Jill Churchill: A Knife to Remember

Lynette glanced at Jane for a fraction of a second, but didn't acknowledge her except with a slight compression of her lips. It was an unfortunate expression.

It showed up the "drawstring" wrinkles just starting around her mouth. Then she turned away. "Roberto, darling! Sit here with me! And George! Here!”

It was said in that soft, sexy voice, but it was an order just the same.

“May I join you, too?" Jake had approached just behind the director and the male lead. He was "technical" rather than "talent" but was apparently highly enough placed to horn in without violating the rules.

“Of course, Jake." A monarch granting a favor. "Why don't you go get your lunch, Mom?" Mike asked in a tone that verged on hostility.

Sensing that her place would disappear if she did, Jane said, "Thanks, Mike. But I'm not hungry. I'll just sit here.”

Mike stared at her as if to make her feel guilty for spoiling his lunch with Lynette. But, since that was exactly what she meant to do, Jane held her ground.

7

Jane listened carefully as they all chatted while luncheon trays were being delivered to them. She thought sure she'd recognize the voices of the blackmailer and the victim, but she could not. They were all speaking in their normal voices and the ominous discussion she'd heard earlier had been in abrasive whispers.

Going over it in her mind, Jane decided the victim must have been an actor or actress. Obviously somebody who made their living in front of a camera, not behind it. Lynette Harwell? Possibly. Or maybe George Abington. But if George or Lynette were holding any grudges against anyone at this table, they weren't evident at luncheon. The chat was general, professional: discussion of the weather as it related to filming, talk of the schedule. Very mundane stuff.

Jane studied George, suddenly recognizing him as the hero in a movie the children had loved when they were little. George was in his fifties, trying desperately to look thirty-five. He held himself rigidly upright, even seated, making Jane suspect he was wearing some kind of corset-type underpinnings. His hair was longish and unrealistically black andwhen a breeze lifted a lock of it off his ear, Jane could see the faint whitish line of a face-lift. His eyes, likewise, were too blue to be natural and the lashes looked tinted.

But for all the fraudulence of his appearance, he was still handsome. His manner, perhaps natural, or perhaps taken on for the duration of the filming, was Old-World, flowery and courteous, at least to Jane. He was the only one at the table who acknowledged her existence. "What a nuisance it must be for you, having your neighborhood invaded this way," he said.

“On the contrary. It's fascinating," Jane said. "I had no idea how hard — and early — all of you have to work. I couldn't even be myself, much less another character, so early in the morning."

“Ah, but you're seeing only a part of it," George answered, looking critically at a tray of food that a gofer had put in front of him. He turned over a lettuce leaf as if expecting something slimy to be on the other side of it. "Between jobs we lie about eating bonbons — or having wild affairs, if you were to believe the media."

“That may be how you spend your time, George," Lynette drawled. "I for one live a very spartan, healthy life. Rising early, exercising—"

“As well I know," George said with an excessively capped smile. "I remember all the exercise you used to get lifting glasses of wine to your lips. So good for the muscles of the arm, I always thought.”

Lynette glared at him for a second, then laughed with hollow merriment. "Darling, you know I don't drink. You must have been reading the sleazier tabloids. I don't know why that doesn't surprise me."

“At least I can read, my dear," he said, and winked at Jane, drawing her into the joke on his side. Jane tried to look pleasantly noncommittal.

Roberto Cavagnari joined them at this point with a tray piled high with food. "Jake, the campfires, they are not right. These people, they would be burning bits of buildings, not twigs and branches and natural rubbish.”

Jake set down his fork and said, "I don't agree. Remember, they have fled the fire into the country. There would be no buildings and they certainly wouldn't have carried pieces of buildings with them as they fled.”

Cavagnari apparently recognized the sense of this, but didn't want to back down, so he pretended he hadn't heard Jake and launched into a story of a film he had directed in Europe where a special effect fire had gone wrong and endangered the surroundings. The story was not only boring and pointless, but delivered with such drama and so extreme an accent that Jane couldn't follow it at all. Instead, she just studied the others, wondering which of them she had overheard earlier.

Lynette was picking daintily at her food, but managing to subtly put quite a bit of it away without looking piggy. She was gazing at (or through) Jake as she ate. She might well have been in a naughty movie in her youth, but her voice was so very distinctive that Jane couldn't have failed to recognize it if Lynette had been one of the unseen speakers. Jane certainly knewit was Lynette moments later when she overheard her talking to Mike.

Olive the Keeper stood behind Lynette, a sentinel. Her eyes were never still. Jane had once attended, unwillingly to be sure, a political rally where the vice president of the United States was present and had been fascinated by the way the Secret Service agents continuously examined the crowd the same way Olive Longabach was. It was as if she had it on reliable authority that a sniper was present.

And there were plenty, but the "snipes" were verbal and seemed to be bouncing off Lynette. Yes, Olive was the only one who appeared disconcerted, but it looked like an habitual attitude. And the idea of lumpy, frumpy Olive ever being in a skin flick was ludicrous.

Jane gave up speculating. After all, there were a hundred people on this set and there was no reason to suppose the two she had overheard were among those at this table. They were probably off someplace else right now, hissing more threats and excuses at each other.

Pretty, chestnut-haired Angela had unobtrusively taken a seat at the far end of the table and was keeping a low profile. Apparently she and Jake had sorted out whatever they'd been arguing about earlier in the day, or had at least decided to ignore each other.

Jake Elder had wolfed down his lunch and appeared to be listening to Cavagnari drone on. He looked quite interested and calm, except for his right hand. Jane guessed he was an ex-smoker, having a hard time passing up the after-meal cigarette, because his hand kept fidgeting wildly, as if it had a life of its own. It reminded her of Dr. Strangelove.

Mike, well-mannered as he was, was looking at Cavagnari intently, pretending great interest. But Jane knew the look on her son's face. She'd seen it often enough. Fake fascination, and behind it he was thinking about baseball or girls or how to talk her out of the use of the station wagon for the weekend. She was enormously relieved.

“. . and by the time the fire trucks, they arrived, the fire was out!" Cavagnari finished up his story with a flourish. Jane and the rest took this to be meant as a humorous ending and she joined the polite tittering. The only one who made no pretense was Olive, whose face was set in a grim, angry mask, although what there had been in the story to offend her, Jane couldn't guess.

“This is great! Just great!" the producers' nerd said. "I've been taping you!"

“What!" Cavagnari and Jake objected in unison.

Only George Abington went on eating, bending forward at the neck slightly and confirming Jane's guess that his underwear prevented him from bending at the waist.