So Much For Buckingham: The Camilla Randall Mysteries #5 (25 page)

"Assholes," Joe said when we pulled into the driveway beside the store. "Excuse my French, Doctor, but that's what these people are. Who does something like that?"

"Somebody who really, really hates me. I wish I had a clue why."

Joe shook his head as he walked me back to the cottage. To my relief, it was free of the police tape that surrounded the store. 

I unlocked the door.

"Looks as if the fire dudes saved your house. Very cool," Joe said. "You want me to check to make sure there's no jerks hanging around inside?"

I hadn't thought of the possibility. How horrible that would be. Joe made a signal for me to stay as he walked inside.

"Looks all clear, Doctor," he called after a few moments. "You might have a little smoke damage, but things look pretty good."

"Thank goodness!" I entered the cottage with some trepidation, carrying Buckingham with me. Everything was as I had left it, including my half-drunk glass of wine.

The place did smell horribly of smoke. I'd probably need to have the carpet and upholstered furniture shampooed to get the smell out, but the fire seemed to have been contained before it jumped the courtyard. I flicked on a light to see if there was damage in the bedroom, but the electricity seemed to have been turned off. That made sense. The cottage and the store were on the same meter.

Buckingham meowed from his carrier and gave a cough.

"The smoke might be bad for the cat," Joe said. "Want me to take him outside? I was planning on doing some busking from the bench outside the store. Looks like my bench didn't get any damage."

Joe was such a kind soul. I didn't know what would have happened if he hadn't got me out of here last night. I was grateful to him for his concern, and for his mysterious affection for Buckingham.

But now I didn't know where to start. Homeowner issues were probably not Joe's strong point. I didn't know of any handbook for people whose homes and businesses had been attacked by mad arsonists.

I took a short, cold shower and put on some clean clothes. I pulled out a battered Vuitton case from the closet and tossed in what I'd need for a week or so. When I got to my sock drawer, I tossed in the scary knife, too. Whoever stuck it in my door might be my arsonist. I was glad I'd kept it.

I clicked the bag shut and hoped my insurance would cover a motel stay. I had too much to keep in Joe's little tent. I sure hoped I could find a place that would take Buckingham.

I checked my landline phone and was amazed to hear the dial tone. I made some calls and managed to get appointments with my insurance agent and left a message with somebody at the police department to say that I would be by to talk to them shortly.

I fixed some food for Buckingham and started out the door with his dish when I saw what looked like a crumpled eight-by-ten photo stuffed in the bushes beside my front step.

It made my skin go prickly

I reached down and there it was—another copy of the photo of Ronzo's behind. Maybe it had been stuck to the door when Joe came by last night.

Had he taken it down and tossed it here? I shuddered as I turned it over and saw a message scrawled on the back.

"You need to die, bitch. The rape train is coming, you murdering whore."

––––––––

P
lantagenet looked at Alfred's knife, and then at Alfred.

He had a growing suspicion this was not a dream. Nor a hallucination or ectoplasmic apparition. He was possibly about to be attacked by a very real, very bad screenwriter who thought Plant had killed his friend.

Since Plant was a middle-aged man who had spent a very stressful five days, it was unlikely he was going to prevail in hand-to-hand combat with a young man in his twenties.

Especially a demented one, and the grinning Alfred now looked like a severely mentally-challenged rodent.

So Plant was going to have to use his wits, which he had to admit could have been sharper. But he had to give it a try. He swung his feet off the bed and sat up in what he hoped looked like a dignified position. Not entirely successful in his tighty whitey ensemble.

He decided to handle this the way the Manners Doctor would—by pretending to ignore anything unpleasant.

"So, let's talk business then, Alfred."

Plant reached for the whiskey bottle and pretended not to see the knife at all.

"How do you want to work this? The script could use a bit of a polish. I'd be willing to work on it for a writing credit. That way I can submit it through my agent." He took a swig from the bottle, trying not to gag, then held onto it.

"Oh, no. Oh, no." Alfred wagged his finger. "That script is perfect. I've been working on it for months. It's exactly the way I want it." Alfred waved the knife around for emphasis.

"So you want me to send it to my agent without a rewrite? I can't guarantee he'll look at it, but I'll certainly give it a try."

Plant pictured his agent opening
The Kingdom of Perpetual Night.
If he didn't think Plantagenet Smith was a washed-up loser before this, he certainly would now.

"That's the ticket," Alfred said. "I want your agent to look at it. Maybe send it to Spielberg."

"I'll tell him that." Plant worked at keeping his expression serious. "Spielberg it is. You send me a copy as an email attachment and I'll send it along as soon as I'm back in California."

"No. You're going send him the copy I gave you. And you're going to send it tomorrow morning. Where is it?" Alfred looked around the room and started opening and closing the drawers of the tiny bureau as if Plant had squirreled it away somewhere.

"Don't tell me you don't have electronic copies?" Had this poor man typed the thing on an old fashioned typewriter? "I told you the police took my copy. I think they may have sent it to MI5."

"MI5! Bloody MI5! They came to the house, me mum said. Looking for me. All on account of you! And if you think I'm barmy enough to make electronic copies anybody can pirate, you're stupider than you look."

Alfred waved the knife and came at Plant again.

"I'm not going to be much use to you dead," Plant said. "Why don't we discuss this in the morning? I've spent the most awful five days..."

"Well you should have thought of that before you murdered Neville, shouldn't you?" Alfred put on the demented-beaver smile again.

"Actually, I didn't do that. I never saw him alive after our little encounter at the Pit Bar on Saturday evening. I thought he'd been stabbed."

"I'll tell you who is going to be stabbed. It's you, you Hollywood ponce. Stop bloody lying to me. Everything you say is a lie!"

Alfred came at Plant with the knife, and Plant stood abruptly and whacked at Alfred's knife arm with the whiskey bottle, but he misjudged the hardness of Alfred's arm. The bottle bounced, slipped from his fingers and shattered on the floor.

Alfred kept yelling incomprehensible things about liars as he lamented the loss of his whiskey.

Plant ran to the open door hoping to escape into Alfred's room, but the drunken man swung around and pinned Plant against the door, holding the knife very close to his throat.

Plant tried to sound calm. "Alfred. I think..."

"I think you're both keeping me up past me bedtime!" A voice shouted through the door from the hallway outside. "Brenda, can you unlock this door?"

The door swung open and there stood Brenda, with a scruffy-looking man in a hoody behind her.

"What in bloody hell is going on here, Mr. Duffield?" Brenda said.

Alfred folded the knife and stood back. "Just a bit of fun," he said. "Sorry we disturbed you."

The scruffy man stepped forward and grabbed the knife with a swift, authoritative move.

"Alfred Duffield is a suspected terrorist who is wanted by MI5," the man said. "You'll need to call the authorities, Brenda."

"The police? Are you sure?"

"Yes. I'm sure." The man turned to Plantagenet. "Are you all right, Mr. Smith?"

Something about the man was familiar, but Plant couldn't place him. He had no idea how this stranger knew his name. Maybe from the newspaper stories about Neville's murder.

"I think Mr. Duffield's story will probably exonerate Mr. Smith once and for all," the stranger said.

"If the coppers are coming, you'd better make yourself scarce, Peter, I mean Mr. Stygar," Brenda said. She picked up the broken whiskey bottle and made a threatening motion at Alfred. "And you'll have to pay for this mess, Mr. Duffield."

"Brenda's right. Time for me to disappear." Mr. Stygar gave Plant a broad grin. "Glad to see you again, Mr. Smith. Camilla will be that relieved to know you're all right."

The man dashed down the stairs, with the formidable Brenda forcing Alfred to follow.

Plant now remembered where he'd seen "Mr. Stygar" before. But he also knew that man was dead. He was Camilla's former publisher, Peter Sherwood. He and Silas had met Sherwood once at the Frankfort book fair.

But Peter Sherwood had died three years ago.

Which meant Plant was only dreaming after all.

He got back into his cozy, comfy bed and went to sleep.

––––––––

I
presented the photo of Ronzo's behind to Joe with a shaky hand.

Joe pretended it was "probably some advertisement", but it was obvious he'd seen it before. He paid a lot more attention when I showed him the writing on the back.

"That's messed up. Hella messed up. It's also evidence, Doctor. You gotta take that to the cops. Much as I hate cops, you gotta go see them. Pronto. They gotta catch these jerks."

"I'm going right now," I said.

I started toward the car.

"Ain't you forgetting something?" Joe held up Buckingham in his carrier.

"Could you keep him while I do this..."

I saw from Joe's face that he was done with cat-sitting.

"Oh, I'm sorry. I've been imposing."

Maybe Buckingham wasn't Joe's cat after all.

I took the carrier as Buckingham gave a plaintive meow. I knew I was unkind to make him stay in a cage all this time, but I couldn't risk having him run into the off-limits fire-damaged bookstore.

Joe packed up his guitar. He seemed to be getting ready to move.

"Can I give you a ride somewhere?"

"Mind dropping me off at the library? I got some work to do there." Joe put his guitar in the back seat again. "And if you could keep custody of my guitar, I'd be grateful. I won't need it again till my gig tonight and they don't like me taking it into the library. They're scared I'm gonna start playing or filling the case up with stolen books or something."

I left Joe at the library and took off toward the police station with Buckingham on the front seat in his carrier. Thank goodness for the Morro Bay fog. The car wouldn't get too hot to be safe for him.

I was relieved when I was introduced to a woman police officer. It would have been awkward to talk to the same officers who had told me the rape email wasn't a credible threat.

Detective Kimberly Alvarez was large and unsmiling and a little intimidating, but she paid close attention to my tale of Internet troll hell.

I didn't want to go into too much detail. I knew the story would sound preposterous if I went into the messy parts about Richard III and Ronzo's kitten murders.

I offered what I thought were the relevant points. I said I suspected the threats and arson were motivated by untrue stories spread about me online. I did have to mention the Twitter photograph, but that had been thoroughly debunked by Marva's star turn in the British press.

I also showed Detective Alvarez the knife and the photo of Ronzo's behind, with the threat written on the back.

"Do you know the owner of this, um, posterior?" Detective Alvarez said.

"I can't be sure, but it could be my former boyfriend. He had a tattoo like that, but he recently passed away."

Detective Alvarez gave a sympathetic smile.

"That's what they do, these trolls. I heard a story on the radio a couple of days ago about a lady who was stalked by a troll who pretended to be her deceased father. This lowlife stalked her online after finding a copy of her father's obituary. These people are often sociopaths. Unfortunately, the laws haven't been passed yet to allow us to prosecute them."

I smiled back. I hesitated a moment, wondering if I should disclose Ronzo's awful secret, but decided too much information might simply confuse things.

"I'm so glad you understand, Detective," I said. "The other officers didn't believe it was a credible threat. It's hard to understand why anybody would be that hateful to a complete stranger."

"You get two kinds of online bullies." Detective Alvarez spoke as if she were reciting information from a manual. "Some cyberstalkers are just losers who wouldn't hurt a fly in person. They tend to think the Internet isn't real life and treat it like a videogame. They want to scare you, but they're not actually committing a crime. Our officers couldn't do anything when they visited earlier, because what the email said wasn't technically criminal."

"But this is a crime, right?" I pointed to the message on the back of the photo. "And it was stuck to the door with that knife. I'm sure whoever did this set fire to my store."

"Arson is a crime. Absolutely." Detective Alvarez relaxed, obviously on more familiar ground. "That is the second kind of online bully: the person who makes a criminal threat on the Internet and carries it out in real life. But we don't have any evidence that the person who wrote this note also torched your business. The language seems to be similar to the emails, but we'll have to wait until we get more evidence from the arson team. And we'll check that knife for fingerprints."

I felt panic grip my throat. "But this man—he's out there. He wants to rape and kill me."

"You think it's a man?"

I hadn't thought of the possibility any of my stalkers could be female.

"The online book reviews and emails threaten rape a lot of the time. I guess I kind of assumed...."

"Do you have a feeling about who this person is? Anything that could help our investigation?"