Nancy Grace - Death on the D-List

Oh, hell. It was that kid again. Jonathon. How in the hell had he gotten her number to start with? It had all begun when he said he was collecting stars’ autographs to fund some sort of Boy Scout charity. Or something like that. Maybe an illness was involved? Or a school project? Or the school band? He went on and on about the band.

Whatever . Now the kid texted her fifty times a day, it seemed. She usually didn’t write back. And wouldn’t you know that if she ever wrote him a nasty note cutting him off, it would end up in the tabs that she was an evil shrew. More of what she didn’t need.

She wrote back brightly, “Nothing much! Just enjoyed the holiday! Tried not to eat too much turkey!” She’d long ago learned not to ask him any questions like, “How’s school?” “How’s your family?” Or even “How are you today?”

Even the most general and innocuous questions resulted in reams and reams of text messages back that totally clogged her BlackBerry. She dropped it into the elliptical’s magazine holder and got back to her movie. It was all about a marriage that went bad and the husband turns out to be a stalker. Again.

She must have seen this one, or one just like it, before. But now she was invested in the characters and wanted to see the end. Damn Lifetime. That network sucked up every daylight hour.

Bling-ding-ding. The BlackBerry tinkled again.

“I thought you were a vegetarian!”

Damn! Busted by a fifteen-year-old boy sitting at home in his room. What? Had he read every single article ever in existence about her? You could dig up twenty-year-old articles on the Internet, and apparently this kid made her his own personal research project.

She’d told the press for years about all her healthy eating habits, how she did yoga for hours, went “clean” vegetarian, and only ate organic vegetables. No dairy, no gluten, no meat, no chicken, no fish… You had to live like a food monk to be “in” in this business. She had to hide if she even ate a French fry. If they ever got wind she ate cheeseburgers whenever she wanted, she’d be a laughingstock.

“Oh, just joking! Ha, ha! It was Tofurkey! A tofu substitute!”

Gritting her teeth, she punched in the letters and hit “send.” This was ridiculous. Could she block his never-ending text messages? But if she didn’t keep writing this kid back, the press could make hay over her breaking the heart of an Eagle Scout in Slidell, Louisiana, or wherever…

No sense risking that. Sweat was rolling down her back. Why did this actress get a lead role on a Lifetime movie? She was horrible.

She, Fallon Malone, would have been so much better. Were these people that blind? Couldn’t they see what a box office draw she still was? She’d even be willing to wash another car without a stitch on underneath… or a van… even an eighteen-wheeler… anything…

Turning the volume up on Lifetime, she waited for the next BlackBerry jingle.

THIS WOULD DRIVE HIS MOTHER CRAZY. THE FACT THAT HE, FRANCIS Merle McGinnis, was texting back and forth with Fallon Malone. And Malone wasn’t the only one. He texted, e-mailed, hand-wrote letters to them all. And they wrote back. Why?

Because they were into him.

He made it a ritual to devote time to each one of the women every day; he recorded every TV appearance he could find, even going so far as having a satellite dish installed to get hundreds more channels than local cable offered. Now Francis had access to thousands of channels on which to find them. Even the repeats. Of course, live TV was the best because then he could get fresh signals, messages especially to him from the ladies via the airwaves.

It was their secret. The casual viewer would never catch on. A tilt of the head, a wink of the eye, pushing hair back from the face or behind the ear, touching a necklace or earring-each move had significance. He loved communicating with them like this, and told them so in all the letters he sent. It was in the letters that he prearranged what each signal would mean. There were different love signals from each lady.

They were into it.

He had loved watching Celebrity Closets over and over. Prentiss was always gorgeous, but over the last few months, he had gotten really concerned she was dressing a little slutty. She was totally coming across as a tramp. Not that he’d ever tell his mother he agreed with her even in the slightest.

He’d written to Prentiss several times about her image problem, nice, long letters. He had tried to stop her from looking so cheap, flaunting herself. She was ruining her image, plus other men could mistake the look for a come-on.

After all, Prentiss was already taken. They’d had an intimate relationship for years, since long before Celebrity Closets hit the airwaves. He stuck with her through thick and thin. And what did she do? Wear low-cut blouses, tube tops, mini-skirts, you name it. Plus, she flirted outrageously with the male celebrities and Francis was convinced she did a better job on their closets than she did for female celebrities. It was subtle, maybe the shelf liner was more upscale, more shoe space… Francis noticed details like these. Subtle… but important details.

She even flirted with some of the workmen on the show, construction guys responsible for tearing down walls and building shelves. But that was all for ratings, it didn’t mean anything at all… and Francis had been very understanding and patient… up to a point. Then, he had to endure the trumped-up claim she’d had an affair with one of the young and talented celebrities whose closet she “designed,” but Francis stayed strong and sure enough, it all blew over.

It obviously wasn’t true. She’d never cheated, he was sure. At least, pretty sure.

But Prentiss wouldn’t respond to his letters. She just wouldn’t listen. She’d put her career before his wishes. She didn’t understand his motivation. She refused to see it wasn’t that he was jealous, he was trying to help her. But she kept right on with the slutty look no matter how much he warned her. She simply wasn’t the woman he’d thought she was. She misrepresented. She basically lied to him throughout their whole relationship.

It finally got to be too much for him and he had to end it. He didn’t want to, but he had to. There was just so much a man could take. He hated to agree with his mother, may she rot in hell. She’d never thought Prentiss would amount to much.

But his mother had hated them all and thought they were all sluts. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Mother particularly hated Fallon Malone. She was absolutely livid over Fallon’s part in her last big screen role, where she’d washed the Corvette. Of course he had disagreed with his mother vehemently, arguing that that bit of film was classic movie magic and would one day be considered an all-time great, like Gone With the Wind or The Godfather.

But since he’d had his mother buried far, far away on the other side of town next to the interstate, he’d taken the liberty of moving every single one of his girlfriend’s posters from the confines of his bedroom, rearranging and distributing them throughout the entire house.

And why not? They were art. Tasteful, yet provocative.

After putting them all on prominent display, as they all well deserved to be, he methodically removed and destroyed all his mother’s religious paraphernalia. The crucifixes, the saints, the ceramic figures of the Mother Mary, the giant oil painting of The Last Supper … It all went straight to the Dumpster.

Right along with his mother’s collection of ceramic dogs, her vast collection of miniature spoons from all over the world, and dozens of cream-colored, crocheted doilies carefully arranged all over every stick of furniture in the home. Armrests, foot-rests, headrests, seat cushions… all draped with doilies.