A Knife to Remember (3 page)

They muttered behind the closed door while Jane got dressed and they twined themselves around her ankles as she headed for the kitchen. She'd just plugged in the coffeemaker and started the can opener when there was a knock at the door. The cats howled protests at this interruption of her activities.

Maisie was at the door. "Good morning," she chirped.

“It's only six-fifteen! How can you say that?" Jane exclaimed.

“Oh, I've been here for a half hour already. Is your son ready? I have some things he can do. Send him along.”

Jane bellowed up the stairs for Mike and got him on his way, then got the cats fed and a cup of coffee inside herself before rousting out the other two kids. As soon as she heard movement upstairs, she took Willard out to his new dog run. He cowered and groaned in protest at first, but when he discovered that someone had tossed a half-eaten donut into the run, he settled in as if it were a home away from home.

Todd accepted the inevitable and went off to school without much fight. Katie tried to claim a horrific case of cramps, cramps that might well go down in medical history, but decided she didn't feel
that
bad when Jane made clear that staying home from school would mean staying in her own bedroom, which faced the front of the house, all day. Jane went back outside to drag Willard back indoors while Katie was reluctantly getting ready for school.

When she had her car pools done, Jane returned to the house, put on a minimum of makeup, brown corduroy slacks, and a peach-colored sweatshirt before strolling into the backyard. Shelley was sitting on a lawn chair next to Maisie. They'd situated themselves next to a snack spread of epic proportions.

“Help yourself," Maisie offered as Jane goggled at the long plywood table and the coolers beneath it.

There were drinks of every description: milk, buttermilk, skim milk, orange juice, pineapple juice, apple juice, coffee, cocoa, a dozen kinds of tea in bags. There were donuts and fruit bars, little plastic bags of sunflower seeds and peanuts and candy bars. She counted six kinds of chips and four kinds of bread besides bagels, donuts, and sweet rolls. There were fresh fruits and vegetable crudités, cookies, cheeses, spreads, dips, and all the makings for every kind of sandwich imaginable.

“There's enough food here for a hundred starving people," Jane said in wonder. Her stomach growled.

“That's about what we've got today," Maisie said. "Dig in. You can't make a dent."

“Is this normal?" Shelley asked. "All this food?”

Maisie nodded. "It's one of the best things about the job. The food. You should have seen breakfast."

“You mean this
isn't
breakfast?" Jane asked, biting into a sweet roll.

“No, the caterers' truck just left. Breakfast was a hot meal for everybody a couple hours ago. I'd weigh three hundred pounds if I worked very often.”

They chatted with Maisie about her job and discovered that she was a military wife and an actor's daughter. She had combined the two with her nursing degree and had worked on many movie sets over the years as she followed her husband's postings. "Fortunately he was assigned to desk workin L.A. several times back when nearly everything was done in the studio. I worked a lot then," she said. "And now that so much work is being done on location, the number of jobs elsewhere in the country is increasing."

“You mean you live here in Chicago?" Jane asked. "Is anybody else local?"

“Oh, yes. Quite a few. Transportation, extras casting, all the extras, catering, craft services," she said, rattling off individuals by their jobs instead of names. "All local. Even Jake there is local now."

“Who's Jake?”

Maisie popped a donut into her mouth to free a hand and pointed to a tall man in his early forties who was leaning against a piece of fake building, obscuring their view of the set. He had shoulder-length maroon-red hair. As they looked at him, he made some semaphore-like gestures to somebody with his arms, then turned toward them as if he'd sensed their gazes. He was very fair-skinned, with lean, distinctive features that would have made him seem more likely to be in front of the cameras than behind them. He wasn't handsome in a traditional sense, but he was striking-looking and sexy in a bizarre, hazardous way. He looked like the sort of man who, in another age, might have come over from Ireland and led labor revolts.

— and cheated on his wife, Jane thought as he approached them with a dazzling, wolfish grin.

4

In spite of her better judgment, Jane was flattered at the interested look on Jake's face — until she realized it wasn't meant for her.

“Baby, you're killing me with those sexy outfits!" he said with a laugh.

Jane turned around to find a young woman approaching from behind. She was in her twenties and extremely pretty, but dressed and made up as a turn of the century escapee from a fire. Her long chestnut hair was deliberately disordered and there were sooty smudges on her face and arms. She wore a baggy gray dress with what Jane assumed were artificial sweat stains and ragged tears in the skirt and sleeves. "You old flatterer!" this young woman said, blowing a kiss at Jake as she went by.

He watched her, then reluctantly turned back to Maisie, ignoring Jane and Shelley as if they were no more than inanimate objects. "You don't happen to have seen Bobby's fancy watch, have you?" he asked.

“By 'Bobby' I assume you mean Roberto? The director?" Maisie said coolly. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Maisie wasn't crazy about Jake. "If he hears you call him that, your ass is grass."

“Oh, Bobby wouldn't mind. He and I are old chums. Seriously, he's lost his Rolex. He thinks he took it off when you bandaged up his finger this morning."

“If he did, he just put it in his pocket. I didn't pay any attention. I think he got some coffee after I was through with him. Maybe he set it down over there," Maisie said, gesturing to the loaded-down craft service table.

Jake wandered off, looking around the table and taking nibbles of half a dozen things.

“The director hurt himself?" Jane asked.

Maisie started laughing. "It was, honest-to-God, a hangnail. He's just a raving hypochondriac. Oh, dear. .”

A pair of young women were approaching them, one head down, crying. The other had her arm around her and was muttering to her comfortingly. Maisie got up to meet them and as the sobbing young actress raised her head, Maisie said, "Oh, you poor dear. It's chicken pox, you know."

“I can't have chicken pox!" the girl wailed. "I'm not a kid and I've got my first line today! I've never gotten to say a single word in a single movie and I'm supposed to do a whole scene with Miss Harwell this afternoon!" She'd gotten so pale that the telltale spots stood out even brighter.

“I'm sorry, honey, but you're not going to get to say a word in this one either.”

Her friend spoke up. "I talked to Carl in makeup. He said they can cover the spots."

“Maybe so, but that's not the point. Chicken pox is a disease. A highly infectious disease that can be very tough on adults like you who missed having it as kids. I can't let you stay and pass it on to the whole crew — if you haven't already. Thank God we'll be wrapped before the incubation period is over!”

A crowd had gathered around them by this time, clucking curiosity, sympathy, and surprise. But Jane noticed that Jake, standing at a little distance, looked pleased. He suddenly dropped the roll he was munching on into a trash barrel and abruptly plunged between the fake buildings onto the set itself.

A young man with earphones standing by the table suddenly raised a bullhorn to his lips. "Quiet on the set!" he bellowed.

The unexpected blast of sound nearly flung Jane and Shelley out of their chairs.

“Quiet on the set!" they heard echoed two or three times from various distances, then another bullhorn voice squawked, "Rolling!”

A complete and stunning silence fell over the entire production. It was so quiet, Jane realized, that if she'd closed her eyes, she wouldn't have believed another human being was anywhere near. And yet there were probably a hundred people milling around chatting only a second before.

The girl with the chicken pox was led away, her shoulders heaving with silent sobs, and Maisie came back to join them. Jane started to whisper a question, but Maisie hushed her with a finger to her lips.

Everyone stood frozen. Most of the snackers, under the fierce eye of the boy with the bullhorn, had even quit chewing. Finally, after what seemed like five minutes of suspended animation, the distant bullhorn bellowed, "Cut!" and everybody came back to life. Conversations were resumed mid-syllable, a held-back sneeze erupted, the sound of hammering was resurrected, and everyone was once again in motion.

Shelley was bright-eyed. "I should have let the kids stay home to see this! And then I could have gone out and bought my own bullhorn and they'd have taken me seriously!”

A mob of people in tattered, burned clothing suddenly came crowding through the little space between the fake buildings and headed for the food like a swarm of locusts. A few gathered around a coffee can with sand in the bottom that sat on the ground a few feet away. They, the smokers, avidly lighted up.

Jane watched and listened with fascination to an ethereal, pious-looking girl who was dressed as a nun and was saying, ". . so I told him I wouldn't ball a baldheaded guy if all my girlfriends swore he was the biggest stud in the world.”

Shelley and Jane both burst into laughter at the incongruity of it.

A plump, frazzled woman in her sixties pushed through them and approached Maisie. "Nurse! Nurse! That girl with the awful spots! What did she have?"

“Just chicken pox, Olive. Nothing to worry about.

I've sent her home. Miss Harwell has had chicken pox, hasn't she?”

The older woman sighed with relief. "Yes. When she was only four and a half, poor darling. She was terribly sick. Can you only get it once?"

“Yes, only once."

“Well, that's good. Thank you. I'll just take Miss Harwell some nice herb tea and tell her not to be concerned.”

They waited until the woman was out of earshot, busily fussing around the craft service table, before Jane whispered to Maisie, "Who in the world is that?"

“That is Miss Olive Longabach, Lynette Harwell's lifelong keeper. Apparently she was some kind of governess or nanny when Harwell was a kid and just stayed on with her. She's listed on the tech list as Harwell's 'dresser,' but she's dresser, keeper, social secretary, and all-round mother tiger. Poor old thing has no life of her own at all."

“I need an Olive Longabach of my own," Jane mused. "Where do you think I might pick one up."

“Just get yourself born into wealth in your next life," Shelley said, then after a pause added, "or be born a man and get married.”

Since filming had apparently been suspended for the moment, Jane got up and edged close to the nearest fake building. There was, as she had hoped, a bit of a setback to one of the flats and she was able to peer out between them and see a slice of the field.

She'd looked at this abandoned area, withoutreally seeing it, for nearly twenty years, but it was virtually unrecognizable now. It was literally crammed with people and equipment. Not merely actors and cameras — she would have expected those — but dozens of people in grubby modern dress, all appearing extremely busy, and enough lights and stands to illuminate a baseball stadium. There were twelve-foot-square screens on frames set here and there and the hulking condor with the floodlights was being moved, chugging along snaillike as young men slapped sheets of plywood in front of its treads so it wouldn't sink into the ground.

There was also, to Jane's delight, a straggling row of tall wood and canvas chairs with the principal actors' names stenciled on them. "Just like in the movies!" she whispered to herself, grinning.

The sheer clutter of it was amazing. It seemed as though everybody on the whole set had brought some kind of bag along, some of them very nearly suitcase-sized. These were piled in heaps, thrown in odd corners, slung over the uprights of the chairs, and all the miscellaneous objects in one area were being moved as she watched. The actors' chairs, with the books, bags, knitting, and snapshot cameras associated with them, were being hauled off to a new site. Bags, light stands, and big electrical cables were likewise being dragged away.

Suddenly, a voice only inches away, but on the opposite side of the building flat, startled her. "Such a very nice boy you are.”

Jane recognized Lynette Harwell's distinctive tone. For some reason Harwell's voice always reminded Jane of the old-fashioned phrase "Ashes of Roses." Elegant, extremely feminine without being shrill, understated, a little husky. No, more whispery.
I'm standing a few inches from a movie star!
Jane thought.

“I wonder if you've ever considered going into the business? With that profile and physique, you could probably get tons of work. And beefcake never goes out of style, you know," Lynette was saying.

“Not really, ma'am. I just live nearby and thought this would be fun," Mike answered.

Mike.
This woman was talking to her son Mike about going into the movies! Horrified, Jane almost burst through the scenery before she could get a grip on herself. The dirty old woman! Talking to Mike—
her
Mike — about beefcake! This was an obscenity! And to think how she herself had helped Mike get on the set. It was like a mother mouse shoving her young into a cage of eagles! Apparently they moved away because, try as she might, Jane couldn't hear either voice again. She stood there fuming for a moment before someone else approached the other side of the scenery.

She heard footsteps rustle the grass, then an unidentifiable voice saying, "What is it? I've got things to do."

“It's about that scene this afternoon. The kid who was supposed to be in it has come down with something."