A Rather Remarkable Homecoming (29 page)

Worse yet, it was clear that, of all the people in her entire attentive entourage, Dorothy actually believed that Rollo was the most dispensable person on her team. Rollo, the only one who truly loves her. I felt indignation rising in my throat.

“How can you be so cold to your only son?” I gasped. “He lives for you. Last year when you got sick, he was absolutely beside himself with worry. Don’t you know how much he loves you?”

Dorothy looked amused for the first time all day. “Dear girl,” she said petulantly, “what romantic notions you have. But we all must accept life as it is, not simply as we want it to be. And I have always known that I might one day outlive my son.”

Having dropped this final, astounding bomb, she took the tips of her fingers and tapped her own chest in the place where a heart should be, and said slyly, “I am touched, truly touched Penny dear, that you care so much for my foolish son. I leave it entirely in your capable hands. I’m sure you and your Jeremy will make this all turn out for the best. Now, I am sorry but I have a dental appointment and must prepare for it. Clive will show you out.”

The butler, I’d noticed, had been hovering in the doorway for some time now. Dorothy must have pressed a button somewhere to summon him, but I didn’t even see her do it. I glanced inquiringly at Jeremy, who was gazing at her now with undisguised disgust.

“Dorothy, you will simply have to put up half of it,” he said briskly. “Call your bank and arrange to have it ready for us. Otherwise your son’s blood will be on your hands, and I will be sure to inform everyone who knows you about your unconscionable actions here today.”

Dorothy had grabbed her cane and risen to her feet, but now she took a step forward so that she was right in Jeremy’s face as she leaned on her stick. I’d seen her wield that very cane as a weapon before, and I moved forward, too, not really knowing what I’d do, but perhaps to show her that I was prepared to clonk her right back with her own weapon if she dared assault Jeremy.

“My friends—very nearly all of them—are
dead
,” she said levelly, as if, having outlasted most of the people she knew, she believed that God had done it on purpose to show that he was on her side, rewarding her for being a superior human being. “But, were they alive, my friends would applaud me, for they knew what a burden this son of mine has been, and they always thought that he would one day come to an end like this.”

 

“Crikey,” I said to Jeremy when we were back out on the street, “she’s got Rollo dead and buried in a pauper’s grave already. I can’t believe she didn’t offer a single brass farthing. Not one!”

Jeremy sighed. “I figured it would go this way,” he said, “but it was worth a shot.”

“So now what do we do?” I demanded.

“We go back to Cornwall, and find out who’s got Rollo,” Jeremy said decisively. “Otherwise you and I are going to be out of a lot of money.”

I
must say it really looked like it was curtains for Rollo, no matter what we did. We managed to scrape together thousands of pounds in small notes, all marked by the bank so that, if the kidnappers took them and then spent them, the bills could be traced. The real money was then wrapped around packets of counterfeit bills (provided by the police). The fakes were just bundled in there to pad them out, so that it looked like we had a suitcase full of a million pounds.

We were banking—if you’ll pardon the pun—on the hope that the kidnappers wouldn’t take the time to closely examine every single bill in the suitcase before making the exchange.

“But what if they
do
see the fakes?” I asked Jeremy, looking apprehensively at the open suitcase full of bundled bills.

“Hopefully they won’t notice before the cops are able to move in and grab Rollo,” Jeremy said, adding cheerfully, “assuming the kidnappers don’t simply shoot us all dead immediately.”

We drove into Port St. Francis with the red scarf dangling from Jeremy’s car door. (In case anybody wants to know, I bought the scarf in London from a sidewalk vendor just outside Harrods.) I kept a lookout for any pedestrian who seemed to stare intently at the scarf.

Well, the fact is, they all did. I mean, it looked fairly ridiculous. And in a small town, any little thing out of the ordinary seems to capture the attention of the bored locals. Plus, the sidewalks were still teeming with tourists who gawped at everything, since they weren’t quite sure what they should stare at.

“Look, there’s those creepy Mosley brothers,” I told Jeremy when he pulled over to pick up two cups of takeout coffee from Toby Taylor’s. “They’ve got the longest, blackest limo I’ve ever seen. I thought it was illegal to have dark windows. I bet the Mosleys are behind this kidnapping!”

“Well, if they are, then our goose is cooked, because those guys would surely know how to pull off a professional kidnapping,” Jeremy commented.

As we sat there drinking our coffee, I watched Toby Taylor come out of his restaurant, hop into the blue Ferrari that a valet brought him, and go roaring off. Suddenly my mind snapped into gear.

“Jeremy!” I cried. “Follow that Ferrari!”

Startled, Jeremy put down his hot coffee in the coffee-holder slot on the dashboard, and started up the car, saying only, “What’s up, Pen?”

“Toby’s tires!” I exclaimed. “They have a streak of that orangey-pink paint on them. You know, just like the paintballs that somebody shot at our cottage. So, the only way a car could have that kind of paint on its tires is—”

“If someone drove their car through those paint puddles in our cottage driveway,” Jeremy said, pressing his foot to the pedal to speed up. “Why should Toby have trespassed there?”

Toby’s sports car had gotten pretty far ahead of us, but we could see him veering off the main road now in the direction of the older part of town.

“Do you suppose it’s been Toby Taylor all along who’s been behind these threats?” I wondered. “Why should he care if we halt the sale of Grandmother Beryl’s house?”

“Because it would stop the condo development,” Jeremy said. “Think of all the customers Toby stands to lose if we prevail. Why, with an influx of that many visitors, he could open three or four more restaurants; it’s what he’s publicly said he wants to do.”

“Does he want it enough to go out and hire kidnappers?” I asked speculatively.

“Darling,” Jeremy said, “restaurant owners can sometimes have links to unsavory characters who are known to get things done when all else fails. And it’s quite possible that Toby has ties to the Mosleys or anyone else who’d be a natural ally on this issue. So yes, Toby could be part of this.”

“And to think we ate his Dover sole!” I said indignantly.

“Well,” Jeremy admitted, “it was pretty good.”

“I’ve had better,” I said stoutly.

By now Jeremy caught up with the blue Ferrari. Toby had led us to the old warehouse area, not far from Ye Olde Towne Pub where Colin and his band played. But Toby didn’t pull up to the pub.

Instead, he tore around the corner, down a road so narrow it seemed more like a driveway, which led us farther into the labyrinth of shuttered warehouses, over by a section of the docks that was largely deserted, since the fishermen had already sold the day’s catch and gone home.

Jeremy slowed his car a few feet away, so that Toby didn’t notice us tailing him. Toby seemed preoccupied anyway, as he parked his car, locked it, then went up to one of the boarded-up warehouses and knocked at an unmarked, nondescript door. I watched in fascination as the door was opened by someone I couldn’t see. A second later, Toby went inside.

Jeremy expertly backed the Dragonetta into an alleyway between two of the warehouses that were across the street from the one where Toby had disappeared.

“Now what?” I whispered.

“We sit here and scope this out,” Jeremy said in a low voice.

“Oh, good!” I said, reaching for my coffee. “I always wanted to go on a stake-out.”

“Be quiet,” Jeremy said tensely. “This is not a game.”

“Woo, excuse me,” I muttered. At least the coffee was still hot. In all my excitement, I hadn’t drunk any yet. “Well,” I said after a few sips, “the guy makes a good cup of coffee, I’ll say that for him.”

“True,” Jeremy agreed.

“What do we do when he comes out shooting?” I asked.

“You
will
keep chattering,” Jeremy commented.

“You only scold when you’re worried,” I retorted.

“Quiet,” Jeremy answered, gesturing ahead. “Looks like we’ve got more company.”

A swarm of young men on bicycles had come swooping down the road. The bikes—and the kids on them—looked pretty scruffy. I’d seen these kids in town before. They all wore black, unmarked helmets and dark sunglasses. Their bikes were old but seemed souped up, enabling the riders to do daring stunts in the deserted streets. They acted as if they were on skateboards, and they rammed the bikes up against a curb, to fly in the air and yet land miraculously intact.

They were imitating motorcycle stunt drivers, I realized. They kept shouting at each other in hoarse voices, and there was something anarchic about the way they operated, making sudden, risky moves that could easily end in disaster.

“I guess these must be the vandals I’ve been hearing so much about,” I said in a low voice.

“They could be Colin’s friends,” Jeremy noted. “Some local ‘eco-warriors’, see? It’s on their T-shirts.”

I saw that they were all wearing similar black T-shirts with gold and red lettering; and most of the kids had cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves.

“How can they be eco-warriors and smoke?” I murmured distractedly.

“You’re mixing apples and oranges,” Jeremy commented. “One does not necessarily follow the other.”

The bikers were still swooping around us like bats, but their group had already thinned out, and only a few diehards remained. They didn’t notice us because Jeremy had shut off his engine.

At that moment, Toby came out of the warehouse, followed by a guy in fisherman’s clothes who was hauling a big crate. Toby unlocked the trunk—excuse me, the “boot”—of his car, and the man obligingly put the crate inside. The man then locked the warehouse door, and climbed into his own nearby truck.

Toby scowled at the few bikers who swooped past him. Then he got into his car and drove off.

“Well, that’s all there is to Toby,” Jeremy said with some irritation. “The only deal that went down with him today was a wholesale fish buy.”

“That still doesn’t explain the pink paint on his tires,” I pointed out.

“For all we know, these stupid kids could have paintballed him with their environmentally-correct paint, just like they threw eggs at my windshield,” Jeremy said.

“I still don’t think those kids threw the eggs,” I insisted. “Farmers’ kids know the hard work that goes into gathering eggs.”

“Forget the eggs!” Jeremy said. “Who cares? Got any other bright ideas?”

“I’m as exhausted as you from our little visit to Great-Aunt Dorothy,” I replied huffily, “but you don’t see me blaming you for every dumb idea you came up with.”

“That’s because I don’t come up with dumb ideas,” Jeremy said maddeningly, drinking his coffee as if we had all the time in the world now.

“You certainly do! Threatening Dorothy with ruining her rep among her snotty friends. Even if she hadn’t outlived them all, couldn’t you figure that her friends despise Rollo as much as she does?”

Jeremy winced. Then he nudged me. “Look. One of the eco-warriors is still hanging about, and he’s going into that call box. Think the old phone in there could possibly work?”

I glanced up with mild interest. Because of mobile phones, English call booths are a vanishing species. This one looked as if it had been erected in the 1950s. As for the phone, I could see that it was the kind that starts your call for you, then, a few seconds later, requires you to jam a large, thick coin into it really fast, or else the call cuts out. I sat there idly waiting to see if the kid actually succeeded in making a call on one of those dinosaurs.

And then, all of sudden, my mobile phone rang.

For a moment I just stared at it. I saw that my incoming call was from a local number. I answered it on speaker mode, so Jeremy could hear it.

“Penny Nichols?” came the voice, sounding as if someone were talking through a sock. I looked up, and I saw that the kid in the booth had indeed put a cloth over the mouthpiece. Jeremy waggled his eyebrows to indicate that he saw it, too, and that I should respond.

“Who is this?” I asked cautiously. Jeremy was busy trying to e-mail the local cop he’d talked to.

“Your cousin Rollo is safe . . . for the time being. Bring the money to the abandoned railroad station tonight at midnight. It must be only you and Jeremy who make this drop. Don’t bring anybody else, or the deal is off.”

My phone clicked just as I saw the kid hang up. He rapidly hopped onto his bicycle and drove away. Jeremy set off after him. But it was impossible to tail the kid, because he disappeared through alleyways between the warehouses where a car couldn’t fit. Jeremy and I tried to figure out which street he would come out on, but in the end, we lost him.

“Damn!” Jeremy exclaimed. “It looks like those kids really have kidnapped Rollo. If that’s true, then Colin has a lot to explain.”

W
ell, we ended up assembling our own SWAT team. First, of course, we had to get the local cop, Alfred, on board. He swore that he would bring only a select group of cops with him for back-up, and most of them would be in plainclothes. Jeremy made him promise that the cops would hang well back, out of sight.

Of course, when Geoff, Shannon and Colin learned that a few renegade eco-warriors were behind the kidnapping, they were aghast. Colin wanted to interrogate his younger brother and “punch out his lights” but the cop said that would be foolish because he would surely tip off his buddies.