Playing Dirty. Susan Andersen
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have to discuss with you, Janie. You both know he produces documentaries about unsolved mysteries, right?”
The other women shifted guiltily, and she laughed, feeling tension she hadn’t even realized she’d been carrying—in her neck, her shoulders, her spine—release its grip. “Relax, I don’t doubt your loyalty—you guys have boycotted all things Gallari forever. But we’d have to live in outer Mongolia not to have heard something about the name he’s making for himself.”
“Okay—I confess—I saw one of his films.” Poppy held her hands up in a Don’t shoot! gesture when both Ava and Jane gaped at her. “I didn’t pick it out—Jason ordered the damn thing from Netflix one night. He-who-shall-not-be-named is never mentioned in our house, so Jase had no way of putting the documentary maker together with the guy he saw upsetting you in that bar in Columbia City last year. Murphy’d just told him he had to see it.”
Focusing on the sign next to the kiddie play area, Ava did her best to wrestle her curiosity to a standstill. Unsupervised Kids Will Be Given An Espresso And A Free Puppy, she read. Usually that tickled her, but now the words simply bounced around in her head like Ping-Pong balls in a box—until finally, unable to help herself, she surrendered to her need to know. “All right, I give. Did it live up to all the hype?”
“Yeah.” Her friend grimaced. “I’m sorry, Av, but it did. I’ve never liked the dramatization-type documentaries because the acting is usually abysmal. But apparently Gallari’s gaining something of a cult rep as a star-maker. Several times now he’s chosen unknown talent that he’s gotten on the cheap from SAGIndie or university drama programs, who’ve then gone on to garner moderate-to-Ohmigawd-worthy success.”
“And you know this how?” Jane demanded. “Jeez, what are you, Gallari’s biggest fan now?”
“Seriously?” the blonde demanded right back. “Could you be any more insulting, Janie? Of course I’m not. Jase was so blown away by the documentary he insisted on watching the extras.”
“Good God,” Ava muttered. “The thing was that good?” As she watched Jane reach for Poppy’s hand and say, “Sorry, babe,” she wasn’t sure how she felt about Cade’s achievements. On the one hand, she would hardly cry a river if he tanked in every endeavor he touched.
On the other, his success might well help her and her friends’ finances.
“I’m afraid so.” Elbows on the table, Poppy skimmed back her cloud of curls with both hands. “He really does have an eye for talent. But he only used the reenactments in tiny doses. It was the interviews that really sold it. The whole thing was just so…compellingly presented.”
Then her slender brows drew together. “Still. Why the hell would he want to shoot one in the Wolcott mansion, which he had to know would be a hard sell, given it belongs to us now? Unless—?” Abruptly, she let go of her hair and snapped her spine erect.
“Ho-ly shitskis, Av. You said he’ll landscape the ground back to the way it was in the eighties?”
“Of course.” Jane, too, sat straighter. “The break-in where Miss Agnes’s guy was killed and the Wolcott diamonds disappeared.”
“That would be the unsolved mystery,” Ava agreed.
In 1985, during a remodel of Miss Agnes’s bed-and-sitting-room, her suite of diamond jewelry had been stolen. Late one night six months later, “her man, Henry,” as she always referred to him, heard a noise and came out of the office where he’d been working to find Mike Maperton, the head carpenter from the remodel, inside the mansion. Henry tripped the alarm, but Maperton killed him before help could arrive. It was assumed the construction worker had been retrieving the jewelry from where he’d hidden it, but if so, it was never recovered.
Jane smiled crookedly. “I always got the impression, whenever Miss A referred to Henry, that he was a lot more to her than just a factotum or man of business or whatever the heck he was supposed to be.”
Poppy shrugged. “We all did. What’s your point?”
“Damned if I know, except that I can see the story playing out in a documentary.” Jane hooked her hair behind her ears. “And I hate to admit it, but it would be nice to have the financial burden taken off our shoulders for a while. But Miss A was one of a kind—so, unless Gallari’s scored Streep to play her, I can’t imagine the actress who could do her justice.”
“I’d like to talk to you about something that’s related to the Miss A part, but first I should probably tell you—” okay, this is the tricky part “—that I, um, agreed to work for him next week, then for an additional six weeks during the actual production, which starts around the first of the year.”
“Are you out of your freaking mind?” Poppy kept her voice low to prevent two nearby little girls eating the frosting off their cupcakes from overhearing, but her tone held a fierce edge.
“Maybe.” Tough to take offense when she’d been asking herself the same thing way too frequently since walking away from Cade last night. “Probably, even. My first impulse when he approached me was the same ole, same ole—to either spit in his eye or gouge them both out.”
Straightening her shoulders, she looked from one friend’s face to the other. “But that’s just a knee-jerk reflex.”
“One that totally works for me,” Jane interjected in a dry tone.
Ava shook her head. “He’s old news, Janie. I am so over him. But you know how dicked up my finances have been the past year.” Her lips tilted wryly. “So when he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse as the production company’s personal concierge—I didn’t.”
Watching her with concern-filled eyes, neither Janie nor Poppy smiled back and Ava sighed. “What? You think I’m too fragile to handle it?”
“No, of course not,” Jane said. “But I don’t trust that bastard as far as I can throw him. We were there the last time he got up close and personal with you and had to watch you struggle to put yourself back together.”
“It was a piece-by-piece process,” Poppy agreed, “that took way too long and too much glue before it held together. And then you had to handle most of it on your own because of him screwing up our after-graduation plans—”
Yeah, getting shipped off to the fat farm didn’t help hasten the process, she thought wryly. Which, okay, was more her mother’s fault than Cade’s. But screw that—the truth was, if she hadn’t been so flattened by his betrayal, something her mother hadn’t even seemed to notice, she would have dug in until she’d won that battle. So, for all intents and purposes, it was his fault.
She tuned back in to hear Poppy continue, “So I suppose that I, at least, am a little afraid for you. You worked like a demon to build yourself back up, and I just don’t want to see all your hard work go down the drain because of Buttface Gallari.”
“Neither do I. And I won’t let it. I will never forgive him, Poppy—ever. But I’m through running away from him. Because you’re right, I did work too hard building myself back up to keep doing that. I’m not surprised you might have reservations about my ability to handle myself—”
“I don’t! You’ll go down in the I-am-woman-hear-me-roar annals for your counterattack on Gallari during the worst moment of your life. You more than proved you can handle yourself.”
“Since then, though, I’ve been more reactive than proactive whenever I’ve run into him. So maybe I feel I have something to prove—to myself, if no one else. It doesn’t help that I looked in the mirror this morning and had a ‘fat’ moment.”
“Dammit, Av,” Jane said. “When are you going to let those go? You’ve been a size twelve for twelve years.”
“Which you like to remind me would be a size fourteen if I’d buy my clothing at the less spendy stores where most women shop.” She knew her friend was only teasing when she said that, but she couldn’t honestly deny