Reap What You Sew (10 page)

The guard stopped chewing and looked over at Margaret Louise, who had, once again, buried her head in her arms while Annabelle simply sat and stared. “Is that why she’s got that vacant look in her eyes like she doesn’t know what’s going on?”

“I suppose it’s a combination of that and being old.” Tori bobbed her head in an effort to reclaim Stan’s attention. “She did the same thing at the library the other day. In the blink of an eye she took my stapler, my paper clip container, my pencil holder, and my apple and placed them in her bag before I even saw her hand move. Seconds later, her daughter was taking each item out of her bag and placing them back on the information desk. Annabelle seemed oblivious to the whole thing. It didn’t bother her one bit that everything she’d just taken was being returned.” Waving her hand in Annabelle’s direction she continued, “She didn’t care, Mr. Kelly, because she’s not a thief.”

He began chewing again. “I suppose Ms. Davis did give the items back to Mr. Quandran unprompted….”

Finally a light at the end of the tunnel…

She nodded. “She did. And Ms. Elkin didn’t resist at all, either.”

Slipping his hand into the front pocket of his pants, Stan Kelly retrieved an oddly shaped key and carried it over to Annabelle. “Okay, I’ll make an exception this one time.” With gentle motions, he freed the elderly woman from the handcuffs and returned the key to his pants’ pocket. “You just keep sitting right there.”

When Annabelle didn’t offer a response of any kind, he shrugged at Margaret Louise and returned to the hallway. Bending his leg at the knee, he braced his foot against the wall. “So what do you want me to”—he glanced toward the table and stopped. “She doesn’t quit, does she?”

“Who? What?” She followed his gaze to the table, saw Annabelle’s closed fist disappear into her voluminous bag.

Uh-oh.

Tori jogged into the room and laid a gentle hand on the elderly woman’s shoulder. “Annabelle, may I have that back, please?”

Annabelle stared straight ahead, her eyes a veritable blank slate.

Margaret Louise’s head shot up. “Mamma? Did you take something?”

“She took my damn gum,” Stan groused.

With a practiced hand, Margaret Louise reached into her mother’s tote bag and extracted the opened packet of gum that had been on the table just moments earlier. Handing it to the guard, Margaret Louise released a frustrated exhale. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t paying attention.”

The scowl on Stan Kelly’s face stirred a sick feeling in Tori’s stomach. Had all the progress she made disappeared that quickly? Were they back to square one?

She tried to think of something to say, something, anything that could bring Stan back to the place of compassion she’d glimpsed before Annabelle swiped his gum. But before she could find the right words, he simply waved his hand toward the door. “You’re free to go.”

To Margaret Louise, he said, “I expect you’ll see to it that your mother doesn’t come back here again.”

Tori’s friend nodded, her normal sunny smile nowhere to be seen. Stan, too, seemed to sense the woman’s sadness, rushing to soften the harshness of his words just a little. “I came mighty close to losing my job this week and I can’t have that. Not now. Not anymore. But if it makes a difference, banishing your mother from the set is nothing personal. We just can’t have people’s stuff walking off.”

“I understand, Mr. Kelly. And I do thank you for not pressin’ charges on my mamma.” Margaret Louise hooked a hand underneath Annabelle’s left arm and pulled upward, lifting the elderly woman to her feet. “I’ll be sure to let my sister know how understandin’ you’ve been.”

Stan furrowed his brow. “Your sister? Who’s your sister?”

“Leona. Leona Elkin.”

He shook his head. “Can’t say I know anyone by that name.”

Tori linked her arm with Annabelle’s right elbow and walked with the women toward the door of the trailer, Stan’s footfalls bringing up the rear. “That’s because she introduced herself to you by a different name,” Tori explained. “One you apparently hadn’t been made aware of prior to your first morning here in Sweet Briar.”

“Oh? What name would that be?”

Before she could answer, they were interrupted by the squawk of the man’s two-way radio. Stan reached down, unclipped the equipment from his belt loop, and held it to his mouth, pushing a button on the side as he did. “This is Kelly. What’s your location, Todd?”

“Oh, hey, I thought you were gone.”

Releasing a long exhale, Stan shook his head, his free hand making a rolling motion while his index finger pressed the radio button once again. “Is there a problem?”

“Um, well, I don’t know, exactly. Anita didn’t respond to her call to set so Warren asked me to check in on her. Anyway, that’s what I’m trying to do, only she’s not answering her door.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to be bothered.”

“It’s time to tape her scene. It’s not like her to ignore a call.”

“Did you look in the window?”

“You really think I should?”

Stan rolled his eyes. “Forget it. I’m on my way.”

“No, wait, I’ll look.”

“Good idea there, champ,” Stan mumbled to no one in particular as Margaret Louise and Annabelle headed out into the bright morning sun. When the door closed behind them, he clipped the radio back onto his belt. “Well, Miss Sinclair, I guess I better head on out—”

The guard’s words were interrupted by a yell from the radio that echoed off the walls of the security trailer. “Kelly? Kelly, are you still there? You gotta come quick! I see her, I see Anita! She’s just lying there… on the floor. I think she—I think she might be
dead
!”

Chapter 8

By the time she’d walked Margaret Louise and Annabelle to the gate and returned to the tent where Margot was to be waiting, any hope Todd’s final radio call had been an exaggeration was gone. Directors, assistant directors, camera operators, makeup artists, and talent ran amuck, their normal tasks thwarted by a kind of chaos no editing equipment could ever quite duplicate.

Those who weren’t running here, there, and everywhere were sitting, typing away furiously on their cell phones and BlackBerries, all confidentiality agreements long forgotten as they rushed to be the first to release the kind of news that would be splashed across every newsstand in the country within hours. Fellow actors of the deceased would be interviewed about her profound talent; her parents, if still alive, would be tracked down for the purpose of eliciting a quote designed to tug at the reader’s heartstrings; and the town where she died would be jettisoned into the public eye until it grew bored and turned elsewhere.

It was a mess, an absolute mess.

Tori flopped onto a bench beside one of her fellow extras, a woman named Callie who lived on the outskirts of town. “Do we know what happened?”

Callie paused her fingers atop the mini keyboard that sat in her lap and looked up, her eyes glowing with excitement. “Anita Belise is dead! They found her in her trailer not more than twenty minutes ago.”

Already in the know on those details, Tori simply nodded. “I mean, do they know what happened? How she died?”

“Not yet, but every time another member of the crew comes up to Margot, I start reading lips.” Callie looked left, then right before leaning in to make sure her words were heard by no one else but Tori. “A friend told me once that you can make
millions
if you’re the one who breaks a story for
The Inquiry
. The more details you can provide, the bigger the payout.”

She studied the woman closely. “You also signed a confidentiality agreement. You break that, and you could end up paying back more than you make.”

“Not if I’m an”—Callie held the index and middle fingers of both hands into the air and moved them up and down—“
unnamed source.
If I’m one of those, no one around here would be the wiser, you know?”

I would be.

Shaking her head free of the desire to pontificate about the many differences between right and wrong, Tori turned the subject back to the facts at hand. Callie’s decision to seek money from tragedy would be on Callie, not Tori. “What have you learned so far?”

Again, Callie looked both ways. Again, she leaned as close as she could to Tori’s ear. “Seems she died sometime around eleven or so last night. Though how they know that is beyond me.”

Tori glanced at her watch, noted the passage of nearly twelve and a half hours. “She must have been in full rigor mortis when they found her. That happens at about twelve hours.”

Callie pulled back, the left corner of her lip curling upward. “You mean like what happens to the raccoons on the side of the road when animal protection takes too long to show up?”

“I guess. It’s when the body is at its stiffest before beginning the process of softening up again.”

“Ewww. How do you know that?”

More experience than I ever thought I’d have?

“Cop shows,” she lied, hoping the woman would accept her answer and move on.

Callie took the bait. “Yeah, see, that’s why I don’t watch those things. They give me the willies.”

Tori nodded only to stop in conjunction with Callie’s elbow in her side.

“Here comes another one,” Callie whispered. Picking her cell phone off her lap, the woman positioned her thumbs over the miniature keyboard as Glenda sidled up beside Margot, bubbling with the latest scuttlebutt—scuttlebutt Tori didn’t need lipreading to discern.

“Rick got ahold of Todd. They know how Anita the Great died.”

Tori mirrored Callie’s not too subtle lean forward.

Margot’s eyes widened. “How?”

Aware of the golden egg she possessed, Glenda pursed her lips. “I’m not sure I should say. Rick doesn’t want to get Todd in trouble.”

“The hell he doesn’t,” Margot argued. “Rick’s been after Todd’s job since the day Fifth-Cousin-Once-Removed Warren got him this gig in the first place. And you know that as well as I do.”

Tori and Callie exchanged looks. So Rick—the often talked about but rarely seen crew member—was related to Warren Shoemaker… Now his presence on set made sense. Nepotism always superseded incompetence.

Glenda held up her hands. “Okay. Okay. You win. Sheesh.”

Tori and Callie waited along with Margot as Glenda took in a dramatic inhale, releasing it with maddening slowness. “She was finally done in by her biggest nightmare.”

Margot’s eyes widened once again, this time accompanied by a gaped mouth from which she seemed unable to recover.

Glenda nodded. “Yup, you heard me right.”

Callie’s thumbs stopped moving. “What was her biggest nightmare?” she whispered.

Tori’s shrug was cut short by Glenda’s next words.

“Why on earth she didn’t reach into that damn drawer for her EpiPen is beyond me. Then again, she probably didn’t know what to do when one of us wasn’t around to fetch it for her like a trained pooch.”

Tori felt her mouth drop as wide as Margot’s.

Callie poked her in the arm. “What? What’d I miss?”

Margot recovered long enough to ask the question pinging through Tori’s mind. “Why didn’t she call for help?”

Glenda made a face. “I wasn’t there to open her phone for her and dial the number, I guess.”

“C’mon. If you’re dying you’re going to call for help no matter who you are. It’s only three numbers—9-1-1. It’s not that hard.”

“Well, she didn’t. Or no one came. We are in Sweet Nothing, South Carolina, you know.”

Callie’s thumbs paused above her keyboard. “That’s Sweet
Briar
, South Carolina.”

Go, Callie…

A thundercloud of anger clapped behind Glenda’s eyes. Gesturing toward the extras, she looked at Margot. “What are they still doing here?”

“I haven’t been told to dismiss them.”

“Well, then, dismiss them,” Glenda hissed. “It’s not like taping is going to resume the moment the witch’s body is removed from her trailer. She was, after all,
the star
.”

Margot offered her grudging agreement along with the semblance of an appreciative smile. “Okay, ladies and gentleman, I guess we’re going to let you go. If something changes, we have your numbers on file. But for now, it doesn’t make much sense to keep you.”

“Damn,” Callie mumbled. “I still don’t know how she died.”

“Nuts. She died from eating nuts.” Tori rose to her feet and made her way over to Margot, who still looked as stunned as she had the moment Glenda shared the news. “Margot? Are you okay?”

Margot stepped back, removing herself from Glenda’s immediate vicinity just long enough to shake Tori’s hand. “I’m just… shocked. I can’t believe this happened. I mean, this woman
berated us
on a daily basis about her allergy. So I don’t get how she died from ingesting nuts.”

“She probably didn’t know.”

Tori and Margot both turned toward Glenda. “How could she not know?” Margot asked. “I mean, that woman quizzed everyone who walked by with so much as a carrot.”

Glenda grabbed a pretzel stick from a nearby snack table. Popping it into her mouth, she sucked off the salt and then popped it back out again. “Maybe someone lied.”