Keeping It Together

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1

Cameron woke slowly, her eyes not yet open. As she did every morning, she thanked the cosmos for her lover, Dr. Margaret Thomason. They’d known each other for almost twenty years but had never broached the subject of love. Maggie had been her best friend and control when she worked for the CIA. Maggie had always sworn that she was straight and they had known each other’s significant others.

When Cam’s wife, Michael…really Michelle…was killed in the debacle in South America five years ago, and Cam was imprisoned for an assassination she hadn’t committed, it was Maggie and Pauly who found her after over thirty months. Pauly had been her best friend since they graduated from the police academy together all those years ago. He had found her and brought her home. She spent several months in a hospital to repair the damage caused by that time in a foundry cell and in a mountainside coca farm. She’d been exonerated but spent more time at her sister’s house in Lexington, Massachusetts to get her head back together. The prison hardship and the grief of losing Michael had left a deep wound on her psyche. It wasn’t until she went back to the Vermont home she and Michael had shared, visited with Michael’s family, and wept at Michael’s grave that she began to heal.

When Cam had finally realized how much she had depended on Maggie and how much she meant to her, their relationship had begun to blossom. Maggie had really been in love with Cam all that time but was reticent to tell her while they were working so closely together. Now they lived together in a beautiful house overlooking a finger of Chesapeake Bay.

Cam started to turn over, but something was preventing her from moving. She tried to raise her arms to rub her eyes, but her hand didn’t reach her face.

Cam quickly opened her eyes and looked down at her arms. Her forearms were encased in thick leather bands that were secured to the edges of the bed frame. Another wide strap was spread across her chest so that she couldn’t sit up. She tried to reach up to move the breast strap, but the straps that bound her forearms the bed weren’t long enough to even touch it.

Cam tried to bend her knees to shift her weight, but her ankles were also tethered to the bed with what felt like the same hard latigo.

What the hell is happening here? she wondered, filled with dismay and confusion. Where am I?

She raised her head to look around the room. The room didn’t look familiar at all. It was a small room, painted a cool, light industrial green. There wasn’t any other furniture in the room except the bed on which she lay. There were no windows, but there were two doors: one to the right at the foot of the bed, and the other at the end of the room. That door had a small, round window in it. The walls were bare. The floor was tiled in a single color, a shade darker than the walls.

Cam fought to try and break the restraints, but the straps didn’t even stretch a millimeter as she struggled. They were buckled tightly and securely.

She laid back and stopped her struggling. She thought back, trying to remember where she was and why she was here. Had she been hurt in an accident? Had something happened to her? The last thing she remembered was fighting the crowds at the mall. What was she shopping for? Presents for her sister’s birthday? Oh yes, that beautiful, over-priced, magenta silk blouse with dainty little gold buttons. It would look perfect on Lori.

Cameron had been retired for over three years. She’s been surprised at the retirement package Craig Roberson, the director of the CIA, had offered her. It was more than generous. As an operative for both the CIA and the DEA, she’d traveled around the world doing a myriad of assignments under several different identities. The assignments she’d been given called on her life-mission to get drugs out of the hands of young people and on the education she’d received at the Universidad de Barcelona where she’d gotten a master’s degree in International Affairs. Her background in law enforcement also added to her value and she found herself more in demand as time went on. After three long years locked away in a South American prison for a crime she didn’t commit, she’d returned home. Now, even though she was not quite fifty, she was enjoying her retirement with Maggie.

Wasn’t she?

But where was she now?

Cam lay there and tried to remember what had happened. Today had started slowly, hadn’t it? It was a beautiful sunny day. She’d been sitting in her favorite Adirondack chair on the deck of their house overlooking the water…