PS. Laura told me of your difficult parting. I think you should know the pearl-handled gun was one Laura used when she was eighteen while an assistant to lion trainer Clyde Beatty. The gun was quite harmless as it held only blanks.
In disbelief, I reread the letter. So she really did have friends who were movie stars!
I picked up the Cleopatra dress and walked into my closet, carefully hanging it on a padded hanger.
I’m sorry, Miss de France. I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. So maybe she had fibbed about starring in a famous movie. And maybe she’d lied about Steffie too, but so what? Did it really matter?
I lay down on my bed and shut my eyes. Soon a jumble of images skipped through my mind—Miss de France sitting in her red chair; me dancing across the drawing room with Anthony and pretend kissing Nick in our love scene from Beneath the 12-Mile Reef; me showing up at Miss de France’s front door in the rain looking like a drowned rat.
Miss de France hadn’t tried to kill me. In fact, she really cared about me. Cared enough to remember me during the last days of her life. She’d given me more than Earl Grey tea and The Patent Leather Room. She’d given me confidence that began the night of her Valentine party when I paraded down her staircase in the Cleopatra dress.
Your hair looks divine and in the final analysis that’s all that really counts, she’d told me when we’d first met. I laughed out loud. Savvy as she was, Miss de France had been wrong. Because in the final analysis all that really counts is loving yourself so that you can in turn give love to those around you.
THE END
Acknowledgements
Many beau coups to ninety-year-old actress Sharon Randall, aka Janice Chambers, whose early years as a star inspired the creation of Brooke’s antagonist, Laura de France.
Also, special thanks to actors Robert Wagner and Terry Moore, who, unbeknownst to them (Snoopy advises writers to use this word), provided a crucial piece of the Double Take puzzle. Without Beneath the 12-Mile Reef, the 1953 Romeo and Juliet 20th Century Fox film shot on location in Tarpon Springs, Florida, my characters and I would have floundered.
In addition, many thanks to Denise Meinstad, Fire and Ice Acquisitions Editor, for plucking me from the virtual-reality slush pile, and to publisher Nancy Schumacher for making Double Take actually happen.
I can’t forget my Wednesday Morning Writer’s Workshop composed of authors Adele Woodyard, Carol Perry and Liz Drayer, who read every syllable, as well as the members of the Tarpon Springs Writer’s Group which met at the library.
Finally, thanks to family and friends, especially my husband who supported me.
Laura Kennedy
About the Author
LAURA KENNEDY lives in Tarpon Springs, a Greek sponge fishing town on the West Coast of Florida. She grew up in Minneapolis where her mother was a romance writer who helped her father support the family. By the time she was twenty-two, she lived in Southern California, was married, had a baby, and was broke, the perfect Petri dish for the beginning of a writing career. Encouraged by her mother’s writing success, Laura borrowed her mother’s portable typewriter on which she concocted her first story that sold for the staggering sum of $225.
http://laurakennedy17.wordpress.com
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