For 74 years, the Palatine Club had held a week-long August retreat at Poderoso Pines. It was the longest-running tradition in the oldest men's club in California. They had missed 1942, what with the pressure on businesses to produce war materiel, but not a single season during the Depression years.      

     

    Now there was a dead woman on the bridle path beyond the east grove, and the retreat, only half over, was in danger of being  ruined.    

     

    She was fully clothed, if not according to the dress code for women guests at the club's townhouse in the city. This was the country, after all, and she was not an invited guest. No women were allowed at Poderoso Lodge. Fortunately she was outside the fence.    

    

    For much of the night, she had lain belly-up on the dark forest path, like a fish floating in a bed of kelp. Now and then the moon  broke through the clouds, but the pines were tall, the Douglas firs thick in this part of the woods, and what little light reached the  forest floor only dappled the path like moonlight on moving water.

    

     She was slight, her limbs splayed out at what could have been painful angles. There was no visible line between skin and clothing, her fair hair and skin very pale and the folds of her dress rippled out around her. A high-heeled sandal was tethered to  one foot by its ankle strap. Several times she seemed to sigh, unless it was a breeze moving through the cooled forest. The edges of her dress lifted and settled, and leaves shifted around her body on its soft pallet. Sometimes her hands stirred, made little sculling motions by her side and then were still; sometimes her feet twitched.      

    

        

 

 

The foregoing is excerpted from What Goes Around by Susan Diamond. All

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