“Why don’t we call Vera in the morning?” Maybe she hadn’t been in this afternoon, and nobody else had bothered to answer the phone. “She’ll know how to reach Henry, and she’ll probably know if Alan’s still in Oxford. Plus, maybe she can connect me with Peter and I can find out what’s going on with both our books.”
I longed to talk to him. Not only because I was beginning to feel like a jilted lover again, but I wanted to resolve the question of my contract.
“You want to talk to him?” Rosalee looked at me as if I were a dimwitted child. “Why? He’s low-life scum. And that Vera is his pet—Alan said I shouldn’t trust her one bit. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, baby girl.”
The next morning, I woke still sniffly, but feeling a bit better. Rosalee’s potions seemed to be working—helped by the bright sunshine streaming through my dormer window.
Downstairs, I found Rosalee already dressed, coming in from assessing the damage to her cottage garden. She wasn’t in a good mood.
“The garden’s a mess, and I’ve been calling the Sherwood office all morning, and still nobody answers. It’s so unprofessional.”
I agreed, but tried to push away my anxiety. After all, Peter and the men might have stayed in Hull because of the storm. And sometimes Vera went out on the factory floor to help with shipping. Henry’s absence was worrying—unless it was his Wednesday off. Between my cold and the weather, I’d lost track of time.
“What day is it?”
Once we had determined it was indeed Wednesday, I explained about Henry’s Wednesday’s off and urged Rosalee to relax and enjoy a day in the garden. I reminded her how pleased everybody would be when we announced the edits were done. I promised to make more progress today.
My head-cold fog made Rosalee’s book seem more surreal, but I plodded through, cutting a lot of unnecessary description—especially of the men’s muscular bodies. An odd thing for Rosalee to write about so copiously, since her current paramours didn’t look as if they’d ever seen the inside of a gym.
After lunch, I attacked a passage where Robin Hood and Little John were trapped in a cave by torrential rains on a steamy August day. But after I’d cut a few of the purpler sentences, I stopped.
A steamy August day. Rain.
What happened to Rosalee’s California-centric disbelief in summer rainstorms?
I’d heard tales people who claimed to have “channeled” a book they believed was dictated from the spirit world. Those stories stretched belief—but so did the idea that Rosalee was the sole author of that passage.
I hoped to find the right moment to ask her what had inspired her rainstorm scene. But at dinner she was in one of her manic moods and talked nonstop. She’d decided to restart her elaborate plans for “our” book tour, apparently in preparation for her dreaded meeting with Peter. She seemed to think that my Manners Doctor celebrity would open whatever door she chose. Which might explain why she was being so gracious in opening up her home. I decided it wouldn’t be prudent to enlighten her.
“We need to have everything in place when we talk to them,” she said, barely stopping to slurp soup. “We need to launch at the Lincoln Book Fair in two weeks. Then we have to get on the Richard and Judy show. They’re like the English Oprahs or something. I don’t mean they’re black, but Judy is kind of fat, I think…”
It was probably my cold, but I couldn’t help tuning out. I sorely missed Charlie Vicars. I thought of the woman with the pram and wished I’d had a chance to ask if Charlie had taken a new position. If not, maybe Peter could hire him back.
“We should listen to the radio and see what stations have talk shows we can go on,” Rosalee was saying. “Alan says there’s this desert island show on Radio Four…”
I missed my radio. BBC Four had been my most constant friend during my time at Sherwood.
“I have a radio back in Swynsby,” I said. “When we get the car going again, maybe I can pick it up.” I hoped the crates would be gone by the time we got back to town. I needed to retrieve more than my radio. I had only two sets of underwear and they were taking so long to dry, I had to put on the rinsed-out ones while still damp.
“We’ve got a radio right now. In the rental car—duh,” Rosalee said. “If you’ll do the dishes, I’ll go check it out.”
As I washed up, staring out the kitchen window at Rosalee sitting in the still-mudbound Taurus, I pondered the amazing difference between the Rosalee Beebee who had written Fangs of Sherwood Forest and my volatile and clueless young housemate. I couldn’t quite made sense of it.
No more than I could make sense of Rosalee’s cries from the car, or her dramatic gesturing to me to join her.
I tossed on my raincoat and slogged through the mud to the car, where Rosalee sat, pointing in wide-eyed horror at the radio in the dash. A man’s voice was delivering the weather report in mellifluous BBC tones.
“It’s flooded!” Rosalee shrieked. “Swynsby-on-Trent. It’s under water. The whole riverfront. They found bodies. Right there on Threadneedle Street.”
Chapter 58—The Trespasser
I sat next to Rosalee inside the mud-trapped Taurus, trying to make sense of the terrible news: twenty-six inches of rain in fourteen hours—that’s what Swynsby-on-Trent received on Sunday, the announcer said. And ten more inches in the next two days. The whole riverfront had been flooded.
No wonder nobody had answered the phone at the Maidenette Building.
I thought of my idyllic first day with Peter, when he told me the Trent’s name meant “trespasser.” So the ancient river had trespassed into human habitat yet again. It was all too Mill on the Floss. I said a silent prayer for the safety of my friends. I couldn’t bear to think of anybody at Sherwood, Ltd. being drowned like the Tulliver siblings in George Elliot’s novel. Not even Alan Greene.
I tried to get information out of the hysterical Rosalee.
“What did you hear? You said somebody mentioned Threadneedle Street…?”
“Yup.” Rosalee’s sharp tone was almost smug. “They interviewed some guy who said he saw bodies floating around Threadneedle Street. Dead bodies. Everywhere. And some drunk ran out of the Merry Miller and got washed into a drain—it killed him, like, instantly.” Her tone rose with hysteria. “I wonder if it was one of those guys—Liam and Davey—with the way they like to drink. Hell, they could all be dead. That weird little dog, too. It’s insane. How could there be that much rain?” She gave a whimper. “Thank goodness Alan was in Oxford. But I know this will ruin all our plans…oh, god, why does this stuff always happen to me?”
I said nothing as tears of grief mingled with the product of my head cold. I rolled down the car window, breathing in the clean, rain-washed air, focusing on the misty-green Wolds in the distance. I tried to block out Rosalee’s dire hypothesizing, remembering that Much would have been safely out of harm’s way at the veterinarian’s—and Vera, too, since her house was in the hills. But as for the denizens of the Maidenette Building, Rosalee made a terrifying point: they did drink rather a lot—all of them: Peter, Ratko, Liam, and Davey. They might very well have been sleeping off a pub crawl on Sunday night, after celebrating that business deal in Hull…
No. I couldn’t let myself think that way. I turned back to Rosalee and faked a cheery tone.
“Don’t let’s kill off our friends before we get some facts, okay? I think we should call Vera Winchester at home. She’ll be able to tell us more.”
Rosalee gave a protesting sigh, but finally agreed to go back inside and try to reach someone with her cell phone. Unfortunately, the cottage had no phone directory, and several attempts to reach Swynsby information services didn’t go through. We tried calling the local constabulary number and the Swynsby Sentinel office, but got nothing but recorded messages. Ditto Radio Lincolnshire. By the time we decided to give up, it was too dark to think about digging out the car.
Rosalee ceremoniously made a pot of “calming” tea, with a variety of herbs she promised would knock us out. We
decided that tomorrow we could excavate the Taurus using a garden shovel and some plywood we found the shed. Then we would brave the muddy drive into Swynsby-on-Trent.
Or “Swynsby-like-totally-under-Trent,” Rosalee said, with a burst of black humor.
I knew there was nothing more for me to do that night but work to still the pounding worry in my heart.
Chapter 59—Swynsby-Under-Trent
Rosalee’s tea did its job and I slept like the dead until morning. The bright sunshine streaming through my dormer window seemed like a good sign. I cheered myself with the thought that Peter might sensibly have nixed a plan to transport and unload leather goods in the middle of a rainstorm. I worked on visualizing the four men happily weathering the storm in some dockside pub in Hull.
Even my cold seemed better. At least it had moved from the feverish stage to merely fountainous. After blowing through a number of tissues in the decorative pink box on the bedside table, I went to the window. I was amazed to see Rosalee already at work outside, putting down the plywood in front of the Taurus’s embedded tires.
I threw on the bunny suit and ran down to help with the car. When I got outside, I could hear voices coming from the radio.
“They still don’t have any names,” Rosalee called. “I guess they haven’t identified all the bodies. We’re going to have to drive in there to find out what the hell is going on. Oh, my god, I hope this doesn’t hold up the publication of my book…”
I said nothing. Rosalee’s self-absorption was so predictable, it was almost soothing.
Rosalee said she had experience getting vehicles out of mud, since they had mostly dirt roads where she grew up. And she proved herself right: after rocking the car back and forth, she got it out of the hole and onto the more solid paving of the driveway.
After a quick breakfast, I started to go upstairs to change, but Rosalee turned on me with a burst of anger.
“Our publishers—our friends—might be dead in the streets, and you have to change into Armani? Please. Camilla, sometimes you’re so narcissistic!”
I forced a smile and got into the car wearing the muddy bunny suit.
It was slow going along the boggy country lanes as we made our way toward Swynsby. While I drove, Rosalee recounted what she had learned about the flood from the radio. The Trent hadn’t actually overflowed its banks, she said. Ironically, the disaster was caused by newly-built barriers along the riverbank. The barriers, designed to protect the town from floods like the one that killed the woebegone characters in the Mill on the Floss, had prevented the record-breaking dump of rain from making its way into the river. The first torrents had clogged the floodwall’s drain system with debris, and after that, the water had nowhere to go.
But apparently a concerted unclogging effort had allowed the water to drain quickly. In fact, Swynsby-on-Trent looked mostly undamaged as we drove down the winding road into town. Even the old medieval section looked unchanged, except for a bit of mud between the cobblestones. It wasn’t until we reached the riverfront that we saw signs of real disaster. Mud caked the lower stories of factories; windows were shattered or boarded up, and doors had been torn loose from their hinges. I had to raise the car windows against the smell—raw sewage, rot, and the stink of death.
As I turned onto the still-soggy Threadneedle Street, I took shallow breaths and said a silent prayer.
The parking lot of the Maidenette Building, although much puddled, was dry enough to enter. It was full of vans and various utility vehicles. A team of men in orange vests and hard hats were gathered around the delivery entrance to the warehouse.
I scanned the lot for Peter’s Mini, and relaxed a bit when I didn’t see it. I took it as a good sign. He and the others must indeed have stayed in Hull with their merchandise.
But I tensed again when I remembered the crates in the warehouse. What would the inspectors do when they found them? Would they report their find to the police?
Rosalee tried to peer into the mud-caked windows, but the men shooed her away.
“They don’t seem to understand you live here,” she said, a little too loud.
I steered her away. This wasn’t the time to discuss the fact my living arrangements were not entirely legal.
“They better not mess with your stuff. I can’t lend you my clothes forever.”
But as I stepped over a muddy heap of debris, I began to lose hope of getting my wardrobe back. I recognized the titles of ruined Dominion books that had once formed the walls of my Wendy House. The water must have flowed through the warehouse with considerable force—probably taking my things as well as the Sherwood inventory. There was something tragic in seeing books—even smutty ones—soaking in a puddle. Lucky for Gordon Trask that he’d stolen a few of his books before the flood. They’d all be gone now.
We peered through the muddy, but intact, windows of the office end of the building, which didn’t seem as severely damaged as the rest. I caught sight of Vera, who bustled out to meet us, cool and businesslike in her navy blue suit.
But her eyes were full of worry.
“They won’t let you two inside, I’m afraid. They have to make certain the building is sound. They can’t turn on the power until they’re confident we won’t all be electrocuted. They’ve cleared the office area, which didn’t have as much damage as the rest of the building, but they’ll only allow essential management personnel in there. That seems to be me. Henry’s back in Nottingham. He wasn’t making much sense, so I sent him home.” She shook her head as if she were talking about a slow child.
I was almost afraid to ask.
“Peter...? Liam, Davey and Ratko? Are they...?
“Liam and Davey are fine, but Mr. Ratko and Peter…” Vera’s look darkened. “No one’s seen hide nor hair of them since the flood.”
My mouth went dry.
“Maybe Peter and Ratko are still in Hull?” I tried to hide my panic. “Peter drove to there on Sunday morning.”
I couldn’t bear to think what I was thinking.
“All I know is Peter was here in the building on Sunday evening,” Vera shook her head sadly. “But after that…we simply don’t know.”
Chapter 60—Not Precisely All Right
“If Peter Sherwood was sleeping in the building when the flood came, he’d have been totally drowned…” A triumphant smile passed over Rosalee’s face before she put on a somber mask to match Vera’s. “How horrible…”
Fighting the urge to do violence to the gloating Rosalee, I urged Vera to elaborate.
Vera spoke slowly, as if she were relating the events of a dream, “I should have got more information out of him. But you see, he kept ringing in the middle of our Sunday tea, and George and our Callum were terribly irritated with all the interruptions. They thought he had a nerve, to call of a Sunday evening, out of the blue, when he’d left me alone with that lot for months. Callum calls this place the Smutworks, and they both keep begging me to quit. But where can I find another position at my age?”
She waved her hand, dismissing the thought and went on.
“What Peter wanted was last month’s accounts, which he couldn’t find. That wasn’t a surprise to me, since Henry’s head has been all in a muddle since Alan Greene took over. Peter must have called five times. I kept telling him to try the desk Alan had been using, and Henry’s—but he said he had cleared out both of them, and finally… well, I turned off the telephone. Or rather, Callum did. I’d made a nice shepherd’s pie that was getting cold…” Vera bit her lip. “So we finished our tea, and had a bit of Stilton for afters. Then I did the washing up…”
Rosalee gave an impatient stomp. “Yadda yadda. So what happened to Mr. Sherwood?
Vera gave her a cold look and went on with her story.
“It couldn’t have been more than an hour later that I turned on the telly and saw the awful flooding. I rang the office, but nobody answered. I tried Peter’s mobile, but he hasn’t restarted his service, and…” She gave a heavy sigh. “I haven
’t heard from him since. I don’t know if he ever found those accounts. They’re certainly gone now.” She gestured at the muddy mess inside.
I tried to keep my voice calm.
“But you know Peter was in the building? During the storm?”
If Peter had interrupted Vera’s evening meal, that would have been around seven o’clock—hours after the rain started. The water would have been building up around the clogged riverbank by then.
Vera gave a half-smile. “Peter said he was planning to leave at any moment. He and Mr. Ratko. He was in an awful rush to leave Swynsby. That’s why he kept ringing, you see.”
So. Peter had been planning to take off again without a word to me. I took a breath as anger joined my mix of emotions. “He was leaving again? Without saying where he was going?”
Vera nodded. “He told me they’d be back Monday week, but didn’t say where they were off to—or when they were planning to leave. Or perhaps he did… and I didn’t hear. I had me menfolk talking my ear off at the same moment.”
“So you don’t know if they left…or not?” I tried not to sound hysterical.
Vera sighed. “I have to believe Peter left before the flood and he’ll come back when he hears what’s happened.”
Rosalee, who had been peering through a window into the office, turned and gave them an eye-roll.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Mr. Lowlife Sherwood is going to show up for clean-up day? Alan said he was moving some big smuggling shipment. If he’s not dead, he’s probably off celebrating with his gangster friends.”
So Alan knew about the “shipment.” And so did Rosalee. Not good news for Peter, wherever he was.
But Vera dismissed it all with a head shake.
“That’s twaddle, Miss Beebee. Another of Alan Greene’s fairy stories. Everything Alan Greene says is twaddle. You should stop up your ears. That’s what I do.”
Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. Page 20
