Deadly Anniversaries

by Marcia Muller

  “Where’s Sophia?” Corinne said. “The one who called me?”

  “Long gone,” Dawn said.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “I’m never going to drink again,” Dawn said, but not to Corinne. She was staring at the ceiling, promising whatever God she believed in. “Never.”

  NOW

  “Bloody or virgin?”

  Dawn had thought she could hide in another hotel bar along the Riverwalk, but here’s Corinne, yet again. It feels like that episode of MoonWatch, the one on the planet with the invisible creatures that track humans by their smell. Everywhere she goes, there’s Corinne, waiting to take little bites out of her.

  “Virgin,” she says. “Not that it’s any of your business. I haven’t had a drink for—”

  “Twenty-five years ago. Today. Though I have to wonder, when did you really quit drinking, Dawn?”

  “I’ve never fallen off the wagon, not once. I had a reaction to some pain meds one time, but I never drank after that night.”

  “You weren’t even drinking then, were you?”

  Dawn just looks at her.

  “The drinks, the drugs—it was all very convincing. At first, I thought you killed him because you were jealous. Jealous and drunk and high.”

  Ah, but it was M.J. they made jealous, Dawn and Sophia. It wasn’t really Dawn’s thing, but she was an actress, after all. Here’s what you’re going to do, she had told the girl. We’re going to kiss a little, just to tease him. And then we’re going to tease him some more.

  “M.J. died playing Russian roulette, Corinne.”

  “I know that’s what you told me at the time, Dawn. Doesn’t mean I believed it, even then.”

  “You were the one who said that wouldn’t fly—that no one played Russian roulette alone, that they would want to find witnesses. You also knew that his father, the whole production really, wouldn’t want it to be reported as a suicide. So the official ruling was an accidental shooting, even if the gossip rags whispered for years that it was a suicide. Good diversionary tactic.”

  “It was a murder. I’ve always known that.”

  “Really.”

  “What really happened, Dawn?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve run out of time for questions,” Dawn says. “Catch up with me at my next signing.”

  “I’ve kept your secret for twenty-five years. I think I’m entitled to the answers.”

  She feels a surge of rage. “Entitled? Everyone thinks they’re entitled to what I have. My mother took my money, 20 percent of my salary to be my manager, which was a joke—not like she was finding me new work.”

  “She drove you to set, she was your guardian—”

  “Aren’t guardians supposed to guard? Watch? She barely did anything. Hell, she thought it was a good career move, being raped by Mickey Sinclair Jr. She all but congratulated me.”

  Corinne stares at her. “Raped! You acted like his girlfriend, the whole time. You weren’t raped.”

  “Not in Texas, Corinne. I’m talking about the set of Runaway. Late rehearsal. He sneaked me a few beers.”

  “You were fifteen years old,” Corinne says, her eyes wide.

  “Still fourteen, actually. Not that it made any difference under the law. And the law never came into it.”

  For a few seconds, the years peel back and Corinne’s transformed, looking like that trusting young publicist again. That sweet, frizzy-haired MoonWatch fan who couldn’t hold her liquor and spent her days hunting down patches of bluebonnets.

  Her reaction feeds Dawn somehow, pushing her to tell what she’d never given anyone before. “When I told my mother and my agent what happened, they said I shouldn’t make a big deal out of it, that it would torpedo my career. Well, here I am, career essentially torpedoed. I’ll never know what would’ve happened if Comanche County was produced. And you know what? I’d still do it all over again.”

  “Shoot M.J.”

  “I. Did not. Shoot. M.J.,” she says, watching Corinne’s face change even more. Twenty-five years of self-assurance dropping away. A fixer who knew the answers to everything, realizing that all she’d ever had was a partial script. Corinne was younger than Dawn. She’d always be younger than Dawn.

  “We did goad him,” Dawn says. “Sophia was an extra, wanted to be an actress, so I gave her a scene. Told her to cozy up to him in the bar, then start fooling around with me back at the casita. M.J. wanted to get with both of us, of course, but we told him he wasn’t man enough for two women. We told him he couldn’t be with us until he proved he was a man. We said we’d do his father before we’d do him because his father was a real man.”

  And, Dawn remembers, she’d made sure to call him Mickey Junior, the one thing M.J. could never stand.

  “Who suggested Russian roulette?”

  “Does it matter, Corinne? An accident is an accident is an accident. It’s like what parents say to little kids. If Dawn told you to go jump off a bridge, would you do it? No one could prove anything.”

  “I could have,” Corinne says. “I checked the gun while you were in the bathroom. I grew up around guns. My dad taught me how to shoot.”

  Dawn almost admires that long-ago Corinne. Almost.

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  Dawn leans against the table and gazes into Corinne’s eyes. “If you had it to do over again—”

  “I wouldn’t do anything differently. Not then. Not now.”

  THEN

  “I want to be famous,” Sophia said.

  Corinne blinked at her. She’d expected Sophia to say something else. She wasn’t sure what. But standing, as she was, in the woman’s trailer home at 1:00 a.m., the line seemed from a different, more glamorous script.

  It hadn’t been hard to find Sophia. That morning, during the press conference announcing M.J.’s death, Corinne had seen her in the back of the crowd in a different pair of tight pants—red this time—a smirk on her face, as though all this was some terrific joke and only she knew the punch line.

  A tragic accident, the Comanche publicist had said, Corinne and all the other personal flacks forming a grim line behind him. No one knows... He was a happy young man... No other cast members involved...

  And there she’d been, that bad penny of a bad actress, smirking away.

  After the group of reporters had dispersed, Corinne had approached her, heart pounding. “I’m—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “We need to talk.”

  Sophia had pressed a piece of paper into her hand, an address scrawled on it. “Meet me here,” she said.

  “It will have to be late. Dawn’s flying back to LA and I have business to attend to.”

  “That’s fine,” she’d said. “I like late.”

  And late it was. The lights had been out in all the trailers except Sophia’s. Corinne had arrived to find the door unlocked, Sophia standing in her sty of a living room—with a gun in her hand, aimed straight at the door. Corinne’s thoughts careened around in her head: A Western, that’s what this is. The OK Corral. Sophia spoke again. “You hear me? I said, I want to be famous, like Dawn.”

  Corinne’s gaze stayed on the gun. Calm. In control. “And how do you expect to accomplish that?”

  “You’re going to help me, Corey.”

  “How am I going to do that?”

  “You’re going to call your boss. You’re going to tell him that you’ve met the next Dawn, and you need to fly me out to LA for a screen test and you won’t take no for an answer.”

  “My boss runs a PR agency, not a studio.”

  “You can still make it happen.”

  Corinne swallowed, her gaze fixed on the barrel. “And if I don’t?”

  “Then I tell. I tell everything about what Dawn did, and how you covered it up. I tell the cops. I tell the
tabloids. Either way, I’m famous.” She smiled. “It’s win-win.”

  Corinne felt light-headed, her thoughts traveling back to the morning. Dawn in the bathroom. That moment, right before she’d knelt down and plucked the gun out of M.J.’s hand with a room-service napkin, right before she’d opened the cylinder and looked inside and saw every chamber except that one filled with a bullet.

  “Poor innocent me,” Sophia said. “Taken in by those awful debauched celebrities. Witness to a murder. Hell of a story for the Enquirer. I bet they’d pay good money for it, too, and I’ll be...you know—”

  “Famous,” Corinne said. “Okay. You win. I’ll fly you out. I’ll get you a screen test and an agent.”

  Her face brightened. “You will?”

  “Just put the gun down.”

  Sophia laughed. Spun the cylinder. “No bullets. I put them all in the other one.” She laughed. “It’s almost like a nursery rhyme, innit? Or the Three Bears. The first gun had too many bullets, but the second gun had no bullets—”

  Corinne stared at her, this laughing woman who would always be a part of her life. Of Dawn’s life. Sophia was standing on a chair now, brandishing the gun and going on about some stupid scene she’d seen on One Life to Live...

  And Corinne went for the gun in her purse, given to her just a few hours ago by the oiliest of the local teamsters in exchange for the rest of her per diem and an act she’d rather forget.

  “See, I’m good, right?” Sophia said. “I could make it, right?”

  Corinne shot Sophia until every chamber was empty.

  As Corinne ran back through the trailer park to her rental car, she thought of all the sheriffs she’d seen in those old Westerns she used to watch with her dad. How they never hesitated before shooting someone dead because they knew they were in the right, and right always wins. Just doing my job, ma’am, those sheriffs would say. Then the movie would end, and the sheriffs would tip their hats and would walk off into the sunset.

  And never think on it, ever again.

  * * *

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Doug Allyn is the author of eleven novels and more than a hundred and thirty short stories. He has been published internationally in English, German, French, and Japanese. His most recent, Murder in Paradise (with James Patterson), was on the New York Times bestseller list for seven weeks. More than two dozen of his tales have been optioned for development as feature films and television. Career highlights? Sipping champagne with Mickey Spillane and waltzing with Mary Higgins Clark.

  Lee Child worked in television until he was fired in 1995 due to corporate restructuring. Deciding to see an opportunity where others might have seen a crisis, he bought six dollars’ worth of paper and pencils and sat down to write a book, Killing Floor, the first in the Jack Reacher series. It was an immediate success, and launched the series which has grown in sales and impact with every new installment over twenty-three novels—the most recent being Past Tense—and various short stories. He currently lives in New York City.

  Max Allan Collins is an MWA Grand Master. He is the author of the Shamus-winning Nathan Heller historical thrillers (Do No Harm) and the graphic novel Road to Perdition, basis of the Academy Award–winning film. His innovative ’70s series, Quarry, revived by Hard Case Crime (Killing Quarry), became a Cinemax TV series. He has completed fifteen posthumous Mickey Spillane novels (Masquerade for Murder) and is the coauthor with his wife, Barbara Collins, of the Trash ’n’ Treasures cozy mystery series (Antiques Fire Sale).

  Jeffery Deaver is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous suspense novels, including The Blue Nowhere and The Bone Collector, which was made into a feature film starring Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie. He has been nominated for five Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America and is a two-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Reader’s Award for Best Short Story of the Year. A lawyer who quit practicing to write full-time, he lives in California and Virginia.

  Meg Gardiner is the bestselling, award-winning author of fifteen novels, including China Lake, which won the 2009 Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original, and UNSUB, which won the 2018 Barry Award for Best Thriller. She is the 2019–2020 President of Mystery Writers of America. She lives in Austin, Texas.

  Alison Gaylin’s tenth novel, If I Die Tonight, won the Edgar Award in the Best Paperback Original category. A graduate of Northwestern University and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Alison lives with her husband and daughter in upstate New York.

  Sue Grafton (1940–2017) was a #1 New York Times bestselling author, published in twenty-eight countries and in twenty-six languages. Books in her alphabet series, beginning with A is for Alibi in 1982 and ending with Y is for Yesterday due to her death in December of 2017, are international bestsellers with readership in the millions.

  Sue was a writer who believed in the form that she had chosen to mine: “The mystery novel offers a world in which justice is served. Maybe not in a court of law,” she has said, “but people do get their just desserts.”

  Carolyn Hart is the author of sixty-two books and two collections of short stories. Her work includes sixteen suspense novels and the Death on Demand, Henrie O, and Bailey Ruth mystery series. She has been a member of MWA since the publication of her first book in 1964. She was named an MWA Grand Master in 2014. She is a past president of Sisters in Crime.

  Naomi Hirahara is the Edgar Award–winning author of two mystery series set in Southern California and one in Hawai’i. Her Mas Arai series, which features a Hiroshima survivor and Los Angeles gardener, ended with the publication of Hiroshima Boy in 2018. The books have been translated into Japanese, Korean, and French. The first in her Officer Ellie Rush bicycle cop mystery series received the T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award. A former newspaper editor, she has also published noir short stories, middle-grade fiction and nonfiction history books. For more information, go to www.naomihirahara.com.

  Wendy Hornsby is the author of fifteen novels and a collection of short stories, Nine Sons, that includes the Edgar Award–winning story of the same title. Several of her short stories have been selected for inclusion in annual best story collections. Her most recent book is A Bouquet of Rue (Perseverance Press, April 2019). A professor of history emeritus, Wendy lives with her husband in California’s Gold Rush country.

  Laurie R. King is the author of twenty-seven novels and other works, including the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series which began with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, named one of the twentieth century’s best crime novels by the IMBA. Her books are regulars on the New York Times bestseller lists, and have won an alphabet of prizes from Agatha to Wolfe.

  William Kent Krueger is the author of the New York Times bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series, set in the great Northwoods of Minnesota. He is a five-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award. Among his many other accolades is the Edgar Award for Best Novel for his 2013 release Ordinary Grace. He lives in St. Paul, a city he dearly loves, and does all his creative writing in local, author-friendly coffee shops.

  Since the publication of her first novel in 1997, Laura Lippman, the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed stand-alone novels After I’m Gone, I’d Know You Anywhere, and What the Dead Know, has won virtually every major award given to U.S. crime writing, including the Edgar Award, Anthony Award, Agatha Award, Nero Wolfe Award, Shamus Award, and the Quill Award. Her latest book is Lady in the Lake.

  Peter Lovesey’s crime writing began with the Sergeant Cribb novels, set in Victorian times and later made into a TV series. His many awards include the Gold Dagger of the Crime Writers’ Association for The False Inspector Dew. More recently he has written about Peter Diamond, a modern detective based in Bath, and the first of the series, The Last Detective, won the Anthony award. In 2000, he was awarded the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in recognition of his career and in 2018 he was honored as Grand Master of the Myste
ry Writers of America.

  Margaret Maron lives and writes in North Carolina where she is an inductee into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. A founding member of Sisters in Crime and its third president, she is a past president of MWA and an MWA Grand Master. Her novels have won her the Edgar, the Agatha, the Anthony and the North Carolina Award, the state’s highest civilian award.

  Marcia Muller was named MWA Grand Master in 2005. She has published fifty novels, thirty-two in the Sharon McCone series, as well as six short story collections and numerous articles, stories, and book reviews. Her other honors include two Edgar Award nominations, three Shamus Awards, the Lifetime Achievement Award (1993) from the Private Eye Writers of America, an RT Lifetime Achievement Award (1999), the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award (2005), and a Western Writers of America Short Fiction Spur Award (with Bill Pronzini, 2008). In addition, her character Sharon McCone received the PWA Hammer (2010) for her longevity and contribution to the genre.

  Peter Robinson is an English Canadian crime writer best known for his crime novels set in the fictional Yorkshire town of Eastvale and featuring Inspector Alan Banks, which encompass twenty-six volumes and have been translated into nineteen languages. He has also won nearly every major mystery writing award there is, including the Ellis, the Macavity, Le Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, the CWA Dagger in the Library Award, the Martin Beck Award, and the Edgar.

  S. J. Rozan is the author of sixteen novels and more than seventy-five short stories, and the editor of two anthologies. She has won multiple awards, including the Edgar, Shamus, Anthony, Nero, Macavity; the Japanese Maltese Falcon; and the Private Eye Writers of America Life Achievement Award. She speaks and teaches widely. S. J. was born in the Bronx and lives in lower Manhattan. Her most recent book is Paper Son. She can be reached though her website: www.sjrozan.net.