Death with a Dark Red Rose

by Julia Buckley

  I laughed and moved toward my shower and the start of the day.

  * * *

  * * *

  CAMILLA AND I had settled in her office: I sat in my beloved purple chair; she sat behind her desk. Sam was in the sunroom, reading a book he’d found on Camilla’s shelf and drinking tea. Adam had gone to work, excited at the prospect of telling his chef about Carl.

  “Before we get back to our Debenham idea,” Camilla said, playing with a silver pen on her desk, “tell me your ideas for the writing manual.”

  “Oh yes. Well, I approached it from the perspective of a Camilla Graham fan. Which I am, as you know.”

  Camilla smirked. She hated it when I fawned over her, but she had grown used to it. “And what would my fan want to see in this book?”

  “I would definitely want biographical information. But, as a writer, I would also want writing advice. In order to market this to a vast audience, though, you’d want to suggest that everyone has a story in them.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Everyone has a story—I like that. Hmm.” She poked her blotter with the pen. It was a smooth, silver-plated instrument, a gift from her publisher, inscribed with the words To Camilla Graham, in appreciation of our forty years together.

  “So you could start each chapter with a real anecdote about your life. Let’s say that you introduce a theme or technique in each chapter, and then you demonstrate that with your biographical story.”

  “Hmm. But if it’s biography, then I’m not really using narrative techniques.”

  “Or are you?”

  “Hmm,” she said for a third time. I loved earning “hmms” from Camilla because it meant she found an idea worth considering.

  Emboldened, I said, “What if you started with that story you told me about your childhood—about how your grandfather would invite you into his lap under the apple tree in your backyard, and you would eat a fresh, ripe apple while he read you a fairy tale.”

  Her eyes gentled with the memory. Camilla had loved that particular grandfather the best. “Lena, that is a perfect idea. So let’s say I began with that anecdote, and explained that it may well have been the foundation for my love of a good story. Then, in a passage afterward that encourages readers to write, I might ask them, ‘What is the story of your beginning? What might be the origin of your special talent? And if you were going to write this story down for your descendants, what is the inevitable starting point?’”

  I clapped. “You see? And then the more stories you tell, the more specific you could become with technique. One memory could focus on tone. You could ask the reader, ‘Did you become anxious when you read that tale about my youth? Did the fact that a man followed my friend and me to school make you worried for us? Now consider how my word choice may have led you to have those reactions.’”

  She nodded slowly. “My concern in writing this book was that I wasn’t interested in relating one long linear tale of my life. I fear it’s not as interesting as people might imagine, and frankly I’m too private a person. But carefully curated memories—really good stories—that would be far more fun. You are brilliant, Lena.”

  “I’m so glad you like the idea. And I can’t tell you how much I will enjoy reading this one.”

  “I’ll have pages ready for you this week. I’ll need to work on that one in the background as we do our other tasks. Death at Delphi is ready to send in, after we give it one last glance. Oh, and I forgot to tell you!”

  She put down her pen and rifled through a little stack of correspondence. “I printed this e-mail for you, Lena. It’s from Michelle.”

  I took the paper and read the brief note from Camilla’s editor—a note that contained five exclamation points. “Death on the Danube is going to be a bestseller?”

  “It will be on the list next week, landing at number three.”

  I stood up and danced around. Camilla laughed.

  “You dance with me,” I said, pointing at her. To my vast surprise, she stood up, came around her desk, and began to sway gently with my conga-line chanting: “We made the bestseller list, we made the bestseller list!”

  Sam appeared in the doorway, holding a blue mug. “You ladies make writing look fun.”

  Camilla and I burst into giggles and hugged each other. Sometimes our brainstorming sessions did have a slumber-party tone to them.

  Camilla leaned on her desk, slightly winded, and said, “What can we get for you, Sam? Would you like to take your kittens upstairs to join you in a nap?”

  “Maybe later.” He smiled. “I still have some energy, so I was thinking I might take a walk. Just to the bottom of the bluff and back.”

  The dogs had heard the word “walk” and appeared almost stealthily in the room, their giant ears at attention.

  Sam frowned. “I wasn’t going to take them this time.”

  Camilla studied his face with her shrewd eyes, then nodded. “Star should be coming for them any minute, so you’re off the hook.” Star Kelly walked the dogs for Camilla three times a week.

  “How is Star?” I asked. “I haven’t talked to her lately.”

  “She’s doing well. She and her father are planning a little fall getaway, too. They’re flying to New York to see some Broadway shows. Star is very excited.”

  I was pleased to hear that Star, a nice girl who had gotten into some trouble back in the summer, partly due to her father’s emotional neglect, was now in a better situation.

  A knock at the door alerted us to Star’s arrival. Sam went to let her in, and for a moment there was a chaos of reunion in the hallway. The dogs loved Star, and they did some barking and jumping to remind her.

  Camilla moved swiftly to the door. “Boys, be good,” she said, and the dogs went quiet.

  I followed her to the doorway and waved at Star, who looked casually pretty in jeans and a red sweatshirt. Her dark hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her blue eyes were bright. “Hi, Star.”

  “Hi, Lena! Okay, I’d better take these guys because they seem really peppy today!”

  Camilla thanked her as she found the leashes that Camilla kept on a nail near the door and hooked them on the shepherds. As she and the dogs went barreling out, Carl Frailey appeared in the doorway. I had not seen or heard a car, so his appearance was rather startling.

  “Oh!” Camilla said. “Carl, where did you come from? And you’re pale as a ghost. Come inside, and we’ll make you some tea.”

  “Thanks,” Carl said, moving stiffly toward us. He wore a polo shirt and khaki pants that looked like semiprofessional office wear.

  Sam waved and mouthed the words, “I’ll be back.” Then he disappeared out the front door.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?” I asked Carl.

  He looked at me with his uncanny green eyes. “I should, but I got fired. They told me to leave the building and to not even get my things out of my desk. Just to go.”

  “Oh, Carl! I don’t think they can do that, can they?” I cried.

  Camilla was studying his face, as she had just done to Sam’s. She put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Come in the kitchen. Your favorite place in every house, right?”

  Carl nodded with a brief smile.

  We went into the kitchen to find Geronimo in the center of the table, his legs tucked under him, making him look like a little marmalade-colored box. “Not okay, mister,” I said, scooping him up and putting him on the windowsill. I scanned for Arabella, who was never far from her brother, and saw that she was curled in front of the refrigerator.

  “Cute cats,” Carl said, unsmiling. He sat in a kitchen chair. “Sorry I came here, but Belinda is at work and her boyfriend is at work. So I didn’t know where to go or who to tell.”

  Camilla turned on the flame beneath the kettle and then sat across from Carl. “I’m wondering,” she said, “what you did, Carl. Because you’ve only been
at work a few hours, and I assume you either just gave your two weeks’ notice or didn’t even have time to do it yet?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t. But when they said I was fired, I said I was going to give notice today, anyway. They said on my record it would show I was fired. But I don’t care. I have a new job.”

  “Yes, you do.” Camilla was calm, soothing. “So what did you do?”

  Carl shrugged. “I hacked into some computers. Of guys I work with.”

  I gasped.

  Carl looked unapologetic. “One of them, I didn’t even have to try, because his e-mail was open on his screen. And the other one I just tried some stuff until I got in.”

  I stared, openmouthed. “That’s illegal, Carl. Isn’t it?” I turned to Camilla.

  “It’s a fireable offense. I don’t know if you can get arrested for it.” Her eyes went back to Carl. “Why did you hack into their e-mail?”

  “To see what they were hiding about Luis.” He said this as though we should have figured it out on our own.

  I wondered in that moment if Carl was emotionally stable. “That’s a job for the police, Carl. Now Plasti-Source can press charges against you, I think.”

  He lifted his chin. “They won’t, though. They should be afraid of me.”

  An icy feeling began to inch its way up my arms. “Why is that?”

  “Because I know they had him killed, that’s why. And now they’ll want to kill me, too.”

  Camilla’s dark eyes were fixed on him, fascinated. She shook herself slightly. “We have to call the police,” she said. “But first, Carl—tell us what the e-mails said. You must tell us while you remember and before they get here.”

  “Why?” Carl and I asked in unison.

  “Because the information was illegally obtained. Doug and Cliff can’t use it to arrest anyone. But they can certainly take the advice of some friends who heard things and made rational deductions.”

  Carl nodded. “Okay, fine.”

  “How much do you think you can remember?” I asked, grabbing a paper and pen from the sideboard. “I can take notes.”

  Once again, his luminous green eyes met mine. “I remember every word. I have an eidetic memory.”

  “What’s that?”

  Camilla was pleased. She lifted Arabella, who was biting her shoe, and looked into her tiny face. “It means Carl has a photographic memory, and that means we may as well have been right there reading over his shoulder.”

  16

  In order to make suspense grow, one must escalate the conflict: with escalation comes discomfort. I want my readers to be very uncomfortable, indeed.

  —From the notebooks of Camilla Graham

  CARL’S FACE WAS calm, but his fingers were busy, pulling at one another in agitated motion. “You did this because you knew Doug and Cliff were coming,” I said. “You figured your bosses would be distracted.”

  “Yeah.” Carl shrugged. “There are two guys whose e-mail I read, but I was also looking at e-mail sent to them by other people in the building. So I can tell you things about five people who work there.”

  We sat around the kitchen table, leaning inward, a conspiratorial circle.

  Camilla had given Carl a pad and a pencil, and he jotted things down as he talked. “There’s Edward Grange. He’s the president of the company. I’ve never met him, but I know he’s come to our plant a few times this year, and he talked to the police when they came the other day. Then there’s Phil Enderby, the vice president. He’s in and out of our plant. I don’t talk to him much because I’m in IT and no one talks to us unless they have a computer problem. We’re sort of invisible.”

  “I read about both of those men in the article at Coffee Dreams. They are the guys who presided over that community meeting.”

  “Yeah, that’s them,” Carl said, studying his pencil.

  I touched his elbow. “Carl, why do we care about those two? Is it their e-mail you hacked?”

  He shook his head. “No, but they both wrote e-mails to the people I was looking at. One was Joe Piper, who is our plant manager. And the other one was Gino Perucci, our quality control manager.”

  “And why did you want to look at their e-mail in particular?” Camilla asked.

  “Because they’re the ones who acted like Luis didn’t exist. But they both saw him every day, and they knew he was a good person and a loyal employee, so there’s something wrong. And now I know for sure.”

  Camilla pointed at Carl’s pad and at mine with one sweeping gesture. “Get it all down, one of you. What was the first e-mail that bothered you?”

  Carl said, “Lena can start; I can’t write and talk at the same time. I’ll write it down when I’m finished.” He sighed and put his elbows on the table, leaning forward slightly. “I was reading Gino’s e-mail. He’s the one who just left it open on his desk. I knew he and Joe were both at a meeting with the police. Doug said so yesterday, and I waited until I saw Doug and another guy come in. Then I went to Gino’s office. He had an e-mail from Edward Grange, telling Gino that he wanted to know what had been going on while he was gone, and to be sure to sign off on the contract from Crandall Construction.”

  “Crandall?” I said. “I thought they were working with Anemone Construction. That’s what it said on the sign outside the new plant.”

  Carl shrugged. “It was weird, because the e-mail implied that Gino had not been on board for signing it, or approving it, or whatever he had to do, so Grange was telling him to sign off. He was being a jerk about it.”

  “Interesting,” Camilla said, her eyes on the window. A gold tree rustled just outside, providing an alluring visual while her mind did its brilliant work.

  “Yeah. And there were some e-mails back and forth between Gino and Joe, kind of arguing about it. I only got to skim those, because by then I heard them coming.”

  “And the other computer? The one belonging to Joe Piper?”

  Carl nodded. “I looked at his first. I pretended I was fixing something in his office. No one cared, because people were always calling me in to look at their computers. That wasn’t even my job, but it sort of was, if you know what I mean.”

  “I doubt they were paying you enough, Carl,” I said.

  “They definitely weren’t,” he agreed. “I looked up IT salaries online. It’s a big joke, what they paid me. Adam said they’d pay me much more at Wheat Grass.”

  I touched his sleeve. “I’m so glad you got that job!”

  He smiled, his green eyes crinkling momentarily. “Me, too.”

  “Back to business,” Camilla said. “We have to call Doug soon.”

  “Right,” Carl said. “Joe Piper was also getting e-mails from both Grange and Enderby. They were kind of urgent, saying things like ‘We have a deadline’ and ‘Crandall has threatened to go public.’”

  “Ah,” Camilla said.

  “And Joe got a lot of e-mails from someone called Elephant21, who talked about Luis. The first one said, ‘I’m worried about our Luis cover story. Will they buy it? What do we do if they don’t? Would it be better to say nothing?’”

  “Who is Elephant21?” I asked, shocked.

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll find out, though,” Carl said, his jaw jutting out.

  “Our Luis cover story,” Camilla said, stunned.

  “What else did Elephant21 say?”

  “He said it put him in a weird position. That he couldn’t keep covering, and he was getting worried.”

  “Covering what? What the heck is going on at that place?” I asked. “What did poor Luis find?”

  “That’s what I was trying to figure out. The closest I got was in an e-mail from Enderby. He was in charge for a long time because Edward Grange took personal leave. He told Joe Piper that ‘we were recently spared some unpleasant public exposure of the project.’” Camilla and I gas
ped.

  “Is that a reference to Luis being—put out of the way?”

  Carl said nothing; his face said it all, and his quiet fury was unsettling.

  “Carl, did he say what the project was?”

  “No, but he mentioned that they had an EPA visit next week, both at the plant in Stafford and at the new place being built out here. They seemed to be linking the project to the EPA visit.”

  “If it’s the EPA, it’s not just a visit,” Camilla said. “It’s an investigation. They’re being investigated for some environmental concern. Perhaps their ‘project’ was helping them cover something up.”

  I had been writing furiously, but now I stopped. “And perhaps Luis found that out,” I said.

  Now Carl took up where I left off, writing furiously on his pad. “I’m going to put it all down,” he said.

  Camilla lifted her cell phone. “You do that, dear. And I’m going to call the police.”

  * * *

  * * *

  “YOU DID WHAT?” Doug yelled. He was in the kitchen with Carl, and Cliff was standing nearby, hands on hips.

  Carl sat at the table where we had left him, holding his pad full of information. “I did what I had to do.”

  Doug sighed and looked out the kitchen window. “Well, Carl, that information was illegally obtained. I cannot use one bit of it. Don’t even show it to me.”

  “Okay,” Carl said.

  Doug stood glaring at him, clearly nonplussed by the whole situation.

  Cliff moved toward the table. “Why did you do it if you didn’t want to show it to Doug?”

  Carl remained calm. “I did it because I knew they were hiding something about Luis. I was right. And another thing: how come they didn’t call you right away and say that I stole confidential information? How come they didn’t ask you to arrest me?”

  Doug sat down in the chair Camilla had vacated. “Maybe they did. I haven’t been back to the station since—”

  “No, they didn’t, and they won’t, because they don’t want me talking to you or anyone. They don’t know what I saw, but I’ll bet they’re afraid about it.”