What Remains of Me

by Alison Gaylin

“You guys can check that one out, I’m gonna explore,” said Bellamy, who was weaving around a line of motorcycles, making her way to the far end of the garage. Bellamy glanced at her—a meaningful glance. Kelly saw the car she was headed for: a black Porsche with tinted windows and mirrored hubcaps. Kelly nodded.

  “I love Jimmy Page,” she said to Vee, though she wasn’t quite sure if Jimmy Page was Led Zeppelin’s guitarist or their bassist.

  “Try the driver’s seat.” He opened the door for her, stepped aside. Kelly slipped in. The car smelled of leather and oil. She rested her hands on the wheel and leaned her head back, trying to get lost in it. But her thoughts were on Bellamy in the Porsche.

  Vee smiled at her. “Someday, you can take it for a spin.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. “I figured you could . . .”

  “Why?” She looked at him. He winced a little. “Oh.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Bellamy making for the black Porsche. It wasn’t lost on her, the weirdness of this situation, Catherine’s ghost, looming over everything, a passenger in every luxury car.

  “Do you know who taught Catherine how to drive?” she said. “Mom and I never knew.”

  He shook his head. Kelly had a flash-memory of him, crying in her arms at the Jailbird Party, shoulders shaking, her shirt wet with his tears. Poor Vee. Poor both of us.

  “I’d give a million dollars to know what’s on your mind right now,” he said.

  She swallowed hard, wishing for a cigarette. “I’m . . . I’m just a little nervous about the screen test,” she said.

  She made herself look up, into those warm blue eyes. “You shouldn’t be,” he said. “You’re going to be amazing.”

  Her heart crumbled. You are such a good person, she thought. And you don’t know a thing about your father.

  “I’ve seen so many actresses in my dad’s films, at clubs . . . Practically every girl I know wants to be in movies, and none of them is like you . . .”

  Kelly stared out the windshield at the black Porsche, passenger door yawning open, Bellamy inside. She stared at the rear tire. Its mirrored hubcap sneered at her.

  “You’re what my dad would call a ‘natural,’ Kelly.”

  Catherine’s tire tracks weren’t the only ones up at Chantry Flats when they’d found her body. Mom had asked the police detective about it. If it was suicide, Mom had said, who was in the other car?

  “If he doesn’t go nuts over you, then he’s an idiot.”

  It’s a lovers’ lane, ma’am. That means lots of tire tracks, lots of cars . . .

  “Kelly?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You okay?”

  She closed her eyes, nodded slowly. “I’m so happy you’re my friend,” she said.

  He knelt down and kissed her on the cheek. “Me too,” he said.

  Kelly was aware of footsteps, the passenger-side door opening. Bellamy’s loud voice. “I’m bored again.” She grabbed Kelly’s hand and dropped something in it—something small and cold. “Found this in the trunk,” she whispered as Vee stepped away. “Don’t you think Kelly will do great at the screen test?” he said.

  “I think your dad will love her,” said Bellamy as Kelly glanced down at the cool object in her hand. A tube of lipstick, elegant, silver. She read the name. Rouge de la Bohème. Her blood went cold.

  CHAPTER 27

  WATCH! ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE OF A MURDERER’S SCREEN TEST—HER VICTIM IS BEHIND THE CAMERA!

  In 1980, a shy teenager named Kelly Michelle Lund shot and killed director John McFadden in the midst of his own wrap party. Stoned and confused, Lund never gave a reason for shooting the respected lensman—nor did she seem to show any remorse for the deed. But because of her age, degree of intoxication, and other mitigating factors (many wrote letters to the parole board on her behalf, including several A-list celebrities and McFadden’s ex-wife Leilani Valle) Kelly Lund was released from prison in 2006.

  Still, this chilling footage may give those letter writers reason to reconsider. In a screen test taken just two weeks before Lund murdered McFadden, the 17-year-old appears openly hostile, refusing to take any direction from the Oscar nominee, whose voice can be heard offscreen, becoming increasingly frustrated. (“You’re wasting both our time, Kelly,” and “You don’t seem to be taking this seriously,” he says throughout the latter half of the audition.) The most disturbing exchange comes at 2:24, when Lund refers to the script’s fictional town, Chatsworth, by the wrong name: Chantry Flats. When McFadden attempts to correct her, she snaps, asking him if Chantry Flats “makes [him] think of dead girls.” Yikes!

  Comments:

  Guest1: Wow, what a psycho bitch. She obviously wants that director’s azz and he is not into her and so she’s pissed. How is this freak not in jail for life?! Or better yet, fried!!! Not spending my taxpayer dollars supporting her sorry, psycho azz.

  Guest 2: Run, John McFadden, run!

  FlimFlam: Um, he can’t run. He’s dead. Another liberal Hollywood casualty. If he had a gun of his own, he could have defended himself.

  Laney23: Pretty sure she shot him with his own gun. : )

  BuzzFeed

  May 1, 2009

  CHAPTER 28

  APRIL 23, 2010

  When was the last time you visited your in-laws at their house?” said the female detective, Louise Braddock.

  Third time she and her ginger-pink partner Dupree had asked Kelly that question, phrasing it a different way each time. Kelly said nothing. She’d been here before. Literally been here before, in this same interview room. Different building or not, it felt like it. Same hard-backed chair as the one she’d sat in thirty years ago, same conference table between them, the announcement of the date and the presence of the tape recorder, police phrasing and rephrasing questions, Kelly saying nothing. Same routine. She’d known her rights back in 1980. She knew them now.

  Kelly turned to her lawyer—Ilene Cutler. More déjà vu. She’d asked Sebastian Todd to find her a lawyer, and this, out of every criminal defense attorney in the greater Los Angeles area, was the one he’d found. Cutler had changed a lot in the past thirty years, just like Kelly had. But while Kelly had gone harder, grayer, and more angular, Ilene had smoothed out, her frizzy hair tamed and highlighted, wire-rimmed glasses abandoned for sky blue contacts, pasty skin spray-tanned and Botoxed to face the unforgiving cameras of the cable TV station where she’d been a regular commentator for more than a decade. Cutler was fifteen years older than Kelly, but age no longer divided them so much as experience. The effects of prison versus the effects of TV. A study should be done.

  Ilene said, “Why should she answer that question?”

  “You’d think she’d be interested in finding her father-in-law’s killer,” said Dupree.

  “Don’t see how asking her about socializing with her in-laws accomplishes much of anything, other than . . . you know . . . TMZ fodder.” She smiled sweetly. “You guys on Harvey’s payroll?”

  “No,” Braddock said between her teeth. “We’re not on Harvey’s payroll.”

  “Well then, how about something a little more relevant?”

  “Their relationship isn’t relevant?”

  “Hey, Louise. I’ve known you for quite a while, and to be honest, I’d rather get a grapefruit juice enema than socialize with you. Does that mean I’m going to murder you? Not in the slightest.”

  Braddock shook her head. Kelly could have sworn Dupree stifled a smile.

  She’s good, Kelly thought. Strange—she’d done a triple take when Ilene had first shown up here, telling herself how dumb she’d been to have trusted ST. Yet still she had to admit that it was comforting, Ilene Cutler striding toward her, saying her name with the same intonation she’d said it thirty years ago.

  “Kelly Michelle Lund. I’ve been a defense attorney for thirty-seven years. And in all that time, there’s only one thing I feel guilty about.”

  “Repping those skin
heads?”

  “Treating you like a piece of crap. How about a do-over?” And the more time she spent with Ilene, the more she wanted to thank ST. A familiar face—bronzed and Botoxed though it may have been—was something to cling to, with everything else in her life shifting, changing, falling apart . . .

  Kelly wondered if Shane had read the letter she’d left him or if he’d just seen her handwriting and thrown it away. She didn’t even know whether it mattered anymore. The truth was now a different thing than it had been when she’d written it. She was a different person.

  I’m Sterling Marshall’s daughter.

  “Kelly, are you the only one who drives your car?” Dupree said. “Or does your husband sometimes drive it too?”

  She glanced at Ilene. Ilene nodded.

  “Just me.”

  “Okay, good. Can you tell me where you were in that car at”—he glanced down at the notebook on his lap—“two-eighteen A.M. on April twenty-first?”

  “Excuse me?” said Ilene.

  Kelly stared at him. “I . . . I don’t . . .”

  “There’s a charge on your credit card at that time—Amoco station on Hollywood and Fairfax.”

  “Long way from Joshua Tree,” Braddock said.

  Ilene stared at Kelly. “You don’t know anything about this, do you?”

  “How did you get my credit records?”

  “Also,” Louise said. “And this is the part we’re having trouble with, Kelly. We found blood in your car.”

  “What?” said Ilene.

  “I . . . I was going to . . .”

  “We’ll talk later.” Ilene swung around with her jaw set, and aimed her sky blue eyes at Braddock. Attack mode. “My client’s rights are being violated.”

  “How so?” she said.

  “Are you kidding me? You searched her car without a warrant and without permission. That’s what’s known as a violation, Louise.”

  “Oh we did get permission.”

  Ilene turned to Kelly. “You gave them permission?”

  “No,” Kelly said as Ilene turned back to the detectives, everything around her dropping away, Kelly knowing the answer before they said it.

  “We got permission from the car’s owner—her husband,” Dupree said, Kelly staring at the two-way mirror, numb. Lost. “He also gave us his extra key.”

  “YOU DID THE RIGHT THING,” SAID BELLAMY.

  Shane looked at her. “I don’t feel like I did.”

  “You protected your family. Our family. It’s what Dad would have wanted.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Do you want a drink?”

  Shane shook his head. He collapsed on Bellamy’s Navajo print couch, and as she went into the kitchen to mix cocktails for Mom and herself, he rolled it over in his mind, what his sister had just said to him. It’s what Dad would have wanted. He couldn’t even respond to that—the level of delusion.

  But that was what Bellamy was about. It was what she’d always been about—believing the lines she said, the roles she played—Daddy’s girl, party girl, respected artist . . . A natural actor just like Dad had been, Living the Part. She’d only taught at Irvine for one year, yet here she still was, six years later, in the condo the university had found for her, playing “artist-in-residence” because she couldn’t find another character. She booked speaking gigs, invited local press into her home, brewed herbal tea for them in her Spanish kitchen, chatted them up in her southwestern-style living room, her one successful piece glaring down at them from the wall. She invited them into her studio out back, no doubt, just as she’d taken Shane there this morning, showed them her glitter and her paints and her fancy tape-recording equipment, these fresh young reporters who probably had no idea that she was just saying lines, wearing a costume, discussing “pieces in progress” that she would never complete or even begin. It was getting stale. Bellamy had to know that. “Artist-in-residence” had a short shelf life when you took no joy in making art, only in talking about it.

  But now, Dad had given her a new role to play.

  Bellamy returned from the kitchen with Mom’s martini and a glass of red wine for herself. “Just the way you like it, Mom,” she said, handing her the drink. “Cold and dry as an agent’s heart.” She gave her a brave smile befitting her new role: Brave Daughter.

  Mom didn’t look at her. She took the drink, downed half of it, then set it on the coffee table, staring straight ahead the whole time. “I miss my house,” she said quietly.

  Bellamy took a pull off her wine. She glanced at Mom, then at Shane and smiled again, her teeth stained bloodred from the wine. “When was the last time,” she said, “when we were all together like this, as a family?”

  Mona Lisa watched Shane from its spot over the fireplace, Kelly’s teenage smile angry and accusing. The real Kelly, the grown-up one, was probably being questioned by police right now because of Shane, because of the credit card record he had printed out and shown the detectives—a gas station at 2:00 A.M. on the night of Dad’s murder, ten minutes away from his parents’ home—and also because of the things he’d told them about Kelly, all true, but damningly so when arranged a certain way.

  He had to do it, he knew. As Bellamy had pointed out, he had no other choice—they were family after all. The family had to protect each other. But he’d taken no joy in it. And Bellamy, being Bellamy, so desperately wanted him to.

  “Mommy,” she said. “Remember when you and Dad had them shut down Disneyland for my eighth birthday party?”

  Mom stared at her, that lost look in her eyes. “Yes. I remember.”

  Bellamy smiled again. Her bloody wine-smile directly under Kelly on the wall. One of those moments when positioning shows you something you could never put into words. Shane wished he had his camera, which made him think of his room, his home, his marriage. “I miss my house too,” he said.

  Shane. Your whole life has been built on a lie. Mom had said that to him yesterday morning at the house she now missed, a house caked in Dad’s blood, strewn with yellow police tape. She’d said it, just before letting him know that fifteen years ago, he’d married his half sister.

  “I would have told you long ago,” she had said. “I would have stopped the wedding. But you see, Shane. I just found out myself.”

  “You made the most wonderful cake for that party, Mom, remember? It was Cinderella, and her dress was the cake—vanilla with buttercream filling and blue fondant frosting.”

  “I do,” Mary said, warming a little. “Flora and I made that together. It was her idea to use those edible crystals on the gown . . .”

  Shane still couldn’t get over it. Dad had never said a word when Shane announced his plans to marry Kelly. Dad, movie star, and war hero letting two of his children get married to each other without saying a word. How had he rationalized it? Had he told himself that he was protecting his family from getting hurt? That he could keep a secret forever if he had to, that this was his mess, why should Shane’s love life have to suffer? Family means everything. He used to say that all the time.

  “That birthday party was the best day of my life,” Bellamy was saying. “You guys were wonderful parents.”

  Right after his mother had told him everything, Shane had gone into her bathroom and taken half her bottle of Ambien. Washing down the pills, he’d thought of all the times he’d tried to make love to Kelly, during arranged conjugal visits and then after her release. She never wanted to. She kept apologizing. It was prison, she’d say. It wasn’t him, she’d say. She just had these barriers, she couldn’t help it, be patient and things would change. But it was him. It had been him all along, and it had been the two of them together, and he had felt it too, much as he’d tried to ignore it . . .

  Some families must have meant more to Dad than others.

  Shane had taken the Ambien intending to off himself. Mom hadn’t followed him into the bathroom. She hadn’t even asked what he was doing in there for so long, and when he’d left her room, left the hous
e . . . when he’d gotten behind the wheel of his car . . .

  He couldn’t remember the strip club, couldn’t remember the fight or the arrest, or Bellamy picking him up at the station. The only thing he could remember from that entire night was Bellamy, putting him to bed in her guest room, kissing his forehead, telling him, “You can’t kill yourself. You have a purpose. And that purpose is to help your family.”

  He had drifted off to sleep again, longing for more Ambien, wishing himself back to a week ago, when the worst secret he had to struggle with was Kelly’s affair with Rocky Three.

  “I think I’m going to hit the sack,” Bellamy said. She emptied her wineglass and put her arms around Mom, who made a weak show of hugging back. “I hope I dream of that birthday party tonight,” she said, and for a few seconds Shane flashed on Bellamy in her prom dress, walking down the marble staircase to meet her date, her gaze focused not on the guy at all, but on Mom and Dad. It was 1981. Kelly had just gone to prison, he realized now. He hadn’t thought of it then. That night, Kelly Lund had been the last person on anyone’s mind. “Doesn’t she look beautiful, Mary?” Dad had said. And Bellamy, his only daughter, had basked in his praise.

  SHANE AND HIS MOTHER SAT IN SILENCE, MOM SIPPING HER MARTINI with the truth thick in the air, Bellamy no longer in the room to drown it out. Shane tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t. Everything had changed, including him. Especially him. Nothing made sense anymore.

  His gaze traveled around the room—all this tasteful, sunbaked, West Coast college professor furniture, photographs strategically placed among bookshelves with color-coordinated books, most of them moody-looking black-and-whites of Bellamy—publicity promos from the ’90s, when she was art’s “It” Girl and took great pains to look the part. One of the frames was broken—a big chunk of glass missing from the front. He hadn’t noticed it before, this one thing out of place in this orderly world, and he wondered why. Usually, his photographer’s eye worked in his favor when it came to spotting things like that.

  “That house on Blue Jay Way was a wedding present to me from Dad,” Mom said. “Did you know that, Shane?”