A is for Actress (Malibu Mystery Book 1)

by Rebecca Cantrell

  They were sweet kids, but they were also, to put it politely, a little quirky. Six-year-old Van wanted to know how everything in the world worked, and thought the best way of achieving this knowledge was by taking things apart to see (household appliances, flies, automobiles), while seven-year-old Violet was going through a phase where she was obsessed with every kind of unarmed combat, or as she had precociously decided to describe it, “The Science of Fear.”

  “Van did what? How…? And Violet … again with the chokeholds?” Sofia asked.

  “Hey, sis.” Emily walked in through one of the sliding doors that led out to the pool. She was wearing a red swim suit and had her hair up in a towel. She looked fantastic, as always. She walked over and gave Sofia a peck on the cheek.

  “Please don’t tell me I look tired,” Sofia said.

  “I’m too exhausted to notice if anyone else looks tired,” said Emily. She turned to her husband. “Ray, can you…?”

  “On my way,” said Ray, disappearing through the door Emily had just come in through.

  “Did one of the kids hurt themselves?” Sofia asked her sister.

  “Huh?” said Emily.

  “The first aid kit?” Sofia said with a nod to Ray as he headed through the door and toward the pool.

  “Violet scraped her knees trying to climb up on the roof. It’s fine though. She’s busy running around, asking if anyone wants to taste her blood to see if they’re a vampire,” said Emily. “I had to send two neighbor kids packing before they did.”

  “What was she doing on the roof?” Sofia asked.

  “High board isn’t high enough for the ‘flying death slam.’ I mean, duh!” said Emily. “Thankfully, Ray got to her before she could actually jump off. He has the reflexes of a panther.”

  Tim wandered down the corridor from direction of the kitchen. “Hey, Sofia. How you doing, kiddo?”

  He enveloped her in a big bear hug. Tim had gotten together with her mom five years ago, so while he was technically her and Emily’s stepfather, he’d never actually been a father figure in the study-hard, eat-your-vegetables role. Sofia liked him. He was pretty straightforward. He loved her mother, and he loved to play golf, loved to watch golf, and loved to talk about golf. That was pretty much it. He had a happy-go-lucky demeanor and didn’t seem to get upset about much. If Sofia hadn’t known better, she would have suspected he was on some kind of medical marijuana prescription. He really was that mellow.

  “Good, Tim, thanks. How are you?” she said.

  “Great. Just great. Hey, did you see that accident on the 2? Just flashed up on the news,” said Tim.

  “Must have just missed it.” She hoped her mom hadn’t overheard her words. She had used the freeway crash as her excuse for being late. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Don’t think so,” said Tim. “Freeway’s going to be backed up for hours. Y’know you can always stay over with us if you don’t want to make the drive back.”

  “I would,” said Sofia, “but I have work in the morning.”

  “Oh yeah, how’s that going?” Tim asked. “Put any bad guys behind bars yet?”

  Sofia smiled. People had as many misconceptions about being a private investigator as they did about acting. Both jobs involved long stretches of boring work, like sitting in a car outside someone’s house or sitting in a trailer while the crew got set up to shoot a scene, but everyone assumed they were both glamorous and exciting all the time.

  “Working on it,” she said brightly. Actually, this was one case where her work could actually result in someone being sent to prison. She hoped it was someone really guilty as opposed to whomever the DA could make a case against. By now she knew enough about the criminal justice system to appreciate the difference between the two.

  “I’d better go say hi to my niece and nephew,” she said to Tim as he walked past and opened a cupboard to reveal a floor-to-ceiling temperature-controlled wine cabinet full of bottles. Besides golf, Tim had also amassed a pretty serious wine collection, though Janet had been doing her best to trim it down to more manageable proportions since they’d gotten married and she’d moved into his home in La Canada.

  An afternoon of swimming, not to mention trying to climb up onto the roof to execute the Flying Death Slam, seemed to have tired out Violet and Van. Ray was kneeling next to Violet, putting a Band-Aid on her knee. Van was still in the pool, facemask and snorkel on. Both kids flew to Sofia.

  “Auntie Sofia! Auntie Sofia!” they screamed. At least that part of her optimistic visualization had worked.

  A soaking wet Van threw off his mask and snorkel and launched himself at her. A slightly less wet Violet did the same. Sofia knelt down and pulled them in for a hug.

  “You know,” she said, looking at each one of them in turn, “you both look like perfectly normal children.”

  Van gave her a goofy, gap-toothed smiled. “Hey!”

  Violet hugged her so tight around the neck that Sofia feared this might be an attempted choke hold.

  “My teacher says I’m special. Mom told me to tell her that normal’s boring.”

  “That’s always been my motto,” said Sofia.

  “No kidding!” said Janet.

  Sofia looked up to see her mom, decked out in an apron that read “Wine! How Classy People Get Wasted” and holding a wine glass. “Children, dinner will be ready in a half hour, so you two need to go dry off and get changed.”

  “Go on,” Ray prompted them. “Get in the shower. And, Van, no messing with the plumbing, okay? That’s Daddy’s job.”

  Ray glanced over at Tim.

  “All my tools are locked up in my toolbox,” Tim said. “Should be safe to let them into the bathroom.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Van said, scampering off after his sister to cause who knew what kind of damage. Apart from choking people out and dismantling pretty much every object that came within reach, they were, at least as far as Sofia was concerned, actually pretty good kids. They weren’t sneaky or malicious or spoiled. They were just high energy, the way kids had always been before someone came along to tell everyone active kids were suffering from ADHD and needed to take Ritalin. Then again, Sofia wondered if she’d be less tolerant of their behavior if she had to deal with them every day. But Emily and Ray seemed to manage.

  “So, Ray, how’s business?” Sofia asked.

  “Pretty good. Plumbing’s pretty recession proof. I mean, if you have a leaky pipe or your toilet stops working, you still need to get it fixed, right? How you finding the new gig?”

  Ray had been the only one in the family who had been unconditionally supportive of Sofia turning her back on showbiz. He’d already told Emily, who was the one in the family who’d actually wanted to be an actress, that he would never have married her if she’d been doing that job when they met. Ray was a no-bullshit, blue collar guy who pretty much regarded the entire entertainment industry with a mixture of horror and disdain. He felt that it wasn’t the real world in the same way that sticking your hand into a blocked toilet was. Sofia agreed.

  Tim appeared with a fresh beer for Ray and a bottle of wine. He handed Ray the beer and shook the bottle in Sofia’s direction. “Refill?”

  She put her hand over the top of her wine glass. “Driving home later. This is it for me.”

  Sofia guessed that it came down to the fact that you pretty much had to drive to get anywhere in LA, but she’d always been amazed at the number of normally law-abiding and otherwise responsible citizens who would happily slam down a couple of cocktails and three glasses of wine at dinner and then merrily get behind the wheel. Her max was a glass of wine that she took her time over, and not even that most times.

  “No problem,” said Tim, wandering back into the house.

  “So are you still okay to take the kids on Saturday?” Ray asked.

  “Yeah, should be.” Sofia planned on taking them down to the beach and pretty much letting them loose. The beach would usually tire them out enough that she could feed them and put them in f
ront of a movie with ice cream. “You have anything special planned?”

  “I’m going to take Emily up to Santa Barbara, but don’t tell her because I want the place to be a surprise,” said Ray. His cell phone rang. “Sorry, I better get this.”

  Ray stepped away to take the call as Emily came out.

  “Where are the rug rats?” she asked Sofia.

  “They went to take a shower,” Sofia told her. “Tim says he locked up the tools, so don’t worry about it.”

  Emily took the chair next to Sofia’s. “So how’s Aidan?”

  Here we go.

  Both her sister and her mom had gotten it into their heads that Aidan had a thing for Sofia, and that the thing was mutual. Sofia’s years of denials had only served to reinforce the idea, and now, it had become a thing. She wasn’t sure if it was a running joke or whether they actually believed that one day she and Aidan would get together.

  “I think he might have finally found someone he likes,” Sofia told her sister.

  Emily’s eyebrows shot up. “No kidding.”

  “Yeah,” said Sofia. “He’s even got as far as a second date.”

  Emily, who was pretty familiar with Aidan’s Tinder/Internet dating obsession and his crazy checklist, seemed genuinely surprised. “Wow. How are you with that?”

  Sofia couldn’t help but roll her eyes. “Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?” As soon as she said it, she realized how defensive she’d sounded.

  Emily held up her palms. “No reason. Just taking an interest.”

  “I work with the guy. That’s it. There’s never been anything between us, and that’s not going to change.”

  “Let me guess. You’re talking about Aidan?” They turned to see their mom coming toward them, wine glass in hand.

  “He’s dating someone,” said Emily. “Sofia’s fine with it.”

  “I am fine with it,” said Sofia.

  Emily and her mom exchanged a look. Her mom reached over and put a comforting arm on Sofia’s shoulder. “We know, darling.”

  33

  To Sofia’s great relief, the dinner topics consisted of pretty much everything apart from her love life, the sheer folly of her career change, and, minor miracle, no one mentioned the incident outside the rehab center or the brief but intense media storm that had followed. Ray and Tim discussed golf and baseball, and their mom told Emily and Sofia about the round-the-world trip she was planning for next year. Emily said she was thinking about taking a part-time job in Ray’s office helping out with the paperwork. Ray was a good plumber, but less good at getting paid on time and the day-to-day business admin side of the operation.

  For her part, Sofia relaxed and enjoyed eating a meal that she hadn’t cooked herself. Her mom was a pretty phenomenal cook. She planned everything with military precision, but could improvise her way round a recipe if she needed to. Sofia thought that she would make a pretty amazing restaurant owner if she’d wanted to open one. She had the right mix of food knowledge and planning and operational skills. Plus, she took absolutely no crap from anyone. Woe betide the person who crossed Janet.

  While the grown-ups ate dinner, Van and Violet had been relegated to a smaller children’s table over by the fireplace. They ate like ravenous wolves, demolishing the food while arguing about which would be the best instrument to kill someone, a fork or a knife. Despite it seeming obvious that the knife would be the winner, Violet mounted a spirited case for the fork on the basis that a three-pronged fork, if shoved into a person’s neck with sufficient force, had a good chance of puncturing more than one major blood vessel. As dinner discussions went it was, Sofia thought, more interesting than golf, book keeping, or world travel.

  Sofia helped her sister to clear the plates. Emily doled out ice cream with strawberries and Hershey’s chocolate syrup to the kids and sent them into Tim’s den to eat it. They could watch TV, but Emily told them that the adults had something to talk about so they had to stay in there—unless someone was bleeding. Overhearing her sister’s comment, Sofia had a bad feeling about what the adults might be talking about.

  Before Sofia could make her excuses, thank her mom and Tim for a lovely evening, and escape, the doorbell rang. Her mom went to answer it. Sofia was definitely picking up lots of looks between everyone else, as if they were in on a secret that she wasn’t. Not good.

  Her mom came back into the dining room with a tall, white-haired man wearing half-moon glasses and a tweed sports jacket with leather elbow patches. As soon as she saw him, Sofia knew he was a shrink. It was pretty obvious. No detective skills required for that.

  “Sofia, everyone, can we all sit down?” her mom said.

  Holy crap on a cracker. They were staging an intervention. Her life was officially a sitcom.

  34

  Any moment, Sofia was expecting Jeffrey Weiner to pop up from behind the couch with a camera crew and release forms for everyone to sign to agree that their contribution could be used on screen. Luckily, that didn’t happen.

  But it dawned on Sofia about ten minutes into the intervention that she was in a no-win situation. She couldn’t admit to an addiction problem she didn’t have. But the more she denied that she had a problem, the more everyone looked at her like she was in denial and this was all part of the process.

  The whole thing was ridiculous. Apart from a glass of wine after a hard day at work, she was about as clean living as anyone in LA could get. She rarely even took aspirin when she had a headache.

  After a while of everyone telling her how worried they were about her, Sofia got tired of it. She really wanted to drive home, feed Fred if he was still hanging around, go to bed, and pretend the day hadn’t happened. It would be a bonus if no one tried to run her off the road on the way.

  The main evidence that they seemed to have to prove she had an addiction problem was that her behavior had changed over the past year. She guessed that this was mainly about her career change. Other than that, her mom and the therapist seemed fixated on the whole peeing in the street outside a rehab clinic incident.

  Lance Sterling, the therapist, who came off like a skinny version of Dr. Phil, called it, “the clearest cry for help I’ve seen in over twelve years of dealing with addiction.” After he said that, he leaned in, touched Sofia’s knee in a way that totally creeped her out, looked her in the eye, and said, “Sofia, you were actually outside a rehab facility. Peeing. In broad daylight.”

  She glowered at him. “I know that. It was a surveillance operation. I needed to pee. There was nowhere else to go.”

  At that point, Lance shot her a pitying look and handed the discussion back to her mom. After a few more minutes, Sofia finally lost patience and did something she’d hoped she wouldn’t have to. She called Aidan to get him to corroborate her story.

  To make sure that no one suspected that Aidan was covering for her, or in the words of Lance Sterling “facilitating self-harming behaviors,” Sofia put Aidan on speaker. Risky, but she didn’t have much choice.

  “Hey, Aidan, how’s it going?” she said when he answered. Judging by the background noise, he was in a bar or restaurant with his date, the Other Sofia.

  “Good. You skip out on dinner with your crazy family?” Aidan’s voice made it clear that he wouldn’t blame her if she had. That made him right, and annoying.

  “No, I’m right here. So are they. And I have you on speaker. Why don’t you say hi?”

  “Um, okay. Hi, Sofia’s family! By the way, I meant crazy in the good way. You know like quirky, off-the-wall, kooky,” Aidan said, each word digging the hole a little deeper.

  Everyone in the room with Sofia pretended not to have heard him call them all crazy. Sofia wasn’t sure how to shut him down. He was like the Energizer bunny once he got going.

  He must have half covered his cell but everyone in the room heard him say, “Sorry, Sofia, it’s work. Why don’t you order another drink and I’ll be right with you? Shouldn’t take too long.”

  “He’s dating a girl named Sofia,”
Sofia explained to everyone in the room.

  Her mom shot Lance a look before staring up at the ceiling. “Don’t need to be a shrink to work that one out.”

  Lance looked uncomfortable. At first he’d tried to overrule Sofia’s call to Aidan until Emily had intervened on her behalf after Sofia had threatened to scoot her caught-peeing-outside-rehab ass into her car and leave them to it. It made for a pretty bad day when almost being run off the road by a psychopath in an SUV wasn’t the worst thing that happened.

  Aidan came back on the line. “Whatever this is, can we make it quick? I’m kind of busy here.”

  “It won’t take long,” said Sofia. “All I need you to do is explain to my family exactly what happened outside the rehab clinic when those guys from TMZ were there.”

  “Wait. You called me out of office hours, with your entire family on speakerphone, to ask me to tell them what happened outside the rehab clinic when it’s all on film.”

  Terrific. Suddenly Aidan had switched to private investigator mode and was starting to sound genuinely interested.

  “Do you mind if I ask why they want this information? I mean, couldn’t you tell them?”

  Sofia took the opportunity to stare at each of her family in turn. Janet gave her a concerned smile. Tim kind of nodded to her mom with an I-do-what-I’m-told-round-here look, Emily and Ray were good enough to look embarrassed, and Lance practiced his stare off into the mid distance while hoping that someone would get to the point before the next ad break, apprentice TV shrink look.

  “Yes, I could,” said Sofia through gritted teeth. Thank God she hadn’t Skyped or FaceTimed him so he couldn’t actually see what she was looking at. “But they’d like to hear it from a trusted, independent source. So…”