Silver Scream : A Bed-and-breakfast Mystery

made known by a pile of scripts and a file folder

marked projects. Judith glanced at the script on top

of the stack. All the Way to Utah, by Amy Lee Wong.

Flipping through the script, she saw severe editing

marks on almost every page as well as derogatory

comments, some of them obscene. She replaced the

script, then dared to look inside the project file,

SILVER SCREAM

87

which contained loose newspaper and magazine clippings.

Judith extracted one of the clippings, which was

printed on slick paper. The headline read, MUCHO

MACHO COSTS FARRAR A GAUCHO.

Hunkster Dirk Farrar’s two-fisted attack on Mighty

Mogul Bruno Zepf has cost the actor the lead role

in Zepf’s Argentine epic, El Gaucho Loco O No.

The brouhaha occurred outside a restaurant last

week in Marina Del Rey when producer and actor

got into an argument over who would star in All the

Way to Utah, a project Zepf has temporarily put on

the back burner.

Judith slipped the clipping back into the file. She

shouldn’t be wasting her time snooping. There was

work to be done. Briskly, she went into Bruno Zepf’s

room. On the nightstand were at least ten pill bottles

along with a couple of tubes of ointment, an inhaler,

and two small brown-paper packets that felt as if they

held some kind of tablets. A tiny scrap of paper that

looked like part of a prescription lay on the floor. Judith picked it up, but could only make out the words

pharmacy and thalidomide. She looked at the medications on the nightstand, but their labels were intact.

With a shrug, she put the little scrap in the wastebasket, then returned to her tasks.

Straightening the bed, Judith noticed a thick book

with a tattered cover and frayed pages slipped under

one of the shammed pillows. She picked it up, barely

making out the sunken lettering on the cover.

The Gasman.

88

Mary Daheim

Opening the book, she noted the author’s name—C.

Douglas Carp. The copyright was 1929. The publisher,

Conkling & Stern of St. Louis, was unfamiliar to her.

What struck Judith was not the density of the prose but

the well-fingered pages. It reminded her of an aged,

much-loved, well-thumbed family Bible. Fragile

pieces of leaves and flowers, brittle with age, had been

placed between some of the pages. There was a small

lock of hair so fine it could have belonged to a baby.

Then, as she riffled through the last chapters of the

nine-hundred-page novel, a photograph fell out onto