I nodded, encouraging her to go on. Pieces were falling into place.
“Lance had been weird ever since he gave the manuscript to his Hollywood boyfriend. I think that snot must have wanted the story for himself. I hated that guy. He got Lance to start drinking some fancy-ass vodka. Did you ever hear of anything so stupid: forty dollars for a bottle of alcohol that has, like, no taste? For all I know, that stuff could have been what killed Lance. He never used to drink anything but beer.”
I tried not to react as Rosalee maligned Plantagenet. I didn’t need to add to the drama by disclosing that the hated “snot” was my best friend. Right now I needed to get the facts straight about Peter’s connection to Lance.
It could prove Silas’s innocence.
“Lance met Peter Sherwood in San Francisco on the day he died? You’re sure?”
“Yes! No…” Rosalee’s lip quivered. “I’m not sure of anything. I got somebody to cover my shift and drove up there as fast as I could, but…by the time I got to the apartment, Lance was dead! Only thirty-two years old and his heart just gave out…” She gave a piteous sniffle. “I was sure he had some kind of condition, but he couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. I gave him herbs, but who knows if he followed my directions…”
Fighting my dizziness, I stood and put a sisterly arm around Rosalee. I remembered Plant saying Lance’s hometown girlfriend “took clueless pills for breakfast”—a sad but accurate description. Rosalee had apparently never thought it suspicious that Lance “dropped dead” on the day he was to meet Peter.
She didn’t even seem to know the police had ruled it a murder.
Or that they’d arrested Silas.
Just as well. The evening didn’t need any more dramatics.
“Whose idea was it to contact Sherwood Publishing in the first place? Did Lance and Peter know each other from…someplace else?” I tried to sound casual. In my heart, I wanted to mourn Peter, not prove he was a murderer. But I had to find out.
Rosalee went back to the dishes and handed me a towel.
“No way! It was my idea. Like everything else. I met Colin, and Colin told me about Sherwood Ltd. He read about the company in the Swynsby Sentinel and told me how to submit the manuscript. But then I waited and waited and didn’t hear a damned thing. So I started surfing the Robin Hood sites, asking if anybody knew about Sherwood Publishing. Right away, I got an instant message from Alan Greene. It seemed like destiny—him being a Sherwood editor and everything—so we started sending each other, like, twenty emails a day. A lot of it was text sex, but we talked about Fangs of Sherwood, too.”
I tried not to think about text sex between those two illiterates.
“So how did Lance contact Peter? Did he know he was going to be in town?”
“That was totally my idea, too. I was visiting the bookstore after Christmas, and I saw those porno books from Sherwood, Ltd., so I asked his boss, Felix, if he had a phone number so I could get them to hurry up and read the manuscript. Felix said Mr. Sherwood was coming to California, and he’d set up a meeting if he could.”
“So they made an appointment for Lance to talk to Peter about his book? Did Peter actually say he was interested?” I dried a plate, trying to figure out why Peter would have agreed to meet with an unpublished author of “unreadable dreck.” Maybe Felix had championed the book in an attempt to keep Lance from leaving. Peter had mentioned reading some “rubbish” Robin Hood books by American writers.
“You said it again! His book.” Rosalee slammed down her dishrag. “It’s not Lance’s book. It’s mine. Don’t you ever tell anybody anything different, do you hear me?”
She yelled with such feral anger that she seemed about to sprout some of her Marian’s paranormal fangs.
After setting down the plate, I managed to say something vaguely reassuring about undying silence and escaped to my room with mutterings about a nap. As I climbed the stairs, I realized that only one thread tied together what were otherwise a credulity-stretching set of coincidences surrounding the death of Lance McMerlin.
That thread was the late Peter Sherwood.
Chapter 68—Out of the Way
Thanks to Rosalee’s teas, I slept deeply and didn’t wake until nearly noon, when Rosalee appeared with more tea and news, her mood sunny again. She said she’d talked to Vera, who told her Henry would be in the office tomorrow.
“She says she expects Alan will be back too, at least for a couple of days. I told her to let them know I’m almost finished with the rewrites. Can you download them to my flash drive? I guess I should read them after all. I’m sorry I yelled about it before. I guess I’m totally stressed from the flood and everything.”
I plugged the sparkly green drive into my computer.
“It’s nearly finished. I’ve only got a couple of chapters to go.” I wasn’t pleased to hear that Alan was back in the picture. That made things fairly hopeless for my own book, even with my re-surfaced contract. “So what has Alan been doing? Besides avoiding clean-up work?”
“Nobody knows.” Rosalee shrugged. “I guess some of the stuff he told Brenda was true—about how he’s planning to go to the States to do some business deal. He left Henry a message last weekend saying he was planning to go to over for a few months. He said he was going to make enough money to bail them out of their financial hole and hang onto the building. I’m so pissed off. He’s supposed to be promoting Fangs, not running all over the planet. I don’t even know who to call to get on the Richard and Judy Show. Henry’s pissed too, but he says my book will still launch next month, so everything should turn out okay, now Peter Sherwood is out of the way.”
Peter was “out of the way.” I could hardly stand it.
“So it’s official?” I couldn’t keep the catch out of my voice. “That body—they’re sure it’s Peter?”
Rosalee pocketed the flash drive. “Na. Vera says they’re being all bureaucratic about it. I guess things are complicated because those guys didn’t actually drown: no water in their lungs. Vera thinks maybe they got electrocuted like the old dude they found outside the Merry Miller.”
Electrocution. Probably quicker than drowning. I hoped so. Also, it would explain how a couple of wily crooks like Peter and Barnacle Bill let themselves get trapped in that dungeon. There might have been live wires down there after Ratko’s destruction. Even a small amount of water on the floor could have been lethal.
Rosalee took off, talking in the breezy tone she used when she was lying about something. At this point I didn’t really care what. I gulped the tea—even more medicinal than usual—and tried to stifle my judgmental attitude.
Rosalee was like her tea—with blasts of intense sweetness that couldn’t quite mask the bitterness underneath.
By nightfall, I had almost finished the editing. However, my cold—or whatever it was—had not finished with me. I could barely lift my head. I felt nauseated, and everything in the room seemed to have little halos around it. Maybe it was some kind of flu. Or depression. I certainly had reasons for feeling down. Let’s see:
Peter was dead.
All hope of my book deal had evaporated.
Silas was in jail.
Plant had heart disease.
I was unemployable and homeless,
and sick,
with no medical care,
no phone,
& no Internet.
I felt so separated from everything I’d ever known, I might as well have time-traveled to Robin Hood’s day. And as I remembered, the twelfth century hadn’t been a terribly cheerful time.
Rosalee came in around seven and offered to bring dinner upstairs, but I couldn’t face food.
“I think I should see a doctor. This isn’t an ordinary cold.”
Rosalee shook her head sadly.
“You can try to find somebody if you want, but I bet all you need is sleep.” She felt my forehead. “Yeah. Your fever’s gone. All you need is time to get your strength back. I’ve been selfish, making you work so h
ard.”
She pulled her flash drive from her pocket.
“Can I get the file off your computer so I can read what you’ve got done?” She dangled the shiny green drive from its key chain, which did not help my queasiness. I was almost too dizzy to sit up.
But with Rosalee’s help I managed to download the last of my edits. I was glad to be nearly finished with the job. Sitting up for even a few minutes was exhausting. I wouldn’t get any more work done tonight.
Rosalee tucked me back into bed with a motherly cluck.
“You’ll be fine in a couple of days, baby girl. I’ll bring you some more tea. It’s way better for you than a bunch of drugs. They don’t do any good anyway, most of them. I heard on Oprah that doctors prescribe sugar pills half the time. The body heals itself if you let it.”
She was probably right. I thought of all the times my nannies had rushed me to a doctor, only to be told that all I needed was “plenty of fluids and bed rest.”
After the tea, I fell into heavy sleep, but woke the next morning still feeling awful. Urgent need for the bathroom got me out of bed and down the stairs. I called for Rosalee, but got no answer. She wasn’t out in the garden either.
And the car was gone.
I was alone, feeling sicker by the minute.
Chapter 69—The Great God Peter Pan
I stumbled back to the kitchen. I saw an empty peanut butter jar in the trash, and decided Rosalee had gone for groceries.
I had no appetite myself, so I went back upstairs and tried to focus my fuzzy mind on Rosalee’s novel. I did a last once-over of the whole manuscript.
Lance’s Sherwood saga wasn’t the standard rob-from-the-rich/give-to-the-poor Socialist mythmaking of modern Robin Hood tales. It was a fall-from-Eden story. His was a preposterous but idyllic Sherwood, populated by civilization’s outcasts, real and imaginary: vampires, werewolves—even an ugly unicorn with a broken horn—along with gays, pagans, witches, and other victims of oppression. Robin was a wild, bisexual forest beast. Not an ordinary Teutonic werewolf, but a Pan figure—the half-animal personification of unfettered male sexuality.
I reflected on my own Robin Hood fantasies about Peter. There was definitely something wild and Pan-like about him, but more of a Peter Pan than the priapic satyr of classical myth. And I couldn’t imagine Peter Sherwood as gay, although he had seemed more attached to Jovan Ratko than to any Marian figure. I wondered what would become of Ratko now. He must be heading back to Croatia. A terrible time for him.
Lance’s Marian was more of a maternal figure than a lover. Like a mom looking in on play-date warriors, she brought news and goods from the normal world to Robin’s wild, magical one—just as the Maid Marian of tradition could move from the Norman aristocracy to the Saxon peasantry. And, as in Rosalee’s old ballad, Marian became Sherwood’s downfall: the poisonous Eve to Robin’s clueless Adam.
It was a fascinating take on one the central myths of Anglo-Saxon culture, if a depressing one.
By afternoon, I felt I’d done what I could for Lance’s opus—not that I’d transformed it into a masterpiece—but I’d made it less embarrassing than it had been. I felt sad for Lance—and what he might have created, had he lived long enough to acquire writing skills to match his imagination.
I went downstairs, but still couldn’t face food. My skin itched, and halos perched everywhere I looked. I sat on the couch with an Agatha Christie. I hoped the ultra-civilized, reason-triumphant world of Miss Marple would drive Lance’s dark images from my head. But I soon drifted into sleep and didn’t wake until Rosalee bounced in.
She beamed when I told her the edit was finished.
“That’s perfect. I’ve been into the office, and Henry loves my changes.” She put down her purse—which looked like a new one. “I hope you don’t mind, but I told him the edits were mine. Well, they are, really, aren’t they? I’m paying for them.” She pulled two fifty pound notes from the bag. “Here’s some of what I owe you.”
I felt absurd elation when I held the big, wrinkled bills Less than two hundred dollars—but a fortune to me now.
“How is everybody doing at Sherwood?” I asked Rosalee as she booted her laptop. “Have they cleaned up all the mud? Was anything salvageable?”
“Some, I guess.” She seemed distracted. “Davey’s working night and day trying to get the print machines working. They can’t fill orders because there’s no inventory—except for a bunch of books that Alan had stashed in his room at the Merry Miller.” She giggled. “Brenda had a hissy fit when she found them. And oh, yeah…” She gestured outside at the car. “She also found a suitcase full of ladies’ clothes in Alan’s room. She thought they were mine. Like I’d wear a size thirty-four B Wonderbra… I brought them home, in case they’re yours.”
My Wonderbra. Alan must have salvaged my luggage. How uncharacteristically helpful. Fueled by adrenaline, I rushed out to the car. There it was: my Louis Vuitton case. I dragged it back to the house and opened it on the parlor sofa. I think I squealed when I saw my favorite things: the Stella boots, Alexander McQueen dress, Burberry suit, and Versace undies. No jeans or comfy sweats, unfortunately, but clothes. Mine.
“This is amazing,” I gushed to Rosalee as I poured sweat from the exertion. “Tell Alan I don’t know how to thank him. It was so kind…”
“Kind? You think he stole your shit to be nice?” Rosalee snortled. “Like he stole the books to help Henry? He just lifted what he thought he could sell. He probably ripped off your things when you came out here to visit me and Colin. I think he may have promised them to that bitch with the maroon hair. The night he took me to the pub, that skank kept asking me where you got your clothes.”
Rosalee seemed unfazed by her paramour’s thievery.
“Do you like my bag?” She displayed the new purse. “It’s a Birkin—do you believe it? Alan had like, twenty of them boxed up in his closet, Brenda said. They go for two thousand dollars a pop back home. Brenda was happier than a pig in shit when I told her what they’re worth. That’s why she let me have one.” She displayed the bag in a coquettish pose. “Who knows who he ripped them off from? If he wants this back, he’s going to have to fight me for it. Besides, Brenda would have sold it anyway. She’s so pissed at him.”
I smiled, saying nothing. I found it fitting that Rosalee and Brenda had bonded over looting Alan’s stash of swag. But I wondered what had happened to the rest of the faux Hermès bags. There had been hundreds in that warehouse.
Rosalee headed for the kitchen. “I’m getting a cup of coffee. Let me make you some more tea. You’ve got to get your rest, baby girl. You still look awful.”
I closed up my suitcase, saying a little prayer of thanks for Alan Greene’s serendipitous larceny.
A few minutes later, Rosalee returned with a steaming mug. Her smile was radiantly phony.
“I totally forgot to tell you. I guess that other body in the dungeon—it wasn’t Peter Sherwood after all. It was some lowlife named Willy Small. Henry said he had a criminal record. So those two bodies were just a couple of crooks. Nobody we know.”
Peter. Not dead. That’s what she said.
I stared at the offered mug and then into Rosalee’s big, bland face, wondering if I’d heard correctly.
“Peter is… alive?”
“Yeah. And I’ll bet he’s going to make a shitload of trouble for me.” Rosalee gestured at the tea. “I made it strong. Tell me if it needs more honey.”
If I hadn’t felt so weak, I would have stood up and screamed my thanks at the heavens. I had to admit I shared Rosalee’s lack of compassion for Barnacle Bill, and this Willy Small person—whoever he was. Probably some prison pal Bill had recruited for the faux designer bag scheme.
Rosalee flopped into the easy chair.
“I hope Mr. Sherwood isn’t there when I go back to the office tomorrow. I want to get my final edits to Henry before that Sherwood guy shows up and starts bossing everybody around.”
Peter. I pictured him
back in his office—alive and well—and felt a thrill of pure joy.
“Peter Sherwood is the managing director of the company,” I said, “Bossing people around is his job description.”
I was unwilling to accept negativity while I basked in the news. Good news. I wouldn’t let it be otherwise. I decided to take it as a sign that Peter wasn’t involved in anything as vile as Lance’s murder.
“Just because Alan doesn’t like his boss doesn’t mean you won’t. It might pay to keep an open mind.”
“I guess. Maybe he won’t be such an asshole now that Barnacle guy is dead. Alan told me Peter was scared shitless of that old guy.”
I doubted anybody made Peter feel poop-inducing fear. Still, I realized, with Bill gone, Peter’s life would no doubt get a whole lot easier.
Peter was alive. I could rid myself of that horrific image of him in that dungeon, half-eaten by rats. And my poor maligned book might actually be published. The news cheered me so much, I downed the bitter tea in one gulp. Time to get well. I would be seeing Peter again. Soon.
I did so much hope he wouldn’t turn out to be Lance’s murderer.
Chapter 70—Three Murders
Unfortunately, my body did not respond as readily to the good news about Peter as my spirits did. I spent much of the night being sick in a tin wastebasket with a picture of Princess Diana on the side. I woke from sweaty, fitful sleep to see Rosalee standing over me, tears contorting her pink face. Behind her, mid-day light streamed in through the dormer window.
Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. Page 23
