Of Spice and Men

by Sarah Fox

  “I can’t believe we get to do this,” she enthused. “I’ll have to take pictures, or my friends will never believe me.”

  “You haven’t told them yet?” I asked, surprised.

  Given the rapidity with which teenagers seemed to spread news over social media, I’d figured that all her friends would already know about her upcoming visit with Christine.

  “No, I decided to wait. I was afraid they might ask to go with me, and I wasn’t sure what Christine would think if I showed up with a bunch of people tagging along.”

  “Good thinking.”

  Hearing a vehicle approaching from behind us, I glanced over my shoulder. A silver pickup truck was coming from the direction of the highway, and as it drew closer, I recognized the driver.

  “Brett?” Sienna guessed as I came to a stop and the truck slowed down.

  “Yes.”

  My boyfriend pulled over to the side of the road and I walked across the two lanes to his truck as he lowered the driver’s-side window.

  “Hey,” he said as I reached his vehicle, and I returned the greeting with a smile.

  “On your way home?” I said.

  “Yep. I was in Port Townsend. Where are you two headed?”

  I told him about Christine’s invitation.

  “Sounds like fun,” he said, but his expression had grown serious, his blue eyes troubled. “Marley, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  “Okay,” I said, wondering what it was that had him so somber.

  His gaze shifted to a spot over my shoulder and I followed his line of sight to where Sienna waited for me across the road.

  “Another time, though,” he said.

  “Should I be worried?” I asked, already feeling just that.

  “No,” he said quickly. “You have fun with Sienna, and I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “All right.” I stepped back from the truck.

  He waved at Sienna over my shoulder and smiled at me before driving off, although the expression lacked its usual ease.

  I watched his truck disappear around a bend, and then I rejoined Sienna across the road.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  “Everything’s fine,” I replied, hoping that was the truth.

  Something had Brett stressed, but since he’d told me not to worry, I’d do my best to follow his advice.

  As Sienna and I approached the line of trailers, I tugged my phone out of my pocket to check the time. “We’re a bit early. Maybe we should find a way to kill some time.”

  “Let’s go have a look at the Abbott house. Maybe we’ll see something cool.”

  We continued on toward the T-intersection where Shady Lane met Wildwood Road. I didn’t tell Sienna what I’d seen at the Abbott house earlier that day, but I did remember to tell her who I’d seen by the trailers. “When I was walking home earlier, I saw Chase Lowman.”

  “Really? Where?”

  I hooked a thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the trailers we’d just passed. “Near the trailer at the end there. He was talking to Christine.” I didn’t bother to mention that their conversation had been less than friendly.

  “Did you take a picture? Did you get his autograph?”

  “No. Like I said, he was talking with Christine, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Too bad.” Her face brightened again. “But maybe we’ll see him tonight.”

  “Maybe.” I wasn’t sure how many cast members would be hanging around when there was no filming going on, but since Chloe and I had both spotted Chase around town already, maybe there was a chance we’d see someone.

  We turned onto Shady Lane and had walked only a short distance when someone behind us called out, “Hey!”

  We both spun around, but I quickly realized that the woman who’d spoken wasn’t addressing us. She was coming from the direction of the center of town and was walking briskly. Although the light was fading from the sky, I could still see well enough to tell that the woman was roughly my age and beautiful. Her highlighted brown hair fell in a silky cascade to the middle of her back and despite the cool air, she wore a white tank top with what had to be designer jeans and four-inch heels.

  “Oh my gosh!” Sienna grabbed my arm.

  “What is it?” I asked with alarm.

  “That’s Alyssa Jayde!”

  “Who?”

  “She’s playing the lead female role in The Perishing.”

  “Oh, she’s the one they got to replace the original actress.”

  Sienna let go of my arm, her attention still with the actress. “And there’s Christine.”

  Sure enough, the makeup artist was standing outside her trailer, smoking a cigarette. Alyssa was striding toward her, a stormy expression on her gorgeous face.

  Sienna and I had both taken a step toward Christine, but we stopped as one as Alyssa reached the other woman.

  “You need to stay away from Haze,” Alyssa practically spat at Christine.

  The makeup artist appeared unfazed. “Or what? You’ll challenge me to a catfight?”

  That looked exactly like what Alyssa wanted to do right then and there. “You think you’ve got your claws into him, but he’s only using you to make me jealous.”

  Christine took a drag on her cigarette before responding. “Riiight. That’s why he got a new phone number so you couldn’t keep calling him. And that’s why we’re going to Europe together in November.”

  Practically shaking with rage now, Alyssa swore at the other woman. “He’s mine.”

  Christine looked down her nose at the shorter woman, her mouth twitching with a hint of a smug smile. “Not since he dumped you.”

  “He’ll come crawling back to me. Just wait and see. In the meantime, stay away from him!”

  With that, Alyssa stomped off, heading back the way she’d come. At the pace she was going, it didn’t take long for her to disappear from sight.

  Christine muttered something under her breath as she ground her cigarette beneath her shoe. I didn’t catch everything she said, but the few words I did hear were colorful, to say the least. Without noticing me and Sienna, Christine stepped inside her trailer and slammed the door behind her. She’d managed to maintain a cool and unconcerned façade for Alyssa, but that had slipped away as soon as she thought she was alone.

  “Wow,” Sienna said, her eyes wide as she stared at the spot where the two women had argued. “Talk about Drama City.”

  “No kidding.” I eyed Christine’s trailer. “I think we should stick with our plan and not show up there right away. I’m guessing she needs a few minutes to cool down.”

  “I’ll say.”

  Together we resumed walking in the direction of the Abbott house, the streetlights switching on as dusk settled more deeply around us.

  “You know what this means?” Sienna asked.

  “What?”

  “Christine is dating Haze Moody.”

  “Sounds like it,” I agreed, knowing the women likely hadn’t been referring to anyone other than the well-known actor.

  “He’s so gorgeous.”

  “And almost as old as Chase Lowman,” I said to her with a smile, remembering our conversation from that morning.

  “Can I take my foot out of my mouth yet?” she asked, but she was smiling, too.

  We came to a stop, having reached the Abbott house, but there wasn’t a whole lot of activity going on. There were two trucks parked out front, and a few lights were on indoors, human silhouettes flickering now and then as people moved about inside, doing whatever they were doing—setting up equipment, maybe.

  “Not much to see here,” I commented.

  Sienna wasn’t looking at the house. She had her phone out and was focused on the screen.

  “What are you looking at?”

  “The latest gossip on Alyssa Jayde and Haze Moody. Apparently they dated for a little over six months before he dumped her back at the beginning of the summer. Um…” She scrolled down the website
. “And Haze and Christine have been together for almost three months now. Whoa. He sure didn’t waste any time moving on from Alyssa.”

  She closed down the website and glanced at the time on her phone before tucking the device into her pocket. “Should we go see Christine now?”

  “Sure. We’ve probably given her enough time to recover from that visit from Alyssa.”

  Leaving the Abbott house behind, we headed back in the direction of Wildwood Road. Aside from the hoot of an owl and the rustle of tree branches in the wind, all was quiet in the neighborhood now, the deepening dusk slipping toward nightfall. As the line of trailers came into view, white rectangles faintly illuminated by the streetlights, something tickled at my nose.

  “Is that smoke?” I asked, knowing the answer to my own question by the time the words were out of my mouth.

  Sienna grabbed my arm for the second time that evening. “Look!”

  I’d already spotted what she was pointing at.

  The door to Christine’s trailer was unlatched, the wind causing it to swing open, orange light flickering inside behind a screen of billowing smoke.

  The trailer was on fire.

  Chapter 4

  “Call nine-one-one!” I shouted at Sienna as I sprinted toward the burning trailer.

  I heard her yell for help, but I didn’t look around to see if anyone responded to the plea, my attention on the flickering flames. When I drew close to the trailer, I realized with a hint of relief that the fire was still quite small. Quickly climbing the metal stairs, I covered my hand with my sleeve to protect it from potentially hot surfaces and grabbed the wind-buffeted door, slamming it wide open.

  “Christine? Anyone in here?” I called out.

  I heard no response.

  Pulling the collar of my jacket up over my nose and mouth, I ducked inside the trailer, the gray smoke immediately stinging my eyes and making them water. Through the smoke and my tears, I spotted a travel mug sitting on a shelf. I grabbed it and yanked off the top, pouring its contents into the metal garbage pail where the fire was burning. Unfortunately, that doused only half the flames, and the rest continued to lap greedily up the sides of the pail, reaching for something to burn beyond the confines of the trash can.

  Frantic, I peered through the smoke, checking to see if I was the trailer’s lone occupant. To my left I noticed someone slumped over a worktable. Coughing, I put my collar over my nose and mouth again and grabbed the person’s shoulder, realizing as I did so that it was Christine. I gave her shoulder a shake, but she didn’t respond to my touch.

  “Christine!” I coughed harshly, the toxic smoke building up inside the trailer despite the open door.

  Holding my breath as much as possible, I hooked Christine’s right arm around my shoulders and tried to hoist her out of her chair. Although she was a slim woman, she was tall and I could barely shift her dead weight.

  I was about to drop her arm and run from the trailer to seek help when a dark shape loomed through the smoke and grabbed her other arm. Together, the new arrival and I hauled Christine out of her chair and toward the door. I stumbled on the metal steps and fell to the ground, landing on my knees in the damp grass, coughing as I gulped in deep breaths of fresh air.

  I glanced up in time to see my fellow rescuer—an unshaven man in his fifties—carefully lowering Christine’s inert form to the ground next to me. As soon as he released her, he ducked back inside the trailer. Still kneeling on the grass, I turned to look into the trailer and saw that he’d kicked over the trash can and was now stamping out the last of the flames that had spilled out onto the trailer’s floor. The smoke billowing through the door above me thinned out as he extinguished the last spark and gave some charred material a kick. What looked like the remains of a large sketchbook tumbled out the door and down the steps, falling open to a pencil drawing of a young girl with flowing hair, her face half-missing where the flames had burned away part of the page.

  Satisfied that the man had eliminated the danger of the fire, I crawled toward Christine. Her skin had a funny tinge to it, and I couldn’t tell if she was breathing.

  Sienna rushed toward us and dropped to her knees on Christine’s other side. “Oh my God. Is she okay?”

  Before I had a chance to respond, the man who’d helped me get Christine out of the trailer yelled at the small crowd that was now gathering nearby. “First aid!”

  A woman rushed forward with a first-aid kit in hand.

  I pushed myself to my feet and moved out of the way, taking Sienna’s arm as the first-aid attendant took charge of Christine’s care, two other individuals moving in to assist her. I was about to ask Sienna if she’d called 911, but the wail of an approaching siren gave me my answer.

  “What about you?” Sienna asked, squeezing my arm as I coughed again. “Are you all right?” Her heavily lined eyes were wide and lit with a mixture of shock and fear.

  “I’m fine,” I assured her, although my voice sounded croaky. “I just breathed in a bit of smoke.”

  Sienna’s gaze returned to the spot where Christine lay on the grass, although her figure was now hidden from view by those attending to her. A fire truck pulled to a halt in the middle of Wildwood Road, and soon the scene was crawling with fire department personnel, two of whom headed into the cluster of people surrounding Christine. As the small crowd parted momentarily to make room for the newcomers, I caught a glimpse of the female first-aid attendant performing chest compressions on Christine.

  My heart sank, and beside me Sienna gasped.

  “Do you think she’ll be okay?” she asked, her voice trembling.

  Realizing how upset she was, I put my arm around her and tried my best to sound calm. “I hope so.”

  An ambulance arrived next, followed shortly after by a cruiser from the sheriff’s department. When a fireman asked all of us onlookers to move back, I kept my arm around Sienna as we retreated farther from the trailers, ending up by a white tent that had been set up on the grass at the side of the corner lot.

  A woman pushed through the crowd, trying to get closer to the scene. “Does anyone know what happened?” she asked, her voice frantic.

  In the light of the nearby streetlight, I caught sight of the woman’s turquoise hair and realized that it was Nicola, Christine’s assistant.

  “Does anyone know what’s going on?” she asked again. “What’s happening?”

  The man who’d helped me with Christine appeared out of the crowd and grabbed hold of Nicola’s arm, preventing her from getting any closer to the emergency personnel.

  “Howard?” she said to him. “What happened?”

  “Now, calm down,” he said to Nicola. “There was a small fire in the trailer, but it’s out now.”

  “A fire?” Nicola’s eyes widened. “In our trailer? Where’s Christine? She wasn’t in there, was she?”

  Howard held up a hand to stop her rapid flow of questions. “She was, but we got her out.”

  “So, she’s okay?”

  He hesitated. “She’s in good hands.”

  Nicola covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God. Poor Christine. How did this happen?”

  Apparently satisfied that Nicola wouldn’t try to charge the scene again, Howard let go of her arm. “The fire started in the trash can.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what Christine was thinking. She knows better than to drop her cigarette in the trash.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Chris,” Nicola said, but her voice was vague with distraction.

  She fell silent as paramedics lifted Christine onto a stretcher and wheeled her toward the waiting ambulance. The crowd that had gathered prevented me from seeing whether or not the paramedics had stopped the chest compressions. I hoped Christine’s heart was beating again. The alternative was too terrible to think about.

  Seconds later, the ambulance pulled away from the curb, its siren flicking on with an ear-piercing wail. As the sound slowly faded into the distance, I looked down at my hands, realizing that my
skin felt strange.

  “What’s wrong with your hands?” Sienna asked, as I held them up to get a better view in the light from the streetlamp.

  “I’m not sure,” I replied. My skin had puckered and turned pink in places, feeling tight whenever I moved my fingers.

  “Rigid collodion,” Howard said. He held up his own hands, showing signs of the same affliction as mine. “It’s used for fake scars. It was all over Christine’s clothes for some reason. She’s damn lucky she didn’t go up in flames. The stuff’s flammable.”

  His words sank into me with a deep chill, and I barely suppressed a shiver. If the fire had been given a few more seconds to spread beyond the trash can, Christine could have ended up in worse shape than she was at the moment.

  “Why would it have been all over her clothes?” Sienna asked.

  Howard shrugged. “Maybe she knocked the bottle over when she was overcome by the smoke.”

  That was a possibility, but I wasn’t completely sold on it. I knew it didn’t take long for smoke to knock someone unconscious, but the fire hadn’t been that big when I arrived on the scene. How had Christine failed to notice it when it was first igniting? Wouldn’t she have smelled the smoke and either escaped the trailer or tried to extinguish the fire?

  “You can peel it off,” Howard said, indicating the rigid collodion on his own hands, “but you can also use spirit gum remover.”

  I nodded my thanks and Howard threaded his way through the crowd, soon disappearing from sight.

  “Who is he?” I asked Nicola.

  She was staring at the emergency personnel milling about in front of the trailer, one hand still covering her mouth. She blinked and lowered her hand when I addressed her, and it took her a second to respond.

  “Howard Eastman. Assistant director.”

  A large woman pushed her way through the crowd until she reached Nicola’s side. I recognized her as one of the women who’d dined at The Flip Side that morning. Debbie, I thought her name was, from the wardrobe department.

  “Nic, honey, I heard what happened. Are you all right?”

  Tears pooled in Nicola’s eyes. “I don’t know. I’m so worried about Christine.”