A Knife to Remember (2 page)

“No, the studios are sanitized. Especially the ones that allow tourists. Location work is a whole different game. You'll probably enjoy it a lot. It's a weird, inbred little world and probably very different from what you'd imagine. My base will be by craft services. Bring your lawn chairs out tomorrow when they start filming and I'll try to explain anything I can."

“Won't we be in the way?"

“Not if you stick with me. They're putting up a fake building to shield the 'innards' of the production from the camera's sight. We'll be able to peek through. Just don't invite everybody you know."

“What about the kids?" Jane asked. "My son's school is having an in-service day tomorrow. He's dying to watch."

“How old is he?"

“Eighteen.”

Maisie nodded. "Let me see if I can't find him something to do. Some kind of gofer job. He'd have fun."

“That would be great! Tell us about the movie," Jane said, handing around the cookie plate again just above Willard's reach. "The people who contracted with us for our backyards didn't tell us anything. What's the story?"

“As it happens, I sort of know. I don't usually even see a script because I don't need to, but this one's based on a book I read and really liked a couple years ago. The working title is
The Chicago Fire,
but the marketing dweebs will rename it. Probably
Secret Flames
or something. We're moving fast. Only five days on this location, including setup. The rest of the film was done
in
studios and these scenes will wrap it up. If they're following the book, there should be two parts that happen here. The big scene with the refugees from the fire setting up a sort of camp and then another segment many years after the fire when the heroine comes back, having inherited the land where she was once a penniless, singed widow. It was really a great story. The first part, of course, involves mobs of extras — all doing their best to hurt themselves and come whining to me," she added with a martyred look.

“Who's going to be in it?" Shelley asked. "Lynette Harwell is the lead."

“Lynette Harwell? I thought she was dead!" Jane exclaimed. "She won that Best Actress award for
Day of Love
and then dropped out of sight."

“Not entirely," Maisie said. "You just haven't been watching grade-B movies since then. She's starred in such memorable films as
Killer Women of the Andes, Horror Nite,
and something I swear was called
Wasted Efforts,
which was truly a wasted effort. There must have been another ten or twelve, but I'm glad to say I've forgotten the names. Real doggy films. But I don't believe she's made any movies for the last five years or so."

“Why? What happened to her?" Jane asked. "I saw
Day of Love
a half dozen times — I just rented it from the video store a month ago, in fact — and she was fantastic. Was that great performance just a fluke, or what?"

“No, she's good. She just made real poor choices because she was greedy. I think she figured she could overcome the roles, like Michael Caine does. Nobody holds it against him that he makes terrible movies. He still gets chances to make good ones, too. But karma must have been against Lynette. She probably did a couple dreadful movies and nobody gave her the opportunity to do another good one. Then, too, there's the bad luck thing—"

“Bad luck? What do you mean?" Shelley asked.

“Well, she's been on troubled sets where there were accidents, thefts, illnesses, financial problems. I was on one of those films. None of the bad things had anything to do with her, as far as I know, but people in this business are fanatically superstitious. If somebody gets the reputation for bringing bad luck to a set, it's damn hard for them to get work."

“Is that why she hasn't worked lately?"

“I don't know. I heard a rumor that she was carted off to a loony bin for some kind of intensive therapy. Probably drugs. But it might not be true atall. Maybe her manager just decided it was trendier to be in rehab than simply unemployed and put the rumor out himself."

“Then how did she get this job?" Jane asked.

“I have no idea. There's a lot of speculation about it. Most of it pretty rude. But this one may well be the role that revives her career. I've watched some of the dailies and she's doing a fantastic job. One day last week she did a scene that even had the grips wiping their eyes. It's astonishing.”

Jane was reveling in the conversation. All this inside poop on the famous was like having "Entertainment Tonight" broadcast live from her living room.

But Shelley had the perplexed look of a woman who was trying to drag something out of deep storage at the furthermost recesses of her brain. "Wasn't she from around here?" she asked. "It seems to me that I knew somebody who knew somebody who knew. . no, it was her brother. He used to live in the next suburb over. I think he was deaf and went to work for a school district down south."

“Why, yes. I know who you mean," Maisie exclaimed. "I remember her brother. He used to do her makeup, but got out of the business to teach the deaf. So they lived around here?"

“I'm pretty sure they did. I'm remembering an article in the Sunday supplement years ago when she won the Oscar. It said she was a 'home town girl' who started out here doing commercials and fashion shows."

“Shelley, you're right," Jane said. "Now that you mention it, I recall having a pretty heated discussion with someone about how I remembered seeing her doing the weather on one of the local stations once, but I was told I had rocks in my head. I'll bet I was right. It was — oh, sixteen or seventeen years ago that I saw her doing the weather. When Mike was a baby.”

Maisie grinned. "Watch out with that 'years ago' talk. She still pretends she's barely thirty."

“No!" Jane exclaimed. "She's my age, at least."

“Come on, Jane. Nobody's that old," Shelley said, with a grin. "Who else is in this movie, Maisie?"

“The principal male is George Abington. Do you know him?"

“I don't think so," Shelley said.

“Sure you do, Shelley," Jane said. "He was in a spy series on television for a couple years, then he showed up on all the game shows for a few more years. Real good-looking, but seemed like an ordinary kind of guy. He was married to Lynette once, wasn't he?"

“Jane, you amaze me, the junk you know," Shelley said.

“They
were
married once. For about five minutes," Maisie said. "It was during the movie I worked on with her ages ago. She'd just married George in a big splash of publicity, then they both went off to do some potboiler that Roberto Cavagnari was directing. Before the film was even in the can, she'd filed for divorce and moved in with Cavagnari."

“Who's Cavagnari?" Shelley asked. "Should I have heard of him, too?"

“Probably not," Maisie answered. "He's done a ton of high-testosterone things.
Terminator-type
movies. Spaghetti westerns. War stories. I can't imagine why he was hired to do this movie, but like Lynette, he's doing a great job. Far better than you'd ever expect.”

Jane forgot herself so much that she put her cookie down where Willard could get it. "You mean Lynette Harwell is starring opposite George Abington, the man she abandoned for Cavagnari, the same man who's directing this movie?”

Maisie smiled wickedly. "Stranger things have happened in this business."

“Stranger, maybe. But that sounds downright dangerous," Shelley said.

Maisie got up and started putting her layers of clothing back on. "As I said, you'll find watching the process very, very interesting.”

3

Vehicles and people kept arriving until well after ten o'clock that night. Jane watched, fascinated, from the back windows of the living room. An enormous piece of equipment that she later learned was called a condor, unfolded itself and lifted bright lights attached to a cherry picker — type basket high above the activity. The huge floodlights illuminated the field with harsh, heavy shadows. It was a truly eerie atmosphere, reminiscent of the scenes she'd sometimes seen on the news of nighttime catastrophes. It wouldn't have been inconceivable to discover a downed airplane in the midst of the scurrying mob of technicians. All that was missing was the wail of sirens and the flash of red lights. The noise and mob and sense of purposeful urgency were all there.

From the moment they'd come home from school and seen the extent of the production, Katie and Todd, Jane's two youngest children, both had been enraged that Jane wouldn't let them go out and wander around in the midst of it. "Just in the backyard, Mom," Todd pleaded after a quick, early dinner. "I'll take Willard out to his pen.”

They were all crowded around the window with the best view. "You know he's afraid to go in the pen with anybody but me," Jane said, looking at the dog with irritation. "The big sissy."

“Poor old Willard is going to be one constipated doggy by the end of the week, aren't you, boy?" Mike said, grabbing Willard's ears and wrestling his head around — to Willard's absolute delight.

“Mike, please don't talk about the dog's digestive tract," Jane said with a shudder. Mike had given the dog a banana a week earlier, with results Jane was afraid she was never going to be able to forget.

“Come on, Mom," Katie nagged, tossing her hair dramatically. Katie was at the age that nearly all her conversations with her mother involved hair-tossing, flouncing, and/or door-slamming. Often all three. Jane had to keep telling herself that someday Katie would be a nice young woman and a wonderful companion to her — if they both survived her teenage years. "We won't go any farther than our own yard."

“This week it isn't
our
yard. I've rented it to the movie company. Part of what they're paying for is us staying out of their way."

“Aw, Mom. Let them go," Mike said. "They've got a security guy to keep people out. He won't let them get in the way.”

Instead of being grateful for his older brother's help, Todd turned on him furiously. "Stop being so. . so. .
big!"
Todd sputtered. Jane suspected he'd rejected a number of adjectives that were popular among sixth grade boys, but wouldn't have gone over well at home. "Just 'cause you don't have to go to school tomorrow and the next day! Mom! Please can't I please stay home, too?"

“Todd, you know you can't. But they'll still be working when you get home from school anyway. You'll get to see plenty."

“Mom, it's just not
Fair!"
Katie whined. Jane gave her a look.

“Yeah, yeah," Katie said. She raised her hands like a conductor and the boys joined in the chorus of Jane's oft-repeated line, " 'Life isn't fair.' “

The argument sputtered on throughout the evening and became more wide-ranging. Jane was accused of being an insensitive mother, obsessive about meaningless academic considerations at the cost of her children's social and intellectual development. Not that Todd had the vocabulary to put it that way, but that was the point.

Katie tried a pity ploy, not having caught on yet that crying didn't dissolve her mother's hard heart, but merely drove her to a frenzy of irritation. Then Katie moved on to guilt, working up an imaginary scenario in which Jane, unreasonably favoring her firstborn, had somehow suborned the school district in advance to let the high school be off for the exact day filming was to start, therefore deliberately slighting her two youngest children, whom she probably never wanted to have anyway.

Jane found herself actually wondering what
had
made her think it was a good idea to have three children. But she held firm, not because she believed that missing school would have been such a bad thing, but because she knew they'd inch closer and closer to the production if they were allowed to stayhome and eventually get in trouble for which she'd be held responsible.

It didn't help that Mike was really being insufferably smug and adult about the fact that he'd been promised some kind of job, however menial, on the set.

Jane finally escaped her bickering progeny by pleading mending that needed to be done so that she could go hide from them in the minuscule guest room where she kept the sewing machine. When she looked out that window around ten-thirty, the floodlights had been turned off, vans full of workers were just pulling away, and a security guard was standing in her backyard talking on a mobile phone.

She already felt exhausted from having the movie filmed in her backyard and the filming hadn't even started yet. She sighed, remembering that she'd meant to get Katie aside sometime this evening and break the news that she and Mel were going to New York for the weekend.

But she hadn't the energy left for another confrontation. And teenage girls, like dogs, could sense fear and use it to their advantage. No, this wasn't the time.

Mike was up at the crack of dawn and woke Jane to ask which jeans he ought to wear.

“Jeans?" Jane asked blearily, trying to get her eyes open far enough to discern some difference between the two pairs he was showing her. "It's still dark. What time is it?"

“Almost six," Mike said. "I think the ones with the pocket torn off, don't you? The ones with the hole in the knee don't look serious enough.”

Jane sat up in bed, shielding her eyes against the vicious glare of the bedside lamp. "Mike, I'd put those in the trash. They're both awful. You have a new pair in your top drawer. Wear those.”

He looked at her with surprise. "I can't do that, Mom. They're new."

“Yes. And outrageously expensive, I might add.”

Mike knew she was still half-asleep and was dreadfully patient with her. "Mom, I'd look like a kindergartner on the first day of school in those. Too eager. Like a. . a. . kid.”

Jane shook her head, trying to clear it. "Okay, okay. The one with the pocket gone. Take the cats with you—" she called out as he headed for the door.

Max, a gray-and-black tabby, and Meow, a yellow butterball, were not happy at being scooped up and removed from her bedroom. They felt it important to be on the scene when she got up in the morning, just in case she'd been sleeping with a can of cat food that she might open any second. The fact that this had never happened didn't deter them from believing that it might.