A Knife to Remember

“The one with 'Max' on his tag? Yeah, he's takin' a nap in the cab of the truck.”

Jane sighed. 'I'll take them home. It didn'toccur to me that I needed to shut them indoors this morning.'

“Naw, don't do that, ma'am. They're having a good time and I like the company. I'll make sure they're back to you before we shut down for the night so they don't get shut in somewhere. Which house do you live in?”

Jane pointed it out, got Butch's repeated assurances that he'd be happy to keep tabs on her adventuresome cats, and went back to her own yard. Shelley had gone somewhere and Maisie was busy putting salve on an extra's insect bite. Jane wandered over to the table where the phone was. The table had colorful stacks of papers, each stack held in place against the breeze by an unopened soft drink can or other heavy object.

Most of the photocopied piles meant nothing to Jane: call sheet, second unit requirements, a chart that appeared to show which scenes would be shot which days. But one stack said clearly, 'Welcome Packet.' Jane looked around for somebody to give her permission to study this, and since no one radiated authority or showed the slightest interest in what she was doing, she helped herself to one packet and went back to her lawn chair to skim through it.

“Is it okay for me to look at this?' she said when Maisie was through with the extra.

“Sure. It's for anybody who's involved in the production and you're involved — in a way.'

“Maisie, I was counting the people on the crew list. There are over a hundred of them and it doesn't include a single actor! That's amazing. I had no idea it took so many people to make a movie. But isn't it awfully wasteful? When I was roaming around earlier, there were a lot of people just sitting and doing nothing.'

“Like me right now? Well, it's a hurry-up-andwait kind of business. Everybody's an expert in their special, narrow area and when they are needed, they're needed desperately. But the ones who are sitting and doing nothing at any given moment are on instant call. We all have to be poised to do 'our things' at a second's notice.'

“Sort of like a mother,' Jane said.

Just then a young woman in jeans and a denim jacket approached with a clipboard. 'Are you Mrs. Jeffry from this house?' she asked briskly.

“Yes.'

“I just wanted to let you know that we'll be breaking for lunch in ten minutes and you can let your dog out for an hour if you'd like.' With that, she made a check mark on her clipboard and moved on up the block.

Maisie grinned. 'As I said, there are a lot of very specialized jobs.”

Jane went indoors to get Willard, whose fear of the dog run had come back full force. She had to put his leash on him and lure him with a piece of lunch meat to get him out the back door and then he stopped dead in horror at the sight of all the people in his yard. She hauled him to the pen and left him cravenly glued to the inside of the gate to the run while she went next door to put Shelley's yappy little poodle into its run. By the time she'ddealt with all the livestock, she returned to her own yard to find another table being set up.

“No, no. Not in the shade,' Lynette Harwell was saying to three young men who were trying to get the table placed to her satisfaction.

Jane was fascinated by the sight of the movie star. Though Jane knew Harwell to be her own age, she looked like a slip of a girl in her old-fashioned costume and blond hair done in an artfully disarranged braided coronet. Even the slight smudges of makeup soot on her face were placed so as to emphasize her enormous blue eyes and high cheekbones. She looked absolutely stunning and not quite real.

Jane had always imagined that unearthly beauty of some stars was a camera illusion and that in the flesh, they would look like normal people, but this was obviously wrong. Lynette Harwell was awesomely beautiful. Jane edged closer to the group surrounding her, a group including an adoring Mike Jeffry, and she was pleased to see that there were faint lines of age in the star's gorgeous face — tiny lines radiating at the corners of her eyes, a hint of the softness that precedes crepeyness on her throat, and the merest suggestion of the onset of a sagging chin. But these signs of aging only added character to the astounding beauty rather than detracting from it. Still, when you got close to her, it was clear that she was forty, not twenty — as her role demanded she look.

And as Jane gawked at her, Lynette turned to Mike and whispered something to him with an intimate smile that chilled Jane to the core, especially when she saw Mike's reaction. He grinned, looked at his feet, and all but scuffed his toe in the grass in pleased embarrassment.

She's playing mind games with MY child, Jane thought furiously. That her 'child' was eighteen and had always been remarkably self-sufficient made no difference. She'd have felt the same if he'd been a fifty-year-old 'Captain of Industry.'

“Yes, just there is perfect,' Lynette was saying, sweeping forward to take her place at the table. Like Queen Victoria, she didn't look back to see if a chair was in place, she just sat down, confident that someone had taken care of it. Which they had.

“I'll get your lunch,' Mike said. 'What would you like? The menu on the catering truck said prime rib or grilled shrimp.'

“No, no! I will get Miss Harwell's luncheon tray!' Olive Longabach said. She'd just caught up with them and was breathless and disconcerted by having lost sight of her charge, however briefly. 'I know what she likes.'

“Olive, dear, there's no need. Mike can do it,' Lynette said, positively twinkling at Mike. But Olive looked as if she'd been stabbed in the heart and Lynette relented. 'Oh, very well, Olive. Mike will stay here with me, won't you, dear?' She gestured for him to sit beside her.

Jane snatched up her lawn chair and plunked it and herself down at the table before anyone could stop her. 'How do you do, Miss Harwell. I'm Jane Jeffry. Mike's mother.”

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.'