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“So, who did we expect to be, all those years ago? How are we different?” Whitney asked. Tess didn’t jump in. She knew Whitney had her own set of answers and would want to go first. “We’ve traded Coors for Taylor Fladgate. And instead of Kent House, our dorm, we’re in a Baltimore high-rise that neither of us can afford.”
Tess was sure that her friend could afford such an apartment, but she had the WASP habit of cheapness when it came to big-ticket items. Whitney would probably live and die in the guesthouse at her parents’ mildly run-down valley home because it was free.
“We were both going to be journalists,” Whitney continued. “You, a crusading investigator, part Nellie Bly, part Woodstein. Me, a globe-trotting foreign correspondent. Now you’re the owner of your own business, and I run the family foundation. Upgrade?”
“Downgrade, I would think,” Selene snarked.
“My uncle Toddy married an actress,” Whitney said, addressing Tess in a stage whisper. “He was disinherited.”
Selene got up and flounced into her room, slamming the door behind her.
“She hates me,” Whitney said cheerfully.
“Good, then you’re doing your job. How was the day on set?”
“Tedious. Why do people think it’s glamorous, spending hours in a big drafty barn of a place, watching people say and do the same things over and over again?”
“Did they give you one of those little headset thingies that allows you to listen to the scene?”
“Yes, but I turned the sound off after the third take. I couldn’t take listening to that dialogue. I felt like my IQ was dropping by the minute.”
“And the day was problem free?”
“For our purposes. The tiny woman, Lottie, said the energy was a little off, because people are upset, but it seemed to be going well. Joh
“No,” Tess said quickly, knowing where her friend was heading and prepared to disavow it, three times if necessary, like Peter denying Jesus before the cock crowed. She was never going to admit to her youthful yearnings toward Joh
“Oh you did too have a crush on him when you first got to school.” Whitney spoke with the smugness of a true friend. “What were you thinking? Even thin, he wasn’t that attractive.”
Tess looked out at the harbor, so beautiful at night. Her thoughts followed her eyes eastward, to the mouth of the bay and then across it, time-traveling to the pretty little college campus where two girls had met, two girls who were at once so much younger and older than the girl who had just closeted herself behind her bedroom door. “We thought that we would never get old, much less fat. Well, fatter, in my case. We thought our metabolisms would never change. We thought we would get everything we wanted. We were, in short, twenty.”
Whitney laughed in rueful agreement. “What if someone had made you a bargain, all those years ago, offered you all this? Not just the apartment, but the life, too? The money, the beauty, the attention. Would you have wanted it under these conditions – life in a fishbowl, a job at which you have very little control?”
“Honestly? At twenty? I think I would have said yes. I think almost anyone would. At twenty. Not now.”
“Poor baby,” Whitney said, looking at the closed bedroom door, sotto voce for once. “She’s already beaten the million-to-one odds by becoming a successful actress. Now she has to face the ten million-to-one odds of becoming an actress who finds work past the age of thirty-five. Remember the silent stars whose careers ended when the talkies came along? For women, it hasn’t really changed.”
“Marie… Dressler, the one whose dog ate her,” Tess recalled.
“Wrong Marie,” Whitney said. “Marie Dressler was in Di
“She was in talkies,” Tess said.
“Right. But she went bankrupt and ended up drowning in her toilet when she vomited up all the Seconals she had taken in hopes of a slightly more, uh, picturesque suicide. Don’t you know your Hollywood Babylon? Hollywood kills its own.”
“Well, there was Thelma Todd, whose murder was never solved,” Tess said. “But I’m not sure that was actually Hollywood ’s fault.”
“You’ve forgotten the starlet who jumped from the thirteenth letter of the Hollywoodland sign – back when it had thirteen letters. Oh, and another one who immolated herself on a pyre of her own clippings. What a way to go.”
The two old friends fell silent, and Tess assumed that Whitney must be thinking, as she was, of the fates available to actresses of a certain age. To women of a certain age. The distinctive ring of Selene’s cell phone broke the silence, followed by her side of the conversation – not the words, only the tone, which was suffused with a husky, flirtatious giggle.
“I wonder who she’s talking to,” Tess said. “Then again, knowing Selene, she’d talk to the dry cleaners in that breathy little voice.”
“Easy enough to find out.”
“How?”
“She has an eleven o’clock call tomorrow. Grab her cell while she’s still asleep, check the received call log, make a note of it.”
As it happened, Tess didn’t have to wait until morning. A few minutes later, the water started ru
The received call log exhausted, Tess was about to put the phone back on the nightstand when she remembered Selene’s furiously tapping thumb, texting in the car on the way to New York. She found the text function and clicked back two days in time. Derek again, checking Selene’s ETA. And, in between Derek’s calls, one from a different number, a text that read simply: ACHING FOR YOU. WHERE ARE YOU? The absence of text shorthand – no 4 for for, no u for you, no r for are – might have been enough to tip Tess off to the sender – someone who had enough pride, or time, to use the language in full. But she didn’t have to guess. The text was from someone named “Be
She pressed the call button, hanging up when Ben Marcus picked up breathlessly on the second ring: “Have you figured out a way to get rid of them?”