Brownie Oxford and the Riverview Revenge

By Valerie Gaumont

Still reeling from her abduction and escape from the rogue Agent Halloran, Brownie Oxford, still living as Bonnie Brown must resume her disguise and pretend that all is normal while she deals with the aftermath. What will happen when Steve and Swift finish dealing with the dead? What will happen to the symbol carved body of Dr. Harding? What havoc will a freed Mesopotamian demon do? Who can she trust? Who must she fear? And more importantly, can she maintain her normalcy through her scheduled date with Tom when no one seems to be who they say they are?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Valerie Gaumont
• Release date: Dec 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463497906

Valerie Gaumont

Valerie Gaumont is an evil genius whose mission is to take over the world. Her latest efforts were thwarted when her flying monkey army discovered beer. Currently they are in Rehab because no one likes a drunk flying monkey. (Thank you for your cards and letters of support.) When she is taking a break from villainy she can often be found with a pen in her hand. Yes, sometimes she is doodling, other times writing fiction and discovering new and interesting ways to combine reality with the outré. She has had short stories in the Violet Ampersand Anthology, Poetry, Prose and Other Voyages to the Edge, and the online Journal, Gothic Fairytales for Melancholy Children. In 2007 she was listed as a finalist in the William Faulkner International Writing Competition in the Novel-In-Progress category.

Book preview

Brownie Oxford

and the

Riverview Revenge

Book Five in the Brownie Oxford Series

Valerie Gaumont

Copyright 2019 by Valerie Gaumont

License Statement

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Chapter 1

I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. Fingers of early morning light snuck in around my bedroom curtain. I twisted my head on the pillow to the bedside clock and saw that I had a little more than an hour before my alarm went off. A little more than an hour before I had to face the day.

Whatever this day would bring.

Since running from Mayenfield, hiding from my former handler, Swift, and the National Clandestine Services or NCS, each morning began more or less the same. I woke up and reminded myself that I was now Bonnie Brown instead of Brownie Oxford. Then I went to the bathroom, used a flat iron to straighten my tell-tale curls and inserted brown contacts to hide my green eyes.

As I applied make up, contouring my face so I looked as little like myself as possible at first glance, I reminded myself that Bonnie could not speak to the spirits of the dead. She could not walk into a cemetery, say hello and push power into the ground and make the spirits rise.

Bonnie could do none of that.

Even if Brownie could.

I reminded myself of the unsavory dead I had to talk to in order to get answers for Swift and his cohorts. I remembered the injuries and the painful recoveries. I thought of the isolation and how I was viewed as some sort of freaky experiment.

Then, I thought of the good things that were now in my life. I was able to study fashion instead of dealing with mass graves. I had friends, actual friends who, even if they didn’t know about my past, my special skills or my real name, knew and liked me. I thought of how despite the name change I was actually getting to figure out who I really was beyond my skills with the dead. I thought of how much I didn’t want that to go away.

It made the disappointment and challenge of altering my appearance on an ongoing basis worth the effort.

I looked away from the clock to study the shifting shadows dancing across the ceiling and sighed. An hour left or not, I knew I wasn’t going to get back to sleep. I reached over and turned off my alarm, sitting up in bed.

Last night things changed.

I just didn’t know what those changes meant.

I slid out of bed and walked over to the bathroom. Change or not, I needed to become Bonnie to at least start my day. As I showered, dried and straightened my hair and put in my brown contacts, hiding Brownie away, I deliberately did not think about the night before. I kept my mind perfectly blank. I dressed for Bonnie’s day, went to the kitchen, made myself some blueberry pancakes, settled at my table and began to eat while the coffee percolated off to the side.

I finished my pancakes, washed everything I used to make my breakfast and set the items in the dish drainer to dry. With my belly filled and the knowledge that my nutrient levels were balanced with no threat of my bilirubin levels causing me stomach upsets and jaundice, I poured my first cup of coffee for the day.

As I took my first sip, I let myself think about the night before in all its multi-faceted glory. Yesterday evening after class I went to meet Mrs. Avery for an early dinner. For secrecy’s sake was calling herself Emma Potts. Her role in the evening’s drama was as a friend of my deceased grandmother who stopped in on her way to a wedding to check in on me.

Jessie, I reminded myself. I frowned.

When arranging to meet me, Mrs. Avery called my grandmother Jessie. When running I was still unsure of the Averys. I didn’t know how far I was willing to trust the couple and didn’t give them all that many details of my arrangements. When figuring out my past life prior to relocating and staring school, I looked up obituaries for a woman approximately the right age as my recently deceased faux grandmother and used the details I found to expand my story, blending fact with fiction for a more believable story. It was a trick Swift taught me, although I doubted he expected me to use it against him.

With reality helping me out if I ever needed to expand my story, I would be ready and not have to stumble around trying to think up details on the fly. The woman I used was named Janice. Having no other name I needed to use for my deceased grandmother, I kept the name for my backstory. It kept it simple and if anyone checked, a cursory examination of Janice would appear to validate my story. As long as no one went to where the deceased Janice lived and spoke to whatever friends she left behind, I would be in the clear.

Of course Mrs. Avery didn’t know that.

And called my grandmother Jessie.

I was beginning to trust the Avery’s more, but they weren’t my closest confidants. They along with a host of deceased family members buried on ‘The Hill’ at the Matheson estate expected me to return to Fairview and the Matheson ancestral home. There they expected me to complete my training as a necromancer carrying the Matheson bloodline. What they expected me to do beyond that, I didn’t know. Our few conversations didn’t actually touch on that topic as there were more immediate concerns. As the only living Matheson I ever met was Cecil Matheson, who hunted me down and threatened to kill me, I was a bit unclear as to what the normal daily life of a necromancer involved.

Or if I’d want any part of it.

Not that I mentioned that to either Mr. or Mrs. Avery. If they were willing to help me with information to help keep me safe until I could return to the estate, I wasn’t going to mention that I wasn’t sure I wanted to return. So as long as I didn’t mention that, the couple could be trusted, to a point.

‘Besides, so far no one has asked me my grandmother’s name either, so it didn’t cause any alarms when they overheard the conversation.’

That the conversation was overheard, I didn’t doubt. I wasn’t entirely sure who over heard the conversation. Steve Wallace, my ‘new neighbor’ knew of my meeting at The Seabridge Restaurant, as did Agent Halloran. They weren’t exactly working together thought. In fact Steve was hoping to catch Halloran.

‘Can two people bug the same phone?’

For a second I sat drinking my coffee and thinking about that. I used a cell phone for my conversation with Mrs. Avery/Potts. I doubted anyone wanting to listen in attached a physical bug to my cell phone but I was positive that some sort of technology existed to let them listen in on my conversations. I just wasn’t sure how close they needed to be to do so.

Steve rented the apartment right across the hall from me and Swift, in his guise as retired Agent Mike Johnson, was in the apartment that shared a wall with my living room. As Mike and Steve were technically on the same team, either apartment could have been used to eavesdrop on me. Halloran I only saw on campus, at least until last night. I wasn’t sure how he knew where I would be at the Seabridge Restaurant to meet Mrs. Potts as that conversation was held only in my apartment and I didn’t mention my plans to anyone else.

‘Maybe Halloran was in one of the empty apartments,’ I thought.

Surprisingly, it wouldn’t be all that difficult. After the team of serial killers dubbed ‘The Cemetery Three’ were arrested there were a lot of people who decided to look for a different place to live. A few months later when a team of searchers visited the area and tried to lure me out of hiding by dropping a dead body on the lawn, quite a few more of my neighbors decided it was time to move. At the moment my apartment building was less than one third occupied. Nicole, the building manager reported rentals were on the increase, but there were still a lot of empty apartments in the building.

I looked up at my ceiling and wondered if anyone lived on the floor above me. I lived in this apartment a little over a year and had never heard a single sound from the apartment above. I chalked it up to good insulation and quiet neighbors. Now I wondered if the apartment was occupied at all or if it was one of the empty ones.

‘It would make an ideal hiding spot,’ I thought.

I started to wonder how I would go about figuring that out and then realized I was stalling.

I really didn’t want to think about the night before.

Truthfully, it started off fine. I met Mrs. Avery at the Seabridge. She pretended to be Mrs. Potts, a subterfuge that was largely unnecessary as the restaurant was crowded and noisy and no one was near enough to listen in, even though I later found out Steve was there watching.

After dinner and my chat with Mrs. Avery, in which she told me a second team of Searchers would be visiting my area, we went our separate ways. I crossed the parking lot only to be abducted by Agent Halloran and Dr. Harding. They didn’t take me far, just into the mechanics garage next to the restaurant. They also didn’t search me or my purse and missed the flash drive Mrs. Avery passed me. I was hoping it would have useful information on it, but as of yet hadn’t had the time to investigate.

Halloran and Harding wanted to test my blood to make sure I was the person they knew as Betty Watson, the cover identity Swift gave me when I first started working with the NCS. From the conversation I gathered the disgraced Agent Halloran, now that he was no longer an agent, had plans to use my skills with the dead to make himself piles of money.

He was light on the details, but I didn’t think his plans meant fuzzy bunnies and sparkly rainbows for me.

Luckily for me, when Swift switched out my fingerprints with Betty Watson’s in my file, he put Betty’s blood type in the file as well rather than mine. The real, and very deceased, Betty had a blood type of B positive while I was O positive. While I didn’t know too much about it, Dr. Harding assured both me and Agent Halloran that I could in no way be Betty Watson. It was a medical impossibility. He was also somewhat bothered that they seemed to have kidnapped the wrong girl.

Despite knowing Dr. Harding since the age of sixteen, until then I didn’t realize that he could be bothered about something. Admittedly, I was pretty sure it was the problem I presented to his experiment as the wrong girl instead of actual remorse for kidnapping an innocent bystander, but it was still more human feeling than I thought he possessed.

Despite being told it was impossible for me to be Betty, based on modern medical science, Halloran was willing to try one more test to be one hundred percent certain.

Unfortunately for Dr. Harding, the final test required a body and Halloran decided the good doctor would be a fine candidate. While I never liked Dr. Harding and in all honesty couldn’t say I was sorry that he was no longer among the living, I did not enjoy watching him die.

At close range.

Halloran slit his throat while Dr. Harding was facing me, coating me with blood and giving me a front row seat to his death. I knew that once I had time to process everything, I would have nightmares about his death.

‘I probably only avoided the nightmares last night because too much happened in too short a space of time,’ I thought.

I took another sip of my coffee and noticed my hand shook a little threatening to slosh the coffee over the rim of the mug. If there was one thing I learned in my seven years working with Swift, it was how to hide my fear. I may never be the consummate actor he was, able to pull on different personas the way other people pulled on a fresh