Poison Pen
Chapter 6
Pressing his palm to his mouth, Rick unsuccessfully suppresses a yawn. Not enough intrigue from our suspects, Castle?" Kate asks, driving back to the precinct.
"No, they're an interesting bunch of characters, even if I don't believe any of them is the Poe Award killer. I was up late. I had some ideas racing through my head I had to get down in writing," Castle explains.
"Is that an occupational hazard?" Kate wonders, "or do you usually sleep in?"
"Generally, I don't sleep in during the school year and can't whenever my mother is in a play. I like to make sure Alexis has a decent breakfast before she leaves, and sometimes she has something for me to read or sign that I didn't deal with the night before. And mother starts performance days with vocal exercises. For some reason, she feels obligated to perform them at 5 a.m. Fortunately, my loft is reasonably soundproofed, or the neighbors would have marched on us by now with torches and pitchforks."
"So, you took your mother in after her ex-husband ripped her off?" Kate assumes.
"Uh-huh. Before then, she was out on the road so much that she and my daughter hadn't gotten to know each other very well. These days Alexis loves having Mother around. I've always told her that she can talk to me about anything, but now she has someone to go to with, you know, woman stuff."
Kate drums her fingers on the steering wheel. "I get that. I was 19 when I lost my mother, but I still missed girl-talk."
Castle points to the watch on Kate's wrist. "Did that belong to your mother?"
"No, to my dad. He missed a lot more than girl-talk, and it took him a long time to start functioning again. I've tried my best to pull him out of his hole. He's doing a lot better now." Stopping at a red light, Kate reaches beneath her blouse to pull out a ring on a slim gold chain. "This was hers. I wear it to remember the one I lost." She holds up her watch. "And this is for the one who is still with me."
"Kate," Rick murmurs gently, "if it's at all possible, I believe your mother is still with you as well."
"My father thinks she is. And," Kate confides, "sometimes I do too. What about you, Castle? You're famously fatherless. Did he pass away when you were young?"
The seat belt presses against Castle's shoulder as he shrugs. "I don't know, and according to Mother, neither does she. I was the result of what she describes as a night of the deepest passion she's ever experienced. I have to assume that my father didn't agree. Mother says he was gone when she woke up. She never even knew his full name. He told her to call him Jackson, but that could be a given or surname. Or he might have made it up to bed an ingenue. Mother swears she never saw him again and about all she's been able to tell me is that he was tall, probably about 2 inches taller than me, dark and handsome. How good her recall is, I can't say. If she was that caught up in the moment, her memory might be more like a dream. I don't believe she regards any of the liaisons she's had over the years since then as measuring up."
"That would have to be some dream, Castle if she's held on to it all these years," Kate opines."
As Kate pulls into her spot at the 12th Precinct, Castle strokes the stubble already forming on his jawline. "I suppose it would."
As Kate activates the computer on her desk in the bullpen, an arriving email chimes. "Castle, we've got the name Scriptorium's Flaming Sword used to register with the Sharper Point chatroom. It's François‐Marie Arouet. Did his letters strike you as sounding like he's French or French Canadian?"
Castle shoves back a lock of hair that falls on his forehead as he shakes his head. "Neither, and probably for a good reason. François‐Marie Arouet was otherwise known as Voltaire. Flamey used the real name of a literary great. That's got to be an alias too, Beckett. It's a dead end."
"Maybe not, Castle," Kate suggests. "He also had to give the administrator of the chat room an email. I should be able to trace it. It will take time — and more paperwork. There's no reason you have to stick around for that. You could go home and get your writing in while there's still some daylight. I'll call you if I come up with anything."
"Promise?" Rick demands.
"You've helped me get this far, Castle. So, sure."
Putting aside the laptop that was resting across his thighs, Castle swings his legs down from the top of his desk. He winces at the pins and needles as he shakes his feet awake. How long was he writing? After a glance at his watch, he calculates that his time at the keyboard before and after a quick dinner with Alexis comes to about eight hours. If Beckett thought he'd finish while the sun was still in the sky, she must have been thinking Pacific time. At least he made his word count goal. He'll have the chapters Gina demanded on time, and they'll be good. They'll be better than good. The women that sniffle in the seats at his readings will feel for Nikki Heat. The cop who fights every day against her own sense of loss to bring justice to homicide victims is smart and brave. And oh, yes, she's beautiful too.
Rick's also poured his heart into his thinly disguised alter-ego, Jameson Rook, a prize-winning investigative reporter who also writes romance novels. Castle penned a few of those himself when the demand for mysteries and spy books fell off for a while, some years back. For the most part, it was like picking from an old-style menu in a Chinese restaurant. One from column A, the plucky heroine who hates the man who'll be her true love on sight. One from column B, the deliberately snarky hero with a secret past that makes him hesitant to open his heart to column A. Fill in the other picks with the situation that forces them to fall in love, the obstacles in their way when they finally do, and the happy ending. No matter how he spun the other elements, there had to be a happy ending. He tried to give happy endings of a sort to Storm too, but disappointments in his own life often darkened them. When he found out that Meredith was cheating on him, he decided to kill off, if temporarily, Storm's lover Clara Strike.
He'd love nothing more than to find a happy ending with Beckett, but he barely has a beginning. He doesn't even know if she's interested in him as anything other than the author of her comfort books. She's wounded by her mother's death. That's clear enough. Wounded people often bury their true feelings as a shield against future hurts. He knows about that too well. He's spent much of his life doing it himself. But Beckett's given him some hopeful signs, opening up about her history.
So what's his next step? A date, maybe? Between the investigation, his family, and his writing, when will he have time? Simple. He and Beckett will have to catch the Poe Award killer as soon as possible. Sure. Uh-huh. Right. He can handle that no problem. But first, he has to figure out how to stop thinking about Beckett long enough to get some sleep.