Bertram's Blog

Rubicon Ranch is a collaborative and innovative crime series set in the desert community of Rubicon Ranch and is being written online by the authors of Second Wind Publishing. Seven authors, including me, are involved in the current story — Rubicon Ranch: Necropieces.

Residents of Rubicon Ranch are finding body parts scattered all over the desert. Who was the victim and why did someone want him so very dead? Everyone in this upscale housing development is hiding something. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone’s life will be different after they have encountered the Rubicon. Rubicon Ranch, that is.

Although some of the characters were introduced in Rubicon Ranch: Riley’s Story, a previous collaboration, Rubicon Ranch: Necropieces is a stand-alone novel. The first chapter will be posted on Monday, June 11, and one chapter will be posted every Monday after that.

We hope you will enjoy seeing the story develop as we write it. Let the mystery begin! Whodunit? No one knows, not even the writers, and we won’t know until the very end!

Chapter 17: Melanie Gray
by Pat Bertram

Melanie stood at the window of her upstairs office, waiting for the photos of Eloy’s dog to finish printing.

Waiting. Always waiting.

Still waiting for Alexander to come home or call, though he had been dead for more than three months. Still waiting for the sheriff to investigate her husband’s accident—if in fact it had been an accident that killed Alexander. Still waiting for her grief to end and her life to begin.

The printer chugged as if deliberating over each line of data. Finally, it spit out the last photo of the puppy. Melanie shook her head at the amateurish product. She’d used high-grade photo copy paper, and the image was a good one, but the picture didn’t have the hard finish of a professionally developed photo.

This was the first place they’d lived where Alexander hadn’t set up a darkroom. She wouldn’t have known how to use the equipment even if she had it, but the absence of the chemical smells underlined the absence of her husband. They were only going to stay in this rental property a short while, just long enough to do the job and move on, and setting up a darkroom wouldn’t be worth the trouble, or so Alexander had claimed. He’d never said where their next job would take them, but he’d seemed anxious about the assignment. And now it didn’t matter. He was dead and she was . . . waiting.

Melanie fanned out the printed photos. Four eight-by-eleven pictures of the puppy, each a different pose, each charming. She printed a fifth page with smaller versions of the images, gathered up the papers, stuffed them in a large Manila envelope, and headed outside.

The cloudless sky was pale blue, and though not particularly hot, the air felt oppressive and humid. The small effort of walking the few steps to Delano Road made Melanie’s skin feel sticky. Normally she would have taken this as a sign that a storm would soon be passing through, but nothing appeared to work normally in Rubicon Ranch.

A curtain in the front window of the Sinclair house twitched. Was someone watching her? Melanie quickened her steps and let out a sigh of relief when she’d passed the house. She hesitated in front of Eloy’s place. The old man’s empty chair stood empty. She’d planned to hand him the photos and slip away before he could get awkwardly avuncular again. So, now what? Wait for him?

Waiting. Always waiting.

Melanie marched to the front door and rang the bell. Silence. Not even a bark or a yip from the puppy. Had something happened to the old man? Maybe he’d meddled in something he shouldn’t have.

In the months she’d lived here, she hadn’t seen Eloy do anything but sit on his front porch and glower at everyone who went by, and the recent change in him seemed suspect. If he’d wanted a dog, a monstrous canine would have better fit his image, but he’d gotten a puppy, for cripe’s sake. And what did he mean when he’d said Morris wouldn’t be bothering her any longer? Why would he make her welfare his concern? Besides, she knew how to take care of herself—Alexander had made sure of that, insisting she take lessons in self-defense and weaponry before they started traveling to dangerous locales. They’d lived in a whole alphabet of perilous countries, from Afghanistan to Zambia, and she’d survived them all.  When they’d moved here to Rubicon Ranch, she’d felt safe for the first time in years, but this quiet community had turned out to be the deadliest place of all.

Melanie pressed the doorbell once more on the off chance the old man and young pup were simply napping, but the chimes still elicited no response. Grateful she didn’t have to talk to the old man, she slipped a corner of the envelope beneath the welcome mat to anchor it. Wondering why that most unwelcoming man had a welcome mat on his porch, Melanie trudged to the street.

Moody half walked, half trotted toward her, a hand raised in greeting. “I need to talk to you.”

Melanie waited for her neighbor. “I need to talk to you, too. A couple of weeks ago Morris told me—”

“That Alexander had been taking photos of necropieces for him? I overheard my father talking to you that day. I’m sorry he upset you. He won’t bother you again.”

Anger surged through Melanie, temporarily displacing the sorrow that weighed on her. “Why does everyone think I need protection? I’ve dealt with worse things than a nasty old man who needed to be exterminated.”

Moody held up her hands, palms out. “Sorry. I didn’t realize protection was an issue with you.”

Melanie gritted her teeth to keep from blurting out a denial. She remembered that Moody had once been a psychologist, and any further discussion would give the woman fodder for more assumptions. She pivoted on one foot, getting ready to walk away, then turned back. Her neighbor might be a psychologist and a Sinclair, but she was the only one who could explain why Morris had accused her of killing Alexander.

“Your father mentioned something else that day. He said Riley told you she’d seen me messing with our car.”

Moody blew out a breath. “The bastard lied. Riley only said she’d seen someone messing with the car. That’s all. Never mentioned a name. I didn’t believe her, though. If you knew Riley, you’d know she loved to cause mischief. Even I found it hard to discern when she was telling the truth.”

“But could she have seen someone messing with the car?”

Moody put a finger to her chin and said slowly, “It’s possible. Generally, Riley’s lies were quite detailed—more like stories—but she made the remark about the car in an offhand manner. Are you thinking someone deliberately caused your husband’s accident?”

“Sheriff Bryan told me the accident looked suspicious, but . . .”

“You don’t trust him.”

Melanie focused on the peak of a distant knoll. Did she trust the sheriff? She lowered her gaze to meet Moody’s. “I think he has . . . agendas.”

Moody nodded. “That’s my take on the sheriff, too. I also think he’s on a quest for redemption, whether he’s aware of it yet or not. I’ll let you know if I recall anything else Riley said about your car or Alexander.”

“Thank you.” Melanie turned and started walking up Delano Street toward the desert.

“Wait. Please?”

Melanie stopped.

Waiting. Always waiting.

“I need to warn you about Jake,” Moody said, a new urgency in her voice.

Melanie spun to face the woman. “Are you trying to protect me again? I can take care of myself.”

“Yes. You said. But Jake . . . Jake’s my brother. He wears a cloak of righteousness, but his heart is as black as the rest of the Sinclairs’.”

Melanie frowned at her neighbor. Moody was a Sinclair, too. Could she be warning Melanie that as Morris’s daughter, Moody also had a black heart? A lifetime with Alexander should have prepared her to deal with the Sinclairs, but she sensed nuances of evil in the family next door that made Alexander’s machinations seem like child’s play.

“You don’t believe me,” Moody said flatly.

“Why are you worried about me all of a sudden?”

“I haven’t seen Jake in years, and he just showed up. Supposedly he’s been in the area for several weeks participating in some sort of revival, and he heard about Morris being missing. So now he’s come to . . .”

Interested despite herself, Melanie said, “So now he’s come to—what?”

Moody shrugged, a strange look on her face. Fear, maybe? She glanced toward her house, then fixed an intense gaze on Melanie. “He knows about you. Knows you found the foot yesterday. Don’t believe a word he says. And whatever you do, don’t get yourself in a situation where you are alone with him.”

Melanie watched her neighbor hurry back to Morris’s house. As Moody walked up the driveway, the door opened, and a man walked out.

Melanie gave a start. Morris! Couldn’t be. This man looked younger than the writer. Must be Jake, the son.

Jake glared at Moody, then turned his head toward Melanie. He seemed to study her, the Sinclair dead-fish stare frozen on his face.

And then he smiled.

Melanie fled to the desert. She inhaled the humid, creosote-scented air, trying to remove the stench of the Sinclairs from her nostrils, but no cleansing breath could remove the memory of that evil leer.

Forget the Sinclairs. Focus.

Melanie took a swig of water from her canteen, screwed the cap back on, and reached in her pocket for her little digital camera. Thinking of the last photos she took, the photos of Eloy’s dog, she wondered if her photos would be better if she had professional equipment. She made a mental note to ask the sheriff about her husband’s cameras—Alexander had taken them when he left on that fatal car trip, and they hadn’t been returned to her.

Melanie shot a few photos at random—a jogger in red shorts, a wadded fast food wrapper that looked like a yellow rose nestled in the scrub, a frisky puppy running circles around an old man. Captain and Eloy. Seeing Eloy in the desert again made her shoulders itch. Too much strangeness. Too much change.

She picked her way up the steep rock-strewn track to the top of the knoll, past the place where she’d found Riley’s body stuffed in a television console, past the place where she’d found the foot. She stopped to snap a few shots of the vast desert wilderness spread out before her, a sight that never failed to bring her comfort.

Distant shouts rising above the whine of idling motors caught her attention. She cut to the left until she glimpsed the altercation. Two people, one in red racing gear and one in silver, were standing by a canoe, balancing motor bikes with one hand while gesturing with the other.

“No!” bellowed the red-garbed racer. He hopped on his red bike and sped toward Melanie.

The silver racer got on his bike and chased after his companion. “Someone got chainsaw massacred. We have to call the cops and tell them we found a part of a body.”

“No,” yelled the red racer again. “We can’t. My mom will kill me. I’m supposed to be home looking after my little sister.”

They hurtled past Melanie, still shouting. She took pictures of the two boys, then of the canoe. She’d often seen the abandoned canoe in her treks, but until today, the boat had always been turned upside down. Apparently the boys had found something hidden beneath the canoe. A necropiece.

Could she take a chance that the boys hadn’t seen her, and so pass on calling the sheriff? She hadn’t found the body part, but she felt sure the sheriff would use her presence as an excuse to lay the blame at her feet. She sighed and pulled her phone out of a pocket. Even if the boys didn’t say anything, the sheriff would eventually find out she had been in the vicinity of more death. Not notifying him would seem more suspicious than making the call.

She talked to the dispatcher, explained the situation, described the boys and gave directions on how to find the canoe from Tehachapi Road.

“Wait right there,” the dispatcher said. “Someone will arrive as soon as possible.”

Melanie shoved the phone in her pocket, and shifted from foot to foot.

Waiting. Always waiting.

To hell with that. If the sheriff wanted her, he knew where to find her.

Melanie turned away from the canoe and tramped across the desert expanse, heading toward the storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

Rubicon Ranch is a collaborative and innovative crime series set in the desert community of Rubicon Ranch and is being written online by the authors of Second Wind Publishing. Seven authors, including me, are involved in the current story — Rubicon Ranch: Necropieces.

Residents of Rubicon Ranch are finding body parts scattered all over the desert. Who was the victim and why did someone want him so very dead? Everyone in this upscale housing development is hiding something. Everyone has an agenda. Everyone’s life will be different after they have encountered the Rubicon. Rubicon Ranch, that is.

Although some of the characters were introduced in Rubicon Ranch: Riley’s Story, a previous collaboration, Rubicon Ranch: Necropieces is a stand-alone novel.

We hope you will enjoy seeing the story develop as we write it. Let the mystery begin! Whodunit? No one knows, not even the writers, and we won’t know until the very end!

Chapter 9: Melanie Gray
by Pat Bertram

Melanie locked the front door of the house and turned around to face the day. It was clear and warm with a platinum sun shining in an azure sky. She felt her spirits rise. With such lovely weather, things couldn’t be as bad as they seemed. She marched down the driveway, and her spirits plummeted as fast as they had risen. The sheriff’s tan Navigator, like a brooding predator, loomed in the driveway of the Sinclair house next door.

Melanie had tried to forget Sheriff Seth Bryan and the conflicted feelings he had aroused in her, but apparently she hadn’t succeeded. She could feel the emotions rushing back to fill the emptiness inside her. She still couldn’t tell if she’d felt more drawn to him or more repelled by him. With any luck, she’d never have to explore those feelings. As soon as he finished his business and left the area, she could forget him again.

She heard the sound of his voice, though not his words, and for a moment she considered dashing back into the house to avoid any encounter with him, but then she realized the truth. The sheriff had no interest in her. It had been almost three months since she’d last seen him, and in all that time, he had made no effort to contact her.

She lifted her chin. She didn’t need him or any man. They were all worthless creatures who had no regard for anyone but themselves.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to see what he was up to.

She took a few steps forward so she could see the front door of the Sinclair house. The sheriff looked the same as he always had. Jeans and a white shirt with a badge on the shoulder clothed his lean, flat-bellied body, and a navy blue ball cap with a yellow “Sheriff” embroidered on it covered most of his dark brown hair. And he still wore those ridiculous mirrored sunglasses.

The sheriff and Moody seemed to be standing closer together than politeness dictated. Could something be going on between the two of them? Movement in the passenger seat of the Navigator caught her attention. Deputy Midget. If the sheriff intended anything shady, surely he wouldn’t bring a deputy along to witness his behavior? Then this must be an official visit.

Moody looked okay — happy, even. It had been very quiet the last week or so without “The Sounds of Silence” blaring at all hours, and she’d probably been enjoying herself in Morris’s absence.

The sheriff starting walking toward his vehicle. Melanie squatted to retie a shoelace, hoping he wouldn’t catch sight of her. She might have the courage not to seek refuge in the house, but she had nothing to say to him.

When she heard the sheriff’s Navigator slowly moving down the street, she squelched a pang of disappointment. As annoying as his attentions were, at least they had reminded her she was alive. She’d been living with the dead — or rather memories of the dead—for way too long.

She arose with only the slight aid of one hand to push her erect, and angled her steps to the right of her driveway, intending to head up Delano Road to the desert. She paused, took two steps to the left.

The Daily Indecision is how she’d come to think of this inability to act. “Sounds like a newspaper,” she said aloud. “They’d print both sides of every story since the editor would be unable to decide which view to stand behind. Or maybe the paper would be blank because they’d never be able to decide which stories were newsworthy. And since when do you talk to yourself?”

Since Alexander died. She often wandered in the desert, trying to understand her husband’s death and her grief, and she’d gotten in the habit of talking aloud to him, hoping he could help make sense of her chaotic thoughts. He never responded. But then, he’d seldom replied even before he died.

When had their relationship become all about him? And why hadn’t she noticed the change? She sighed. Probably because she’d spent so much time online doing research for the coffee table books she and Alexander wrote. Well, she wrote. He took the photos. After his death, she discovered he’d somehow squandered the advance for the book about the Mojave Desert they’d contracted for, so now she needed to take the photographs in addition to writing the text. She thought she’d become good at shooting photos, but just this morning she’d received an email from her publisher:

“Some of your photos are usable, but most are uninspired. You take photographs, but the great photographers, like Alexander, make photographs. And when they make photographs, they make love. We feel the empathy between the external and internal events.”

Whatever that meant.

“What it means,” she said aloud, “is that you have work to do.” She took five resolute steps up Delano Road, then stopped. She could see Eloy Franklin hunched on his porch like a land-locked amphibian, watching everything that went on in his vicinity.

After all the turmoil the neighborhood had gone through recently, after all the deaths, she thought that things would have changed, but there Eloy sat, as unapproachable and forbidding as always. She’d smiled at him a couple of times when she passed in front of his house, but he’d never acknowledged her efforts at friendliness by so much as a nod.

Unable to stand the thought of Eloy’s scrutiny, she turned left. The sheriff’s navigator hadn’t gotten far, only a few houses away. The vehicle still moved slowly, as if the sheriff were looking for something. Trying to see the neighborhood through his eyes, Melanie peered down Delano Road. A petit woman held a camera to her face, either taking photographs or hiding behind it. Did Sheriff Bryan think the woman was Melanie? Melanie smiled to herself. Whatever faults the man might have, mistaking one woman for another was not one of them. Melanie had seen the woman several times before; she was shorter, prettier, and younger than Melanie, and had the clear luminous complexion of someone with a mixed race heritage.

Beyond the woman, a skinny man lurched along the side of the road. Melanie had also seen him several times before, and he worried her. Anger seemed to crackle around him, like lightning right before it strikes.

The Navigator’s siren blared, and the vehicle shot down the street and tore around the corner onto Tehachapi Road, heading east.

A dark cloud seemed to lift from the neighborhood, and Melanie’s indecision disappeared. She turned right, past Moody’s house, past the strange no-man’s land that separated the Sinclair land from the Franklin land, past Eloy’s house.

The wilderness beckoned.

*     *     *

Melanie stood at the crest of knoll and surveyed the expanse of desert. Somewhere out there, midst the creosote bushes and cacti, a photograph she could make waited for her — an image so compelling, viewers would immediately sense her empathy with the subject.

But how did one get emotionally connected to something as vast and as alien as the Mojave Desert? Then she remembered Alexander saying he looked for a significant detail. By focusing on a single feature, by making it the heart of the photo, the rest of the scene came into focus.

Crap. I’ll never get the hang of photography. Damn you, Alexander, for putting me through this.

She heard a sound closing in on her from behind, a leisurely whup . . . whup . . . whup. She turned and froze, transfixed by the raven gliding by. It flew so close she could see the brown pupil of its bright black eye and the purple and blue sheen of its feathers. She’d never seen such a huge bird—the body looked bigger than a cat, and its wings spanned at least three feet, maybe four. For a moment, it seemed to hang motionless, then a graceful wing beat stirred the air and propelled it forward.

Melanie fumbled with her camera, almost in tears. She’d had a perfect opportunity to make a photograph, but she’d become so lost in the moment, she’d forgotten all about taking a picture. Alexander wouldn’t have forgotten. His camera had been an extension of his hands, his eyes. He never let anything get between him and an image he wanted to capture. Not even Melanie. Especially not Melanie.

Then she heard it behind her again, the whup . . . whup of wing beats. And this time she held her camera ready. As the second raven passed her, she caught the image. Joy burst inside her.

I did it!

Only then did it strike her as odd that the two ravens had been so focused on their goal that they hadn’t seemed to notice how close they’d been to her.

The first raven had already disappeared, but she watched the second one descend behind a rocky outcrop thirty feet away.

She followed a barely perceptible track through the scrub to where six or seven ravens pecked at what looked to be the carcass of a small animal. A rabbit, maybe. Thinking how wonderfully the image of this raw savagery would contrast with the majesty of the flying raven photo, she crept closer. And gagged.

The ravens weren’t feeding on a rabbit, but something oddly familiar and totally out of place.

*     *     *

Melanie waited for Sheriff Bryan and Deputy Midget to pick their way up the rock-strewn path to the top of the hill. The sun glinted off the sheriff’s mirrored sunglasses, making him appear soulless.

When he drew near, Sheriff Bryan grunted. “I wish you’d stop finding bodies in such out of the way locations.”

“I didn’t find a body. I found . . .” She swept out a hand, showing the track and which direction he should travel.

The sheriff furrowed his brow at her, then followed the track. Deputy Midget trailed after him. Melanie brought up the rear.

Sheriff Bryan stopped by the outcropping. “A boot? You called me here to see crows playing with an old bloody boot? You must really be desperate to talk to me.”

“Desperate?” Melanie stared at him, the heat of anger flushing through her body. “Are you really so self-absorbed that you think I called you here on a pretext? I didn’t call you. I called dispatch and told them exactly what I found. It’s not a pretext, and they’re not crows. They are ravens.”

The sheriff and his deputy exchanged shrugs, then proceeded forward. The ravens squawked, rose as one, and circled above them, as if protecting their treasure.

Sheriff Bryan squatted, then whipped his head around, lips drawn back in a rictus, and faced Melanie. “A foot? That’s what you found, a foot?”

Midget took a step back. “It looks like something out of Morris Sinclair’s books.”

“Necropieces,” Bryan said, turning back to the foot.

“So where’s the body?” Midget asked.

“Maybe there isn’t one. Someone could have been illegally dumping medical waste.” Bryan rose and loomed over Melanie. “What do you know about this?”

She studied him for a moment, wondering what was going on behind those sunglasses. “Are you accusing me of something?”

The sheriff cocked his head like a raven getting ready to peck at its prey. “The person who calls in a report is always suspect.”