Crazy Lady (37 page)

The tense atmosphere deflates like a punctured balloon as Janet slumps back on the pillow with her taut face softening as if she has finally been exorcised.

“I'm getting security,” says the sister, but Bliss roughly grabs her arm and hisses, “Stay.” Then he turns back to Janet and speaks softly. “How, Janet? How did Joseph do it?”

“With my Jesus,” she says clasping her icon tighter. “He hit him with my Jesus.”

“Creston and his people are fighting the exhumation,” Donaldson tells Bliss when he phones the superintendent ten minutes later to give him more ammunition. “Good lad,” enthuses Donaldson. “Creston is beginning to look like that Dutch kid who tried plugging a leaky dyke.”

Dermot Barnes, QC, the leading mouthpiece of Barnes, Worstheim and Shuttlecock, believes that the Magistrate's court in Dewminster is beneath his dignity, so Malcolm Jackson is trying to plug a leak on behalf of his client by badgering the Crown Prosecutor to reveal the name of the person or persons who trampled on Mr. Creston's rights and grounds.

But whatever the prosecution lawyer may suspect, he knows only what he's been told, and he shrugs to the justice of the peace. “Your worship, this application is based solely on the information contained in the statement of Dr. Peter Symmonds.”

“Someone's been digging around…” complains Jackson, but it gets him nowhere.

“I'm inclined to accept the doctor's word,” says the lay magistrate who doubles as the town's soccer referee and finds a certain delight in red-carding a team of London barristers. “I hereby issue a search warrant.”

“We could appeal,” suggests Jackson as he and his team mill around Creston in the foyer. “But it might make it look as though we have something to hide and will only delay matters.”

“Long enough to move the body?” questions Creston hopefully, and he gets an immediate reprimand.

“What body, sir?” asks Jackson. “I thought we agreed that we knew nothing about a body.”

“Right, sorry,” says the executive, but Donaldson was correct: he is a man trying to plug leaks and a deluge is heading his way.

“Mr. Joseph Crispin Creston?” queries a uniformed inspector from Dewminster police station.

“Yes.”

“I'm arresting you on suspicion of murder,” continues the officer, placing a hand on Creston's shoulder. “And I must warn —”

“Murder, what murder?” spits Creston, throwing off the hand. “You haven't even dug up the bloody body yet.”

“And what body would that be?” queries the inspector.

“Shut up, Mr. Creston,” Jackson hisses to his client through clenched teeth, but J.C. is under too much strain to listen.

“You can't prove it,” he yells into the officer's face and lashes out with a fist as a constable tries to slap on handcuffs. “You can't prove a bloody thing.”

“I'm just waiting for one of the local lads to show up with some statement forms,” Bliss tells Donaldson from the nursing sister's office when he gets the news.

“Are you sure you don't want a job?” asks Donaldson, but Bliss already has his hands full.

“Sorry, but I've got a book to finish and two women to woo,” says Bliss with both Yolanda and his prince's paramour in mind. “I'll check in at the Yard, fax you a copy of the statement, and see if I can get a flight out this evening, whether the assistant commissioner approves or not.”

It is after one in the morning by the time that Bliss hails a cab outside Nice airport, and nearly two before he hits the pillow in his apartment. His manuscript of more than five hundred handwritten pages will wait until the morning, and so will the letter sitting in his mailbox in the concierge's office.

Daphne wakes him at nine. “Damn,” he says, glancing at the clock as he reaches for the phone. “I wanted to be writing by seven.”

“Trina's on her way over,” Daphne explains, as if he should care. “She's bringing a visitor to see Janet.”

“Clive?” he questions, and Daphne laughs.

“Apparently he's quite smitten with her.”

“I don't know what her husband will say about that,” says Bliss, but Daphne is unconcerned. “According to Ted he isn't going to be saying much at all for a very long time.”

“I wouldn't be so sure…” starts Bliss, but he doesn't know that Creston's dyke has finally ruptured now that Peter Symmonds has seen the light.

“His old dad must've been worried that the wheel would fall off the Creston charity bus one day,” Daphne tells him. “So he kept two sets of notes.”

“About John's murder?” Bliss questions.

“Yep, Peter found them in his dad's papers after he died. It's all there: smashed skull, blunt instrument, and — and this is the best bit — J.C. Creston Jr. so cut up about it that he had to shoot him full of a sedative.”

“Doesn't prove he did it, though,” cautions Bliss, although he admits that it will corroborate Janet's testimony.

“You're right, David. But he's going to have a job explaining why he was so upset about the death of another man's child.”

“So where's Creston now?”

Joseph Creston is still in a cell at Westchester Police Station, despite his lawyers' attempt to get him bail, and is facing further charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer.

“Life begins when you're in love,” sings Billie Holiday as Bliss puts down the phone and looks across the azure bay to the island of the Man in the Iron Mask. “Time for you to finally get the woman you deserve,” he says, speaking of both himself and the besotted prisoner, and he gaily plucks his pad and pen off the table with a croissant and café au lait in mind.

It's time the world woke up to the fact that true love always triumphs
, he tells himself as he shuns the elevator and bounds down the stairs.

“Ah, monsieur. Bonjour, you have returned,” sings out the concierge as he wafts a letter in Bliss's direction.

“Ms. Yolanda Pieters,” Bliss reads from the return address, and it takes no more than a second for the information to sink in.

“Oh my God,” he breathes. “It's worked. She's coming back.”

Bliss rips open the letter with the enthusiasm of a birthday boy and starts, “Dear David…,” then he stops as his eyes scan the single sheet. The words
married
,
Klaus
, and
sorry
leap off the page, and he feels his knees buckle.

Daphne is first in the fining line. “It's your damn fault,” he complains bitterly. “If you hadn't dragged me back to nail Amelia none of this would have happened.”

“David… I'm so sorry,” she starts but he cuts her off and lashes out at his daughter instead.

“She's gone. Sam,” he cries as tears well in his eyes. “I've lost her.”

“Are you sure, Dad?” she asks as she dances outside an Old Bailey courtroom, knowing that if she doesn't take her seat in less than two minutes she'll get an earful from her leader.

“Of course I'm sure,” he shouts. “She married him.”

“But why?” asks Samantha. “She loves you. She told you. Didn't she?”

“A thousand times, Sam,” he keens. “She told me a thousand times. She told me I was the only one for her and the best lover she had ever had. She looked into my eyes and told me that she'd had my face in her mind from the day she was born. Even before that.”

“Then why would she marry him?”

“Bloody Klaus,” he yells in desperation. “I bet he couldn't wait to get a ring on her finger.”

“Dad, I've got to go —” she starts but Bliss holds onto her.

“No wait, Sam. You've got to help me. What can I do?” Samantha checks her watch… a minute late. “Dad, hurry up, what —”

“Why did she do that?” he carries on, but his voice breaks.

“Why did
he
do it?” asks Samantha more to herself than her father. “He must be crazy, Dad. Why would he marry someone he knows is in love with another man?”

“He doesn't love her, Sam,” mumbles Bliss. “He just doesn't want me to have her.”

“Wait, wait,” says Samantha, slowing down, no longer concerned at the rebuke she'll get when she takes her seat on the defence bench. “Are you sure they're married?”

Bliss skims through the short letter again, feeling himself close to vomiting as he finds the word
married
, then he reads, “Klaus and I are getting married.”

“There you are,” yells Samantha. “It doesn't say ‘we are married.' She might mean next month, next year, or even five years' time for all you know.”

Bliss reads it over again. “True,” he agrees.

“Well then stop her, Dad. How long will it take you to finish your novel?”

“Three, maybe four days if I work around the clock.”

“Well work around the clock. Put everything you've got into it, every bit of passion, every bit of love. I'll track her down and as soon as you've finished you can get it to her.”

“But what if she's already married?”

“Then Oprah will have one of the best shows ever, and you'll be writing bestsellers for the rest of your life. Now get on with it.”

“
T
here is a small pinnace approaching the island, Captain,”
writes Bliss, in the voice of a seventeenth-century legionnaire as he sits across the road from L'Escale on the promenade at St-Juan-sur-Mer with fifty clean sheets of paper under his hand. Then he looks across the calm waters of the bay to the masked man's fortress and spins himself back to 1698.

“I see a royal pennant flying from the mast, Captain,” sang the lookout. “I think it is a messenger from Versailles.”

“Very well,” replied Captain Montelban, the captain of the guard. “Bring him to my quarters the moment he arrives and I will escort him directly to Maréchal Mars.”

“As you command, Captain.”

Prince Ferdinand, peering hopefully through the bars of his cell window, also saw the courier skimming across the bay and his heart momentarily leaped.
Perhaps today is the day,
he told himself.
Perhaps the woman I crave has finally consented
… But eleven years of dashed expectations have weakened his resolve. The trickery of his mentor, Louis XIV, has become more evident in his mind…

“Would you like another
café
?” interrupts Angeline, but Bliss shoos her away.

“Busy,” he says, but then he looks up to see Daisy eyeing him from the next table.

“Are you all right, Daavid?” the sad-faced real estate agent asks, and he's tempted to tell her of his problems but doesn't see the point of adding to her woes.

“Fine… just working, Daisy,” he says, bending his head back to the page, but she's not fooled.

“I zhink you have been crying, no?” she says.

“No, Daisy. I'm fine. But I have to get my book finished.”

“But where is your lady friend? I have not seen her…”

Bliss stops, gives up, and gives in. “All right,” he admits fiercely. “She's gone, Daisy. She left me… she's marrying someone else.”

“But, Daavid,” Daisy protests. “She loves you.”

“I know she loves me.”

“And you love her.”

“Yes, Daisy, I love her. I love her more than any man has ever loved a woman. I would happily die for her…” then he pauses to correct his tense. “I would have died for her.”

“Oh, Daavid,” she says with a compassionate hand on his shoulder. “I am so sorry for you.”

“Thank you, Daisy,” he says forcing a brief smile. “But now I must get my book finished.”

The bounce has gone from Daisy as she walks back to her office along the street from L'Escale and Bliss watches her for a second.

“She's still yours if you want her,” a voice tells him deep in his mind, but he shakes his head. No spark… no magic, he tells himself and continues writing.

“It is a message from someone in Paris,” the governor of the fortress, Maréchal Mars, told the masked prisoner as he handed over the letter with its wax seal.

“She is coming, she is coming,” mused the prisoner, and he broke the seal with impatience.

“My dear Prince…”
Bliss begins, with the words
I regret to inform you
already formed in his mind, when he stops himself. “What the hell am I doing?” he questions aloud. “She has to come to him.”

Bliss's cellphone shakes him back to the present, and he's amazed to discover he already has four pages written.

“Yes,” he says no longer considering that it might be Yolanda.

“It's Trina,” says a faraway voice. “Daphne told me what happened.”

“Oh,” he says.

“Don't worry David,” she carries on. “We're all praying for you.”

“It might take more than prayers. It might take a miracle.”

“I've just called Raven in Vancouver,” she carries on as if Bliss should know that the young woman is a seer. “She says she's been in touch with Serethusa on the other side and you will get your wish.”

“Serethusa…?” he questions vaguely then changes his mind. “OK. Thanks,” he says hurriedly, but he's forced to listen for a few more seconds while Trina bleats about the success of her subterfuge.

“We did it, Dave. Daphne and me; Lovelace and Button, International Investigators. We solved the Creston murders.”

“With a little help from me,” he mutters under his breath, but he doesn't want any credit. He just wants to finish his script.

Day two is simply an extension of day one for Bliss. He has catnapped a few times during the night and has often been tempted to simply write,
and the masked man's great love returned to him,
but he knows that won't wash; knows that he has to finish the saga with as much passion as he began; knows
the end of the book is what the readers will react to. And he knows that if he is too late to save Yolanda from making the biggest mistake of her life, he must offer publishers and the media the most compelling bittersweet love story of all time.