CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 6
Is It Okay to Be a Bridezilla If Someone Is Trying to Kill You?
When I find Emma in her room twenty minutes later, she’s inconsolable.
“A midnight murder ? Did you see, Eleanor? Someone is planning on killing me at my wedding at midnight!”
She’s sitting in a green rattan chair in front of a bank of windows. The sun is filtering through in a way that makes her seem lit from within, a visual that’s accentuated by the white linen dress she’s wearing.
Fred is standing behind her in white pants and a blue chambray shirt. As I meet his gaze over Emma’s head, it strikes me again how very much he looks like Connor.
“It’s a typo,” I say as I sit down next to her and gather her in my arms like a child. “No one is going to kill you.”
She wipes at her cornflower-blue eyes. “A typo! It was supposed to say ‘buffet.’ How does that get changed into ‘murder’? There aren’t even any letters in common in those two words.”
“There’s the u and the e . You know how autocorrect is.”
She shoots me a look. “But I checked it. Shawna checked it. The wedding planner checked it. You did, too, right, Fred?”
Fred and I exchange another look, and I’m 100 percent certain that Fred did not check the wedding schedule to make sure it didn’t refer to an upcoming murder.
Not that I blame him for that.
I’m not good at reading the fine print either.
“Of course I did, love.” He pats her gently on the shoulder.
“Then how did it happen?”
“Maybe someone thought it was a theme wedding?” I say. “Because of When in Rome ? That’s what you can say if anyone notices.”
“No one chooses murder as their wedding theme!”
“Which makes it original.”
“I guess.” She sniffs. “Did you notice?”
“Well, yes, but you know I’m a stickler for detail.”
I hold my breath because this is not true. Like I just said, I’m terrible at details. This is what I have Harper for. Emma knows this, but she’s distracted right now, so maybe she’ll forget.
“You think people will believe the theme wedding thing?”
“I do.”
“And when there isn’t any murder mystery to solve, what then?”
“They’ll be too drunk to notice,” I say. “There’s an open bar, right, Fred?”
This is an item I’m certain he took care of. If I know one thing about Fred, it’s that he loves an open bar.
“I certainly ordered one. If the studio wasn’t being such a bunch of ass—” He stops himself, his face turning red. “Maybe there will be a murder,” Fred says through his teeth. “The more I think about it...I bet Tyler had something to do with this.”
“Oh, Fred,” Emma says. “Not this again.”
“I’m telling you, Em. He wants to ruin me.”
I squeeze Emma and stand up. “Ruin you? That’s a bit dramatic isn’t it?”
He gives me a hard stare. “You don’t know Tyler.”
“You’re right, I don’t. But still. You’re starring in his movie. He needs that to succeed. Bad publicity won’t help.”
“You know the saying...”
There’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Only I don’t think that’s true.
People get canceled now. So there are consequences for bad publicity.
Sometimes. Not often enough.
“What happened between you two?”
Emma makes a slashing movement with her hand against her throat, but I pretend I don’t see it.
“Fred?”
“What? Oh, some silly dispute over money. I’m good for it. A gentleman never goes back on his obligations.”
I do a mental eye roll. That Oscar that Fred won? It was in a Jane Austen adaptation. And ever since then, he peppers his conversation with garbled quotes from the books or the movies or the SparkNotes.
I haven’t figured out which yet.
Not because I haven’t read Austen.
I have. I just haven’t committed the books to memory the way some people do.
“Why does he think you aren’t good for it?”
“I simply asked for more time to pay it off, that’s all.”
“And this was because of Julius Caesar ?”
Fred grimaces. “Yes. Though it wasn’t my fault the movie failed. You saw those beastly reviews the critics gave it. Like locusts swarming...And Tyler’s an old friend. I didn’t force him to produce the movie. He was eager to do so. We all thought it would be a hit.”
So Fred and Tyler are in a dispute over money. And the wedding schedule is, what? Some kind of revenge? A real threat? Just a stupid accident?
No, there’s the note, which I notice Emma is not bringing up.
The note is not an accident.
“Can you find out who did this?” Emma asks, tapping the schedule against her hand. “Make sure I’m not in danger?”
“I’m not an investigator.”
“You do it in your books all the time.”
“That’s a fictional version of me.” 32
“But you always solve the case.”
“Because I write the mysteries. I know what happens in advance.”
“Still,” Emma says, “the skills have to be applicable. Putting together a mystery has to be the same as taking it apart. Look at Italy.”
“I was almost too late in Italy.”
I was too late.
Someone died .
“But you solved it in the end. You survived.” She shudders and tears spring back to her eyes.
“Why do you think it’s directed at you, Emma? Even if the schedule’s not a typo, it doesn’t mention who the intended victim is.”
Emma frowns at me, pissed I’m pushing her to reveal her secret. But if her life is in danger, now is not the time to keep things to herself.
Because that’s how people die in these kinds of books.
They hold back a crucial fact, and the next thing you know, they turn up dead.
“I’m sorry, babe,” Emma says to Fred. “I should’ve told you this before, but this isn’t the first thing like this that’s happened. There have been notes. And a Twitter thing.”
“What kind of notes?” Fred says.
“And plural?” I add. “More than one?”
She catches my eye and ducks her head slightly. “Nothing specific. Just vague...threats, I guess you’d call them.”
“Did you keep them?” I ask.
“I threw them away except for the one I gave you yesterday.”
“There was a note yesterday?” Fred says.
I pull it out and show it to him.
He shakes his head and hands it back to me. “Why didn’t you tell me about this, Em?”
“I didn’t want to worry you. You know how it is with fans sometimes. It’s not the first time I’ve received weird mail.”
Fred frowns. “How was this delivered?”
“It was left in my trailer. The others, too.”
“Your trailer ? That means it was someone who had access to set.”
“I know. But there are so many people wandering around all the time. It’s not that hard to get access if you want to.”
This feels like a lie. Every time I’ve visited set, I’ve had to show ID and be on a list. But I understand why she’s telling it. She wants to justify why she didn’t do anything about it.
Why she didn’t tell Fred.
She wants to minimize the possibility that she’s in danger.
And who can blame her for that?
“I didn’t want to worry you, Fred.”
“And the Twitter thing?” I ask.
Emma takes out her phone and opens the app. She taps, then looks up. “I blocked them.”
“What’s the handle?” I say.
“@Emmaswooden.”
“Ouch.”
“I don’t care about that. It’s the other things they know about...”
“Like what?”
She meets my eyes, then looks away. Not here , she’s telling me. Not in front of Fred.
“They knew I’d been cast in the movie before I did. Other things they couldn’t know unless it was someone very close to me.”
“I wish you’d told me about this,” Fred says, pouting.
“You had enough going on with Tyler.”
“That man has lost his mind. And did you see that karate move he tried to pull last night?” He rubs at his chin. “Maybe he’s doing the Twitter thing?”
“Doesn’t seem like his style,” I say.
“It might just be lucky guesses,” Emma says tentatively. “You know how it can be with fans on the internet—all their theories. Sometimes they get it right.”
“But all of it combined...” I say.
“It is concerning,” Fred says. “Will you look into it, Eleanor?”
“I will.”
“Thank you.” He puts his hand on my arm and stares directly into my eyes, and I’m not going to lie: Fred Winter staring into your eyes is a powerful thing.
“You’re welcome,” I say, feeling foolish.
It’s a feeling I’m used to, though.
I’ll get over it.
And, like Mr. Bennet, probably sooner than I should. 33 , 34
“Darling, I should go check on the next ferry. My parents are arriving on it.”
Emma’s mouth turns down at the corners. “I thought we said no parents.”
“My mother caught wind of it from that stupid Santa Monica Gossip, and she wouldn’t be denied, I’m afraid. I figured it was better to have her in the fold than out, you know how she is.” He pauses after saying this, a reminder that we all know how his mother is.
She’s an actress, too, and was big in the ’80s, starring in several soapy television shows where the women had big hair and bigger shoulder pads. Her career never recovered after she had Fred, though—something, I gather, that she’s made known to him.
“It’s not too late to have your parents come, Em,” I say in solidarity, though it probably is.
There is a storm coming.
And even Hollywood can’t keep endless ferries running into a hurricane.
Mrs. Wood isn’t going to be happy to have been left out of the wedding, but that’s a relationship I don’t have to manage.
There are, occasionally, advantages to having dead parents.
Sorry, Mom and Dad! I’m sure you would’ve been amazing wedding guests.
“I’ll think about it. But Fred, let’s keep your mother out of the pictures, all right?”
“Not sure we’re going to be able to manage that.”
“She can’t be in the official photos, or my mom will freak. Come to think about it, can you confiscate her phone?”
“I will.” Fred plants a kiss on Emma’s cheek. “Thanks, darling. You should relax. Go for that soak we talked about. You know you always feel better after a soak.”
He tips his head against her forehead and they share a tender moment.
One of those ones TikTokers make endless reels about to heartbreaking songs.
And no, I’m not jealous.
I just sound that way.
Fred leaves, and Emma turns to me after we watch his shadow pass the window. “Did you check the Twitter thread?”
“I left my phone in my room, as per instructions.”
“Sorry about that. But you know how it is with these exclusive photo deals.”
“It’s fine. I’ll check when I get back to the villa.”
“Thanks.”
I twist my hands together. “You really want me to look into this? What if I find something you don’t want to know?”
“Fred knows all of my secrets and I know all of his.”
“Really?”
Her shoulders slump. “Okay, not all , exactly...”
“What about Tyler?”
“What about him?”
“There’s a rumor that you and him...”
She turns away, a blush creeping up her cheek. “I...”
“Just tell me. No judgment.”
She laughs. “El, come on. There’s always judgment.”
She’s right. I am a judgy person.
I’ve tried to change, but people don’t change.
You should remember that.
“I’ll dial it down.”
“It was a long time ago,” Emma says.
“When?”
“Two or three years ago.”
Or two and three years ago, my judging brain can’t help but assume.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was right after your breakup with Oliver. Honestly, I didn’t think you could handle it.”
“Was I that bad?”
“You were inconsolable. You even said, ‘I can’t be around happy people right now.’”
“That doesn’t sound like me.”
“You said it, trust me. You know I have almost perfect recall of dialogue.”
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”
“We’ve all been there.”
“Right,” I say. And the truth is, I’m terrified I’ll end up back there again. If Oliver and I don’t work out this time, I don’t know how I’ll survive it. Or I do, and that’s even worse. That’s a hard thing to navigate in a relationship. Tiptoeing around the fact that you’re in a panic that your happiness will be taken away at any moment.
“So what happened?” I ask Emma. “How did you and Tyler meet?”
“He’s been in my orbit for years. You’ve met him before.”
“Sure, but we always kind of thought he was a jerk, didn’t we?”
“He can be. But he has a sweet side...Anyway, I was trying to get the funding for that indie Christmas film I wrote, and Tyler was one of the people I approached.”
This rings a vague bell. She’d asked me to take a look at the script. It was about a woman returning to her small town at Christmas—one of those Hallmark movies that seems to be on every week. Only this one was...“elevated,” I think was the word she used. The main character was a singer who’d had a big hit. Her career was slipping away. And she didn’t end up staying in the town or re-falling in love with her high school boyfriend.
Ha ha. Of course she did! Have you seen these movies?
Had you going there for a minute, though, didn’t I?
Anyway, it never got made. Such is Hollywood.
“Tyler was going to finance it?”
“He decided not to. But we had a nice dinner. And then I ran into him again a couple of days later when I was in Malibu.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Are you cross-examining me?” Emma asks.
“You want my help. This is how it works.”
“It was some promo party thing.” She stares off into the distance, remembering. “We talked late by the pool and then went to the beach to watch the sunrise. You want the details?”
I try to hide my shudder. Does one ever want to imagine their best friend having sex?
Besides, I don’t have to imagine it.
I’ve seen her fake it on screen.
“Do I need them to figure out what’s going on?”
“Probably not.”
“Whatever happened to your no-producers rule?”
“That was for projects I was on. We never did a project together. And he agreed to keep it quiet.”
“How long did the relationship last?”
Emma twists her engagement ring around her finger. It’s a large square Harry Winston diamond that People devoted an entire three-page spread to. “A couple of months, but...I think he fell kind of hard.”
“Not you?”
“Not me. He was a bit messed-up when I ended it, frankly. Like surprisingly so.”
“What did he do?”
She gets a faraway look in her eyes. “A little light stalking. Showing up at my place, leaving messages.”
“How long did that last?”
“A couple of months. But this was years ago.”
“How did you get him to stop?” I ask.
“I had my security talk to him. I use them sometimes. Around releases. And it seemed to do the trick. We even saw each other a few times after that and it was all good. Or so I thought.”
“And then?”
She nods slowly. “And then I got cast in When in Rome .”
“You think that was because he wanted you around?”
“I didn’t at first, but...”
“What?”
She gathers up her hair in her hands, then releases it. “He tried to renew the relationship. I told him no, and I thought that was the end of it, but...”
“Then he found out about you and Fred.”
Her eyes connect with mine in a way they have so many times before.
I remember the first time we communicated that way. It was the second day of kindergarten and we were playing one of those kids’ games involving a ball and minor injuries. We called it murder ball, even though we weren’t allowed to.
Anyway, old story: I didn’t get picked, but then there Emma was, holding my hand and insisting she couldn’t play if I wasn’t on her team, and that was it. We were a unit after that.
Eleanor and Emma, murdering everyone in sight on the blacktop playground.
And now we might be bound up in a real murder, and the thought of that scares me in a way I haven’t been in a long time.
Three months at least.
“What did Tyler do?”
“It wasn’t what he did so much as how he was acting. Just angry all the time. And then, when those notes started showing up in my trailer, I thought it was him.”
“What did the other notes look like? The same as the one you gave me? Made up of cut-out letters?”
“Yes.”
I shudder, thinking of the time it took to do that.
Whoever wrote them went to a lot of trouble not to get caught.
“Did you confront him?”
“How could I? He’s the producer.”
“What about the studio?”
“ He’s the studio...You know he has his own...You’d call it an imprint.”
“He must have a boss.”
“Not really.”
“So you did nothing?”
She stands and goes to the window. “I didn’t think he was going to do anything, just make my life uncomfortable for a while. It wouldn’t be the first time. It’s Hollywood, for fuck’s sake.”
“I’m sorry, Em.”
“It’s fine. Every job has downsides. Yours, too, right?”
My mind goes to the obvious place. “Downside, your name is Connor Smith.”
“All those years that he was needling you...how did you handle it?”
“Denial, mostly.”
She laughs. “The shoot’s over and we just have to get through the wedding and then that’s it.”
“Get through it?”
“You know what I mean.”
I walk to her. The view is truly stunning, with the white-sand bay below us and the dark blue water dotted with sailboats and yachts. “What if we postponed the wedding?”
“No, I don’t want that.”
“I know, Em, but what if someone is trying to kill you?”
“No. Like you said, the threats aren’t even specific. It’s just someone fucking with us.”
“Okay, but what about this financial thing between Fred and Tyler...You don’t want to put your own money at risk.”
“Don’t worry. We signed a prenup.”
“You did?”
“Yes, dearest, we did.” She lays her hands on my shoulders. “I keep what’s mine and he keeps what’s his. We signed the papers at the lawyer’s office last week when we updated our wills. It was his idea, even.”
I stare at her, impressed with her forethought, which is so different from how I go through life. She’s dyed her hair the same color as mine for the shoot, and we do look very much alike.
Which is kind of creepy.
How do identical twins deal with this?
“Don’t be so surprised,” Emma says. “You might not read contracts before you sign them, but I always have.”
“Yes, yes.”
“He’s not after me for my money, he has plenty of his own.”
“Why not pay Tyler back, then?”
“Because Tyler is a jerk. He doesn’t need the money. He just wants to hurt Fred because I chose him.”
“Maybe. But don’t be so sure Tyler doesn’t care about the money.”
“Okay, Mom.” She lets me go and checks the time. “All of this is stressing me out.”
“Too early for a drink?”
She smiles. “Probably, but there’s this amazing series of hot tubs built into the hillside. Why don’t you go get changed and meet me there in twenty?”
“Can Harper come, too?”
“Of course. The more the merrier.”
I hug her impulsively, and she shoos me away.
I go to the door, and when I get to it, I turn back to watch her. She’s staring out the window again, and if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was lost in thought.
But I do know better.
I know her best.
And so a shiver runs through me when I recognize her expression for what it is.
Fear.
32 Everyone always thinks the main characters in books are a thinly disguised version of the author. And okay, I do borrow from life, but after ten books, Cecilia Crane has gotten up to some pretty shady things, including killing someone. Do they think I’m capable of that? Oh, wait, I did kill someone. Fine.
33 See, I have read Austen.
34 Okay, FINE. I’ve watched the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice more times than I can count. In my defense: Colin Firth.