Katherine Page - The Body in the Cast

Alan Morris had been at the press conference, representing the movie company, and Faith had feared he would avoid her. In a way, she had once more brought the production to a screeching halt. Instead, when the press left, he had greeted her warmly, expressing concern over her gruesome discovery and asking whether she was all right. She'd thanked him, then wondered if she should ask him about plans for the shoot. Were they going to continue—and, if so, would her services be required? The police hadn't said anything and Alan's own statement to the press had been a short expression of sympathy for the victim's family. Just as she started to say something, he did. She let him go first.

“Evidently, the police have decided there is nothing to be gained by keeping us captive in our hotel rooms, so we're going to be shooting again tomorrow night. With that area in the basement roped off and an officer at every door, I'm told. Will you be able to supply the same sort of provisions?”

Faith had assented emphatically. And she'd be sure they brought their own extra tables this time.

They would have all day tomorrow to get ready and maybe even sneak in a nap, since it would be a late night again, she thought as she began to make a list on the paper in front of her.

It wasn't a shopping list.

Somewhere, somehow, there had to be a connection between the two deaths besides their occurrence during the shooting of A. f she wrote down everything she knew, that connection might become clear.

She folded a sheet in half and neatly labeled one column "Death One" and the other "Death Two." Approaching the whole thing as a kind of social studies report helped. These were events, not people. The first thing to determine was who was present at both times. This neatly enabled her to eliminate all of Aleford save her own catering staff and self. The day Sandra died, there had been no extras around. She had to assume the cast and crew were the same at both, except for Caresse. She hadn't been on the set during the prison cell scene. But everyone else who was at the Town Hall had been.

So where did that leave things? Plenty of suspects, yet no apparent motives. She let her imagination roam free over the landscape of her mind. What possible connection could Sandra have to Alden? They were an unlikely couple, although Alden might have harbored certain fantasies. Besides, Sandra was so besotted with Max that she wouldn't look at Greg Bradley, certainly a more suitable choice than portly, pretentious Alden. Maybe Sandra was Alden's long-lost illegitimate daughter and she was blackmailing him. But Alden hadn't been anywhere near the set of A when she died. His presence, even before, to doctor the drink, would have been noted. And, if he'd killed her, then who'd killed him? Sandra's mother, a possible avenger, was already dead. According to the police, Sandra's closest connection had been her roommate, who was in California at the time, and Greg Bradley had not given Faith the impression of an impassioned lover. His relationship to Sandra had been mostly wishful thinking.

But was it so improbable to assume that Alden had been on the set when she died? He'd certainly been there, lurking in the woods, during the shooting of the forest scene. Alden with his binoculars. Faith hadn't ac- tually seen them, and she suddenly realized she'd been barking up the wrong tree. It wasn't a pair of binoculars that Alden had been trying to hide, but a camera. Alden had had an interest in photography—"art" photography. Now where did this take her?

f the slides he was showing at the Town Hall were nude shots of Sandra, who would have been there watching with him? The most logical choice was Sandra. He might have tried to blackmail her in some way with them. But she was dead.

Faith decided to approach the subject from another angle: timing. She scribbled away. The neat columns had long gone by the board. Alden had not been killed during a general break, which meant it couldn't have been anyone actively involved in the scene being shot. One of the townspeople would have been able to slip away, but this didn't link up with Sandra's death. Were there any cast members peripheral to the scene? She made a note on a separate page to ask Dunne, who was no doubt going over the footage and might let her have another peek.

She started to gnaw on the pencil eraser, then got herself a large ruby comice pear instead. It was a juicy one and she stood up to eat it over the sink. Her meanderings had touched upon Sandra's mother, which reminded Faith that neither victim had had many family ties. This was invariably the first place to look for a perpetrator, since every third grader knew from constant repetition on TV and in the press that you were much more likely to be bumped off by blood than water.

The pear finished, she rinsed her sticky fingers and sat down again, the sensation that she wasn't getting anywhere increasing steadily. Her interesting but admittedly tenuous theory about Max/Chillingworth did not apply to Death Two, unless—going back to the purported photos—Max was enraged by Alden's voyeurism. Yet unless Max had some well-concealed reason for wanting to sabotage his own film, she was forced to eliminate him from her suspects. But it could be someone else wanting to sabotage the film. Someone who had it in for Max or one of the other actors?

She thought of Alan Morris, the ever-present, loyal assistant director. He seemed devoted to the movie, and especially its director; however, it was possible he was secretly jealous of Max and resented all the credit Reed got. Certainly, Alan worked incredibly hard. Maybe the one line he got on the screen wasn't enough. Maybe he wanted to move up. He'd been in medical school and might have known Sandra was asthmatic.

She went back to Alden and Sandra. What in their past lives could have connected the two? They lived a continent apart, but she had been born in Boston. Or was it something completely separate in their pasts that led to their deaths happening coincidentally close together? Was Alden's a copycat crime? The two methods were so different: one quite subtle and obviously premeditated; the other brutal and impulsive.

She wrote "Find out more about Alden and Sandra's past" on the page with "View footage." Her head was starting to swim. She had two possible leads. It wasn't much.

Then she added: "Alden on set last Friday? Saw something? Blackmail?" f this was true, she could put Max, Alan, and virtually everyone else at the Pingrees' back in the running. She thought about what Greg Bradley had said: "... a lot of everyday rules get turned upside down." Maybe a lot of those rules got broken, as well.

What else? There was the question of the soup. It had never been answered. Was it safe to assume Caresse added the Chocolax in a moment of pique, or was it some kind of rehearsal for Sandra's poisoning? She made a note to suggest to Dunne that he press the little girl—oh so gently, of course—to confess to her prank.

She tried to picture a piece of blank paper. Someone had once told her this was a way to cure yourself of insomnia—or trigger something you were trying to remember. It seldom worked for Faith in either case, not that she'd had much trouble sleeping since Ben was born. The problem was staying awake.

The sheet stayed snowy white, then a single word appeared: suicide. "Suicide," she wrote down. Not Alden. That would have been quite a feat, but Sandra. There was the slim possibility she had been despondent enough over her hopeless crush on Max to want to kill herself. Or drugs may have been involved. Faith needed to think it through some more.

Tom came out to the kitchen in search of nourishment.

“What are you up to, honey?" he asked.

“I thought if I got something down on paper, I might be able to make more sense out of all of this."