Chapter 14
The next day I sat back down in the logging room, protein bar in hand, and watched Jason Dean prepare for a charity golf tournament.
An hour of him poking around in the garage, looking for a missing club.
The laces on his shoe broke, so he had to stomp around and pout about it.
An hour twenty of the drive to the mall, and the subsequent purchase of new shoes.
Twenty minutes on the phone with Maggie, who was somewhere—Massachusetts?
—for a concert. Kissy faces and I miss you, baby, and what were these two doing, seeing other people and then coming together to be America’s sweethearts on TV?
Making money. That’s what they were doing. Making money and celebrity.
Maybe it wasn’t fair to lump Maggie in with Jason. She hadn’t likely hit a person with her car. She hadn’t poisoned Sally Ann. The woman of the pair always did take the brunt of the blame.
“I love you, baby. I’ll see you tomorrow.” On-screen, Jason hung up his phone and went off to stretch his shoulder.
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t just sit and watch this footage knowing Jason Dean had almost certainly killed Sally Ann.
He had a criminal history that by some act of god hadn’t blown up in the press, and when she’d said, What you told me that night in Reseda, she’d meant that she was going to expose him.
This would torpedo his TV career, and so he had killed her.
Jason’s whole life and sense of self had been destroyed because his elbow tendon didn’t quite click in right.
Maybe it made sense that he’d done some drugs.
He had some leeway to be stupid and reckless.
I tried to imagine myself as his wife—or had Maggie been his fiancée then?
—watching him implode and then not knowing what to do about it.
It made sense that Maggie had turned to Gabe.
He was a good person to call in a crisis.
If only my own current crisis didn’t feature him as its lead.
I sent postproduction an email saying I was feeling sick, said goodbye to front desk Monica, and headed home.
By the time I got through traffic, both Jen and Celia were already back at the apartment.
I hadn’t seen them for more than a quick second since my heart-to-heart with Gabe, and both immediately accosted me, Celia literally pulling me by the arm onto the couch, Jen plying me with a prepoured glass of wine.
“Tell us everything,” Jen said. It was permission.
Other than my drunken rambles, I’d been holding my suspicions about Sally Ann’s death close to the chest—I was enough of a wreck about Gabe that I didn’t need my friends adding “conspiracy theorist” to my list of undesirables.
But I couldn’t really hack it at the murder board all on my own.
I needed Jen and Celia. I’d been waiting for a reason to include them, and Gabe’s story had provided it in spades.
I began with the facts of the case: Gabe had a history with Maggie; Jason Dean had a history with drug abuse. I mixed up the stories until they became the same story: Maggie and Jason and Gabe and me and Sally Ann.
“But, Cassidy, how are you feeling?” Jen wanted to focus on Gabe.
She wanted me to talk about how hard it had been not to grab his hand each time my foot hit a root in Angeles Forest, not to give in and take him back and pretend none of this was happening.
Absolutely not. I wanted to talk about Sally Ann and Jason.
“I’m feeling like, if Jason really killed her, I should tell somebody.” A package of Celia’s silly diet cookies sat open on the table, and I grabbed one and ate it.
“Well yeah, okay, but did he?” Despite her concerted attempts to come off as bohemian and unique, it was already clear that Celia was going to be one of those women who thrived on true crime when the genre exploded.
“He’s a celebrity. You can’t bring something against him without actual proof. You’d be totally steamrolled.”
“He had motive! She was going to tell the press about his accident,” I said.
“We assume he had motive,” Celia corrected me. “You don’t have actual proof.”
Jen stood over us, landline in hand, about to order the takeout we so desperately needed. “You’re deflecting,” she said.
“Jason Dean knew she had an allergy and grabbed the bag of lunches, and Jason Dean’s the one with reason to get rid of her.” I palmed another SnackWell.
“What about all the people working on the show who would be screwed if she went public about screwing him? If they already had the next few episodes in the bag, wouldn’t it ruin the show to have some exposé come out saying the marriage was a sham?
” In her excitement, Celia knocked over a bottle of nail polish, Mango Magic dripping onto the magazine she’d been using as a placemat.
“When you hear hoofbeats, don’t assume that it’s zebras,” I said.
“Excuse me, what?”
“It’s something my mom says. When it’s probably horses, you shouldn’t guess zebras.”
“If the simplest solution is the right one, this whole thing is just an accident.” Jen came back to the couch. “I got us Thai.”
“I still don’t know what horses have to do with the fact that you can’t go to the cops about something that looks like an accident and claim that Jason frickin’ Dean masterminded it all.” Celia righted the nail polish, trying to wipe up the spill.
“But, Cassidy.” Jen sat down on the couch next to me. “What about Gabe?”
“What about him?” I said, sniffing.
“I know as your friend I’m supposed to be all, ‘Girl power,’ ‘He’s an asshole,’ ‘You’ll be better off without him,’” Jen said. “But isn’t there a way to forgive him and make this work out? You’ve been so happy together. He seems like he really wants to try.”
“Does he?” Celia held up a wrinkled magazine page. “Sorry to be the bubble burster, but I don’t know if he does.”
A touch of Mango Magic remained streaked across Maggie’s cheek, but there she was on the page, walking with Gabe through some parking lot.
They both had on sweatpants and baseball caps, the kind of celebrity incognito that’s basically a magnet for paparazzi.
Maggie McKee’s New Meat? The headline sat at the center of a series of photos, Gabe kneeling to pick something up, giving it to Maggie, receiving a hug.
The picture from the magazine last week, their legs twined together under the outdoor table.
A photo from The Tiger Crew, Maggie in ringlets and Gabe four foot ten.
Underneath, the article claimed that Maggie and Gabe had been in a relationship for years, flaunting their love affair behind Jason Dean’s back.
It did nothing to endear Gabe to me, but the thing stank of some conniving publicist.
“‘Maggie McKee plays the blissful newlywed on-screen, but in real life, things are heating up with former costar—’” Celia stopped herself from saying Gabe’s name. She skimmed a bit, then resumed. “‘Sources say that Jason is devastated. “She’s not the girl I thought I married.”’”
“Key word girl,” Jen snorted.
“‘Does this spell trouble in Calabasas? We’ll be on the lookout for more signs that “Reality” isn’t all it appears to be.’” Celia handed me the magazine, but I didn’t want to look at it.
The buzzer rang. I went down to pay the driver for our dinner and avoid the looks of pity across my friends’ faces.
I felt sorry for myself, yes, but I also felt sorry for Maggie.
We were a generation of Spice Girl power, but that didn’t mean that, below the surface, we weren’t all just as misogynistic as our parents.
We didn’t paint everything pink and glittery because we ran the world, but because we were run by it.
Maggie might have thought she was in charge of her story, but she was just as susceptible as Jason to the metaphorical elbow tweak that would throw her off course.
Could you really take back power by leaning into the role you got stuck in?
Maggie was trying to make “dumb blonde” a battle cry, but I thought that all it ever really could be was a scar.
I felt an immense sadness as I carried our pad thai and drunken noodles up the stairs to our unit, where Jen and Celia were waiting to coddle me.
“They might not actually be together,” Jen said. “Didn’t he tell you that they weren’t together?” We doled out chopsticks and sat on the couch, eating straight from the containers.
“At this point it doesn’t matter,” I said. “I still can’t trust him.” Jen sighed.
“Who do you think the mysterious sources are?” Celia asked. “Who got the photos?”
“Probably Jason and his team,” I said. “Trying to get ahead of things. Making Maggie’s infidelity a major deal just in case something gets out about his thing with Sally Ann.
” Dopey old Simone, Jason’s publicist, who’d counter rumors of him cheating with some of her own.
Plant a story, get a photo spread. What a way to live.
“Well, you have to tell Maggie that you think he might have killed her,” said Celia. To my surprise, Jen nodded.
“You might not have evidence to take to the cops, but if you know he has a history of violence, you can’t just let her sit there, not knowing.” Jen slurped a noodle. They were talking about Maggie and Jason as if they weren’t people, just the characters they played on TV. I felt slightly sick.
“If it’s going to be an all-out war and a messy divorce, and Maggie’s getting thrown in the dirt, you don’t want her to be totally blindsided,” Celia said.
“I thought you guys were on my side.”
“We’re on the side of sisterhood.” Celia seemed genuine. Jen scoffed.
“What about the side of preventing domestic violence?”
“Jason’s not going to hurt Maggie,” I said.
“You can’t be sure.” Jen poured us all more wine.