Randall #03 - Sherwood Ltd. (34 page)

At the moment, Rosalee, her tea—and her on again/off again generosity—was all I had.

After some sporadic napping, I dragged myself back to the kitchen, but my limbs felt increasingly heavy and uncooperative. I looked at the teapot, but couldn’t face any more of the gray-green concoction. I sat down with a glass of water and took another look at Rosalee’s sparkly treasures. The cell phone looked too old to be worth anything. Plant had one like it and had been about to trade up for a new one. I tried to get a signal, but it was dead. But the iPod batteries still had power. I put in the earbuds. The music wasn’t bad. Show tunes mostly. They reminded me of Plant. That helped me hold onto hope. Maybe Plant and Silas would visit New York soon.

I listened to Sondheim’s
Into the Woods
while I examined Rosalee’s jewelry. None of it would bring more than a few pounds—except the cufflinks, which, upon examination, turned out to be 18K gold, inlaid with what looked like real diamonds—channel-set to form the letter “R”. Quite chic. I wondered who Rosalee knew with that kind of money and taste.

I drifted into sleep with my head on the table and woke to the crunch of driveway gravel. I lifted my head to greet Rosalee, but voices from outside stopped me. Men’s voices. I took one bud out of my ear. I knew those voices. There was no mistaking the Serbian vowels.

Ratko. With someone else. Maybe several someones.

Barely breathing, I gathered Rosalee’s things and hid the case under my jacket. The least I could do was save my friend’s treasures from this gang of thieves.

Heavy knocks rattled the front door.

“Duchess? Are you in there? Open up!”

Peter’s voice.

I ran to Rosalee’s bedroom in a frantic hunt for a place to hide. There was no closet—just a wardrobe too small to hold an adult. The bed was a high, Victorian four-poster with a ruffly bedskirt. I dropped to the floor and rolled underneath.

I could hear more banging.

“We know who you’ve got in there, you cow,” somebody else shouted. “Do you want us to break the door?”

Somewhere, glass shattered. Peter barked.

“You didn’t have to knock out the bloody window, Tom. You know what that will cost to repair?”

Peter and Ratko, the knife-wielding killer, and Tom Mowbray—famous for his violent outbursts and his ASBOs. The three of them must have come to kill me—to finish off what the poison hadn’t done. I could hear them inside the cottage now, clomping up the stairs to the bedroom. My bedroom.

My stomach began to heave. No. I couldn’t be sick now.

The pain came in waves. Voices faded in and out. I thought I heard them outside the bedroom door. Peter. Coming into the room. I heard his voice, just above me, calling my name. I thought I heard concern. Part of me wanted to roll out and jump into his arms and beg him to be the man I had believed him to be: A “courteous outlaw” like Robin Hood. Not a ruthless killer.

Somebody shouted. Peter’s footsteps faded. I listened for more voices, but heard nothing. Maybe I was dreaming. One of those weird lucid dreams like the one about the coyote. Peter was a trickster like the coyote. I couldn’t trust my senses when I was around him. I couldn’t trust anyone or anything.

Everything spun around me—and went dark.

Under Rosalee’s bed, I woke to the sound of heavy footsteps in the hallway outside and froze. Were the men still here?

A light in the room switched on and I felt something thunk onto the mattress above me and heard someone scurry around the room, opening and shutting drawers.

I had no idea how much time had elapsed.
Into the Woods
was still playing on the iPod. I tried to turn down the sound on the control wheel, but it only got louder. My fingers didn’t seem to work.

“Hey, what’s going on under there?” a voice said.

The dust ruffle lifted and Rosalee’s round face appeared.

“Camilla! Jeez. What are you doing down there—stealing my stuff?”

I realized I still held the jewelry case clamped in my hand. I felt Rosalee grab my ankles and pull me toward the light. Everything was still spinning. I tried to give the jewelry case to Rosalee, but couldn’t lift my arms. They felt as if someone had attached weights to them.

“I can’t believe you’re still here.” Rosalee was dressed in a conservative blue suit—which didn’t quite work with her big pink and silver sneakers. “I thought you’d be long gone. The stupid cops let Peter Sherwood out of jail. I thought for sure he’d come looking for you. So who broke the window on the door? Colin is going to be so pissed.”

“Peter came,” I hardly recognized my own raspy, weak voice. “I hid.”

Rosalee let out a bizarre laugh.

“You hid? Jeez, you are some kind of a masochist. No wonder you like those pornographers. Did you really buy my story about the Jamaican drug dealers? Lance would never go to Jamaica. He totally hated reggae.”

I stared up at Rosalee—in her uniform-like navy blue suit, her wild hair surrounded by an aura of yellowish light—and thought again I must be dreaming. Or maybe hallucinating.

That’s it: I was still back in Plant’s apartment, driven mad by a surfeit of show tunes. The Sondheim in my ear was certainly crazy-making, but I couldn’t seem to lift my hand to take out the earbud.

Rosalee laughed again.

“Hey, I’m glad you’re still alive. You can tell me where your passport is. I can’t find it anywhere. Your driver’s license has expired.” She pulled the license from her pocket and dropped it on my chest.

Okay—I had to believe this was a dream. Otherwise I would have to accept that Rosalee, not Peter, was the villain, and I’d been guilty of terminal stupidity. I called Plant’s name, hoping he’d come and wake me up.

Rosalee snorted. “Yeah. I sent Mr. Hollywood an email this morning, like you wanted. I said you left last week after the flood and you were back home in New York.” She gave another awful laugh. “I told him he should drink some of his fancy-ass vodka to celebrate that you’re home safe. Serve him right.”

Why was Rosalee interested in Plant’s drinking habits?

“Where’s your damned passport?” she said again. “I’m so out of here. The Swynsby cops want to talk to me now they let Peter Sherwood go. Henry said they didn’t have enough evidence to hold him. Maybe they found my prints on the damned absinthe bottle. My bad. I should have wiped it down.” She looked down on me as if she were scolding a naughty child. “But you know, it would all have gone fine if your boyfriend had come back and drunk it like he was supposed to, instead of leaving it there for Alan to steal. Didn’t I tell you Peter Sherwood would wreck everything? You have the worst taste in men. Him and your Hollywood friend are always wrecking my plans.”

Rosalee’s big, silvery shoes were only inches from my face. Big glowing alien space boots. A hallucination or a dream. Definitely. I called to Plant again.

“God, I hate that snot.” Rosalee loomed over me, huge and blue. “It’s his own fault, your guy Plantagenet. He wouldn’t give me the
Fangs
manuscript. I didn’t want him going around Hollywood telling people Lance wrote it.” She scrunched up her face as if she’d smelled something bad. “If only Lance hadn’t gone back on our deal: fifty/fifty. My idea/his words. But he got greedy and dug his own grave, the asshole.”

I tried to make sense of this. Why did Rosalee keep talking about Plant? I tried to ask, but I sounded like a drunken frog.

Rosalee grabbed a water bottle from her purse.

“Here. Drink something. I can’t understand a word you’re saying.” She stood at the dresser and applied some too-red lipstick and adjusted the collar of her suit. “Do you like my new outfit? I bought it at the Oxfam thrift shop in Swynsby. I needed something boring enough to pass myself off as the Manners Doctor.” She smoothed her hair. “The hardest part will be convincing the airline people I’m forty. But I figure I can say I’ve had a face lift. And a boob job. Passport pictures totally suck anyway. I’m booked out of Robin Hood airport tonight. Flying to Belfast and then New York.” She hefted her suitcase and carried it outside.

I leaned against the bed and sipped the tepid water. Okay, Rosalee seemed to be going to New York, intending to pose as me. That much had come though the brain fog. She was going to have trouble finding my passport. I always kept it hidden in the lining of my make-up case—a precaution from traveling to odd parts of the world with Jonathan, before he stopped inviting me along. Rosalee’s search might buy some time.

Time to do what, I wasn’t sure, since my muscles seemed to have gone on vacation with my brain. I still wasn’t sure any of this was happening. But the water made things seem a bit more real.

A few moments later, Rosalee returned.

“No more games,” she said. “I’ve got the car packed and ready to go. Come on. Tell me where the passport is. It’s not like you’re going to need it. With all the foxglove tea I gave you this morning, you could croak any time now.”

Foxgove tea. Fairy Thimbles. Digitalis. The ingredient in that heart medicine.

It wasn’t Peter who had poisoned me.

Rosalee laughed. “I’ve been feeding it to you for days—in small amounts—because I wasn’t sure how long I’d need you alive. But when I realized everything was hitting the fan—I made you one big-ass pot. And like a good little girl, you drank it all up, didn’t you? It won’t be long now.”

“Why kill me?” I managed to croak out the words as Rosalee loomed above me.

She snorted. “No way am I going to let you stay alive to tell people I didn’t write that book.”

Okay—if this was real, Rosalee had poisoned me, and apparently Lance as well—over authorship of that sad book. An idiotic reason, but a reason nonetheless. But why had she poisoned the absinthe?

I seemed to have said the last bit out loud.

“Why?” said Rosalee. “Because it was so easy. There was his booze bottle, and that can of strychnine right next to it. Duh. With Peter Sherwood out of the way, I wouldn’t have to give Alan another kinky screw, would I? Or I should say Willy Small. And he sure had one. That’s what they call a dick around here, you know that? A willy. No wonder he used a fake name.” Rosalee turned back to the mirror and worked on her hair, trying to slick it back into some sort of a chignon. Not a good look for her.

But then I saw my way out: Rosalee’s cell phone, tucked into a pocket of the Birkin bag. If I could distract her for a bit, maybe I could reach in and grab the phone and call 911. Except it wasn’t 911 in this country. It was something else.

“Sad name: Willy Small,” I managed to say, hoping to engage Rosalee in something like conversation.

Now I remembered: 999. I had to get her phone.

“Whatever his name was, the guy turned out to be useless. Do you know my contract isn’t even valid? Henry told me this morning. It needs Peter’s signature, and obviously he won’t sign. Just as well. It looks like the company’s going belly-up. The bank’s going to foreclose on the building, and Peter Sherwood and his friend Ratko are sailing into the sunset, leaving Henry holding the bag. And I have to find another publisher. Luckily there’s a bunch in New York. Can you recommend anybody?”

I thought of giving Rosalee my agent’s number but decided that would be unkind.

Rosalee loomed over me.

“Okay, baby girl,” she said. “I need the passport. Now. And give me my jewelry, you little thief.” She squatted down to grab the jewelry case. I managed to get my heavy hand almost to Rosalee’s purse, but just then, Rosalee reached for the iPod. Our hands collided.

“Oh, keep it,” Rosalee said, standing abruptly. “It wasn’t worth stealing. Nothing but show tunes. Faggots have the worst taste in music.” She stuck the jewelry in her purse—on top of the phone. So much for the quick-grab plan.

But as
Into the Woods
soared in my ear, my fuzzy mind managed to make sense of what Rosalee had said: the iPod belonged to somebody she knew to be gay—the iPod that mysteriously played all of Plant’s favorite music.

Rosalee had been the burglar in Plant’s apartment.

Plant said the thief got into his old manuscripts—that must have been Rosalee, looking for the other copy of the
Fangs
manuscript. Then she must have stolen a few things to make it look like an ordinary burglary: the iPod and phone and—the cufflinks. Of course. The letter R was for Ryder.

And—I didn’t like this new thought forming in my foggy brain: Plant’s email said the burglar “had some fun in the liquor cabinet”—Rosalee could have poisoned Plant’s Grey Goose when she broke in. The Grey Goose that Plant had three glasses of right before his heart attack—if it was a heart attack at all.

The Grey Goose that Rosalee suggested he drink to celebrate my homecoming.

No. I might not be able to save my own life, but I had to save Plant.

He might not have drunk the vodka yet. He’d been trying to be “good.” Adrenaline and anger gave me strength. I pulled myself up to sit on the bed, trying to make my addled brain form another plan as Rosalee put the finishing touches on her make-up.