Fade to Black (19 page)

Elizabeth rounds a bend in the path and sees that the playground is deserted.

That’s not surprising on a day like this.

Except …

One of the swings is swaying slowly back and forth, as though someone had been there just a moment before.

But that’s impossible.

Nobody passed Elizabeth on the path, and it’s the only route into and out of the playground area, which is surrounded by dense woods.

The swing is still moving, its chain making a slight squeaking sound.

Maybe it’s the wind, Elizabeth thinks, staring at it.

But there’s no wind; the muggy air is hushed with the kind of stillness that precedes a summer thunderstorm.

And besides, only one of the swings is moving.

Her heart begins to pound.

Maybe, since she saw no one on the path, a child jumped off the swing and ducked into the woods.

Her eyes flit slowly along the overgrown screen of foliage surrounding the edge of the playground.

And slowly, an eerie sensation steals over her.

Someone is watching her from behind those trees.

She’s certain of it.

“Manny?” she calls, her voice sounding hollow to her own ears. “Is that you?”

Please let it be Manny. Please let him be playing a little joke on me....

But Manny isn’t a mischievous child, and he’s never hidden on her before.

It’s your imagination. There’s no one there
.

Elizabeth turns abruptly and starts walking away from the playground and the swing, her sneakered feet crunching loudly on the gravel path.

So loudly that she doesn’t hear the footsteps behind her until a split second before an icy hand grips her bare arm.

Casting Director Seeks the New Mallory Eden!

The bold headline leaps out at Flynn Soderland.

He sits upright in his chaise longue and adjusts his prescription sunglasses, scanning the full-page ad in today’s issue of
Variety
.

It’s a publicity gimmick, of course, for a new romantic comedy to be directed by Martin de Lisser. The man had been a virtual unknown until last year, when his low-budget independent caused a sensation at Sundance, then wound up winning several Golden Globes and, ultimately, an Academy Award for Best Picture.

Now Hollywood’s newest golden boy, who’s rumored to be all of thirty-two, has a deal with Paramount, and, according to the ad, is hoping to cast an unknown in the lead role of his new film.

Flynn has heard the buzz about this particular casting call for weeks; it’s the same old story.

There’ll be all kinds of media hoopla showcasing the hopeful unknowns who will storm the auditions, and in the end some fairly well-known Name will be cast … if she hasn’t secretly already been.

“Mallory Eden would have been perfect for this film,” de Lisser is quoted as saying. “I need someone who can somehow fill her shoes—someone who has that rare combination of dazzling beauty and zany sense of humor.”

Flynn shakes his head, folds the paper, and tosses it onto the flagstone poolside patio.

He lights a cigarette, leans back, and closes his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the sun on his face.

It’s amazing that in a town where today’s hottest starlet will be yesterday’s news at midnight, his former client hasn’t been allowed to die a natural death after five years. Mallory Eden has been transformed into a true Hollywood legend, along with Monroe, Dean, and a handful of others who died young, at the height of their fame.

I need someone who can fill her shoes
.

“Don’t we all,” Flynn mutters.

If she had lived, Mallory Eden would have been his ticket to immortality....

Or, at least, to a very cushy retirement.

Just another year or two of Mallory Eden commissions, and he could have bought himself a villa in Monte Cristo or perhaps a small island in the South Pacific.

You could have had it all, anyway, if you had played your cards right
, he reminds himself.

If not for those weekly trips to Vegas, he would now be wealthy beyond his wildest dreams.

But he had thrown away millions over the course of his career, thanks to gambling and booze.

Flynn drags deeply on his cigarette.

That last year of Mallory’s life—his most successful ever, financially—had mostly been a blur.

He hadn’t even realized he was in deep trouble when his star client took him aside and told him that if he didn’t straighten out, she was going to fire him as her agent.

“But you can’t fire me,” he had told Mallory, bewildered. “I got you to where you are today.”

And you got me to where I am today
, he had added silently.

They both knew that if she fired him, it would be all over for his career.

“I’ll do what I have to do, Flynn,” she had said grimly. “You’re going down fast, and believe me, you’re not going to take me with you. I’ve worked too hard to get where I am.”

He had begged her for another chance, and she—caught up in her own personal drama created by the stalking—had given it to him.

Still, he somehow hadn’t realized how serious his problem was.

Not then, and not when rumors started circulating in Hollywood that Mallory was secretly shopping around for a new agent.

Not even when he started waking up in strange places, with memory blanks. There were entire weekends, at times, when he simply couldn’t account for his whereabouts or his actions. There were times when he knew he’d been beaten or robbed by the men he’d picked up, and still he didn’t stop.

That was a long, hot, harrowing summer.

But by mid-August he had finally started to believe that maybe it really was time to turn himself around, to get people to take him seriously again.

Mallory’s death had been the catalyst he needed.

He had joined AA and Gamblers Anonymous the week after her funeral. Got himself tested for HIV and found, miraculously, that he’d managed to escape the virus.

He’d been clean and behaving himself for five years now, with just occasional lapses …

Until recently.

“Back on the sauce, huh? I knew it was only a matter of time.” That was how one of his favorite Vegas bartenders had greeted him the first time he ventured back to his beloved town last winter.

Since then he’s made the trip across the desert at least a dozen times. But Flynn has promised himself that it won’t be a regular thing—that he isn’t going to revert to his old ways. He never wants to see his life spin out of control that way again, with the endless booze, the reckless gambling, the dangerous random sex.

But just yesterday he woke up in a dumpy apartment in West Hollywood, a gorgeous stranger asleep next to him. He was a beautiful boy, couldn’t have been more than twenty, his cheeks baby smooth, without the slightest hint of a bearded shadow.

Just how you always liked them
.

Flynn still hasn’t the foggiest notion where he and the stranger had found each other or what they had done—and he hadn’t stuck around to find out. He knows only that he’d had a monster hangover, and that his wallet is missing the two thousand dollars in cash he’d had when he’d gone out the night before.

If he isn’t careful, he’s going to lose everything this time.

Everything.

He turns his head and opens his eyes to look up at his sprawling stucco Spanish-style house with its red tile roof and arched windows and doorways. Perched high in the Hollywood Hills off Mulholland Drive, on impeccably landscaped, terraced acreage, his home had once belonged to a silent film star, a forties screen goddess, and the lead guitarist of a world-renowned heavy metal rock band.

There’s the customary pool and tennis courts, but also a private screening room, a gym, and a greenhouse where Flynn used to grow his prize orchids. The property has a majestic view of the city off in the distance—and, in the foreground, of the infamous mansion that had formerly been owned by Madonna. Parked in Flynn’s three-car garage are his Jaguar convertible, his Mercedes, and his Bentley.

Not bad for a kid who had grown up in a cold-water walk-up in the midst of Depression-era Baltimore.

After spending the war years stationed at some dinky Texas naval base, he had moved to Los Angeles intent on becoming an actor, until a casting director did him a favor after his first audition and told him, bluntly, that he sucked.

Flynn had bounced back from that the way he’d bounced back from his mother’s death in a car accident when he was ten, and from his alcoholic father’s brutal beatings throughout his childhood.

He had simply, quite resourcefully, set aside his illusions of how his life should be, and he had gone on.

If he couldn’t be an actor, he would find some other way to get rich in Los Angeles.

Because he sure as hell wasn’t going to be poor the rest of his life, and he wasn’t going to spend it in Baltimore.

His destiny was sealed the day he answered an ad and landed a job in the mail room at the famed William Morris Agency.

Maybe you should go back
, he tells himself idly, closing his eyes again.

Not, of course, back to William Morris. Decades earlier, he’d had a highly publicized falling out with the agency’s powers-that-be. After that he had branched off on his own, amid insiders’ predictions that he would never make it.

You did it once … you can do it again
.

Maybe it’s time to come out of retirement, get back into the swing of things. Lure back a few former clients and start collecting commission checks again.

Anything you can make now would be a drop in the bucket compared to what Mallory could have brought you....

But the whole world knows Mallory has been dead for five years now.

Didn’t he commemorate her death just the other day at his annual lunch with Rae Hamilton?

Rae Hamilton.

Casting agent seeks the new Mallory Eden
.

Hmm.

Flynn reaches toward a glass-topped table at his side, stubs out his cigarette in the crystal ashtray, and picks up his cellular phone.

H
arper hears a rumble in the distance, puts down his roast beef sandwich—rare, and dripping mayonnaise and ketchup, just the way he likes it—and goes to the small kitchen window to look outside.

There’s a decent view of the bay from this apartment above his small shop on Center Street—which is one of the few positive things the ramshackle place has going for it. Aside from the view, there’s a fireplace in the bedroom—not that it works—and a built-in bookshelf in the living room, which would be useful if he had any books.

But his books are in storage in Los Angeles, along with most of his worldly possessions. He had left abruptly, no time to sort through his belongings to decide what should stay and what should come with him. He had arrived in Windmere Cove with little more than the clothes on his back and the tools to set up his locksmith business.

The fewer reminders of L.A., and what had happened there, the better.

Harper notes that the water has gone from a pale bluish-gray to a dark greenish-gray, and a slight breeze seems to have kicked up, driving the dark clouds closer to shore.

Can it be that it’s actually going to storm, after what seems like years without rain?

Harper remembers that he left the windows open on the van when he returned from that morning’s job over in Warren, where he had fixed the lock on a church collection box that had been tampered with.

With a sigh he heads down the steep staircase leading from the kitchen to a small vestibule behind his shop. He steps out the back door and crosses to his van, which is parked on the dirt driveway that runs alongside the building.

Another rumble of thunder causes him to look up at the darkening sky.

No rain yet, but it looks like it’s coming.

There’s no discernible breeze yet either.

The air is motionless; it’s as though everything around him is poised—the thirsty trees and parched grass and dusty earth—waiting for the promised torrents of cool, cleansing water.

Harper swiftly rolls up the windows on the van and heads back to the house. Just before stepping inside, he pauses with his hand on the knob and looks up at the sky again.

Rain would be a refreshing relief from these dog days of August.

Yet he feels apprehensive.

And it isn’t because of the approaching storm.

He wonders where Elizabeth Baxter is now, whether she, too, is watching the darkening sky with a sense of trepidation.

Harper goes up the stairs, lifts the receiver of the old-fashioned rotary-dial wall telephone in the kitchen, and dials the number he’s committed to memory.

It rings once, twice, three times.

He frowns.

She isn’t home …

Or she isn’t answering.

He continues to let it ring long after he’s sure she won’t answer, staring absently out the window, his hand clenched on the receiver.