both said things we shouldn't have and that hurt to this day. While I'd left him far behind I still had my share of pain to deal with and some powerful residual feelings of all types for him.
The walk took about a half hour and while I didn't push the speed, I did a bit of thinking about him and how I should have handled it differently. Trust me, the old adage 'hind sight is twenty-twenty' is true. A calmer head would have prevailed and we might still have been together today and if not that, we might still be friends. However, we both lost our cool and then we both lost everything else.
I opened the door to my cute little bungalow. She's painted a pretty yellow with dark blue shutters and a wide front porch, painted white, that runs the whole length of the front of the house. There are two bedrooms upstairs with one bath, a dining room, living room with a fireplace and a very nice eat in kitchen with a walk in pantry that I love cooking in, on the first floor. I'm no Martha Stewart but I enjoy baking and I probably won't starve to death when the zombie apocalypse happens. When I first moved here I lived in a two room furnished apartment and had almost no furniture of my own. I had my bedroom set but everything else that I had in D.C. was rented so when I left it all went back to the rental agency. It took a couple of years to decide that Bishop was where I wanted to stay so I then started looking for a home of my own. On day sixty Providence came through and the realtor showed me the cutest house I'd ever seen. The owner's mother had just passed away and he wanted the house to go to someone who'd love it like his mom had. It was mine. It is the last house on the street with no immediate neighbors. I love the solitude it provides me.
I put my down vest, briefcase and purse away in the closet and went to the kitchen to fill and start the tea kettle for a nice pot of tea. I chose a nice decaffeinated version of Irish Breakfast Tea and placed the tea in a tea basket for the pot. Then I ran the faucet to get hot water to fill the tea pot to warm it. The ritual of tea making has a calming effect on me so I take my time with it. Calming is apparently what I needed this afternoon. By the time the tea was brewed my thinking had calmed down a bit and moved away from him, his grey hair and his startling blue eyes. It was time to do something for me like reading a good book. When the teapot was ready I took the pot, my cup and the novel I'd been reading into the living room and enjoyed my time.
Five o'clock came and the dimming light made me realize it was starting to get late. I took my leftovers from the night before out of the fridge and put them in the oven. Turkey and gravy over stuffing and butternut squash will taste delish again this evening. I reached for the light switch to turn on some lights when three men with flashlights came running from the woods and right through my yard, trampling my daffodils.
I went to the front door and thought to ask them what they thought they were doing running through my gardens but something told me not to open it. It turns out that thought was right on the money. Through the window by the door I saw that the third man carried a handgun.
I let them go on by down the hill and then called the County Sheriffs office over at Independence.