On the Cutting Room Floor (A Ghosts of Landover Mystery Book 8)

by Etta Faire

  “Who should I make this out to?” I said.

  “Hank, please. Crazy Hank. That’s what everyone calls me. And put the date on there too.”

  I opened my eyes.

  Chapter 19

  Action

  Mandy quickly wrote: Crazy Hank, never be afraid to make your dreams come true. Mandy Smalls. September 25, 1987.

  He dried the ink by fanning the signature with the side of his gloved hand, smiling and nodding at us as we shoved the pen at him.

  I kept my focus on the glove. It was light blue, just like the kind most people wore at the doctor’s office. I would have to see if I noticed anyone else with one of those.

  “Sorry, but I’ve got to get going. I’m supposed to be on the set,” Mandy said, then rushed by Ruth, who was back to looking perturbed again. Mandy didn’t care. She knew she was late.

  We hurried down the hill toward the cabins at the end of the property where the filming was going on. Our heart raced in our t-shirt. Sweat formed around our armpits, threatening to ruin the mom costume that wasn’t really too much of a costume.

  The evening breeze coming off the lake wasn’t doing much to cool Mandy down. It had been unseasonably warm the last few days.

  Her arms suddenly felt huge against the hot, constricting denim jacket. Her back hurt, but she couldn’t move fast enough.

  She peeled off her jacket and picked up speed. She looked behind her, checking for Crazy Hank, but he was probably still drying the ink on the poster, and gushing out thank-yous to Ruth, who was lapping up every last one, no doubt.

  We were approaching a one-story log cabin with faded gray wood and dark green trim at the bottom of the hill by the lake. Long and spacious, the cabin had four different rooms.

  Mandy talked to me in our head as we got closer to the cabin where ten people, mostly twenty-year-olds in short-shorts and t-shirts, were congregating outside one of the doors. “Ruth and Barry bought this property about fifteen years ago and had a house built on it. It was some sort of old Boy Scout camp or something. They said they were going to tear down the cabins first thing. They tore down all but one. Their kids talked them into keeping it, so they could have slumber parties and stuff in there.”

  Ned’s eyes squinted into angry darts when he saw us coming down the hill.

  “Mandy, you’re late,” a reddish-brown-haired man in his 40s said when we approached the group. I knew it was Graham. He was wearing the same outfit in the photo on my phone: a long dust jacket and bright white boat shoes. His hands were in his pants pockets, so you could see his tight gray t-shirt accentuating a small beer belly.

  “I didn’t mean to be late. Honestly, I thought somebody was going to let me know when Olivia got here,” Mandy said, glaring at her husband. “And my scene’s after hers, so…”

  Ned scowled and looked Mandy up and down, his eyes stopping at our pit stains. “You have a call sheet, right? Stop being so sloppy. Stop expecting special treatment every place you go…”

  “That’s not it…” Mandy stammered. Everyone looked at her through the side of their eyes, watching as the big-name director shook his head in their direction, like they were all sharing a private joke about Mandy.

  We looked at Graham, but he just rocked in his boat shoes and pretended to study the script in his hand. He pushed it at us. “Ned made changes to the scene, anyway. Your scene comes later now.”

  Ned raised a hand at her as if to stop her from complaining. “I don’t want to hear it either. You and Graham asked for my help, and you’re going to get it. You don’t know what it takes to make a blockbuster. I do. And this is what it takes. You actually want to make money this year, right?”

  Mandy hated the way the paper shook in her hand, the way she could feel every stare from the younger actors in board shorts and bikinis. A part of her did want to kill them.

  She scanned the paper her husband had just handed her. Her lines had been cut significantly. “You changed the big reveal scene? Where we discover what happened twenty years ago and how it’s come to haunt the… the… camp. I wrote this myself…” Her eyes scanned over the changes quickly. It was a scene in the woods now. She was running from the killer. She was dying.

  Her cheeks warmed, but she sniffed back her anger and quickly composed herself.

  Ned checked his Rolex. “If you would have been here instead of raiding the pantry again, you would have known about the changes,” Ned said. “Learn your new lines and get over the loss of your old ones, please.”

  She looked over at Graham. Her husband was pretending to be discussing something with one of the younger actors.

  Mandy caught his eye. “My character wouldn’t just run away. She’s strong. She’s a central part of the wrap-up scene. Isn’t that right? Graham?”

  He didn’t even notice she was talking. I read her mind from the time.

  Look at him tugging on his five-o’clock stubble, thinking he looks like Miami Vice.

  He didn’t care about the movie, or the way she was being treated. He didn’t care about anything but money and his midlife crisis.

  Graham had recently begun picking fights, wearing his hair long to cover up his ever-increasing forehead. He’d even bought a motorcycle, for crying out loud. A used Harley Davidson that sat in the driveway until he finally got up enough nerve to take some classes on how to ride the damn thing. But she supported him. She supported him when he got the weird tattoo on his arm of some Chinese word he told everyone meant “strength,” but really, when they asked at their favorite Chinese restaurant, found out it meant dish cat.

  She took a long inhale. He supported her too, most times, just not when he was around his old friends.

  Sure, their marriage wasn’t perfect, but no one’s marriage was. Her friend, Susie, found condoms in her husband’s truck once, so at least Graham wasn’t doing that. A midlife crisis was no big deal. He was a good man. A good dad.

  She just wished he didn’t treat Ned like he walked on water.

  She put her jacket back on just as one of the young girls hanging around in short-shorts handed her a mirror and her makeup case. She checked herself. She looked just as tired as she felt.

  She smeared cover-up along her baggy eyes, slapped some lip gloss on, then fluffed her bangs into place.

  She was proud to be the mom character, she told herself. This was where she was in life and there was nothing wrong with that, no matter how many people in the industry wanted her to feel like a has-been.

  She heard the sound of a camera clicking nearby and turned. Crazy Hank was there, taking pictures.

  I noticed he was no longer wearing his gloves, but I saw them hanging half out of a back pocket.

  She tried to get her face to form a relaxed smile as she read over her new lines.

  A young girl with a crooked dark brown ponytail bounced over to Mandy. “Mom, I wanted to go get you, but Dad and Ned said they would handle things.”

  Mandy hugged her, breathing in the scent of a musty wig and some Noxzema. She cupped her daughter’s chin in her hand and straightened her dark wig so no blonde hair peeked out from underneath it.

  “Did you already do your first big scene with the lines?” Mandy asked.

  “No.”

  “Good, I wanted to see it. Are you nervous?”

  She nodded.

  “I’d be worried about you if you weren’t.” Mandy stroked her daughter’s wig. Olivia was the same age Mandy had been when she first started acting in college.

  Someone used to come and get Mandy for her scenes back then. The lines would change every day, but they would change in her favor. The world felt like it was hers for the taking. She hadn’t known at the time that people were only treating her a certain way because of her youth and looks. She just thought that was the way the world treated everyone and would always treat everyone.

  Ned yelled for the girls to get into the cabin for the next scene.

  Olivia hugged her mom and scooted by the crowd of people and into
the room.

  Mandy looked over at Graham. He had his arm around Somer’s waist, nudging her into the cabin, whispering something into her ear just as she was leaving. She looked up and giggled.

  Mandy talked to me in our head. “I can’t believe I never saw it before. The jerk. I thought he saw Somer as a daughter. He said he saw her as a daughter.”

  Graham turned, noticing Mandy staring at him. He walked over to us, chuckling to himself. “Somer’s always asking for advice.”

  Mandy laughed. “If only our real daughter did.”

  Graham half-smiled and pointed up the hill toward the house. “The caterer will be here soon. I’m gonna go help set up the dinner spread.”

  “You’ll miss Olivia’s first scene…”

  “I’ll see it when it’s done. I don’t want Barry and Ruth getting upset about where the caterer sets up again.” He looked around. “Isn’t this great, though? A dinner spread. A breakfast spread. A lunch spread, if we want it. We should have it this good all the time, babe. And we will. I have a feeling after this movie, we’ll be able to get investors right and left.” He pushed his hands into his casual, loose linen pants.

  “You’re letting Ned take over,” she said. “We agreed we wouldn’t do that.”

  “Come on. Don’t start.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry your scene changed, but he knows what he’s doing and we don’t. Let’s just ride this wave while we can, okay? We couldn’t even afford sandwiches for the crew on our last movie, and there were only ten of us.”

  He grabbed our arm and pulled us away from the cabin. He lowered his voice. “Look, a bunch of us are going out again tonight, over to Slap Pappy’s. Right after dinner. You probably don’t want to go anyway, but why don’t you stay here and look over all the footage and everything, and if there’s anything you want to change, I’ll go over it with Ned.”

  “I can go over it myself with Ned.”

  He nodded and pinched our chin, bringing our gaze up to meet his. “Yes you can. But you and Ned have never really seen eye to eye. And he probably won’t listen.”

  “Whose movie is this? I thought it was a Toppletree production.”

  “It is. Just try to compromise, okay? Just look over the footage tonight and take some notes.” His eyes begged her to stay home, to listen to him.

  She didn’t say anything, even though she wanted to say a lot, mostly about the favor and the finances. She was mad, but it was more to do with how Graham’s midlife crisis had grown to levels that had exceeded their bank account while she clipped coupons and shopped at K-Mart, and usually looked every bit the “mom costume” she was wearing now.

  “You’re discovering another note,” Ned yelled into the cabin. “Okay, everyone. Quiet on the set.”

  “Picture’s up,” someone yelled.

  “Roll sound, roll camera…” someone else yelled.

  Graham walked away to go help with the catering, and Mandy walked back over to the cabin to watch from outside the room as the clapperboard snapped.

  The cabin was large on the inside. It had obviously been the cafeteria area. Tables were still set up with bench seating, a serving area at the front of the room. Two cameramen stood in the back. Another guy had a boom mic. The five actresses were standing or sitting at their various marks.

  “Camera set, action.”

  “No one’s seen Jenny. I checked everywhere,” Somer said to Olivia as she sat down beside her on one of the benches. “None of the phone lines work, and she’s not the only one missing.”

  Olivia laughed. “You talk like you think something’s wrong. I’m sure she’s fine. Last time I saw her, she was heading to the freezer. She said she was officially off her diet. You know how she loves ice cream.”

  “She could have gotten locked in there,” one of the other girls said.

  Olivia and Somer looked at each other. “We need to find her now,” Olivia replied.

  “I’m getting a bad feeling about this place,” Somer added.

  The girls went to the back of the cafeteria where the freezer room was. They called Jenny’s name as they ran.

  “Jenny, are you stealing ice cream again?” Olivia yelled into the closed door. “You know that’s for the campers. Are you locked in here?”

  There, tucked into the handle of the freezer door, was a blue folded piece of paper.

  “I’m starting to think these blue notes aren’t jokes,” one of the girls said, hesitating before snatching the blue paper. She opened it. It shook in her hand as the camera closed in on it.

  “She can’t come out because she’s dead,” the girl read aloud.

  Mandy watched with pride as her daughter opened the freezer door, screaming when the frozen corpse of her friend fell onto her, a hook sticking out of her back. And I looked around the room for clues.

  I knew from the folder Caleb had given me what Mandy’s crime scene had looked like when officers arrived.

  Film everywhere. A champagne glass sitting in the middle of the room, possibly a blue glove. There were fingerprints all over the place from almost everyone in the crew, but no unexpected fingerprints, and none on the film around Mandy, or on Mandy herself.

  The perpetrator had to have been wearing gloves. But were they blue gloves like the disposable ones Hank had been wearing? Could Ned have been lying about seeing that glove?

  I looked over at Somer, who was dragging the frozen corpse of her friend away from the freezer while yelling at the others that they needed a plan, they needed to go into town and get help. She was still wearing her archery gloves.

  Mandy smiled at the actors, happy Ned hadn’t changed too much of her script. There was at least one strong female character left after his massacre.

  “That was pretty good, but let’s do it again and change some things up,” Ned yelled into the room. “This time, ditch the flannel and the gloves, Somer. You’re only in your bikini, and you don’t know what to do. You all run from the room, screaming. That might work better.”

  Mandy turned and walked away, mostly because she didn’t know what to do, and she felt an awful lot like screaming.

  Chapter 20

  Heart Attacks

  The sun was setting by the time Mandy finished her scene, which was after the cafeteria one, and it took forever. Nothing but take after take of her running through the woods, and Ned telling her to run faster or slower, to scream louder or softer.

  It had just been her, Ned, and a couple of crew members. And it almost seemed to me like he was making her do the scene over and over on purpose as a way to control her.

  She trudged up the hill to the dinner spread already set up in the covered patio room, unable to get her achy legs to move as fast as her stomach wanted them to.

  She could hear their laughter from here. The clinking of glasses. The jokes. She was one of the last to get to the buffet, and she hoped there’d be some good stuff left because, unlike Ned Reinhart, nobody was probably saving her a plate. Graham used to, but she’d forgotten to ask him, and she knew he wasn’t going to think of it himself.

  It was Mexican food today. The smell of carne asada and salsa wafted down with the breeze. Her stomach rumbled to her to hurry up.

  The patio room was full. A couple of long tables had been set up outside. Most were crowded with crew members and extras from the lake, along with some friends and family Mandy didn’t recognize.

  Graham was off to the side of the buffet table, talking to a tall, dark-haired man in a plaid shirt with a full beard and mustache. Somer was on the other side of the man.

  “The guy in plaid is Barry Locke,” Mandy said to me, as she grabbed two paper plates at the far end of the food table by the two men. With his full dark beard and plaid shirt, Barry kind of looked like a lumberjack in Birkenstocks, meek yet intimidating.

  Mandy checked the table over. The carne asada was gone, but there were still plenty of chicken tacos, beans, rice, cookies, and fruit. I could tell by Mandy’s thoughts that the fruit was always the last
to go.

  She placed a couple of tacos and some beans and rice on one plate, then put two large sugar cookies on the other one.

  Barry took a sip of his craft beer. “Ruth would never touch any of this,” he said to Graham, but loud enough for Mandy to hear. “She’s very strict about her diet. Works out all the time.”

  “She’s got an awesome figure. You’re a lucky man,” Graham said, making Mandy grind her teeth. She hated it when Graham said stuff like that to other men about their wives. You’re a lucky man…

  It was creepy and disgusting. She grabbed another cookie out of spite.

  Graham swigged the craft beer Barry probably got for him from his private collection. “They have apples too, babe.” He called to her. “Did you see that?” He laughed with Barry.

  She looked over at him. “I’m sorry, what?”

  He pointed to the large fruit bowl that hardly anyone had touched. “Maybe you should start with an apple, that’s what Barry told me Ruth does to stay healthy.” He turned back to Barry. “Then, what does she do?”

  “She waits ten minutes…” Barry began.

  Graham cut him off. “That’s right. You need to wait ten minutes for it to digest. Then, if you’re still not full, you can go and have a taco.”

  Mandy’s face grew warm. She was too tired for this. “If you want an apple, Graham, have an apple.” She motioned to her plate. “I haven’t had anything but a couple of Pringles since breakfast. I’m going to have tacos and cookies like everyone else.”

  He turned back to Barry. “She’s going to die of a heart attack one of these days.”

  His voice was loud, and it made everyone else’s grow quieter.

  “We’re all eating the same food,” Mandy yelled, even though it was almost silent now. “Why, in this scenario, am I the only one who’s going to die of a heart attack if I don’t eat apples and wait ten minutes for them to digest?”

  She reached in the cooler of drinks. Her hand instantly stung in the melting ice water. She fished around until she found what she was looking for, the familiar red and silver can of a Diet Coke.