So Much For Buckingham: The Camilla Randall Mysteries #5 (7 page)

Plant was doomed to sit out the entire second half of the play in the lobby, missing Kevin Spacey's once-in-a-lifetime performance, waiting to get his raincoat back.

He wondered if Neville had left. He hoped so. The wait might be more bearable if he could get another Grey Goose in the Pit Bar without the distraction of attractive lunatics who claimed to be acquainted with long-dead monarchs.

He decided to take a chance and started down the stairs.

When he was half-way down he heard a loud pop from somewhere above.

And screams. Terrible screams.

––––––––

I
couldn't figure out why Plant hadn't called me back. Maybe his phone battery was low.

I felt so alone, wearing my smiley mask of "helpful book person" while everything inside me was screaming.

I desperately wanted to hear from somebody. I felt isolated from reality in the calm microcosm of the store. When there was a lull in customer traffic, I went to the back room and checked the computer.

Nothing of note in my inbox.

But there were a dozen more one-star reviews on my Amazon pages. Especially
Good Manners for Bad Times
.

These poisonous rants were even more toxic and threatening than the last batch. Some accused me of criminal behavior and others of sexual deviance. Lots of them threatened me with rape. Some also threatened somebody named Hinckley Lutterworth.

I didn't even know anybody named Hinckley Lutterworth, although the name rang a distant bell.

I felt a burning in my gut as I skimmed the headers. Part of me wanted to click away and pretend it wasn't happening, but I knew I had to face the full catastrophe.

The most recent "review" had come in only a minute before.

"Jezbellzbooks" said "Dr. Manners is a BBA. Sumbudy shud teach HER sum manners. Maybe with a **** up her ***. Or get a gun. Just shoot that old bat. Put her out of our misery."

A gun. They wanted to kill me. Apparently the crime of responding to a ridiculous "review" of my imagined taste in architecture was a capital offense to these people.

I refreshed the page and another one came up.

"Owain Glendower" said: "These bloody reviewers have completely lost the plot. As William Shakespeare said, 'Hell is empty and all the devils are here'. Looks like the work of You-Know-Who-You-Are-You-Sodding-Prats. The filth on Book Reviews dot Com is even worse. Utterly depraved. What's wrong with you people? Henry Tudor was one of the greatest kings Britain has ever seen."

Except for the weird reference to English history, that was the first "review" that had made any sense. It even gave me five stars.

I Googled Book Reviews dot Com and searched for my books.

What came up turned my stomach. There were many pages of obscene comments. "Author Should be Sodomized Sideways with a Garden Gnome" was repeated at least 50 times by different "reviewers" with monikers like "SmarterThanYouBitch", "Pottymouth" and "F***U2". Some had odd symbols instead of names. But they all called me a "badly behaving author" and threatened me with rape and torture. Hinckley Lutterworth got a number of threats too, although he didn't seem to get the "badly behaving author" accusations.

The only person who defended me was my Amazon friend "Owain Glendower," who appeared to be a civilized, non-psychopathic person. As a result, subsequent reviews attacked him, too.

DickonThePig, who seemed to be everywhere, said he knew where Owain lived and threatened to cut off his private parts with rusty garden shears. The one called "Alfred the Cake" threatened to blow him up with a fertilizer bomb, and "Libra Rising" thought Owain deserved garden gnome rape as well.

Gardening seemed to be a theme here.

But I didn't have a clue if the threats were real, or even why any of it was happening.

Well, maybe I did.

It must have to do with my connection to Ronzo. That was the only explanation for this kind of over-the-top hatred.

If these people knew I had been the girlfriend of a monster who tortured animals, maybe some of their rage at Ronzo had spilled over. He was dead and I wasn't, so I made a better target.

But it was odd there was not one word about Jer-Z-Boy or kitten torture in any of the "reviews".

There was, however, excessive verbiage about Richard III and Henry Tudor and British history. What these people thought I had to do with medieval English monarchs I couldn't even guess.

If I could blame this on Ronzo, the verbal abuse would somehow feel less personal.

It was so unfair that Ronzo had turned out to be a monster. And that he was dead.

I needed the man I'd fallen in love with. Right now. Desperately.

The Ronzo I knew could have helped me. He was tech-savvy. He'd understand about this Amazon nonsense. I was a cybermoron. With my publishers AWOL and Plant refusing to return my phone calls, I had no idea what to do about any of this. I didn't even have Silas to ask for help. All I had was the Jens. And Marva.

The Jens were sweet, but they were young people with their own lives. I certainly didn't want to inflict this stuff on them. And Marva—well, a cross-dressing dominatrix who had only a casual relationship with the truth was not somebody I could turn to for comfort.

Besides, I had no idea how to explain what was going on to any of them.

Right now Jen was calling from the front desk. She wanted help finding the latest James Patterson. Which I hadn't unpacked yet.

The world had to go on, but I couldn't remember why.

––––––––

P
lant's tux was covered with white plaster dust, and he'd slid down a few stairs, but other than minor scrapes—and what would probably be an ugly bruise on his forearm—he seemed to have avoided injury. He'd hit his arm on the railing when he tried to grab it for stability when the building had been rocked by...whatever it was.

It had felt like an earthquake.

He wandered into the cold, drizzly night, desperately wanting his raincoat. He wondered if they'd let him go in and look for it.

But that looked unlikely. There was a steady stream of theater goers coming out of the building. Whatever had happened inside was looking pretty scary. Some people were being carted out on stretchers and loaded into waiting ambulances.

No sign of Neville.

He heard muttering about bombs and terrorism. Somebody loudly blamed Middle Eastern extremists and somebody else claimed a resurgence of the IRA.

But others seemed to think it had been an accident.

Whatever it was apparently caused part of the Dress Circle to fall onto the orchestra seats below. The far left side of the Dress Circle.

Exactly where he had been sitting.

He shivered. He could so easily have been one of those poor wounded people limping out onto the sidewalk. He did hope nobody had been killed. And they would all be all right.

It was so very odd that Neville had urged him to leave the theater just before the incident. All that urgency: maybe it wasn't about going "down the Pig" at all—but escaping disaster. He had gone on about "the circle."  Maybe he'd meant the Dress Circle. He'd been so fidgety—and not much interested in the play. How awful if he'd been there to plant a bomb.

Could he be with the IRA? His accent was strange, but didn't sound Irish.

He was too fair-skinned be Middle Eastern, although he did have that beard. But he hadn't been eager to blow himself up. Those religious fanatic types usually liked to add their own bodies to the carnage. Seventy-two virgins and all that.

Did gay terrorists get same-sex virgins?

No. That didn't make sense. If Neville were a mad bomber, why would he have warned Plant away from his handiwork?

Whatever the case, Neville had succeeded in saving him. If the man hadn't been so distracting, Plant would have made it back to his seat and he'd be one of the people moaning on a stretcher or limping out of the lobby looking like a combat survivor.

But he would have liked to have his raincoat. He shivered and looked around for somebody to ask about where he might go to retrieve it.

The walking wounded were being herded out of the theater and into a queue where they waited to get into a bus that seemed to be a kind of mobile infirmary.

A policeman motioned Plant toward the medical bus.

"Thanks, but I don't need a doctor," he told the policeman. "I'm fine. Except my raincoat is still inside. I was on my way to the bar when I heard the explosion. No damage down there that I could see. What happened in the theater? A bomb?"

"Move along to the queue." The policeman showed no expression. "We need to ask a few questions. Just routine."

Another man in a plaster-powdered tux came up behind Plant.

"Everybody's talking about bombs, but I was in the middle of the orchestra," he said. "I saw the Dress Circle fall. Looked like an accident. Termites, I shouldn't wonder. They've been brought to England by idiots with their marijuana plants from the Canaries. The balcony probably simply gave way. Like at the old Apollo Theatre a few years ago. Some of the West End theaters are aging wrecks behind their facades. "

"So nobody was killed? The damage...doesn't look like a bomb?" Plant brushed the plaster off his own shoulders. It would be nice to know he hadn't been flirting with a bomber.

"If it was a bomb, it wasn't a big one. The damage is nowhere near as bad as it could have been. I'm seeing cuts and limps, but so far no fatalities. No need for panic. Of course you can't convince this lot of that..."

The tuxedo man gestured at the television crews who were gathering behind a line of police tape.

Plant found himself nudged into another queue. This one seemed to lead to a policeman who was asking people for their identification. It was beginning to rain again.

And his raincoat was probably under a pile of rubble.

Where he would be too, if it hadn't been for Neville.

Who was either clairvoyant or a terrorist.

Or maybe a hallucination.

He thought it over. He did not want to believe he'd been conversing with some paranormal entity. That would mean Glen Jones had won.

And he didn't want to believe he'd been attracted to a terrorist, either.

So he decided to go with hallucination. Sleep deprivation, jet-lag, and vodka had made his brain pretty mushy. It might very well have invented an attractive little gay pixie to keep him company. Why not?

In fact, it occurred to him that perhaps none of this was happening at all. Yes. That was the most logical explanation: he was still napping on the plane and this was a dream.

And if he wasn't having a nap, he desperately needed one. He hadn't had any real sleep in over 24 hours. But in order to get to his hotel bed he'd have to brave the army of reporters.

As soon as he ducked under the yellow tape, one of them accosted him.

"Is this the work of terrorists?" a bland-faced young man asked.

As if Plant would know. But if it wasn't a bomb, he didn't want to fuel any rumors.

"The people I've talked to seem to think it was an accident," Plant said.

"But what do you think, sir?" said a woman wearing camera-ready make-up.

Why did these people always interview the victims? They were the ones who had been ignorant enough to get caught in the disaster.

Plant shrugged and shaded his eyes from the lights. 

"Who knows? Maybe it was the ghost of Richard III," he said with a sardonic grin. "Shaking up the Old Vic to protest what Shakespeare and his Tudor patrons did to the reputation of the last Plantagenet king. Maybe King Richard meant to let people know he didn't like being reinterred in the Midlands after languishing all those years under that Leicester parking lot."

Plant realized immediately he'd made a mistake. Not only was his joke rather unfunny, but he had given the reporters a sound bite. Now the whole lot swarmed around him.

He wasn't going to see his bed anytime soon.

––––––––

I
had to accept the fact I now had a cat. I hoped Buckingham would be happy living outdoors. I could not deal with cat hair and claws messing up the antique furniture that was all I'd inherited from my once-wealthy family.

I also couldn't deal with the smell of a litter box. My cottage was tiny. Six hundred square feet. I had no place to put a cat box.

On Saturday evening, Buckingham trotted behind me as I locked up the store and walked the gravel path that led to my cottage.

It was obvious the animal expected to be invited in, but I explained to him that he could be in the store or outside, but he wasn't to come in the cottage.

He looked up at me and let out a polite meow.

"I suppose you think it's my job to feed you," I said.

He sat on the front step and began to lick a paw. Washing up for dinner, no doubt.

I went inside and found a can of tuna in a kitchen cupboard, spooned some into a Pyrex dish and placed it on the front step by the door.

Buckingham took one bite and sat back looking up at me as if he were waiting for the wine list.

Water. He probably wanted water. I filled another dish from the tap and put it down next to the tuna.

Buckingham continued to stare at me.

Okay, maybe he liked privacy when he ate. I went inside and made myself a sandwich with the rest of the tuna.

I'd been checking my phone every five minutes, but I hadn't checked my email for a few hours. Maybe Plant had sent something. I booted up my laptop.

Nope. Nothing from Sherwood, either, of course.

But there were plenty more toxic reviews. On Book Reviews dot Com, Owain Glendower and somebody called Jasper Tudor seemed to have got themselves into a "flame war" with DickonthePig, Libra Rising, and Alfred the Cake. It was horrific, but also pretty laughable. Luckily, they dropped any mention of me early in their Tudor-vs-Plantagenet battle in the comment thread. Owain and Jasper quoted a lot of Shakespeare, and the other two used mostly incomprehensible British slang, but they all threatened each other using obscenities that nearly seared my eyeballs.