The Starlet

by Mary McNamara

  “So why did you do it?” Juliette asked, torn between just letting Angie blow off whatever steam she had to blow off and be done with it, and feeling like this drunken sob story was a bit too self-indulgent. “Why take a child to auditions? Why let a child work in the movies? Why keep being her manager if it makes you so unhappy?”

  Angie stared at her. “Haven’t you been listening?” she asked. “She’s my daughter and this is what she is. She can’t do anything else. She didn’t go to college, she didn’t really finish high school—those on-set tutors are just a joke. I don’t think she could name the fifty states or more than three presidents, frankly. Unless she had to in one of her movies. She remembers every line she’s ever had in her movies. Because this is all that interests her. Oh, she can still spit back whatever she reads, but she doesn’t understand things like math or science or history. It doesn’t interest her enough to understand unless she can imagine herself playing it. When she can do that . . . well, you’ve seen her.” Angie shook her head and her features softened. For a moment Juliette could see Mercy in Angie’s face, older and harder, but still there. “She’s like an angel, or a muse. Something, I don’t know, not human. Or totally human. More human than human. It really is a gift, like Mozart or Einstein. She has this rare and wonderful talent, this one thing that she can do, so well, better than anyone, but that’s all. That’s all there is.”

  Angie threw herself back in her chair.

  “And she’s going to ruin it. With her drugs and her fucking around. She burned down our house, for Christ’s sake. Like Richard fucking Pryor. Wrecked the car twice, practically killed us. And she thinks she’s immortal, that it will all always be right there—the success, the money, the work. She doesn’t realize that it’s one thing for a male star to screw up—Russell Crowe or Colin Farrell or your buddy Michael O’Connor. They can drink and drug and fuck whoever they want, but for a girl it’s totally different. You get older, the roles dry up anyway, even without all this insurance crap. But she doesn’t want to think about that, oh, no, and she doesn’t need me. Because I’m such a bitch. I’m holding her back. Fuck her. I’m holding her up. She has no idea the things I’ve had to do to protect her, to keep her from winding up like Lloyd. Poor old Lloyd,” she finished, a sob choking off her final words.

  Juliette had heard more than a few drunken rants in her time, so it wasn’t precisely sympathy that prompted her to reach over and pat Angie’s shoulder, but it was something close. Pity, maybe. Angie might be a monster, but there was a certain desperate necessity in her monstrousness. Exhaustion raked her face, fear bruised her eyes, and Juliette could certainly see the truth in what she said. Mercy was damaged, and damaging. She was selfish, obsessive, irresponsible, self-destructive, and untrustworthy. Still, whenever Juliette thought of her, that sharp little chin, those strange shade-shifting eyes, she smiled. Knowing how destructive Mercy was, Juliette had still brought her here. Like the sun and the wind, Mercy was a force, an inevitable uncontrollable force who could reach through and around all sorts of walls, even those of her own faults, and touch people. Somehow she found the smallest, tiniest cracks and took hold, bloomed, like the flowers that thrived on an old stone wall. That was why she had become so valuable to so many people, the object of so much desire, capable of so much destruction. Something essential about Mercy made you love her.

  What must it be like to be the mother of a person like that? Juliette thought. To see your daughter captivate millions without even trying? To see a younger version of your own face on posters and billboards, on the cover of magazines and dominating the movie screen? At times, the envy and fear must be so great that even the most loving mother in the world would choke.

  “I think everyone understands what a great job you’ve done,” Juliette said, attempting to coax Angie to her feet and away from what remained of the wine. “It’s easier for people who want to work with Mercy to blame you, but they know in their heart of hearts that you’re just doing what’s best for Mercy. Believe me. They know.” Angie gave Juliette a small but grateful smile, of which she took full advantage. “Now, why don’t you go up to bed and relax for a change?” This time Angie allowed herself to be lifted and led away from the table, but not back into the villa. Pulling away from Juliette, she headed instead to the wide lawn that separated the back of the villa from the garden.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said, straightening herself and walking with surprising steadiness. “In the moonlight. To collect my thoughts. And say goodbye to this place. It really is a very lovely place,” she said, sounding suddenly tired and sincere and almost normal. “You were very nice to let us come. I hope we haven’t ruined it for you.”

  “Not at all.” Juliette shook her head. “Shall I join you?” She did not want to spend any more time with Angie, but she felt somehow responsible. After all, this woman had just been fired by her daughter. “Would you like some company?”

  “No,” Angie said sharply. “Jesus. You really are your own worst enemy, aren’t you?” She stopped and peered into Juliette’s face as if looking for something specific. She did not seem to find it. With a small sigh, she patted her hair into place and fished around in her purse for a cigarette. “If I go,” she said after lighting it, “she’s going to expect you to take my place. She likes you. She’ll tell you she wants to be more like you. And that will make you feel very special.” She took a long hard drag and blew out the smoke. “But it won’t be true. Mercy likes being Mercy, and in the end she’ll just wear you out. So take a little motherly advice. Go back to your old job if you can. Because my daughter is way too much work. Even for you.”

  Angie looked at Juliette with sadness more than anything, then turned around and walked out onto the lawn. As she finished clearing away the last few wine glasses and crumpled napkins, Juliette thought to herself that everything Angie had just said, every single thing, was probably the God’s honest truth.

  It was years before Juliette forgave herself for not following Angie—drunk, distraught, irritating Angie—into the blurry dark. Because the next morning Mercy found her mother lying dead at the bottom of the old quarry behind Casa Padua. She shredded the breathless dawn with her screams. She screamed through Juliette’s attempts to comfort and embrace her and through Carson’s harsh slap to her face. She screamed as Gabe pulled a blanket around her and pulled her onto his lap, as Steve Usher peered over the edge of the quarry and fell to his knees, unintelligible in his distress, and as the police rather slowly arrived. She didn’t stop screaming until one of the paramedics who arrived with the police gave her a shot. And then another one when the first one didn’t seem to take.

  Chapter Ten

  JULIETTE WISHED SOMEONE WOULD give her a shot. Angie’s body looked strangely peaceful. Head to one side, one arm thrown up as if in sleep, she was surrounded by the purple trumpets of morning glories. Still, when Juliette saw her, when her brain was able to process what the utter stillness of Angie’s form meant, she felt as if she had been suddenly placed in an icy glass box. No sound seemed able to register, though all around her people were talking. It was fairly clear what had happened—walking in the dark, her senses already considerably blurred by wine and anger, Angie had accidentally stumbled against the waist-high wire fence, much of it also covered in the morning glories that surrounded the quarry. She flipped over, falling to her death. It must have been instantaneous; none of the greenery that surrounded her body was disturbed. Her purse lay a foot or so away from the upflung arm. Summoned, as Juliette had been, by Mercy’s scream, Gabe had joined the growing crowd beside the quarry at a dead run, and as he tried to comfort the hysterical girl, Juliette could see the memory of her words of warning about the fence register on his face.

  She heard them echoed a few minutes later when Carson arrived, just as the ambulance pulled into the courtyard. Surveying the situation—Angie’s corpse, the inconsolable Mercy—she put her hand on Gabe’s shoulder and said in a voice pitched low but deadly enough to
be heard over the braying of the siren, “If we lose one day of shooting because of this, I will sue you so hard you won’t be able to sit down for a month.” Then she slapped Mercy’s face.

  “That’s her way of expressing relief,” said O’Connor, who had appeared a few steps behind Carson, tucking in his shirt and stepping gingerly in bare feet. “Someone said it was Mercy who had fallen.”

  “Are these people all insane?” Gabe asked, one arm still around Mercy, whose screams were now ragged and regular, a shattering subset of breathing. Before Juliette could answer, the emergency team arrived, followed quickly by the fire department and the police. She was surprised, and unnerved, to see Inspector Di Marco, unmistakable in another dark and perfectly cut suit, his hair silver and sleek as if he had polished rather than combed it. He bowed his head gravely to her before moving to survey the accident scene.

  When the police had left and Mercy had been taken sedated to her bedroom, when Carson called for a cast and crew meeting and Gabe disappeared into one of the lower fields where the horse had kicked its way through a wall, Juliette logged on to the Internet and the website deadanddying.com. She wanted to see if the accusations Mercy had made against her mother could even be true; for some reason, she felt this was important.

  The site’s creators had taken the Smoking Gun’s template of posting mug shots of the rich and famous one step—or several steps—further. As Mercy had said, here were death certificates and autopsy reports, morgue photos and a gallery of wrecked cars, from Montgomery Clift’s to Lindsay Lohan’s. Mercy had her own page, as did Lloyd Watson. Clicking on Lloyd’s, Juliette saw, along with a gallery of the typical gotcha pictures, the clothes he had died in, the police report, photos of the crime scene, and then a grainy, horrible, and blurred photo of his corpse. Or at least what might have been his corpse. It certainly was the figure of a naked man, on his knees, but with his head hanging forward. It could have been a corpse, and it could have been Lloyd, but it was impossible to know for certain.

  Had Angie taken the picture? Some overwhelming emotion had crossed her face when Mercy had accused her of doing so. Was it outrage, or guilt?

  Bile rising in her throat, Juliette clicked on Mercy’s page. While she didn’t believe the most gruesome aspects of the site were real—the clothes, the death certificates, even the wrecked cars on the other pages could easily be fakes—it was certainly Mercy in various compromising photos. Which included a series featuring the star cavorting with the crew in Siena. Juliette still had a hard time understanding why Angie would take photos of her own daughter passed out or falling out of her dress or making out with a cameraman. And why would Angie take a picture of Lloyd after he had died? Juliette could not believe that whatever she was paid would be worth the possible damage the photos would do to the film, not to mention the general horribleness of it all. Even Angie could not be so cold-blooded, could she?

  The image of Angie’s own corpse rose in Juliette’s mind and she remembered a famous photo of a young woman who had jumped from a building and lay nestled in the remains of the car she had fallen onto as if she were sleeping. That’s what Angie had looked like; someone, Juliette thought, hysteria gathering in her throat, should have taken a picture of her. A cold wave washed over her as she wondered if someone actually had. Well, she thought, bookmarking the site before closing down her laptop, they’d know soon enough. Then she picked up the phone to call Devlin.

  • • •

  “Shall I come over?” was all he said when she told him what had happened.

  “What?” she asked, taken aback by his curt tone. “No. I mean, why? Do you think something’s going on? I mean, besides what’s going on.”

  Devlin sighed. “I think this sounds like utter insanity. I think you sound rattled and paranoid. You’ve called me six times in as many days at all hours of the morning, and I don’t know what you expect me to do for you from here.”

  “I don’t expect you to do anything,” she said haughtily. “I just wanted . . .”

  “You just wanted what? What do you want, J.? You run off to Italy to ‘collect yourself’ without even a hint at whether you’ll be back or not. You go silent for weeks, and the next thing I know, you’ve got Michael O’Connor and an entire movie set in your backyard.” He sighed and his voice softened. “Tell me, J. Just tell me. What do you want from me at this point in your life?”

  On top of everything else, here was a question she could not anwer. Why was she calling him every single day suddenly? What did she want?

  To hear the sound of his voice, that’s what. To have him make things right-sized. Dev didn’t believe in out-of-control or the end-of-the-world, only in situations to be handled. And when she was in Los Angeles, she did handle them. But always with the knowledge that he was there, just around the corner, which somehow made things easier even if he didn’t lift more than a skeptical eyebrow. She closed her eyes and thought of how much better she would feel if Dev were just standing in the next room. Just standing there with that so-how-are-you-going-to-sort-this-out look on his face. She called him because she missed him, but if she told him that, it would make things even more confusing. He was her boss and her friend, and however he defined love, she could not imagine it involved anything approaching monogamy, much less devotion. Just thinking about it made her eyes sting. Instead she leaned her head against the wall and listened to the awful sound of her own silence.

  “Well, whatever you do, don’t fix the fence,” Dev said when she didn’t answer. “That would be an admission of liability.”

  And then he hung up on her.

  “I don’t understand,” Gabe said, examining the fence a few hours later, after the police had left. It seemed unbroken, untouched almost except for a small sag at one point where, apparently, Angie had hit it. “I don’t understand how she could have just fallen.”

  “It was dark, she was drunk,” Juliette said shortly. “She could have tripped on a rock, or just slipped on these loose stones. She had those damn high heels on, she would have hit the fence just at her waist. Shit, Gabe, I knew we should have fixed that fence. I knew it after that night I chased Mercy up the tower . . .”

  “Well, unless we had turned it into a wall, I don’t see what good it would have done,” Gabe said. “Christ almighty, this is one of the reasons I hate drunks so much. Drunk drunks, that is. I mean, she wasn’t the greatest mother in the world, but she could have at least tried not to kill herself right in front of her daughter.”

  Juliette felt the blood drain from her face; she looked at her cousin quickly, but Gabe’s eyes were on Casa Padua, where Mercy still slept.

  “I just hope she doesn’t think it was my fault,” he said softly, and Juliette could hear the strain in his voice. “Because,” he added, catching her eye and finding his normal irritated tone, “it wasn’t. And I hope that witchy Carson keeps her liability comments to herself. Or I will throw her off this property.”

  “How could this be your fault?” Juliette said angrily. “You don’t control the universe and everyone in it, you know.” Her conversation with Devlin left her feeling pulled tight and thin and she felt suddenly worried about her cousin’s concern for Mercy. Although she had felt a certain smug satisfaction watching him recognize Mercy’s allure, the thought of him having his heart broken by a woman who was nothing if not a professional heartbreaker did not sit well with her. “And we are not liable, because I made certain that the contract we all signed stated that the production company was aware of the condition of the estate and that we would not be responsible for any injury to persons or property.”

  “Oh,” said Gabe.

  “Which means that, in the likely event Mercy is unable to work tomorrow, Carson will have to answer to the insurance company herself. Since she okayed the location. So,” she added practically, “we should definitely leave the fence as it is; to fix it now would be admitting fault.”

  Gabe looked at her narrowly. “Wait, did you just run this by Devlin?”
>
  “No,” Juliette said shortly. “Well, I did fax him the contract before we signed it. And the bit about not fixing the fence, that was what he said when I called him today.”

  She and Gabe were on the porch now and because she could think of nothing else to do, Juliette sat down. Gabe joined her.

  “I hope you swore Devlin to secrecy,” said Gabe. “I heard Carson and O’Connor sweet-talking the cops about keeping their lips zipped. Carson even intimated to me that I should get a nondisclosure oath from my staff because ‘any publicity about this tragedy would just reflect poorly on Cerreta.’ I told her I had heard that there was no such thing as bad publicity so I had already called Entertainment Tonight. She was not amused.”

  Juliette looked at him narrowly. “Eamonn Devlin’s default setting is secrecy,” she said with a brittle laugh. “I saw you talking to our friend Di Marco. What did he want?”

  “If I knew where Mercy had been last night. And I did.” He looked at his cousin coolly. “She was with me.”