No Place Like Home - A Camilla Randall Mystery (The Camilla Randall Mysteries) (29 page)

"Kids need to get some sleep. They got school tomorrow."

When they'd gone, Doria felt a chill. Not only from the departure of the warm bodies and camaraderie, but she felt a sudden fear of being alone with Joey. Would he expect her to be intimate? She wasn't ready for that. Even if she didn't have a half-healed surgical wound to worry about.

He opened the tent and set his guitar inside. He held the flap open.

"It's not exactly Home magazine material, but it keeps pretty warm inside," he said.

He picked up the lantern and set it on a small table by the mattress. The tent was so neat and organized. It appealed to all the nesting instincts that had made her become a decorator in the first place.

"It's actually…" she didn't know what to say. She wanted to let him know she was impressed with his ingenuity and neatness, but all the words that came to mind sounded condescending.

"It's…home." He said quietly. Come on in, Dorothy. There's room for two."

When the alarm woke me at 5:50, I admit to letting out a few curses into the misty dawn. Why had I agreed to meet Marva/ Marvin at six o'clock in the morning? This was insane. I had to get to the bookstore by at least eight to get the place tidied up after the crazy cash mob day.

I dreaded waking Dorothy and telling her I'd volunteered her for early morning shorthand-reading duty.

And my arm hurt. I checked the bandage. I should probably change it later, before I went out for the day.

I scrambled into one of the outfits Plant had bought me. I still hadn't got to the storage unit to get my clothes. I pulled my hair back in a barrette and didn't bother with make-up. Everything was harder with only one fully-working arm.

What I needed now was coffee. I figured I'd start the pot first, then go wake Dorothy. I hoped she'd be rested. The poor woman had no idea what she'd signed up for coming to work for me.

With a few sips of Peet's Arabian Mocha-Java in me, I poured another cup, added milk and carried it down the hall to Dorothy's room. A caffeinated bedside chat might be the best way to ease her out of bed.

But as I walked by the front window, I saw Marvin's pick-up truck pull into the driveway. I opened the door and motioned him to be quiet. Poor Plant and Silas deserved their rest, even if I was stupid enough to go along with the man's schemes.

He bounded in, grabbed Dorothy's coffee cup and gave me an annoying grin.

"Fabulous. You made me coffee! Great. We need to get right to work. I have news. First, I called the car rental people at the airport. The car I saw at Sebastian's in San Simeon—it really is the car they rented to Ronzo. He has it until the end of the week. The GPS says it's still in San Simeon."

"What about that stupid blog? Have you made sure he's not back in New Jersey writing snarky stuff about us?" I half wanted that to be true.

"No activity from him on his blog. Lots of comments though. Everybody loves his story about you."

I led him back to the kitchen in silence. I needed to work up some sympathy for Ronzo, not remind myself of why I hated him.

"Dorothy's still in bed," I said. "I'll go wake her up."

I shuffled back down the hall and knocked lightly on the door, desperately hoping Dorothy might be an early riser and already awake.

Nothing but silence.

I knocked again, louder.

Still nothing.

I opened the door a crack. The drapes were drawn and I couldn't see much in the dawn light, so I opened it wider. I could see Dorothy's blond head on the pillow. And her tiny body asleep on top of the bedclothes. Could anybody be that thin?

I flicked on the light. The bed was empty and un-slept-in. What I'd seen was a wig tossed onto the pillow—and the "Manners Doctor" outfit, carefully smoothed on the bed.

But Dorothy herself was nowhere to be seen.

Neither was her purse—or Ronzo's notebook.

I checked the little half-bath, and it was empty too.

Dorothy was gone.

This was crazy. Where could the woman be? She'd seemed so weak and frail. Not the sort to go out for an early morning hike. Maybe she'd been embarrassed by her over-indulgence last night and taken a taxi home. But what would she have worn, since she left her clothes here?

Marvin didn't seem to notice I wasn't my smiling self when I got back to the kitchen. He simply went on with what he'd been saying.

"But here's the biggest news of all: I talked to the people at the motel when I got home last night. They said the pool guy saw Ronzo talking with two guys who had a couple of kayaks. One of the kayaks was a two-seater. Their third guy got sick on bad oysters and went back to Fresno. So they needed a third person to paddle."

"And Ronzo volunteered?" That sounded like him.

"Yup. And they were going to go north. Toward San Simeon."

That sounded vaguely interesting, but insignificant compared to the fact that my new employee had disappeared into the morning mist, apparently naked.

Doria woke to the sound of birds. Noisy ones. She'd never been one for camping, so she'd never realized birds sang that loud. Their trills were pretty, if not conducive to sleep.

Joey's head lay next to hers on the pillow. Joey Torres, her long lost love. It was all too much to make sense of.

They hadn't made love. Although the words were unspoken, he probably sensed—as she did—that physical intimacy at this point would be way too much, way too fast.

And her body was still too fragile from her surgery.

But they'd talked well into the night. Forty years was a lot to catch up on. He'd obviously been through some rough times, but he was still the same funny, witty Joey she'd fallen in love with at that sing-along so many years ago.

She pulled on the running suit she'd borrowed, slipped into her shoes and went outside to answer an urgent call of nature. She grabbed the shovel with a toilet paper roll on the handle that Joey had instructed her to take "fifty paces" from the campsite to dig a makeshift latrine.

She was a bit fearful that she'd meet the proverbial bear doing the same thing in the woods, but otherwise, it was an oddly freeing experience. Her years of yoga classes paid off.

When she returned to the site, Joey was preparing breakfast on the tarp-covered area in front of the tent. He lit a can of Sterno and set an ancient percolator on the burner to boil. He'd set two places on the little table, each with a plastic bowl, a tin cup and a spoon. A battered cracker tin filled with granola sat between them, plus a can of evaporated milk.

"It's the good stuff," he said. "That granola is from the health food store in Morro Bay. It's got flax seed, cranberries, and almonds. They let me have it when it hits the expiration date. I used to have to fight old Tommy the Tooth for it. But now he's gone—I guess I'll get my pick."

"Tommy the Tooth? Is that the man who owned the whiskey everybody was drinking at the camp when I arrived? He hasn't reappeared?"

Joey glanced up from his coffee making.

"Nope. They might have been right about him being dead. I thought maybe he got picked up by the cops, but he'd have been let out by now. They usually only keep him overnight if he's drunk and bothering people. They don't like to keep us longer than necessary. They know we sometimes get ourselves arrested so we can get medical help and a warm place to sleep."

Doria's brain started whirring as she remembered some of the patio conversation she overheard last night, plus the things Camilla said yesterday as they were driving from Morro Bay. Those missing men—they seemed to be connected.

Maybe Joey knew something.

"There's a man—a blogger—who's been looking for Tom. I think his name is Ronson or something?"

Joey's face went through a scary transformation. His eyes intensified and his mouth almost vomited the name. "Gonzo Ronzo? I hate that guy. Follows me all over the country. I gotta keep one jump ahead of him. It's like I'm that fugitive in the movie, and he's Tommy Lee Jones—following right behind me out of sheer cussedness…sometimes I want to kill that dude."

Joey stopped his rant and poured her a cup of coffee.

"Sorry. I didn't mean to get carried away. I just hate him is all. He won't go away. Thinks he's gonna get famous by proving J. J. Tower didn't die in that fire." He gave a harsh sigh. "Dude is smarter than the average reporter—I gotta give him that. But he thinks he's effing Hunter S. Thompson."

Doria sat down in the camping chair and dug into the granola. It was surprisingly delicious with the evaporated milk.

"He knows you're alive—this Bonzo Gonzo person?"

"Bonzo!" Joey let out a big laugh. "I like that better than Gonzo. Yeah, he thinks he knows I'm alive. But he's never got close enough to prove it." Joey took a sip of his own coffee. "He usually comes around pretending to be one of us, camping out and feeding everybody a sob story about his time in Iraq. But this time, he put on a suit and pretended to be a lawyer. Told a bunch of guys who hang out at the Mission that I had some big money coming. Said they'd get a cut of it if they helped him find me."

"Did anybody fall for that?"

"Nope. They didn't have a chance. Cause Tom got there first. Said Bonzo was his territory. Tom was a mean old customer. You didn't mess with him."

"He had enemies?" This was a new development. "Do you think somebody might have killed him because they wanted to turn you in to this blogger?"

"Nobody liked Tom much, but na—I don't think anybody would kill over getting a cut of the supposed fortune of an old hobo. Luckily nobody believed Bonzo's story about me being J. J. Tower. When you've been living on the road a while you learn not to trust anybody. You sure don't believe some guy in a suit who comes around with a fairy tale."

"A fairy tale that happens to be true." Doria reached across the little table and squeezed Joey's hand.

He squeezed back.

"Yes and no. Joey Torres is still alive. J. J. Tower is dead. He was a jerk. I don't want to be that guy. And whatever money or royalties he left behind went to the girlfriend who said she had my kid. They deserve it. I don't. And nothing—nothing—is going to bring that guy back to life, even if I have to kill somebody else to keep J. J. dead."

"You'd kill somebody to protect your anonymity?" Doria felt a pang of fear. She really didn't know what this man was capable of.

"Yeah. Tommy knew that. I told him, loud and clear. I told him I've got a weapon and I know how to use it. You learn to take care of yourself when you live on the road."

Doria body went cold. If she remembered right—on that first night with Lucky and Bucky, Joey had been the one who'd brought Tom's bottle of whisky back to the camp.

And he'd just told her he had the means and the motive to kill the man.

When I got back to the kitchen and told Marvin about Dorothy, he gave me a skeptical look, as if I'd lost Dorothy on purpose, or made her up entirely.

"Who is this Dorothy person? She's your employee?"

I gave him a quick run-down of yesterday's events.

When I mentioned the Manners Doctor outfits, his gaze intensified. He jumped up, his eyes wide. His hands started to shake and his voice squeaked. It was as if I'd triggered some latent insanity.

"The outfit—it's in her room?" he said in a breathless voice.

I watched him dash down the hall, half-wanting him to discover Dorothy in her bed safe and sound and find out I'd been dreaming.

But the little room was still quite Dorothy-free.

However, Marvin appeared to be having a psychotic break.

He picked up the clothes, one by one, and smoothed them, as if they belonged to a beloved child. When he got to the wig, I was afraid he might burst into tears. He collapsed on the bed and held the ball of blond synthetic hair to his heart like a cherished pet.

"It's her. I can't tell you…can't begin to tell you…how relieved I am. I thought she might have…I don't know. I thought Harry might have found her. Killed her."

It was way too early in the morning for this kind of theatrics.

"I take it you know Dorothy?" I tried to speak in a reasonable voice, as if this man weren't having some kind of fit on my friends' guest room bed. "If I'd known you were friends, I would have asked her to join us last night. But she was resting. I think she'd had a little too much wine."

Marvin held the dress against his own body, as he morphed into his Marva persona. "How could she have worn this? I'm a size fourteen." He held the dress against himself like a teenaged girl shopping for a prom dress. "She can't be more than a four. Oh, look—safety pins. She's poked pins in my lovely raw silk. I hope this can be repaired." He started to fold the dress and jacket carefully, like a sales girl at a good boutique.

All I wanted was for the man to make a little sense.