On the Cutting Room Floor (A Ghosts of Landover Mystery Book 8)

by Etta Faire

  “Out to eat?” Jackson said, reading over my shoulder. His face was so close, I felt a chill. “What a fun idea. I wonder where we’re going.”

  There were many things I wanted to talk to my boyfriend about tonight, especially the meeting the Complex had with its residents about the satellite dish and the new security.

  But, I texted back. “Actually, can we do this another time? I’m not feeling well.”

  Jackson smiled when he saw me writing out my text. “I’m glad to see your paranormal life is finally taking precedence.”

  “Just until some extra-strength ghost repellant is ready,” I replied.

  Mandy hovered next to me as I set up my spot on the couch, using two throw pillows for my head and one for my feet. I was prepared this time around. My neck still ached from last time’s channeling.

  Her coloring wasn’t as strong as it had been the day before. Her blonde hair seemed pale and limp. The light streaks in her acid washed jacket faded into her pink shirt.

  “Lilith’s birthday is in a couple of days,” she said.

  “We’ll get your murder figured out by then,” I said, hoping my voice sounded more confident than I thought. “We’re already narrowing things down.”

  “Are we?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer, mostly because I didn’t know how to.

  I plopped onto the couch and relaxed into my pillows, closing my eyes, taking one deep breath after another.

  Rex curled up by my feet at the end of the couch. He liked to be near me when I channeled, and I liked the company. I gave his head a quick cuddle then went back to listening to my clock.

  Mandy and I were used to each other by now. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing, but I knew exactly how to draw her into me.

  And, I hardly even noticed the difference in our breathing or walking once we’d merged.

  I briefly wondered if this was going to be the way it ended for me one day. Not death with a bang, but death by forgetting who I was.

  “We’ll clean this up later,” I found myself saying in Mandy’s voice. I felt myself brush by a chair, forcing it to screech along the tile floor of the Lockes’ patio room. “I was also hoping to get a little snack.”

  I opened my eyes in time to see Barry’s angry, lumberjack-looking face smirking at me as he made a sweeping motion with his arm. “By all means. My house is your house, for now. But, we’re done.”

  Chapter 28

  Renewed Spirits

  Mandy watched Barry strut up the stairs. Something in the way he took the stairs two at a time reminded her of 1962 and how the boys had taken over so much of that day, how they’d hardly included her and Ruth in the movie, even though they were theater geeks too at the time.

  I read her thoughts about it.

  She was remembering how the guys were going to light Barry on fire. A completely safe thing to do. Ned would supervise because he’d done it before. Graham would film. They just needed to gather together the necessary props for the stunt.

  Mandy had known it was a bad idea. To this day, she wished she would have said something.

  And then, after taking over everything that day in 1962, the boys had taken off when they’d messed up and it was apparent the fire was growing out of control. Red hot flames climbed the walls like they wanted to show everyone who was really in control. Thick, black, toxic-smelling smoke billowed everywhere, filling Mandy’s lungs, infecting her eyes. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. She had yelled for Ruth, surprised by how soft her voice had sounded against the crackling flames, by how much pain had shot through her lungs when she tried to form words. That’s when she saw her friend heading out the door. Mandy tried to use the opened door as her guide through the spacious dark living room, stumbling into furniture, barely hearing the cries coming from Baby Felix upstairs.

  Mandy shook herself back to 1987 as she turned on her heel away from the Lockes’ staircase and toward the patio room again. She was going to ransack the guest house where she and Graham were staying.

  She was going to find that film from 1962. And then, she was going to be the one taking over.

  It was a cool night. Frogs chirped loudly as we approached the lake. Mandy took a long inhale, enjoying the earthy smells coming off the water. Enjoying the fact she could breathe, unlike the poor woman who did not survive the fire so long ago.

  The guest house was basically a smaller version of the main one, but it was about as big as her and Graham’s normal house back in Hamperville. And it was nicer. Dark brown wood trim with flower boxes in the windows. And the boxes actually had flowers in them. Real ones.

  Mandy tried to stay focused, not compare her house to the Lockes’s guest house. She did not have time to feel sorry for herself.

  I was checking for clues as her gaze scanned the trees and bushes surrounding the property. There were too many places where someone could be hiding. Too many shadows. I didn’t see anything suspicious. But, it felt very much like someone was already watching us, to the point where my mind was adding shrieking violin sounds and a hook.

  Walking up the dimly lit porch, Mandy mindlessly reached for some paper plates stuck in a bush on the side of the steps, but told herself to let it go. She didn’t need to pick up after these kids and her husband. She wasn’t the maid, or the “mom,” just because everyone else looked at her that way.

  She knew Ruth and Barry would blame her for the mess, though. She smiled to herself, thinking that maybe if they did, she would remind them about the mess Barry’s boss had come back to in 1962, the mess that had almost included his baby.

  Two could play at the secrets game.

  The door creaked open and Mandy flicked on the light inside.

  Brown rattan couches surrounded a clunky, floor-to-ceiling media cabinet with a huge TV, a VCR, and a white Nintendo sitting on the shelves below it.

  Mandy paced the plush white carpet for a minute, trying to figure out where her husband would hide the film, furious with him for blackmailing their friends in the first place and dragging her along, but even more furious with her friends for asking her and Graham to hold their secrets for so long.

  She decided they deserved to be blackmailed. She could not blame her husband for taking advantage of the situation. But, why was he the only one in control of it?

  She dug her hand inside the couches first and under every cushion. She flipped each couch back and checked underneath for a false bottom, for anything that felt like a tape or a film reel.

  Nothing. Not even some loose change or one of those weird clumps of dust that kind of looked like hair that Mandy always found when she checked her own couch cushions at home, which meant Ruth and Barry had a maid come in here on a regular basis.

  She thought about it as she righted the couches. Of course they had a maid. They made the kind of money where they were looking for extra junk to spend it on. The kind of money with guest houses, portfolios, and no weird clumps of hairy dust in any corner.

  She shoved the couch cushions back into their spots. Barry and Ruth had that kind of money because she and Graham had kept their secrets.

  She needed that film.

  She checked behind the large fish tank on the back wall and inside the cabinet it sat on. There was only fish food and cleaning stuff.

  She went to their bedroom, thinking now about Frederick and the internship. Why hadn’t Graham negotiated something for Olivia, too? It was just like him to only think of the boys. The boys take over and then they take off.

  She lifted the mattress and checked in between it and the box springs, but she knew that was far too obvious. No one would hide anything there. Plus, she would’ve felt the film when she slept.

  She yanked Graham’s suitcase out of the closet next, but it was empty. She went to his drawers, feeling her face grow red with resentment again because he always insisted on taking the top three drawers in any place they ever stayed, even though he knew she had bad knees.

  She threw open th
e top drawer. His Miami-Vice-looking, loose-linen pants looked back at her, neatly folded and sectioned by color. She almost wanted to toss them around and catch them with a pair of scissors. Since when had her husband gotten so uptight about his looks?

  He used to wear dirty jeans and t-shirts.

  She gently felt around the clothes. It was obvious there was no film in the drawer, and she went to close it, but hesitated last second.

  She pulled out a pair of gray slacks that felt ten times more expensive than anything in her drawers. She slipped her hand into one of the long pockets and felt something small and metal. A key.

  It was the thick kind that usually went to a safe deposit box or a modest fire safe or something.

  “I knew it,” she said to herself in the channeling. She thought back to the time when her friend, who worked at the bank on 10th Street, swore she saw Graham in there once to get something from a safe deposit box.

  That must’ve been where the film was at. Maybe.

  She stuffed the key into the tiny front pocket of her jeans that was inside the larger pocket, then folded Graham’s pants back up and put them in the drawer. If there was something in one of those fancy pants, there was probably more in the others.

  She picked up another pair and searched its pockets. Nothing. Then another. And another.

  There was something in the fourth one. It was square and thick, like a candy wrapper, only flat.

  She pulled it out, and it unfolded in her hand in accordion fashion. A roll of condoms.

  Condoms?

  Her heart dropped into her stomach. She and Graham had never once, in their entire relationship, used those. She plopped on the bed, then laid all the way down, staring at the blue wrappers in her hand.

  What was going on here? How had she not known? Who was he having an affair with, anyway?

  She thought about Graham’s “lucky man” comment he made to Barry earlier and shook her head. Was he having an affair with Ruth? Their good friend who was not that good of a friend…

  That was crazy. There would be no way Ruth would go for Graham, especially not since he was blackmailing her.

  The green floral comforter on the guest bed scratched at Mandy’s cheek and smelled like mothballs. Damn cheap bedspread. Ruth and Barry splurged on every inch of their property, except the guest cottage where their friends would be staying.

  Maybe Graham wasn’t having an affair, she thought to herself. There was that time when her friend Susie found condoms in her husband’s truck and went off the deep end about it. Turned out, he was holding them for a friend, or so he said, because the friend could not get caught cheating on his wife.

  Maybe, this was one of those times. It probably was. Graham had to be holding them for a cheating friend. Sure, their marriage had problems, but he wouldn’t throw away more than twenty years on something stupid, would he?

  Unless he was the cheating friend Susie’s husband was holding condoms for…

  Even though she told herself she would wait to freak out until she asked him about the condoms, her heart still thumped uncontrollably with the thought of it all.

  She got up and went back to the dresser. Bending down to reach one of the bottom drawers, she heard her knee make its weird cracking sound as pain shot through her leg. She opened the very bottom drawer and tossed the condoms by her rolled up socks, watching as they fell in between the perfect rolls, hating it that she always rolled up his socks too, let him have the good drawers, let him make all the decisions.

  She kicked the drawer shut. Things were about to change in her life, and she knew she should feel terrified, but she also felt exhilarated, like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders.

  She was glad she found those condoms. It would be worse to be in the dark about them.

  A full-length mirror stood off in the corner of the room, and she caught sight of herself in it. Her eyeliner had run all along the bottom of her eyes, and her hair was sticking out in crazy ways.

  But she was surprised by how beautiful she looked. She stood up straighter. She’d never felt more beautiful before.

  She ran a hand through her stiff hair, fluffing out her bangs. Then she straightened out her “mom costume,” fixing the collar of her jacket.

  She glanced around the room, looking for anything out of place. She smoothed out the bed spread and put Graham’s suitcase away. She would find the 1962 film later. It was probably in a safe deposit box, anyway. She needed to spend her time in the screening room, looking through every reel. It was time to take this movie back from Ned and Graham. She had a reputation to withhold.

  And Camp Dead Lake was her movie now. They were about to find that out.

  She went to the kitchen, yanked open the fridge, allowing the cold air to spread over her face a second before grabbing the Dom Pérignon laying on its side on the top shelf. Graham bought it on their way into Landover to drink with Ned, Ruth, and Barry when the movie wrapped up.

  She twisted off its protective foil and popped the cork. A set of six fancy champagne glasses hung under the kitchen cabinet, and she pulled one down.

  There was no reason to save this for later anymore. She was ready to celebrate her new life, right here, right now. A life without her past. A life where no one made decisions for her, except her.

  Chapter 29

  Girls Just Want to Have Fun

  She talked to me in our head as we stumbled over to what Mandy was calling “the shack,” a large wooden shed near the back of the property.

  The champagne glass sloshed in our hand, a notebook and pencil tucked into our armpit.

  “It was good to relive that,” she said, a newfound swing in our tipsy step. We passed the circular fire pit made of rocks with folding chairs around it, and around to the bullseye target area.

  I glanced into the fire pit. It only had burned wood. I knew from the police reports that it would soon have a burned reel of film in there.

  She went on. “I hadn’t remembered finding the condoms in Graham’s pocket. And now, thanks to you, I also know who he was having an affair with. Somer…” Her voice trailed off. “I wonder if she had her own room at the motel. We had such a big budget this time around, and some of the actors had their own rooms in town. They usually shared. I used to do the books for the company. I should have noticed. But then, I did a lot of things. Way too many things…”

  “She did have her own room,” I said, almost not wanting to tell her.

  “Figures.”

  Mandy’s tennis shoes made an ominous sound, smacking along the sticks and rocks that scattered the trail leading to the gray building off in the distance.

  It was much larger than the shack I was picturing, darker too. Gray splintered, faded wood. No lights outside.

  “It used to be the storage shed for the campground way back when. I guess Ruth and Barry still used it to hold gardening stuff before we took over,” Mandy said to me. “They were going to knock it down soon, along with the youth cabins.”

  A cool wind blew by us, and Mandy tugged her denim jacket in closer with her free hand, then took another sip of champagne before opening the door.

  The shack smelled musty, like it hadn’t been aired out in weeks. I could tell by Mandy’s non-reaction that it always smelled that way. She flicked on the light, but it was still pretty dim, only a soft yellow bulb illuminating the entire room.

  Whatever gardening stuff used to be in the shack three weeks ago wasn’t in there anymore.

  Acoustic foam lined the walls. Film reels in metal containers were stacked along a metal rack. A projector and a large screen had been set up at the back wall where a black couch and a couple of chairs surrounded it.

  I noticed there weren’t any windows.

  “The dailies are the raw footage shot every day. It’s usually one long roll of all the different takes done. Most directors watch them every night to see how the movie is coming along, to see the actors’ performances, to make sure everything is in focus and to know if a
ny scenes need to be reshot,” she said to me in our head.

  The Mandy in the channeling was enjoying her champagne. She sipped it every few seconds while she searched under the couch cushions, singing to herself, “Girls just wanna have their own access to the blackmail tape…” in a Cyndi Lauper voice.

  I could tell she wasn’t really looking for the blackmail film anymore. She wasn’t even sure what she would do if she found it. Maybe she would burn it, or maybe she would expose everyone. Maybe both.

  “Graham directed most of our movies,” she said. “And I wrote them, so we usually sat and looked over the dailies together with our camera people. But Camp Dead Lake was different. Ned was directing, and he told Graham he didn’t want me in the room when he went over the dailies. He didn’t want my added input on anything. I was treated like just another actress.”

  In the channeling, Mandy stopped looking for the 1962 movie and went to the projector. A reel marked Friday, 09/25/87 was already cued up on the machine.

  She hit the rewind button, and the machine hummed into action while Mandy thought about her marriage and her friendships and how everything seemed to be crashing down around her at the same time.

  She had so much to confront Graham about. What to do first?

  She checked her watch. It was close to midnight. She would confront him as soon as he came in the door tonight, whatever time that was. She had no idea when the bars closed. But she would wait up with that roll of condoms so she could chuck them at him as soon as the door opened. And then, she would ask for a divorce.

  Ask? She would tell him they were getting a divorce…

  She angrily hit the play button, then turned off the light. A soft light came from the projector. It was the only light in the room now, and it wasn’t much.

  She plopped down on the couch, watching as the numbers ticked down on the screen in front of her like they were symbols of her declining marriage.