Chapter 42 #2
I noticed how neat and exact his entries were.
I could tell he took pride in his piloting, and wondered if he felt the same about being a chauffeur.
When I talked to the mortuary assistant who was present during Diana’s autopsy, he told me poignant details.
Her toenails were painted turquoise blue.
Her fingers were broken, most likely when she put up her hands defensively while impacting with the back of the front seat.
He said there was no visible sign that she was pregnant when she died from a torn pulmonary vein that caused massive internal bleeding.
Frederic Maillez, the doctor who stopped to help her in the tunnel, told me about finding her on a backseat floor, the Mercedes split in half, smoke billowing out of it.
She was struggling to breathe, and he assisted with a respiratory bag.
When I interviewed Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, he seemed convinced that her death was no accident.
The royal family didn’t want her marrying Dodi.
The problem I have with their deaths being homicides is that she and Dodi weren’t wearing their seat belts.
Had they been, they may have survived the crash.
The likely truth is that Henri Paul was driving at an excessive speed to escape the paparazzi and lost control of the car.
If there’s more to their deaths than the obvious, I doubt we’ll ever know.
It was a tragedy that shouldn’t have happened, and while I retraced Diana’s footsteps during filming, I felt haunted by her.
One night I had a strange dream. I was by myself in a London coffee shop and noticed a young woman sitting alone in a corner.
I realized it was Princess Diana, nobody else there but the two of us.
She was running her fingers through her hair, seeming anxious and extremely upset.
I didn’t want to bother her but was concerned.
Finally, I approached her as she got up from her table. I asked if she was okay. Maybe I could help her? Weirdly, there was an elevator in the middle of the room, and she walked toward it, the doors opening as she boarded.
“Would you like me to accompany you?” I asked. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“You can’t come where I’m going.” She vanished behind the closing doors.
When I woke up, I felt I’d been visited by her ghost.
By the fall of 2000, I didn’t want to live in Richmond anymore. My house was monitored by surveillance cameras, the windows in my office bulletproof glass. I was having a problem with stalkers.
A woman disguised herself in a FedEx uniform and tried to get up to my apartment in Manhattan to “deliver a package.” Another woman would sneak a look at the tennis schedule at the club where I played.
She’d make sure to be on the court next to mine whenever I showed up.
She never missed a book signing or public event, managing to run into me all over the place.
A high school teacher, she had a fine reputation and it seemed no one knew how deranged she was.
One day she was playing tennis next to me again, and as usual her balls strayed into my court, forcing me to return them every other minute.
She’d walk back and forth in front of my car as I was pulling out of my parking place.
On this occasion as I drove away in my V12 Mercedes convertible, I was fuming with my security over the phone. I’d always been told that you never confront a stalker. But I’d had enough of this one. By now, she’d been at it for the better part of five years.
“Screw it!” I told my head of security. “Enough is enough!”
Making a U-turn, I raced back to the tennis club, and there she was outside the entrance talking to someone. I pulled up and called out her name. It was the first time I’d ever addressed her, and she looked startled. Reluctantly, she walked up to my car.
“You know, it isn’t lost on me that wherever I go, there you are,” I started in.
“And just so you know, your behavior is obvious to others. Including people at this very club. And I’m wondering what your school would think about it.
I highly recommend you cut it out or you’re going to discover you’ve picked up the wrong end of a snake. ”
She was taken aback and rather mortified that I did this in front of other people lingering nearby.
I never saw her again after that. But she wasn’t the last of my problems. Soon after, another stalker publicly accused me of stealing his self-published book idea.
I’d never heard of this person or his writing, and I sued him.
During my deposition, I was forced to spend eight hours with him inside a small room.
That’s unfortunate when the person across the table is a stalker.
Pale and without any affect, he stared at me the entire time.
He would cyberstalk me after that for more than a decade, accusing me of ridiculous things like trying to murder him and killing his cat.
While on tour for The Last Precinct in the fall of 2000, I met Irene Shulgin, who introduced me to her friends Dan and Donna Dixon Aykroyd.
Irene had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner with “friends” of hers without saying who they were.
When Whit Baldwin and I landed a helicopter on a farm in Winchester, Virginia, Dan and Donna were standing there waiting.
I hired Irene to help me close my Richmond office and start over somewhere else.
It was a painful thing to do. I loved the building I’d bought near my favorite restaurant, Ruth’s Chris.
The owner would let me land a helicopter on their lawn.
I was fond of my staff and appreciated all they’d done for me over the years.
But I had no peace of mind in Richmond. It was time to move on.
In early 2001 I moved into a ten-thousand-square foot house in Greenwich, Connecticut, where I bought my first Ferrari, a Modena 360 with a Grigio Ingrid pale gold paint job.
In the spring, I flew to London with my close friends Virginia governor Jim Gilmore and his wife, Roxane.
They’d invited me on a trade mission to promote the Jamestown archaeology dig outside Williamsburg.
I’d been involved with the excavation for several years, often participating, and mostly that meant digging up ancient skeletons.
I was working on my helicopter pilot’s license, and would fly a Jet Ranger to the site, landing in a grassy clearing on the James River.
There’s little I found more exhilarating than flying solo.
I admit getting a kick from the looks on people’s faces when they’d watch me landing and taking off by myself.
One late afternoon at Jamestown, I was covered in red clay and limping after kneeling on the hard ground for hours on end.
It would turn out I had nerve damage to the same ankle I’d sprained badly in the second grade.
I called the injury Granny’s revenge, because it happened while I was working on a skeleton that I nicknamed Granny.
She was old when she died, with an abscessed tooth, a notch between her front teeth from smoking a clay pipe.
I had a feeling she was cranky while alive, imagining her puffing away on tobacco inside the Jamestown fort in the early 1600s.
After carefully brushing away dirt from her bones all day, my right ankle prickled numbly when I stood up. The helicopter I’d flown was empty and baking in the sun when I gimped back to it. A tourist standing nearby watched me with a baffled look on his face.
“I’m trying to figure out what you’re doing!” he exclaimed.
“A girl’s gotta get home somehow!” I replied, climbing into the cockpit.
While I was in London with chief archeologist Bill Kelso and the Gilmores, New Scotland Yard invited me for a tour. It was terrible timing, my schedule packed. I was there to talk about Jamestown and not my usual research, but it was an honor to be invited to the Yard. It would be rude to say no.