A Shadow in the Water Read online

  A Shadow in the Water

  By

  April Hill

  ©2014 by Blushing Books® and April Hill

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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  Hill, April

  A Shadow in the Water

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-62750-612-0

  Cover Design by ABCD Graphics & Design

  This book is intended for adults only. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults. Nothing in this book should be interpreted as Blushing Books' or the author's advocating any non-consensual spanking activity or the spanking of minors.

  Table of contents:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About April Hill

  Ebook Offer

  Blushing Books Newsletter

  Blushing Books

  Chapter One

  On the morning the whole thing began, I was having one of those days. You know the kind, where you lose your reading glasses, discover the milk has gone sour after you pour it over the last of the corn flakes, and then stumble into the mangled remains of your neighbor/former employer while you’re walking your dog with a broken toe. (Your toe, not the dog’s.)

  By the time Detective Lieutenant Matt O’Connor showed up, looking as handsome as ever, and apparently willing to let bygones be bygones, I had already been questioned by several cops about the neighbor/employer’s unfortunate demise, and was on the verge of losing my usual sunny disposition. So, when I heard what turned out to be the last knock of the day at my door, I had no way of knowing that it was Matt. I just naturally assumed it was yet another officer of the law about to invade my privacy and complicate my life. What I didn’t know, then, was how really complicated it was going to get.

  I hadn’t seen Matt for a while, though not from lack of trying. He lives a few miles from me, across the street from this very nice little park, and when my car was still running, I made a point of parking it in front of his condo several times a week, on the pretext of exercising Benjamin—the aforementioned dog—in the nice little park. The plan was brilliant in its simplicity. Matt would come out his front door, see me there, and be so overcome with passion that he’d instantly forget the silly little squabble that was keeping us apart.

  Unlike other members of that noble breed, my beagle has never much liked walking, so he never seemed to fully understand why we had to drive somewhere else to do something neither of us wanted to do in the first place—like taking a walk. I tried explaining to Benjamin how such a carefully arranged “chance” meeting with Matt would improve my phenomenally lousy sex life, but he isn’t a romantic sort of dog. Ben has apparently never experienced a deeply fulfilling sexual encounter of his own, having been surgically deprived of the required equipment at some point in his life. On occasion, when an attractive lady-dog wanders by, I get the feeling he’s giving me a suspicious look, suggesting that I might be the party responsible for his impairment. I find this extremely unfair, and have repeatedly assured him that he was already in this condition when I found him—a starving, homeless waif—trying his best to get run over at four in the morning on the Hollywood Freeway. I risked my life dodging cars doing seventy miles an hour, spent two months advertising in newspapers and posting “Do You Know This Dog?” notices all over town, and checking local shelters. Sometimes, Ben can be every unappreciative.

  Anyway, after my aging Kia breathed its last, Benjamin and I were forced to go back to taking our walks along the beach where we live. These daily outings are very important, since, according to his doctor, poor Benjamin is seriously overweight. I, on the other hand, am … Okay, let’s just say that I weigh a tad more than Ben does, and leave it that. To paraphrase Winnie the Pooh, Ben is what might be called “a beagle of very small brain.” He’s also a beagle of very small bladder, and since he wasn’t exactly at the top of his class at the $200 potty training program I paid for, his morning walk had become more precautionary than recreational.

  If he could talk, though, Ben would probably point out that if I hadn’t insisted that we take our usual beach stroll that morning, most of the really creepy stuff that happened to us wouldn’t have happened to us.

  Matt—Detective Lieutenant Matthew O’Connor—and I had enjoyed a brief history together, a history that ended abruptly, after just two and a half dates. The affair was, as the saying goes, ill-starred. It wasn’t even an affair, in the strictest sense of the word, but more like this really badly timed picnic. The kind where you get overrun by ants and mosquitoes and then it starts to rain before you even crack open the first container of potato salad.

  My life and career were in the pits at that time, and I was going through what might charitably be called a period of depression-induced over-indulgence. I was indulging in way too many weekend margaritas and/or frozen daiquiris. I’ve never really liked the taste of liquor, so if the beverage doesn’t involve fruit juice, blenders, and tiny paper umbrellas, I’m usually immune to the perils of the demon drink. But back then, if you offered me a frosted glass of something that looked and smelled like a snow cone, I would usually gulp it down and ask for seconds.

  Everything between Matt and me would have been just peachy if he hadn’t decided to confront me about what he referred to as my “drinking problem.” Mind you, I didn’t see it as a problem at all, but as a way of keeping me from thinking too deeply about my shitty life. Matt’s problem was chivalry. He was one of those increasingly rare males who think there are unwritten rules about sex with inebriated women. So, like the gentleman he is, he felt the need to rehab me before bedding me. I, on the other hand, have never liked people trying to improve me, since that would somehow suggest that I need improving.

  Anyway, we had a rather heated disagreement on the subject, and when it seemed like I was losing the argument, I felt suddenly inspired to bonk him over the head with a sugar bowl. It was kind of cute, really, like a scene from an old screwball romantic comedy. Unfortunately, Matt didn’t see anything remotely comic about either the smashed sugar bowl (a family heirloom, as it turned out,) or the bleeding head wound that resulted from the bonk. At which point the chivalrous gentleman disappeared, and the annoyed Alpha male took over. In less time than it took to ask myself, “What the hell were you thinking?”, Matt dumped me facedown over the kitchen table, hauled down my specially purchased just for him lace-trimmed panties, and began walloping my bared ass with a rubber spatula, while I shrieked bloody murder and threatened to castrate him with a pair of cuticle scissors.

  After that, it didn’t seem that our relationship had an especially bright future. Not only was being spanked with a rubber spatula humiliating in the extreme, but it hurt like hell. In a futile effort to avoid as much of it as possible, I kicked and squirmed and swore, but still went home that day with my butt on fire and my pride in shreds. Once there, I added to my own humiliation by crawling up on the counter to check out my backside in the mirror. My otherwise flawless ivory derriere was still sho
wing reddish spatula-shaped marks.

  I didn’t see Matt again for close to six months. He called a couple of times, to ask how things were going. Since this wasn’t a subject I was eager to discuss, I ended up making polite conversation until I ran out of things to say, and then said goodbye. I sensed that he was willing to try again, but for reasons I can’t really explain, I didn’t feel ready. What I didn’t mention, and what he probably would have liked to know, was that I had quit drinking right after what happened at his place. It wasn’t even hard to do. I’d never really liked it anyway, and while it had sometimes allowed me to forget for a few hours what a failure I was, I finally decided that living in a fog all weekend and going to work nauseated on Monday morning was just another stupid way to screw up my life. I already had plenty of those without having to pay for them.

  Then and there, I made myself a solemn vow. I would pull myself up by my bootstraps. I would get on the ball. I would turn over a new leaf, and get my act together—or else.

  Three days after I turned over my new leaf, the framing shop that had allowed me to keep a roof over my head went broke. I showed up for work one morning (payday morning, naturally enough) to find the place locked up tight as a drum, and when a quick peek in the front window showed that the walls and shelves had been stripped of everything of value, I knew I’d done it again.

  I have this amazing talent, you see, for jumping aboard ships that are in the process of sinking. Even the other rats on board seem to conspire to keep me in the dark, until that day arrives when I find myself alone on deck, with cold seawater bubbling up around my ankles.

  Two weeks later, with my apartment rent already overdue, I was saved from drowning—or so it seemed at the time, by a small ad in the local paper: “Artist wanted. Must be good copyist. High-end photographic studio. Great pay.”

  I started just two days later, copying people’s wallpaper onto armoires, tables, chairs—whatever they wanted. There were dining room and bathroom murals, and a lot of baby rooms featuring Winnie the Pooh and Beatrix Potter. Before long, I could paint Peter Rabbit and Piglet in my sleep. And when I wasn’t painting, I helped out in the adjoining photo studio. And when I wasn’t doing those things, I was expected to “help out around the house,” a rather broad job description which could entail anything from doing the laundry, to running errands. Not that I cared, at that juncture. It was a job. My boss was a guy named Gabriel Tannhauser, whose various business cards variously described him as a fashion photographer, and an art dealer. He was on the flamboyant side, and liked to brag about his “film industry connections,” but most of the time he was fun, and easy to work with. A little too flirtatious and touchy-feely for my taste, but since he never actually pushed it too far, what could happen, right?

  What happened was that after a few weeks, I began to like it when he “accidentally” brushed my breast while pointing out the little changes he wanted me to make in a project, or when he kept his arm around my waist when introducing me to somebody. Please try to remember that I was adrift on the sea of love, so to speak, with no welcoming harbor on the horizon. Gabe was mildly good-looking, in a sort of flashy, Hollywood way, and he could be really charming when he wanted to be.

  One thing I could never figure out, though, was exactly how the guy managed to live as well as he seemed to. The art studio seemed to be successful, and I sometimes had trouble keeping up with the commissions, especially with all my other duties, but I was savvy enough about Malibu real estate to know that the art business, alone, wasn’t coming anywhere close to paying the freight on either the boss’s house, or his lifestyle. If there wasn’t a very rich mommy or daddy tucked away somewhere, the boss had a few other irons in the fire that he wasn’t talking about.

  So, when he suggested that I move into the small studio apartment at the back of the house for the very modest rent of four hundred bucks a month, I ignored the storm warnings and agreed. My living there would be good deal for both of us, actually. Four hundred a month less that he’d have to pay me, and four hundred and fifty less than what I was paying for my admittedly ratty apartment in an equally ratty section of Hollywood. “Why not?” said I.

  And that’s how I became a crewmember on the doomed “Loveboat.”

  The cruise didn’t last long, and this time, I didn’t wait for the ship to sink. It wasn’t long before Gabe’s checks to me began to bounce, and daily life in what was essentially a poor man’s Playboy Mansion wasn’t as much fun as you might expect. So, when it finally dawned on me that I was surrounded by rats, I jumped overboard. Okay, so they were well-dressed rats in designer sunglasses, who drove around in silver-tone convertibles, but they were still rats. Jumping ship seemed like a good idea at the time. What I didn’t know, then, was that I was jumping out of the frying pan, and into the fire.

  The jump was a short one, at least. On one of my shore side strolls with Benjamin, I had been fortunate enough to meet a close neighbor named Carlotta—the highly eccentric seventyish lady with whom I was still living on the day all this happened. She was the proprietress of a sort of curio/souvenir shop, and lived just down the beach from Gabe’s. By a great stroke of luck, she was also in need of an artist with flexible skills. What’s more, she had a spare room I could have—for free! It was Fate for sure, or maybe just my usual rotten luck.

  No more Winnie the Pooh, thank heavens. Nope, Carlotta had me painting toilet seats—for around half of what Gabe had paid me, when he paid me, at all. And believe it or not, I considered the toilet seats a promotion.

  * * * *

  It suddenly occurs to me, dear readers, that in my eagerness to describe my dysfunctional love life to a bunch of total strangers, and share with them the gross details of the worst, most humiliating moments of my entire life, I’ve whizzed right by what caused to bring the police to my door in the first place. Allow me back up to the part where Benjamin and I found the mangled corpse on the beach, and try to explain how I wound up ass-deep in the murder of Gabriel Tannhauser, Malibu bon vivant and full-time sleazeball.

  If the name Gabriel Tannhauser doesn’t ring a bell, that’s probably because you don’t make a practice of reading the Hollywood gossip columns—not the big headlines in the major newspapers, but those smudgy, smarmy little bits and pieces near the bottom margins in the ratty local rags—where everyone’s name gets misspelled or omitted for lack of space. That was always Gabe’s style—backpage and bottom line, just below the phone porn ads. And if my description strikes you as insensitive, mean-spirited, and disrespectful to the deceased, it’s because you didn’t know the deceased when he was alive.

  He was called ‘“Gabe’“ by all his close friends, of whom he had, by my count, none at all. Zero. Nada. Zilch. Bupkis. I don’t like to speak ill of the dead and/or recently eaten, but I had learned that just about everyone who’d ever known him, probably since the day he bribed his way out of kindergarten, referred to Gabe as that “Rotten Little Prick.”

  Anyway, there we were, Benjamin and I, strolling along the beach that fine morning, bothering no one and thinking our own deep thoughts. Ben was probably thinking about what to have for breakfast, and I was thinking about how to scrape up enough dough to get the phone turned back on. (Carlotta was out of town on one of her mysterious and prolonged shopping expeditions, and had neglected to pay the bills before she took off, and it was beginning to look like I’d have to find a way to pay them myself.)

  I was running down my severely limited financial options when it happened. We were almost home when my reverie was disturbed by this odd little squishing noise. Benjamin had stepped in something. He looked up at me a bit curiously, apparently hoping for an explanation. Then, he took a tentative sniff of the mystery object, wagged his tail once, and massively threw up on my sneakers. And when I looked down … well, while I’m not quite as squeamish as Benjamin, it wasn’t the sort of thing I like to see before breakfast.

  A body, or part(s) of one. And a familiar body, at that.

  All of
you who saw the original Jaws movie will probably remember that scene where Roy Scheider finds the first victim on the beach, so I won’t need to explain to you the less attractive details of Gabe’s condition when I found him that morning. For those of you who haven’t seen Jaws, please go out and rent the movie. One picture is worth a thousand words.

  At first glance, it looked as if Gabe had been eaten, or snacked upon, by a shark and/or sharks, or maybe run over by an outboard motor of more than average horsepower. The truth is, I’ve lived in California on and off for years, and I’ve never actually seen a live shark, other than in an aquarium. I’ve never known anyone who was attacked by a shark either, but that disagreeable possibility seems to lurk just below the surface of many people’s thoughts. It’s kind of a primal fear, so my first reaction was to glance seaward for that telltale dark form and tall dorsal fin that haunts a lot of beachgoers’ nightmares. But it was only when I summoned the courage to take a second look that I knew for certain that it was, or had been, Gabe Tannhauser.

  There are frequent shark sightings in this part of Southern California, of course—and even the occasional attack, but the locals seem to take them in stride, the way we do earthquakes. People here can give you the Richter scale reading on tremors about as accurately as the experts on TV do—usually by watching their swinging light fixtures. Living in paradise has its drawbacks, but people have learned to make light of them, like they did the smog until they couldn’t ignore it, any longer.

  The thing about sharks, of course, is that when you live in a place like Malibu—widely considered to be a kind of paradise—the idea that a man-eating shark could be lurking just beneath the surface is like a metaphor for evil. A sunny day in paradise, marred by a frightening shadow on the water.