Final Transition

By Nancy Castaneda

Susan Soble is a fifty-one year old mother of two and a half grown boys. She is also an ex-principal, ex-equestrian, ex-wife and now an ex-best-friend after a brutal murder that she is determined to solve. To the dismay of her lover, Detective Carlos Alvarez, Susan uses her equestrian, school and family contacts to uncover a new suspect in that murder, all the while fending off her increasingly volatile ex-husband, Peter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nancy Castaneda
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311510099

Nancy Castaneda

Nancy Castaneda spent most of her athletic years around horses. She now lives a quiet, horseless life in Connecticut with her Colombian husband and their golden retriever, but memories of her horse years are never far from the surface of her thoughts and enrich the fabric of her books.

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Final Transition

Copyright 2014 Nancy Castaneda

Published by Nancy Castaneda at Smashwords

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-six

About Nancy Castaneda

Other books by Nancy Castaneda

Prologue

As soon as I turned Lofty to gallop up the grassy hill I could feel we were going to be in trouble. He was lumbering, tired, without his usual enthusiasm. He didn’t even seem to see the huge fence we were approaching that would take all of our combined skill to negotiate. I knew that behind those railroad ties stacked in jagged asymmetry there was a steep, rocky drop-off. We had to jump on a diagonal or he would land dangerously far down the hill. To the right and to the left of the penalty box there were already crowds of people jostling for a good view of the treacherous landing. If there was going to be a spectacular fall on this course, it was going to be here.

I put my reins in my left hand and smacked Lofty hard on the flank with my bat. That did it. It hadn’t hurt him but now he knew that I meant business. He wasn’t focused yet on the monstrous jump, but at least he was paying attention to me. I was able to get him to come in correctly and when he finally registered the enormity of the task before him, his enthusiasm returned. He got his hindquarters under his giant frame for one last powerful stride but, just as he was about to jump, a cell phone rang in the closing crowd. Lofty’s ears flicked toward the sound and he hesitated. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. We crashed into the immovable barrier with all the power of a two-ton machine. As I shot forward, horseless now, sailing into empty space high above the rocks, I heard that damn cell phone go off again.

I never hit those rocks. I opened my eyes, instead, to my familiar, downstairs bedroom that had once been the dinning room of my old two-story colonial. The cell phone was still ringing.

But I didn’t have a cell phone.

The doorbell rang again. I glanced at the clock. Six O’clock! Who was at my door at six O’clock in the morning?

Dragging my somewhat decently clad self out of bed, I opened my bedroom door, shuffled three steps into the entry hall and slid the safety chain on before I warily opened the front door. What I saw made me quickly undo the chain and open the door all the way.

A woman in a police uniform stood there with John.

Susan! John wailed as he fell crying into my arms, all of his teenage bravado abandoned.

What is it, John? What’s wrong? I smoothed his hair as he sobbed unchecked, clinging to me with his head buried in my shoulder.

The woman answered for him. His mom got murdered tonight, poor kid.

Sally? Sally? I looked at her in horror.

She nodded. John, here, found her when he came home. He said he had no family now. He wouldn’t let us call anyone, just toughed out the questioning himself. Then he asked us to bring him here.

Still in shock, I just stared at the woman.

She misinterpreted my silence. It’s OK? That he’s here?

Of course, I finally found my voice. I sounded strange.

We stood there for a moment with John sobbing in my arms.

The woman got it now. Sorry for your loss, Ma’am.

She reached out to touch John’s shoulder. We need this poor lamb at the station after he gets some sleep.

I’ll take him down there later. I managed. Thank you for bringing him here.

Guiding my still sobbing John into his new home, I closed the door. Sally was dead. I struggled to accept that impossible fact. I needed more information. But before I could find out anything more about what had happened to her, I needed to take care of her son. At eighteen he was not really a child any more, but this morning he needed a mother.

John continued to sob in my arms as I took him over to the long sofa in the living room and pulled an afghan around us. It wasn’t cold in the room but it was something comforting I could do and I was out of my league. John’s was a sadness that I couldn’t imagine.

Sally was John’s whole world. His father had died before he was born and Sally had made it her mission in life to be sure that John had everything he wanted. Without her, his life was going to be completely changed.

I didn’t try to say anything. Nothing could reach this boy’s grief. I had raised two sons and comforted them through numerous tragedies, but never anything like this.

I was also struggling to absorb what had happened. Sally was dead. I didn’t know anything more than what the woman had told me. I had seen Sally just yesterday at the awards luncheon for high school seniors. John had been given the science prize and she had been ecstatic. I could see her face now, beaming beside me in the audience. It didn’t seem possible that she was gone.

Eventually John fell asleep out of sheer exhaustion and I was able to extricate myself and get a pillow from my bedroom to put under his head on the couch. I didn’t dare move him to a bed for fear of waking him.

Free from supplying John’s immediate needs, I went into my bedroom and, while I got dressed, I tuned the television to the local station run by the college. They were scrolling THIRD WOMAN MURDERED IN FOXTON across the bottom of the screen, but they weren’t reporting any more than that yet. They were showing a clip I had seen two nights ago. The father of the first woman murdered in Foxton was shown at his last news conference railing at the police for their incompetence. He reminded me of the old films of Hitler rallying the German public. He was a little man with small, intense eyes. His fist banged the lectern and his glued-together hair flapped in response as he ranted in loud, short sentences.

My wonderful daughter and that other beautiful, young woman are dead! Dead! And no one cares. Our police force is a joke! They talk and talk and they don’t do nothin!

He trained his wild eyes at the camera now. You other women out there, you’all lock your doors, you hear. Cause your police don’t care nothin about you.

I turned it off. He would be worse tonight. Sally’s murder would give him more fuel for his destructive fire. It didn’t matter whether her death was related to the others, or not. He would burn up the town this time.

Oh God! Sally. Was she just a statistic? The horror of the last few months in Foxton had become personal now. My stomach lurched as Sally’s murder hit home.

I needed to call the boys. I didn’t want them to hear about this from the television. As my best friend, Sally had been their second mother as they grew up.

Stephen, my eldest, answered with a slurred hello.

Stephen, I’m sorry to wake..

Stephen interrupted me, What’s wrong Mom? I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

Stephen. Sally’s dead. The connection was quiet for a while.

What happened?

She was murdered, I don’t know anything else.

Oh Mom. Why? I could hear that he was trying not to cry.

I don’t know. They brought John here. I don’t know anything more.

How’s John.

Not good.

Mom, I’m going to wake Edward and we’ll be right over.

Thank you, Stephen. Would you call your father? He should be told.

I can’t Mom. He’s up at camp. I’ll drive up there later. We’ll be over soon. You going to be OK?

I’m OK. But it will help to have you here.

I hung up. My ex-husband was at camp. As usual he would be off playing his man games while I handled real life. My fury was never very far from the surface these days and now it shifted to Sally’s senseless murder. As I made the bed and cooked a breakfast for the boys, that fury grew until I could easily have outdone that crazy, ranting father on television. But I knew I would do more than yell about Sally’s murder. I would fight!

One Year Later

Chapter One

Looking in the mirror was not something I enjoyed. I certainly didn’t often stand there after a bath naked, studying each oversized piece of my fifty-one year old body. But that was exactly what I was doing that Saturday morning. I was trying to see the beautiful Susan Carlos saw, or said he saw, last night when we made love.

Either he was lying, or he saw something that I didn’t see. Beautiful was many years behind me. Every part of my body that once was the muscle I needed for riding event horses, had turned to fat and my white, burn-and-peel skin was rippled with cellulite. My hair was good, long and still blond, and I was tall enough at five ten to look as if I were in proportion, but the mirror no longer showed a beautiful woman.

It wasn’t depressing. I had long since accepted my aging body and consciously decided not to try to remain at my fashionably correct weight. As far as I was concerned, the advertising world was dictating unrealistic weight limits. Years ago I observed women in their fifties and sixties and found that the dried-up skinny ones didn’t looked soft and feminine. They looked old. As far as I was concerned, women were supposed to look like women, with curves and padding. Besides, my big boobs would look ridiculous on a stick figure.

Enough! I was OK with my body the way it was, but I was not going to believe beautiful. Carlos was lying. That was all right too. All Latin lovers called their women beautiful. That was why we fell for them. A little romantic exaggeration was good for the soul.

I turned away from the mirror and wrapped my bathrobe around my body before I opened the bathroom door. It was a good thing that I had, since John was just outside the door, at the top of the stairs.

Just get in? I asked.

He answered with a grunt as he went past me into the bathroom. John was incoherent in the morning whether he was getting up or going to bed.

Where’s the aspirin? he grumbled as he searched the medicine cabinet, knocking bottles of pills into the sink.

Reaching over his shoulder, I pulled out the Bayer, shook out two and handed them to him. He swallowed them dry, grunted again in the way of thanks and stumbled downstairs to his converted sun-porch off the living room.

I put the pill bottles back, wondering again why I still put up with John. He was a walking disaster. He never seemed to notice the trail of broken, dirty or just scattered things he left in his wake. At first I had thought that he just didn’t understand the responsibilities of living with others, but after repeated attempts to retrain him, I had given up.

He had an excuse, of sorts. I knew better than anyone what Sally had been like. She and I and had ridden together in high school and had formed a strong friendship that we had picked up again when I returned to Foxton after college. She was still single then, but a few years after I married Peter, she married Sam. A year later she was a single mother. She barely had time to get over the car accident that killed her husband before she gave birth to John.

All of her swirling emotions were then channeled into raising John. When he started Kindergarten, she volunteered as an aide at his school just to be near him. She took guitar and piano lessons with him so that they could practice together. She pushed him, coddled him and protected him. She did everything but shit for him until that night when she became victim number three in the series of horrible local murders that were still unsolved.

I knew, now, that John found her at about two in the morning when he got home after a night of forbidden drinking with his friends. At eleven minutes after two he called 911 and by six he was at my door. He never went back. His friends had brought his stuff over and packed Sally’s personal belongings in a suitcase that I have in the attic if John ever wants it. Her clothes went to Good Will and the furnished apartment they had rented still sat empty.

For all of Sally’s fanatic attention to John, she never got around to getting any life insurance. John’s plan to go to college had been short-circuited so he got a job working unpredictable shifts in a small clothing distribution center, and hated every minute of it. If I had the money I would gladly help him more than by just giving him a place to live, but I left my career as an elementary principal just before Sally’s murder and was living on my small retirement. It was enough for me. My expenses were not very high. I owned my big colonial and didn’t have any family to support anymore.

My boys were still single and had both landed solid administrative jobs at the college. I was one of those lucky parents who didn’t worry about her children at all. They lived together about three miles from our homestead in a big, rundown Greek revival that they were energetically fixing up. Although I dreaded the day when one of them got married and they would have to split up their assets, there was plenty of time yet before that was likely to happen. Both of them were still joyously playing the field of college women.

My ex, Peter, on the other hand, was pointedly not playing the field. He had decided that he wanted me back and was doing everything he could to convince me that remarrying was what I wanted too. It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t and I told him so, again and again. He didn’t seem to get it. Ever since I had started dating Carlos, the one detective who had listened patiently to me in my furious attempt to force the police to find Sally’s killer, Peter had been trying to get me back. Fat chance!

My memory was a little longer than that. I remembered landing on the floor when he kicked my sleeping body out of bed for snoring. I remembered the angry explosions that ended every discussion. And I remembered the call at five am, two years ago, telling me in which motel I could find him with his pretty new secretary. That secretary was very young, a classmate of Stephen. The call was from her husband who had since, wisely, convinced her to move to Cleveland with him.

Twenty-two years of our slowly dissolving marriage had ended with his lies and cruelty. I would never go back to him. Thank God he had not decided to hold onto me before the final divorce papers came through. I had purposely severed all direct ties by refusing alimony. Basically, I got the house that I had stupidly put in both of our names when we got married, and he got the rest.

Poverty wasn’t really bad. It certainly wasn’t as awful as earning a living as a school administrator. Maybe being a principal was once a prestige position but lately it had become an impossible job. Every decision an administrator made was inspected under a microscope. All parties: parents, community, students, faculty and administration, were given a say in the workings of a school. It sounds good. But in practice the idea degenerates into a stagnating struggle for power with