by Josh Lanyon
I heard Marion let out a held breath and say after me, “Has anyone told you how fine you look for your age?”
A grin crossed my face, but I didn’t look back.
I heard his footsteps retreat after a moment, and I was left completely alone on the dimly lit, silent set. I carefully moved around light stands, piles of sandbags, and wrangled cables as I moved deeper into the room. Paul’s sound cart was where it had been all week. There were no drawers, merely shelves housing a state-of-the-art mixing board and a few recording devices. The bottom part had a plethora of cases, small leather satchels I’d seen him pull various tools of the trade from—moleskin, Topstick, nail scissors, even a box of unlubricated condoms, the latter being something I’d not yet learned the importance of while on a film set.
But they weren’t big enough to stuff a thick stack of paper into.
Another bag of suitable size was empty but for a few pairs of unused headphones.
I stood, rubbed my lightly bristled chin, then turned on my heel. The hard shell equipment boxes were still stacked against the far wall. Stickers of competing companies adorned the outsides, fighting for limited advertising space. They were Paul’s. I’d first seen him go into one the day we met when he needed a cable made. I walked forward, unsnapped the top case, and looked inside.
Nothing.
I closed the lid, pushed it aside, and crouched to open a bigger one. There was some kind of mixer-looking gadget safely tucked into the foam specially shaped for the gear. I started to close the box as the convoluted foam fell. I muttered a swear and pushed it back into the top of the lid, then paused to stare at it.
Removable.
I leaned the lid against the wall, carefully took out the equipment, then hoisted out the middle section of foam. Underneath was a stack of white printer paper, held together by a binder clip. I picked it up, angled it toward a nearby security light, and read, John Anderson, across the title page.
I let out a quiet whoosh of air. All right. I’d have to put this back. Assemble everything just the way I found it, and give my evidence against Paul to John. The producer would have the authority to search—
“Son of a bitch!”
I was hit in the face and went sprawling sideways across the floor, script tossed somewhere in the dark. My tortoiseshell glasses dug into the side of my nose and snapped in two, leaving me at a distinct disadvantage. I slowly raised myself up on one arm and spit blood from my mouth.
“Who the fuck are you?”
I turned my neck with considerable difficulty, to see Ethan holding one of those foldable, high-legged director’s seats. The asshole had hit me with a goddamn chair. “Rory Byrne,” I answered.
“I don’t care what your name is,” he said. “I asked who you were. A cop?”
“No.”
“You’re sure as shit not a PA.”
“No,” I said before spitting again.
“No,” he agreed. “Because a PA would never be so stupid as to suck face with Marion Roosevelt out in the open for anyone to see.” He walked toward me, holding the collapsed chair like he was ready to beat my ass with it. “Do you have any idea who I am, Rory Byrne?”
“I know exactly who you are. A murderer.”
That gave Ethan pause. He wasn’t expecting that sort of response. Wasn’t expecting some nobody to be aware of his crime.
It was enough for me to scramble to my feet and lunge for the script. But the chair came down on my back with a deafening smash, and I collapsed. The wind was knocked from my lungs, and I gasped like a fish out of water. I tilted my head where I lay, watched Ethan toss the mangled furniture to the floor and walk to the script.
He bent down, retrieved it, and stared at the title page for a moment. “How did you find this?” Ethan looked down at me.
I winced, managed to swallow a shallow breath of air, and started to get up on my knees, when a suppressed shot rang out from behind me. Ethan screamed as he crumpled to the floor. It happened so quickly, I literally couldn’t react accordingly.
Not to my own pain.
Not to the sound of a gun using an illegal silencer.
Or the fact that Ethan had just been shot.
My adrenaline went into overdrive, and I scrambled the rest of the way to my knees.
“Don’t move,” Paul ordered, his voice too close for comfort.
I froze, hands up in surrender. “Paul,” I said, my voice almost steady. “I’m unarmed.”
“I know.”
I dared a quick look toward Ethan. He was alive, curled in the fetal position, and whimpering. The script had fallen nearby and was soaked in blood. “Can I stand?”
“No,” Paul answered without hesitation. “You move, and I swear to God, I’ll pull the trigger.”
“All right,” I said slowly. “But listen, we need to get help for Ethan—”
“Shut. Up,” Paul hissed.
I struggled for a plan, but I’d been dealt a dud hand in this round of poker.
We were alone. My phone was in my pocket. Ethan was of no help. Paul was in flight–or-fight mode. And while silencers didn’t work like movies portrayed them, no way would folks all the way in the lunch room have heard the pop.
All I had on my side was a bluff.
“Paul,” I said again, keeping my voice low so as not to startle him.
“What?” he snapped. The rubber of his sneakers squeaked against the floor as he moved to the equipment cases and closed the lids.
“I have backup coming.”
“I heard you,” Paul answered in between the snapping of the locks. “You aren’t a cop.”
“No, you’re right, I’m not.” Sweat prickled under my arms. “I’m a private investigator.”
“Who’d you call, then?”
“Detective Grey,” I lied. “He’s a homicide detective with the 105th Precinct. He was here yesterday when I found Davey.”
“Let him come,” Paul answered. He moved past, gun trained on me with one shaking hand as he bent to retrieve the script. “If Ethan killed Davey, he deserves to rot in a cell.”
I watched Paul’s blurry shape walk to my right and then disappear from my line of sight as he moved behind me again. “And what do you deserve if you shoot me?”
Paul didn’t have an answer to that.
“You can’t use John’s script as your own. You can’t even take the idea now. You’ve been caught.”
“I said shut the hell up,” Paul warned again. “Damn it. If you’d just kept your fucking nose out of it, Rory—”
“I couldn’t do that.”
“No, of course not,” he spat. “I knew you’d come here to sniff around after I heard you talking with Marion.” Paul laughed, full of vitriol. “That overpaid prima-donna actor living off the laurels of us nobodies instead of accepting he’s a commodity—”
Paul was interrupted by a sudden scream. There was a thwack, a crack, and then the unmistakable sound of a pistol sliding across the floor. I jumped to my feet and turned to see Marion’s outline in the poor lighting. He was breathing hard, visibly shaking, and holding a graphite boom pole in his hands like a bat. Paul had crumpled to the floor like a ragdoll after a knock to the back of the head.
“He—he was going to shoot you,” Marion protested.
I nodded in agreement as I reached for the fallen weapon. I got down on one knee beside Paul, put two fingers to his neck, and felt his pulse. “He’s alive. Going to have a hell of a headache when he comes around, though.” I went to Marion, pried the pole out of his hands, and took him into my arms. “Thanks,” I whispered as he wrapped himself tight around me.
EXT. CHAPTER ELEVEN – DAY
I stood outside of Kaufman Astoria Studios with a few dozen other cast and crew members of The Bowery, watching the ambulance crews pack up Ethan and Paul into their own buses.
“You sure you want to refuse medical treatment?” Grey asked.
I briefly removed the ice pack from my jaw. “I’ve still got all my teet
h.”
“He hit you with a chair.”
Like I needed to be reminded.
“Paul will be okay, right?” Marion asked. He’d been all but glued to my side since we’d phoned 911 and effectively shut down another day of production. “I had to hit him,” he insisted for probably the dozenth time. “He was going to shoot Rory.”
Grey held up a hand. “He’s going to be fine, Mr. Roosevelt. Had you not acted, Byrne might have ended up with more than simply a bruised jaw.”
“You saved Rory’s life,” John agreed as he turned away from the ambulances. “But why were you even on set, honey?”
“That’s a good question,” I said while looking down at Marion. “Not that I’m upset, but I’m pretty certain I told you to go away.”
“I did,” Marion answered. “I’d barely reached crafty when Ethan stopped me. He saw you kiss me before going on set.”
Grey gave me a you-dog look.
I ignored it.
Marion swallowed, pinched the bridge of his nose, and shook his head. “We’ve been broken up for six months, but he’s so… He still tries to control what I do. Who I see. He said he was going to beat the shit out of you.”
“He did a fairly decent job,” I remarked.
“Because I was afraid to stop him,” Marion murmured, finally looking up. “But he’s…he’s a killer. I couldn’t leave you alone with him.”
I put an arm around Marion’s slender shoulders and gave him a sideways hug.
“And when you went after Mr. Lefkowitz?” Grey pressed.
“Paul was already in there,” Marion answered. “Maybe he’d been in there the entire time, or came through the side entrance, I don’t know. But I saw the gun—saw Rory with his hands up—so I grabbed the first thing I could find. When I was pretty certain I had a half-second’s chance of stopping him…” Marion motioned swinging a bat.
The ambulances turned their sirens on and pulled out of the studio driveway.
Grey motioned John aside to speak semi-privately.
I dropped my arm from Marion’s shoulders and pressed the ice pack to my jaw again. “I’m sorry.”
He moved to stand in front of me. “For?”
“For my accusations earlier.”
Marion squinted a little as the sun peeked out from behind winter clouds. “Did you really believe I’d lied to you? That I could have stolen the script?”
I considered the question for a long while. Cold air puffed around my face as I breathed. “No…but…I’m a rational, work-obsessed person. I follow the rules. The facts.”
“And the facts were stacked against me?”
“I felt like I had to believe them. Even though I didn’t want to.” I lowered the ice pack. “I wasn’t joking, Marion. I’m no good at the stuff that happens afterward. That’s why I have an extensive ex-boyfriends list.”
He chewed his lower lip for a moment as he stared at the road. “Maybe you need more rehearsals.”
“Come again?”
Marion looked up, and his mouth quirked into that smile I loved so much. “And if we need to go off script to figure it out, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”
“I thought movie-making took teamwork.”
“Two makes a team.” He removed the ice pack from my hand and gently pressed it to my face. “The MET is having a special exhibit on Kuniyoshi and his woodblock art of cats. There’s a really great Indian restaurant nearby too. If you’re free later.”
My jaw was throbbing, but it didn’t stop the smile from breaking out across my face.
FADE OUT
Stranger in the House by Josh Lanyon
Miles Tuesday’s memories of Montreal are happy ones, but now that he has inherited the mansion at 13 Place Braeside, everything feels different. Was Madame Martel’s fatal fall really an accident? And who is stealing her treasures?
One thing has not changed: Miles still wants handsome and sophisticated art dealer Linley Palmer to have a place in his life.
Chapter One
The gate was locked.
Which was not a surprise. Miles had told himself that if he couldn’t get in, it would be fine. He could wait until Monday when Monsieur Thibault was back in his office and could supply the keys. It would be enough just to see the house from the outside.
But of course, when the moment came, when he was gazing through the ornate wrought-iron fence at the red ivy-covered Jacobean stone mansion with its distinctive turquoise-green oxidized copper roof, it was not enough to be stuck gawking on the outside like a tourist.
Because he was not a tourist. Not this time. This was not a visit. The house at 13 Place Braeside in Westmount was his.
He had arrived at his hotel in Montreal only two hours earlier on this rainy Friday evening. He had not even waited to unpack. The shock that had driven him since learning of “Aunt” Capucine’s will had made it impossible to relax and wait like a—well, grown-up. Encouraged by dim memories of the first season of Downton Abbey, he had assured himself that someone was bound to be there to let him in.
But no. As the grand old house, half-hidden in the surrounding gold and red foliage, faded into the twilight, every single window remained dark.
No one was home.
So Miles did what any red-blooded American male would do. Praying that he would not begin his tenure as a Canadian immigrant by getting busted for trespassing, he scaled the gate.
At twenty-six, he was a little old for climbing over fences, but this one was not that tall, and he was in good shape. He grabbed the top rail, swung himself up, and scrabbled for a foothold in the inner curves of the black curlicues. He found a toehold—barely—and climbed clumsily over the top, then dropped to the damp bricks of the exterior courtyard.
He wiped the wet from the gate on his jeans and gazed around himself. The evening shadows deepened, the natural wood doors of the long garage to his left and the white balustrades lining flower beds to his right blurring, becoming increasingly indistinguishable in the gloom.
Hopefully, he had not just tripped an alarm.
He did not see any security cameras. There had not been any in the old days, but the old days were a long time ago. A decade ago. He had been sixteen the last time he had visited the house.
It was so quiet.
He closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of a rainy autumn evening. The fragrance of wet stone and woodsmoke and dripping leaves. The more distant city smells. This was how home would smell from now on.
He smiled, but then a feeling of unease crept over him. He opened his eyes.
Quiet was one thing. This was an almost deathly stillness. So weird. The garden and surrounding trees seemed to swallow all sounds of the nearby city. There were houses all around, but the size of the grounds and the dense trees created the illusion of being on a country estate in the middle of nowhere.
Back in the day, one of the boys had always been coming or going—Miles recalled the purr of sport cars zipping in and out through the gates at all hours of day and night. He could hear the ghostly echo of voices: Oliver’s deep and measured tones, Linley’s lighter, more sarcastic commentary, Capucine’s affected but charming Grand Dame accents. Oh, and music. Music had always been playing. Capucine had been a great fan of musicals of the ’50s. The grand halls had echoed with the strains of kooky retro tunes like “I Love Paris” and “Que Sera, Sera.”
Capucine claimed to have given up her career as a showgirl to marry Gordon Beauleigh, but Miles’s mother had told him that the closest Capucine had come to being a showgirl was her unsuccessful audition for South Pacific in college.
Miles shook off the memories. This was not the time for looking back. This was a new beginning. This was a chance to have the life he had dreamed of—hell, this was way beyond anything he had dreamed of.
He crossed the wide, watery courtyard, passing the benignly smiling stone lions, sooty-colored with the recent rain, and a bronze lamppost, slightly forlorn with its five round white dripping globes—
as though a balloon man had recently wandered away. The bricks gave way to squares of black slate. He waded through the sodden, multicolored leaves, went up the narrow, curved steps, past the stone urns overflowing with teary ivy, and stepped under the carved stone archway. The whisper of his rubber-soled Converses sounded like thunderclaps in that profound and watchful hush.
He stopped before the massive double set of carved wood and smoked glass doors. He drew a deep breath, let it slowly out, and pressed the doorbell.
He heard the deep and sonorous chime roll through the house…and fade into silence.
No one came.
Of course not. Because no one was home.
Capucine was dead, and her sons had moved out years before.
He waited, hesitantly rang the bell again—impatient with himself for that hesitation. Who did he think he was disturbing? Anyway, for all he knew, there were servants in the house. He couldn’t see from here if there were lights in the back of the house. He was just assuming—
But no.
As before, the bell tolled, dwindled, then died.
No one answered.
He sighed.
Okay, he would have to wait until Monday. After all, it wasn’t like the house was going anywhere. It was still his, whether he could get inside or not. Every inch of the 43,000 square feet of land the building sat on belonged to him now. Every sliver of artisan-carved wood, every pane of leaded glass, every gritty bit of brick and paver and marble. His. All his. No strings attached.
Five days after finding out, he was still trying to absorb it.
The house alone was worth over nine million dollars. Nine. Million. When Miles had first received M. Thibault’s letter, he had read that as nine hundred thousand dollars—and been thrilled to pieces. A million-dollar inheritance was a dream come true for a high-school art teacher earning just over sixty grand a year.
It was his friend Robin who, over lunch, had pointed out those three extra zeroes. In the space of a grilled-cheese special, Miles had gone from delightedly planning to build a home art studio and invest heavily in his 401K, to planning out the rest of his life.