GYPSY MAGIC
by
Judy Griffith Gill
This is a work of fiction. All characters, dialogue, and events arise purely from the imagination of the author. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is completely coincidental.
Text copyright ©
Judy Griffith Gill, 2013.
All rights reserved.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter One
“All that for a few thousand feet of videotape?” Gypsy Gaynor’s voice rose indignantly as she faced Fredrick Halliburton across the smooth expanse of his highly polished desk. “It’s beyond ridiculous! Not only that, you got me in here on false pretenses on a holiday Monday, the only long weekend this month. I’ve finally talked Tony into going house-hunting today. If I agree to this, I’ll be lucky to get home by midnight. I’ll also be lucky to pin Tony down to another house-hunting day. You have no idea how difficult it is for us to find time to do something like that together, and what am I supposed to tell our realtor? Why are you asking this of me?” With a toss of her head, she flung her hair over her shoulder.
“That’s why,” he said. “The client wants the Wow! factor. Your sapphire eyes, the way they flash, that long mane of glossy black hair, the way you can toss it around like a cape over your shoulder, will provide the perfect contrast to honey-blond mink.” Frederick Halliburton rubbed a hand over his bald head and raised one shaggy eyebrow, wrinkling the skin of his sun-lamp tanned forehead. “There’ll be a bonus in it, for you, Gypsy.” The light of admiration coupled with something Gypsy was accustomed to, but did not like, made his small eyes look even greedier than normal. She surely hoped he didn’t think she might accept him as the bonus.
“Not only that,” he added silkily, “Atwater asked for my best. As of right now, you’re it, darling.” The unctuous smile which did not, somehow, suit the round, pudgy face, turned Gypsy’s stomach and she looked away from him to study her perfectly manicured, pale pink nails, only looking back at his face when he heaved himself from his high-backed leather chair and came around the desk.
“I could,” he said with narrowed eyes, “have offered the assignment to Vanessa, my love. Atwater specified a brunette, but she’d have worn a wig if I’d asked her to. Vanessa—” he almost seemed to taste the name, finding it satisfying—“Vanessa has dedication.” There was an overt warning in his tone. “Dedication,” he repeated, turning Gypsy’s face toward him with a palm on her cheek, “is a very necessary commodity in this game. Without it, without tireless dedication—and ambition—you are sunk.”
Dedication and ambition! She’d had the ambition, certainly, when she was fifteen years old and her mother signed her with the Halliburton Agency. And it was her mother’s dedication to seeing her daughter succeed in a field where she, herself, had mostly failed, that made Gypsy the wealthy twenty-three-year-old she was. But her mother had moved on, and now dedicated her life to the search for husband number five.
Gypsy wished she, too, could move on. She wished she could just quit the modeling business. Or, this morning when Halliburton had called her at half-past-five on a day for which she had plans, she wished she could at least threaten to resign. Unfortunately, Halliburton knew Tony would kick up an unholy fuss if she did.
“Ah!” Halliburton had said with satisfaction when she answered the phone lying near her on the patio table while she went through her exercise routine at the crack of dawn because then it was cool. “I knew you’d be awake, my sweet early-bird, and I know I can count on you.” His croon sharpened into an order. “Bring your makeup case and come in to the office, Gypsy. I need you.”
“But I—”
Halliburton had rung off. Out of long habit of obedience to duty, Gypsy’d left a voice mail for Tony and driven the twenty minutes to the Halliburton Modeling Agency’s downtown office. Ordinarily, the trip would have taken up to an hour, but at this time of day, there was no traffic. She took her customary cup of yogurt and five fresh strawberries with her, tucking them into the corner of her makeup case.
“What’s so important, Fredrick?” she’d asked a harried-looking Halliburton when she arrived at the agency.
He covered the phone with his palm to answer her. “An emergency assignment.” Returning to his call, he spoke rapidly. “Of course you’ll have the proofs by tomorrow morning. Everything’s arranged and my favorite model has just walked in the door. I’ll brief her and send her on her way. I promise, you will not be disappointed.”
He hung up, looking slightly panicked, but also pleased. “This is a brand new client, Gypsy. Jason Atwater came to me at a social gathering last night. In fact, I haven’t even been to bed yet, trying to set up the details of this shoot.”
Atwater? Gypsy knew Jason Atwater headed up one of the largest advertising agencies in the entire from Portland, Oregon, in the south, to Vancouver, BC, in the north. He had offices in both those cities as well as Seattle, the trio of Pacific coast metropolises which made up a large body of population. Advertising agencies were the bread-and-butter—not to mention the marmalade—of modeling agencies.
“Turns out Atwater’s in danger of losing his account if he can’t pull this one off. His client, Hudson’s Fine Furs, is not happy with what he’s proposed to date. They’re threatening to fire him. This is big, Gypsy. If I can sign Atwater, there’ll be more assignments for you, more money, chances to travel. I know you love Hawaii, and he does a lot of work for clients there, as well as in Fiji. The tropics sell.”
I don’t need more money, she wanted to say. She’d been earning large sums since before she even learned to count much beyond ten, and by law, her mother had put most of it away for her. Her earnings, carefully invested over the years, had grown to, in her opinion, an almost obscene total .Halliburton took her stony silence for attentiveness and continued, putting a heavy arm around her waist and squeezing. She pulled away, gritting her teeth. He followed, still determined to touch, to stroke his hand over her shoulder. Don’t paw me! she wanted to scream. God, but she was sick of people—men—touching her. Photographers pulling her body-parts into positions they felt were right—whether they were comfortable or natural didn’t matter. They had no qualms about taking her head in their hands, turning it this way and that, tilting her chin up, ordering facial expressions of one nature or another. Heavens! Even Tony got in on the act, thinking he knew better than she did what she should wear, who she should smile at and how, and—
But that was unfair. Tony needed her to act and dress in specific ways because, as a politician, especially since he was seventeen years her senior, with plenty of experience in the social world he had to occupy—a world about which she knew little—he was well-equipped to make those decisions for her.
More to make Fredrick leave her alone than anything, she said wearily, “All right, all right. I’ll take the assignment.” She side-stepped out of reach, into the doorway. God! Why couldn’t Tony understand how tired she was of all this? She’d been modeling and doing commercials since she was three years old! Most people received promotions, or if they didn’t, changed career paths after twenty years in the same job if they were unhappy with what they did.
Maybe buying the house would help Tony see she would be just as valuable an asset to him as someone to entertain important colleagues and clients, as she was a model in the public eye… Oh, Gypsy! she scoffed at herself, you dreamer you. Tony loved having her on
his arm.
“You’ll go?” The piggy little eyes devoured her as Halliburton reached for her again, to pat, squeeze, or caress.
“I said I would,” Gypsy responded dispiritedly, taking herself three paces away. “But I still protest. I’ve done some pretty far out commercials, but this one tops them all. Who in their right mind would wear a mink coat to the beach?” She picked up her makeup case near the door and asked, “And why so darn far away, anyhow?”
“You know the answer to that.” Now that he had his own way, Halliburton wasn’t about to waste any more time on her.
Gypsy did know. In August, it was impossible to find a local beach without a thousand and one bodies cluttering it up, and if the account wanted mink coats over bikinis, that was what she had to deliver. “I suppose I should be grateful it’s not February,” she said, grimacing.
“Don’t!” Halliburton, horrified, waved his hands at her. “Don’t pull faces. You’ll get lines. And if it was February, no one would be setting up new ads for furs. As it is, what with the snafu he ran into with the last presentation, Atwater’s behind schedule. Now run along, pet.”
Gypsy slammed the door as she left.
She had thought, when Tony proposed, he would want an immediate marriage and for her to leave her job. She had been quite wrong.
“A long engagement would be best for both of us,” he’d said. “Right now you’re at the top of the heap and I’d hate to be the one to pull you off it. You need all the exposure you can get and,” he grinned with the boyish candor which both charmed and irked her at the same time, “your exposure isn’t doing me any harm, either. ‘Anthony Pierce, member for Oceanside dining, attending the symphony, the opening of the new hospital, or whatever with his fiancée, the lovely model, Gypsy Gaynor’, oh I know it reads ‘former’ member, but darling, better things are just around the corner. And when we get married, of course you’ll want to keep on working until the law firm is better established or the Party gets back into power. Housekeepers we can hire.”
Gypsy had tentatively, wistfully mentioned a family, bringing an outright hoot of laughter from Tony. “What? Spoil that lovely shape? Never! Or, not at least until you begin to fall from the top of the heap.”
Gypsy pushed such memories aside and parked in the short-term lot before entering the airport building where she was to meet her companions of the day. After a long, uncomfortable flight, the pilot pointed out their destination, a small, isolated wooded island with a few lacy edges of surf curling up on several narrow beaches on its lower, western side. Here, the water was much too cold to tempt swimmers, and the place too far off the beaten track even for sunbathers.
The helicopter hovered, kicking up a storm of sand and dried seaweed, then landed. The day’s work began. While the pilot and photographer politely turned Gypsy away removed her clothing, and donned the skimpy red bikini the client had decreed she wear. She allowed the photographer to drape her in a floor-length mink coat, artfully drape a scarlet silk scarf over her head, and took pose after pose at his direction. There were knee-length coats, stoles, short jackets and a long, gorgeous cape with a cream satin lining. After each garment—every one shown over that red bikini—she touched up her makeup, the photographer smoothed or tousled her hair, placed her left foot, or her right, on a boulder, or had her sit on the sand with nothing under her but a towel, nothing on her but the bikini and a sultry smile, eyes gazing with adoration up to where the pilot, not exactly in the picture, dangled one or the other of the mink pieces as if enticing her. In some shots, the photographer had her wear her large, solitaire diamond ring and her diamond pendant. In others, he had her removed them. At one point, he gave her a break to eat her yogurt and strawberries while he and the pilot gobbled roast beef sandwiches. Exhausted, she’d have willingly fought one of them for their lunch, but knew better. She sipped cool water from a plastic bottle.
Near the end of the afternoon, with the sun a flamboyant orange sinking toward the rim of the Pacific, staining the rolling water with flame, the photographer deemed the lighting just right for the last and most important sequence of the day. “This one will do it,” he declared, sounding exultant. “I know it. Atwater will love it. His client will love it. The others are good, but I’m betting the bank on this one.”
He assisted Gypsy to the top of a high, flat rock, and draped her in a floor-length cape of pale honey-gold mink.
“I want you to lie on your side and we’ll fly in from a distance, panning what will seem to be a deserted island, and finally, I’ll zoom in on you lying there on that cape. When you receive my signal—I will fire off a flash—I want you to roll over slowly, draw the cape up around your shoulders, rub your cheek with the fur. Then, flip your hair back the way you do and laugh, as if your lover has just given you the cape as a beach cover-up. Remember, Gypsy, you’re seducing men, persuading them to buy this cape. Or convincing women who look absolutely nothing like you, that they would—will—if only their wealthy lover will wrap them in mink like this, be you. Flash that diamond solitaire, too, because it lends authenticity to the entire production.” Tony, Gypsy thought, would like that idea as much as the photographer did.
He adjusted the mink, flipped a strand of her hair back, tucked one end of the silk scarf into her right hand—“For contrast, and to catch the eye—“ he said, then added, “but leave all that leg exposed.” With a final pat off “that” leg, he leaped to the sand below and sauntered off toward the waiting aircraft, making sure he gathered up everything that could mar the scene.
Gypsy lay on the hard, black shale, unappreciative of the thousands of dollars’ worth of animal pelts under her nearly naked body. All she cared about was the acute discomfort of the cool breeze off the ocean, the lonely feeling given her by the dwindling clatter of the helicopter as it circled out over the ocean. Too far out, she thought, half panicking, to begin its run in.
She turned her head fractionally to see if she could spot it out toward the setting sun and saw it as a crawling black dragonfly just at the edge of the orange blaze that filled half the sky. As she watched it grow larger, ever larger, beating its way across the molten lava of the sea, she kept her attention firmly on the bubble, expecting the flash, which would be her signal to draw the fur cape up around her body, smile her most seductively and laugh at an imaginary lover.
The noise grew louder and louder as the machine flew nearer, flattening and darkening the waves with its rotor-wash. As it approached, only a few hundred feet offshore, the nose raised up and the entire craft seem to shudder. It clawed at the blood red sunset clouds as if seeking purchase and then with a tortured screaming of overstressed metal, one blade appeared to cut helicopter in half, both pieces falling from the air to land with almighty splashes which, in dying, left a terrible silence.
Without quite knowing how she got there, Gypsy was on her feet, screaming into the wind, staring with horrified eyes at the empty, concealing ocean. She jumped from the high rock, intending to do something, anything, without fully realizing there was nothing in the world she could do, and landed on a slick, weed-covered boulder. It rolled under her impact, pitching her sideways and then there was nothing at all… Except the sensation of cold on her feet which made Gypsy pull them up, bending her knees toward her chest. It was dark, and dimly she grew aware of the cold light of stars wheeling slowly, remorselessly overhead and she wondered why they were there, then ceased wondering about anything as the night wore on.
As first light disturbed her, Gypsy struggled to her feet, wrapped the mink cape around herself for warmth and wandered away from the shore, totally unaware of her surroundings, or her reason for being in them.
~ * ~
Dawn came, pearling the rolling water with a fine, lavender glow, lighting the bent limbs, the black trunk of a solitary, wind-tortured pine tree. The rising sun turned to flaming red rusty streaks in the bare rock where the tree stood. Stark difference between light and shadow exposed to view the expense of empty sand, uninhab
ited except for one lone black oyster-catcher on a row of rocks jutting outward. The bird hopped away as the sound of approaching aircraft filled the morning air.
Circling the beach, the helicopter searched, then landed. Two men emerged, watched only by a bald eagle in a tall silver snag a quarter-mile away. Presently the men return to their craft and it left, to be joined in the distance by others, quartering the sea, back and forth, each to his own sector until at last the clatter died to a whisper and then nothing as the aircraft made their way east toward the other side of the island, flying into the rising sun.
~ * ~
Kevin climbed from his untidy bunk, pulled on muddy, tattered jeans and rubbed at his eyes with balled up fists. He tiptoed from the cabin, careful not to disturb the other occupant. He stood for a moment watching the sunbeams cut down through the overhanging boughs of a cedar tree at the corner of the hut, then ran to the creek where he knelt and drank thirstily before digging his already grimy fingers into the mud at the edge. He counted laboriously as each worm was, literally, unearthed and then stuffed the wriggling mass into a pocket. He followed the path of the creek through the shady forest, now and then sucking in his cheeks as one foot slipped into the water. He wasn’t allowed to get his shoes muddy or wet! But Auntie Lorraine wasn’t there, he reminded himself, and once, just once, deliberately stuck his foot into the water, swishing it back and forth. Daddy wouldn’t care. Daddy wouldn’t even notice.
Beside a gravel bar where the creek widened as it left the woods and ran through a sunlit glade, he knelt once more. Shading his eyes with one hand, he peered intently into the water. “Come on,” he called softly. “Breakfast’s ready. Come on fish.” By lucky accident, although in Kevin’s estimation, by dint of careful training, two small trout chose that moment to swim into view from under the shade of a large devils-club plant which hung over the small pool. One by one the worms plinked into the water. There, the greedy fish gobbled them up. “That’s good fishies,” he told them. “Now you’ll grow up and be big and swim far, far away and get to be salmon. I’ll be back.”
Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) Page 1