Cowboy For Hire (10 page)

He had a feeling Uncle Bill was right. Damn
it.

Five

Amy felt pretty awful by the time she and
Martin arrived at the tent where the costume fittings were to be
done. That wretched Charlie Fox always seemed to make the worst
possible interpretations of the things she said.

She couldn’t help it if she’d been
surprised—oh, very well, scandalized—to see a young female, and a
respectable-looking one, at that, smoking a cigarette. Everything
Amy had ever been taught told her that smoking was a masculine
pastime and not one to be indulged in by women. In Pasadena, even
men
who smoked cigarettes were looked upon with disapproval
unless they were otherwise judged worthy citizens. For some reason,
cigars and pipes weren’t looked upon with such intense disapproval.
In men. No amount of good works, in Pasadena, could ever nullify
the evil of smoking in a woman.

Why, the minister at the First Presbyterian
Church in Pasadena, to which church Amy went every Sunday of her
life, had as much as said that females who smoked were going
straight to hell.
Amy
hadn’t said it; a minister of the
Gospel had said it. So there.

So why did she now feel as if she’d been
wrong to disclose her shock?

Nobody’d asked her for her opinion, Charlie
Fox had told her. Humph. Horrid man. He’d asked her what was wrong
and she’d told him. Then he’d as much as told
her
that she
was a stiff-necked, judgmental fusspot. Anyhow, where would the
world be if it depended on people being asked before they told
other people what they thought?

That didn’t make sense even to herself, and
she was frowning at it and trying to reconfigure it when Martin’s
voice dragged her out of the dumps.

“Miss Wilkes,” he said, “please let me
introduce you to Miss Karen Crenshaw. Miss Crenshaw is Madame
Dunbar’s assistant, and has been more than helpful to our cast
members for some time now.”

Looking up, for her eyes had been downcast
and focused on the ground while her brain had toiled with her
discomposure, Amy discovered herself staring straight into the face
of the woman who’d been smoking. She felt herself blush.
Fiddle!

Miss Crenshaw curtsied prettily. Not having
anticipated such a courtesy from a woman who smoked cigarettes, Amy
stuttered, “Oh! Oh, well, I’m pleased to meet you, Miss Crenshaw.”
Heavenly days, Amy was accustomed to curtsying to her uncle’s
inmates. She couldn’t recall ever having been curtsied to,
herself.

“Likewise,” said Miss Crenshaw, gazing at her
askance, as if she didn’t understand why Amy was rattled.

Why should she? Amy asked herself
bitterly.

Because Charlie’s words seemed to be ringing
in her ears and scoffing at her, Amy held out her hand. “It’s so
good of you to do this, Miss Crenshaw.”

Miss Crenshaw transferred her puzzled gaze to
Amy’s hand and held it there for a moment before taking the hand in
her own and shaking it. Martin cleared his throat behind her, and
Amy feared she’d made a fool of herself. Again.

Well, that was just too bad. She lifted her
chin, determined to maintain her good manners no matter what. She
was no better than Miss Crenshaw—even though Miss Crenshaw did
smoke cigarettes—and she wouldn’t try to pretend that she was, as
she’d read some moving picture actresses did. Amy, too, had to work
for a living. Until she’d met Mr. Tafft, she’d done it at her
uncle’s health spa. Now she was supposed to be acting. All things
considered, Amy wished she’d stayed in Pasadena and refused this
offer.

But that was how quitters talked, she
lectured herself sternly. She was a Wilkes, and Wilkeses didn’t
quit. They fulfilled their promises and finished their jobs. Then
they quit.

Very well. She would do her job. She smiled
at Martin. “Thank you, Mr. Tafft.”

Beaming and rubbing his hands together,
Martin said, “Certainly, certainly. I’m sure you two will get along
just fine. I—er—had better check up on some things.”

Horace Huxtable, unless Amy missed her guess.
She managed not to wrinkle her nose and purse up her lips, and was
proud of herself.

After he’d left the tent, Miss Crenshaw went
to the flap and tied it. With a smile for Amy, she said, “Don’t
want anybody waltzing in while you’re in your knickers and chemise,
do we?”

Horrified, Amy cried, “Good heavens, no!”

Fiddle!
She knew she’d misspoken when
Miss Crenshaw lifted her eyebrows and said, “There’s no need to
carry on. The Flap’s tied shut.”

Oh, dear, now she thinks I’m a prig,
too.
Amy was beginning to get awfully discouraged. Miss
Crenshaw had lovely eyes, Amy noticed—probably because they were
opened so wide. Big and pansy brown. Amy would wager that Charlie
Fox would consider Miss Crenshaw quite pretty. That made her feel
even more discouraged.

With a sigh, she said, “I beg your pardon,
Miss Crenshaw. I didn’t mean to speak so loudly.”

“Nonsense, don’t even think about it.” Miss
Crenshaw flipped Amy’s apology away with her hand. “But let’s get
you undressed now so we can try on your costume for the first
scene. I hope you’ll like it.”

“I’m sure I shall,” murmured Amy, praying she
was right.

She undressed, uneasy about it. Not that she
feared Miss Crenshaw would do anything untoward, or that anyone
else would enter the tent during her fitting. But she’d never
undressed in front of another person, and she was shy about it. She
also had a feeling Vernon would disapprove. She disapproved,
herself, if it came to that. She kept her back to Miss Crenshaw,
worried as she did so that the costumer would believe her to be a
big prude.

With a heavy sigh, Amy came to the conclusion
that she
was
a big prude. And since that was the case, she
might as well behave as she wanted to. The good Lord knew, she
reflected darkly as she gave a thought to Horace Huxtable, that
everyone else around here seemed to do so.

When she turned around again, she realized
Miss Crenshaw had not been looking at her at all but had turned her
back and was working at a large table set against the far side of
the tent. Amy sighed, and the other woman turned.

“All ready now?” asked Miss Crenshaw
pleasantly.

She guessed so. “Yes.” She tried to sound
pleasant, too.

“All right, let’s take a look first.”

Amy felt like a china doll on display in a
department store window.

“Yes,” said Miss Crenshaw, eyeing her
critically. “I think we’ll need very few alterations.”

Assuming that was a good thing, Amy smiled.
Her smile tipped a bit when Miss Crenshaw, treating her as Amy
expected she might treat a dressmaker’s dummy, put two fingers
against Amy’s shoulder and pushed it in an effort to get her to
turn around. The seamstress frowned and stared at every inch of
Amy’s figure, reminding Amy of Horace Huxtable in one of his
shocking displays of salacious rudeness, except that Miss
Crenshaw’s expression was much more critical.

But this wasn’t rude. This was business, and
Amy tried hard to keep her embarrassment from creeping out into the
open.

“We’ll have to shorten the skirts,” Miss
Crenshaw said after Amy had just about decided she couldn’t take
anymore.

“Oh.”

“But that won’t be difficult.”

“Good.”

“Madame Dunbar is very adept at designing
costumes for the pictures,” Miss Crenshaw said. “She has an eye for
it. You’re lucky to have her.” She turned and waltzed over to a
rack against the west tent wall where several ladies’ and
gentlemen’s costumes hung.

“Oh. Good.”

Great grief, she couldn’t go on saying “Oh”
and “Good” all day, could she? Scrambling madly to think of
something else to say, she suddenly lit on Pasadena. Thank heavens!
Something she knew about!

“Um, I understand Madame Dunbar has her
business in Pasadena.”

“It’s actually in Altadena, but it’s close by
to Pasadena.”

“Oh.” Irked with herself for succumbing to
another “Oh,” Amy said, “Yes, Altadena’s just north of us. In
Pasadena.”

Miss Crenshaw, her mouth full of pins and her
hands full of clothes, nodded. She handed Amy a pretty blue
shirtwaist. Amy assumed she was supposed to put it on, so she did.
Without speaking, Miss Crenshaw yanked Amy around to face her and
buttoned the waist up the front. Amy blinked, rather surprised that
this was all such a businesslike operation. Miss Crenshaw stabbed
pins into the material here and there, taking up folds of excess
fabric.

“Er, whereabouts does Madame Dunbar have her
establishment?”

Speaking around a mouthful of pins, Miss
Crenshaw said, “Foothill Boulevard and Maiden Lane. She had the
house built last year.”

Foothill Boulevard and Maiden Lane. Amy
consulted her mental map of the area until she found the proper
location. Then she was taken aback. “My goodness, that’s a very big
house!”

Miss Crenshaw nodded. Amy knew it was
probably impolite to talk to someone who couldn’t talk back very
well due to having her mouth full of pins, but she couldn’t account
for Madame Dunbar’s house unless the woman was phenomenally
wealthy. Could a dressmaker become so wealthy simply by designing
costumes for the moving pictures? It didn’t seem possible.

Still and all, that house was gigantic. It
must have cost a fortune. Avidly curious, she decided to plunge
ahead and ask questions, in spite of Miss Crenshaw’s pins. Heaven
knew, everyone else in this stupid moving picture village seemed
exempt from proper behavior. “Er, does she make a large amount of
money from the pictures? I mean, so that she could afford to build
that huge house?”

Again Miss Crenshaw nodded. Greatly impressed
and feeling a trifle more kindly disposed toward her new pursuit,
Amy said, “My goodness.” The notion of becoming morally corrupt
didn’t sound so awful if a great deal of wealth was provided as
compensation. She’d never say so to Vernon. Or anyone else, for
that matter.

Swirling around, Miss Crenshaw took the pins
out of her mouth and headed back to the rack of clothing. “Oh, yes,
ever since she started working for the pictures, she’s been making
gobs of money.”

Gobs. How nice. “I see. I—er—had no idea
working in the pictures was so profitable.”

“You’ll find out.” Grabbing a fringed skirt
from the rack, Miss Crenshaw whirled again and turned to Amy.

She moved quickly. And gracefully. Again. Amy
thought about how Charlie Fox would probably admire Miss Crenshaw,
and again, she felt a little blue.

“Here, hold up your arms and I’ll slip this
over your head.”

Without speaking, Amy did as she’d been
bidden. She felt sort of like a department store mannequin. The
skirt slide over her shoulders, and Miss Crenshaw caught it at her
waist so it wouldn’t fall to the floor. The fabric seemed to be
some kind of soft and supple chamois or animal hide. It felt nice
and soft to the touch as Amy fingered it.

“Please don’t touch,” Miss Crenshaw
admonished, making Amy jerk her hand away from the fabric as if
she’d been slapped. “It’s buckskin, and the oil on your fingers
will discolor it. We try to keep them in pristine condition, at
least until the shooting’s over. Then they’ll probably use them
again and again and again. Peerless is frugal about sets and
costumes.”

“I see.” There was no reason on earth, Amy
told herself, why she should be suffering from embarrassment. There
was no crime attached to not knowing something until you’d been
told.

She was embarrassed anyway.

“I didn’t mean to bark,” Miss Crenshaw said
with a laugh in her voice. “I tend to get involved in my work and
forget to be polite when I’m working with people instead of
dressmakers’ dummies. I’m sorry if I startled you.”

Much mollified, Amy said, “Oh, no, that’s
quite all right. I didn’t know about the buckskin discoloring.”

They got along well, considering that Amy was
almost too afraid to open her mouth during most of the fitting.
Miss Crenshaw seemed like a pleasant person, though, a fact that
slightly altered Amy’s opinion about females who smoked cigarettes.
She still deplored the activity but she was relatively certain that
not every single female who smoked was heading straight to
hell.

In other words, she disagreed with her
minister. Oh, dear. That meant, she supposed, that either she
herself was headed straight to hell, or the minister was too harsh
in his judgments. She decided not to worry about this particular
conundrum at the moment because she had plenty of other things to
worry about. She concentrated on them, and on trying not to appear
too awfully foolish in front of Miss Crenshaw.

* * *

“Damn, blast, and hell.” Huxtable had escaped
again.

So Martin swore out loud—something he seldom
did—when he peeked into Horace Huxtable’s tent, expected to find
the actor nursing a sore jaw. Instead, he didn’t find the actor at
all.

Immediately Martin set out to find him. On
the way, he met Charlie ambling along, and he perked up. Charlie
was a good egg, even if he did seem to possess a violent streak and
variable grammatical leanings. Martin was sure he’d help in this
instance.

“Charlie!” he called.

Charlie, a slow-moving cowpoke from head to
toe, Martin noticed with an internal chuckle, stopped moseying and
turned. When he spotted Martin, he smiled and gave a small
salute.

“I’m glad I saw you.” Martin hurried up to
him and held out his hand. He noticed that Charlie gazed at his
hand for a moment before taking and shaking it. Must be unused to
such a civilized custom as shaking hands, Martin presumed.

“Listen, Charlie, I just dropped Miss Wilkes
off at the costume tent and went to see how Huxtable’s getting
on.”

Charlie’s expression clouded. “I know I
probably shouldn’t’ve plugged him, Martin, but he made me mad. No
man should talk to a woman the way he talked to Miss Wilkes.”