Hushed

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Logan, you yourself told me that you don’t feel challenged anymore, that you’re not satisfied. Can’t you just try something new, something different?”

  “Sounds like you’ve got plans for a new-and-improved Logan. Next thing, you’ll be asking me about my intentions, like your father did. Asking me what I plan to do with my life when I give up ‘play-acting and make-believe.’” He stands up, shoots his cuffs, and pulls his jacket down at the back. Up on the set, Britney beckons Logan with a finger and a smile which promises royal treatment.

  “I just think you can do more, that’s all.”

  “Let me guess, sharks? Spread awareness, raise money, change the world?”

  “Is it so stupid to want to do something meaningful, to leave the world a better place?” There are tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. It feels as if he’s slipping away, like a handful of water in my fingers.

  “No, it’s not stupid. You should do it.”

  “I want you to do what will make you happy.” I speak passionately, but I’m not sure he hears me. He’s already walking towards the altar, towards Britney.

  Chapter 32

  Headlines

  Logan Rush and Britney Vaux married — for reelz!

  The Beast weds the Beauty!

  Logan and Britney tie the knot in Africa

  Representatives for Logan Rush and Britney Vaux, stars of the Beast trilogy of films, have refused to confirm or deny reports that they are officially married.

  On Friday, the couple filmed a scene in which their on-screen characters took their vows. According to a confidential source, the priest who presided over the scene was no actor, but was in fact an ordained member of the ministry. This has raised the possibility that the couple may now, in fact, be married in reality.

  For years, rumours have circulated that the on-screen lovers are also an off-screen couple. Their red-hot chemistry … (continues page 3)

  The crap-flinging tabloid monkeys have just made my mood — already bad after my tiff with Logan — even worse. I’m unsettled by our conversation yesterday. For one thing, I regret getting all preachy with him about his work. But what bothers me more is how he reacted to my throwaway comment about Cilla having some kind of hold over him. I only realised afterwards that he never actually answered my question.

  She’s such a witch, it wouldn’t surprise me if she’s trying to strong-arm him into more Beast movies. And something keeps niggling at me — the memory of her saying Logan should check his mail for a letter to Levi. And the strange smile on her face when she said it. The outside of the letter was addressed to Logan, and it was still sealed, so how did Cilla know about “Levi”?

  I click the stupid news sites closed but leave my browser open. I’m due to have lunch with Logan this afternoon, but in the meantime, I could do some research. It’s not something I’m especially eager to do — it feels a lot like snooping. But what if Cilla knows a secret and is using it as a weapon against Logan? I want to help him, to protect him from Cilla if possible. So I need to know what he’s up against, don’t I?

  Ignoring my twinges of conscience, I retrieve the crumpled letter from my drawer and make a list of key search terms.

  Jonas Peabody

  Louisiana State Penitentiary

  Levi and Wynette

  My pen hesitates, making little ink dots on the paper, before writing down the final two words.

  Levi Peabody?

  I key the first term into the search box, hit the return key, and dive into the results, checking ancestry sites, directory listings, social security birth listings and obituaries, reading Facebook profiles and sifting through newspaper articles, eliminating false leads and clicking through hopeful-looking ones until I find what I really wasn’t looking for.

  Holy cow.

  I print out some of the news articles, order them chronologically, and read them again carefully, trying to get my head around what I’ve discovered. The first article, dated fourteen years ago, is from the Picayune Daily Chronicle.

  Fatal stabbing on Canal Street Bus

  New Orleans: The New Orleans Police Department has confirmed that seventeen-year-old Clarence Washington, a senior student at nearby Jefferson High, was yesterday stabbed and killed during an altercation on a city bus in the French Quarter.

  Washington and another man boarded the Canal Street bus at the Decatur Street stop. A confrontation over seats followed, in which the man taunted Washington with racist epithets. According to Miss Tanita Merrero (22), a fellow passenger on the bus, the man “called Washington a ‘mongrel’ and ‘good-for-nothing n__r.’ He used the n-word several times. He said that they were taking over the city and getting all the good jobs. He said that Washington should stand up and give him the seat because you should respect your elders and betters. Clarence told Peabody that he was hardly old, and what made him better? Next thing he shoved Clarence off the seat into the aisle, and began kicking him, telling him to go back to where he came from. When Clarence got up, they started fighting and the man stabbed him. There was blood everywhere.”

  Washington was stabbed four times in the chest and neck, and was pronounced dead on the scene by paramedics.

  When asked if the stabbing was being treated as a hate crime, NOPD Captain Luiz Delgado refused to speculate. “We are open to all possibilities at this time.”

  The last article is from July of the following year.

  Peabody convicted in Canal Street Stabbing

  New Orleans: Jonas Peabody (27), of Chalmette, New Orleans, was yesterday convicted of the second-degree murder of seventeen-year-old Clarence Washington.

  The jury took only three hours to deliberate the evidence presented over the course of the four-day trial and to return with a unanimous guilty verdict. Criminal District Court Judge Roberta Broussard dismissed Peabody’s claims that he had acted in self-defense, noting that Washington had been unarmed and that Peabody had provoked the dispute between them.

  Addressing Peabody, Judge Broussard said, “You ended the life of an innocent young man with a bright future, a young man whose right to sit on a bus like any other citizen was won many years ago. I find no extenuating circumstances in your actions or motivations.”

  Peabody seemed shocked by the verdict. As he was led away in cuffs for his transfer to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, he shouted that he had been “railroaded” and would be appealing his conviction on the grounds of “incompetent lawyering.”

  Under the 1979 “life means life” amendment to Louisiana law, he has been sentenced to a mandatory life sentence, without the possibility of parole. Peabody’s criminal record includes previous convictions for DUI, domestic violence, assault and drug possession. It emerged in the trial that he has links to the Aryan Nation and KKK organizations.

  Peabody’s wife of seven years, Mrs. Nancy Peabody (nee Rush) (25) was in court to hear the verdict, but she declined to answer questions from the press.

  Mrs. Arlene Washington, mother of the murder victim, has been in the courtroom for the duration of the trial, often weeping as she heard details of her only son’s shocking death. When asked, after the conclusion of the trial, if she believed justice had been served, Mrs Washington said, “The law has done its job. But you can’t call it justice when my boy is dead and that vile man is still alive.”

  Accompanying this article were two colour photographs. The first, a mugshot of Jonas Peabody, showed a scowling man with black hair, squinting blue eyes, and a mouth that was slightly sunken — as if he had bad teeth. Narrower, older and meaner, his face was like an off-kilter, distorted version of the features I know so well.

  The second photograph was captioned: “Mrs Nancy Peabody leaves the court building with her two young children, Levi (7) and Wynette (3).” It showed a woman in a dull beige dress, clutching a toddler on one hip and holding the hand of a small boy on her other side. The toddler’s and the woman’s faces were half-turned away, but the small boy was looking over his shoulder dire
ctly at the camera. His black hair was neatly combed in a side-path, but one lock tumbled across the forehead of his thin, pinched face. His little hand was stretched out towards the camera — in appeal? In a wave? — and you could just see the resemblance, if you were looking for it.

  So Logan Rush is Levi Peabody — the son of a good-for-nothing drunk and wife beater, who may well have knocked his little kid around, too. Logan’s father didn’t die in a car accident when Logan was seven years old. He’s alive and kicking, serving out his life sentence in a high-security prison.

  No wonder Logan wants to write a screenplay about the Freedom Riders. His own father was a racist, possibly even a white supremacist, who killed an innocent young black man in an argument over a seat in a bus.

  More searching turns up nothing for the remaining Peabody family after the trial. It’s like they vanished. I suspect Nancy and her kids left New Orleans and started fresh somewhere else because I do find a mention in a small-town newspaper of a Mrs. Nancy Rush winning employee of the year in 2007 at Donny’s Dinette in Fairville, Alabama.

  Maybe the kids took their mother’s maiden name as a new surname, too. I spend another hour searching for Levi Peabody and Levi Rush, but I find nothing that relates to Logan until thirteen years after the trial, when stories of Logan Rush’s discovery begin to appear. I spend another fruitless hour trying to track down his supposed music band, scan endless music reviews of gigs in Atlanta clubs from the time period, and search for a Levi or Logan Rush in Atlanta prior to his casting as the Beast. But I come up with a big, steaming pile of nothing. Perhaps the band story is just another fiction created for the new star by the studio’s publicity department.

  Or by Cilla. Because this must be what she knows and holds over him. She knows his real origin. Heck, she probably presided over the birth of “Logan Rush,” complete with a good haircut and an even better backstory.

  Thank God that scummy reporter never got his oily hands on that awful letter. It’ll destroy Logan, or at least severely damage his career, if the news ever gets out that his father once killed a black teenager in a hate crime. I can just imagine the media descending on Jonas Peabody, offering him money, listening with phony sincerity and empathy to his racist rantings, his whines about being railroaded by the justice system, and his self-pitying stories of how he’s been abandoned by his wife, daughter, and especially his rich, too-big-for-his-Hollywood-britches son.

  All attention would be diverted from Logan’s talent as an actor, to the sordid, sensational details of his childhood and speculation about whether he’s inherited any of his father’s character. The media feeding frenzy would make great whites look like genteel ladies at a tea party.

  I can see why no one has ever connected Logan Rush with Levi Rush — nowhere are their names mentioned together, though I suppose if I searched through every single one of the millions of mentions of Logan Rush now on the Net, I might find something along the lines of, “I swear I went to school with that guy — but his name was Lionel or Levi or something like that,” in a Facebook page somewhere.

  I collect all my printouts into a neat pile, but I don’t want to leave them where someone might find and read them. As I shove them, together with the Peabody letter, into the back compartment of my handbag, I catch sight of the time on my wristwatch.

  I change into a red dress and a pair of strappy sandals and do my hair and make-up as quickly as I can, because I’m already running late for my lunch date with Logan. It’s his last Saturday off. My stomach feels cold and hollow at the realisation that this time next week, they’ll be wrapping the shoot.

  I give the life-sized poster of Logan a quick kiss and hurry off to meet the real thing. Today is going to be difficult because I’ll have to come clean and confess how I’ve been snooping and checking up on him. There’s so much awful stuff to discuss and so much to ask that, even though I’m longing to see him, I’m also dreading it.

  Chapter 33

  Appetites

  Knocking on a door and having Logan Rush answer it? That never gets old. I laugh in delight.

  “What?” Logan says, grabbing my hand and pulling me inside his hotel room, shutting the door behind us.

  His suite is enormous — all polished wood furniture, thick brocade fabrics in muted greys and charcoals, black leather seats, and deep, soft carpets. Massive canvasses streaked with abstract splashes of red hang on the walls. Ceiling-high windows run the length of the room, looking out on the glittering, silver ocean of Table Bay. But my eyes are drawn inexorably to the view of Logan.

  He’s wearing faded jeans and little else. His feet are bare and his sky-blue shirt —which turns his eyes the azure colour the sea is where shallow water meets deep — is unbuttoned, as if he just slipped it on to answer the door. The sight of his chest and abs does funny things to the inside of me. The hug he enfolds me in, crushing me against that bare chest, compounds the effect.

  I am lost. Funny how it feels like I’m found.

  “What?” he demands again, in response to the goofy grin I can feel on my face.

  “The first time I met you, you told me about this room. You were right.”

  He cocks an eyebrow.

  “It is very nice. And big.”

  “I said that, did I?”

  “You did.”

  “I always was one for the fancy words.”

  “Oh, you used a fancy word to describe the shower — you said it was massive.”

  “Did I describe the bed?” He walks backwards, towing me towards it.

  My breath hitches in my throat. I shake my head.

  “You could come check it out with me. Help me find the right word to describe it. You know, soft … hard … bouncy.” He smiles slowly and lazily. His eyes are hot with invitation. “And afterwards, we could explore that shower together. See if it is … big enough.”

  I blush furiously, which seems to delight him. He grins and flicks the tip of my nose.

  “I could just eat you right up, sugar-lips. But first I think I need to apologize for yesterday. Sorry I was such a grump.”

  “No, I’m sorry — I had no right to tell you how to live your life. And,” I force myself to add, “I also want to apologize for something else.”

  “Let’s have lunch first, okay? I’m starving, and there’s only so much emotion a man can take on an empty stomach. There’s a room service menu here somewhere.” He rifles through folders and room files in the drawers of the room’s massive desk, and finds a leather-bound menu. “So what do you fancy?” He flings himself onto one of the massive leather sofas and beckons me to join him. “How about some fois gras?”

  “No! They force-feed those poor ducks, Logan!” I take a seat at the other end of the sofa. “Don’t tell me you eat that stuff. Do you know —”

  “Hmm, I’m guessing you wouldn’t like the veal, then. How about steak tartare?”

  I pull a face. “That’s raw meat, right?”

  “Yeah, but —”

  “Yeah, but no. Thank you.”

  “Bobotie?” He pronounces it boh-boh-tye and reads the description of the dish with a growing look of disbelief. “Wait, there’s a regional speciality over here which is actually a dish of curried ground meat and raisins, with a baked custard on the top?”

  “It’s an acquired taste,” I say, shrugging. “Besides, don’t they serve jello salad, and sweet potatoes topped with marshmallows in your neck of the woods? I watch the Cooking Channel, you know. Those who live in glass houses …”

  “Vanilla smoked quail breast? Lobster bisque? Seared” — he does a double take and repeats — “Seared lamb’s brains with pan-fried scallops?”

  I snort and take the menu from him.

  “Just something light and simple — I’m not too hungry.”

  That’s the truth. This morning’s discoveries and my guilt are sitting heavy on my stomach.

  “How about a chicken club sandwich?” I suggest.

  From what I can decipher from the fa
ncy description, it sounds like a bog-standard, but extortionately expensive, toasted sandwich.

  Logan rolls his eyes. “Anyone ever tell you you’re a cheap date?”

  He snags the room’s phone, asks for room service, and puts in an order for oysters on the shell, caviar, and something called Bollinger. Then he lifts my feet, slips off the sandals, and swings me around so that I rest back against the cushions with my bare feet in his lap. He rubs his hands slowly down my soles, massages the balls of my feet, pushes deep circles into my heels. The worry that my feet might stink flashes briefly through my mind, but soon I’m lost in pure bliss.

  “There you go,” he says when I sigh and relax back into the cushions. His fingers rotate my toes in small circles and tug on them. “You always look like your feet are hurting you.”

  “They are. It’s the heels,” I murmur from deep in my sensuous trance.

  “Then why d’you wear them, if they hurt?”

  “Cilla.”

  “Ah, Cilla. She who must be obeyed.”

  I groan as he kneads knuckles into the flesh under my arches. All the tension locked into my body melts down into a puddle of delicious pleasure.

  “You ever taste caviar, Romy?”

  I move my head slowly from one side to the other. I’m beyond speech.

  “Tastes of the sea. I think you’ll like it.”

  The caviar, when it arrives and I can be persuaded to rouse myself to take a look, is served in a round blue tin set on a bed of crushed ice atop a glass pedestal. A delicate mother-of-pearl spoon protrudes from the gleaming black mass of tiny eggs.

  “Is this ethically sourced?” I ask, trying to wake my brain up. I realise I don’t know how caviar is harvested. Do they kill the fish to get the eggs?

  “Shhh.” Logan’s lips purse as he shushes me, and my gaze fixes on them like a limpet on a wet rock.