Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. (29 page)

“Peter.” Vera said in a monotone as the van drove away. “It has to be. Peter and that awful old sailor. The one with the eye patch. Meggy said she’d seen him about on Friday, asking after Peter and Mr. Ratko.” She choked on her last words, and bit her hand to stifle sobs.

“Barnacle Bill?” My mind raced too fast to let my emotions erupt. “Barnacle Bill was here—on Friday afternoon?” That would have been when the crates had been packed into the warehouse—when I first went to Puddlethorpe with Rosalee and Colin. So my suspicions—and Gordon Trask’s—had been right. Peter and Barnacle Bill must have been in league all along: two old partners in crime—scheming together in that dungeon when the flood came. I could hardly bear it.

“Barnacle Bill.” Vera repeated. “Peter kept saying the name. I thought I was hearing wrong. That’s the title of an awful old music hall song.” She reached in a pocket for a handkerchief. “Maybe that’s who he meant, when he said “we”. I thought he meant himself and Mr. Ratko.” Her lip trembled. “How horrible—the two of them, trapped down there, whilst we were happily finishing up a nice piece of Stilton…”

Davey and Liam stood immobile, their faces a stony gray. This was obviously not part of the plan they had been keeping secret.

I could say nothing, as my heart constricted with a pain too raw for tears.

I drove back to Fairy Thimble Cottage with my computer on my lap, clinging to it like a life preserver. If Peter was dead, I was pretty much adrift here, and the computer was my only connection to my old life. I had to find some place with Wifi. I wasn’t going to wait until power was restored in the Sherwood offices.

I didn’t even want to see the Maidenette Building again. I couldn’t banish from my mind the terrible image of Peter and Barnacle Bill in that dungeon, with the water rushing down on them. What had they been doing down there? Maybe they’d been cleaning up Ratko’s horrible mess. And where was Ratko? He wouldn’t have left Peter to drown. Maybe he was dead, too—his body floating somewhere in the sewers of Swynsby, with the unidentified cats and dogs.

I wished I had been able to get Liam and Davey alone to ask them what they really knew—if they knew anything at all. It was possible they didn’t. They had been as shocked and upset by the discovery of the bodies as I and Vera.

Poor Vera. Whatever happened now would be hard for her. Maybe her family would finally persuade her to quit the “Smutworks.” Maybe everybody would quit. Jobs were scarce in this part of England, but almost anything would be preferable to playing minion to Alan Greene. Even if we all stayed, it wasn’t likely Sherwood Ltd. would stay afloat long with a pathological liar at the helm.

Rosalee seemed happily unaware of the disasters ahead for her publishers. She was entirely preoccupied with “that bitch at the pub.”

“I’m never going into that place again,” she said as I took the exit for Puddlethorpe. “Nobody talks to me like that. She is so-o-o too old to be Alan’s girlfriend. She has to be like, over forty. What did she expect? And all that crap about him and me going off to make millions in Hollywood? With my dad? Dad’s doing three to five in Soledad for extortion. He can’t even get blackmail right. Such a loser. My mom had the world’s worst taste in men.”

Blackmail. Extortion. I had a brain flash. Maybe Alan Greene had used blackmail to get control of Sherwood. Gordon Trask talked as if he’d got rather chummy with Alan while staying at the Merry Miller, so he might well have got an earful of Trask’s stories about Peter’s criminal past. If Alan had carried the tale to Henry, and threatened to reveal his knowledge to Swynsby’s bankers and city fathers, that might provide a plausible explanation for Alan’s bizarre climb to power at the company. Nothing else did.

Maybe Peter’s death would liberate Henry—and Sherwood—from Alan Greene’s tyranny. Except… I had a flash memory of Henry in that awful rubber outfit. If Alan had pictures, Henry could be enslaved forever.

Plus, there was a warehouse full of counterfeit handbags to explain. Poor Henry.

But I couldn’t work up a lot of sympathy for him.

In fact, I couldn’t work up much feeling at all. Maybe I was in shock, or denial—the first stage of grief. Somehow I couldn’t believe Peter was dead. None of the events of the last week seemed quite real. But maybe that was because of my head cold, which seemed to have built a wall of congestion between my brain and reality.

“Let’s stop for coffee someplace,” Rosalee said as we drove through another picturesque village—this one with the oddly sartorial name of Old Somercote. “I’m totally beat from all that cleaning.”

I was happy to agree, especially since Rosalee was still generously picking up my restaurant tabs. I stopped at a quaint little café, envisioning scones and tea, but was surprised to find the inside sleek and modern, offering Starbuck-style espresso drinks and trendy sandwiches made with pancetta and goat cheese. At first I was disappointed to see global culture had invaded even a place called Old Somercote, but changed my mind when I realized that many of the patrons were tapping away on computers.

Internet access, at last! I booted up my computer while Rosalee ordered us a couple of lattes and panini.

I was overjoyed to see three messages from Plant. The first, written in text-speak from a new phone, said his doctor had given him permission to drive back to San Francisco for the last week of rehearsals for his play. He’d had to promise to walk every day and not indulge in as much as a whiff of Grey Goose. Silas dictated he could have just one glass of red wine a day. And no red meat. Just as well, since he couldn’t afford any of his usual luxuries any more, he said. His co-payments for the hospital stay were astronomical.

But he still had a home, insurance, and money for wine, I thought, with a small amount of bitterness. And he’d been able to replace his stolen phone. He might be facing bankruptcy, but Plant didn’t have a clue what it was to be poor.

But I was going to have to tell him—and tell him soon. It was time to grovel and ask to borrow money from Silas for a ticket home.

A second message, dated a few days later, detailed Plant’s most recent tiff with Silas—mostly over diet and exercise, plus Silas’s endless business traveling, especially to the Berkeley store, where he apparently still had an ardent admirer in one of the clerks. Plant’s comments got testier as he went on. By the last paragraph he said he’d pretty much decided to end it. With his bad heart, he said, he needed a calm, sensible relationship with somebody who came home from work every night.

I was in complete agreement, since my husband Jonathan’s long absences were one of the main reasons for our marriage’s collapse.

However, the third message, sent just today—obviously texted from Plant’s phone—changed everything:

“Silas arrested by idiot SFPD. Lance murder. Lance was screwing Silas’s #1 Berkeley fan. S**t.”

I stared at my screen, unable to type—barely able to breathe. Two intense feelings hit me simultaneously:

1) Sympathy for Plant, and the ordeal he must be going through.

2) My growing fear that Silas might be guilty.

If Silas’s Berkeley boy toy had been involved with Lance, he had a motive. Romantic jealousy combined with anger at Lance for stopping the sale of Felix’s store could add up to a motive. I was overwhelmed with worry for Plant. With his heart condition, this stress could kill him.

“Are you done?” said Rosalee, who had been monologuing about the general untrustworthiness of men. “I’m not going to sit here all day while you surf the damned Internet. I have a headache.”

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.