I typed a quick sentence to Plant saying I was devastated by his news and had moved in with Roslaee and would write more soon. He didn’t need to hear the dreadful news about Peter. Not yet.
I had a headache, too, plus body aches and an increasingly sore throat. There was probably nothing more I could do right now. It had been a horrible day. I only wanted it to be over. The little attic room at Fairy Thimble Cottage would be a welcome refuge.
But sleep proved no escape. I had terrible dreams all night about swimming in the Trent with rats and mangled bodies and flotillas of muddy copies of Good Manners for Bad Times, while Peter called for help and Silas threatened us all with a chef’s knife.
I woke to pale dawn light, practically drowning in my own sweat. I threw off the stifling duvet. The trip to the loo downstairs took every bit of strength I had, and my throat felt as if I’d swallowed fire. I couldn’t face the prospect of climbing back up the stairs, or the horrors of another nightmare.
I decided to sit down at Rosalee’s computer and, bathed in its soothing blue light, started to work on Fangs of Sherwood Forest. I hoped the detail-heavy editing would keep my mind off the grief of losing Peter, the grim news about Silas, and my fizzled career hopes. Besides, since I was living off Rosalee’s largesse, I had to earn my keep.
I found editing easier without Rosalee’s endless chatter, and realized that now that I had my own laptop, I could copy the manuscript and work in my own quiet little room. But sometime in the middle of transferring the file, I must have fallen asleep. I woke with Rosalee standing over me holding a cup of steaming tea.
“You look awful,” Rosalee announced. She put a cool hand on my forehead. “You’re a sickie, baby girl. You were passed out on the keyboard when I woke up.” She handed me the cup. “This should help. It’s got honey, lemon, pennyroyal and elderberry. The elderberry makes you sweat. You should go upstairs and get under the covers and sweat it out. I’d take you to a doctor, but they’d just give you some antibiotic, which won’t help a virus, and those things create superbugs, anyway.”
I didn’t look forward to more perspiring, but on the other hand, I knew I couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. British citizens got free health care in the UK, but as a foreigner, I’d have to show proof of insurance from home. Which had lapsed long since.
The tea was soothing, and so, in a strange way, was Rosalee. She was almost motherly as she helped me back up the stairs.
“Don’t work too long. Take a nap every couple of hours, okay, baby girl?” She tucked me into the narrow bed like a sick child. “I’ll bring breakfast and then I’m going out. I guess I have to learn how to drive on the wrong side of the road sometime. I’m going for groceries. And some DVDs. We totally need DVDs. We can watch them on my laptop. I don’t know how you can sit and read moldy old books night after night.”
This seemed an odd sentiment for a novelist, but then Rosalee was nothing if not odd. As the day wore on, I kept coming back to my “channeling” theory of the book’s authorship. Once the syntax was cleaned up and extraneous passages pared down, it wasn’t a bad read—sort of Twilight meets Robin of Sherwood. However—except for the endless recipes for herbal remedies—there didn’t seem to be much of Rosalee in it.
The story got gayer and gayer as Marian disappeared for long passages. The scenes of Little John’s jealousy over Robin’s philandering made me think of Plant and Silas. I wondered if Silas could actually be guilty of murdering Lance. Perhaps he had the double-standard of the old-fashioned primary bread-winner: he could have his affairs, but Plant couldn’t. Plant did say he and Silas almost broke up about Lance once before.
I had a scary thought: maybe Silas sent me away because he suspected I’d find out he’d poisoned Lance.
I tried to stifle my disloyal thoughts with work on Rosalee’s book, but when I came to an orgy with Will Scarlett, Robin, and several inebriated bishops, I laughed out loud. Giggles overtook me and I laughed until I hiccupped.
Rosalee, coming in from her shopping trip, called from downstairs to ask if anything was wrong. When I pulled myself together, I answered truthfully that things were improving. My cold had gone from incapacitating to merely annoying. Rosalee’s teas seemed to be working.
Along with a DVD of the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Rosalee had managed to acquire something called “peanut butter spread.” She made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that were enough like the real thing to give me a pang of nostalgia. Even though Rosalee was of such a different class and educational background, she provided a comfortable familiarity I could never feel with Brits.
“Don’t you miss home sometimes?” I asked Rosalee as I washed down the gooey sandwich with milky tea. I hadn’t eaten PB&J since childhood, but it soothed my sore throat. “Do you think you could live in England permanently?”
“I have to,” Rosalee said. “I have fibromyalgia, which I treat myself with herbs, but with that diagnosis on the books, I can’t get insurance—ever. So if I get cancer—my life is over. That’s what happened to my mom. The diner where she’d worked forever couldn’t afford to pay benefits any more, and she was too young for Medicare, so she didn’t go to the doctor. By the time she ended up in the emergency room, the cancer was everywhere. She had to sell her trailer and the car and died sleeping in her ex-boyfriend’s basement on an old cot. I don’t want to go like that.”
I felt empathy as I watched Rosalee lick grape jelly from her fingers. She had suffered more than her share of tragedy.
“I had to find a safe place to live,” she went on. “Canada’s too cold, and it was like I’d sort of lived in England already with the RenFaire. I thought Colin was my ticket. He seemed like an okay old dude—a major dork, of course—but I thought I wouldn’t have to worry about competition for him. Stupid me.”
It might have been my virus-frazzled brain, but I started to follow her loopy logic.
Rosalee scooped a fingerful of the peanut butter from the jar and licked it. “I figured fat old Brenda wouldn’t be much competition either, so Alan was my back-up plan. I don’t have a clue what’s going on with that bitch—or him. Vera thinks Alan and Henry are hiding out until the police get finished investigating the dungeon. Like maybe they’re embarrassed to talk about all the kinky stuff that was down there.” She got up and washed her hands. “I don’t know how a lady like Vera can work for a bunch of porno guys, do you? She’s like some ’fifties housewife.”
“You’ve talked to Vera? Today?”
Rosalee was right: Vera did have a kind of honorable, maternal reliability that seemed to come from another time.
Rosalee poured more tea. “Yeah. She’s way stressed. She was creeped out when they asked her to go in and identify the bodies.”
Peanut butter turned to lead in my stomach. “She identified…Peter? She’s sure?”
“Not really. Vera said the faces had been mostly eaten by rats. The other guy had an ID on him—some ex-con. Vera said his name was William Barnstable.”
I barely made it to the bathroom before my dinner came up. If one of the rat-eaten bodies was Barnacle Bill, I had to accept the other was very likely Peter. He’d as much as admitted he and Bill were doing some kind of business together. And Gordon Trask said they were long-time partners. Who else would have been with Bill in that dungeon?
Peter was really, truly dead.
Chapter 65—Gay Best Friends
I woke from my nap to see Rosalee coming in the door with a cup of chamomile tea. “Not that it matters, with everything screwed up at Sherwood. But how is it going? It’s a good story, huh?”
“I’m enjoying it,” I said, glad I didn’t have to lie. “I like the way you’ve played with the idea of a gay Robin Hood—doing the Robin Hood/Maid Marian relationship as a gay man/straight woman thing. It makes sense. It’s always seemed odd to me that Marian’s called a “maid” if she’s in a sexual relationship with Robin—I mean, since ‘maid’ meant ‘virgin’ back then.”
Rosa
lee set down the teacup with a rattle.
“What did you say to me?” Her face distorted with anger. “Did you just call my book gay?”
I was way too weak to argue.
“Didn’t you mean it that way? Sorry. My best friend is a gay man. Maybe I see a gay sensibility where it doesn’t exist.”
Rosalee screwed up her face and grasped the teacup in a white-knuckled grip, as if she were about to throw the contents in my face. But after staring into the cup for a moment, she let her face relax into a bittersweet smile.
“Me too. My ex-husband was gay—or well, bi. I didn’t know when we got married; I thought he was being a gentleman.” She sat on the edge of the bed, in girl-talk mode. “But we stayed friends after we split—best friends—right up till when he died.” She bit a trembling lip. “He’s only been dead since March. Sometimes it doesn’t feel like he’s really gone…”
I saw genuine grief in her eyes.
“March? Your ex-husband—your best friend—just died? How awful.” The pain of losing Peter felt overwhelming, and I’d only known him a couple of months. Rosalee had lost a lifelong friend less than three months ago. Maybe her erratic behavior was part of her grieving process.
Rosalee’s eyes teared.
“Yeah. He died of a heart attack. After he was gone, I didn’t feel like there was anything for me back home. That’s when I decided to move to England. I guess it was nuts, but Colin had been so nice to me…” She sniffled.
I handed her the tissue box.
“I empathize. My gay best friend has been in the hospital recently. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost him. He’s like a brother.”
Rosalee gave me a hug.
“That was us—totally. In fact, he was better than a brother. My real brothers are lowlife scum.” She jumped up, the tragic moment over. “Talking about low-life scum, I’m going to go phone Alan again. He still won’t return my phone calls, the jerk.”
As I drifted off to sleep, I was grateful to have a better understanding of my countrywoman. No wonder Rosalee was so protective of the book. It was her bond with her dead husband—all she had left of a man she had loved and missed terribly.
I felt better the next morning, and barreled through several more chapters of Fangs of Sherwood Forest, wanting to cut mercilessly. It was a fun take on the Robin Hood myth, but scenes like the orgy with the bishops veered dangerously close to farce.
At lunch—canned soup, because I could not face peanut butter again—I tentatively asked Rosalee about the cuts and braced for a burst of angry protectiveness.
But she gave me a blank look.
“Oh, yeah. You can cut that. Cut all that. It was…well, that part was my ex-husband’s idea. Yeah. I guess I should have told you he did help with the book. A little.”
For someone who made such a habit of lying, Rosalee wasn’t terribly good at it.
But I wasn’t going to press the point.
“Why don’t I transfer what I’ve done to your computer and you can go through it and see if my cuts work for you, okay? I know you may find it hard to see so much of your husband’s work cut, but…”
Now, inexplicably, Rosalee’s anger burst forth.
“I told you, I don’t want to mess with that thing any more. I’m done with it!” She yanked away my half-finished bowl of soup. “Isn’t it enough that I’m waiting on you hand and foot?”
I realized I had indeed been letting Rosalee take on all the household chores as I convalesced. I rose to help clear the table.
“I’m sorry. I appreciate all your help. I didn’t mean to pressure you…”
Rosalee pushed me back into my chair with a forceful shove.
“You did too. You’re trying to get me to say I didn’t write that book. You think Lance wrote it!”
I felt dizzy again, and the shove knocked the wind out of me. I wasn’t used to people who resorted to physical violence in literary discussions. But I was quite sure Rosalee had just called her gay ex-husband, “Lance.”
Odd coincidence. Dead Lance from the San Francisco bookstore had written a novel, too—what had Plant called it? “A medieval vampire/werewolf saga—writteneth forsoothly.” Plant hadn’t mentioned a collaborator, however.
“Your ex-husband—his name was Lance?”
Chapter 66—Madri-Gal
Rosalee turned her back to me and ran water into the dish pan, saying nothing for several moments. My mind was madly trying to connect dots. How could Rosalee possibly fit into the drama going on back in San Francisco?
When Rosalee swung around again, her anger had dissipated.
“My husband’s real name was Larry,” she said in a conversational tone. “He was from the San Joaquin Valley, like me. But he moved to San Francisco and got all Goth and gay.”
Now I had no doubt. Rosalee had been married to the unfortunate coyote-gnawed bookstore clerk with the Goth tattoos. I tried to keep my face serene. She didn’t need to know I was the one who had found her ex-husband’s body. It might bring more emotional outbursts. And shoving. I would prefer to avoid further shoving.
I retreated to platitudinous safety.
“That must have been difficult for you. But how nice he managed to keep working on his book, even with the temptations of big city life.”
“His book?” Rosalee’s voice crescendoed. “I told you—it’s not his book. It’s mine! I don’t appreciate your accusations.” She trembled with rage of a bizarre intensity. “It was all my idea—mine! I’m the one who figured out Marian was a vampire. Me! You know how? It’s in the old songs. I know all the songs—the Child ballads. You know what they are? They’re like the Bible of folk songs, and thirty-eight of them are about Robin Hood. We sang them at the RenFaire. The Madri-Gals. That was our group. An all-girl group. Lance couldn’t sing. He couldn’t carry a tune in a goddam bucket.” She clanked dishes with angry emphasis.
I took in this piece of extraneous information with a polite nod. I’d heard of the traditional Scottish Border ballads collected by Francis Child in the 19th century, but found it hard to picture Rosalee as a student of them.
“You shut up,” Rosalee said. “I’ll prove it to you. Listen.”
I didn’t move a muscle as Rosalee stood by the sink and sang—in a rather pretty contralto—the same old ballad about the death of Robin Hood that Liam performed that night in Davey’s lair. There was a verse about Robin Hood feeling sick and going to a priory, where a woman “pierced his vein, and let out the blood, the thick, thick blood/and afterward, the thin.”
Rosalee gave a triumphant smile.
“You see? I was in the middle of singing that one afternoon when I had this like, total epiphany. ‘That lady’s a vampire!’ I said. I’d never even been that into Robin Hood before that. Mostly I figured he was kind of a RenFaire version of Green Arrow.”
I thought the verse sounded like the description of a medieval medical procedure, but I knew better than to say so.
Rosalee went on, with increasing fervor.
“See, Robin was dying and he went to Maid Marian for help and she took his blood. Why would she do that, if she loved him? Well, I figured it out: that’s what vampires do to make you immortal. The other Madri-Gals thought I was nuts, but that night I told Lance and he got all excited and said one of Robin Hood’s nicknames was “Wolfshead”—so it was obvious—Robin Hood was totally a werewolf.”
I continued my “I’m listening” head motions as Rosalee barreled on.
“So right then, Lance and me decided we’d quit the Faire and become rich and famous writers. But since I’m bad at all that grammar stuff, I told him he should write down the words, but since it was my idea, we’d split the profits fifty-fifty.”
I credited it to my debutante training that I was able to hold my face in a polite smile while hearing such amazing nonsense.
“I see. So you had the idea, and your ex-husband wrote down the actual words?”
I felt sad for poor Lance—dealing with an ex-wife who h
ad no idea of the soul-crunching labor involved with “just writing down the words” of a novel.
Chapter 67—Clueless Pills for Breakfast
My sarcastic remark had obviously gone sailing over Rosalee’s head.
She gave me a hug. “Finally, somebody gets it! Lance was just writing down the words, but it was all my idea—well, mostly. I would have helped, but after we quit the Faire, Lance said he couldn’t write in Buttonwillow. So he went to San Francisco and got a job in some gay porno store. I couldn’t get up to visit him that often, because my boss at Taco Hut would never give me two days off together.”
I thought of Rosalee galumphing through the Castro Street bookstore and felt compassion for Lance. That brought a memory flash. Plant had told me about Felix having to deal with Lance’s “high school girlfriend or whatever she is.” That had to be Rosalee.
She went on. “Then, if you can believe it, after I did all the work contacting Sherwood Publishing, and getting Alan Greene to accept it, we were just waiting for Mr. Sherwood to give the okay—and suddenly Lance got weird and acted like it was his book. He made an appointment to meet Mr. Sherwood—by himself—without even telling me until, like, a couple of hours before. I think Lance’s snotty Hollywood boyfriend must have made him do it.”
My neck went prickly.
“Lance—your ex-husband—had an appointment with Peter Sherwood?” Even through the woolly-brain of my cold, a glaring fact came through: Peter had lied about knowing Lance/Larry the bookstore clerk.
“When did they meet—Lance and Peter?”
Rosalee sat down and leaned her elbows on the table.
“They had the appointment at the bookstore in San Francisco on the day Lance died. The actual same day. Maybe the stress killed him. We knew Mr. Sherwood was coming to the City to talk to Lance’s boss, and Lance was supposed to tell me a few days before he got there so I could get off work, but he didn’t call till that morning and he acted like he didn’t want me to come.”
Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. Page 22
