A Knife to Remember

“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.

The young man came forward from where he'd been lurking. He had a camcorder. 'Well, we'll need all the promotional clips we can get and I told 'Entertainment Tonight' that I'd get some casual shots before their crew gets here. That was a great story, sir, and people will love seeing you tell it.'

“I did not authorize this taping!' Cavagnari shouted. 'I will not have it on my set!'

“But, Roberto, people like seeing the cast out of character,' Lynette said softly. 'I think it's a good idea.”

Jane looked at the beautiful star and guessed that she alone had noticed the faint whir of the camcorder and had been eating so daintily because she realized that it was being filmed.

“No, no! I authorize filming!' Cavagnari shouted. 'Nobody else!'

“I'm sorry, sir,' the young man said. 'But that's not quite right. The producers authorize—”

Cavagnari stood up, green poncho swirling, flung his chair aside, and lunged for the camera, wrenching it from the startled young man's grasp. Cavagnari pushed a button and popped the tape out. 'The producers? The secret, chickenshit, afraid-to-showtheir-faces producers? This is what I think of your producers!”

His accent had been pure Bronx for a moment. He strode to the trash container by the craft service table and dropped the tape into it with a flourish.

Then he thought better of that. Accent back on track, he said, 'Ah-hah! I see your look! You think when my back is turned, you will come back and remove it!' He fished the tape back out and looked around for a means by which to destroy it on the spot.

“I'll throw it away if you like,' Jane said. 'Who are you!' Cavagnari demanded.

“This is my yard. I live in this house,' Jane replied sweetly. 'I'll put it in the trash inside.' Maybe, she thought to herself. Or maybe she'd just keep it as a nice little souvenir of having had lunch with a bunch of famous people. She noticed that Mike was smiling at her, making her wonder if her son could read her mind as well as she read his.

Cavagnari lobbed the tape at her, which she managed to catch before it hit her. Jane felt her face reddening with anger and embarrassment. This man needed to go back to preschool and learn manners from the ground up. She slipped the tape into the kangaroo pouch on the front of her sweatshirt.

The producers' representative was muttering fiercely to himself and studying his recently assaulted camcorder for damage.

“If I see you use that again, I'll smash it to bits,' Cavagnari said to him.

A tense silence fell over the group. Only Lynette Harwell seemed immune. She was still eating; slowly, delicately, relentlessly finishing everything on her plate. Perhaps this was why Olive Longabach insisted on serving her, Jane speculated. Knowing Lynette's appetite and her need to stay slim, Olive probably chose precisely the number of calories Lynette could afford to eat.

Jane was still seething with anger at Cavagnari's rudeness, but she had come out of the scene with the tape and was feeling an odd hostessy urge to make conversation. After all, they were all eating in her backyard, even if she hadn't invited them. 'I understand you're originally from Chicago, Miss Harwell,' she said.

“Oh, hundreds and hundreds of years ago,' Lynette said with a coy laugh, which was presumably meant to cue somebody to say that it couldn't have been so long ago.

Nobody did.

“From this part of town?' Mike asked.

Cavagnari fell to eating his lunch, having ignored it while telling his endless story. Jake was studying a script with notes in the margins. George was making conversation with two people at the far end of the table who Jane hadn't even noticed were there until now.

“No, we lived much closer in,' Lynette said. 'I was in my last year of high school and didn't know a soul. It was very lonely for me.' This with an attractive little moue of sadness. 'But I kept myself