Chapter 35
Nine months later in early November I got other news that was stunning. I’d won the British Crime Writers’ Association award for best first crime novel. It would be presented by Princess Margaret in London the following month, and I was astonished while worrying what to wear and how to curtsy.
As soon as I got the news, I hurried downstairs to the morgue to tell Marcella, but she wasn’t there.
Autopsying a homicide, Dr. Wiecking held an excised stab wound in forceps as I announced the news.
His only reaction was to toss the stab wound at me.
I don’t know why. Picking it off the floor, I returned it to him and washed my hands.
On my way home, I stopped at Montaldo’s, Richmond’s ritziest women’s clothing boutique, where I’d never shopped.
But I needed advice about what to do and wear when presented to royalty.
I assumed if any local place would know it would be Montaldo’s.
I walked in dressed like college and hopefully not smelling like the autopsy suite.
Finally, I got the attention of a sharply dressed saleswoman named Diane Jefferson.
I told her the situation, and suddenly there was interest. I was shown a long black skirt and an ornate gold-and-black beaded top.
When I tried them on, I stood on a wooden box feeling like a figure on top of a wedding cake while a seamstress stuck pins here and there.
The following Monday, I stopped at Montaldo’s after work and picked up my outfit, spending $161 I couldn’t afford.
Diane Jefferson taught me how to curtsy, and I practiced until she was satisfied that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in front of royalty.
I bought a pair of pantyhose and found a pair of low-heeled pumps I could wear without breaking my neck.
On December 4, I arrived in London for the first time since my summer in Oxford.
My British publisher was MacDonald & Co.
, the name later changing to Little, Brown Book Group.
The afternoon of the awards ceremony my editor and other staff took me to lunch at a wine bar where we spent far too much time.
When I returned to my hotel, I was tipsy on top of jet lag.
I took a long shower trying to revive. As I got dressed in my dazzling outfit from Montaldo’s, I realized I’d made a serious tactical error.
My beaded top was as tight as a glove. It wasn’t possible for me to zip it up in back even a little.
Opening my room door, I spotted a man in a suit carrying a briefcase.
He walked briskly in my direction, and I said, “Excuse me?”
He looked around, making sure I was talking to him.
“Yes?” He stopped.
“I’m so sorry to bother you. But could you zip up my top?”
“Why… certainly.”
He zipped me up with an air of expectation, and I quickly shut my door.
That night more alcohol flowed in candlelight, and I watched Princess Margaret at the head table across the crowded room.
She was smoking, and into the Famous Grouse Scotch.
I was glad to see it since I still had a buzz going from my protracted lunch in the wine bar.
When it was my turn to walk up front, I did fine with my curtsy, my award an engraved magnifying glass I keep close to my desk to this day.
After the ceremony the winners were directed backstage by men in red coats.
We were to sign a big red book, and Princess Margaret appeared to greet the award recipients individually. And briefly.
“And how long did it take you to write your book?” she asked me.
“About a year.”
“Yes, it does take a while.” Her eyes seemed elsewhere.
“I understand you like horses?” I wanted to be friendly, and she froze like a wax figure in Madame Tussaud’s.
I realized that my attempt at chitchatting wasn’t welcome or appropriate, not knowing that one doesn’t initiate conversations with members of the royal family.
The saleswomen at Montaldo’s had neglected to pass along that bit of intelligence.
One of the red coats quickly escorted me away as if I’d been grabbed by a stage hook.
The next morning, I woke up to snow in London, and it was like a scene out of Dickens.
The weather was too bad for me to fly home, and I had a magical time walking around Knightsbridge.
I trudged past Liberty London, Harrods, Laura Ashley, and all sorts of places I couldn’t afford.
It was a limbic moment I’ll never forget.
I’d won a major award presented by a royal, and London was blanketed in snow.
Postmortem would go on to win four more awards, including the Edgar presented in New York City. Los Angeles Times reviewer Charles Champlin attended as my guest. While we danced together, he said he was interviewing actress Jodie Foster onstage in the fall. I should come, and he’d introduce us.
“She should play Scarpetta,” Charles Champlin said, and I was dumbfounded, agreeing that would be amazing.
In the early spring of 1991, Michael Congdon sold Body of Evidence for $120,000, an astonishing amount of money to me.
I moved out of Honey Tree Apartments and into a faux Tudor home in Richmond’s wealthy neighborhood of Windsor Farms. The house hadn’t sold yet because it was modern construction and handicapped equipped.
Countertops, cabinets, toilets, everything was low.
A huge oriental rug had conveyed with the house because it covered plyboard flooring so that the great room was level for a wheelchair.
The elderly couple who built the place had died, and many of their belongings were left, some of them tossed into super cans at the foot of the driveway.
I owned next to nothing, and dug out an old violin with no strings, antique tools, a tapestry, a few vintage law books that I displayed in the great room.
I bought my first Mercedes and was getting a lot of media requests, including national ones like The Washington Post and the TV news magazine 48 Hours.
I was starting to be recognized wherever I went, and it made me uncomfortable. I did my best to duck nosy neighbors who pushed through my hedge when I was in my backyard minding my own business. They’d start in with a litany of questions, most of all wanting to know about my family.
“We’re not from here,” is all I would say while thinking, You don’t know the half of it.
I was beginning to have privacy concerns, getting calls from strangers, prompting me to change my phone number to an unlisted one. I hired a woman I’d met at Honey Tree Apartments, setting her up in the parlor of my house. She was my secretary and a buffer between me and everyone else.
I no longer made appointments or reservations myself.
I didn’t want strangers on the phone asking questions or making comments about my books.
I began disguising myself with baseball caps and sunglasses.
I trained with firearms experts at the FBI Academy, learning everything I could about self-defense.
I was one of the first to install outdoor cameras.
When people rang my bell, I could see them while hearing everything said.
I had a security system and kept my revolver on my nightstand.
On Christmas morning of 1991 I was up early and working in my office next to the main bedroom.
A friend called and we were talking when my burglar alarm started hammering.
The window next to my bed was open several inches.
Someone had tried to break in. Strangers had begun leaving books on my doorstep in hopes I’d sign them.
Or they “returned” them because they didn’t like something they’d read about me.
With increasing frequency, cars parked across from my house, people hoping to catch a sighting.
I didn’t have a clue how to deal with becoming famous.
In the spring of 1991, I was overwhelmed.
I couldn’t keep up with my mail, the media requests, and when I’d appear in the grocery store, people would check out what was in my basket.
I was working at the OCME part time, watching autopsies and shadowing Marcella as always.
I slept poorly, my heart racing, and a cardiologist had me wear a Holter monitor.
I was hooked up to electrodes while in the morgue, aware of how odd that must look.
I told a visiting commonwealth’s attorney that when I’d gotten to work that morning, I was dead, and the medical examiners had reanimated me. For an instant, his face turned pale.
The cardiologist decided I was having premature ventricular contractions and recommended that I limit my stress.
I decided I needed to get away. Far away.
But who would I take with me? I thought of my FBI agent friend Ed Sulzbach.
He worked out of the Richmond field office, and we’d gotten to know each other years earlier after I heard him lecture about criminal profiling.
Taking the cardiologist’s advice, I decided on a research trip that would also be restorative.
I invited Ed and his wife, Susan, to Austria and Germany.
She declined but told me to take her husband and have fun.
He’d make sure I was safe, she added. What Ed and I didn’t know at the time was Susan had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
When Ed and I landed in Vienna, I rented a BMW 735i we’d take turns driving from Austria to Munich.
I spent a lot of time thinking about my life, imagining how much Charlie would have loved the trip.
Not so long ago, he’d visited my house in Windsor Farms. He tried to reconnect, and I’d started crying. Then we argued.
What we’d had was broken beyond repair. He knew it too.
What I didn’t say was that I’d gotten involved romantically with a woman.
I’ll call her Merle because it’s not my business to out anyone, and as far as I know she’s remained closeted.
We started out as friends, and I was caught by surprise when we became more than that.
I’d never thought of myself as bisexual.
But clearly, I am, and it would take most of my life to come to terms with that part of myself.
I didn’t grow up aspiring to such a thing.
In Montreat, that was the stuff of fire and brimstone.
When people ask why I decided on that “lifestyle,” I always reply that our attractions aren’t a decision. They’re not a choice.
By the time I left for Austria, Merle had broken up with me, and I was having a hard time getting over her. She didn’t want to be friends, and we weren’t anymore.
“I will not forget you,” I wrote in Austria on June 29. “I see you in the roses blooming in the wild and the bells chiming late at night. I see you in the cafes when young lovers stare into each other’s eyes and laugh as they smoke, knees brushing and bodies begging for a way to be closer…”
My favorite place was Schloss Ernegg. Built in the twelfth century, it was set back on a huge property lush with wild orchids, cherries, roses, ancient yew and linden trees.
White stucco with a red roof, the three-story castle was filled with suits of armor, medieval furniture, and old oil paintings.
There were very few guests while Ed and I were there, and I enjoyed the quiet spookiness of the place.
Each day I’d go for walks alone with my notebook, reflecting on my divorce and all that had transpired since.
The castle was next to a golf course that was deserted.
Each late afternoon, I’d sit on the edge of a green writing in my journal.
“Not a cloud in the sky. Daisies white and yellow. Red poppies… Trees like bottle brushes… farmland and mountains in the distance. Reminds me of Western North Carolina. Air like cool, distilled water…”
I was told Schloss Ernegg is haunted. I’m pretty sure that’s true.
“I’m a little weirded out,” I wrote on the early morning of July 1.
I’d placed my deodorant inside my cosmetic bag on the back of the toilet. When I returned to the bedroom, I heard a loud clatter. The deodorant seemed to have leapt out on its own and was on the floor.
“It scared the hell out of me, and I don’t see how it happened,” I described at the time.
“Also, there was a misty shadow on the wall, moving like the faint shadow of leaves when the sun is shining through trees beyond a window. But there is no tree so tall as to make a shadow. And after a minute the shadows were gone. And I’m sitting here, thinking, no this isn’t happening to me… ”
At breakfast I mentioned the experience.
I found out that one of the castle’s ghosts was a young beautiful blond servant girl who had misbehaved and was locked in the cellar.
That made sense as I thought of something flinging my deodorant to the floor.
There was a portrait of her across from my bed.
She held white flowers in one hand, a handkerchief in the other.
The next day, Ed and I set out for the town of Mauthausen, quaintly filled with stucco homes painted in pastel colors, their gardens sumptuous.
Such an irony that any place could be civilized and beautiful when located close to a notorious former concentration camp.
I wanted to see it after reading the book Mauthausen: The History of a Death Camp.
I needed to put my hands on the Holocaust’s atrocities the same way I did a dead body, to feel what had happened, to see for myself.
That required visiting. I felt led in that direction without knowing why.
Maybe I could incorporate something about it in my next Scarpetta novel.
I imagined my character’s reaction to such an unthinkable crime scene.
Ed and I parked our car and followed a very steep, narrow path.
I heard children laughing and sheep bleating as we reached the road that would take us to the death camp.
It looked like a huge granite penitentiary.
I was sickened by photographs of the emaciated Jews carrying granite up from the quarry.
Many of them were pushed off the cliffs.
When we toured one of the barracks, I smelled death as vividly as if I were inside the morgue cooler.
I asked Ed if he smelled it, and he didn’t.
I said we had to leave. He was looking around while drinking a beer, baffled, asking if I was okay.
I shook my head, no. I wasn’t okay and needed to go.
I’d wanted to experience what happened at Mauthausen, and I did.
“I felt sick in there,” I wrote in my journal.
While in Austria, I had an overpowering sense that I’d been there before. Perhaps it was my ancestral DNA stirring, since my mother’s German-speaking family was from that part of the world.