Chapter 12 #2
Jason ate nuts all the time, and kissing Sally Ann had never caused a reaction.
He must have known the extent of the allergy.
I imagined the camera in front of us while Jason took the lunch bags, offering to lighten my load.
I’d thought it was genuine kindness, but Jason was a performer, used to keeping his head straight in the middle of a tight game.
A pitcher always had to think a step ahead.
He’d give that goofy grin while unpacking the containers, hiding his true intention behind the mask of Honeymoon Stage’s Jason Dean.
How easy would it have been to switch Sally Ann’s meal with Maggie’s, fork a few bites from one container to the other?
All we’d need would be a shot of his hands, stabbing the chicken and replacing it.
Ominous music. Zoom in on his eyes; if we got close enough, we’d always catch the tell.
The thing to do, I realized, was go back to the footage from the day of the accident. What I had seen was not what the camera had seen. I dug around in the computer until I found everything labeled “2/13.”
No one had ever opened these files. I guessed once they knew Sally Ann hadn’t made it, production considered the day a sunk cost.
I started with camera A, which was Rahul.
Some outside stuff—a dog peeing a mud hole in the garden, a flock of birds, a shot of Eli through the living room window as he set up his own shot.
This seemed to capture Honeymoon Stage with the most authenticity: people watching other people as they readied themselves to make life into not exactly art.
And then:
Jason putters around in the kitchen, replacing disposable chopsticks with forks.
He hands a bag to somebody off camera. Pops a lid and sneaks a bite of what seems to be Maggie’s chicken.
Maggie comes over to playfully complain about the fact that he’s eating her food.
Her body covers the view of his hands, the containers.
We see them banter about hot pepper tolerance before she eventually turns around to call Sally Ann to come eat.
This is the moment. The opportunity is here.
Maggie’s back is to Jason for enough time for something to happen, if that something is well executed and has been carefully planned.
Unfortunately, Rahul didn’t catch it on camera.
Jason steps out from behind her, in one hand Maggie’s open lunch, in the other Sally Ann’s closed one. Because the lid is on now doesn’t mean it has always been on. Is that a grain of rice, escaping?
And then here are Maggie and Sally Ann at the kitchen island, elbows down, leaned into each other.
“Not Maid in Manhattan again,” Maggie moans.
“Why not? It’s more fun than A Walk to Remember.”
“Don’t you ever just want a good cry?” Maggie spears a piece of chicken from the black plastic container, licks her lips for any residual sauce.
“Not really.” The camera’s behind Sally Ann, so we watch Maggie over her shoulder.
Those shoulders, the spaghetti straps, the youth and potential that radiate off her—not something you ever considered when you saw Sally Ann in person, but it glows like the aura of a cartoon angel when you know she’s going to die in the next scene.
Maggie bites her lip in a coquettish way that can’t have been intended for Sally Ann. The camera angle changes. Sally Ann shrugs, eats some plain rice.
“Okay fine,” Maggie sighs. “We can do Maid in Manhattan, if they have it at the video place, and you want to go pick it up.”
Sally Ann grins and takes a bite. She frowns while chewing, her eyes suddenly flitting with fear.
The wheezing starts, and she raises her hands to her throat, her elbow knocking a takeout lid, which falls with a clatter.
That awful sound. The camera tilts down to the wood floor, and Rahul says, “Oh my god.”
Then you can hear me say “Fuck,” and the crew’s footfalls as they leave Video Village, and Maggie saying, “Where is her purse?”
“Keep shooting,” Dan instructs. But somebody turns off the camera.
Cassidy—began Gabe’s email—You’ve been ignoring my calls and I want to explain.
I want to apologize. I should have been open about what’s going on with Maggie, why I was even at her house that first day.
I can explain it all, if you’ll let me. I am not seeing Maggie, I am not romantically involved with Maggie.
It’s really all about doing the music. I know I messed up here, but I don’t want to lose you.
Can you please call me back? Love, Gabe.
Delete. Delete delete delete. From my inbox, from my memory.
I’d shared the barest of details of Gabe’s betrayal with my roommates.
I’d delusionally hoped to get it past them, but when I spent the second night in a row watching Dumb and Dumber, they both knew something was definitely up.
In the spirit of girl-power-hood, they told me I was better off without Gabe, that they’d always sensed something was off about him.
Jen got me a backpack full of drugstore chocolate and a dartboard that hung over the back of the door.
“For your rage,” she explained. But I didn’t have rage.
Rage would have been better than what I had, which was immense self-doubt, deep sadness.
The sense that the world was, in fact, the ruthless place I had always suspected it to be, and being a good person couldn’t protect you.
If anything, being a good person made you a sucker.
I know your texting plan is expensive and I’m sorry to bombard you but please can you call me.
Honeymoon Stage continued to be a ratings smash.
News had leaked of Sally Ann’s death—if you could call several strategically placed calls to magazine editors “leaking”—and public response was mostly sympathetic.
Maggie had lost a dear friend, and since the audience had come to feel that they were friends with Maggie, by the transitive property they, too, had experienced a loss.
Who hadn’t lost a friend, be it to death or drugs or sleeping with their husband?
And how brave of Maggie and Jason and the Honeymoon Stage team to keep on filming!
If you watched the show in a bubble, you’d never even know that Sally Ann had died but for the dedication they were going to run at the end of the episode where Jason invests in a T-shirt company.
Jason Dean was still handsome, and Maggie McKee was still ditzy and hot, and people just wanted to watch them be famous, goddammit. Maggie got a sponsorship deal with Sally Ann’s favorite brand of lipstick. Jason played golf.
I kept plugging away at my growing mountain of new footage to log, none of which provided any insight into who had caused the accident.
Maggie seductively licking a lollipop. Jason doing a photo shoot for some brand of athletic socks.
Maggie complaining about Pilates. I dipped back into the old stuff when I could, trying to figure out who’d been acting suspicious in the days leading up to Sally Ann’s death, trying to find a good angle of the food being set on the counter.
I kept ignoring Gabe’s emails and calls.
“Cassidy, I miss you. Please call me. I don’t know what Maggie said to you, but it isn’t like that with her, I promise. Maybe this—us—wasn’t the same thing for you. Maybe it didn’t mean what I thought it did. What it meant to me. To you, I mean. Damn it, please just call me back.”
Looking back, it seems insane that I thought I, a brokenhearted twentysomething whose knowledge of criminal investigation came mostly from Law and Order: SVU, could single-handedly implicate either a genuine celebrity or his handlers in a murder, then use it as leverage for my own career advancement.
But I threw myself into finding so-called justice for Sally Ann as if the case I’d haphazardly put together was my rebound relationship.
I didn’t have a bulletin board covered in red string, but I wasn’t far off.
Though the facts pointed to Jason, everyone was a suspect.
This suited my current state of mind. Trust no one.
Read between the lines of every conversation.
Eat Twix bars for dinner. Deny my own possible guilt.
Jason punching that wall when Sally Ann said she’d reveal, not their affair, but something else, was what had me convinced he was involved in her death.
People didn’t just coincidentally die before they could publicize a life-altering secret.
Somebody had to be responsible. The difference between pulling a string that made Maggie McKee seem vapid and another that made Sally Ann dead really was no difference at all.
Did I like poking around in this wound as a distraction from thinking about Gabe being with Maggie?
Absolutely. I wanted to press as hard as I could on the bruise of Sally Ann’s death until I made myself sick with it.
But I also thought that there was something I was missing.
I didn’t want to get caught, yet again, with my proverbial pants down. I didn’t want to be played for a fool.
I cornered Ian in the conference room after an all-hands production meeting.
“Hey,” I said. “I have a question about footage.”
“Okay, shoot.” Ian made finger guns at me, and despite Dan’s many flaws, I found myself grateful I had been on the other ENG team when I’d worked on set.
“Were you the one who gave me that new stuff last week? From the garage? It looked like it might be your handwriting.”
“Ah yes, Coyote Cam.” Ian put his notebook and little neon stress ball back into his bag, making it clear that he had limited time for me.
“Coyote Cam?”
“One of the developers working on the house thought he saw signs of a den. Put up a camera to try to catch them. He never got anything, though, and it’s a bad space for filming.
But who knows? If that guy’s right, it could be a story.
” Always, production was looking for stories.
Scavengers themselves, sucking on the bones of people’s lives.
Ian continued. “Remembered it again last week or whenever, and dropped it by for you to look at. Sorry if it was a bust.”
“Did anyone else talk to that guy? The developer? Why wasn’t the camera officially listed?”
“I figured it was gonna be pretty poor quality. Not one of ours, but good enough to get those yellow coyote eyes or a pup or something to stir up some drama. Any luck?”
“No coyotes,” I said.
“Sorry about that,” Ian said again. He started to leave and then turned back to me. “Hey,” he said. “You see anything good, you come to me first. I’ll help you out, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t quite know what he meant, and there was a long line ahead of him, but I nodded and thanked him. Coyotes. How banal.
I found out that Lauren was pregnant the old-fashioned way, by which I mean she told me. She’d come into the office for what she called girl talk, and when she sat down at the table in the conference room, she kicked off her shoes.
“My feet are so swollen they’re practically balloons,” she said. “Second trimester’s supposed to be the easy one.”
I was twenty-four—my birthday had passed with cake and champagne from Jen and Celia, and some crying in my bedroom when I drunkenly thought about Gabe—but no wiser to the language of pregnancy than I’d been at twenty-three.
“What?” For someone acting as the sole investigator into a possible murder, I was remarkably dense. Lauren blinked at me, confirming that fact. “What’s second trimester?” I guess I thought it was a class she was taking or something.
“What, do you live under a rock?” Lauren scoffed. “Cassidy. I’m pregnant.”
I hadn’t seen her day-to-day since my transfer to postproduction. I never wanted to assume about someone else’s body—god forbid they assume something about mine. But now that she mentioned it, she was a little larger in the middle. Her boobs were massive.
“I didn’t know.” Was I allowed to ask my boss about the father of her baby? I knew it must be Dan. “Who’s the . . . lucky dad?”
Were I Lauren, I might have given myself exactly the withering look of pity that she gave me in response.
I, too, would want to keep my crew from knowing I was sleeping with my director.
But I wasn’t Lauren’s crew anymore. I was pretty sure she knew that I knew about Dan.
Had I thought that she would tell me because she saw me as a friend?
This was not the case. We were every person for themselves, adrift alone, until some shared plunder briefly united us.
“Anyway, getting back on track,” said Lauren. “Have you found anything good?”
“Ummm, not really.”
“Ian’s pitching something about coyotes on the property,” said Lauren. “Making Maggie and Jason go looking for signs, working them all up. Apparently he’s got a contractor who’ll say he saw some damage.”
“That sounds silly,” I said. “I haven’t seen any coyotes on the footage.”
“No one has. We can do better. Talk to me about what you’ve got. Something juicy. Something we can use.” Lauren took a long swig of an orange energy drink that couldn’t have been good for the baby.
“Jason lies about his bench press numbers,” I said. Jason might have killed his mistress, I did not say.
“Nah, what else?”
I was biting my tongue so hard it was about to fall off.
Despite everything, I still wanted to impress Lauren.
I wanted her to bring me with her when she rose to the head of production.
She was so sure of herself, it was impossible to doubt her.
And I wanted to win something, now that I’d lost Gabe.
“Maggie’s, like, one unpaid parking ticket away from getting a boot on her car,” I said.
“Boring.”
“I think that Maggie might have slept with my ex-boyfriend.”
There it was. I hadn’t said it in so many words to anyone.
All of a sudden, I’d blurted it out to my boss.
What a gift Lauren had, to line us all up, little toy soldiers, and wind us until we marched to her drum.
She might have gotten a leg up by sleeping with Dan, but it was her own talent that would catapult her to an executive suite.
And now I had betrayed Gabe. I’d betrayed Maggie. In keeping other people’s secrets, I had told on myself.