Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. (36 page)

Plant. He knew Plant. Of course. They’d met in Frankfurt last year.

“Plant. Poison!” I said, as urgently as my weak voice would allow.

But Peter only laughed.

“Yes. Rosalee poisoned the vodka. Plant smelled a rat when he got that email, so he phoned us immediately. He told Vera that never, under any circumstances, would you refer to anything as ‘fancy-ass,’ so he took his bottle of vodka into the San Francisco police. They found Rosalee’s fingerprints—on record because she’d done time as a juvenile—and inside was enough digitalis to induce cardiac arrest.” Peter looked at his watch. “She’s being extradited, and Silas Ryder should be emerging from jail as we speak.”

I felt massive relief. But then Peter stood and I realized he was going to leave. Now. I reached for him.

He gave my forehead quick kiss.

“I’ll see you as soon as I can. After I deliver the
Marynia
to the buyer, I’ll fly back here and get things sorted with the company. I’m hoping there will be enough cash to put in that flat above the canteen. So when you return, there should be a splendid place for you to stay. No more sleeping rough in warehouses. That was dreadful. I don’t know how things got so bollixed up…”

Was there really going to be a do-over? It seemed too much to hope.

He went on. “I do hope you’ll give us morons another chance. As soon as I have proper digs, I’ll send plane fare. Charlie can reschedule your book tour and everything will get back on track.”

He leaned down and gave me such a magical kiss I wondered if he was a hallucination after all.

“Are you, um…real?” I said.

“Is any of us real? Are you real, Camilla Randall?” He kissed me again. “I hope so, because I’d hate to think I’d fallen in love with an apparition.”

It did feel like a solid, reality-based kiss.

And he’d said the “L” word.

I watched him disappear behind the curtain, equally impressed and appalled that he’d managed to sneak into the hospital undetected, and steal some poor doctor’s scrubs. But that’s what he was—like the real Robin Hood—a trickster and a thief. His expensive clothes. The Rolex—who knows, maybe the publishing business itself—probably all stolen.

I clutched Mother Goose to my heart, hoping that at least some of what he’d told me was true.

My stay with Henry and Emily and their children was lovely. Henry became a different person while at home with his family—relaxed and jovial. The day before I was to leave for San Francisco, he presented me with an envelope. Inside was a check for two thousand dollars.

“Your advance,” he said. “Peter informed me the night of his departure that you’d never been paid. Shocking oversight.”

“So he has, um, sailed to the Caribbean?” I still wasn’t entirely sure my romantic moments with Peter in the hospital had actually happened.

Henry gave an enigmatic shrug.

But I happily accepted the check. It meant I’d be arriving home with enough money to survive until I found a job.

Davey, Liam and Tom all came to see me off at the airport. I asked if they’d had word from Peter. Their faces went glum.

The news about the
Marynia
wasn’t good. The Croatian paperwork was dodgy and Peter didn’t have clear title. I wasn’t surprised. But they said he’d decided to make the trip anyway to sell it on the black market.

The mention of illegal trade brought up the question that had been nagging me since the weekend of the flood.

“Those crates in the warehouse—did they, um, belong to Peter?”

Tom gave an angry laugh. “Of course not. The knock-off scheme was Bill’s. He tried to enlist Peter as a co-conspirator, but Peter only agreed to retrieve the yacht to settle his debt. Bill found a more willing partner in the Baron, er, Small, Willy. ”

Davey snorted. “But it was the bloody rain that bollixed it for those two. They had the crates loaded into a hired lorry when the rain started, so they decided to wait an hour or two until it let up. Only it didn’t. So they seem to have gone looking for a bevvy.”

Liam joined in. “That’s when we showed up with our load of Polish pottery from Hull. We figure they scurried down the rat hole so we wouldn’t see it was them using Peter’s warehouse to store illegal merchandise.”

“Which we didn’t,” Davey said. “More’s the pity for those two.”

I couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for Bill and Alan/Willy. I wondered what had happened to the “hired lorry” full of faux Birkin bags.

But I had an idea.

And I knew better than to ask.

Plant and Silas met me in San Francisco with warm hugs, roses, and a bottle of Dom Perignon. They announced they were taking me down to Silas’s beach house because “we all deserved a vacation.”

On the ride down to Morro Bay, in a champagne-and-jet-lag haze, I longed to spill out the truth about the dire financial situation that had kept me in England. But compared to what Plant and Silas had just been through—a poison-induced heart attack and an accusation of murder—my problems seemed too minor to mention.

Plant had received a stack of mail for me, which I went through as we drove through the Salinas Valley. There were several notes from Valentina, whose cousin had still not been paid. I would have to send off a check as soon as I deposited my advance. There were several more overdue bills, some dog-eared, much-forwarded notes of condolence on my mother’s death—and at the bottom of the stack—something in a business envelope, with an address written in odd, foreign-looking handwriting. It had a New York postmark.

“Dearest Madam,” it said, in the spidery script. “I am having for you a load of furnishings, which you have asked to be reserved in storeroom. The Co-operative Board are not allowing such storage, so I have sent to house of my sister’s husband in Flatbush. You will please to fetch these soon. Sincerely, Habib Amir.”

I squealed so loud that Plant started to pull the car over to the shoulder.

“My doorman,” I explained, urging him to drive on. “He didn’t steal my things. He’s been keeping them for me all this time. I can’t believe it. I have to send him some money and get a van and…” And what? I hadn’t wanted to think about it. What the hell was I going to do? Whether Sherwood published my book or not, it wasn’t going to produce any income for some time, if at all. What was left of my two thousand dollars would barely pay a month’s rent, much less move my furniture—or pay Habib for his extraordinary kindness.

“Maybe you can find a moving company that can bundle your things with a partial load of another New Yorker moving out here,” Silas said. “Lots of easterners retire to the Central Coast.”

I looked out at the rolling, golden hills where plump cattle grazed between lush vineyards and prosperous, Tuscan-style wineries. Ahead was a sign pointing west that said simply, “Beaches.”

“It looks like paradise, but I’m not exactly in a position to retire.”

“I wasn’t suggesting it,” said Silas. He turned around and grinned. “This may be a little soon, but I wondered if you might need a job. The manager of my Morro Bay bookstore is leaving the area, so I’m desperate for somebody. There’s a little cottage in the back. Just a one-bedroom beach house, but you can walk to everything and there’s an ocean view…”

I couldn’t hear any more over my own shouts of joy.

Everything in Morro Bay fell into place with such ease that I could hardly believe I’d been in abject misery just a few weeks before. After about a month of camping in my little cottage, my furniture arrived. Everything was intact, just as I’d packed it. I was putting the Limoges dishes away in the Chippendale cabinet when my new cell phone rang.

It was Davey. “We’ve got your book in galleys,” he said. “I wanted to alert you that we’ll be sending the electronic version today and I’ll need to get any corrections as soon as possible. We want to go to press immediately. Peter’s come through with the cash to get us up and running again.”

I couldn’t believe luck could get this good. “So he sold the
Marynia
?”

Davey paused. “Not exactly. But he sold some, er, merchandise at a tidy profit.”

I blurted out what I’d suspected all along. “The designer knock-offs? He got hold of that truckload of Bill’s fake bags, didn’t he? He sold them in the Caribbean?”

Davey was silent for a moment. “Must go,” he said. “This is a dodgy connection. Watch for my email.”

I wandered around in a blissed-out fog for two days. When I finished my corrections and sent them off, I went to the liquor store next door and bought a bottle of local wine to celebrate. I sat down to email Plant the good news. A new message sat in my inbox from Davey. No header. No salutation either. I hoped my attachment had got through all right.

But the message said nothing about my manuscript.

“The
Marynia
has sunk off Jamaica,” it said. “No survivors. We’re all shattered. No idea what will happen now.”

No survivors.

My wine sat in my mouth in a sour puddle. I had to jump up and spit it into the sink, as the memory of an ancient ballad ran through my mind, along with the absurd memory of Peter singing in his off-key tenor about Robin Hood’s adventures as a sailor:

“If I should cast thee over-board/There were nothing but a lubber lost.”

Over the next seven months, I kept hoping to hear that the news of Peter’s death was yet another hoax by the master trickster. But finally I had to accept the truth: this time Peter really was gone.

Davey sent links to the local newspaper reports of the wreck of the
Marynia
. Three men had been aboard: Peter, Jovan Ratko and a seaman they’d hired in Kingston. The bodies hadn’t been found, but they wouldn’t have been, in that deep water.

His death seemed such a tragic, pointless loss. But nobody seemed to be grieving as acutely as I was. From what Davey wrote in his emails, it sounded as if Sherwood was doing perfectly well without Peter. Insurance on the
Marynia
had paid off the company’s debts and allowed for necessary repairs on the Maidenette Building. Henry had made Vera and Charlie full partners so he could concentrate on his writing—he was doing the final edit on his Mr. Darcy novel,
Fitzwilliam, Aged Five
—and the Professor now had two assistant editors for the Major Oak line.

On the day in early December when the store got its first shipment of
Good Manners
for Bad Times
from Swynsby-on-Trent, I decided it was time to let my fantasies of Peter’s resurrection go, and embrace my new life. The small carton from England arrived along with a big shipment of bestsellers, replenishing the store’s inventory for Christmas buying. I unpacked the rest of the shipment first. It included five copies of Gordon Trask’s
Home is the Hunter
, just out from Knopf, and two boxes with more copies of
Fangs of Sherwood Forest
—the number one paperback bestseller this week on the
USA Today
list.

Sales of
Fangs
had taken off in my store as soon as it came out two weeks ago. I couldn’t tell if my customers were as intrigued by the idea of a gay werewolf Robin Hood as they were by reading the work of an alleged poisoner on trial for her life. But the book deal Rosalee had made soon after her arrest was proving to be a fantastic business move on the part of her new publishers—and her lawyers—who had rushed it into print almost as soon as the news of her arrest was out. Plant reported recently that
Variety
had announced a
Fangs
film deal in the works, with Robert Pattinson attached to the project.

But poor Rosalee was likely to spend the rest of her life in prison.

At least she’d get access to health care.

Once I’d processed the other books from the new order, I opened the little box from Swynsby-on-Trent and took out a copy of
Good Manners for Bad
Times
. Tom’s silver tray design—in embossed, metallic silver—was as elegant as I’d remembered. I caressed the thin volume, wondering if it had been worth all the pain. I unfolded the packing slip and found a letter in Vera’s neat handwriting.

The note was a couple of pages long. I decided to take it to lunch so I could read it in private. Anything from Sherwood tended to make me emotional, even now. I went to my favorite café—a little spot with outdoor tables overlooking the bay—and ordered the smoked albacore taco and tea with milk. I still drank my tea British style. I took the letter from my pocket and smoothed it open.

“As you can imagine,” Vera wrote. “The big pre-publication order of
Good
Manners for Bad Times
from Ryder’s Bookstores has our whole office celebrating. The Professor is sending review copies to all his old University friends, including people at the
Times
and the
Guardian
, so you should be getting some well-placed publicity.”