Hard Fall Read online

  Summary

  Five days after the Loma Prieta earthquake strikes San Francisco, Emily Bryson, a young, everything-to-live-for lesbian SFSU student/part-time exotic dancer, is dead, her body washed up on a beach south of the Golden Gate Bridge. The medical examiner rules it a suicide, and the police close the missing person case filed by Emily’s lover, K. M. “Stone” McStone.

  Stone, the university’s graduate admissions officer, doesn’t believe it’s a suicide. The Emily she knew had too much going for her to take her own life. Through a series of fortunate circumstances, Stone is introduced to Zoe Martinelli, office manager of Coppola Investigations, amateur sleuth, and student psychic. Stone and Zoe team up to find out what really happened to Emily. Their investigation takes them into the private lives of San Francisco’s exotic dancers and into Emily’s dark past where they discover that some secrets can be deadly.

  Was it suicide, as everyone assumes? Or murder? Or something else?

  Hard fall

  a mcstone & martinelli thriller

  Hard Fall

  a mcstone & martinelli thriller

  Pascal Scott

  Sapphire Books

  Salinas, california

  Hard Fall: A McStone & Martinelli Thriller

  Copyright © 2019 by Pascal Scott. All rights reserved.

  ISBN EPUB - 978-1-948232-68-5

  This is a work of fiction - names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without written permission of the publisher.

  Editor - Tara Young

  Book Design - LJ Reynolds

  Cover Design - Fineline Cover Design

  Sapphire Books Publishing, LLC

  P.O. Box 8142

  Salinas, CA 93912

  www.sapphirebooks.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition – June 2019

  This and other Sapphire Books titles can be found at

  www.sapphirebooks.com

  Dedication

  For Josette, my Muse and Traveling Star.

  Acknowledgment

  Thank you to Josette Murray, beta reader and wise counsel; LJ Reynolds, book designer; and Tara Young, editor extraordinaire. Thanks also to Christine Svendsen and Sallyanne Monti for welcoming me into the Sapphire Books family of authors.

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Her given name was Kathleen Mary, a name that didn’t suit her at all. She went instead by her abbreviated surname Stone. K.M. McStone, it read on her desk placard in San Francisco State University’s admissions office, next to the flip card that showed the day’s date. Today Is: Monday, July 13, 1987, it read on the day Emily walked into her life.

  “K.M.?” Emily pondered aloud.

  Emily had been next in line to present her application for the university’s graduate program. Stone had focused her attention on the proffered papers, absently noticing the smooth, red-nailed hand holding the unfolded form. Stone heard the voice—a smooth, self-assured contralto—but stared at the papers, not the face.

  “Kiss Me?” Emily asked.

  “I beg your pardon?” Stone looked up.

  Involuntarily, Stone caught her breath. Before her was probably the most beautiful woman she had ever seen. Emily was model tall—and Stone liked her girls tall—close to six feet in come-fuck-me heels, which she wasn’t wearing but Stone was imagining. All sixty-nine inches of Emily’s flawlessly sculpted body seemed to be made of endless legs. Emily had one of those long figures that started at the toes and seemed to rise up forever, leading the eye to the small hips, the narrow waist, and the perfect, round breasts. For the first time in longer than she could remember, Stone felt the overwhelming primal response of instantaneous desire.

  “K.M. I was trying to guess what it stands for,” Emily explained. “Humor. I was going for humor.”

  Stone didn’t laugh. Or smile.

  “Guess it didn’t work.”

  She had beautiful eyes, too—blue-gray, the color of a storm cloud. Intense eyes. Hypnotic eyes. The kind of eyes that set their sight on you and didn’t let you go, that made you feel like you were the only person in the world worth looking at. And she didn’t blink. Those stormy blue eyes didn’t seem to blink.

  “Sit down, Ms….”

  Stone glanced at the name at the top of the application.

  “Bryson,” they said in unison.

  Emily sat in the chair alongside Stone’s desk and crossed her legs, right over left. She wore a silky white blouse unbuttoned to the dip of her cleavage and a short black skirt. Disappointingly, Stone saw that Emily was wearing white sneakers, not stilettos. Watching Stone’s gaze on her legs, Emily slid her skirt up just a little, just enough to tease.

  She’s flirting with me, Stone thought and then reprimanded herself for being distracted. Beautiful women were one of Stone’s weaknesses. Beautiful women and alcohol—often together—were the two causes of virtually all the bad choices she had ever made in her life. She forced her gaze back on the packet as she flipped through the pages.

  “Application, transcripts, undergraduate work at UCSC,” Stone said.

  The University of California at Santa Cruz. She glanced at Ms. Breathtaking, making sure her expression revealed nothing of what she was thinking. Or lusting. Emily shifted in her chair, recrossing her legs, now left over right.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Business major, women studies minor.”

  “Business major,” Stone repeated.

  “My father insisted. Women studies was my choice. Business was his.”

  “His nickel, I suppose,” Stone said and paused. “Bryson. Any relation to Bryson Industries?”

  “Yes, my uncle is the CEO.”

  “That’s a Midwest company, isn’t it?”

  “Hammond, Indiana. My hometown.”

  Stone considered Ms. Privileged Beauty a little more closely.

  “How’d a nice Hoosier girl like you end up in the Bay Area?” she asked, still maintaining her poker face.

  “Hammond,” Emily repeated, as if it were obvious. “Indiana. Born, bred, and fled.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Stone said, nodding. She’d heard it a hundred times: small-town lesbian flees the conservative Midwest for the promise of the liberal Pacific coast. “I see you’re applying to the graduate program in women studies.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a very competitive program.”

  “I know,” Emily said with just a trace of self-doubt in her sweet voice. Could it be that there was something in Emily’s world that Daddy’s money couldn’t buy?

  Nah. People like the Brysons had long arms. Stone shuffled the papers, searching.

  “Two letters of recommendation?”

  “They’re included.”

  “Here they are. The only thing I don’t see is the personal statement.”

  “No, it’s there.”

  Stone looked again and found the essay. Silently, she read the first paragraph.

  “Patriarchal heterosexuality may be deconstructed in the postmodern terms provided by feminist theorist Gayle Rubin; that is, as a traffic in women,” Emily’s essay began. “A traffic in women is the use of women as exchangeable objects; i.e., as symbolic male property used to cement relationships between men. As a sex-positive lesbian feminist, I am applying to the Master of Arts program in Women Studies at San Francisco State University to be engaged critically with the oppositional analytical category that is le
sbian sexuality.”

  Oh, yeah, Stone thought, she’ll get in.

  Reshuffling the pages, Stone rearranged the papers until they were in the required order.

  “That should do it,” she finished, paper-clipping the application and setting it in a tray marked “Outgoing.” Emily gave Stone a thin, red-lipped smile that seemed to get stuck on her bright white teeth.

  “You should hear one way or the other within the next thirty days,” Stone concluded.

  Emily remained seated.

  “Something else?”

  “No,” Emily said curtly. She got up from the chair. “Thank you, K.M. It was lovely meeting you.”

  Emily extended her right hand to shake. Stone glanced at the offer. That hand looked awfully inviting. No, that’s how they get you. Instead, Stone resisted, nodding brusquely, avoiding the danger of that temptingly soft skin-to-skin contact.

  “Next!” she called, looking to the next applicant in line.

  ****

  The flowers arrived a week before the fall semester, delivered by a hunky guy in khaki shorts. Stone was surprised by the mixed bouquet of late-summer blooms and the card that read, “I was accepted! And I couldn’t have done it without you. Call me sometime and let me take you to dinner to say thanks.” A local phone number followed, below which she had written her name in a floral scrawl next to a neatly drawn heart. Emily.

  Slumming, Stone thought, crumpling the card and tossing it at a wastebasket across from her cubicle. She missed. Stone was bending to retrieve the missed shot when Marcus returned from his afternoon break. Eyeing the bouquet, he made a beeline for her desk.

  “Ooh, flowers,” he cooed.

  “You should have been here for the delivery boy.”

  “Oh, damn. Did I miss somethin’?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So who’s the sender? New girlfriend? You been holding out on me, Stone?”

  “No.”

  “Old girlfriend?”

  “No!”

  Marcus splayed his fingers beneath the petals, fluffing the blossoms to make them look fuller.

  “Who then?”

  “Someone who got into grad school.”

  “And for that you get flowers?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Jeez, am I at the wrong desk, honey,” he said. “Later.”

  “Later,” Stone replied.

  Stone moved to drop the retrieved note into the wastebasket and paused. Reading the message one more time, she reconsidered. And then, against her better judgment and although she wasn’t quite sure why, Stone slipped the card into the pocket of her Dockers. Emily. With a heart.

  Chapter Two

  “So,” Stone said, “women studies, huh? What do you plan to do with a degree in women studies?”

  They were in a back booth in the Outlaw, a bistro in the Castro. The Outlaw had been Emily’s choice, which was only fair since she was paying. Stone figured Emily had chosen it because it was within walking distance of her apartment. It wouldn’t have been Stone’s choice. Her restaurant was La Cocina on Mission, and her watering hole was a lesbian dive in the Haight called Mabel’s. Emily had left her Toyota van parked on the street and walked to the Outlaw. Stone had driven her old Dodge truck and had lucked out by finding a parking space right in front.

  Emily was on her second glass of chardonnay. Stone was sipping Perrier because when she had asked the waiter for bottled water, Perrier was what he brought. Stone was on the wagon, again. This time she hoped it would stick. She couldn’t face the prospect of going back to AA, sitting in a stuffy room with a crowd of remorseful dykes who were supposed to be anonymous but were anything but. Stone knew from personal experience that what she confessed at the Wednesday night Lez-B-Sober meetings went out into the community by way of buzz. Sometimes it was immediate, sometimes eventual. But it happened. It was just human nature to gossip. You couldn’t change that. Stone was a private person. Her personal business was hers alone. No, Stone would try to stay sober on her own.

  “You sound like my father,” Emily said, responding to Stone’s question with slight agitation. “‘What do you plan to do with a degree in women studies?’ I plan to teach. After I get my graduate degree, I’ll find a teaching assistant position while I work on my PhD.”

  “Wow. Ambitious,” Stone said.

  “Two and a half years at State and as many as it takes to get my PhD. I’ll be done before I’m thirty. Thirty-five at the latest.”

  “Because you’re how old now?”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “Twenty-two, huh,” Stone said.

  “Yes, my birthday is January 20. Aquarius, on the cusp of Capricorn, if you’re into that sort of thing.”

  “I’m not,” Stone replied.

  Emily ignored this. “What are you?”

  “Taurus.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “It does?”

  “Taurus is an earth sign. You’re down-to-earth, level-headed, sensual.”

  “I guess. What’s Aquarius like?”

  “Aquarius is an air sign. Aquarians are a force to be reckoned with. We’re not a light breeze. We’re more like a tempest.”

  “Wow.”

  “Don’t worry. Taurus can stand her ground with an Aquarius woman. I won’t blow you away.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Let me ask you something else,” Emily continued. “How old are you? No, wait. Let me guess.”

  Emily squinted those impenetrable blue-gray eyes while she considered. “Hmm. You’re in good shape. You work out.”

  “I do.” Stone was proud of her body, and why not be proud? “I put in the time; I might as well take the compliments” was her attitude. “At the gym at State, though, not The Women’s Gym,” she added.

  The Women’s Gym was the trendy new place for upwardly mobile dykes to show off their biceps in front of floor-to-ceiling mirrors and the plate glass windows that faced Market Street in the Castro.

  “The Women’s Gym, I’ll return to that in a moment.” Emily pointed a manicured finger at the air, as if to mark her place.

  Stone saw a flash of red—red nails, red lips, red cheeks. Stone steeled herself. She had a weakness for a woman in red.

  “Yes, so you work out,” Emily was saying. “You’re obviously more mature than a lot of the women I date—”

  “Thank you, I think,” Stone interrupted, noting that Emily seemed to consider this meeting a date, a first date.

  “You’re self-confident but not cocky. You consider before you commit. Those are signs of an S.O.L.”

  “A what?”

  “An S.O.L. A Slightly Older Lesbian.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m assuming you’re gay.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Then I’d say you’re an S.O.L. Maybe thirty?”

  “Ha!” Stone exclaimed. “Thirty-eight! I’m old, baby.”

  Baby. As soon as she said it, Stone regretted using the endearment. Even dropped casually, baby was not a term to be tossed lightly at a woman like Emily. Because Stone already knew that with Emily, it couldn’t be casual, that if she gave in to desire and went there, a love affair with Ms. Emily Bryson of Hammond, Indiana, would be anything but a casual one-night hookup. There was too much going on below that sexy surface, beneath that brainy armor of intellectual defense. Emily’s theoretical certitude was just a veneer. Stone saw it all the time in academia, in admission essays, and the everyday speech of tenure-track professors. No, if she went there, Stone would have to commit. And that would be a mistake better not made.

  “Well, that’s not exactly May-December,” Emily said.

  “No?” Stone challenged.

  “No,” Emily said firmly, as if something had been decided. “Now enlighten me about The Women’s Gym, why you’re not a member.”

  “I suppose you are?”

  “Yes, I am,” Emily confirmed. “I try to support women-owned businesses whenever I can. I can bench-press eighty-five po
unds, by the way. That’s meant to impress you.”

  “It does,” Stone said truthfully. “Tell me something. Why do you say yes instead of yeah. Nobody says yes like that. Or is that a preppie thing?”

  “It’s a respect-for-the-English-language thing,” Emily retorted. “But I suppose I got it from my mother. She was an English teacher.”

  “Was?”

  “She’s dead. She died of a stroke when I was eleven.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  “Any brothers or sisters?”

  “No, I’m an only child. But you’re avoiding the subject, K.M.”

  “What subject? And call me Stone.”

  “Stone.” Emily let the word rest on her tongue as if she were tasting it. “Are you stone, Stone? I wonder.”

  Before Stone could answer, Emily had returned to her earlier question.

  “The Women’s Gym. Why you’re not a member. That’s what I was asking.”

  Stone sat back, wishing she had a Bud in front of her now instead of expensive French water. “I can’t afford it,” she said.

  “That’s it?”

  Stone sneered. “That’s it. Not everyone comes from money.”

  There, she had said it. Emily didn’t miss a beat.

  “True,” she countered. “And not everyone appreciates the disadvantages of wealth.”

  Mid-sip in her Perrier, which she was drinking out of the bottle instead of from the glass the waiter had provided, Stone choked and then coughed, trying hard not to spit out her mouthful of fizzy water. When she had gulped it down, Stone managed a comment. “Wow,” she said.

  Emily raised a perfectly plucked eyebrow but ignored the remark. “For example,” Emily began, “there are parental demands that working-class children are spared. My father wouldn’t pay for my college education unless I majored in ‘something sensible.’ I really had no choice.”